Katherine stares down at the relatively-blank page in her journal. There are a few pen marks from when the Impala rolled over a particularly tall speed bump and Dean wasn't paying attention...or when the Impala hit a shallow pothole. They've pulled over a few times already so Dean can inspect any damage.

She can't think. There's a bunch of static in her brain. Or...like a marsh. Hard to wade through to get to her thoughts.

And all she can think about was how she kissed Dean last night, and he kissed her. How good it felt to hold him again, to be held by him again.

And then he ruined it. "You should get some sleep," he said. And then she was crying, probably because she was still thinking about the big picture, and he's going to be dead in a few months if they don't find some kind of Hail Mary play, and so he let her ugly cry into his neck and get his t-shirt all snotty because she has no goddamn self control and oh my god Charlie.

Katherine rubs her aching forehead.

"How you doin' back there?" Dean calls over the engine. "You gonna throw up?" He kindly gave her a barf bag when they got on the road that morning. Just in case, he said. And every time she puts her head down, he sits up and looks in the rearview mirror like a meerkat to remind her that she has a barf bag.

"No, my head just hurts," she replies.

She's wearing her sunglasses, Sam's sunglasses, and Dean's sunglasses. Still not enough.

She was only able to write a few sentences about the crocotta case before she decided it could wait. She closed her journal and pulled her jacket over her eyes and went to sleep. Tried to, anyway. Eventually, she just gets so tired of faking sleep that she actually just does it.

They're driving to Georgia, to her family's old estate. Is it risky to go back there? Yes. The last time she was there, she was seventeen, and Bela Talbot had stolen the Book of the Damned. Maybe one of those stupid old books had something that could help them.

It's dark when she wakes up. They're pulling into a motel for the night, Dean said. He helped her out of the car, carried her bag, slowed his strides to walk alongside her.

Katherine sits on her bed with a heavy sigh.

"How's the head?" Dean asks, dropping her bag on the floor.

"Better," she answers. "Still feels kind of foggy, but...the headache's gone."

"Well...keep sleeping. We got a couple more hours til we get to Georgia," he hums.

Katherine felt panic tighten her throat again. The lack of time they have is a pressure on her chest she can never shake.

"Thanks for letting me snot all over your shirt," she mumbles, unlacing her shoes. Dean cracks a smile.

"Any time."

"You never seem to want to snot on anyone else's shirt," Katherine continues, a not-subtle way of asking if he wanted to talk about it. Any of it.

Dean shrugs. "Snotting on people's shirts doesn't get the job done." He watches Katherine's eyes drift as she nods. "I'll be okay," he murmurs after a few moments. Katherine grunts. This one was paired with a flash of her eyebrows. She's annoyed. "I'm just not..." Dean sighs. "I don't see the point in crying about it. For me, anyway. We find something...or we don't." Dean shrugs again. "But, uh...you know, kissing..." Katherine's eyes snap to Dean, who's looking somewhere west of her face. "Kissing makes it better." His eyes move to Katherine, and he cracks a wry smile. Katherine chuckles, slowly shaking her head.

"I'm sorry," she mumbles.

"I'm not."

"You're never sorry."

"I sometimes am. Never for you kissing me." He sits a foot away from her.

"It's not fair to anyone," Katherine murmurs. "So I shouldn't have done it."

"Eh...you're concussed. I think it's forgiven." Dean rubs his thumbs together. "Wouldn't mind if you did it again." She gives him a look. "What? I'm a dying man."

Katherine clears her throat. "Should probably get some sleep, yeah?" She asks as Sam opens the bathroom door.

"Don't have to tell me twice," he says, and flops onto her bed face-first.

✕

Dean remembers the first time he saw Katherine interact with Bela Talbot. She mentioned an old family estate, build when the first Donovans came over from Ireland. In the middle of a field sits a gravel drive leading up to an old, old mansion. Looks like part of the Greek revival, supported with ionic-type columns and two stories with one side having a large, spacious balcony overhanging a side porch. The old, unoccupied home is all white, spare the black open shutters, and greenery crawls all over the columns, sprawls across the front. The grass is all dead and tall. No one's lived here for a long time, but the property hasn't been sold out of the family.

It technically belongs to her grandmother. The one trying to kill her, supposedly.

Then there's the crypt Katherine mentioned. It looks macabre, fitting of this unkempt picture, but darkens the image. It's nestled in a small, iron-fenced graveyard, looking old and grotesque, hidden in the shade of the tree line.

"It used to be a pecan farm," Katherine said. "Then they brought cattle and horses in...kind of like a demon detection system."

"This looks like a sorority house heaven," Dean said.

Katherine rolled her eyes. "We're not staying for long. I just need a book."

It didn't matter she couldn't read it. She would look up other resources. Anything to help Sam and Dean figure this out, she wanted to know.

The traverse to Bobby's, Katherine sat in the back of the Impala and read her books. Most of them were written in Gaelic, and some had Latin annotations in the margins.

So this was going to be a bitch to translate. Sam and Dean looked for demonic activity, and Katherine chipped away. Bobby was helping, too; he took three of four books off of Katherine's hands so she could still help out with the demon-hunting.

So she looked for anything demon related, but received an interesting phone call from someone she visited yesterday.

She's sleeping lightly on her back, ankles crossed and fingers intertwined over her diaphragm. Charlie said all the guys at work jokingly tried breathing exercises on their lunch break yesterday and wound up falling asleep, so...she thought she'd try it. Help out with all of this stress.

Lots of things in a feedback loop. She hasn't taken biology in a few years, so the ideas are scrambled, so she isn't sure if it's a positive loop or negative...negative thoughts, positive loop? because it keeps growing?

Most of the stress is the Dean proximity. Really, the stress wouldn't be there if he didn't make the stupid ass decision to kick her out of the Three Musketeers two years ago, because she would've never met Charlie and if she never met Charlie, then she wouldn't have married him and she wouldn't feel guilty about kissing Dean, because she and dean would still be together.

Or something.

The sound of the door unlocking brings her out of her thought-spiral to sleep. She turns her head to the left, watching as Sam and Dean enter the room. She props herself up on her elbows, kicking her feet a little as they hang over the edge of her bed.

Dean holds up a newspaper. Sam holds up a bag of donuts. Katherine gasps and reaches for him with her left hand. "Stop making grabby hands at me," he laughs.

"Give me donut," she demands, continuing the grabby hand. Sam tosses the bag to her, and she hums contently as the warmth seeps through her thin t-shirt. "What did you find?" She takes a glazed and lies back once more. Dean watches her wiggle her feet as she eats, and he smiles a little.

"The Morton House," he says.

Katherine's expression falls. "Dude, ghosts are so small-fry right now," she deadpans. Sam nods in agreement. Dean narrows his eyes at his brother.

"Every four years, this house becomes the most haunted place in America, beginning at midnight," Dean theatrically states.

"Why every four years?" Katherine asks.

"Some people call it "the leap year ghost"," Sam explains, and she nods to herself. "It's a couple hours away."

"Whatever, I'm in."

"Ah—" Sam frowns. "Katherine, we can't hunt the Morton House."

She shrugs, pushing herself off the bed. "Why not?"

"Because we have better things to do with our time." She's packing her belongings. Sam looks at Dean, who grins.

"Grand Canyon," he says.

✕

Katherine doesn't know why Dean does the things he does. For instance, rolling up to an alleged haunted house blaring rock music. She doesn't even know what this song is, how he heard it, how he got a copy of it, but she would very much like to burn it.

The weird thing is, Sam doesn't even seem to mind it.

"So this is the Morton house," Dean mutters, glancing over the building. There's a mild appreciation in his tone.

It's old. Covered in vines. The wood is disintegrating, so the structural integrity of the building is more than questionable.

"Why can't we ever get a haunted house from, like, 2002 or something?" Katherine mutters, opening her door up. "I'm so sick of the dilapidated buildings that pose more of a danger to my health than a freaking Spooky Scary—" She shuts her door and stalks away from the car, still talking to herself.

"Spooky Scary?" Dean asks, shutting the car off

Sam starts humming Spooky Scary Skeletons as he collects his belongings. Katherine knocks on Sam's window. He turns to look at her, still humming. Her lips are pressed together, brows furrowed. Sam quickly opens his door, not thinking it through too much, and she cries out, clutching her thigh as she moves away from the car.

"Watch it," she hisses, rubbing the tenderness out of her muscle.

"Sorry—"

"I just saw some kids sneak into the house," she sourly interrupts, watching Dean climb out of the car.

He grins, wide and sadistic. "I say we scare the crap out of 'em," he says. Katherine moves to the trunk and grabs her two guns, waits for the brothers, and they start up to the house together.

Sam is still humming Spooky Scary Skeletons.

"February 29th is an odd concept," Katherine mumbles. "And you know what? February doesn't get enough love. If we had thirteen months, every month would be twenty-eight days, the first day will always be a Monday and the twenty-eigth would always be a Sunday."

"Uh-huh?" Dean prompts.

"And every month would have exactly four weeks instead of 4.257, and we would all be properly aligned with the moon," Katherine barrels on.

"You've really put some thought into this," Sam observes.

Katherine rolls her tongue over her teeth as she stares up at the house. "Fuck Pluto. I want justice for February."

Sam gasps, watching Katherine trudge forward. Dean follows her with a humored little grin. "Pluto!"

They've ignored the warning signs, the trespassing signs, and groaned at the clipped chain hanging from the fifteen-foot fence. "Damn kids," Katherine mutters, slipping through the split, and casts her flashlight's beam over the exterior of the home. The windows aren't boarded up too much. Mostly covered in branches from dead trees in the yard. "Scare 'em how?"

Dean smiles and shrugs, coming to a stop beside her. "Whatever gets 'em out of the house." He turns his gaze to her and just watches. Her eyebrows are probably relaxed and her face is probably slack as she's devising all the ways to scare the kids inside. She sighs, eyes following her flashlight beam across the house. She can hear the gaggle of teenagers from clear over here.

Then she turns to look at Dean, and panic briefly flashes across her face. It's quickly replaced with secret humor and a splotch of color.

"Amateurs," she mutters, and turns back to the house.

"Amateurs," Dean agrees.

He didn't know what game they were playing, but he was happy to play it.

Katherine turns her flashlight off as she pushes the front door open, which was surprisingly quiet. The noises of all of whoever is in the home become louder and louder. Then it's quiet.

Katherine stares down the corridor, squinting at the oddly-shaped figures, until she shines her flashlight into the other room. The two men are freaking out amongst themselves. Cameras hang in their faces, suspended from cranes attached to the vests they wear. "Hey!" She barks. "Let's see some identification—c'mon!" She holds her hand out, impatiently glancing between the two.

One of them looks a lot younger than the other. The younger one is taller, too, with dark hair and fair skin and green eyes. The older one has red hair and a scraggly beard, wears glasses over his blue eyes. She narrows her eyes speculatively, waiting.

"Are—are we under arrest?" The younger one wails. Dean glowers at him as he hands Katherine his wallet.

"We are unarmed," the older one is muttering.

Katherine frowns down at the driver's license she's holding. "What's with the getup, Mr. Corbett?" She asks, briefly looking over Alan Corbett's attire.

"Wait," The redhead says. "I know you."

Katherine's stony gaze moves from the license to the redhead, brows furrowed. No, he doesn't know her. He'd never forget her face. The angled cheekbones and jaw, the big, light eyes and the mouth. But the other two, he knows very well.

"Sure you do," Dean mutters. "C'mon—I.D. You realize you're trespassing, right?"

"I know both of you guys!" The redhead cries, his voice losing its terrified tremor.

"Holy shit," Sam says, quite loudly, and Katherine turns to him, leaning close.

"What the hell is going on?" She whispers.

"West Texas," Sam says to Dean. "The tulpa—those two goofballs that almost got us killed? The Hellhounds or somethin'."

Katherine swings her flashlight into the redhead's eyes. He winces, holding a hand up to shield his eyes from the light. Everyone looks at each other for a long moment.

"Fuck me," Dean grunts, almost in disbelief.

"Yeah, we're not Hellhounds anymore, all right? It didn't test that well," the redhead says. "And you're not cops." He smacks the flashlight—and Katherine's hand, by default—away from his face. Katherine takes a quick step forward and he jumps back into the wall with a geez. She turns to Sam and Dean with a grin.

"Fuckin' nerd," she mutters, humor lighting up her eyes.

"Bully," Dean accuses.

"What tulpa were you idiots hunting? When was this?"

"After Dean kicked you to the curb," Sam sighs, nodding, and Katherine's face goes flat. "Sorry."

"They're not cops, buddy—at all," Katherine hears.

"Okay so who are these fuckin' nerds?" She hisses.

"Eddie and, uh..." Dean scratches his head.

"Ed and Harry," the redhead corrects. Katherine turns on her heel to look at him, one hand on her hip, the other drilling that flashlight beam right in his eyes.

"Which one are you?" Katherine asks. "Where's the other one?"

"He's around here somewhere, chasing ghosts."

She chuckles. "Chasing ghosts. Well, play time's over. You and Rambo—" she gestures to the other one, Corbett. "—get your girlfriends out of here and let the adults do their job."

The redhead laughs. "All right," he sighs. "Listen here, doll face—"

"I wouldn't," Sam warns, shaking his head.

The other one puts his hand up. "I got this, Gigantor." He turns his gaze back to Katherine, expression stonier than ever. "We were here first, lady. We already set up base camp."

She snorts. "You already set up base camp," she echoes.

"We beat you."

Katherine turns on her heel to face Sam and Dean, then she shrugs. "They were here first," she sighs. Then she whirls around and shoves the redhead into the wall and he cries out. "Which one are you?" She flatly asks.

"Ed."

"Ed," she begins, very lightly, in a silvery voice. Then she flashes a quick, lopsided, dangerous smirk. "Where's the other one?"

"Harry."

She nods. "Where. Is Harry?"

"Uh...somewhere...inside here." Ed weakly laughs, shrinking away from her unwavering gaze. "You, uh..." He swallows nervously. "You've got a pretty good grip, huh? You, uh...you gonna choke me or something?"

"Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" Katherine mutters, pushing away from him, and starts back for the front of the house to search for whoever else is in the place. "What are you doing in here, Eddie?"

"Ed," he corrects, following after the hunters. "And I'm not going to ask what you're doing here, because I'm assuming you're here with these douchebags." Katherine turns her cold eyes to him with a less-than-amused expression. "We're here to spend the night, all right? It's for our TV show."

Katherine's eyes run over the cameras attached to what seems like every viable body part of the two guys. "You have a TV show?" She skeptically asks.

"Yeah," Corbett nods, grinning. "Nobody's ever spent the night before."

Katherine makes a buzzer sound. "Don't you do any reading before you trespass onto a haunted property?"

"We've never heard of anybody staying the night," Ed scoffs.

"Because they're all dead," Dean deadpans.

Ed laughs. "Oh-ho-ho, I don't belieeevee you," he groans.

Sam huffs and drops his duffle onto the dusty table, pushing the other guys' equipment to the side. "I have missing persons reports going back almost half a century," he says, unzipping his bag.

Katherine memorized the reports on the two-hour drive to the house. "John Graham stayed on a dare, gone. Julie Wilkerson, gone. There are lots more." She raises a brow. "If you don't believe us." She gestures to Sam, who hands the stack of papers to Ed.

"All of them came through just to stay the night, always on a leap year, always go missing," Sam says.

"Always go dead," Katherine corrects. She clicks her tongue and makes a finger gun and shoots it at Ed. "But the only body they ever found was of the last owner."

"Freeman Daggett," Sam supplies, nodding.

"I'd make a joke about how he might've killed himself because only parents who hate their child names it Freeman, but he was just an old son of a bitch," Katherine sighs, putting her hands on her hips.

Ed glances from the missing persons sketches to Katherine, and back to the sketches, flipping through them with care. "These all look legit."

"They are legit," Sam growls. "Look, Ed, we ain't got much time here, buddy. Starting at midnight, your friends are going to die."

"Yeah?" Ed challenges, throwing the papers down onto the desk. "And if we leave and you guys stay, you get all the glory! What makes you so different from us, huh?"

"This is our day job," Katherine deadpans. "And night job. This is our 24/7, 366 days a year, lifetime job."

Ed frowns. "There are only 365 days in a year, sweet cheeks."

Katherine advances on Ed as she speaks. "It's a leap year, you idiot, and if you ever call me that again, I will cut your tongue out." She reached into her pocket as she stalked him—and he backed away—and she did, in fact, produce a gleaming silver knife.

Corbett may have shat himself.

"Oh my God!" It's a distant but approaching cry of a man, coming from somewhere in the house, echoed around the wood. "Oh my God!"

The hunters have their weapons and flashlights pointed at the stairs, where all the noise is coming from. Where three amateurs are running down the stairs, screaming and making noises over one another, running away like noisy children.

Katherine slips her gun back into her pants, casting a disgruntled gaze to Sam, and he rolls his eyes with her.

"Oh my God, oh my God we got one—!"

"No, no, no, no!"

"Corbett we saw one! Corbett we saw one!"

"Ed!"

"It was a full apparition, like a-like a class four! It was a spectral illumination."

Everyone goes silent at the same time...almost like they're only just now seeing the three hunters. The men tower over the woman, but she's gigantic in her own right. For a girl, anyway.

"Hey," the black-haired one says. "Hey, aren't those the assholes from Texas?"

"Howdy," Katherine chirps. "Who the hell are you?"

"Harry," Ed says.

Katherine slowly nods. "Okay."

"Let's have this reunion across the street, guys," Dean says, taking a step forward. "Come on, everyone out."

"What are you guys doing here?" Harry spits.

"We'll get you ice cream—our treat," Dean continues.

"And who is she?"

Katherine rubs her temples as they all talk over one another, rushing to computers and scanning over footage. Harry won't stop staring at her. Her grumpy face, her lean figure, long legs. The pure annoyance on her face, though...

It's incredible.

"Honest to God proof!" The girl cries, and the three hunters move to the back of the semi-circle of amateurs gathered around the computer.

Harry stands up straighter as Katherine stands next to him. He even gets a whiff of her perfume. She's perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

There's one man on the far left side of the screen. He looks real. Dressed in a suit and hat...dated, but real.

Katherine looks to her right. Dean cocks an eyebrow at her and tilts his head. Maybe they really did get something.

"Oh, no way," Ed sighs. "What kind of reading did you get?"

"10.9," Harry responds.

"10.9?!"

"Yeah, it was almost 11." Two more people enter the frame, Harry and the girl. "I came out and I was like, "What's going on?" And I was like—"

"Wait, watch this!"

"Oh, he got blasted!"

Katherine nudges the Winchesters with her elbows. "He moved like he got shot," she whispers, pulling the brothers off to the side. "Maybe we're off on this."

"Maybe a death echo," Sam softly agrees, nodding.

"Yeah, but what's it doing here?" Dean asks. "Anyone ever get shot?"

"Not according to any reports I read," Katherine murmurs.

"What's a death echo?" One of the idiots asks. The hunters all glance in that direction before turning back to whisper amongst themselves.

"Hey!"

"We have a problem and that ghost isn't it," Katherine tells them. "Sit down and don't touch anything."

Like they're children.

"Yeah," Harry scoffs. "That's real. That happened. You wanna watch it again, sweetheart?"

His blood was rushing just saying it. The glare he got...OOH! She could stab him.

Katherine turns away from him and looks to Dean to start elaborating on a thought she had.

"What's a death echo?" The first voice asks again, more deliberately. She sighs and closes her eyes.

"Echoes are trapped in a loop, okay?" Dean says, glancing in the general direction of the second guy who came down the stairs with Harry and the girl. "They keep replaying how they died over and over again, usually in the place they were ganked."

"Ganked?"

"It's about as dangerous as a scary movie," Katherine says, then turns to the Winchesters. "So the echo isn't dangerous, but something else is. Something else is killing people. We need to look at this again."

"You're right," Dean agrees, nodding. "All right, people, we need to get out of here. Come on, let's go, let's go, let's go."

"Pack it up!"

Then everyone is talking over one another again. Katherine's got a throbbing headache, like her blood is too thick in her head.

Dean thought she shouldn't be hunting yet, but she's the doctor, dammit, and if she says she doesn't have any more concussive symptoms, then she's lying.

"What about all of our equipment?"

"What are we gonna do about the ghost—"

"—the ghost—!"

"Not a thing worth investigating, I promise," Katherine sighs.

"We've got all kinds of stuff!"

"We'll make you guys recurring guest stars!" Harry says, gripping Katherine by the shoulders.

Her voice is cool and even, and there's zero emotion in her eyes. 100% lethal. "Hands off, before I break all 27 bones in each of your hands." Harry immediately removes his hands, holding them up, and raises his brows at her.

"What's your name?" He asks.

"Get away from me."

"Wait!" Ed cries, and everyone stills. "Where's Corbett?"