Not Until We Are Lost

Smoking outside was something Cas had grown accustomed to. He knew Anna disliked it, so he did wish to respect her wishes. She was always willing to provide explanation as to why she didn't like it and he did understand why it was generally distasteful in regard to the lack of health benefits, but the more he tried to stop, the greater the cravings became. He supposed it was comforting. And leaning against the temporary buildings and places they were to consider home, Cas took a drag off the cigarette and looked up.

He could see stars at least. While they spent some of their time aboard a spaceship, it was...different. To be connected to any form of land, whether it was Earth or somewhere else. It was pleasant to see any side of the cosmos. The parts of him that were still angelic could feel them, albeit faintly.

And as it seemed, someone else was either restless or at least out.

Cas didn't claim to know Phaedra well. She was quiet. More so than any vampire he'd met previously, but then she was likely the only vampire he'd ever spared. It had been easy to think of things in terms of black and white for so long that the new habit of not passing judgment based on species was still difficult for him at times. Though in Phaedra's case, she'd befriended Dean and a number of the others. The fact that they cared for her was reason enough for him to accept her.

"Hello, Phaedra," he said simply, knowing she probably sensed him long before drawing near.

It was a polite greeting. He didn't know how else to address her or anyone else. He supposed it was an attempt at friendly small talk, but in all honesty, he knew he'd feel better outside the fence. With weapons. And even the creatures outside. He wasn't afraid of them. And if one was to kill him, then that was his fate. Everything was created to die. That was not fatalistic so much as any angel's understanding of why they were created. Though he had no intention of leaving Anna. Hurting her was the one thing he had no intention of doing.

"You're out late."

Phaedra shifted and stretched.

She was very, very comfortable. With eyes still closed, she couldn't quite place why. There was light behind her eyelids, but maybe she had forgotten to snuff out the lamp next to her bed. It was that warm glow.

She felt cool sheets, and before opening her eyes, she knew the planet had changed. Her bed in the abandoned house wasn't that great. This mattress had springs, and support. And the sheets were cleaner than they'd ever get with a washboard, soap and a river. She moved and her foot touched warm flesh.

Phaedra sat upright, fast. If her heart could race, it would be racing.

Peter was asleep next to her. Peter was asleep next to her. Her mind raced. He should be dead, he should be at least seriously injured, crushed, bleeding. She looked at him, lying there, trying to parse why he was able to lie there in that sunbeam--

Sunbeam.

Phaedra got off of the bed as quickly as she could, not at all taking care not to wake Peter, and started closing the blinds. She was too panicked to pay much attention to the fact that the sun wasn't hurting her, wasn't singing her, that it was morning, true morning...

Until she got to the last window.

Then she opened the shades, and the window itself, and stood there in the black tank top and underwear. Her black pants were at the foot of the bed, and her boots were, too. This was more clothing than Phaedra ever slept in, but that didn't matter.

It didn't matter what was in the closet, though she would bet her clothing was--the corset, the coat, the skin-tight stuff that she was so comfortable in.

Just under the window, there were tropical flowers reaching for the sun, and something that looked like a hummingbird.

She couldn't talk. Or move. She had to be wary of this, but... Phaedra could not stop smiling.

Peter had slept. A lot. A lot a lot. He wasn't entirely sure he hadn't lost a day or two in the darkness, there. He felt a hell of lot more human - heh. Funny. He looked better, too, though his ribs still ached like fuck. He'd scrounged a shirt from the house but it was already kind of stretched out at the neck; obviously whoever the house belonged to hadn't exactly been a big guy. Not that Peter was overly muscled himself, but he had broad shoulders for a teen. Hell of a lot more body hair than your average teen, for that matter.

He hadn't bothered shaving, stubble tipping the line into a full beard as he padded through the house barefoot. The sun was nearly set, light in broad slashes across the floor. Almost made it look like the floorboards were on fire.

He fixed himself a cup of coffee, poking through the cupboards for something to eat while he waited for it to brew. It wasn't really a surprise that he didn't find anything, but he had still kind of hoped there'd be something edible. His stomach growled agreement, loud enough to wake the dead. Well. Some of them. The rest seemed to be pretty sound sleepers.

Peter was no stranger to waking up in unfamiliar places. Normally those places were the middle of fucking nowhere, curled up butt-naked at the base of a tree somewhere with mud and pine needles under his fingernails.

That, he was used to.

Waking up butt naked in dry dirt, with the fading warmth of the sun radiating off the ground? That was a new one. He pushed himself upright on arms that felt little better than the bendy straws you got on cheap juice cartons, flimsy and thin and sure to give out at any moment. His hair was hanging in his eyes, his skin gritty with sweat and dirt. He'd been lying out here long enough that his pale skin was prickling, sweat still drying on his skin. Getting his legs under himself, he crouched, his eyes flicking around as he took in his surroundings.

Welp. This was fucking wierd. This....was not Hemlock Grove. This was a very, very long way from Hemlock Grove, from anything familiar at all.

It looked like he'd walked on to the set of a fucking cowboy movie. Any minute now, Clint Eastwood was going to stroll down the middle of the road, spurs clinking, stale cigar hanging from his lips.

As post-moon fever dreams went, this was shaping up to be a doozy.
-------------------------------------------
Of all the worlds she had been to so far, this was Phaedra's least favorite. It was an easy thing to decide; here she'd awoken at the end of a rope, relying on Winchesters to save her.

The horror.

She did not like the human beings in this place. Or the aliens posing as humans. Whatever. They were the type to hang their kind. And anyone that wasn't.

She couldn't be sure since she'd woken up already in the noose, but Phaedra tended to suspect the worst of people when it came to their open-mindedness.

Which is why she didn't trust the situation unfolding before her.

Some of the locals--one whose thoughts she seemed to recognize from her time on the gallows-- were approaching this new arrival. She couldn't blame them for THAT fact: he was naked in the street. They were going to have some questions.

She watched and waited to see what they would do, hidden in a shadow. After all, to at least one of these men, she was dead. They'd watched her die, commented on how strange it was that her neck didn't break, taken her pulse.

"Hey, you," one of the men said, as he approached. "Boy!"
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Oh boy. This was a good start.

Peter shoved himself to his feet, unashamedly naked, making no attempt to cover himself as he brushed his hair back from his face with both hands.

"Evening," he said, a disarming smile on his face. "I seem to have gotten myself a little turned around - you know how it is. One whiskey too many at the..." he glanced over, briefly, "...saloon, and suddenly you don't even know what day it is." Or year. Or century. He was really hoping there was an elaborate practical joke being played on someone that wasn't him. The alternative reasoning of 'time travel' was a little too wierd even for him.

"I don't suppose one of you fine gents would be willing to lend me a pair of pants?" He lifted his eyebrows, trying to look as unthreatening as he possibly could. The advantage of being scrawny and average height - it was easy to appear defenseless, even if you weren't.
-------------------------------------------------
The man that'd called the newcomer 'boy' looked him up and down, turned his head, and spat tobacco juice. "We got rules here about public decency."

He shook his head.

"And we got an empty cell over in the jail since we hung the last person who couldn't follow rules. I think you should sleep it off. Maybe your pants'll come back. Whatddya say, Wyatt?"

Phaedra half hoped it was Wyatt Earp, but Wyatt turned out to be a redheaded skinny guy with a tooth missing. He'd bee part of the group that strung her up.

"Let's take 'em in before one of the ladies sees," Wyatt said.

In this world, Dean came to in a crowd.

All around him, guns were being fired, and some drunk townspeople were cheering. Dean realized that it was dark, which was nice. He also realized that if it wasn't at least late afternoon, or whatever it was, he'd be squinting a lot. And he had a cowboy hat on his head. And some kind of blanket poncho thing.

It took him a minute to realize that he was watching a hanging.

He couldn't see who they were hanging, which was probably better. Dean wasn't really down with the idea of public execution. He pulled himself away from the crowd as best he could an watched everyone disperse, looking for Sam, for Mary, for Jo... for anyone, really.

He remembered helping the Doctor. He remembered spending a lot of time with Annabelle and Phaedra, and a guy who said he was the god of dreams, even if Dean didn't think that was really the case (at least not now.)

It took a while for everyone to leave the square. And not everyone seemed all that normal. Dean saw more than one citizen with a few scales here and there, like reptiles, and more than one with orange eyes, though everything else about them seemed human.

Just as he started to worry about the Impala, Dean realized that he did recognize the figure hanging from the noose.

It was Phaedra.

He cursed under his breath. She was obviously faking, but they were going to, at the very least, cut her down and bury her. It looked like that wasn't happening just yet, like they might leave her there until the sun came up because everyone was too busy being stupid and rowdy.

If that happened, she was toast.

And if he cut her down, or she cut herself down, then the rest of the time they were here, she was gonna have to hide.

"Fuck," he said, with feeling.

Rob was upstairs telling Dean about his world right this moment. Or possibly right this moment. Jo didn't know the exact time, but she knew that it was happening tonight. And she wasn't invited. She was okay with that, because she wanted to do whatever was easiest on Rob. But she wanted to be the one to tell Dean what she knew. She'd hated keeping it from him. She also wanted to be there to make sure that no punches were thrown or anything. And she really wanted to be there to see how exactly all of this was going to shake out. She couldn't help but worry that this might cause issues for the two of them.

So while the boys were upstairs talking, Jo decided it was time to keep her mind off things. She still wasn't sure just how much she could push the rules concerning carrying weapons around here. Which irked her, because she could really use a hunt right now. Her trigger finger was a little itchy and tracking and killing something that would only hurt people if left unchecked almost always got her mind off whatever else might be going on. But she'd seen enough of this place to know that any small bit of rule breaking was treated swiftly and violently. She hadn't actually seen the violence, but she'd seen perpetrators carted off and had seen the fear as people watched the perps taken away. She'd sniffed around enough to get an idea of what happened to people who broke laws. Enough to know that they weren't often seen again.

So for now, she was playing the good, law-abiding citizen. Which meant that her only choice for distraction was to head to the hotel bar and try to drink until her head was fuzzy. An hour in, and she had a pretty good headstart on that. She'd chosen a table in a back corner of the bar. It gave her the best visibility on the room. She could see at least most of the doorways leading in and out. Just in case. Some might call it paranoid or twitchy, but most hunters simply called that survival. She never did like sitting somewhere that she couldn't see who (or what) was coming and going in a place.

The doors of the palace were thrown open. The grand ballroom was decked out with silver and blue decorations, crystal snowflakes hung from the ceiling and the palace entertainers played merry tunes to greet the guests. The aromas of the feast wafted out the door and down the street. The Queen herself sat at the head table with the princess at her side. The princess didn't look entirely happy at the moment, though there was speculation that she wasn't the sort to settle down and the Queen had been the one to decide that now was the time for the princess to narrow her sights to one single suitor.

Most of the kingdom turned up in their finery. From lords and ladies to peasants, all could be seen dining and drinking and after dinner, dancing.

Those that were the abductees had been invited as well. The Queen had even arranged with the aliens to keep one, should the princess decide that she fancied one of the group that had come to temporary fill the open job positions. Oh, it had taken some diplomatic posturing, but it was her hope that those from other worlds might hold her princess' attention more than those native to this one.

After dinner, the princess stood at the edge of the dance floor as a line of gentlemen were introduced to her. Those who attended had more than the princess to focus on, however. The minstrel strolled through the crowd as he played, and various other entertainers were stationed throughout the ballroom. Wine flowed generously, which resulted in some of the guests sliding towards entertainment themselves.

Will had been under the impression that once the encephalitis was treated, the hallucinations and the lost time would stop. But he'd still been undergoing treatment before he was brought here and he couldn't find the medication that he'd been put on after turning the room upside-down.

So he'd lie awake in bed until he couldn't keep his eyes open anymore, and then a disturbing dream would jolt him awake again - each time, back in this same place, as if it was trying too hard to convince him that this was all real - until one day he'd become too exhausted to even dream, and sleep felt like a blissful way to die.

He'd only fallen asleep for about two hours when he got out of bed, put a jacket on and left his room. There was a trail that only the sleepwalker could see and follow, and he didn't seem to be overly keen on responding to anything else in the corridor.

Phaedra knew it'd been full, bright day just a second ago. She remembered moving further back in the cave on the island because of it, in order to give anyone else who might want that shelter as wide a berth as possible before going dead when the sun rose. She remembered it clearly.

So now, when she woke up in a darkened room, the vampire sat stock still considering the change.

Her clothes were next to her, though she still wore the outfit she'd had on the island. All her dark blacks, and the daggers sat neatly on top. Her boots were next to the bed she was lying on. There was a small portal on the wall, and it was dark outside of it. To the left of that portal was a small, thick-looking curtain; it seemed to be a chunk of that material she used back at her apartment in Seattle to block sunlight.

There was a wardrobe on the far wall, and slowly Phaedra got up and went to it. It opened easily, and inside was the green dress she'd worn on that other planet. She'd known it was green, even though it appeared in black and white. She smirked at it.

Excellent, she thought. Now it can be shredded.

She changed back into her own clothing, listening to the sounds of the ship on the water and listening for the minds of the people aboard. Once she had a dagger happily on each hip, she went to the door of the cabin and opened it, stepping into the hallway.

It wasn't that Phaedra did not care that Mary was missing. She did. And, away from the Winchesters and their team, was doing her own poking around for information. She simply did not wish to be near so many hunters at once, some of whom didn't know her. And really, she worked better alone. She pretty much always had, unless you were Harry Dresden.

Had Dean, or Jo, or Cas... or any of them who knew her asked for her help, she'd have given it. But no one had. Despite how useful she could be. She could isolate the thoughts of a single mind.

She could hear the killer. Or Mary.

More and more since leaving York, Phaedra felt like an outsider. In this world she had to be extra careful not to smile too wide, not to move too quickly... and it was exhausting.

That was why this evening, she was sitting outside in a city garden. With a book. It was easier not to be exhausted by trying to fit in when you were alone.

There was a cup of coffee on the counter by The Doctor's hands.

He arched an eyebrow; last he knew, last he remembered, he'd been speaking to an alien being in the middle of a room full of other people. He'd been asking it questions, and then...

... And then coffee.

He narrowed his eyes at his hands, too. The wrists didn't have a leather jacket on them anymore. There was instead a deep brown suit, and a crisp white shirt. There were silver cufflinks poking out, and they were shaped--hilariously--like tiny TARDISes. The Doctor felt for his neck, and found the knot of silk there that indicated a tie. There was a vest under the suit jacket, too. And a fedora hat on the counter next to him.

He thought quickly and reached inside his suit jacket, happy to find the psychic paper, TARDIS key, and sonic screwdriver inside. He sighed in relief, and looked around.

The music playing in here indicated a real record player, and everyone--EVERYONE--was dressed like he'd just travelled back in time.

To the 1940s.

Eventually, Piotr decided that enough socializing had gone on. People knew that their friends and loved ones were here with them, and that was a good thing. They could catch up further later, however. If he didn't interrupt, the meeting would go on far longer than anybody wanted it to. He'd provided some snacks, but no actual food. There would be a need for actual food at some point.

He cleared his throat to get the attention of everybody present.

"We are all here right now for the same purpose." Piotr's voice wasn't loud, but it was demanding. His accent cut through everything else easily. The edges of it were sharp, the middles heavy. He wouldn't, couldn't be ignored. "All of us were brought to this place, world or dimension, and we have all been seeking answers since we woke up. It is time to share what we have found."

He smiled a little at Mary, at Cas, then at Rob, still not giving up his position.

"I will do this in the most orderly manner that I can, so we can get the information and compare notes as needed."

Piotr turned to Castiel, who had spoken up first.

Piotr was anxious to get everything rolling. While putting the meeting off had given extra time to round up others who might need to be in on it, it meant a delay of information that he wasn't truly comfortable with. He'd managed to play it off with everybody that he'd encountered, making as if this wasn't as big a deal as it really was to him. Inside, Piotr had been twitchy. Anything could happen at any time. They were all dealing with the unknown. There were too many variables, the risk was far too high. Lingering only swayed things away from their favor.

It was very domestic, the way he readied for the guests. He didn't let Max lift a finger. It was the only way he could keep himself from stewing, really. To move, work. Put plates together. Ready beverages. Create a spread that Martha Stewart would have been proud of.

He even dressed up.

Black suit, crisp white shirt, black tie, shiny black shoes, hair combed impeccably, guns tucked away in their holsters under his arms and hidden carefully by the jacket of his expensive outfit. Not a lick of metal showing anywhere to give him away, and that was more a throwback to the long nights of watching a mark than anything else. Piotr didn't have any good reason for it now, but it felt right.

When there was nothing left to do, he leaned against the arm of the couch and worried his lip between his teeth. There wasn't a watch to check on his wrist, so he glanced every few minutes at the clock on the wall, ticking away in its hideous orange and purple motif, strange detached bunny ears the hands, a mangled face grinning behind them. It was disturbing at best, though Piotr didn't really see the image, just the minutes.

The doorbell rang and he opened it, taking up the entire doorway. He smiled at the first guests and stood aside to allow them in. He made motions toward the table of snacks and directed them toward the kitchen for drinks. Every single newcomer got the same treatment. Max still not allowed to do anything that might have taken even an iota of the control out of the Russian's hands. They weren't military people, those who were showing up, they weren't highly trained like he was, but he would be damned if he wasn't in command of everything.

There were so many faces that he didn't recognize, and still no sign of the one that he was still seeking. Rayne was not with any of the others that showed up. Piotr couldn't help the worry he felt for his charge. The strange woman who he'd met in Malden, what felt like a hundred years ago now. He didn't ask after her, knowing that if any of these people knew her, she would have been here. He'd been careful to set the time of the meeting right after sunset to accommodate her and any others that might be like her. If she was here, by some strange chance, and had not been informed of the meeting, and hadn't come looking for him, if she had, in fact, decided to keep herself secret, then she had a reason for it, and it wasn't Piotr's place to draw attention to her. The hope of that was beyond slim, however, and he knew it. She wasn't here, he just had to admit it.

He let everybody mingle for almost an hour, to make sure that all the people that had been told had a change to show up. That and it was obvious that some of them had been looking for each other for a while, and they were just now discovering one another. He couldn't bring himself to break that up. He knew how he would have felt if he'd found his friend. He wouldn't have been able to focus on anything else but making sure that she was alright.

Finally, he stood in the center of the living room, his eyes skating over the seating, knowing that there wasn't enough for everybody and regretting it, and cleared his throat to get the attention of the assembled.

"We are all here right now for the same purpose." Piotr's voice wasn't loud, but it was demanding. His accent cut through everything else easily. The edges of it were sharp, the middles heavy. He wouldn't, couldn't be ignored. "All of us were brought to this place, world or dimension, and we have all been seeking answers since we woke up. It is time to share what we have found."

He smiled a little at Mary, at Cas, then at Rob, still not giving up his position.

There was a strange comfort in seeing Jo.

Just months ago, Phaedra would not have thought she'd find the presence of someone like the hunter comforting at all. She'd lost so much of the humanity that she'd gained because of Lindsey and Harry with their disappearances, and she'd spent so much time alone that it was easy to backslide into being the kind of thing that humans--even hunters--feared.

It never mattered that she was, ostensibly, a 'good guy.' What mattered was that human beings were programmed to fear predators.

Seeing Jo did not change that Phaedra had arrived in this place hungry.

It was better for everyone if she did something about that hunger. Self control came with her age, with her centuries, but eventually that would break. Phaedra did not want to find herself in some strange position again, with someone she knew... and hungry.

After parting ways with Jo, Phaedra made her way to the hospital at greater than human speed. It didn't matter what bassackwards town or planet or whatever this was... there had to be a hospital.

Her only other choice was to find a few willing donors. Nudge them with her mind. Make them forget afterward. She preferred to hunt down those that truly had it coming, though. And so far, in this place, she was not getting any kind of read on thoughts that betrayed that.

She stood outside the emergency room doors, scanning the mind of the nurse at the intake desk for the location of the blood bank. The doors opened and closed automatically three times before Phaedra turned around.

Someone was there.

Jo had found Mary easily enough, but so far she'd seen no sign of Dean, Johnny, or even Jack. She was worried about all three, and she was missing her boyfriend. Worse, she wondered what it would do to Dean for her to disappear again like this. She didn't mean to keep doing that, but it seemed like there were forces outside of her control that were determined to keep pulling them apart.

Jo wasn't one to wallow which meant that she decided now was a good time to take a break before she started wandering too far into those darker thoughts. She found a small pub-a place with tacky neon signs that depicted Cadbury Beer and Pumpkin Ale. She ordered herself a beer and then grabbed a booth in the corner of the room. The booth provided a good vantage point to keep an eye on what was going on in the rest of the bar and to keep her eye trained toward the entrance. It was as much a defensive move as it was a hope that she might see one of the people she was looking for walk through those doors.

For now, she settled into her corner of the bar and started to drain her first beer. It would take a few before she was pleasantly fuzzy, though that was the goal right now. She didn't need to be more than that since she was in a new place and didn't know what threats might be out there in the night, but a little bit fuzzy could be good. It was better than thinking about the people that she might have lost with this latest abduction.

They had moved him when he'd been asleep, during the little catnap he'd decided to take with - funny enough - the cat. Simon still didn't know who "they" were, or what their purpose was, but it was a bit unsettling that the would have the ability to render a fairy into a state of supreme passivity and move him without him knowing. That part bothered him. The rest of it? Honestly, Simon couldn't be too upset. He was having an adventure. Seeing things that he'd never get to see.

The strange little house that he woke up in was nice enough. Filled with interesting little baubles. That he was missing his own things was a bit of a concern to Simon, he'd spent many years with his collection. But they were ultimately only things, and he did have some more important bits in his pockets still.

Simon sat at a small kitchen table overlooking a nice garden outside, watching the sun set. He was waiting for his housemate to rise. He knew she was there, and he knew what she was. Experience with Archer and others had taught him well. He hadn't, of course, known it was a she until he'd sought her out and had a look for himself. A very careful look, since some of those vampire types tended to get a little testy when you poked at them while they slept.

Sympathy was, for lack of a better word, lost.

The ship, Anna Cortez, had somehow found her way inland through a series of locks. She had not done the steering. It had, in fact, happened while she was comfortably asleep in her quarters and the ship had been anchored. When she woke up and found the surroundings had changed, she had brought the whole crew up and accused the lot of them of doing the moving, but not one of them could explain it.

The town they were in was a port town, despite not being right up against the sea, which was what she was used to. It also had a very strange name. Electric City. For days, Sympathy had refused to get off the ship, hoping that she would be able to get herself back to open ocean. The mysteries out there were far more comfortable than the mysteries in this strange place.

But the crew had abandoned her one by one, and soon so had the stowaway passengers. She was left alone and anxious aboard the Anna Cortez, with nobody willing to come help her return the ship to the water it should have been in. To top it off, the lock operators told her that there were several broken mechanisms and who knew how long it would be before they would work again, so she might as well explore.

And that, that, had caused her even more grief.

The pirate didn't know what to think of the bright lights and the fast moving things on wheels. Or all the people in their strange clothing, doing strange things. She didn't want to admit to it, but there was great fear in her at what she saw.

Unable to take any more, Sympathy retreated to the quietest place that she could find, which happened to be a park. There were still strange things within it, but at least she was far away from the fast moving carriers and the big, towering monuments they called buildings. So much glass in them, and metal.

She'd been sleeping in a tree, using her belt to hold herself to the branches so she wouldn't fall out. Bathing in a fountain and rinsing out her clothes there as well. Food she stole from people having picnics, or the occasional man in a funny suit who brought his lunch in a brown paper bag. The unfortunate fool would get distracted, speaking into his strange little light up box, and she would snake in and retrieve the food.

Currently, she was sitting at the fountain, trying to scrub mustard out of her shirt. She'd taken it off and was holding it under the water. A too-dry cigarillo hung out of her mouth, her stringy hair fell in her face.

"I do not know what you are, you bastard yellow stuff, if I did not enjoy how you tasted so much, I would curse you and whoever chooses to put you on their food. I do not understand why you must stain!"

Once the sun had set, and Phaedra was free to move around, she relocated herself from her portion of the house to the kitchen.

And she waited.

She sat on top of the kitchen table, legs crossed under her. She wore a black pair of fitted jeans, her boots, and a simple black tank top. Something about the combination of this almost made her look fragile.

Her back was utterly straight, and she didn't move. She didn't need to.

She'd been tracking the new minds--or, more accurately, the minds that had somehow come back--and she was waiting for Harry.

It wouldn't be long.

I believe I can see the future
Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose
But then again
That might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice
Now I never make a sound...


Some people who spent hours of their lives meditating describe an experience of enlightenment as feeling their third eye open. That was a little too goddamn gentle in Phaedra Romani's explanation.

Every day in York since the disappearances, Phaedra became a little bit less human than she'd been, and a little bit more robotic. She'd looked for Lindsey and Harry with a single-mindedness that bordered on obsession.

At first.

The longer they'd been missing, the more she went through the motions. She'd scan the minds of the citizens of York for their minds, she'd make phone calls and inquiries. But she didn't leave. She couldn't leave this town without some kind of protector. There were too many things that that Gate could do, and not enough people to handle them.

Something about tonight was different.

When she snapped back into consciousness, a few things happened.

The first was very direct.

She could smell him. Like he was in the house again. Like his heart was beating here, in these walls.

When she got up and got herself together, she did her routine searches. Lindsey first.

And then, it was like all at once, she could feel them all. Harry. Dean's daughter. A few of the others that'd been missing.

Phaedra's eyes changed to their more feral green, in frustration and anger.

"You're fucking KIDDING ME!" she yelled, emerging from her portion of the house and heading for the kitchen. HARRY!

It was a very insistent, telepathic yell. WHAT THE FUCK?!