Burn It to the Ground

Maura’s POV

We were all more than happy to leave the motel, which suddenly felt creepy after the return of Freddy Krueger- Er, Yellow Eyes. That’s what Sam and Dean were calling it, anyway. Personally, I figured they had just made it up in order to get Kassia and me to warm up to them, with the whole ‘Oh! Your sister can run around and hack into computers with her brain? Cool! I can see people dying! Sleep with me?’ Well, that had not been the exact conversation, but I had gone over it enough times that that was how I remembered it.
Either way, it had worked.

“Eat.” I reminded Kassia as she picked around her greasy taco salad. Because yes, salad can be greasy.
I still didn’t think there was much to the whole dream situation, I mean everyone has nightmares from time to time and there’s no shame in being bothered by it; but Kassia was visibly shaken by the ordeal and that was the only motivation I needed to go into overbearing-sister mode. Something I was very, very good at.

“I am eating.” She growled, though not with enough contempt to intimidate me very much. Dean sat next to Kass, stuffing his face with some bacon cheeseburger and looking at her with a mixture of amusement and concern on his face while Sam sat next to me in the booth that the four of us shared, sitting closest to the rest of the sleazy restaurant so he had an easier time getting up and ordering me more beer.

God, I love this man.

Shit, no I don’t. I do not. You know what? Just disregard that last thought completely.

Moving on.

It’s not to say that we just all sat around and worried about Kassia, we were still hunters after all. And we had an attack plan. Diana was buried in Weston Hills Cemetery, just outside of town, in a modest little grave. Thank god she wasn’t cremated; I didn’t think I was up for that kind of work; not after everything.

I turned my attention back to my sister, who had taken a sudden liking to her salad and began crunching away at it with gusto. Well, that was one less thing I had to worry about. Saves room for the other billion.

“So…Do you want to talk about it?” Sam asked, leaning forward curiously on the dirty table. I knew my sister well enough to know that she was debating whether or not to just pretend she didn’t hear him or to bluntly say no. Instead of either, she dropped her fork and looked up at him with an exasperated expression. “Can’t any of you just let me try to forget it?” I just went back to my food, smiling slightly and deciding that I would stay out of this one. As worried about my sister as I was, I was not prepared to be her enemy at the moment. It may have been plastic, but the fork she was wielding could do some serious damage if she decided to use it on any of us.

So obviously, it wasn’t a good idea to voice the thought that I had been toying with since we left the motel. It was suicide. After all the near-death experiences I had had, this was probably the scariest.

I thought I should call our father.
_______________
Sam’s POV.

Digging up an old grave should have been easier with four people; I was actually looking forward to cutting some serious time off of the creepy act, but the Valentine sisters just stood there and watched my brother an I work, conversing among themselves like they were watching a dull television show.

“So Michael cheated on Diana, huh?” asked Kassia, not really directing the question at anyone in particular as she glanced around the empty cemetery, the only unnatural light was the faint glow of the streetlamps and even that seemed distant. “Diana goes crazy and seeks revenge…Can you really blame her?” No one fully could, though she was the reason that we were digging up a grave in the cliché cemetery fog.

“Does this seem too easy to anyone else?” My brother asked, throwing another shovel full of moist dirt to the side of the hole as it slowly but surely got deeper under our feet.

“Maybe we caught a break, for once.” I replied, muttering the last part under my breath. Aside from the personal issues, the case had actually gone pretty smoothly. Once we figured out what was going on, it was pretty cut and dry.

After one last shovel full of dirt, the top of the aged coffin was faintly revealed, the wood thankfully appearing to have weakened slightly over the years. The girls actually jumped down to help us pry it open, though it was easier than we had expected and Dean and I had done it a million times before.

The body was severely rotted, almost completely bone except for a few small patches of skin, thin and dry as parchment. The smell wasn’t that bad though, far better than other times we had pried a coffin open.

A can of gasoline was sitting on the ground, elevated slightly from my reach; Kassia was already giving the corpse a healthy shower of salt, a tired look plastered on her face while her sister looked on curiously.

Really, it wouldn’t hurt for all four of us to pitch in.

However, I didn’t complain, half because I was guiltily hoping to get Maura alone later that night and half because my brain suddenly felt like it was trying to split in half.

I gasped and tried to keep from falling to my knees, hoping that it was just a very bad headache even though I knew it was a stupid thought. I had had enough visions to be able to tell the difference, and the sensation that your skull is slowly cracking isn’t an easily mistakable one.

I squeezed my eyes shut in hopes that it would somehow dull the pain, but it never did, so why would it now? The back of my eyelids became almost foggy and my ears began to hum with my increasing blood pressure. I could not see it as clearly as I normally could, it was just a quick glimpse into the scene of a woman, whom I could only assume to be Diana since she was blinking and shaking like a broken video tape, and Michael Taylor. Diana was there, in all her ghostly galore, and she was torturing him within an inch of his life; not with physical contact or pain, but with pure guilty

Dead or not, that was something women were very good at.

And between the guilt and the fear of seeing his dead wife, Michael’s heart couldn’t take it. The aging man fell to the ground, clutching his chest with a wide-eyed expression of horror and pain.

As my vision began to slowly clear, I desperately hoped we weren’t going to be too late. The gas can was still elevated, now out of my reach since I was kneeling on the ground. The girls were around me, worried expressions on their faces. Maura was shaking my shoulder, demanding to know what the hell was going on and Dean was just looking down at me wearily- He would ask if I was okay later.

“Burn it now.” And after I said that, Dean grabbed the can of gas and began soaking the corpse of Diana Taylor in the flammable liquid. I climbed out of the hole, having been just outside of the coffin, and struck a match.

A little lesson of life. When you really need a match to strike on the first try, you’ll end up getting a dead one.

I threw the match away and tried for another one, finally succeeding in igniting the small stick and throwing it into the coffin, which lit up like a campfire.

Diana Taylor went up in flames.