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"Hey, hi," he called, keeping his voice low. "I'm Don Eppes, I'm with the FBI. Can I ask you a few questions?"

There was no response. He wondered if she spoke English.

"Look, you're not in trouble, okay? I'm not gonna hurt you, I just need to –"

"Eppes, get the fuck back!"

Don half turned, looking back to see the Winchesters skidding to a stop behind him, guns raised. Incredulous, Don stepped between them and the woman.

"You fucking lunatics, she's holding a baby!"

"That's not a baby," Sam said tightly. "It's an egg sac."

The woman said something in Japanese, soft and pleading. Don turned back to see her holding the baby toward him, jostling it meaningfully, then pulling it back into her arms, hair falling down again over her face.

"It's one of their strategies for getting victims within reach. She's trying to tell you it's yours," Sam said.

"I think I would have remembered that," Don said distantly.

A spider the size of Don's hand crept out from under the baby's blanket, yellow-banded legs sliding out first and then a slim body, crawling slowly up the woman's arm to disappear under her loose sleeve. Below the hem of her dress, another spider's forelegs slipped out to probe delicately at the air and then settled onto her foot. She didn't even twitch.

"Holy shit," Don said, and wasn't even conscious of covering the distance toward Charlie's office until he'd put himself between her and the door and was looking at her down the barrel of his gun. "Put the blankets down on the floor! Down, wakarimasu ka?"

"Don, what are you –" Charlie demanded from behind him, sounding shaken.

"Charlie, you get the fuck back in that room and you lock the door until I say different. You, blankets down!"

"Don, it's a –"

"It's not a goddamn baby, now you do as your brother says," Winchester barked.

Another spider, or the same one, crawled up out of the neck of the woman's loose dress, slid up her hair, gathered its limbs, and jumped, making for the wall next to her. Don shot it out of the air on pure reflex.

"Not ba – oh, shit," Winchester said.

"Charles, I think we should just, um," Larry said weakly.

The limbs that slid out around the woman's body – over her head, around her ribs, around her hips, easing around her ankles like the tendrils of vines – were yellow-banded and slender, spider limbs the length of a baseball bat and growing longer until if they were stretched out instead of curled around her like a corona they would have brushed the ceiling and walls on both sides. Hair parted on the crown of her head in half a dozen places, drawn back by invisible hands, and underneath it black glassy orbs shone dully in the dim light. She shifted her weight forward and the limbs moved with her, opening claws against the wall as her feet began to lift from the ground.

Don's brain locked with an almost audible click into the same focus he took into firefights, his finger came down smooth on the trigger, and the world dissolved into noise and light and the target in front of him.

When he stopped firing, and the guns behind him stopped firing, the hallway was filled with acrid smoke red-lit by the exit signs. He could still see her in it, limbs searching forward, different lengths now where he'd shot them in half one after the other – and then she was gone, and Don slammed another clip into his gun and went into the smoke after her.

His eyes burned and watered but he could still see shapes, enough to see her if she was there. She wasn't. The smoke thinned as he passed from the hall into the one that crossed it and she wasn't there either; nothing was, in either direction, but closed doors. Don's gaze traveled up to the ceiling and found nothing but shadows.

"Where the fuck did she go?" he wondered aloud.

"We hurt her," Winchester said, reloading as he came out of the smoke behind Don. "My guess is she went back to ground, but now she's pissed off. She's gonna come for you and your brother hard and fast, so we need to –"

"Get somewhere more defensible, yeah, I figured that out for myself," Don snapped, unreasonably irritated and still shaking from the adrenaline. "Get my brother and Larry and let's go."

"Yeah? You know where we're going?"

"My place. I live in an apartment, lots of light and people. Spiders like the dark, and this one hunts in it. We'll be as safe there as we would be anywhere but my office, and I really don't think you want to walk into the FBI building with me." The low murmur of voices came from the hall behind him, and Don winced at the unmistakable sound of Charlie throwing up. "Then Charlie's going to look at those maps I brought him and tell me where this bitch is, and I'm gonna take a flamethrower to her before she gets within a mile of him again."

"We don't take civilians on hunts," Winchester said shortly.

"Yeah?" Don snapped the safety back on and stuck his gun into its holster, his eyes not leaving Winchester's. "Well, how about that? Neither does the FBI."



"Why are you doing that?" Larry asked, green but interested.

Sam glanced up at him as he poured lighter fluid on top of the salt on top of what was left of the spider Don had shot. "Most supernatural things, salting and burning will destroy them," he said. "If you salt and burn a body it gets rid of the person's ghost. With something like this, I'm mostly making sure it'll stay dead."

"Really?'' Larry asked, sounding a little dubious. "But… salt, now, I wonder –"

Winchester dropped a match onto the spider and watched it burn on the asphalt of the parking lot. "We'll put you in touch with a guy, doc," he said.

Sam looked up from his crouch, looking equal parts amused and horrified. "You're gonna hook him up with Ash? Dean, things will blow up that probably shouldn't."

"This isn't happening," Charlie whispered, his voice shaking. "There's no, there's no way this is even possible, nothing adds up."

Don slid an arm around him, palm flat on the top of his head and turning him away from the fire. "I know, buddy. Stay with me. We're just gonna take this one step at a time and have a good long freakout when it's all over with, okay?"

Charlie nodded, pressing his forehead against Don's collarbone, fists clenching in the smoke-soaked cotton at Don's waist. Sam stood and met Don's eyes over Charlie's head, understanding more than Don wanted him to.

"It's toast," Winchester said. "Let's roll."



"Here," Charlie said, tapping the map and looking hopefully up at Don.

Don hated to step on that hope. "No good. There's nothing there but an empty lot."

"What exactly would not be nothing?" Larry peered at the map under Charlie's finger. "Is this an orb-weaving spider? Because I think they ingest their webs in the evening and then –"

"Anything like skulls," Don said. "She carries off the heads. We haven't been able to find them. Find the heads and we'll find her."

"Look at this," Sam said, shifting his laptop around so everyone else could see the screen. "Jorogumo also refers to an actual spider, Nephila clavata, which has yellow-banded legs and spins an orb web."

"What does it matter what kind of web it spins?" Winchester asked, frowning.

"It may not, but…" Charlie trailed off, chewing at his lip.

"Vollrath, 1985?" Larry offered, cryptically.

"No, 1997, it's been raining," Charlie answered, equally cryptically.

"But it wasn't raining when the ship first got here, so the 1985 model would initially fit and then –"

"No, it's nested in the '97 model, just with the implicit path coefficients fixed at zero. I need temperature and humidity ranges for the last two weeks, daily and overnight," Charlie told Sam. Sam pulled a notebook and pen toward him with one hand and typed with the other.

"Fitting the body locations?" Larry asked.

"And Don. We know he was in the, um –" Charlie drew circles in the air with his finger.

"The, uh, the capture-spiral mesh," Larry filled in.

" – the capture-spiral mesh a week ago."

"So this is solvable, right?" Don prompted.

Charlie looked up at him. "When I first started at CalSci, we had a guest lecturer from Oxford give a talk on the geometry of orb spider webs," he explained. "Spiders sit at the center of the web and wait for prey to fly in and get stuck, but not all the strands of the web are sticky. Only the spiral strands are. The straight radii the spider walks on aren't, so when the prey are small enough not to stick to multiple strands, you'll only find them in certain areas. The construction of the web follows certain geometric patterns, so if you know things like the size of the spider, the atmospheric conditions, and the locations of small caught prey, you can work backward to find the center of the web – if we treat the web as theoretical here instead of something that actually is stretched out over miles of Los Angeles and Long Beach, and if we assume that the… that the spider part is predominant and the humanoid part doesn't influence anything but immediate prey-luring behavior. Here, grab a pen and mark down exactly where you went while you were there."

Don did as he was told, then stood back and left Charlie and Larry to their muttering and their hastily scribbled equations, glad to do it for more reasons than one – Charlie absorbed in a practical math problem meant Charlie too distracted to freak out and start on P versus NP. He stood watching them for a moment, then headed into the living room to recover his coffee – no beer, not tonight, which was sad because of all the nights when he damn well needed one – and think about what to do next.

The Winchesters needed to go. He still didn't trust them, not entirely, and being caught with them would be the career-ender to end all careers. Don had a fire axe in the closet with the extinguisher, because he was nothing if not prepared and also had worked his share of arson cases; it wasn't huge, but it would cut through a neck given enough force behind the blow. Those little sea salt mills Charlie made him buy weren't going to cut it, but grocery stores carried salt and he was pretty sure they carried lighter fluid. He had a spare set of tac gear; he didn't have the assault rifles that usually accompanied it, but he did have a regular rifle, buried in the back of his closet where no one else looked, and a silencer that would keep it from bringing security guards, cops, or federal agents running.

He also had a brother and a Larry who would be pretty damn defenseless if that spider thing came for them while he was out hunting, and no one he could trust to babysit without Larry and Charlie spilling their guts. Shit. Maybe the Winchesters would have to stick around for a while after all.

Don had been a lot happier with the world when all it contained were rapists, arsonists, and serial killers. Giant man-eating spiders were just adding insult to injury.

"How long is this gonna take?" Winchester asked as he wandered into the living room, clearly bored.

"No telling," Don said curtly, pitching his voice under the sound of Charlie and Larry talking math at each other with occasional input from Sam. "Sometimes he can pull answers out of a hat, sometimes it takes days."

"Yeah, well, let's hope it's the hat one this time, 'cause I'll be honest, I don't think you have days."

Don ground his teeth. "Look. I get that you're used to dealing with people who'd panic and freeze up if someone yelled Fire in an empty theater. Weird coincidence: so am I. I also spend a pretty significant part of my work life going into hostile terrain to do unpleasant things to people who, number one, are perfectly willing to hurt me real bad to keep me from doing it, and number two, are smarter and better armed than spiders."

"And smaller, and not as fast or as strong, and are vulnerable to bullets, and you've got backup when you're facing them," Winchester snapped. "I'm pretty sure on balance this is worse."

The sounds of math had stopped. Don risked a glance over and saw Charlie and Sam staring at him and Dean with identical looks of purse-mouthed disapproval. Larry looked like he was wishing for a koi pond to commune with. Irritated at every single person in his apartment including himself, Don stepped closer to Winchester and lowered his voice. "You're right. You know how to fight this thing."

"Now, see, there you're –"

"Which is why I need you to stay here with Larry and Charlie while I go after it, in case it decides to circle around and take Charlie out first."

"Okay, no, I take it back." Winchester blew out an aggravated breath and rubbed his forehead. "What is it with you, huh? Why is it so hard for you to deal with the fact that this time you're the civilian and you need to sit the fuck down and let the pros take care of this? What happens in your line of work when the civilians decide they're going to deal with their problems on their own? I bet they fuck it up sixty ways to Sunday, don't they?"

He was right. He was right, and it pissed Don off worse than anything else Winchester had done tonight. But this was Charlie's life, and Don had spent way too much of his life letting other people take care of his little brother – who was watching them now, palms braced flat on Don's kitchen table, with a look on his face that promised serious hell for Don later.

Winchester's eyes slid toward Charlie, then back to Don, and his lips curled in a smirk that made Don want to step between him and Charlie and back him down. "Yeah?" Winchester said, smug and knowing. "We gonna have to settle this with a dick-measuring contest over who can make his little brother scream the loudest?"

Don's punch landed before he even knew he was throwing it, snapping Winchester's head back and around. Sam shoved his chair back on what looked like reflex, then settled back in it with his arms folded and glared at his brother.

"Wow, Dean, and you were doing so well with the logic and using your words and everything," he drawled.

"You know," Larry said, "if I had to pick an ideal time for a dick-measuring contest of any sort, this would probably not be it."

"He might be a jerk but he's right and you know it, Don," Charlie told him. "You can't go up against this without backup. I… I still don't believe in it but I saw it, and you – you can't. Okay? You can't."

"Sorry my brother is such an ass," Sam said to Charlie.

"Likewise," Charlie said.

"Can we maybe get back to the equations now?" Larry asked plaintively.

Winchester rubbed his hand across his cheekbone where the bruise was already spreading and glared at Don. "Look, compromise," he said grudgingly. "You're handy in a fight, I'll give you that."

"Thanks," Don said dryly.

"Don," Charlie warned.

"Sam stays here with the rest of the Dweeb Squad, you and I go. I follow your lead if we have to deal with people, you follow mine once we find her lair. We help you cover the tracks, you give us a day after we hit the road before you tip off Henricksen. Deal?"

Reluctantly, Don nodded. "Yeah, okay," he said slowly. "Deal."

A slow smile spread over Winchester's face, bright and impish, and for the first time Don could see the whole birds-charmed-out-of-trees thing. "Scout's honor?"

The corners of his mouth wanted to tug upward, but he fought them back down, mostly. "I was never a boy scout."

"Yes, you were," Charlie protested indignantly. Don closed his eyes in exasperation.

Winchester chuckled. "Little brothers. Can't live with 'em, can't keep 'em in the trunk. Sam, quit making the bitchface and find us a lair."

"Downloading the email stream of a place the size of the Port of Los Angeles takes time, Dean."

"Hey," Don said quietly as Winchester turned to head back into the kitchen. Raising an eyebrow, Winchester turned back. "What you said about me and Charlie. Don't go there again."

Winchester's expression turned rueful and he looked back at Charlie, who was scribbling with great determination on a sheet of printer paper. "Eppes, man, I'm pretty sure you're gonna get there without me leaving you a trail of breadcrumbs," he said, just as softly. Clapping Don on the arm, he ambled back into the kitchen to lean over the back of Sam's chair and investigate what he was doing. It didn't take long for Sam to settle back against him a little, easy and comfortable, nothing that would look out of place if you didn't know what you were looking at.

Don looked away and caught Charlie's eyes on him, still and unreadable, and decided he needed a beer after all.



He would have sworn he wasn't going to sleep that night, but Charlie's whispered Hey jolted him into disoriented wakefulness.

The apartment was dark and quiet. Don lifted his head and saw the Winchesters curled on the floor in a pile of limbs and blankets; Charlie was sitting on the couch next to him, and Larry was nowhere to be seen. "Where's Larry?"

"I sent him to bed around three. He's in your room. I hope that's okay."

"Yeah, 'sfine. What time is it now?"

"Almost five," Charlie whispered apologetically. "The first set of models we used didn't successfully predict the locations of the bodies, but then we realized that we couldn't use the location of the docks themselves as a structural boundary, we had to use the –"

"Charlie," Don said, rubbing his eyes. "I've been awake for twenty seconds. Do you know where the lair is?"

"To within a very narrow statistical tolerance. Also, Sam found email that seems to corroborate our findings. The first equations I ran were off by three-quarters of a mile."

"Well, good, we can – shit, I guess we can't. We can't go there while it's light out."

"Not if you're going to be burning giant spiders," Charlie agreed, his laughter a soft breath over Don's face.

Don sighed and dropped his hand back down onto his stomach. "You okay, buddy?"

"I just," Charlie began, then gave a painful attempt at a smile. "No. Not really. Don, can you…"

"Sure, what?"

Charlie's knuckles nudged tentatively at Don's side in a scoot over gesture. "Keep the monsters away?"

Don stared at him for a minute, then had to laugh. "Okay, but if we fall off the couch it's your fault. Come here."

Charlie climbed on the couch and a good five minutes of tossing, turning, and jostling for position ensued until Charlie spooned back against him, commandeered Don's arm for a pillow, and settled down into something that was – if Don could overlook the hair in his face – reasonably comfortable for both of them. "Okay?" Charlie whispered.

"Yeah," Don answered, and yawned. "Go to sleep."

"Don?"

"Hm?"

"Last time you were over at Dad's – those spider webs all over the back gate, do you think they were hers?"

"I hope not," Don whispered back, and slid his free arm around Charlie's shoulders.

Charlie was warm and compact in his arms, different in his proportions than Don's body remembered; his hair smelled sweet and clean where it settled against Don's mouth. God, it felt so good, Charlie's heavy weight and the soft whisper of his breath over Don's skin; endorphins, Don told himself a little desperately, a natural reaction to touch, nature's way of priming him to take care of his little brother. Don closed his eyes and tried to breathe deep, wondering if Charlie could feel the thudding of his heart.

"You punched Dean," Charlie breathed, barely audible.

Don slipped his fingers into Charlie's hair and stroked, small and slow. "Yeah, buddy," he whispered. "I did."



"You shouldn't do this," Charlie said tightly, cinching the buckle on Don's Kevlar vest with enough force to bruise his ribs.

"Ow!" Don protested, trying to wriggle away. Charlie kept a tight hold on the straps. "What, you want to just sit here and wait for it to come to us?"

"No. But you could stay here and let the Winchesters go after it. Sam says it won't get in past the salt lines. You don't have to be the big bad hero all the time."

"Hey, Charlie. Breathe," Don soothed, catching him by the wrist. "Come on, slow down."

"Remember when I wanted to fix the furnace myself and you wouldn't let me because you said I'd blow up the house with me and Dad in it and you made me call a repairman? Maybe, maybe the Winchesters are like furnace repairmen, Don, and I think you should –"

Don wrapped an arm around Charlie and tugged him close. "Easy, buddy," he whispered into Charlie's hair. "Come on, don't make me get Larry in here with a paper bag. Breathe, okay?"

"I am breathing," Charlie protested, muffled against Don's vest. He slowed down a little, though, focusing until he'd matched his breathing to Don's, long slow inhales and exhales.

Don stood there for a minute more, inhaling the smell of his own shampoo in Charlie's hair, breathing for both of them, in and out. It was warm, and nice, and… he let go and nudged Charlie back.

Charlie took a step back. "You know, I'm not the girl," he said suddenly.

Don gave him a dubious look. He had no idea where Charlie was going with this, but it didn't sound like it was going to be anywhere good. "No, you're the math geek. You're the brains, I'm the brawn, remember? Don't start having problems with our arrangement now." Please, I'm begging.

"I don't like our arrangement right now."

Sighing, Don sat down on his bed and looked up at Charlie. "We've been through this already, Chuck, okay?"

"Don't call me that."

"Okay, but come on, I've got a dangerous job. You know that, Dad knows that, everybody knows. How is this different from – from walking into a bank robbery that's got a high chance of turning into a firefight? Or hunting armed fugitives? I do those things a lot, I thought you were used to it by now."

"Seriously?'' Charlie asked thinly. "You seriously don't see the difference between a bank robber and a woman who can – who can apparently turn into a spider despite the fact that there's no way she should be able to, who you don't even know for sure how to kill?"

"Okay, I was sort of ignoring that part until I really have to deal with it," Don admitted. "That's what's bugging you, isn't it? Not knowing."

Charlie looked away and picked at the hem of his shirt. "All probabilistic models have some nonzero probability of failure," he said; it was an admission, Don knew, and a hard-won admission at that. "But this one, I don't even know what variables to put in, or whether I can trust the variables I have, because according to the variables I have none of this should even be possible. That thing, it shouldn't, it can't even exist. Math has always been almost the only thing I really knew inside and out, it always has answers, always, and now – now it's like I look at it and suddenly it's turned into a language I can't even read."

"Hey, hey, just because you got some new data?" Don reached out and caught Charlie's fingers, stilling them before they did any more damage to the hem. "Charlie, you love new data."

Which wasn't true, really. Charlie hated new data that didn't fit into his established parameters. But he'd always been able to assimilate it eventually, more or less; Don just hoped to god he'd be able to do it in this case too, because this wasn't sounding too promising.

"I don't love new data that wants to eat my brother," Charlie snapped.

"Look, nothing is gonna eat me, okay?" Don said, tugging on Charlie's hand to make him look up. "This is weird shit and I don't love it either, but you got an equation for us, right? You got us a location for the lair? That's gonna help, so whatever this thing is, this new, scary thing, it's not immune to math."

"I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I knew it wasn't immune to bullets or Kevlar either. And look, we don't know yet that the equation works and –"

"Charlie. It'll work," Don told him firmly. "And also? You totally are the girl right now."

Charlie flushed and yanked his hand back. "I am not."

"Okay, no, you're still the math geek," Don conceded.

Charlie made a face and sat down by Don, twisting his fingers together in complicated patterns. "I want to go with you," he said after a minute. "Not just sit here wondering if you're okay. I always sit here wondering if you're okay, and I guess I'm used to it now but I hate it every time. And I can't go with you because I'd just get in the way. Sam gets to –"

"Hey, we're not the Winchesters, okay?" Don reminded him. "There are a whole lot of things they do that wouldn't work for us, and even more that wouldn't work for Dad or the FBI, so we're just gonna keep being the Eppes brothers and let the Winchester brothers be who they are, okay?"

Charlie raised his head to look Don dead in the eye, and Don couldn't read the expression on his face but it made his breath come a little faster anyway. "That's what we're going to do, huh?"

Don swallowed hard. He wanted to clap Charlie on the knee and say Yeah, it is, all hearty and sure of himself, but suddenly he couldn't. Not when he wasn't sure what Charlie was asking, or what answer he wanted. Especially when he didn't even know what answer he really wanted to give.

Fucking Winchesters. He and Charlie had been fine not knowing about things that go bump in the night.

"Come back," Charlie whispered. "I'll hunt it down, Don, I swear I will."

Don slid a hand around the back of Charlie's neck and pulled him close, letting Charlie just cling for a minute, for as long as he needed to. "No, you won't, buddy," he whispered back. "You're gonna stay safe. You hear me? 'Til the day you die, you're gonna stay away from this thing if I don't make it back."

"Yeah," Charlie said, voice harsh and choked, and Don could feel Charlie's breath coming hot and shallow against his neck. "Okay. That's what I'll do."

Winchester rapped sharply on the bedroom door. "Eppes, you ready to – hey, nice tac gear. The FBI supply that or do you get it yourself from somewhere?"

"No, Dean," Sam said from somewhere out in the apartment.

"C'mon, Sammy, you know we could use it," Dean called back.

"Space is at kind of a premium in that car, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Don't talk smack about my baby. She's got room for a couple of tac outfits. You ready, Eppes?"

Don rubbed the back of Charlie's neck, and felt him shiver under the cool leather of Don's gloves. "Yeah," he said. "Let's do this."



"Jesus, this place," Winchester said, tapping his fingers restlessly on his knee and staring out the passenger window at the sea of cargo containers. "You lose something in here, you'd never find it again."

Don shot him a glance. "Speaking of which, how did she track Charlie and me all over LA?"

Winchester shook his head. "Sometimes things get your scent and there ain't nowhere you're safe. I don't know how it works. I don't think anyone knows. Be glad it was her and not a vampire; those fuckers are really mean."

Don decided that he hadn't actually just heard the word vampire. "So how did you know she was after me to begin with?"

Winchester winced a little. "You're not gonna like hearing this."

"Lay it on me."

"Sometimes film and video can pick things up that people can't see. Ghosts, for instance. Certain kinds of creatures. Some of these things, they're like energy forms, they don't quite live on the same plane we do. We don't know where they go when they're not here. We don't know how they appear and disappear." Winchester glanced over at him. "We do know, Sam and me, that when you left the crime scene last week and drove past the photographer for the Long Beach Press-Telegram, she was sitting in the back seat of your car."

Don slammed on the brakes, nearly sending both of them into the windshield. "What the fuck?"

"So we knew she was probably after somebody in there," Winchester continued, irritatingly unperturbed. "We just didn't know who until we got out to CalSci to talk to your brother."

"So how do we know she's not in here now?" Don demanded.

Winchester reached into his jacket and pulled out something that looked like a well and truly repurposed Walkman. "We know 'cause I swept the car with this before we left. It's an EMF meter. Sort of like a supernatural geiger counter." He thumbed a switch and the meter crackled dimly, one red light lighting up and another flickering. "There's still residual EMF from when she was in here last week, but if she was here now this'd be lighting up like a Christmas tree."

Oh, god, Larry's going to want one, Don thought, and nearly beat his head on the steering wheel before he took a breath, got himself back under control, and got the car moving again. "So she hitchhikes. Sort of."

"Yeah, I guess spiders do," Winchester said with a grimace. "I'm gonna spare you the stories Sam told me about the ones in Australia. I didn't put my damn visor down for days."

"Shit, I hope she's not still back in LA. If this equation doesn't work out, Charlie's going to lock himself in the garage again and I may never get him out this time."

Winchester gave him an odd look at that, but didn't ask. "We injured her. You hurt a thing like that, it goes to ground in its lair. She knows she's got a place to hide and a food supply here. Your brother was right, this is where she's gonna be."

"Yeah, but if you take a spider out of its web, doesn't it just build another web?"

"Jorogumo don't. They're associated with places – pools, waterfalls, abandoned shrines. This one probably holed up in an empty cargo container and didn't leave it until she had no other choice. How far through the search area are we?"

"About halfway," Don said, glancing down at his GPS. "So tell me about the murder charges in Milwaukee. They had witnesses, fingerprints, even a corpse."

"Wasn't me."

"Yeah? Just someone who looked like you, huh?"

Winchester looked vaguely embarrassed. "Well… yes and no."

Don looked blankly at him for a moment before realization hit him like the flush creeping up his neck. "Some thing that looked like you?"

"Shapeshifter. If I'd known it was gonna be such a pain in my ass I'd have passed the hunt off to –"

"Wait, wait, it turned into you? Can the jorogumo do that? Because Larry and Charlie are gonna open the door to something that looks like me and let it right the hell in!"

"Okay, first, no, it can't. Second, by now Sam will have put the fear of God into them about going near the doors and windows, and Sam ain't gonna let anything in that can't cross that salt line by itself and uninvited. Third, what's that up there?"

Don ground his teeth. You couldn't put the fear of God into Larry and Charlie. Don had tried. Someone could get turned into a pillar of salt right in front of them and they'd get all wrapped up in discussing the physics of it and the wrath of God would go in one ear and out the other while they were debating ion charges or something.

Focus. Getting scattered and distracted was going to be as fatal here as it was in a home invasion. Don followed Winchester's line of sight, peering into the dark. A handful of wide, squat domes blocked the light from across the bay, only visible as black outlines against distant halogen white. "Some kind of bulk storage containers."

`"So how come they're not lit up?"

Don flipped his high beams on and pointed to a leasing billboard mounted on a chain-link fence. "That's why. They're probably empty. They're not exactly conveniently located, and the docks aren't doing the business they used to."

"Yahtzee. Big, dark, empty, and right in the search area. Let's check them out."

He'd expected to have to use the bolt-cutters he'd brought with him, but the fence opened onto the parking lot in front of the domes. Shaking his head a little at the lack of security, Don killed the lights and pulled in. There were six domes, two rows of three, maybe thirty feet tall and twice as far across; only a few minutes apiece to search if they were open spaces inside. He cruised to a halt and within a few minutes they were suited up and ready to go in, Don with a silencer-equipped rifle slung across his back, Winchester with what looked like a samurai sword across his.

There was maybe a minute when Don was tempted to trade part of his tac gear for the sword, but he didn't. There was more than one way to separate someone's head from their shoulders, and Don was carrying a lot of big guns. "So – decapitation, huh?"

Winchester glanced up at him from where he'd been fiddling with the EMF meter. "There could be other ways. We're still waiting to hear back from a contact of ours on that. The beauty of decapitation, though, is it works on pretty much everything."

"So have you used it on a lot of things?" Don couldn't help asking, his voice interrogation-sharp.

"Nothing you'd have a hope in hell of dealing with your way," Winchester snapped back. "Come on, let's roll. The sooner we get this thing taken care of, the sooner I can quit sharing a zip code with Henricksen. Fucking LA, it gives me the creeps."

Don swallowed his retort, even if it nearly choked him going down, and headed toward the domes. If there was a certain petty satisfaction in making Winchester follow him instead of the other way around, he wasn't admitting to that either.



The first three domes were empty, only dust on the floor and in the steel-girded rafters as far as their flashlights could reach, and the EMF reader was silent and dim.

"She knows we're here, doesn't she?" Don asked, sweeping his light over the door to the fourth dome.

"Yep. She's known since we came onto her hunting grounds." Winchester pulled out the EMF meter and aimed it at the door. It had been stubbornly silent in the face of the other three domes, but now it lit up like New Year's in Vegas, splitting the quiet with a shriek of static until Winchester turned it off.

"Found her," he observed. "Or found something."

"It damn well better be her," Don said, pitching his voice low and sliding the rifle around and into his hands. "I'm not exterminating every random monster we find out here tonight."

Winchester brought the bolt-cutters out of his pack and snapped the padlock off the door. "Just the ones that want to eat your brother?"

"Just those," Don said, and raised the rifle as Winchester moved aside and carefully pushed the door open.

There was nothing blocking the doorway. That was all he could tell in the dark. Crouched by the door, Winchester shone his flashlight into the dome, illuminating a dust-covered floor and brief flashes of the far wall.

"Suppose we could just burn it down with her in it?" he whispered, not sounding too hopeful.

Don looked askance at him. "You know how many hazardous chemicals there are on these docks? You light up a bonfire in a trash can and there'll be four fire trucks and a hazmat team on the scene before you can toast a marshmallow."

"Damn. Okay, Plan B." Winchester reached carefully past the door frame, drew a hand through the dust on the floor, and brought it back up to sniff at it. Apparently satisfied, he pulled a handful of flares out of his pack.

"I'd ask if you're sure that's safe but I'm pretty sure the answer is no," Don observed.

"And you'd be right. I just know it's not grain dust on the floor. That shit goes up like napalm." Winchester lit a flare and tossed it into the dome. Don moved forward, crouched in the doorway across from Winchester, and looked up.

The first thing he saw was the severed head, partly shrouded in red-stained webbing and dangling down on a thin cable like some sort of gruesome Christmas ornament fifteen feet above the ground. The webbing ran through the slack mouth like a gag, tangled in the hair and wound down over the weirdly clean cut through the neck, and Don tracked it back up to the thick web that nearly obscured the frame of girders that made up the dome. In the light of the flare the webbing was neon red; and in its depths, at the top of the dome where the light almost didn't reach, Don could just make out the broad stretch of spindly legs and a dark mass of a body. Outstretched, she was bigger than his SUV – and then she was gone, in a sudden flurry of limbs that set the web trembling and took her god knew where.

Don pulled his head back and leaned back against the wall. "Fuck everything in the entire world," he said.

"Yeeeah, that ain't good," Winchester said, tugging the door closed.

"I thought I shot her legs off!"

Winchester shrugged. "They're back. Things regenerate like that sometimes."

"Yeah, well, where I'm from when you blow off someone's limbs they stay blown off."

"So next time you blow somebody's limbs off you'll know to count your blessings. But look, we got some advantages here, okay?"

"Now would be a good time to tell me about them," Don informed him.

"First, this thing, she's not too bright. She's way more aggressive than real spiders, but she still eats 'cause people walk right up to her to get eaten, just like you were gonna do at CalSci. Second, and man, I hate to keep harping on this, but – the way she fixated on you, and you walking right back into her web, she's gonna think you're here to fuck. And that means she's gonna take on human form at least as long as it takes to lure you in. If one of us can get up behind her while she's human-shaped and take her head off, we won't have to face off against her while she's spider-shaped."

"How likely is that?"

"Hey, people win the lottery, you know?"

Don groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. For a minute he was silent, and then made himself say it. "Look, you need to get out of this even if I don't. Charlie said if I didn't come back he was going to…"

"Yeah," Winchester said quietly. "I figured."

"You have to stop him from doing that. Maybe he'll listen to you if he won't listen to me, but that thing will tear him apart if he gets within ten feet of her."

"I can try, man, but… the thing is, some people? They can lose someone to something like this, even someone it hurts them bad to lose, and they're never gonna quite be the same, but they go on with their lives more or less the way they were. They go to work, come home, spend time with their friends and their kids, and yeah, they know things about the world now that they wish they didn't, and maybe they put salt lines down over their windows now before they go to bed, but they aren't hunters. Mostly that happens when whatever killed the person they lost is dead now itself, when they've got closure or whatever the hell Sam calls it. If this thing kills you and I don't kill it, your little brother ain't gonna be one of those people. I can tell you that right now. Losing you to this would hurt him in ways he can't even understand yet. And yeah, hunting's gonna eat him alive even if this bitch doesn’t. So I don't know what to tell you, Eppes. You're just gonna have to live through tonight."

"Goddammit," Don sighed, and hefted his rifle. "Okay. We got a plan?"



It turned out that Winchester, when a fire of sufficient intensity was lit under him, could move faster than just about anyone Don had ever seen. And Don, who knew from fire, thought that if there was a hotter one than trying to draw an unbroken fifteen-foot salt circle by flarelight as the guy covering your ass kept cracking off rifle shots to warn off the giant spider creeping too close over your head, he just hoped neither of them ever burned in it.

"Okay, move," Winchester called, drawing his gun out to cover Don. "For fuck's sake don't break the circle."

Don looked up into the web, found the jorogumo, and ran. She didn't rush him like she'd tried to rush Winchester when he first came out onto the floor; Don didn't know if that was because of the whole creepy fixation thing or because the half-panicked shot he'd sent right across the chitin of her thorax had been enough to dissuade her from trying that shit again any time soon.

"You sure she'll come down and not just wait us out?" he muttered, settling into the circle beside Winchester.

"Nah, bitch is mad now," Winchester said. "You dinged her with a couple of those shots and I think I hit her in the eye with a flare. A real spider might sit up there and sulk, but not this one."

"Wait, I don't see her." There were flares scattered around them in a circle, outside the salt, hissing like snakes; but they were made to be seen, not to see by, and Don wasn't sure they were much of an improvement over the dark.

"There she comes," Winchester said grimly, pointing with the barrel of his gun. "C'mon down, honey."

She was in human form, mostly. Her arms and legs were too thin and too long, but they ended in hands that looked human, and she was creeping head-first down the long line of the web where it met the wall maybe twenty yards away. Long, snarled hair snagged on the spirals of the web, and Don remembered what Charlie had said about the radii because it was that or think about how the hair was sticking behind her, pulled out of her head by the strand, apparently unnoticed. In the light from the flares, her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot.

A foot from the floor she vanished, and when Don turned to look for her she was standing just outside the salt circle, watching him with two human eyes and six arachnid ones. Don jolted back, fortuitously clearing the way for Winchester, who was there in a flash with a broad sweep of his blade aimed right at her neck.

It didn't connect. In the blink of an eye there was nothing where she had been but a plume of oily smoke that twisted and surged but didn't cross the salt line. "Well, shit," Winchester said.

Don nearly killed him. "Well, shit? Really?"

"No, man, it's cool, we just… need a new plan. She still can't cross the salt line or she'd have done it by now." Winchester pulled out his phone, and what he saw when he glanced down at it didn't make him any happier. "Check your phone, man, I've got twenty-four missed calls and no voice mail."

"You want me to check my voice mail? Now?"

Dean had his phone to his ear. "Breathe, man. We can't stand here in the salt circle all night. Sam's gonna have to come up with something. If he answers his fucking phone, goddamn. Sam, you asshole, call me when you get this! I tried to cut off her head and it didn't fucking work. Find some different lore before she figures out how to get across the salt line."

The jorogumo was back in human form, breath scraping so harsh in her lungs that Don could hear it over the flares. Her face was contorted now, jaws split like mandibles, a thin trail of something that could have been either blood or saliva in this light dripping down onto her dress. Don fumbled for his phone, almost dropped it, and found a dozen missed calls. "Shit. Charlie."

"She's here with us," Winchester reminded him.

"He could be in trouble."

"We're in trouble!"

"Shit," Don said, brought his rifle up, and shot the jorogumo point-blank in the head. Her head snapped back, then forward, incomplete now and missing a few of those horrible glassy eyes. A thin, shrill hiss bubbled up from her throat and spider legs crept out from behind her. The two middle ones slipped around to tug open the front of her dress and Don did not even know what the fuck those were in her skin until she started weaving silk from them, fast and deft, yellow-banded limbs whispering Jacob's ladder between them.

Don shot her again, or tried to. She flickered just for a moment and his shell went straight through. Something hit his leg with almost enough force to break it, the world spun around him, the ground hit his back hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and before he could get his balance back the web line she'd caught him in had dragged him nearly to the salt circle. Winchester landed on him hard, pinned him in a full-body grip that had some hard-core wrestling training behind it, and slashed off the web with his sword. Don was still trying to get his breath back; Winchester rolled them back toward the other side of the circle and came up on all fours over Don, one hand shoving him back down onto the ground while the other emptied a clip into the jorogumo's spinnerets. Don got it together enough to yank his pistol out of his thigh holster, bruising Winchester an inch from his balls in the process, and shot for her limbs.

He'd never really thought about what kind of noises spiders made, if they made any at all. Of course, he hadn't really thought about spiders being fucking enraged, either. For the record, it sounded a lot like an entire chorus of fingernails on chalkboard, until she vanished into smoke again, and then it sounded in his head like the worst, sickest hangover he'd ever had.

"Bitch, come back here," Winchester muttered.

Don prodded him. "Off."

Watching the dark around him, Winchester climbed to his feet and offered Don a hand up. One of the flares, the first one Winchester had lit, guttered and died.

"Hey," Don said. "Does it seem to you like she's not any too anxious to get around those flares?"

"Well, would you be – no, wait, you're right," Winchester said slowly.

"You got any more?"

"Yeah," Winchester said with a grimace. "In my pack. Outside. You wait here, I'll –"

The door creaked open. Beyond it, there was a tense, waiting silence that Don had felt on every home incursion he'd ever been on. "FBI, identify yourself," he barked, and god help him, if it was Charlie he was going to –

"What in the fuck is going on here?" Henricksen asked, moving carefully through the door with his gun trained right between Don and Winchester.



Fast as thought, Winchester's gun came down against Don's temple. Don might have been worried about that if he didn't know for a fact that that was the gun Winchester hadn't yet reloaded. "Stay back, Henricksen," he warned. "I've got a hostage."

"A hostage," Henricksen repeated. "Who's armed to the teeth and wearing Kevlar. And you're holding him hostage in the middle of the night with no one around to make demands on."

"I can explain that," Winchester said, after a minute.

"Oh, for God's sake. Victor, get over here and get in the salt circle and don't break it –"

Don was half-turned away from Henricksen, and that was how he saw when the shadows on the other side of the circle rolled inward and then vomited out a ten-foot spider stretched high on her hind legs.

Henricksen didn't even freeze for the split second it took his eyes to go wide. Don took Winchester down and bullets streaked over both of them, hitting what eyes the jorogumo had left and turning them into a foul black spray.

"Henricksen, get the fuck in the circle!" Winchester bellowed. Henricksen dove and rolled, landing neatly inside the salt line. The jorogumo wavered, vanished, reappeared in human form with half her head and empty eye sockets and crawled toward the salt line like she was trying to find it with her hands.

"You and I are gonna talk about this, Winchester," Henricksen warned.

Don scrambled back away from the jorogumo's reaching hands. "Now what? We blow pieces off her until she stops moving?"

"Got my vote," Winchester said.

"Fire," Henricksen said, and suited action to words, blowing a hole through the jorogumo's hand. "Not that kind. Eppes, your brother called me. He's on his way here –"

"What?" Don bellowed.

"Yeah, I know, okay? He says it has to be fire and if you ever turn your phone off again he'll beat your ass with a tire iron. Does someone want to explain to me why the fuck that thing is not dead right now?"

The jorogumo was crawling around the perimeter of the salt circle, head down to the ground, searching for a break in the line. Don had a feeling it wouldn't take much of one and she'd be right in there with them. Spider legs pushed out of the skin of her back, wrapping around to her ruined spinnerets and pulling bloody silk from them for another rope.

"I could have lived my life and died and not seen that," Henricksen said.

"Just stay braced and low to the ground, man, she uses that shit like a lasso," Winchester warned. "Listen, you two are gonna have to keep her occupied while I go get the rest of the flares."

Two more of the flares around the circle went out. The rest were dimming, bringing shadows closer to the circle like the swell of high tide.

"You step outside this circle and she's going to eat you," Don told him. "We're running out of ammo."

"Look, it can't wait," Dean snapped. "Remember how fast she grew her legs back? She's gonna grow her head back, and her, her web-thread-things, and she's gonna be just as bad and twice as pissed, now cover me!"

"Dean!" Sam called from the doorway, and Don was too busy almost puking to see him throwing Winchester's pack to him and dodging back outside, because Sam there meant Charlie there.

"Charlie, you stay the fuck in the car!" he yelled desperately.

What was left of the jorogumo's head snapped toward Sam, then back toward the circle. Her hair pushed itself aside and a flat black eye gleamed out of it, regenerated and whole.

"No, you don't, bitch," Winchester said, struck a flare, and slammed it right into her abdomen.

The jorogumo screeched and grabbed onto his arm, fast as lightning, striking at him with a mouth full of thick, venomous fangs. Henricksen grabbed hold of Winchester and yanked; Don came off the ground with a roundhouse kick that knocked the fangs off-course. A shotgun blast ricocheted deafeningly in the open space and when the jorogumo turned to face off against the new threat, Henricksen rolled a flare under the hem of her dress.

It caught, and she burned, stuck halfway into a transformation that left her with a malproportioned spider's body and a human head, her dress burning around her in a flame that smelled like dusty bones. Winchester grabbed the salt canister and flung a handful onto her; Sam came closer, wary, and blew what was left of her head onto the concrete, stopping the shrill insectile shriek.

"So," Don said after a minute, when he was pretty sure the body wasn't going to move again. "Is it always like this?"

"Hell, no," Winchester said. "Usually we burn things after they're dead. Sam, you dumbass, get in the circle. You know better than that."

Sam stepped fastidiously over the salt line. "Agent Eppes, Charlie's out in the car with a salt line around him," he said. "You should –"

Don was already moving.



In the car turned out to be a little bit of a misstatement. Charlie was crouched on the hood of the Winchesters' muscle car, glaring back and forth between the salt line and the door to the storage dome. When he saw Don he went still for a long moment, then climbed carefully down and walked right over the line.

"Charlie," Don said helplessly, running a hand through his hair. "What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were home, I thought you were safe. Do you know what Dad would do to me if –"

"Shut up, Don," Charlie whispered, threading his fingers into the hair at the back of Don's head and clenching. "You didn't, you didn't answer your phone, and Sam found out it had to be fire that killed her and when you wouldn't answer your fucking phone I thought…"

"Charlie, hey," Don said, sliding his hands up Charlie's arms. It would be easier if he had a sister, he thought dimly; she'd cry and he'd fold her in his arms and comfort her, and it wouldn't be Charlie shaking like a leaf and refusing to look at Don at all. "It's okay, buddy."

"Shut up," Charlie said again, and somehow he'd gotten closer, so that when he lifted his head the tip of his nose ran along the line of Don's jaw in a feather-light touch. "You don't get to do this again. Ever."

"Hey, not planning on it, okay?" Don said hoarsely. "I think the Winchesters have it taken care of. You and me, we're just gonna… gonna go back to how we were and keep a lot of salt on hand, okay?"

Behind him, Victor's voice was raised in that I know you are not even thinking about lying to me tone. The Winchesters' voices rose with it, Dean protesting and Sam holding on to weary rationality by the skin of his teeth.

"You used to let me sleep with you when I had nightmares," Charlie breathed, and Don closed his eyes and just – let himself despair at how very close Charlie's mouth was, how close Charlie's whole body was, and how very, very badly Don never wanted anything to hurt Charlie ever again. Guilt and misery made him set Charlie gently back; because fuck what the Winchesters did or thought, it was wrong and Don had seen love go bad that way too goddamn many times.

"You want the bed or the couch?" he joked weakly.

Charlie's hand tightened and for a minute he visibly wavered on the verge of saying something really snide and pissy. "What part of I am probably going to sleep with you for the rest of my life wasn't clear, Don?"

"The part where eventually Amita's going to have objections?"

"You have met Amita, right?" Charlie shook his head, frustrated. "Don, just, I want to go, okay? Let's go home."

Don leaned his forehead against Charlie's. "Where's Larry?"

"Your place. The jorogumo's dead, right? I'll call and tell him to dismantle the flamethrower and –"

"Oh my god," Don groaned. "Get back inside the salt circle. We're rolling in five minutes."



In the end, Don escaped more or less unnoticed. A couple of handshakes, some quiet thanks, and then Henricksen pushed him out the door by sheer force of will and went back to grilling the Winchesters about cases that weren't even in their official files. Don hovered long enough to be sure that Henricksen was in fact-finding mode and not in arrest mode, made a note to check back and make sure that state of affairs continued, and took Charlie home.

By the time they got there, Larry had tactfully disappeared. Don looked suspiciously around and didn't see anything that looked like it had been co-opted to make a flamethrower. Then again, he had no idea what in his apartment could be co-opted to make a flamethrower, though clearly Larry did. Don counted himself lucky it hadn't been a laser.

Charlie was standing in the middle of the living room, white and shaking.

"Hey," Don said gently. "Hey, buddy. Bedtime now, okay? Come on, go brush your teeth. I'll find you some sweats and a t-shirt."

Charlie gave him a look. "You seriously think I can sleep?"

Don rubbed a hand over his face. Sleep was in fact not looking like too viable an option. "Okay, change of plans. We get changed, we get out the leftover pizza, and we watch stupid movies until we pass out on the couch at dawn. That sound better?"

Charlie edged down a little. "Yeah. That sounds better."

Changed and ensconced on the couch, his feet tucked under the cushions by Don, he looked like he was breathing a little more freely and his shoulders began the slow process of disengaging from his ears. Don had put something mindless into the DVD player while Charlie was in the bathroom; so mindless he couldn't even remember now what it actually was except that it was one of a large collection of movies involving explosions and improbable terrorist groups and no fucking spiders, and he hit the play button on the remote and watched the menu screen come up with a sort of distracted curiosity.

"I hate this movie," Charlie said in what sounded like satisfaction, wriggling down further into the couch.

"Good," Don said, and took a hit off his beer. "You can explain to me all the things that are wrong with it."

Charlie was silent for a while, though, until the first car blew up; and then he said, "This guy Ash, that the Winchesters know. He thinks the jorogumo secretes some sort of pheromone that disinhibits aggressive and sexual responses."

"Hey," Don said, and put his hand on Charlie's bare ankle. "Thought we were done with that for tonight."

"No, I just meant…" Charlie looked down, picking at the hem of his t-shirt, which was actually Don's t-shirt so Don reached over and removed Charlie's fingernails from the thread. "You and Dean were kind of throwing off sparks, you know? And you were gone a long time. And never mind, it's none of my business."

Don stared at him for a minute, then muted the TV right as the hero was getting ready to give some big righteous speech to a drug dealer. If Don ever gave a righteous speech to a drug dealer, he hoped the dealer laughed right in his face. "Charlie. Are you seriously asking me if I fucked Dean Winchester?"

"No!" Charlie protested, turning scarlet and keeping his eyes fixed on the hem he was clearly jonesing to wreak havoc on. "I wouldn't. I wouldn't ask because it's none of my business."

"No, you're just dying for me to tell you," Don observed, and sighed. "Buddy. No. Okay? No for a dozen different reasons, not the least of which is that he's not my type. C'mon, you said this pheromone disinhibits sexual responses, right? Disinhibits doesn't mean creates. You should know that, you have to look up that word every time Dad uses it in Scrabble because you always think it's got three Ss."

Charlie was watching him, still in the dim light. Don realized it suddenly, heard the apartment go silent when he stopped talking, and almost wished he'd let Charlie keep ruining his shirt. "I know that," Charlie said. "I just wanted you to say it out loud."

Don took an unsteady breath and looked back at the TV, where a gunfight was going on in silent slow-motion. "Yeah, well," he said, and turned the volume back up. The remote shook a little between his fingers. "I said it. Now get comfortable and watch the movie, okay? I want you to get at least a little sleep tonight."

"Pass me another slice of pizza," Charlie said, and then was quiet again, and Don watched the rest of the movie with Charlie's pulse beating like a bird's wing under his fingers.



When he opened his eyes to slanting afternoon sun, his back was a mess from sleeping all twisted up on the couch, Charlie was drooling on his stomach, and he had two voice mails.

The first was from Victor Henricksen, who sounded a little drunk and a lot cranky. He was pretty obviously trying hard to be charitable and not blame Don for the sudden appearance of monsters in the world, though he didn't have any compunctions about blaming the Winchesters. Mostly he appeared to be pissed off because one of his biggest and longest-running cases had collapsed around his ears, which would have pissed Don off too, and the crux of the voice mail seemed to be that he and Don needed to meet for coffee and reexamine a couple of other cases in this new light.

The second was from a number Don didn't recognize, and at first, listening to it, he wondered if someone had managed to butt-dial him at a really awkward moment. Then he caught Dean's name, and Sam's voice tight with pleasure, and his grip on the phone went white-knuckled.

Think Eppes is giving it to his little brother right now? Winchester asked, husky and drawn-out so that Don could almost fucking hear the smell of sex and leather seats in his voice.

God, I – fuck, Dean, oh fuck – hope so, Sam panted.

Charlie was tucked in tight against Don, the hem of his t-shirt hitched up over his sweats to expose a slender stretch of olive skin, not stirring. Don closed his eyes, swallowed convulsively, and told himself to hang up the goddamned phone.

Fuck, that'd be hot, Winchester said. Bet Eppes'd just – just get a grip on those curls and hold the fuck on, y'know? You think Charlie'd beg for it?

Sam laughed breathlessly. I think, oh god, I think he already is, Dean, come on, quit screwing around.

So to speak, Winchester said, and did something that made Sam howl.

Don snapped the phone closed and stared blankly at the wall for a long time. Fucking Winchesters. Don was blaming them for the monsters too.

But he didn't delete the voice mail; and he didn't move his hand from where it was resting, fingers wound into Charlie's hair.