This is definitely AU. I more or less decided I was done with the whole boys-only-club thing, and decided to add my own character to the mix xD It's pretty much in keeping with the main storyline, thus far, though I admittedly haven't finished it yet.

I wrote this from Jordan's point of view, but I want to emphasize that this is about the Winchester family, not necessarily Jordan herself. It's more about how Jordan comes to be a part of that family and what that says about the Winchesters. So sue me, I love the brothers. :) Enjoy!

Jordan stretched, giving a long sigh as her knotted and tired muscles pulled. A glance at her cell phone's glowing face told her that it was nearly eleven. She'd spent far too long doing inventory, but that lazy slouch Reilly hadn't organized it for her like he'd said—if anything, he'd made the mess worse. She'd spent half the time just trying to find products, much less counting them.

Well, whatever. It was what it was. Deep within the bowels of the mall, where no one, not even security cameras, lurked, Jordan shucked off her employee uniform and climbed into the outfit she'd tucked into her cavernous purse that morning. It was her favorite, one she'd spent a lot of time and money putting together especially for her best friend Audrey's birthday tonight: a dark Ecote puff-sleeve leather jacket, a grey racerback T-shirt, a pair of her favorite Guess skinny jeans, and, her favorite part, the dark grey Aldo Norkus heels she'd bought just this week, like construction boots gone glam and sexy.

Oh yeah. She was going to be hot tonight. She redid her ponytail real quick, to give it some life, but a ponytail was a ponytail. Whatever makeup had survived the day would have to suffice now, because she was already late and couldn't put off leaving any longer if she wanted to make the club on time.

Jordan Delaine, twenty-eight, eternal mall employee, was ready to take on the world.

She dutifully locked up the stock room and made her way down the long service corridors, back towards where humanity lived. Jordan liked to tell her friends that the mall they saw was basically just paint, a pretty shell over two floors of horror movie-style hallways, dark rooms, and bolted locks. The mall was creepily still, but after ten years of working in the mall, Jordan was used to it. Her heels clicked loudly against the faux stone floors.

For five to six days a week for the last ten years, give or take a few morning shifts, Jordan had left the mall for the night using a side door that was never locked from the inside, so that the security guards and cleaning staff could leave without hunting down a key. It was a door that couldn't be opened from the outside, so mall management didn't care, and hadn't ever cared—but tonight, when Jordan tried it, the door wouldn't even budge. It didn't rattle or anything, just … stayed. Like she'd suddenly lost the petty strength to wiggle a door.

"Okay," said Jordan, perplexed, and tried another exit. The doors were the same as the first: locked, of course, but strangely immovable, too. She tried the next exit, and the next, until she was running (in heels!) from exit to exit, banging on doors and wrenching the handles, but none of them, not one, budged.

"Shit, shit," she breathed, and pulled out her cell phone on her way down to the security office. She stopped. There wasn't any reception. She'd have expected that below-levels, where the storage rooms were, but out here, reception was always perfect. It had to be, or else the patrons would complain. She waved her cell phone around, moved several feet in either direction, but nothing helped. There wasn't even so much as a flicker of life. Dead air, she thought, and chill crept down her spine.

Jordan spent a split second staring at the dim-lit hallways of the empty mall, heart thudding so loudly she could hear it in her ears, and then took off at a trot for the security office. It was hidden down a service corridor, so that angry customers had to be truly persistent in order to lodge a complaint, and while that had never bothered her before, it did tonight. The cameras watched her come forward, but the little screen beside the door that usually reflected her image back to her in fuzzy black and white was dead.

Hands shaking just a little, Jordan reached out and tugged open the security office doors—and nearly lost her dinner. The stench that rolled out was awful, deathly awful, and when the lights flickered into life, she could see why. There were corpses everywhere, lolling in their chairs, collapsed onto the ground, and they were wearing uniforms and nametags—Luis, Clarence, McGrady, Brown. Night guards that Jordan had known for years, most of them, and struck up a friendship with.

"Oh God," she said, and then the lights died. The door she was holding onto jerked beneath her hand, as if someone had pulled on it, and the instant she stepped back it slammed in her face. The mall doors were pressurized not to slam—years ago she and Monique from the coffee shop had tried, repeatedly, until Gorman, the Head of Security back then, had told them to knock it off. These doors just didn't slam.

Apparently, now they did.

Jordan took the slamming door as a sign and beat a hasty retreat down the corridor, slowing down only once she reached the main stretch of mall. She looked around, trying to remember all the various nooks and crannies she might possibly get out through. All the main doors were blocked, obviously. Security wouldn't be able to help her now, and without cell phone service, she couldn't call for help either. The only option left was to break out.

Most of the glass was reinforced, the sort that they put in banks and gas stations, in case a mad gunman laid siege to the mall. She'd always thought it was overkill, but never more so than tonight. But if she remembered correctly, on the south side of the mall there was a corridor down to the trash compactors with a broken door. It wouldn't shut, and hadn't for months now. It was worth a shot.

She went that direction, her eyes and ears open. Someone had to have killed the security guards, and she sure as hell didn't want to run into them. But she saw nary a soul, and had almost convinced herself that she was alone, when somewhere, a door slammed.

Again with the impossible slamming. Doors here didn't do that. But the sound echoed on, telling her that they did. Somehow. She felt another chill, this time all over, and the shadows around her seemed to flex and grow darker. Or maybe the lights were dying.

Moving slowly now, putting her feet down gently so that the heels didn't click, Jordan crept towards the south end. She kept her back to the wall and made sure to swivel her head around every so often, checking behind her and up on the second level, too. She paused beside Victoria's Secret, the world silent but for her breathing, and the lights flickered—all of them, this time, like someone had flipped a switch. But that was impossible, too. She knew for a fact that these were the emergency lights, lights that were always on no matter what, and couldn't be turned off. Even if the power grid failed, there were generators to keep them up.

And yet …

Something like a cold breeze flowed over her, sending fear driving deep into the pit of her stomach, and in her ear a voice wheezed, "Lovely…"

Jordan spun, heart racing, but there was no one there. She could feel someone standing beside her, knew someone had spoken to her—but the air beside her was empty. Like the mall. Something grazed her hand as she watched, and with something like reflex Jordan wrenched her hand away and said furiously, "Get the hell away from me, perv!"

The chill sank away, and the lights stopped their mad candle-like flickering. Her momentary courage went, too, and she sank against the wall and focused just on breathing properly. Her pulse began to settle—and then two shadows appeared before her, sending her leaping away, only to crash into a faux marble pillar. (She'd been there when they'd installed it—it was reinforced concrete with a pretty shellacking job.)

"Whoa!" one of the shadows said, and she realized they were people. "Easy. We thought we heard something."

"Yeah, me, getting the bajesus scared out of me," Jordan snapped, drawing upright. If she wasn't so terrified, she'd probably have invited them to the club. They were exactly the sort of man candy Audrey would love for a birthday present. "Apparently the mall is haunted. Who knew?"

They raised their eyebrows simultaneously, and then looked at one another, like it'd been choreographed. The shorter one spoke. "What've you heard?"

"Heard? Nothing. But all the doors are blockaded, the security guards have been murdered, and I'm ninety percent sure I just got felt up by Casper." Jordan gave a little shiver, and it was then that it occurred to her that the only people who should be at the mall at this hour was security—security and whatever poor schmuck had been doing inventory until eleven, which if she had to guess, was uniquely her.

But there they were. And they were customers, she could tell, not mall staff. She raised her eyebrows, imitating them, and said, "Why are you here?"

They shared another look, and had apparently decided on the truth, because the tall one said, "We're here to kill your ghost."

"Oh, great," said Jordan. She waited, but there was no "just kidding!" forthcoming. "No—really. Why are you here?"

"Maintenance?" the short one tried.

"Se habla Español?" Jordan shot back. "There's only one white guy on our maintenance crew and he's from Jersey."

"We're here to kill your ghost," the tall one repeated, and this time, Jordan believed them, mostly because there was something cold grazing her neck. She jerked and swung her purse, hitting the pillar—there was a little crack that said she'd smashed her cell phone—but the cold left.

"Then kill it!" Jordan said furiously. "You! Dead guy! You touch me again and I'll feed you your own ectoplasm, you shit!"

Someone laughed, and it wasn't the two Ghostbusters. Jordan's face went white.

"Guess here is as good a place as any," the short one said, and dropped a pack Jordan hadn't noticed to the ground. They got busy pulling out candles and chalk and herbs, and began constructing what looked like a pagan ritual on the floor of her mall.

"You're nuts," she said mildly. "How can I help?"

"One candle at each corner," one of them said, and she obligingly began laying down candles every time they added a tip to the star, ending with a grand total of twelve. She took out her lighter, and when the tall one nodded to her, she began to light them.

"I'm Jordan," she said, while she worked.

"Sam," the tall one answered, and jerked his thumb at the guy beside him. "That's my brother Dean."

"Yo," said Dean, eyes flicking once to hers, a half-assed and probably unconscious flirt. She didn't mind. Not one iota. If they had been twins she would have taken video and sold it to Audrey as soft-core porn. Gorgeous didn't even begin to cover it.

Well. If she hadn't broken her cell phone, she would have taken video.

"So," said Jordan, crouched beside their complex artwork, "want to tell me why Casper has the mall on lockdown, how you knew about it, and what the hell you're drawing?"

"Casper," Dean answered, voice gruff but tone distant, "is one hell of a lecherous poltergeist, and one discovered feeding on souls can give it more power. Thus, the juice to—as you said—blockade an entire mall. We knew it'd be here because every surrounding building has reported activity, but in small doses, and what I'm drawing is a little something I like to call a spirit bomb."

"Because he can't pronounce the actual name," Sam put in, grinning, and Dean shoved him, but there was no malice in it.

"Cool," said Jordan. Dean looked at her. "Not the pronunciation, the spirit bomb. It's going to napalm this Amityville creep?"

"You're taking this very well," Sam told her, and Jordan gave a gentle shrug.

"I expect I'm in shock. I'll start screaming and flailing once it's over. Do you have to do a chant to turn it on?"

"Yep," said Dean, and that was when the windows blew.

Not the windows to the outside, but the glass to the storefronts, there to give the appearance of separation. Glass shot out into the air in a sparkling mist, raining down on them and leaving cuts on whatever skin they couldn't manage to hide.

"Shit," Dean muttered, shaking the glass off his jacket, and resumed sketching the spirit bomb. Sam had gotten to his feet and was busily laying down a line of salt around them in a circle. Jordan could guess what it was for, but she couldn't help but be a little bit skeptical at the idea of it working. Just as he finished the giant potted plants, set into stone cauldrons that rose chest-high, because to break off their bases and roll towards them, while something shrieked and made great booming noises upstairs.

"It's like a little kid having a tantrum," commented Jordan, both eyes on the line of stone rolling steadily towards them.

"Dean," said Sam.

Dean kept drawing. "I know."

"Dean."

"I know, give me a break." He put a last flourish and nodded. "Okay."

Sam yanked out a book and began to read. Every word he said, the shrieks grew worse, and the plant pots went faster. Jordan found herself reaching down her shirt front to grasp her mother's cross, and though she hadn't prayed in years, her lips moved hastily through the Lord's prayer.

And then it stopped.

"Sweet," said Dean, and stood up. He dusted the chalk off his hands. "Works every time."

"That's it?" Jordan asked, still crouched on the ground with her cross clasped between her hands. The brothers shrugged. "What a letdown! And I was hoping for some bloodshed."

Dean started to smile at her, but the lights were brightening, and with them came the sound of alarms, hundreds of them, one for every store with a window that had been blown out. One of the brothers—she wasn't sure who—swore, and Sam pulled her to her feet. "We've got to go," he said, seriously. "You really don't want to get caught by the cops in this mess."

He was right. No one would believe that they'd been fighting a ghost. They took off at a run, and Jordan followed, making excellent time despite her heels. They went down the corridor on the south end, where the broken door was—that was how they'd gotten in, she realized. They'd had to have covered every inch of the mall just to find that one door. That spoke to a level of dedication that was, to say in the least, impressive.

In the trash bay was a sleek black Impala, the sort of American muscle that Jordan had always lusted after but could never afford. She drove a hand-me-down Honda with a touchy transmission.

"Get in," Dean told her, and Jordan came back with, "With pleasure."

The Impala's engine roared, giving Jordan the chills—the good kind, this time—and they zipped out onto the open road just in time to see black-and-whites cresting the far hill. Jordan let out a wild laugh. "That was great," she said, leaning forward between Sam and Dean. The grin on her face was so wide her cheeks hurt.

"You won't think so when they get a hold of the security footage," Dean replied. "It'll show you going into the security office. You'll be their prime suspect."

Jordan's smile vanished. "What?"

"Hey, you're the one who went in there, not me. I'll bet they have footage of you walking around the hallways, too, before everything went to hell. The morning news will be calling it terrorism."

"Oh, hell," said Jordan. She sat back with a thump. "I can't go home, can I?"

Sam looked at her sympathetically, the answer in his eyes. She drew in a deep breath, let it out, and then said, "Nothing I can do but enjoy the ride, I guess. Where are you headed?"

"Nowhere you want to be," said Dean.

"Yeah? Because if they have me on tape, they have you too, sunshine."

Dean and Sam looked at one another again. Jordan was beginning to understand that these were conversations, muted for her benefit, like a pair of foreigners who suddenly switch languages so the ignorant local can't understand them. "Great," said Dean. "Like we need the attention."

"We should lay low," Sam agreed.

"Exactly," Jordan said. "And so do I. Why not together?"

"Look, Jordan, I understand you've been through a traumatic experience—" Dean began.

"Traumatic? I'd call it fun, though I could have done without the corpses." Jordan patted his shoulder. "It's all right, I won't be much trouble. Unless you leave me somewhere on my lonesome, where I'm liable to get captured. I'll warn you, I have a big mouth."

"That's black mail," said Sam.

"Yeah, well, you weren't being neighborly."

"Deal," said Dean, and Jordan reflected that if she'd changed in her car like she'd planned, she'd be wearing a red and yellow uniform instead.

Small miracles, as her grandma used to say.

After a week or so on the road with the Winchester brothers, Jordan had discovered a few things.

One: Plaid was God.

Two: The trunk of the Impala was not used for luggage.

Three: They were still a pair of gorgeous human beings, but Dean ate like an animal and Sam never, ever stopped complaining.

She was sitting on the edge of a motel bed, wearing a makeshift dress she'd made out of one of Sam's shirts and Dean's belts, the result of which was actually very pretty, though it gave the boys ideas. Dean was cleaning his gun collection, and Sam was doing something on the computer—either porn or research, and since he wasn't blushing or trying to hide the screen, she guessed research.

Jordan grinned at her joke. As if Sam would watch porn with a girl in the room. Now, Dean on the other hand—

Dean looked up, as if he knew that she was thinking about him, and said, "Bored?"

"Not yet." That, at least, was the truth. She had no cell phone, but Sam had let her use his computer, so that she could at least email her friends and family to tell them that no, she did not bomb the mall, yes, she was all right, but she wouldn't be coming home any time soon just in case. In the meantime her life consisted of burger runs, AC/DC, and crappy motels.

She was loving it. Maybe not the crappy motel part—she still had little panic attacks every time she thought about what might live in those sheets—but the Impala, the shitty food, the poring over obituaries, and hell, even the music, it spoke to her. And when they stopped over in some podunk town fry up a gremlin (a gremlin!) they'd let her use a gun and a blowtorch, and she'd walked away from that with her blood singing and a grin on her face a mile wide.

"Really?" asked Sam, shooting her a little look. "Because we've been doing nothing but driving for the last three days."

That was a straight-up lie. They'd gotten into a bar fight on Tuesday, had worked on the Impala on Wednesday, and today Dean had decided to do some spring cleaning, which meant that Jordan got to sit back and watch a parade of deadly weaponry that would have made Victor Bout proud. Her favorite so far was a Browning 1911, chromed with ivory grips, and she'd almost asked if she could hold it, except that it was clearly Dean's favorite, too.

Instead she played with the machete, which hadn't been cleaned yet, and therefore still had a smattering of blood near the hilt. "You two wouldn't be boring even if you were pictures on a wall," Jordan said. Her smile turned wicked. "Audrey would call you visual aides."

"Oh, Christ," said Dean, and Sam squinted at her like he hoped she was kidding. Unfortunately, she wasn't.

"That gives me an idea, actually," Jordan said, setting down the machete. "My friends need better proof that I'm alive than an email. Emails can be faked, you know? Audrey's probably convinced herself by now that I've been kidnapped to Iraq. Can I have a card?"

That was how it worked now. She couldn't use her own plastic, because the police would trace that, and she didn't carry cash. Instead she came forward with her palms out for one of the many faked Winchester credit cards.

"For what?" Dean asked, a little suspicious.

"You'll see," Jordan said. "Now cough up, Daddy Warbucks."

Sam snorted, earning a glare from Dean, but Dean dug out his wallet anyway and handed her a card that said Charlie Daniels. She could rock it, so long as the cashier didn't like fiddles. "Thanks," said Jordan, and kissed him on the cheek, and flicked Sam's ear as she passed. They were awesome guys, really. They'd have gotten along well with her friends—because they were sexpots—but they'd have gotten along with her father, too, God rest his soul. He'd had the same penchant for guns, rock, and fast cars.

She walked down to the gas station at the end of the block, wearing her fabulous Norkus heels, which were now in tatters after the gremlin episode, and stained from the brandy and tequila that'd been flying through the air during the bar fight. She found she didn't care, and even like the roughness they'd taken on.

Maybe she should get a tat, too.

Chuckling to herself, she went inside, and picked a disposable camera off the shelf. "Just this for me, hot stuff," Jordan said to the cashier, who weighed about three hundred pounds and had a small ecosystem of acne on his chin.

A week or two later, Audrey found an envelope in her mailbox without a return address, and inside was a photo of Jordan with two shirtless men, both of whom were scowling at the camera, which, in Audrey's opinion, looked sexy as hell. Jordan was grinning and she had her arms around their waists like she'd known them forever.

On the back, Jordan had written her a note.

Hey babe! Just wanted to let you know I wasn't kidnapped by Al Qaeda :) The hunks in the photo with me are Dean (grande) and Sam (venti), it's them I'm traveling with. I'll probably be gone a long time, especially since they put a warrant out for me. It wasn't our fault, I promise! I'm just glad we got out of that mall alive. lol Anyway, spread the word that I'm all right. And you have permission to tack this on your wall. I'm only sorry I couldn't blow it up for you!

– Jordan

P.S. You do not want to know what I had to do to get them shirtless! On second thought, maybe you do … :)

In actuality, Jordan hadn't had to do much at all, so long as you didn't count whining and begging and finally draping herself across Sam's lap. Once Sam had agreed to it, Dean was small potatoes—"Your brother is doing it. You scared, Winchester?"—and bam, Jordan had herself a sexy photoshoot. She recruited the cleaning lady as photographer, and Rosa had been reluctant right up until the moment she saw what she was photographing, and then she had all the enthusiasm of a thirteen year old girl.

Thanks to Rosa, Jordan had a whole stack of photos of her and the boys, including one where they were both kissing her cheek, and that one she kept in her wallet. She taken the photos for Audrey, yeah, but the Winchesters had really grown on her, and if they parted ways tomorrow (God forbid!) she wanted something to remember them by.

Shortly after Jordan's impromptu photoshoot, which she was positive both boys had enjoyed despite their complaints (there was a photo in her stack of the boys tickling the living daylights out of her, and that had been entirely their idea) they left for the last leg of their journey. Their destination, if Jordan understood it correctly, was Bobby's, but who Bobby was, she didn't quite know.

They arrived midafternoon at a gearhead's wet dream—an endless sea of metal, an eclectic mix of old and new that only junkyards had, with a special emphasis on American muscle cars. Jordan's grin turned to a gasp as the Impala rolled to a stop.

"No way!" Jordan cried, and squished Sam's seat forward so that she could wiggle free of the Impala's depths. She nearly turned an ankle trying to jump out in heels, but she recovered well and ran the rest of the way to the beaten hull of what was unmistakably a 1965 GTO. "Oh, my love," Jordan said mournfully. "You're beat to hell. Look at you. You need a face lift."

"Just got that one last week," a voice said, and Jordan spun. An old man in a baseball cap was looking at her from the shadow of his house, hands shoved in his pockets. His beard concealed an amused smile.

"You gonna restore her?" Jordan wanted to know.

"Maybe. There's a Mustang out back I'm tinkering with. Hey, boys." Sam and Dean had finally made it to the party.

"Hey, Bobby," said Dean.

"I saw you on the news. Again."

"It's not their fault Casper lived in a mall," Jordan said defensively, and Bobby gave her a smile that told her he'd been kidding around.

"C'mon in," Bobby said to them. "Beer's in the fridge."

Jordan flopped down onto the bed, sighing happily. Sleeping arrangements at Bobby's were far improved from the motel situation. At first they'd traded off sleeping in the Impala, but that just meant an endless cycle of back pain, so eventually it became Jordan switching every so often between the boys' beds—her head decorously pointed towards the foot, of course. Now she had her own bed—hell, her own room!

She could hear the guys talking downstairs, and though they were trying to be quiet about it, voices carried for miles in old houses like these, and she had no trouble at all making out the words.

"You just gonna babysit her, then?" That was Bobby.

"I don't know if I'd call it babysitting," said Sam, and Dean added, "She's a natural, Bobby."

That made her smile. Maybe she'd come out the other side of this with a new job description. Jordan Delaine, monster hunter and wanted felon. That sounded about right. It beat the hell out of Jordan Delaine, mall slave.

She'd have to convince the boys to teach her, though. She could shoot a little from the days when her daddy was alive, and her driving skills weren't too shabby if she did say so herself, but the ins and outs of monster killing were another thing entirely. Her first question—if she did manage to enroll in the Winchester School of Hunting—was going to be "how many monsters are there?" quickly followed by "how do I off them?"

Jordan Delaine, exterminator.

No. Jordan Delaine—terminator.

This made her laugh, which halted the discussion below. She got up from the bed and went back downstairs, this time barefoot, because while she loved her Norkus heels, they were slightly implausible. She got a beer out of the fridge, because they all had one and she wanted one too, and sat down between the boys.

"Yo," she said, and popped off the top of beer using the edge of the table. "This place kicks ass. I have my own bed, there's a '65 GTO outside that needs love pronto, and I spy with my little eye some bacon in the fridge. Do you know how long it's been since I was allowed to eat bacon?" They looked at her. "Years. Years. But Audrey's not here to guilt me about my thighs now. I think I just found heaven."

"There is nothing wrong with your thighs," Dean said mildly, and Sam kicked him under the table.

"Thanks, sweetheart, but that's because I haven't been eating things like bacon." Jordan let out a laugh, true and loud and happy. An odd look crossed Bobby's face, and Jordan felt her enthusiasm dampen in response. "What?"

"No one's laughed like that in this house in a long time," Bobby answered with a straight face. Jordan's eyes moved from Bobby to Sam to Dean, but none of them were smiling, none of them saying "just kidding!"

Jordan sent Bobby her sweetest smile. "It's a good thing I got here when I did, then."

Somewhere Jordan had found an old CD player. The wiring was faulty, but she'd broken it open and fixed that, and now it played just fine. She had it set up on the counter of the bathroom, plugged into the wall, so that she could sing along while she was in the shower. Her luck was good—in the back of an old Dodge, she'd found an Aerosmith CD.

"Hey little darlin', your love is legendary!" Jordan bellowed at the ceiling. "Love's four letters ain't in my dictionary, 'scuse my position but it ain't missionary—"

"Hey, Sinatra!" Dean yelled through the door. "Some of us have to pee!"

"So use the toilet!" Jordan yelled back. "It's not like it's locked!—When it comes to making love I ain't no hype, ha-ha, 'cause I practice on a peach most every night!"

"Your singing sucks," Dean said, coming in.

"So do your omelets."

"Shut up and look away, will you?"

"You shut up," Jordan said snappily, but she turned anyway, and hummed at the wall instead. Just under the sound of the shower she could hear the sound of him pissing, and even though it made her feel like a kid of five, she found herself giggling.

"You are such a child," Dean muttered, shoulders hunched.

"Has anyone ever told you your peeing sounds like rain?" Jordan countered.

"Christ!"

"That is not my name," said Jordan, and belted out, "Love in an elevator, livin' it up when I'm goin' down, love in an elevator—"

"I want to strangle you so badly right now," Dean growled at the shower door, zipping up his pants. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Jordan opened the shower door a crack, hair slicked back, lips grinning.

"What's stopping you, hot stuff?"

Dean stared at her.

"I'm kidding," Jordan said impatiently, grin turning mischievous. "Go away, would you? I'd like to get out of the shower now. Unless you intend to help me."

"You're worse than I am," Dean told her.

"Thanks for the compliment, ducks. Now do you mind?"

Dean stared at her for a moment longer, looking at her like she was a new breed of human he'd never come across before, before slipping out the bathroom. She could hear him saying on the other side, "Next time, I'm peeing out by the Fords."

Jordan laughed to herself and shut off the water. She loved the boys, and liked Bobby quite a lot for the short time she'd known him, but Bobby was right: there wasn't a whole lot of laughter in this place. In them. Someone needed to perk them up everyone now and then, or they'd turn into zombies.

Towel wrapped securely around her middle and knotted over her chest, Jordan stepped up to the mirror and wiped off the steam until her reflection appeared. Her cheeks were rosy, and the circles under her eyes had gone; she was still smiling, too, even though the joke was long since over. She couldn't remember ever looking—hell, feeling!—this happy.

"So it's just for them, huh?" Jordan asked her reflection. "You're sticking around for purely humanitarian purposes?"

So, yeah, the Winchesters (which, she supposed, included Bobby) needed a clown in the family. A clown that wasn't Dean, for while he had his fair share of pranks and jokes, he had a hell of a lot of melancholy baggage on his shoulders, and it showed. His brand of jokes ran towards the dry and insulting, really. They needed some bubbly, and they needed it badly.

The added benefit to all this was that Jordan had escaped (literally) her long line of dead-end mall jobs, and found herself smack dab in the middle of a world that seemed to just beg her to stay. Jordan! it said. It's meant to be! This is where you belong, chickadee!

She pulled on an old sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants she'd cropped off to be daisy-dukes, getting ready to start working on the GTO. Bobby had told her, more or less, that if she could fix it, she could have it. The last time she'd worked on a car, she was fifteen, but Jordan thought she could do it, and she could always beg Dean to help her if she needed to.

Usually, after dressing, she'd have whipped out her bag of tricks and laid on hundreds of dollars' worth of creams and powders, but that particular bag of tricks was back at her apartment, and all she had in her purse was moisturizer, plus some emergency eyeliner and mascara. So she gave her cheeks a quick pat, smacked her lips, and called it good. Her morning routine had gone from an hour and a half to fifteen minutes, and if she was being honest, she loved it.

In the kitchen, the boys were looking at a bag of apples.

"—don't know how to make pie," Dean was saying, as Jordan came in, tying the wet length of her hair back into a ponytail.

"Who can't make pie?" asked Jordan.

"Us," said Dean, looking mournfully down at the apples.

Jordan tched. "Speak for yourself. I had a grandmother, you know."

Their heads swiveled around to look at her, just a little too eagerly, and Jordan rolled her eyes. "What, you want me to make you pie?" she demanded. "Why is it my job? Because I'm a girl?"

"Or because none of us know how to bake," Sam pointed out.

"It's not my fault your momma didn't train you right," Jordan said, and their expressions went from eager to completely shut-down. Her eyebrows came up. "What?"

"She might have trained us right," Dean said mildly, "if she hadn't died when we were little."

"In a fire," Sam added.

"A demon fire."

"Demonic fire," Sam corrected.

"No, a—look, does it matter?" Sam shook his head. Dean turned back to Jordan, to begin again, but she held up her hands.

"I get it," she said. "No biggie, guys. We don't have to play show-and-tell. I'll make the pie after I finish giving the GTO a once over, okay?"

"I love you," said Dean.

"I love you too, darlin'," Jordan replied sweetly, and patted his cheek. She took an apple from the bag, bit it, and walked out of the house with a swinging, lasses-faire gate. The brothers watched her go wearing identically struck expressions.

"I am so glad we didn't take that sewer monster job in Maine," Dean said suddenly.

"You can say that again," said Sam, before Jordan had gone too far to hear any more.

Audrey found another envelope in her mailbox, though this one was brown, with Jordan's handwriting across the front. She tore into it right there in the hall, and laughed aloud when she saw the picture that slipped out. It was of Jordan, riding on Sam's back, laughing and waving her hand in the air; Dean was standing over a carburetor, grease on his hands, caught in mid-eye roll.

Yeehaw! The back read. Having a blast, babe! I'm restoring an old GTO :) It's going to be gorgeous, I wish you could see it! The boys say hi :)

Love, Jordan

xoxoxo

The GTO was coming along well, but that wasn't why Jordan was excited. Not even close. After a month and a half of living at Bobby's, the brothers were getting restless. So when they'd caught wind of a vampire nest in Albuquerque, they jumped at it—until they remembered Jordan.

"It's vampires, dude," Sam said, sitting on the couch. They were all gathered in Bobby's office to talk it over. "I mean, yeah, she's done a poltergeist and a gremlin, but—"

"I wouldn't call gremlins friendly," commented Bobby. "Are you worried she'll freak out?"

Dean scrutinized her face, unsmiling for once, and then shook his head. "She'll be okay," he said. "That's not what I'm worried about."

"You're worried they'd take me down before I could even get my gun up," Jordan said suddenly. They all looked at her. "Or you think I can't defend myself if I lose my gun. Which is it?"

"Both," said Sam and Dean together.

Jordan got to her feet, feet spread in an easy stance. "Hit me."

Dean started to shake his head, so she hauled off and hit him instead, landing a heck of a left hook right on his chin, and sending him spiraling to the ground. He sat there for a moment, stunned, before remembering that he should be standing up. He used the edge of the desk to pull himself back up.

"Hit me," Jordan insisted, and this time he obeyed. She ducked swiftly and stuck her fist into his kidney, doubling him over, and then punched him in the side of the head, but that was the end of Dean's patience, and he took her by the waist and threw her neatly to the ground. She kicked his feet out and rolled to her feet, but Dean tripped her, and when she landed, he was already there, straddling her waist and pinning her gently by the throat.

"Okay," he said. "So you can fight."

"I went to a school with metal detectors," Jordan answered. He rolled off of her, and she sat up with only a slight oomph. "I can brawl."

"Noted," said Sam.

Jordan rested her hands on her hips, elbows splayed backward, and raised her eyebrows at them. "So. Any more objections?"

When no one answered, she said, "I didn't think so," and punched the air. A grin split her face. "I cannot wait to kill myself a bloodsucker!"

"Aww," said Bobby. "I remember when you used to say things like that, Dean."

Jordan winked at Dean. "I bet you were the cutest baby hunter in the continental US, huh?"

To all of their surprise, Dean blushed.