salt and burn, evelyn

Okay, this really wasn’t fair; not only were all the physical creatures apparently having a whale of a time reminding everyone how much they were monsters, but she had to deal with a freaking spirit, too? Of course, Jo hadn’t really expected those things that seemed to be unaffected by the—whatever it was to just stop existing because there was more to deal with now that vampires were going around eating everybody and the like, but it might have been nice, she thought. But then she remembered that this was the real world, and good things didn’t happen just because they might be nice; it was hard work, especially at the moment, and God, if she could just kill all the vamps at once, it might have made some kind of a difference. She hated the fact that it was beginning to seem like no matter what they did, or how many vampires they killed, they were really getting nowhere, and of course it was frustrating; the fight might be difficult, sometimes, but Jo usually felt as though something was being achieved, but right now they seemed to be as close to getting absolutely nothing as they had been when this had first started out. More people were dying, there were more and more attacks every single day, and Jo could do nothing about it in the slightest. She couldn’t save those people’s lives, and she hated that; she was a hunter because she wanted to save people, because she wanted to kill evil sons of bitches and make the world a safer place to be. And the worst part was that she had known something like this would be coming. Ever since she’d woken up back on earth and found out that vampires had decided to become members of society, she had known that they would turn on the people who called themselves their friends and attack, because come on, they were monsters, it was in their nature to.

She didn’t blame those people who had befriended vampires only to have them turn on them, she wasn’t going to stop helping them, but Jo did happen to think that they were complete idiots. Vampires were monsters, and that was never going to change, however friendly they had professed to be. Look at them now; there might have been some outside influence – in fact, there definitely was, they just couldn’t figure out what – but Jo thought that this showed their true nature better than anything else. Vampires were monsters, full stop. But there were other kinds of monsters, too—and it was kind of refreshing to be hunting on of them, actually. Jo was doing this one alone; she might have gone to ask Dean if he wanted to tag along, but she was still kind of afraid of running into Sam, who was frankly creeping her the hell out at the moment, and it wasn’t like she’d never done anything like this solo before. She’d done the leg work, she’d figured out who the spirit was, she’d even shot it a couple of times in some abandoned house, and now it was time to salt and burn the bones. God, it had been forever since she had done anything like that; her life had been filled with vampires, lately, and the change was great. Sure, not so great that someone had died violently and was stuck taking that out on others, but Jo was about to stop it, so that was okay too, really. And hey, she’d not been to a cemetery at night for a while, she’d been missing out. She hadn’t even made it to the grave site, though, before she spotted a spirit; she was almost there, could see the entrance, in fact, just as she could see the woman it was about to charge at. Did ghosts charge? And why was it hanging around at a cemetery? They tended to stay at the places they’d died...unless it had died here, which would be incredibly ironic. “Hey!” she yelled, hoping the woman would notice before she got hurt. “Move out of the way!” Jo couldn’t shoot until she wasn’t at risk of getting hit by rock salt, after all.

Even if she never sat down to think about it and psychoanalyze herself (she often sat down and tried to diagnose herself, but that was a completely different story), Evelyn guessed that it was fair to call herself a patient person. How many years exactly had passed since she set her mind on finding out what was Illyria and finding her? Six? Seven? How many times had she been told that she was on a wild goose chase and that it made no sense that she'd kick away a bright future for the sake of some imaginary creature? Far too many times to count – and that was of she only took her mother into account. Evelyn had been stubborn and she kept trying and trying, not giving up on her goal. She made sure that she was perfectly trained before she finally headed for New York, because she didn't want to make a fool of herself when she finally met Illyria. She had the patience to look for her for an year and, ultimately, her patience was rewarded. Except that she royally messed it up and it was, oh, so infuriating!

Another night when she was making her way to the warehouse where she found Illyria and Evelyn could already guess what she was going to find there: that precious sarcophagus and all of the weird... human stuff Illyria kept there and no trace of her royal blueberry persona! Evelyn gave herself a mental shake at the thought. Apparently it was complicated keeping the honorific titles in mind when she was so annoyed and, well, at the edge of her patience. This was ridiculous and it made her want to scream! She did not throw away her life for Illyria to avoid her because she made the mistake of opening the damned sarcophagus. How was she supposed to know that touching it was the greatest offense she could bring to her... to it... whatever! Evelyn would have probably been more accepting of the entire situation if Illyria would have graced her with her presence for five minutes and told her to go away because she didn't want her as priestess. Heck, that would have been a pretty nasty crash to reality and put her in a very unpleasant spot but Evelyn thought that it was better than what was happening right now.

Evelyn wasn't a fan of being out on the street every night. Sure, her work schedule was good enough to allow her take quick naps in the afternoon and make up for the few sleep she got during the night itself but it was still tiring. Not to mention the whole vampires running around thing, that had her kind of tensed all the time, thinking that one of them might want to try her for a midnight snack. She had her sais with her but recent experience showed that they were no good unless the vampire was standing right in front of her – inches away from her. Shaking her head to herself, Evelyn rushed her pace, eager to get to her destination before anything creepy happened, to make her bad luck a little worse than it was. The sound of voice calling out... to her?... caught her attention but Evelyn didn't have time to turn and see who called out or why she had to move out of the way. Someone practically slammed themselves against her, the force of the impact shoving her to the ground, turning her vision into a blur as the world violently spun around her. The spirit was preparing itself to deliver a blow to her.

Ordinarily, Jo loved the hunt. She loved researching, she loved scoping out the place where the creatures were, she loved getting her weapons ready and going off to kill the son of a bitch. She loved the high of a fight, the rush from a kill...she still loved all of those things, without a doubt, and the second she was in the heat of the moment, it was the most exhilarating thing on the planet, but she was so tired, too. There was so much to kill that she had been hunting every single night, and while she wasn’t going to stop, because there were too many things killing, now that the vampires were going crazy, and she couldn’t just let them get away with it, not when the piles of bodies led her practically to their door, but that didn’t change the fact that there was no break from it, there was no chance to take a couple of days to recharge her batteries and let her body recover. Jo was tired because it was freaking exhausting, to be hunting every single night without fail, and she probably could have done with taking a night or two off. It wasn’t like there weren’t other hunters out there, or anything, because this place was full to the brim with them, but Jo still wanted to do it herself. She still felt as though she had something to prove, even after all this time, and she wasn’t going to stop. She couldn’t stop, because innocent people were dying and it was her job to protect them as much as she could—and she was failing, because people were turning up dead. She’d known that this whole vampires in public thing would go south, she’d just known, and look at how right she had been. They were monsters, and they were always going to be monsters. This just proved that, and she couldn’t wait to be able to kill more of the things. One dead was one less monster around to kill a person, and that was always a good thing, even if it never seemed to make much impact. One monster dead was still a dead monster, and it wasn’t like they could kill them all at once.

And a good old fashioned salt and burn was still killing a monster – spirits might just have been people who were trapped in the cycle of their traumatic deaths, again and again and again, but they hurt people, and that made them monsters. Sad monsters, ones she wished didn’t have to exist—but then Jo wished all monsters didn’t exist. It might have left her out of a job, and that would have sucked, because she loved hunting, but she loved the idea of people being safe even more. That was why she did this, wasn’t it? She did it because her daddy had done it, because he’d saved people, because he’d died a hero. She did it because she wanted something that would make her close to him, she wanted to do something that he would be proud of. She wanted to make the world safe and kill as many evil sons of bitches along the way as she could – and yeah, Jo liked the hunt. Even when she was tired and could have done with just curling up and sleeping, Jo liked the hunt, and she sure as hell wasn’t tired right now. Frustrated at the idiot who thought it was a good idea to walk alongside a cemetery at night, perhaps, because sure, ghosts didn’t need the darkness and could attack any time, but vampires were still more likely to come out at night, and a cemetery was like just a freaking horror movie ready to happen – but not tired. She was running on the high of hunting, and that was definitely good enough for her. Now if that woman would just—damn it! Jo ran closer, shotgun at the ready, but the ghost was already attacking, reliving some violent event, and it was too close to the woman for her to be able to risk shooting. “Hey, ghostie!” she called out, trying to draw it away from the woman, “I’m a hell of a lot more fun to hit.” Sure enough, it seemed to waver, drawing back, considering Jo instead—and she took that opportunity to shoot rock salt shells at it, making it disappear, albeit temporarily. It would be back and it would be pissed, but she was pretty sure that it was the one she’d come here to salt and burn anyway, so she could deal with that. She turned her attention to the woman first, however. “Are you hurt?”

When Evelyn chose this particular route to head home, she didn't think too much of it other than the fact that it was going to be shorter than the alternatives. Sure, it passed by one of the town cemeteries but the thought didn't bother Evelyn. She wasn't the kind of person to be creeped out at the thought that dead people. After all, she did spend a pretty significant part of her teenage years at the morgue, with her mother. She had a bit of endurance at the sight of dead people so cemeteries... she could have very well walked by a bank or a park or any other random place. It left her completely indifferent even with the whole new fad of vampires prancing around in the open. Sure, they were associated with coffins but reality seemed to disprove everything she thought she knew about them from books. Maybe they didn't even like being sealed up in coffins and they hated cemeteries and the stereotypes.

In conclusion, Evelyn had no logical reason to avoid cemeteries. If a vampire jumped at her, by chance, she thought that she had a chance at fighting it, either hand to hand or with the sais she carried. She didn't take into account the fact that a vampire, or anything else, could jump at her from behind and knock her out before she could even see what it was. That was exactly what happened, because lately everything in her life went from bad to worse and she seemed stuck in an endless loop of bad incidents. Evelyn was ready to believe that Illyria cast some curse on her or something, even if no one ever mentioned that the ancient God-King was able to do magic and cast silly curses on people. Why was everything happening to her? Why now, when she was already feeling down over her inability to contact Illyria again?

A small scream left Evelyn's lips when she realized, through her blurred, dizzy vision, that her assailant was going to attack her again. She had time to lift her hand in an attempt to block the blow, praying that the angle and the force of the hit would not be strong enough to break the bone – God, was that really going through her mind at the moment? She heard the same voice from before call out and taunting the ghost and the hit she head readied herself for never impacted with her hand. She opened her eyes in time to see that whatever tried to hit her simply... dissipated from where it was standing. Evelyn stared in disbelief at the sight, until the same voice from before caught her attention and she turned to look at the young woman that seemed to have saved her. ”I... don't think so”, Evelyn replied, mentally assessing all the discomfort she felt in her body – nothing seemed to indicate some sort of serious injury, at least not for now. Propping herself up on her palms, she stood, cringing a little. ”I'm achy but nothing feels broken.” She could feel a few spots on her skin burning a little so she guessed she had a few scratches to look into once she got home – unless she discovered that she was bleeding. Evelyn looked down at herself to see if there were any signs of it. ”How did you make that thing go away? What was it?” Her brows furrowed. ”It's... not going to come back and be even more aggressive, will it?” Whatever it was, if it dissipated it could just as well materialize again and Evelyn didn't think she wanted to see the sidewalk from up close for a second time.

It was never as fun when there were innocent people in the way; Jo was perfectly happy to taunt a spirit, to get it riled up so that she could figure out who it had used to be, and therefore where its body would be buried, to shoot at it as much as she liked, but that was harder to do when there was a civilian around who could end up getting in the way. It couldn’t be helped, of course, because there always seemed to be people around when it would have been easier for them not to be there, and there was rarely a hunt to be found where people didn’t end up hurt; the things that were out there liked causing pain to humans, apparently, and it was easier to know of a hunt through clues in newspapers when people were hurt in the process. That didn’t really apply to New York anymore, though. Sure, if they wanted to go and kill something that wasn’t a vampire, reading the paper and looking for omens or whatever could give them an indication of what town they should hit, but generally speaking, it was pretty easy to find vamps without needing to do a lot of research. They were everywhere, after all. You just followed the bodies, and you were led to them, and at the moment, there were a hell of a lot of bodies around, without a doubt. Jo might not have known what was going on, exactly, although there were plenty of plans to figure it out, even talk around the hunters’ bar of going back to Wolfram and Hart, something that she was never going to be in favour of, given that they’d almost killed her last time she was there – she still wanted to make them pay for trapping her and Dean in a room and choking them to death – but Jo didn’t need to be one hundred percent certain of the reasons behind the vampires acting this way to know that she could kill them. They were hurting people, they were being the monsters she knew they had always been; she could definitely kill them.

There was never anything boring about a hunt, especially not when taking down an entire nest of vampires, but Jo had to admit that she still appreciated the variety; she was used to hunting a different thing each week, and now she’d been in the same place for a while, hunting the same things, and it didn’t seem as though that was going to change any time soon. It had even gotten to the point where she was almost glad that there had had to be some research done, about the new aggression that had started; Jo was an excellent researcher, had done it for years before she’d ever been allowed out hunting, and it had become kind of strange to know exactly what they were hunting and how to kill it, without any of the reading and trying to figure things out that came normally. The biggest thing to find out was what type of vampire was out there, but staking was generally a good way of killing them, and if that didn’t work, then beheading; and you knew what kind it was by whether it exploded into dust, you ended up covered in gross vampire parts, or it ended up just being a desiccated corpse. It really didn’t matter all that much. Vampires were vampires, at the end of the day; they were all monsters, and sooner or later, they all needed to be killed. It was just nice to have a break from them, even if it would have been nicer if there hadn’t been some oblivious woman in the way. But hey, saving people was what she did, and she smiled as the ghost disappeared, offering the woman a hand if she needed it. “That’s good. You might be a little bruised.” It happened when fighting angry things; Jo might have been able to brush off a few bruises, but not everybody could. It was a matter of what you were used to, and like it or not, hunting was a profession that definitely caused injuries. Occupational hazard.

“Rock salt,” she replied, and it was almost weird, to tell that to someone again; it seemed like it had been a very long time since she’d saved someone from a ghost. Technically, it was; she’d been fighting vamps almost exclusively since she’d gotten back, and then before that she’d been dead for two years, and before that they’d been fighting demons and Lucifer and the apocalypse. It really had been a while. “That or iron repels ‘em. It was a spirit.” A very angry one, too – but was there any other kind? How happy would you be to be stuck on earth and not able to move on because something terrible had happened to you? “It might come back. If it does, it’s gonna be pissed.”

“That’s good. You might be a little bruised.”

Evelyn wrinkled her nose a little as she reached for the other woman's hand and propped herself up, taking a couple of moments to pat at her clothes and get any traces of dust or dirt off them. ”Yeah, I might get a few”, she replied to Jo's words, aware that the fall she took to the ground must have exerted too much pressure on several parts of her tissue, triggering the process that caused the tissue under the skin to change its colour into that unpleasant shade of dark blue or black and then, after a number of days, slowly degrade to shades of yellow. ”But it's not that bad. They'll go away in a couple of days, depending on how badly the tissue was damaged”, she found herself musing out loud. It would have been far worse if she broke something because, depending on the type, a fracture could take many months to properly heal. Evelyn couldn't afford any of her limbs being damaged so seriously for such a long time. Not only would it have been an inconvenient at her plain cover-up job at the library but it would have also left another awful impression on Illyria... who wasn't exactly around, to have any kind of impression but, just in case she decided to stop hiding, Evelyn wouldn't have liked appearing with a cast around one of her arms or legs.

Rock salt? Evelyn tilted her head to the side a little. That was a very unusual kind of ammunition and the young woman already found herself a little more intrigued about what has attacked her, because she had never heard of things that got hurt by salt before. Then again, if vampires didn't like garlic, it shouldn't have been so strange that there were creatures that didn't like salt. Come to think of it, it was a little amusing that you could use a lot of the stuff that went into tasty food in order to protect yourself. Evelyn set aside the lighter thoughts and paid attention to what the other woman was explaining in answer to her curiosities. ”A spirit?” As far as she had managed to gather from the brief run in with Illyria, the person that laid in her sarcophagus also wandered the world as a spirit, so Evelyn wasn't surprised with the fact that ghosts existed. She was more surprised with the fact that one of them had something against her and attacked her out of the blue. Unless... it was the ghost of that guy and it was just as pissed off as Illyria had been over her tampering with the sarcophagus? No, that couldn't be it. It's not like she did more than looking, why would everyone be so annoyed over that?

”I don't understand why a spirit would attack me. I didn't do anything.” She couldn't think of anyone that might have passed away having some unfinished business to settle with her. Another wild thought crossed her mind: maybe it was Knox and he was angry that she became his successor? But he died a lot of years ago, why would he wait until now to be all ghastly and grudgy against her? ”It might come back? I was hoping that salt made it vanish for good. Shouldn't we run if it might come back? I'm not looking forward for round two.” She didn't sound scared, she sounded more irritated with the spirit, if anything else. ”I'm Evelyn, by the way. Thanks for the help.”

Jo liked the simplicity of ghost hunts. She was already pretty sure she knew who this one had been, when they'd been alive, which meant that she could go grave digging and stop them without having to go do a load more research, and just hope that they wouldn't hurt anybody else in the meantime. She didn't exactly relish the prospect of digging out a grave, because it took a hell of a long time without help, but she didn't really see the need to ask Dean to come along with her on this, since she knew exactly what she was dealing with, and Jo could manage. She'd ache like hell after, but nothing a few painkillers and a very hot shower couldn't sort out, and hey, the workout was a good thing, right? And while this ghost was just knocking people over, right now, who knew what it would escalate to in a short while? That wasn't something that she wanted to let happen; there were enough bad things in this world at the moment, what with the vampires being everywhere, without her letting some spirit stick around just because she didn't fancy the prospect of digging a grave. And that wasn't fair to the spirit, either; most of them weren't monsters, not really, they were just poor people who'd been unable to move on, and were stuck repeating something that had happened to them, again and again, getting more and more stuck, more and more violent and unaware of what was going on in the world around them. Jo didn't know why this one was stuck by a cemetery, because that was pretty damn unusual, since they tended to stick around houses or work places, but from what she'd read, the person had been killed here, when they'd just been out for a walk, and that probably had something to do with it. Brutal murders when you were just going about your business was enough to make it difficult for anybody to move on, Jo was sure of that.

“Take a pain killer if they're bad, but you'll be okay,” she replied; bruises were nothing, really, and honestly, it was a good hunt, if they were the only injuries that Jo sustained. She'd been ripped apart by hellhounds, after all, and remembered every excruciating second leading up to her death – a few bruises added up to a good day, without a doubt. When you were a hunter, you got used to being hurt, because you had to fight a lot, and against things that were generally a lot stronger than you were, too. Occupational hazard. “Yeah, sometimes when people die, they can't move on, and they're left replaying the same pattern over and over again. Usually when they're killed horrifically, they kinda...get lost in that, and end up doing the same thing to other people,” she explained, and it probably wasn't the best explanation in the world, but she was dealing with a stranger, when she had to go and do a salt and burn; it would have to do. At least the woman didn't seem overly surprised, Jo guessed; maybe it was because vampires were around, now, and people's eyes were opened to the fact that there could have been other things about, too, maybe it was just the fact that she had been knocked off her feet by a semi-incorporeal being, but Jo was glad that she didn't have to go through the whole 'there are other things out there' routine, because it got old fast, especially now that people had to admit that there was more to the world than they had thought. If vampires were real, how could they guarantee that werewolves or witches or ghosts weren't? She shook her head; it didn't work like that. Ghosts didn't just plague someone who'd hurt them, they plagued everybody. “You're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's never a personal thing, they'll hurt anybody.”

Run, seriously? Jo even gave her a look to express how dumb that question was; she was out here with a shotgun full of rock salt, why the hell was she going to run? This was her job. “The rock salt just dispels 'em for a while, hurts like a bitch. It'll be back.” With a vengeance, most likely, which meant that destroying its body was a pretty urgent thing to do. “Jo. You're welcome. You can go wherever you were gonna go, now, I'll take care of this.”

Evelyn considered Jo's suggestion for a couple of moments, then shook her head. ”A painkiller might be too much for a couple of bruises and, so far, I don't feel like they might give me too much grief. I'll just apply some ice if they start being nasty.” Sure, taking a pill was an easy fix for everything but Evelyn tried to put at good use what she knew about them and their effects on various unpleasant conditions and this included using them rationally. She didn't really need a pill to get over a couple of bruises, so she didn't want to run to the medicine cabinet. As part of her training to become Illyria's priestess, Evelyn also tried to adjust herself for dealing with pain. It wasn't that she was planning to become some creepy masochist and get completely used to pain, not at all, but she couldn't exactly be a girly girl every time something or someone hit her, once she'd be around Illyria. Besides that, after all the hours of martial arts practice she had done throughout the past couple of years, Evelyn could deal with a couple of bruises.

What she couldn't deal with, though, were spirits attacking her in the middle of the street. The whole idea what spirits existed was a little creepy, in Evelyn's opinion. It was pretty disturbing to know that vampires or werewolves or real, so it didn't help to think that ghost stories weren't really stories either. Evelyn dreaded to think what other myth be disproved next – not that she wanted any more weird creatures to roam around; there were too many as it was. Jo's explanation of why ghosts existed made Evelyn shudder faintly. When someone put it like that, the idea of a spirit wasn't creepy as much as it was sad. Being stuck in endless pattern even after death, unable to have that proverbial eternal peace... Was it bad that Evelyn was beginning to feel a little bad for the spirit that attacked her, because that must have been how they lost their life? ”That's pretty sad”, Evelyn commented. A thought occurred to her and her brows furrowed. ”Do they get that lost in that scenario that they'd kill someone?” It gave her chills down her spine to think that the spirit attacking her could have done more than just pushing her around a little. ”That's a bit of a relief... I guess.” Not that she could think of a spirit that might have something personal against her, unless Illyria's ghost friend was also annoyed with her.

The look Jo gave her after she suggested that they ran away made Evelyn frown. ”What?” It's not like she said something stupid, did she? ”It's not like the logical thing to do is to stick around and wait for it to come back and see how angry it got because you shot it”, she explained. ”You'll take care of this?”, Evelyn asked, arching a brow. ”How? Will it go away for good if you keep shooting at it or...?” Frankly, she was a little curious about Jo and the fact that she felt completely calm about this whole deal, as if she dealt with spirits on a daily basis.

Honestly, Jo didn't know how people could continue to claim that there weren't other things out there when vampires had announced themselves not that long ago, and previously, the very same people who were now denying werewolves or demons had been the ones who'd laughed at the idea of vamps being real, and told anybody who believed to grow up. Sure, they might not know what, but taking a look at any kind of horror movie or book would have set them along the right path; there were a hell of a lot of things that they got wrong, but Jo could at least say that they had the right idea when it came to the kinds of creatures that existed, because while they might have not gotten the details, they generally did pretty well at picking up some folklore or other and adapting it to their own ends – the same folklore that the real creatures came from. She was pretty glad that they didn't know, though, she thought; there'd be even more panic than there was already, and the last thing she wanted was for people to think that demons could be their best friends, or begging someone to stick around as a ghost after they died. It didn't work that way, and more people would just end up dead. Did they not notice how many people had died since vampires had come out? Maybe it was just as many as would have died anyway, but it was a lot more obvious—and God, she was glad that she didn't have to think about vampires tonight, because they were a giant pain in Jo's ass and she was thankful that there were still regular hunts to do in NY. Sometimes it didn't seem that way, to be honest. But a good old-fashioned ghost hunt; that was a good break from vampire hunting, undoubtedly. Of course it sucked that someone had gotten in the way, but at least they weren't any more hurt than a few bruises. Ultimately, that was better than death.

She nodded, because that was fair enough; some people needed pain killers for bruises, some people would suck it up and only pop pills when the pain was unbearable. Jo happened to be towards the latter end of that scale, because she'd have been a terrible hunter if she started crying every time that she got hit. Dealing with pain, at least to a certain degree, kind of came with the territory. “It's really sad,” she agreed; spirits might hurt people, but they were never going to be on the same level as an actual monster. “We try and help them move on.” Force them to move on, in fact; that was the only option, because they couldn't stick around, it wasn't right. They all deserved to find peace, and she just hoped that she wouldn't be one of them, one day. She'd moved on once, she could do it again. “Yeah, they can.” Harsh truth, perhaps, but Jo was tired of lying to people to make them feel safer, when the fact of the matter was that this world wasn't safe; telling them that things weren't too bad was what had led to people becoming best friends with vampires, dating vampires, and that was so wrong that she couldn't even begin to describe it. “But I'm the one with the shotgun, it isn't,” she shrugged; she thought that it had been pretty obvious that she wasn't just going to run away; she knew what they were dealing with, she knew how to stop it, and maybe this woman didn't know about hunters, but Jo was obviously not just another civilian. The woman should have gone, but Jo was staying, without a doubt. “No, it'll just get pissed.” So many questions. “I've got to find its grave and salt and burn its bones.” Without waiting for the reply – probably some kind of 'what?!', she'd heard it before – Jo headed for the gates of the cemetery, picking up the shovel that she'd left there in her free hand, before turning around again. “Go home. It's safer.”

Honestly, the idea of rushing home and taking a warm and relaxing bath was a really tempting one right now. Apparently being out of her house was a real adventure as of late and Evelyn was pretty sick of adventures of this kind. She was going to get plenty of them if things ever got settled with Illyria, she was pretty sure of it. Was it too much to ask for some calm and normal days before the blue Goddess put an end to the state of uncertainty she was living in? Evelyn didn't think it was but, for some strange reason, she kept getting in one weird situation after another and, apparently, every time a ghost was involved she ended up thrown against hard surfaces. The first time it happened, it had been when Evelyn had the bad idea of opening Illyria's sarcophagus, where she saw the remains of a man whom seemed to be a ghost for which the Goddess really cared. That bad idea earned her a very close contact with one of the walls in Illyria's hideout and Evelyn still considered herself really lucky for managing to get out of that one without any major physical injuries. Indirectly, she could say that was connected to a ghost. Tonight, another ghost introduced her to a sidewalk. Evelyn idly wondered if there was something about her that made people so eager to crash her against really hard surfaces – a ridiculous thought which she blamed on her mind trying to deal with the oddness of what happened and work through the fear she was feeling.

“We try and help them move on.”

”We?”, Evelyn repeated. ”Are there more people like you?” The petite woman gave herself a mental slap when she realized how the question sounded when she said it out loud than it did when it came up in her head. ”You help ghosts move on...”, she repeated thoughtfully after a couple of moments, her mind flying towards Wesley, the ghost which Illyria mentioned a few details about. ”Can you help any ghost? Even ghosts that have been around for a really long time?” If Jo could do this, maybe she could mention her to Illyria? Surely the Goddess would be inclined to give her a second chance if she introduced her to someone that could help that man she seemed to genuinely care about... wouldn't she? Of course, as brilliant as the idea seemed to be, Evelyn had to remind herself that Jo might not feel inclined to do favours for blue demons from really old times, who happened to exist in this world because they killed someone.

She felt a small shudder run through her entire body when Jo confirmed that a ghost could go as far as to kill someone. To think that she could have died... Evelyn drew in a deep breath to calm her racing heart. She was safe now and the woman beside her had a weapon that could chase a spirit away, in case it decided to return and finish what it had been interrupted from doing. ”Yeah, you do have a shotgun but...” Evelyn's voice trailed off and she cocked her head to the side, looking genuinely puzzled. ”That ghost pushed me to the ground. How could it do that? I thought they weren't solid.” Well, that was the stereotype at least. According to stereotypes vampires didn't like garlic and they slept in coffins but recent years proved that those were only silly stories made up by people who had no idea what they were talking about it. Evelyn managed to get lost in her thoughts for a few moments but she snapped out of the state when Jo spoke again and started heading towards the gates of the cemetery. ”What? Wait!” The petite young woman rushed by Jo's side. ”Won't you get in trouble if you dig up a grave?” As for her going home... yes, she was going to be safe there but... what about the way there? That spirit was pissed off and Evelyn didn't want to admit it but she was a little scared at the thought that it might appear again after she parted ways with Jo.

A ghost hunt was so normal that Jo was almost relieved to be able to do it. She enjoyed killing vampires, certainly, it was something she was never going to get tired of, given how many of the things there were around, but it didn't change the fact that it got kind of tedious, to always be hunting the same thing. She wasn't used to that; normally she took whatever jobs came, and it led to a huge variety in the kind of monsters she was facing, but since she'd woken up again, since coming to New York, it seemed to have been vampires all the way. That was good, because there were too many in this city, but it was weird, too. Jo wasn't used to it, not even a little bit, and if she could have gotten rid of every single last vampire, she would have done—but it was nice to be hunting something else tonight. An increase in the number of vamps didn't change the fact that there were other monsters out there, and with hunters congregating in New York, she had to hope that people weren't dying out there in other towns, that there were still people travelling around and dealing with issues there, like she and the Winchesters had used to do. It felt like too long since Jo had even been on a job outside the city, but that was life, she guessed. There were vampires here to kill, and even if every single hunter in the country gathered here, she didn't think they would be able to kill every last one of them—unfortunately. But today, she wasn't thinking about vampires. It was nice for them not to be her focus for a little while, and salting and burning this ghost was all that she wanted to do. She didn't even want to talk to this woman; the longer they stood around here chatting, the more chance there was of somebody finding them, and of the ghost coming back. No spirit ever seemed to be happy to find that someone was going to burn them; they needed to move on, but they ended up transformed into some warped permutation of themselves that wanted to stick around and hurt people. They had to be stopped, because that wasn't who that person had been. Jo didn't blame the ghosts, it was just incredibly sad, but it still had to be done. Giving Evelyn Hunting 101 hadn't really been on the cards.

It would be safer if she just went home, Jo fully believed that. What did she want to be sticking around here for, in a cemetery when there was a ghost around who'd already hurt her once? Jo didn't understand people sometimes; this was her job, but didn't they have some kind of survival instinct that would kick in and tell them to get the hell out of there because it wasn't safe? Apparently not; people really did put themselves in danger, sometimes. “I'm not the only hunter in the world, no,” she replied, and it seemed obvious to her, but maybe it wasn't, to someone that didn't know hunters existed. But you couldn't have vampires in public without people trying to kill them, and she really didn't think it was possible to think that there would only be one person like her in the world. She had to learn from someone, didn't she? It didn't matter, really; Jo had given up trying to understand how the general public's minds worked, because they never seemed to think about things the same way that she would. “Sure. The longer they stick around, the more they're gonna degenerate, so as long as we can burn what's tying them here, we can help them move on.” Sometimes it wasn't as simple as digging up some bones, after all, sometimes people had been cremated and it was a lock of hair in a locket that was keeping them here; they just had to find whatever that thing was. “They're mostly incorporeal, but the stronger they are, the longer they stick around, they can make themselves more solid.” It probably wasn't that simple, but Jo was done giving a masterclass in ghosts; she had a job to do here, and she had to do it before it got light and there was the possibility that somebody was going to find her here. She didn't stop walking as Evelyn caught up to her, just flashing her a grin. “Only if I get caught,” she said, then sighed. “Go home, or wherever you were heading, please. It'll be safer for you, and a whole load less illegal.”

“I'm not the only hunter in the world, no"

The more the conversation progressed, the more Evelyn wondered if there was something wrong with her tonight that made her say idiotic things or it simply happened that the other woman had a really limited patience to deal with people that asked questions. She wasn't coming off like one of those desperate teens that started fawning over whoever helped them with something, was she? She really was far from that. Yes, she stood by and asked a lot of things in a circumstance in which an ordinary person would have looked at Jo as if she were a freak, before running the hell out of there and to the nearest ghost-free place they could find. Evelyn wasn't exactly the most normal individual though, no. Last time she checked, training to be the high priestess of an ancient demon wasn't on the list of things normal people did in their lives – not that Jo here had any way of knowing that. Still, she could be a little more nice about it. ”Hey, it's the first time I hear about ghost hunters”, she explained, sounding a tad annoyed. ”I already knew about some people out there hunting vampires.” Hopefully that cleared out the fact that she wasn't some naïve girly girl that thought the world was full of sunshine and rainbows and vampires that sparkled when the sun shone down on them. Nope, Evey was the Qwa'ha Xahn who went through a series of amazingly crappy days (or nights, to be more exact) and just so happened to learn about something that might come in handy in the future.

When the other young woman answered her question about the possibility of helping ghosts who had been stuck in this realm for a really long time, Evelyn listened thoughtfully. ”Burn what's tying the ghost here”, she repeated, her mind wandering back to the night when she made her way for the first time inside the warehouse where Illyria was residing. Evelyn didn't think she would forget the stone sarcophagus too soon, or what laid within it. ”Their remains?”, the petite young woman asked Jo, suspecting that the answer might be obvious this time around and she'd end up sounding like an idiot again. Evelyn was tempted to ask if simply burning “what tied the ghost” here was enough or if a special kind of ritual was needed but she didn't think there was a need to know so much. Not yet. Illyria was pretty pissed off with her as it was, so Evelyn couldn't imagine her taking it well to hear any suggestion about burning that man and setting him free. Still, it couldn't hurt to take a mental note of everything Jo said and keep it mind for the future.

This thought sounded pretty bad and it wasn't the kind of thing Evelyn would be caught saying out loud any time soon: wow, Jo really had some balls. What was up with that grin? She talked about herself as being a ghost hunter, which meant that she was probably breaking into cemeteries to do her thing pretty often. To be so casual about it, though? Evelyn wasn't sure if she should think that was a little freakish on Jo's part or if she should admire her for it. She tried to match her pace with Jo's and keep up with her, unwilling to stay back and see if a ghost appeared twice in the same place even after it got shot at with salt. ”Hey, I'd love to be home right, take a warm bath and forget that a ghost wanted to hurt me”, Evelyn started to explain. ”But I don't have experience with ghosts. I don't know if that thing might happen to stalk me and attack me again on my way home. I don't have a shotgun filled with salt on me, you do. That's why I'd rather hang around until I'm sure there's no more danger. Not even I can have that much bad luck to get attacked by another ghost after you take care of this one.” Evelyn sighed. ”I'm not going to get in your way and I can run pretty fast, in case someone sees us.”