1.

"Well, this is gonna be a laugh a minute," Dean said gloomily, flopping back on his bunk and casting a doleful eye at Sam, who was busily packing.

"You're just mad because you have to pretend to be sixteen again," Sam said absently, considering a book of occult rites and discarding it reluctantly.

"Don't forget my shaving cream again," Dean said.

"What do I look like, your slave?"

What do I look like, a teenager?" Dean protested, sitting up and holding his hands to his face dramatically.

"Eighteen is a teenager Dean," Sam rolled his eyes. "Besides, I'm sure they'll be totally convinced by your twelve-year-old personality."

"Nineteen in January. So what are you all psyched up about?" Dean immediately regretted asking: it was just as well notto remind Sam that he usually hated hunts now.

"Well," Sam frowned, sniffing a t-shirt and stuffing it into his bag. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not looking forward to the whole children's home part. But if anyone deserves a break in life, it's kids like them. Seems we could do some real good here, y'know? The last thing they need to be dealing with is a revenant."

"All hunts do real good!" Dean objected. Sam raised an eyebrow and gave him a dour look – it was true, the last month hadn't been the most rewarding. They'd exorcised a harmless a ghost and faced the wrath of a tourist trap proprietor for 'scaring away the customers' with their 'occult gibberish', before Dad had left them to take out a kelpie that, as Sam had objected, hadn't yet harmed anyone so far as they knew.

"Two drownings in a year," Dad had refuted him.

"So? It's a small college town, they were probably wasted and coming home in the dark, and they fell in! You don't know it was the kelpie!"

"Don't have to know," Dad shrugged. "If it hasn't drowned someone yet, it will soon."

He came home three days later, unscathed and with one more kill on the long list to his name, and an article about a disappearing at St. Francis's Children's Home, Fergus County, Montana. The missing kid was fifteen, same as Sam, but the article said she had 'moderately severe learning difficulties' and was 'likely to trust a potential abductor'.

"That's sad," Dean said. "But it looks like one for the cops, not us. Plus this article is three months old."

"That's not all," Dad said. "Got a call on my cell about four hours ago. Bobby gave her the number. Kid's mother works at the home. She saw some stuff, round the time the kid went missing, all signs point to a revenant. Course she thought she was going crazy." A grim, sad look passed across his face, gone as quickly as it came. "But the cops got nothing, and she's convinced of what she saw. So she started exploring…other options."

Dean nodded. He was enthusiastic until Dad revealed the plan for him and Sam to go undercover at the home, Dean shaving two years off his age to meet the requirements for residential stay.

"Still don't get why I couldn't have been like, a janitor or something," he complained now.

"Yeah you do. Resident gets you better access to everything. Ms. Harper can't be around all the time to make sure we're allowed places."

"It will be cool to have a man on the inside," Dean admitted. "Or chick, as it were."

"She's like forty, Dean," Sam wrinkled his nose as Dean's use of the slang.

"Speaking of women…." Dean looked longingly out the window to where the Impala sat perfectly parked and gleaming in the cold winter sunlight. "I have to be apart from my baby. It's the first time since I had her."

"I'm sure Dad remembers how to keep her going," Sam said dryly. "Besides, it might not be for long. More incentive to solve the case fast." With an effort, he zipped his bag closed. "Now come on, pack. You don't wanna be apart from your deodorant as well, do you? Cos dude, I still have to share a room with you, and…"

Dean grinned. It was somewhat insulting, sure, pretending to be a kid, but it was good to see Sammy happy to work again. Well, he thought with an internal snort: for once, he's got a good reason to play the neglected, put-upon teenager. And hey, Dean could act. All part of the job description. For the first time in a long while, he felt he and Sam were a team.

If Sam had been expecting a Gothic, sprawling house crusted with creeping ivy, St. Francis's Children's Home was a disappointment. It resembled, if anything, a small school: a large redbrick building and a couple of smaller ones, set in a tarmac yard with a swingset and a couple of basketball hoops. No-one was in the yard, but when they drove up to the main gates and Dad pressed the buzzer for admittance, a woman's voice answered immediately.

"This is uh, Carter Briggs, Child Protective Services," said Dad, and Sam bit his lip to keep from laughing. "I have an appointment with-"

"Yes," said the woman. "Please come in – the car park is at the back, I'll meet you there."

Lori Harper was a handsome middle-aged woman with the gaunt, drawn look of a person who'd aged a great deal in a short time. She was almost as tall as Dad, standing up, and her long thin fingers wrapped spider-like around his hand when they shook.

"Mr. Winchester," she said. "And these must be the boys."

"We'd uh, prefer to use psedonyms at all times," Dad said, not harshly, but leaving no room for disagreement. Harper frowned slightly, but said,

"Of course."

"I'll stick with Briggs, and the boys are Jack and Thomas Martinson," he nodded at Sam and Dean respectively.

"Right this way." She led them out of the car park and into the main red building by a side door. Sam looked up at the windows, curious for his first glimpse of a resident, but could catch nothing more than the flicker of a profile in passing. Harper showed them into the living room of her modest suite:

"I live on the premises," she explained. "It was just me and Melinda, you see."

"That's your daughter?" John nodded to a photograph on the mantelpiece. It was Harper, smiling and fuller-faced, her eyes alight with a happiness vanished now. She was posing with her arm around a young girl, who was smiling too, but with something a little distant about her expression.

"Yes," said Harper.

"She looks nothing like you," said Dean, and Sam winced at the usual lack of tact. It was true though: Harper was tall, dark blonde, turning grey now, with a prominent jaw and high cheekbones, pale skin and light hazel eyes. The girl in the photo was petite, with dark curly hair and round wide-set dark brown eyes.

"She's adopted," said Harper a little sharply.

"Do you know the birth parents?" Dad asked.

"Does that matter?"

"It might."

"All I know is from official records," Harper said. "They're very bare, but I'll find you a copy of them. It's not a terrible story, as these things go – her biological mother was very young and couldn't look after her, no father on record. I adopted her as a small baby." Her lips tightened momentarily, grief clear, but she mastered herself. "Please sit down. I have coffee in the pot."

"Of course, they all think I'm crazy at work," she confided once they'd settled. "But they haven't the heart to fire me, I suppose, and I'd have nowhere else to go. Poor grieving Lori. I just don't talk about it anymore," she added: "But I don't believe it any less."

"You're not crazy, Ms. Harper," Dad said firmly. "Believe me – whatever people say - you're not."

She regarded him through tired eyes, and her mouth twitched with understanding. Neither asked, but the adults seemed to communicate silently for a long moment. Sam twitched uncomfortably and Dean occupied himself with his coffee mug.

"Now if you wouldn't mind," Dad took out his journal and a fresh sheet of paper, "Tell us everything you saw again, from the start. No matter how strange or impossible it seems. Don't leave anything out."

Harper looked up from regarding her hands on her coffee mug. "Four months ago, if you'd told me I'd be saying this, I'd have called the Home psychiatrist," she admitted. "But the more time goes on, the more certain I am. I understand you deal with – this sort of thing – in a regular basis." She shook her head, as though she couldn't believe what she was saying. "Mr. Winch – Briggs," she corrected herself, and sighed. "I think I saw a ghost."

TBC