Author's note: Final chapter! Thank you for reading and commenting! I hope you've enjoyed the story.
The fact that John's research matched up with Sam's and Dean's was just about the only thing going smoothly for the Winchesters. True, both David Moran and Joseph Quigley were buried in Evans, but due to the decades separating their deaths, their final resting places were on opposite ends of the cemetery. Dean was tired and grouchy, Sam was still a little drained from the night before, and on top of it all, after the sun went down the temperature dropped to an unseasonably cold twenty degrees with a wind chill factor in the low single digits.
At least Sam had a pair of gloves tonight. They were of the cheap, stretchy one-size-fits-all variety--the best John could do on short notice--but they were infinitely better than nothing. And he had put on two shirts! Not that he was planning on getting lost again, but he didn't exactly plan on getting lost the first time, either.
"Um, we're still thinking of dusting David Moran first, right?" Dean hesitantly asked as John pulled the Impala to a stop on one of the narrow driveways near the oldest headstones. "Because he's totally on the other side of the graveyard."
"Yes, we're going for Moran first," John confirmed. "Would you rather hoof it all the way across the cemetery now or after we've dug two graves?"
Dean locked eyes with Sam and shrugged. Neither one of them wanted to ask why they needed to walk all the way across the cemetery at all when they had a perfectly good car to drive.
The boys climbed out of the car and sidled up on either side of John as he opened the trunk. He handed one shovel to Sam, two to Dean, and grabbed the bag of salt and the plastic container full of gasoline to carry himself.
"Sam, I don't want you out of my sight," John said as he slammed the trunk closed. Ordinarily Sam would have taken offense to the overprotective instruction, but after the scare he had given his father the night before, he obliged him without argument.
As the three of them trudged through the cemetery in dead silence, Sam kept his eyes glued to the path ahead of him. He used to study the headstones as they passed, but he would inevitably find a grave marker for a child, especially in the older cemeteries, and he didn't like the thoughts those particular stones would turn up in his head. Thoughts of the death of innocence, of lives unlived, of wishes and dreams unfulfilled. Instead he had learned to stare straight ahead and to see without taking anything in.
It was because of his habit of looking without observing that he didn't notice the blue orb of light until he almost collided with it. He stopped short, staring as the dull light, growing brighter, moved from directly in front of his face down to his hip. As he walked forward it hovered next to him, following beside him like the little lamb to his Mary. John reached down and grasped Sam's free hand, tugging him further down the path. "Come on, Sam. He can't hurt you now and he knows it. Just trying to intimidate you."
Sam nodded warily. It's just like a headstone you don't want to see, he told himself as he fixed his gaze straight ahead. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the orb abruptly stop moving, seeming to hang back in … disappointment, maybe? Sam allowed the tension in his shoulders to release.
The light's movement was so sudden that there was no way Sam could have anticipated it. A blue flash brighter than anything he'd ever seen up close lit the air directly in front of his eyes. The shovel dropped to the ground with a loud clatter as he released it to press his thumbs against his closed eyelids. His startled cry reverberated through the cemetery, causing a few birds that hadn't yet flown south and had been resting on a nearby tree branch to flap their wings. "You okay, Sammy?" he heard his father ask. A hand rested on his shoulder and squeezed out of both comfort and concern, and he could tell from the size and the grip that it was John's.
Sam opened his eyes and blinked hard. A breath caught in his throat when all he could see was the same bright flash, but after a moment the flash faded and the cemetery began coming clear. "Yeah," he said shakily. He blinked again and the light faded further. "Remind me never to complain about flash bulbs on cameras again."
John chuckled and tousled his son's hair. Sam bent down to pick up the shovel while smoothing his hair back into place. They were approaching David Moran's grave, Sam realized. They were closing in, and the will o' the wisp was getting desperate.
As Moran's headstone came into view, Dean rushed ahead; he liked to be the one to break ground when they were digging. He jammed the tip of the shovel down into the dirt as far as it would go and pushed down on the handle. He grinned at the small bit of resistance he felt as fourteen-year-old grass roots were ripped from the soil with small, barely audible pops.
Despite the snow and the cold temperatures of the last few days, the ground hadn't yet completely frozen, and the digging went far more easily than John had expected it to. The ghost light hovered around their heads in a last-ditch effort to scare the Winchesters off the case, but all three were too focused on the job to be done. Soon the sound of wood splintering below the tip of Sam's shovel met their ears. Sam took the sound as his cue to scramble out of the hole and let his father bust into the casket.
The first time Sam ever laid eyes on a skeleton had been an accident. Dean and his father had left him asleep in the backseat of the Impala. He could no longer remember what woke him, but upon finding himself alone, he climbed out of the car in search of the rest of his family. Not ten feet from the car he found them. He ran up to them just as Dean began tossing handfuls of salt into the hole he and his father were surrounding. Neither one of them noticed Sam until it was too late.
He remembered that he didn't scream. He stood riveted, staring down into the hole at the splintered pine of an 1880s coffin and the dark, dingy remains of a man who had been alive a century before. His father cursed then slapped his hand over Sam's eyes as he gathered his son in his arms. Only then, in the safety of his father's arms, did Sam allow himself to cry softly. John whispered apologies into Sam's ear until he calmed down, assuring his father that he was okay. Then he had asked to see it again.
The second look had been an attempt to steel himself against the macabre sight that even in the three years since that night he hadn't quite been able to master. The sound of the wooden boxes splitting under the force of their shovels was Sam's signal to hide his eyes until the first handful of salt had been thrown onto the bones.
Dean covered the bones with salt and John poured the gasoline down into the hole. "Sammy," John called, digging a book of matches out of his back pocket.
Sam stepped forward and looked expectantly up at his father. When John held the matches out to Sam, the boy's jaw dropped open. "Really?" he asked, a slight smile curling on his lips.
John gave a curt nod. "It's personal for you this time, son."
Sam took the matchbook from his father, a twisted form of tradition handed down from father to son. He pulled a match off the cardboard and expertly pulled the head across the black strip. The flame flared bright then died down slightly. With a sly grin, Sam dropped the match down into the fresh grave and jumped back as the flame ignited the gasoline.
Sam handed the book of matches back to his father and watched with a delight that sort of frightened him as the flames turned the fragile remains of David Moran to dust. Once there was nothing left in the hole but ash, the three of them began filling in the grave, the softened soil depositing easily back into the hole.
All three were exhausted, but their job was only half-done. They began their walk to the older stones where Joseph Quigley had been laid to rest. This time the trip was uneventful. The white light, Joseph Quigley's spirit, had appeared from behind one of the headstones midway through their trek and followed along beside them, but the energy surrounding it was much different than that of the blue light. David Moran had railed against the Winchesters but Joseph Quigley seemed almost to welcome them with open arms.
Dean broke ground on Joseph's grave and watched the white light with a wary eye. He was expecting an attack, expecting that the spirit was merely lulling them into a false sense of security. But after an hour had gone by and the light hadn't moved, Dean finally understood. "We're releasing him."
He hadn't meant to say it aloud, but it was too late to rescind his words. John looked up at his older son sharply. Dean averted his gaze and instead concentrated on the digging.
Once Joseph's bones had been unearthed, salted, and doused, John lit a match and dropped it into the open grave. As the fire ignited, the white ball of light brightened for an instant and then was gone. It would be later still, after the boys were tucked in and John was lying in bed himself, that he realized that in the only way he could, Joseph Quigley had said thank you.
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Joseph Quigley weighed heavily on John Winchester's mind long after the streets of Allenstown, New Hampshire were behind them. He flicked his eyes up to the rearview mirror to check on Sam. His youngest was happily settled in the backseat, his feet tucked up underneath himself, deeply lost in the world of whatever book he was reading. He had no idea Sam managed to read in the car without getting sick, but he supposed that as long as it kept Sam quiet, he shouldn't question it.
After ensuring that Sam was okay, he switched his gaze to his right side. His oldest was staring through the windshield but not actually seeing anything, his mind miles elsewhere. John returned his attention to the road ahead of him. Route 93 South to Route 3, he thought. Plymouth, Massachusetts was a zoo this close to Thanksgiving, but who knew if they were going to be anywhere near Plymouth for any future Thanksgivings?
The silence in the car was broken only when Dean asked in a plaintive voice, "Dad?"
"Yes, Dean?"
"Spirits aren't always angry, are they?"
Dean, too, was thinking of Joseph Quigley. "No, son, they're not."
"He was stuck. Trapped somehow, and we released him." Dean turned his head and tried to catch his father's eye. John met Dean's glance for a quick second before putting his attention back on the highway. "But he was still a spirit. So … was he good or bad?"
John was quiet. Joseph was a spirit, inherently unnatural, unholy. But in all those years that he haunted the cemetery and the woods surrounding it, not one person had died as a result of following his light. In fact, a select few over the years claimed to have been rescued, led to the edge of the woods by a mysterious white glow. The injuries, the deaths, the brushes with death began only after David Moran's frozen body had been found among the trees.
John had dealt with shades of gray before, but nothing like this. A lost soul that was actually happy they were destroying him? That was not his usual prey. This was a gray he was not comfortable with in the slightest. "I don't know, Dean," John answered with a slight shake of his head. "I wish I did."
Dean nodded and continued to stare out the window as he mentally added Joseph Quigley to the pile of questions that had no satisfactory answers.