Chapter Text
“So where can I get myself on of those?” Shawn asked, watching Dean wander around the apartment holding what Dean had explained was an EMF.
Dean cocked his head and looked at him. “Gonna take up ghost-hunting then?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow.
Shawn shrugged. “No, but it might be useful in my line of work.” Clients would eat it up, him using his highly specialized equipment. Plus, it was shiny.
Dean grunted and started checking the far reaches of the room. “Hate to shatter your dream, Cleo, but this didn’t register a thing for any of your ‘visions.’”
Shawn could hear the quotes around the vision and snerked quietly to himself, resolving to have at least one more vision around Dean before they solved this. Speaking of, he started prowling around the room also, looking for clues. “Maybe it didn’t go off because I extend my power beyond the veil,” he said, scanning the large floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that dominated one wall. Lots of framed pictures set in amongst paperback romances, bracketed by random knick knacks.
Dean snorted. “Or something like that,” he said. “EMF’s not picking up anything, let’s start looking for a cursed object.”
“You’re gonna have to be more specific than that,” Shawn retorted.
“Statues, things with strange symbols, things that feel creepy,” Dean said, scanning the room, working around Shawn’s bookshelf.
Well that was helpful, except there was so much stuff on this bookshelf he couldn’t see anything that “felt creepy.” Just picture frames and knick knacks. His eyes fell on a large shell – the kind that you heard the ocean in. He loved these things. “My psychic senses are telling me to listen to this shell,” he announced, picturing the look on his face as he enacted a vision based on this shell.
Dean looked at him. “Don’t touch any—“ he began as Shawn clapped it to his ear.
Several things happened at once, before Shawn could react to any of them. The room took a sudden drop in temperature, while the EMF in Dean’s hand shrieked. And he realized that he couldn’t hear the ocean in the shell he held, but screaming. Nonononono noooooooooooo. He dropped it from his ear to stare at it with blank horror just as Dean shouted a warning.
Shawn spun to look at him in time to see a woman appear between them, and he was struck dumb. She was…translucent, shorter than his or Dean’s shoulders, her face clearly bruised and bloody. A spirit, he was looking at an actual spirit. He barely had time to wrap his head around that, much less take in the murderous expression on her face before she moved. “You won’t get away with this!” she yelled, and she shoved Dean hard enough that he went flying back onto the coffee table with a crash.
Shawn just had time to think about moving to help Dean when she flickered and was suddenly right in front of him. “You can’t do this, you’ll pay,” she hissed, and Shawn braced himself to be pushed, but instead she was on him, spectral fingers surprisingly solid as they clawed into his neck, squeezing viciously. Shawn wheezed and flailed to no effect, and he was thoroughly panicking before he heard Dean shout again, and his solid body came flying in from the side, tackling Shawn about the waist. They both flew sideways to the floor as the spirit vanished with an angry shriek, and never had Shawn been so glad to be tackled in his life. But the spirit appeared again almost instantly, and Shawn managed to gasp out a warning.
Dean spun around into a crouch, but the spirit flickered again and was on Shawn before he could blink. Kicking had no effect either, and what did this chick have against him? He watched out of the corner of his eye as Dean dove off to the side and came up with a small cast-iron statue that had been used as a doorstop. With a grunt, he swung it through the spirit, and she vanished again. Shawn frantically sucked in air from his place on the floor. Dean grabbed his arm and started to haul him to his feet, Shawn disoriented enough to not be much help.
Evidently iron worked better than fists, because the spirit stayed gone long enough for Shawn to gain his feet, feeling rather wobbly. But just as Dean started to shove him towards the door with a “Get out of here—“ she reappeared, right in front of them.
Shawn just had time to hear Dean swear before the other man was torn away to fly through the air again. He hit something with an ominous crash. Shawn scrambled backwards after Dean – Dean was still holding the statue, and Shawn hoped Dean wasn’t too badly hurt, because Shawn had no idea what to do here. “Dean!” he called, skidding to a halt beside the remains of the coffee table Dean had landed on. He was relieved to see the other man sitting up and groaning. “Dean, man, come on, get up. She’s really pissed off and I can’t find that statue thing!”
He saw a flicker out of the corner of his eye and cringed, expecting to feel cold hands around his neck. But evidently the spirit had decided that Dean was more of a threat, because she ignored Shawn and flickered onto Dean. “Dean!” Shawn shouted again, casting about frantically for the statue. “Damn, damn, damn, where is it?”
Across the apartment, the door crashed open.
“Dean!”
“Shawn!”
Shawn jerked his head up. Gus and Sam were standing in the doorway. Gus’s eyes were bulging as he took in the scene before him, but Sam had already efficiently sized things up and was striding forward, flinging salt. The spirit vanished with a shriek, and Dean gasped and cursed as he was released. Sam’s long legs had him across the room in a blink, and he hauled Dean out of the remains of the coffee table.
Shawn jumped as a hand landed on his arm, but it was Gus, not the spirit. “Come on Shawn!” he yelled, dragging at Shawn’s sleeve.
“You’ll pay! You won’t—“
Gus shrieked as loudly as the spirit as she suddenly appeared again. She was appearing faster, and she looked a lot angrier. Luckily Sam was ready with salt again – and never had Shawn found a common household item so amazing, including that time he had managed to fill Gus’s shoes with whipped cream without him noticing – and then he and Gus were practically thrown out the door by Sam and Dean.
“Go – parking lot!” Dean wheezed at them. “She won’t be able to go far from her focus!”
There was a lot of screaming and yelling and cursing as they all piled into the hallway, including, as it happened, the spirit. She took Sam off guard, and she managed to send him flying through the door into the stairwell before Dean could move in with the statue. Shawn bolted through the door after Sam. Luckily, he’d hit a wall, rather than a couple of flights of stairs, and he was already pushing himself up when Shawn got there. Gus skidded to a halt beside him and they each grabbed an arm and finished pulling Sam to his feet.
“Thanks,” he said shortly, eyes fixed on the door they’d come through. “Where’s Dean?”
“He’s –“ Shawn began, just as Dean burst through yelling for Sam.
“You alright?” he asked, when he saw that Sam was standing. He grunted at Sam’s nod. “Then let’s go, before that bitch comes back.”
They managed to get outside without any more appearances from the spirit, although Shawn didn’t relax until he saw Dean toss the statue aside to examine Sam’s head.
“Get off!” Sam said, batting his hands away. “I’m fine – you’re the one she was strangling.”
“I’m fine, that was mostly – shit, Shawn. You alright?” he asked, swinging around to look at Shawn, who was leaning back against Gus’s car gasping a bit for breath. He managed to raise a shaky thumbs up. He didn’t think anything was permanently broken.
Gus was fidgeting beside him. “That was – you just – are you – that was a ghost!” he burst out, craning his neck around to look everywhere, as if the ghost might appear again. Shawn could tell he was on the edge of flipping out, but that he didn’t want to be where anyone could see them when he did. “We should go before someone calls the cops.”
At Gus’s stuttering Dean raised an eyebrow, but Sam just nodded. “Good thinking. We’ll meet you guys back at your office?”
Gus nodded jerkily, and Shawn started fumbling with the door handle. He sort of fell into the seat, which was a lot further back than normal. He laughed when he realized why. “How did Sam fit in here?” he asked, because even with it this far back, he couldn’t see this working.
Gus gave a terse laugh. “It wasn’t pretty.” He started the car. Dean and Sam had already pulled out of the lot, and Shawn almost flew into the back seat as Gus peeled out after them. “Woah, hold on there. Gimme some warning before you do that!” he said, righting himself.
Gus was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that Shawn thought there were going to be imprints when he finally let go. “Shawn, that was a ghost. A ghost.”
Shawn pulled a grin, ignoring the ache in his throat. “I know! Isn’t it cool?”
“It tried to kill you!” There was a squeak present in Gus’s voice.
Shawn’s grin widened. “But it didn’t. We were totally handling it before you guys got there.”
Gus’s look called bullshit. “Dean was being choked,” he pointed out.
Shawn leaned back and folded his arms. “All a part of our cunning plan.” As was this – he needed to distract both Gus and himself or things were going to get ugly fast, because, damn, he had almost died back there. From a ghost. Right, distraction.
Gus snorted. “Shawn, you don’t do cunning plans, and you’re not a real psychic – we should not be involved with this. We should not even know about this.”
“Gus, calm down,” Shawn placated. “Now that Sam and Dean know what we’re dealing with, I’m sure they can take care of this with less strangling.”
Gus just hmphed, and Shawn thought of something. “How come you guys showed up, anyway?”
Gus shot him a sideways glance. “I realized the attacks were getting progressively more violent, and then Sam realized it couldn’t be a cursed object and that it was probably a spirit attached to an object. But neither of you answered your phones when we called to tell you, so we had to come and save your asses.”
“You never called—“ he began, but when he pulled out his phone, it did indeed say he had a missed call. “Hmm, odd.”
“Sam says spirits sometimes interfere with cell phone signals,” Gus explained, and Shawn could hear a hint of smugness that Gus knew more than him. Shawn snorted, but let Gus keep that point – better than him worrying about dying.
Gus pulled into their office parking lot and parked. The Winchesters were, of course, already there, although they were still sitting in their car. They got out when Shawn and Gus did; Sam was fine, but Dean was favoring a leg – from crashing into the coffee table, Shawn thought.
“Hey, are you really alright?” Sam asked, once Shawn got close enough. “Dean says that spirit was really after you.”
“I’m fine,” Shawn insisted, and it was mostly true. “She did particularly hate me though.”
“Any idea why?” Dean asked.
Shawn shook his head. “Never seen her before.”
“Yeah you have,” Gus interrupted.
“What? Where?” Shawn couldn’t remember anyone who had looked like that ghost. He hadn’t hooked up with anyone with black hair in at least a month.
“I’ll tell you inside. I need to look something up,” Gus said, and for once his mysterious air worked. Shawn wondered if he’d been practicing. Still, he exchanged baffled looks with the Winchesters and followed Gus inside.
Gus was busy pulling something up on his computer. “Gus, I’m sure I don’t know who she is. Clearly, you’re stressed and seeing things – besides that ghost, which we all saw, so I don’t think that counts as—“
“Do you recognize her now?” Gus interrupted him again, turning his monitor to face them. There was a news story up, with a picture labeled as Mary Brooks, and Shawn remembered that case – it was –
“Well damn,” he said, slumping to sit on his desk. “I do recognize her.”
Shawn could see Dean and Sam read the headline: “Woman Beaten to Death in Own Store.” Now that Gus had brought it up, he could remember the details about it, but it hadn’t been a case he had been involved in. In fact, it had been pretty clear-cut, open and shut so quickly that he’d only heard about it on the news, rather than at the station.
Dean turned towards him with a raised eyebrow. “You know her? Explain.”
“Well, I didn’t know her know her,” Shawn said, pushing off the desk and running a hand through his hair. “But I remember hearing about her case.”
Gus nodded. “It was really high profile.”
Sam was leaning over and reading the article. “Says here that she owned a popular souvenir store on the beachfront, and that she was found beaten to death in the store.”
“Yeah, they found out it was some local punks that did it,” Gus said. “They used it as a reason to call for a crack down on gang activity.”
Shawn nodded. “It was a big deal because that area is supposed to be really safe – for all the tourists and families and such.” Everyone turned to look at him. “What? I can know a fact! I worked down in that area for a while, a couple of years ago. What I don’t understand is why she’s a ghost – they caught the guys that did it.”
“That doesn’t always matter to a spirit,” Sam explained.
“Especially if they died violently,” Dean added. “It’s the emotion, the unfinished business, a lot of the time.”
“Shawn, did you touch something before the spirit appeared?” Sam asked, still looking at the article.
“Dean was there too – why is that question directed at me?” Shawn asked indignantly.
“Because I know better than to just touch things when we’re looking for a spirit,” Dean retorted. “And he picked up a shell right before she appeared.”
Shawn shuddered. “I heard screaming in it, not the ocean.”
Sam looked up, interest plain on his face. “One of those conch type shells? Dean, do you think that shell maybe picked up the energy of her death, channeled it into the shell…”
“And that could have caused her to haunt the shell, rather than the store,” Dean finished. “Presto, one killer souvenir.”
“And why she was going after Shawn – until you started fighting her, she wanted him as the one who’d touched the shell,” Sam added.
Shawn looked at his hand guiltily. Maybe he should listen more to Gus about not just touching things. Then again, how would they have found the shell otherwise? He was totally the one to crack this case.
Dean made a face. “Does that say where she was buried?”
“Yup,” Sam answered, scrolling down to the bottom of the article.
“Why do you need to know that?” Gus asked suspiciously. “Shouldn’t you be after the shell?”
“I’ll go there tonight, salt and burn the body. Should distract her enough for Sam to get in and destroy the shell without her going all freaky on him,” Dean said. “It’s still early enough.”
“Dean, I don’t think we should split up,” Sam objected.
“You can’t dig up a grave!” Gus objected, even louder.
“Destroying the shell won’t be enough,” Dean explained. “We need to burn her body too, or she’ll still be around. And we can’t just burn her body, Sam, her focus on the shell is too strong. We need to get both, and as soon as possible.”
Sam and Gus both kept arguing, but Dean was evidently used to arguments, because when all was said and done, Dean’s plan won, although it was deferred to the next night, in order to give Shawn and Gus a chance to see if the police had been alerted to the disturbance earlier.
It turned out, they had been. The place was crawling with uniforms and there was talk of posting more of a guard than just crime scene tape and a locked door. Shawn, however, managed to talk himself in and over near where the shell had been dropped, where he palmed it directly into the fortunately large bag of salt he had with him. He was counting on the crowd and the salt to keep the spirit from appearing, and it apparently did. Dean nearly flipped out when Shawn pulled the bag out of his coat back at the Psych office though.
“What did you think you were doing?” he hissed as he hastily put an additional ring of salt around the bag. “You could have been killed!”
“I was thinking that there was no way we were getting back in there tonight – someone definitely called the cops,” Shawn retorted. “And that we needed the shell if we wanted to stop the spirit.”
Dean looked put out at Shawn’s eminently logical reasoning. “Yeah, well…don’t do that again. You talk to me or Sam before you mess with the job.”
“Technically, you are helping me on this case,” Shawn pointed out smugly. “I’m the one with a PI license.”
Dean ground his teeth together and called Sam over to revise the plan.
........
Shawn knocked on the Winchester’s motel room door at the bright and early hour of 10 a.m. “Good morning. Have a pineapple in commemoration of a successful partnership,” he said brightly, thrusting the fruit at a sleepy-eyed Dean as soon as he opened the door. Dean blinked slowly from the pineapple to Shawn.
“Why are you here and how did you find our room?” Dean demanded. Grumpy tone aside, he still opened the door and let Shawn inside. Sam, freshly showered and looking far more awake than Dean, was sitting at the table, looking at something on his laptop. He smiled and greeted Shawn and gave his brother an unsure look as Dean plunked the pineapple down.
“Hey Sam,” Shawn greeted back. To Dean, “Duh, psychic here, remember?” Actually, it hadn’t been hard to get Sam to start complaining about the types of motels they stayed in and then to drive around until he found Dean’s car.
Dean snorted and went over to his mug of coffee. “Still doesn’t explain why you’re here. Spirit’s gone, told you that last night.”
“Pardon my brother,” Sam stepped in. “He’s not human before his coffee.”
Shawn just grinned in a way he knew would irritate Dean. “I can see that. And you would have left town without another word and broken my heart, you cad.” He fluttered his eyelashes outrageously. Sam muffled a laugh; Dean just chugged the rest of his coffee.
“I would swear you’re some kind of demon, except I think you’d annoy them too,” Dean grumbled, heading for the coffee pot and pouring another cup. “Seriously, what do you want? Is there another problem with the spirit? Because I’m sure we torched her ass.”
Sam and Dean hadn’t let him come to watch that process, but Shawn was pretty sure they knew their business on that score. They’d taken care of the shell too. And Sam had even said that his idea of putting it in a bag of salt had been a good one before they’d left.
“No, no problems,” he said, smirking at the memory. “I just wanted to come by to say that we worked very well as a team.” Dean’s face turned suddenly suspicious; Shawn blithely continued on. “And I just think that we shouldn’t ignore that. So if you, for example, need any more psychic assistance, you should feel free to call me. I just thought this whole experience was soooo enlightening and –“
“Oh my god, if I give you my EMF, will you shut up and go away?” Dean interrupted. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed you eyeing it.”
Shawn shrugged guilelessly. “Well, I would feel inclined to leave and go experiment with it immediately,” he said. He barely caught it as it flew at him.
“Good. Take it. Go.” Behind Dean, Sam’s shoulders were shaking as he tried not to laugh.
Shawn flashed him a triumphant grin and walked to the door. “Be sure to drop by next time you’re in the area—“
The door slammed behind him. Shawn briefly petted his shiny new EMF before pocketing it and walking to his bike. He wondered if Dean knew Sam had given Shawn Dean’s number. In case of any new supernatural emergencies. Not for crank calling at all. He smiled and put on his helmet. They wouldn’t get any credit on these cases, but this was so worth it.