"Jeez. My allergies are acting up."

"I just opened the door."

"Exactly." Katherine rubs at her nose, flashlight sweeping through the dusty air of John Winchester's lockup. Bloody boot prints track over a devil's trap painted onto the concrete. "No demons allowed."

"That's blood," Dean mutters. She hums in agreement, gaze going back to the floor.

"Trip wire," she chuckles, and scans the walls. "Your dad was even more paranoid than mine." She flashes Sam crazy eyes. "What the fuuuuuck?"

He chuckles and steps over the silver wire. "Two sets of boot tracks. Where's that thing lead to?"

"That skull right in front of your face."

Sam turns to his left where, resting on the middle shelf of a stroage rack, is a shotgun lodged through the eye socket of an animal skull.

Welcoming. Well-hidden. Props to the old man.

"Friend with the buckshot in him kept walking," Dean hums.

"Think it hit him in the face?" Katherine idly wonders. 

"Would like to see that," Dean chirps.

"You think Dad did work in here or somethin?" Sam asks, his gaze sweeping around the unit.

"Livin the high life, as usual."

They find all kinds of junk in that storage unit. Old newspapers, circled articles, skin mags, Sam's soccer division championship trophy that has about five layers of dust on it...

"What in the..."

Katherine holds up a janky excuse of a shot gun. Dean gasps and starts towards her.

"My first sawed-off!" he exclaims, setting his flashlight on the table. Katherine blinks. He smiles sheepishly and takes it from her. "Made it myself."

"That explains a lot."

He grins and elbows her. "Hey. You tellin me you made somethin better than this when you were eleven?"

"Yeah, actually," she chirps. Dean holds the gun close to her face and pumps the handle, sending dust flying towards her. "You ass!" She shoves him into the table. Sam smiles, moving past them, and heads for the back part of the lockup.

The padlock chaining the door shut has been broken.

"Holy shit."

It's an arsenal. Knives, land mines, machetes, shotguns, grenades, ammunition boxes...

"Old marine shit," Katherine mutters, eyes and flashlight scanning the full racks. "None of which they took." 

"Guess they knew what they were after," Dean muses.

"What, if not this?" Katherine swings around, voice trailing off at the end of her question as her eyes land on another storage rack. "Oh."

Dean turns. "What?"

Sam comes up behind Katherine. "What are those symbols?"

"Fucking curse boxes," Katherine scoffs. 

"They're supposed to keep the evil mojo in, right?" Dean asks. "Kinda like Pandora?"

"Yeah, they're built to contain the power of a cursed object," she says. 

"Dad's journal did mention a whole bunch 'a shit," Dean hums to Sam. "Ya know...dangerous, hexed items...fetishes..."

"There's one missing," Sam notices, pointing to the only spot on the shelf that isn't covered in dust, and that is exactly in the shape of a box. "And there's blood on the cork."

"Great," Katherine drawls.

Dean purses his lips. "Well maybe they didn't open it," he chirps. Katherine mocks him in a high, nonsensical voice. His jaw drops. "Hey!" He cries, wounded.

Sam laughed, anyway.

"I'm gonna go check if they picked anything up on the cameras," Sam decides. 

Ten minutes later, he's back in the storage unit with the two, laughing.

Katherine looks up from a stack of files with a raised brow. "Why...are you laughing?"

Sam holds up a sticky note. "The idiots parked right in front of the security camera. I've got their plates."

She cracks a grin. "That was easy." Her smile immediately drops. "No. No, no, there's gotta be a catch."

"No catch," Dean says as he moves past her. "Let's go get the sons-a bitches."

"That guy working the front desk was freaked," Sam says to his brother. Dean frowns. "We could see on the footage that one of them hurt his shoulder and there was blood everywhere."

"Was he working when this happened?" Katherine asks. 

Sam shrugs and shakes his head. "Gonna assume not...otherwise he would've said something about hearing a gunshot, right?"

It's less than an hour's drive to the location of the registered plate, and by the time the Winchesters reach the apartment complex, it's midday.

They hit the front desk with Katherine first, their little secret weapon. Her charm and big blue eyes, wide smile—it can get them almost anything in the world. This, however, was not the scenario for it.

She stormed in there like woman scorned and demanded to know where Brayden Wade was staying. With two tall, built men behind her, the meek concierge quickly bent to her will, directed her to 308, and watched as the three hurried up the stairs.

Sam twisted the door open near silently, and Katherine and Dean followed him in. There's quiet conversation floating towards them from down the hall. She raises her gun and stalks alongside Dean. He leans against the wall facing the main room, while Katherine takes the one with cover. It's so very Dean. If he can't sideline her like he promised he wouldn't, he'd take every precaution he could with her.

Katherine would be lying if she said she didn't think about that still. It's not romantic. He's just protective and bull-headed and has a death wish.

"—let's get out of here, go have some fun—"

"—royal flush—"

Cards.

"—no way we're handing it over to that stuck-up bitch now, not after all we've been through."

Katherine glances towards the door as Sam creeps up the dingey hallway.

And then she waltzes out into the kitchen. Dean's eyes nearly pop out of their head. Maybe he almost faints. She's playing with his blood pressure.

"Hey, boys," she chirps, looking at the two men in the living room with a grin. "Which, uh..." She gestures to them with her gun. "Which one of you is Brayden?"

A stupid question. She already knew from when they pulled his plates and his license.

The brunet looks at the buzzcut blond. He stays looking at Katherine. She quirks a brow at him. "You?" The other man reaches for his gun. "Don't move!" She snaps. Sam and Dean edge into view of the two men. The "shit" factor sinks in. 

"Give us the box," Dean says to Brayden. "And please tell me that you didn't—"

"They did," Katherine says, flatly, furtively glancing to the open black metal box on the table.

"You opened it?!" Dean growls, shoving Brayden up onto the wall.

"Are you guys cops?!"

"What was in the box?"

Brayden glances over Dean's shoulder. They always seemed to do that—tell on themselves.

Dean looks onto the table, and his eyes land on a furry-looking. "That it, huh? Was it?" Then he frowns and looks at it again. "What is that thing?" Brayden slaps his arms up against Dean's and he knocks the gun out of Dean's hands. It happens to fire, and the bullet ricochets off of the radiator and hits Sam's gun out of his hands before bouncing up to the ceiling fan, to Katherine's gun, and smashes into the lamp beside Dean.

"What the f—" Katherine's sentence is cut short as she hits the floor, lunging for her pistol, and the air is forced from her lungs. Sam is going for Dean's gun. Brayden shoves Dean. Sam lands on  top of Katherine. Dean trips over the two and goes through the wooden coffee table, sending the rabbit's foot flying.

"Sorry—!" Sam amends just as Brayden's buddy tackles him to the ground. Katherine scrambles from the floor, and she and Dean lunge opposite ways for different pistols. The bizarrity of the whole situation goes unnoticed for the moment. Brayden gets to Dean's gun first and pulls his hand up so hard it knocks Dean in the forehead, and he's on the ground again. Katherine trips on the curled edge of the rug and splits her head open on the hardwood.

"Ahfuck—!" She grunts, holding her hand to her forehead, and fumbles around for her gun. Then she notices a funny feeling between her eyebrows. A tickle. She rubs the gash harshly, without much thought, and lightning shoots across her eyes. When she pulls her hand away, she sees bright red blood.

Katherine grits her teeth and picks her gun up.

Her father taught her to never shoot with one hand. She can see his permanent scowl now.

How the hell are you gonna shoot when you're blinded with your own blood?

Also it's just stupid, because the kick of the gun is never gonna give you an accurate shot, but Katherine is one hell of a shot. So she takes it. And she misses.

She never misses. Not unless it's intentional.

Dean gawks. Sees the shock on her blood-soaked face.

Then Sam picks up the rabbit's foot, and their luck changes.

He kicks Brayden's friend onto the opposite side of the floor—but into Katherine—and climbs to his feet.

"Guys, I got it!" Sam calls.

"No," Brayden says, holding Dean's pistol up to Sam's chest. "You don't."

"Put it down!" Katherine roars, holding her gun with two hands. No one knows who she's talking to.

The blood from her gash is a steady stream, running down the bridge of her nose and the right side of her face. It curves around the corner of her lip, drips down from her chin, and begins to collect there. It's spattered on her t-shirt. Smeared all over her hands. 

Brayden's accomplice tackles her and sends her bloody gun sliding across the floor, right to Dean. She turns around and starts clocking the guy in the face until she kicks him onto the other side of the wall. When she climbs to her feet and finds Brayden is on his back, out cold, and Sam and Dean are fine, she sinks onto the sofa.

"What—the Hell," she groans.

"That was a lucky break," Dean scoffs.

"Tell that to my face!" Katherine cries. Sam holds up the rabbit's foot. Her expression crumples. "Oh, what the—is that a rabbit's foot?!"

Sam frowns at it. "I think it is."

Well.

She looks down at her bloody hands. "I, uh..."

"Let's clean you up somewhere away from here," Dean says. He grips her by the arm and draws her nearer to the foyer before gently placing her gun in her palm. She looks at his own, covered in her own blood, and wonders why he doesn't wipe them on his jeans.

Dean stops at a gas station at some twisted attempt in humor. He waltzes out looking like the happiest son of a bitch on the planet. He drops into the car and throws at least five scratch-offs in Sam's lap with a smile, then throws a wink Katherine's way. She's still holding pressure over the wound on her forehead. A small amount of fresh blood has forked down her face, but for the most part, it looks dry. "Oh—Dean, come on," Sam protests, catching sight of the lottery tickets. "Seriously? Katherine's bleeding out back here—"

"What? That was my gun he was holding up to you! My gun. And my gun don't jam. That was a lucky break. Also, one of 'em taking himself out—that was a lucky break."

"It's got to be cursed somehow," Katherine monotonously drones from the back. Dean slides her a bottle of water. 

"Dad wouldn't have locked it up otherwise," Sam agrees, scratching at the patch of a lottery ticket with a penny just to humor Dean. The older brother snatches it away almost immediately, eyes as wide as saucers. 

"1200 dollars," Dean states in disbelief. He whips his head to the side to gawk at Sam. "You just won 1200 dollars." He lets out a laugh. "Wooo! I dunno, guys—it doesn't seem that cursed to me."

Dean passes Sam another ticket and heads for the nearest motel.

Sam finds a watch near the edge of a drainage grate in the parking lot. Katherine, sulky from having what will probably be her first face scar, is in an even more miserable mood after that. She stalks off with her med kit and heads for the bathroom of their conjoined rooms.

She's weird about some of her patch jobs. If it's in a visible place, she's fighting like a wet hen to stitch herself up. Something about minimizing the scars.

Dean waltzes into her room as she's finishing up her sutures, holding his phone as Bobby rants on speaker.

"It's real hoodoo," Bobby insists. Katherine tries not to frown as she threads the needle through her skin one last time, glaring at her reflection in the terrible bathroom mirror. Her back and hamstrings are aching from the terrible position over the sink. "Old-world stuff. It was made by a Baton Rouge conjure woman about a hundred years ago."

"Yeah, well, apparently it's one hell of a luck charm."

"Kid, that ain't luck!" Bobby Singer cries. "It's a curse. She made it to kill people, Dean."

"How is finding a gold watch underneath a newspaper in a shady motel parking lot not luck?" Katherine scoffs. Then she winces, setting down the scissors, and walks over to Dean. She tries not to notice the way his emerald eyes are raking over her, scanning her for damages. They settle on her swollen forehead and stay there for a moment, holding a little warmth, before he walks over to the mini refrigerator.

"When you touch it, you own it," Bobby explains. "You own it, sure, you get a run of good luck to beat the Devil. But, you lose it, that luck turns. It turns so bad, you're dead inside a week."

Katherine can't help but shrug. "So Sam won't lose it," she says, watching Dean tuck a few ice cubes into a clean rag from his bag. 

"Everybody loses it!" Bobby sqawks.

Dean offers the ice rag to her without a word. After a moment, she sinks onto the edge of her bed and gingerly presses it to her forehead before closing her eyes. 

"Well then how to we break the curse?" Katherine tiredly asks.

The older man lets out a heavy sigh. "I don't know if you can."

"I'll stitch that bitch into Sam's skin, so help me God," Katherine mutters. "I've just assigned myself to Sam Protection."

"Let me...look through my library," Bobby finally huffs. "Make some calls."

Katherine smiles a bit. "Thanks, Bobby. Happy father's day." 

"See ya, Bobby," Dean says. After a moment, she can tell he's ended the call. "Here."

She opens her eyes and sees Dean has offered his flask to her. Uncharacteristically, she doesn't argue, and downs a shot of bourbon.

"We should get some food in you," he says. "Considering you probably lost a blood."

"Yeah," she breathes out a sigh. "Yeah, I'm...feelin' a little queasy."

There's a Biggerson's ten minutes away from their motel. The whole ride there, with Bobby's words clanging around in her skull and forehead feeling like it has a pulse of its own, she didn't have time to think of much else, though there was a hollowness in her chest, an aching, she identified not with a thought, moreso a feeling. Longing.

Charlie.

She didn't even notice Dean didn't play Metallica as loud as he normally does until they were getting out of the car. 

He glances at her across the glossy top of the car, sunglasses over her senstive blue eyes as she grimaced at the parking lot, then the establishment.

"Thanks for not blowing my eardrums out," she murmurs, sidling up beside him as they approach the restaurant. Sam is ten paces ahead with his messenger bag already.

"Anything for the concussed," Dean hums. He thinks he sees a trace of a smile twitch at the corner of her mouth. 

"How does Bobby know so much about this particular rabbit's foot, anyway?" She rasps.

"Well, he said he built the lock boxes for my dad."

Katherine's brows raie above the gradient frames of her Ray-Bans. "Hell of a box." Dean hums in agreement as he pulls the door open for her, arm well above her head as she strides in past him. "Thanks." He grunts an acknowledgment and follows her unique scent of bright orange and a murmur of warm vanilla. He almost blurts something about it—like opens his mouth and takes a breath to speak, but he quickly snaps his jaw shut and jams his hands into his pockets.

"Table for three," Sam says.

"Congratulations!"

Katherine carefully tucks her sunglasses onto her head, watching the host literally jump for joy. She blinks. 

"You are the one millionth guest at a Biggerson's establishment!" He whips out a huge cardboard check, and seemingly from nowhere, a team of employees is behind him with poppers and noise makers. He shoves the promotional check into Sam's hands—free Biggerson's for a year—and a photo is taken.

The three slide into their booth with mirrored expressions of amused confusion.

"Millionth guest anywhere, huh?" Katheirne asks. "How did they know it would be at this establishment?"

Dean frowns, patting the check. "Don't ruin this."

She grins and leans back into the booth with crossed arms. 

Sam hauls his laptop from his bag and gets right to work. Katherine even orders for him because he won't look up.

Undoubtedly looking into the foot.

"The foot," she mutters. Dean smirks, watching her push her straw into ice cubes in her glass. "Sam, Bobby says everyone who's had it and lost it has died within a week of losing it."

Sam shrugs, not even lifiting his eyes from the computer. "So I won't lose it."

"Everyone has," Katherine retorts. "So I say after this, we head back to Brayden Wayne's place and see if he's dead yet. First, I'm stitching that thing to your armpit. It ain't goin' no where."

"I'll pass, thanks," Sam murmurs.

"Where is that thing anyway?"

"In'm'pocket," the younger Winchester answers, staring at his screen.

Katherine glowers. "Get your face out of the technology and converse."

"I think you could use a drink," Dean hums. "I say we head to Vegas, pull a little Rain Man..." He grins. "Sam, you can be Rain Man."

"Let's just lay low until Bobby calls back, huh?" Sam suggests. Katherine gnaws on her lower lip. "What?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just, to make one like this, you have to cut off the rabbit's foot in a cemetery under a full moon on a thirteenth that happens to fall on a Friday."

"Friday the thirteenth, under a full moon, in a cemetery," Dean repeats. Katherine nods.

"Yup," she hums, crossing her arms over her chest.

"How do you know that?"

Katherine shrugs. "I read."

"And you're just sitting on that little nugget of information." She raises a brow. "How to make a cursed rabbit's foot."

Slowly, Katherine blinks, then tears her gaze from his. "I feel icky and nervous." 

"You two need to chill out," Dean says. 

Her knee starts to hop. "All right, I don't know about you two bitches, but I'm not trusting a necklace to ward off this freaky demon stuff," she says, glancing between the brothers. "I'm getting a tattoo at the next place I see."

"A tattoo?" Sam asks. Why are they talking about demons?

"Yeah. We talked about this," she says in that tone. Questioning, reminding. "Tattoos are until flesh do us part, right?" She asks, then shrugs. "I don't know about you, but having a demon all up in you is not something I want to experience again. Sam?"

"Pass," he says. "But I'm also passing on the tattoo."

"Don't be a wimp," Dean groans.

Katherine sighs heavily. "I gotta pee. Move, Dean."

"Jesus." He barely has time to get up before Katherine is pushing him out of the booth. "Concussed Katherine is probably my least favorite Katherine."

"What about I'm-always-right Katherine?" Sam idly wonders. "Or PMS'ing Katherine?"

Dean mulls over that. "Yeah, you're probably right."

She comes back right after a waitress, who wasn't their waitress, spilled coffee all over Sam and gave him a thorough wipe-down. The two brothers are looking down the aisle rather intently. Katherine hinges at the hip, turning to look at whatever they're gawking at.

A woman with chin-length black hair is sashaying around the counter, staring at the two. 

Katherine grimaces and slides back into the booth next to Dean. Then she frowns some more and sits up straight, craning her neck to look at the waitress again.

There's something familiar about her. She thinks. Then again...no. She's never been in Black Rock before. Never seen her face before. Just one of those faces. The familiar kind. Generic.

"Dude," Dean scoffs, pulling Katherine from her own thoughts. "If you were ever gonna get lucky."

"Dude," Sam chuckles. "Chill out." He reaches for his coffee cup. And, almost like it was in slow motion, Katherine watches the mug slip from between Sam's fingers and spill all over the table.

It reminds her of Charlie's not-penny.

Sam stands up, escaping the rapid flow of hot coffee, and runs right into a waiter with a full tray of food.

All clatter in the restaurant has ceased.

"Sorry," the giant says, quickly stooping to help the waiter up. 

Katherine's bones chill, and she sits up straight, tension in her forehead pulling at her fresh stitches.

This reminds her of Charlie's not-penny because his not-penny was cursed. Haunted. Whatever. He dropped things. Charlie doesn't drop things, just like she doesn't miss when she shoots, just like Sam doesn't spill coffee like that and run into people like that.

Sam lost the rabbit's foot.