and of things that will bite - ladygizarme (2024)

“No! Dad!”

Sam’s shrill cry pierced through Dean’s sleep, sending him bolt upright, his hand tight around the grip of his gun before his brain caught up to the situation. In the bed beside his, Sammy was struggling in his sleep as if the sheets were strangling him. Dean let out a harsh breath of relief and scrubbed a hand over his face, dropping his gun beside his pillow and tossing back his covers to go to his brother. As soon as Dean’s feet touched the carpet, however, Sam suddenly woke with a gasp, kicked his sheets off his body, and lurched over to the bathroom.

A cold sweat broke out on Dean’s body when he heard his little brother start to retch. His own stomach knotted at the sound of Sam’s dinner coming back up, and Dean resisted the urge to cover his ears like a bitch. He was just about to give in when the phone on the bedside table started ringing, startling him. He looked at it for a moment as if he’d never seen a phone before; as if it would bite; and after two rings it stopped. Dean swallowed and held his breath, waiting. The phone started ringing again. Dean put his hand on the receiver, and waited for another ring to pass.

In the bathroom, Sam’s hurling noises finally stopped, and yellow light suddenly filled the dark crack under the door. The faucet squeaked, and Dean heard water gushing from the tap.

He picked up the phone.

“Dean?” Dad’s gruff voice on the other end of the line would’ve been a comfort—even then, at 2 AM—if it weren’t for the odd strain to it.

Dean swallowed down his questions and licked his lips. “Yes, sir?”

“Son, I’m going to be here a little longer than expected. Need you to hold down the fort there with Sammy ‘til I get back.”

Dean heard noise in the background—a voice, loud but distant; repeating; an announcement?—and unconsciously focused on it for a moment until he recognized what it sounded like.

“Are you in a hospital? Dad, what happened? Are you okay?”

Dad sighed down the line. “I’m fine, Dean. Got a busted leg, but I’m just fine. More importantly, the job’s done. I just need a few days before I can drive back.”

Dean made himself start breathing again at the confidence in Dad’s voice. “How long?”

“We’ll play it by ear.”

Dean thought of the dwindling stash of bills in his wallet from the money Dad had left them, and the two cans of Spaghettios Sam was putting away at every meal if Dean let him. He wiped his hand over his mouth, as if to hold down the anxiety crawling up his throat.

Sam opened the bathroom door, and Dean dropped his hand from his mouth quickly, hoping Sam hadn’t seen.

If they needed more money before Dad got back, Dean would take care of it.

“The nurse will be back soon, so I need to go. I’ll call you. And Dean?” Dad prompted.

“Watch out for Sammy,” Dean guessed.

Sam looked at Dean sharply and stalked over, demanding the phone with an outstretched hand, but Dad had already hung up.

“Dad, no, wait!” Sam shrieked as Dean set the phone down on the cradle. Sam pushed him, and Dean let himself fall onto his bed.

Sammy’s face was blotchy, shirt splotchy-damp with sweat and splash from the sink. His eyes looked bloodshot and feverish. Dean wanted to feel his forehead, but Sam looked like he might bite right now if Dean treated him like a baby.

“I wanted to talk to him, Dean! Is he done? Is he coming back?”

Dean sighed. “He’s done, but he has to stay there a little while longer.”

“Why?”

Dean bit his lip before he could help it, and Sam’s eyes zeroed in on it.

Sam grabbed for Dean’s shoulders, fisting his hands into his shirt, and Dean smelled mouthwash on his breath as Sam demanded, “He’s hurt, isn’t he? Tell the truth, Dean!”

He shook Dean a little, and Dean put up with it for a moment before pushing him away.

“Okay, yes, he’s hurt. But it’s not bad! He’s got a broken leg, is all.”

Sam put his hands in his hair and threw his body into a dramatic eye roll, “Yeah, right, Dean. Dad’s driven back with all kinds of injuries before. You really believe a broken leg would stop him? What’s the number for the hospital? Did you get his room number?”

Sam grabbed the notepad next to the phone. The notepad that still only had the phone number to Dad’s motel in Oklahoma. The bitchface Dean received then was incredulous. “You didn’t get a number?!”

Dean bristled. He’d wanted to ask, but Dad had said— “He’ll call us.”

He had known from Dad’s tone he didn’t want Dean to call the hospital and make them suspicious about his children, and that had derailed Dean asking. Still, it was a rookie move. And Sam wasn’t wrong—Dad had shown back up bruised and bloody hundreds of times, and even driven two states with a cast before. How bad would his injuries have to be…?

While Dean’s thoughts were spiraling, Sam had picked up the phone.

“What’re you doing?”

“Star-sixty-nine,” Sam answered, pressing the buttons as he said them. “Duh.”

Dean always forgot about that. He bet Dad did, too. Leave it to Sammy to find an easier solution than asking the operator for all the hospitals near Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Dean heard the tone of the error recording as he watched Sam’s expression bleed from concentration to confusion to irritation. Sam slammed the phone down and glared at it. Then he blinked his eyes clear, shook his head, and picked the receiver back up.

This time Sam pressed nine first to open the line, like the torn sticker on the phone instructed.

Dean couldn’t quite overhear the automated operator as it recited the number that belonged to the last caller, but Sammy was writing it down. And the area code didn’t match the one for Dad’s motel.

~*~

After calling the number five times in a row until someone finally picked up, Sam had found out that the last call had come from a pay phone in the lobby of a hospital in Sheridan, Wyoming. A series of separate, increasingly desperate calls to the hospital itself had turned up no trace of John Winchester, or any of the aliases Dean knew he was carrying. They even tried calling Dad’s motel room in Oklahoma, only to be answered by a very annoyed couple who were staying there now. Dean was running out of fake voices, and Sam wasn’t even mocking Dean for his awful attempt at mimicking their dad. He was too busy biting his thumb.

Even then, though, something made Dean say ‘no’ when Sam got dressed and started packing up their things.

“We have to stay here, Sam. Dad said he would call us. We can’t answer his call if we’re not here!”

“Dean, he lied about even being in the hospital!”

“Not really!” Dean insisted. “Technically he did call from the hospital—”

Sam interrupted Dean with a loud scoff and crossed his arms.

Dean kept going before Sam could start in on how John probably planned it so Dean would hear the PA announcement and come to conclusions. “If he stretched the truth a little bit, he must’ve had a reason, Sam!”

“Yeah, when doesn’t he?” Lately, this bitter statement would’ve come along with a complimentary bitchface from his little brother, but right now Sammy was looking paler and shakier by the minute. “Dean, he was supposed to be on a haunting in Oklahoma! We don’t even know where he is right now, or why, or when we’ll hear from him a—”

Dean covered Sam’s mouth with his hand and grabbed the back of his neck with the other, relieved to find his skin warm but not fever hot. Sam glared at him with wet eyes.

“Shhh,” Dean placated, and then hissed when Sam’s teeth scraped his palm with intent. Dean pulled his hand away and wiped it on his shirt. “Damn it, Sammy, calm down before you make yourself puke again.”

Sam gasped. You’d think he just watched Dean kick a puppy or something. Dean didn’t understand his reaction, or why his little brother’s body crumpled. Dean barely managed to kneel and catch Sam before his head hit the floor. For once, Sam let himself be manhandled, laying across Dean’s lap and clinging to Dean’s middle, pressing his face against the softness of Dean’s belly. His breath was fast and stuttery—the obvious signs of a Sam about to cry.

Dean rolled his eyes and sighed, irritation warring with his internal Sammy alarm. Okay, Dean wasn’t stupid. Sammy must’ve had some whopper of a nightmare for him to get so worked up over it. Dean ran his hand through Sam’s soft, sweaty hair, petting him like a spooked puppy. Finally Sam’s breathing calmed down and he pressed his forehead into Dean’s sternum.

“Dean, what if something happens to him and we never know?” Sam mumbled into the fabric of Dean’s shirt.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dean assured, changing the pressure of his hand from calming petting to a big-brotherly noogie. “It’s Dad we’re talking about!”

Sam’s shoulders shrugged up against his ears and he hugged Dean tighter, until Dean swore he could feel a bruise forming under Sammy’s hard head. “You’re stupid,” Sam said.

Dean rubbed Sam’s back and thought about what to do.

“Look, we’ll call Bobby—”

Sam was up and out of Dean’s arms in a flash, reaching for the phone before Dean finished, “—in the morning. Dude, it’s 2 AM. Bobby will kill you.”

Dean reached for the phone base to press the switchhook, but Sam grabbed it and leapt onto his bed, doing his best to hold the phone out of Dean’s reach, ridiculous of a task as that was if Dean was determined to get it. But Dean was getting tired of this, and if Sammy wanted to be on Uncle Bobby’s sh*t list, then he’d get what he asked for.

But Bobby didn’t answer, and his answering machine was full.

~*~

Sam hadn’t wanted to lay back down, but Dean had insisted they both needed more sleep before they made any more drastic decisions, and Sam had finally relented and gotten back into pajamas. Dean lay in his bed, staring at the motel door, listening to his little brother toss and turn with little whines and dissatisfied grunts. After a very short eternity, Dean sighed loudly and turned back towards Sam.

“Well, get your ass over here, already,” Dean said, holding open his single sheet.

Sam sat up and hesitated just a moment before grabbing his pillow and scrambling over. When they were both resettled under the covers, Dean slung his arm around Sam’s middle and hugged him close.

“Wanna tell me about your nightmare?”

Sam stiffened in Dean’s arms. “I–I…I can’t,” Sam croaked.

Dean tried not to take it personally, but in the dark he frowned. More and more lately, Sammy had been trying to prove he could handle everything Dean could. For the most part, Dean was glad—and not just because he got to go on more hunts with Dad instead of babysitting. Sammy growing into the family business had been one of Dean’s biggest wishes for a while now. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still Sam’s big brother, or that he didn’t want Sam to still need him sometimes. Especially if Sam’s nightmares were this rough on him. Sammy had barely even seen anything yet.

When Dean’s arms tightened a little more around his little brother, as if it would keep the nightmares away, Sam didn’t say anything. And when Sam’s arm wriggled under him and his other hand grabbed Dean’s necklace like a talisman, Dean didn’t say anything either.

~*~

When Dean woke up again, everything was wet.

For a split second, Dean was silently freaking out, eyes squeezed shut, until he realized he was just clammy with sweat. The temps in north Texas, where Dad had left them, had been pretty cool lately, but Dean still should’ve turned on the A/C before letting Sam share the bed—he knew what a furnace Sam was. But Dean didn’t dwell on that, because something was dripping onto his collarbone and Sammy was shaking him.

“Dean? Dean!”

Panic gripped him again as he opened his eyes to see his little brother’s face covered in blood and tears.

“What the f*ck, Sammy!” Dean yelled, voice cracking. He sat up and grabbed Sam’s face, realizing with relief the blood had come from his nose. “Jesus Christ,” Dean swore again, wiping at the blood with a damp corner of the sheet. At least it looked like it had stopped dripping.

“Dean,” Sam whined.

Sam’s wet cheeks squished together when Dean held him tighter so he couldn’t pull away, but Sam didn’t struggle. He just looked at Dean with sheer terror in his eyes, swallowed thickly and said, “I’ll tell you about my nightmare now.”

~*~

Dean’s heart beat painfully against his ribs as he slunk low in the shadows, trying not to think about what Sam had told him back in the motel. Just focusing on his task: finding a car. Sam followed close behind, barely crouching at all because he was still such a shrimp. Under normal circ*mstances, Dean would have a quip to lighten the mood, but right now he couldn’t even think of one. He was too busy thinking about what Dad would do to him if Dean got himself and Sammy arrested for stealing a car—when Dean was supposed to be watching out for him.

“This one, Dean?” Sam whispered near Dean’s shoulder.

Dean shushed him and crouched a little lower, pulling Sam by his backpack to sink below the window line as a car drove past. It was still dark, but if they were going to have a chance at not getting caught, they needed to get a car and get out of here without calling attention to themselves.

As soon as the car passed, Sam asked, “Why didn’t you just get one at the motel?”

Dean shushed him again, and looked through the back window—no baby seat; good. He tried the door—unlocked, thank f*ck. He opened it slowly, wary of any sound that would call attention on the quiet street. He hurried Sammy inside, and climbed in after him as Sam scrambled across the seat.

“Two reasons,” Dean explained in a hush, opening his bag and grabbing his multitool and a flashlight. He handed the flashlight to Sam, then dug his lighter out of his pocket and set it next to the rainbow-haired graduation troll glued to the dashboard. “One, to make it harder to link this to us. And B, stealin’ a car from someone on the road—that just ain’t right, if you can help it. But these local stiffs’ll be fine. Hold that light down here for me.”

Dean pried the wires out from under the steering column and looked at them. He knew how to do this—Dad taught him. He wasn’t gonna choke now, with Sammy watching and when it really mattered.

“Okay, look,” Dean instructed, reciting the steps Dad had taught him in the comfort of Bobby’s junkyard. He’d practiced a lot, but he’d never done it on the job, and it helped Dean remember better whenever he taught Sam something.

He showed Sam how to find the right set of wires on a Chevy Caprice, and how to use his lighter to soften the rubber and strip it, hoping Sam didn’t notice the tremor in his hands. When he twisted the battery and ignition together, they both flinched as the radio started blaring—

“—gether forever and never to part, together forever, we two. And don’t you know I would move Heaven and Earth, to be together forever with—”

Dean switched off the radio, glancing out the windows and hoping no one had heard it. He made Sammy sit back before he pressed the starter wire to the other two, and they sparked at the contact. Dean felt like time stood still in that moment, holding his breath as it tried to start. Sweat prickled his forehead and upper lip, windows fogging up as Dean started whispering, “C’mon, baby, you can do it,” and other words of encouragement at the car. Finally the engine turned over, and Dean grinned when Sammy squealed a triumphant, “Yes!”

Dean revved the engine a little, still sweating. They weren’t homefree yet.

“Help me break this steering column,” he said to Sam, and together they put their combined weight into turning the wheel until the steering broke loose. Dean rubbed Sam’s head affectionately. “Nice job.”

Dean turned the defrost on blast, but still used his jacket sleeve to clear off the windshield. They didn’t have time to wait.

“Seatbelt, Dean,” Sam reminded him, as Dean sped them away from the scene of the crime.

~*~

Dean had never been in the driver’s seat this long before.

He’d swapped license plates twice already, and stocked up on meager supplies (water, coffee, trail mix, a road atlas) at a truck stop. And a little further down the way, he’d filled up the gas and driven off from a smaller station less likely to have working cameras. Luckily the Caprice he’d chosen got better gas mileage than the impala, but Dean didn’t let himself think that. Still, the fact that he was running out of money would become a problem before they got to Dad’s last known whereabouts, and all the not-thinking-about-it Dean was doing was going to give him an ulcer.

Dean glanced over at his brother in the passenger seat. Sam didn’t often get to sit in the front seat, and it gave Dean a weird feeling to look over and see him there, curled over his bag against the door, the pillow he’d taken from the motel pressed against the glass. Dean had worried at first that Sam’s fear for their father would keep him up the whole drive, but Sam had found a box of tapes under his seat at some point and picked out one with a white heart on a red cover, and settled down quickly to the soft rock stylings of The Carpenters. Dean would’ve rather had silence than that sh*t normally, but the sight of Sam with his hand gripped around the unfamiliar seatbelt at his chest and his thumb firmly in his mouth made it too hard for Dean to speak past the lump in his throat. So instead he’d squeezed his hands around the steering wheel and pressed harder on the gas, and let it play until Sam started snoring. Then he’d kept it playing to try to drown out the echo of Sam’s words in his head.

Now the sunrise was bleeding across the hazy horizon—

(“So much blood, Dean!”)

—and Dean needed to change it before he lost it. He was starting to sing along.

“Sammy!” Dean slapped at Sam’s shoulder, and Sam woke with a gasp that turned into a short coughing fit.

“Dean!” Sam complained when he got himself under control. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. “Where are we?”

“Almost to Amarillo. Hey, since you’re awake, get those tapes out and save me from this crap,” Dean said, pointing at the tape deck. “I can’t get anything on the radio out here but static.”

“It’s not crap, Dean,” Sam protested, but pulled out the tapes anyway. “You want Yo-yo Ma, Shania Twain, Whitney Houston, or…Mom’s Meatloaf Mix?”

Dean put on his best Dad voice, “Yo-yo Ma, is that a rap group?” He wasn’t looking, but he could feel Sam roll his eyes as Dean suppressed a grin.

“You’re an idiot,” Sam said under his breath with smothered affection, and put a new tape in. The intro to “Bat Out of Hell” started playing from the speakers. “Can we get breakfast?”

Dean’s stomach growled immediately at the hopeful mention of food, and he suppressed a sigh. The ‘are you sure you’ll keep it down?’ was on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it.

“Yeah, dude, we can get breakfast. Next truck stop I see, I’ll rustle us up some hot food from the rollers.”

Sam sighed loudly in disappointment, but didn't argue. Dean would’ve rather taken him to a diner, or even McDonald’s, but it’d be harder to get his five-finger-discount that way.

Less than twenty minutes later, Dean stuffed four sausages into wax paper sleeves and tucked them into the inner pockets of his canvas jacket beside two plastic-wrapped danishes. Then he grabbed two more sausages, a large coffee, and a banana, and paid for those before taking his haul out to where Sam was waiting in the idling Caprice. It was parked near the outside payphone, out of view from the cashier, but Dean unloaded everything quickly and started eating like someone might pull it out of his mouth at any second.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here?” Sam asked, looking worriedly at his food instead of eating it. Dean wished it wasn’t so obvious to Sam that he’d had to steal, but there was no trying to hide it when Sam had watched him pull the stuff out of his pockets. Or, for that matter, when they were sitting in a stolen car, about to cross state lines.

“It’ll be fine,” Dean reassured him through a mouthful of sausage, looking around surreptitiously for suspicious people.

“Dean, gross,” Sam said emphatically. “Swallow first, ugh.”

Dean shrugged unrepentantly, and stuffed his last sausage into his already-full mouth, flashing his open mouth at Sam before he started chewing fast. He tried the coffee, but it was still too hot, so he sipped from a water bottle, got out of the car and stepped into the phone booth. He rolled a single quarter between his fingers, but hesitated at the coin slot. Maybe he could call collect…but, no. This was a private call situation. He dropped the quarter into the slot and dialed.

The third ring passed, and Dean’s fingers trembled near the hook, unsure if the phone would steal his quarter even if the answering machine was still full. He debated whether to hang up or see if the answering machine picked up anyway. It was probably ridiculous to think Bobby would’ve cleared it by now; he should hang up and get his quarter back. The fourth ring started, and Dean’s finger twitched. The call hung up, and the quarter clunked around inside until it came out the return slot.

Dean let himself breathe as he pinched the quarter up, and tried the call again. He wondered how early pool halls in Amarillo started opening up, and how long it’d take to find a mark. It would be hard to try to run a game on billiards in an all-age place, in the middle of the week. It had been a few days…weeks…since he’d shaved; he could probably pull off looking twenty-one like his fake ID said. Dean could practically hear Sammy in his head, mocking him and his barely-there stubble. He realized he’d started rubbing his chin and lip to feel the coarse peach fuzz there, and made himself stop.

Dean wished he was better at pickpocketing, but it wasn’t a skill he’d practiced enough. He wondered how dangerous it’d be to try lifting a wallet in the truck stop showers, and started sweating.

Fourth ring again. He hung up. Tried again…

Bobby picked up. “Whoever this is, it damn well better be important.”

~*~

“So?” Sam asked, turning the volume down on Meat Loaf immediately after Dean had cranked it up.

“He’s gonna wire us money through Western Union. I’m pickin’ it up in Amarillo.”

“What about Dad? Did he know anything?” Sam urged.

He wouldn’t say anything, but he knows something, Dean thought, remembering Bobby’s muffled ‘son of a bitch.’ Dean’s jaw twitched with the urge to grit his teeth. “Nah, but he gave me directions to a hunter’s cabin outside Fort Collins, Colorado. He’s gonna meet us there.”

He pulled the pad of paper with directions out of his chest pocket and tossed it to his little brother, who caught it with two hands. Sam pulled out the atlas and opened to the earmarked page, tracing a route with his finger to the border of the Texas page and turning to the page for Colorado where the route picked up. Dean tried not to notice how bitten down Sammy’s nail was, eyes on the road, not thinking about why they were on it. Just driving with Sammy by his side.

Sam was muttering under his breath, tapping his fingers like he was counting out a math problem, and announced, “Should take us seven or eight hours.”

Dean tilted his chin in acknowledgement. “Bobby said he’ll make it in about nine or less.”

“We’re still going after Dad when we meet up with Bobby, though, right Dean? You won’t let him bench us, will you?”

Dean wished the swoop in his stomach was from elation at Sammy actually wanting to hunt with him, but the way Sam was so focused on this kept scaring him to new levels. It made him feel stupid and young, to be scared about his father— their father; the best hunter in the f*cking world— just because of a dream his brother had. Just because of a nosebleed. Just because—

(“—so much blood, Dean! And then he—”)

—because of a phone call and a lie and the twist of terror in his guts every time he remembered he didn’t know where Dad was right now.

Dean made himself laugh, reaching over to ruffle Sam’s shaggy hair. “Neither of us are getting benched. We’ll find Dad. Together. Don’t worry.”

“We need to find him in time, Dean,” Sam said ominously.

Sam turned to the window before Dean had to name the sparkle in his eyes as tears.

“He’s fine, Sam,” Dean insisted, hands tight around the wheel again. “And he’ll still be fine when we find him. You’ll see.”

~*~

Dean found a Food King with a Western Union logo in Amarillo and felt a weight lift as the clerk counted five twenties into his hand. He let Sam pick out some fruit snacks and a lunchable, got a bag of beef jerky, grabbed a couple canisters of salt, and then they raided the housewares aisles for some more bits and bobs to add to their cobbled-together emergency kit. Then Dean re-hotwired the Caprice and they got back on the road.

He stopped twice for coffee and once more for gas and a bathroom break before they even made it halfway to Fort Collins. Just across the state border, Dean had put Colorado plates on the car. It was just about noon, but Dean had been running on adrenaline and caffeine since the middle of the night and the midday January sun was giving him a serious case of the yawns. Sam had fallen asleep again—right around the point Dean had started feeling seriously awkward about Sam listening to the lyrics on this person’s freaky-ass Meat Loaf mixtape on constant replay. Now, Sam’s soft snores and twitches from the passenger seat weren’t doing Dean any favors in fighting the urge to nap.

“If you really want to, if you really want to, then I… really can't deny you,” Dean sang absentmindedly as he scanned the road signs.

There was a little wiggle room in the timing of meeting Bobby, and it wouldn’t do any of them any good if Dean ended up falling asleep at the wheel; so when the nods started hitting again, and Dean had slapped himself in the face beyond the point of it being helpful, he started looking for a place to pull over. A place like the closed down rest stop he saw up ahead, overgrown with brush and weeds, and barred with a single rickety sawhorse sign that read: Rest Area Closed. Dean pulled up to it and parked, moved the sign, pulled past it, and put the sign back in place. Then he crept the car around the back of the rest stop, where everything was in shadow, the unkempt conifer trees and bushes seeming to shroud them from the sun and the road.

Dean didn’t want to turn the car off here, just to be safe, but he also didn’t want to chance touching the wires with exposed skin while he caught a few winks. When he opened the door to get into the backseat, Sammy stirred.

“Dee?” He looked around, blurry eyed.

“‘S’okay, Sammy,” Dean answered, waving a hand from the backseat into Sam’s line of sight. “Just need a little rest.”

“I can drive us,” Sam suggested, in a voice that sounded so delirious with clinging sleep that Dean barked a laugh.

“No way. We’d end up in a ditch or something because you can’t reach the pedals and see out the windshield at the same time. Or I’d wake up to a cop at the window because you actually let them pull you over for underaged driving.”

“I’m not that short anymore, Dean,” Sam insisted, clearly waking up more in his irritation.

“Whatever you say, shortstack,” Dean breathed out, pushing the seat belts into the spaces in the upholstery so he wasn’t lying on them; settling into the weirdly soft fabric of the backseat and pillowing his head on his duffle bag.

He heard Sam shifting, but wasn’t worried that his little brother would disobey and try to drive. He was still too much of a scaredy cat. Still, Dean couldn’t help but keep his awareness up as the shifting continued, and when the car started rocking gently, Dean peeked an eye open to see Sam climbing from the front seat into the backseat. Once his body was through, he reached up and grabbed his pillow and the coat he’d removed earlier to use as a blanket. For a moment, he thought Sam had settled down in the eerily clean footwell. Then the shifting started again.

Dean blew a raspberry between his sleepy lips and groused, “Will you get comfortable already? I only got an hour to spare, here.”

A moment later, he let out an ‘oof!’ as Sam jostled his body into Dean’s space and elbowed Dean’s diaphragm in the process.

“Sorry,” Sam said softly—the way he did sometimes in the middle of the night when they were sharing a bed and his shifting woke Dean up.

His wiggling seemed to last forever in a pocket of exhaustion-warped time, but finally Sam fit his frame into the spaces Dean’s wasn’t. They swapped Dean’s duffle for Sam’s pillow, and Dean pulled Sam’s coat over their shoulders before squeezing his arm around Sam’s bony frame so he wouldn’t fall off the seat.

They slept like that until Sam woke Dean up with a full body jerk that ended with Sam landing on his ass in the footwell.

“Three hours, Dean!” Sam was still exclaiming minutes later, head in his hands and pacing as Dean took a leak against a tree and zipped up.

“I know, Sam,” Dean said for the millionth time. “It’s fine, I’ll make it up on the road! Now will you get your ass over here and take a piss already? Or are we gonna have to waste time finding you a pullover ten miles down the road?”

Sam huffed angrily and unzipped, glaring pointedly at Dean as if to say, ‘I’m doing it, aren’t I?’

Dean wouldn’t say this was the first time his little brother had ever made pissing seem aggressive, but it was definitely the angriest he’d ever done it.

Ten miles down the road, Dean still had to find a gas station for the car—and a bathroom for Sam, because his sensitive stomach was acting up.

~*~

It was nearing 8 PM—or 7 PM with the time zone change, but in Winchester time that meant f*ckall—dark and thick with cold fog, by the time Dean crept the car up to Bobby’s cabin. He’d expected Bobby’s truck to be parked there already, with the extra time it had taken to get there between Sammy’s anxious stomach and the unfamiliar backwoods roads. Maybe Bobby had also stopped for dinner like they had. Probably something nicer than the hot pockets Sam and Dean had nuked at the Gas ‘n Sip, Dean thought longingly.

He parked the Caprice but kept it running, digging out a flashlight and his gun.

“Dean?” Sam fussed, sitting up attentively.

“Stay in the car while I clear the cabin,” Dean ordered, reaching for one of the new canisters of salt and tearing the seal off before stuffing it in his inner jacket pocket. It just barely fit.

“I’m going with you,” Sam insisted, digging out his own flashlight.

“Sam, no. You need to stay with the car in case I need to make a run for it. Who knows when Bobby was here last.”

“What if it’s booby-trapped?” Sam pushed.

Dean sighed. “It’s not booby-trapped. It’s warded, but I’m human, so I’ll be fine.” Sam pouted at him, and Dean pushed down the urge to give in, rolling his eyes. “I’ll watch out for booby traps, too. Stay,” Dean repeated sternly, and left the car.

He breathed in the damp, earthy air, and found a thin path through the fog until it dissipated around the steps of the log cabin. The steps creaked as Dean took them slowly—flashlight in one hand; gun in the other. He glimpsed the etchings he was looking for at the door lintel and the window shutters and they looked intact. The handle on the door was iron, and cold to the touch when Dean opened the door to the dark, empty cabin. He tried the light switch on the wall, but got nothing.

Dean’s breath felt hot and wet as he held the flashlight between his teeth and walked the inner perimeter, finding nothing but cobwebs and dust and a few sigil carvings he was unfamiliar with, and trailing salt as he went. He wouldn’t tell Sam, but he was glad there was only one large living space and a bathroom to check before he deemed it safe. The back door fought to open for a second, and by the back steps he found a generator covered with leaves and pine needles. He cleared it off and started priming it.

When Dean returned to the car, all the cabin lights were on behind him, and Sam was standing impatiently by his open door loaded down with their things.

“No Bobby?” Sam asked.

“Not yet.”

“He should’ve been here already.”

“Probably just stopped to eat somewhere,” Dean supplied as he untwisted his hotwire job to shut off the car. He grabbed a couple water bottles from the case, the grocery bag of snacks, and the pillow, and marched Sam into the cabin. His little brother was practically waddling like a penguin under the burden of their two duffles, each more than half his height in length. But Sam looked too determined to accept Dean’s help, so Dean didn’t offer.

The dust inside didn’t seem as bad to Dean in the warm cabin light, but Sam wrinkled his nose as he looked around. When he sneezed, Dean would swear it was on purpose.

“Okay, okay, just go put your stuff down,” Dean said, following his own advice and setting the water bottles and snack bag down on the coffee table. When Sam turned his back to him, Dean threw the pillow at his head and it got stuck there, perched on the bulky duffle on his back.

“Dean,” Sam whined in annoyance, trying to free himself of his burden and make the pillow drop and only tangling himself up.

Dean took pity on him and helped untangle him, until finally all their bags were lined up beside the bed.

Then they waited.

~*~

Blood welled up under strong, familiar hands; bright in the darkness; running in rivulets to collect in shadows; dripping from the blade; dripping into the flames; silver flashing; a tongue, tasting; white teeth; bloody gums. A deep, chilling laugh filled the silence; turned into a growl; drowned out the plat-plat-plat of blood. “Don’t you worry about those boys of yours. We’ll take good care of ‘em,” the voice promised, disembodied but for the disconcerting glow of yellow—

Dean woke with a start, narrowly avoiding kicking Sam in the face as he fought off the vestiges of the nightmare and tried to assess his surroundings. Sam was laying tops to tails beside him, cards strewn across the bed and the blanket they were sharing. Dean remembered settling in together on the bed, still in their coats against the chill, playing Bullsh*t and slowly giving in to exhaustion as they waited for Bobby. It must’ve only taken them a couple hours to fall asleep, Dean thought, but now they were both wide awake, staring at each other. Sam’s eyes looked bloodshot. Dean wondered if Sam had had a nightmare, too, but he couldn’t find his voice to ask. Dean knew his own nightmare had been affected by the things Sam had told him about his, and right now Dean just wanted to let it fade like dreams should.

A twangy country song Dean didn’t know lilted from the clock radio on the side table. They’d turned it on earlier and found that the only channel that tuned in with minimal static was a country oldies station. They’d left it on because the woods had felt too quiet compared to the usual highway ambiance of a motel. Dean hadn’t bothered to set the time on the clock, so the 6:13 glowing in red told him it had been six hours since he turned on the generator. The light over the kitchen sink across the room was still on, and the lamp next to the radio was, too. The space heater in the corner tried valiantly to heat the cabin with its two remaining coils, and it was just enough that Dean couldn’t see his breath anymore. He could hear the droning buzz of the electricity as the radio song changed to “Hotel California.” Then Dean noticed another sound that made goosebumps raise across his neck when it brought with it the unnerving deja vu of the growling from his nightmare. It was the rumbling whine of a rustbucket truck.

A split second was all it took, but Dean felt like he was going in slow motion as he grabbed for his gun and whipped the blanket off him and Sam. The cards went flying, and Sam scrambled to the floor, shoving his feet in his shoes as Dean did the same, and grabbing for his big flashlight and can of salt. Dean wished Sammy had his own gun already. Maybe he’d get one for his birthday in May—Dean had gotten his own gun when he’d turned eleven, after all—but that did them no good now. Dean should’ve searched the cabin for a weapons stash when they first got here. What had he been thinking…?

Dean looked out the window, trying to see anything besides the swirl of fog in the headlights; trying not to fog up the window with his breath. The engine whine cut off with a clunk-clunk-clunk accompanied by the squeak of worn brakes and rusty suspension. As the headlights cut out and the truck door opened, the cabin lights and radio turned off at once. Dean heard Sam’s teeth click together as he stopped breathing.

Dean listened hard for a moment, still trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness and see who was getting out of the truck. “Generator must’ve run outta gas,” Dean whispered to his little brother.

Sam took a shuddery breath, but stepped closer to Dean, into his space so that Dean could feel his body heat against his side.

“Can you see anything?” Sam asked in a stage whisper.

“What do you think? Your eyes work just as good as mine.”

“I think he’s wearing a tutu,” Sam supplied snarkily.

“You idjits gonna stand there all day, or are you ready to go find your daddy?” Bobby’s familiar voice boomed from the gloom, and the oppressive weight of the air around them lifted as Sam and Dean gasped in relief.

“Bobby!” Sam exclaimed, dropping his things and running to open the door.

Too late, Dean noticed those strange sigils he’d seen earlier glowing red.

“Sammy, wait—” he tried to warn, but Sam was already leaping off the porch and running to the thing that probably wasn’t their Uncle Bobby. “Sammy, down,” Dean ordered, and shot towards the dark shape in the fog. His shot was wide—too afraid of hitting his brother, and of being wrong about Bobby—but it was enough to let Sam know he was in danger, at least.

“Dean, what—” Sam started, bewildered as he scrambled out of his crouch and back towards the porch.

“I don’t think that’s Bobby,” Dean said, keeping his weapon aimed at the shape that had started moving towards Sam as he ran.

“Shootin’ into the fog, Dean? Thought your daddy taught you better,” the thing chastised.

He sounded a lot calmer about it than Dean thought the real Bobby would’ve been. Like it was teasing. Playing with its prey.

Sam tripped on the porch steps and fell, and Dean saw a void reaching for his ankle from the fog. He shot at it, where he should’ve seen ground or fog but saw nothing, and Sam scrambled the rest of the way onto the porch and clung to Dean, looking fearfully over his shoulder. Dean clung right back, pulling him backwards through the door and bolting it closed. Dean reached for Sam’s abandoned salt and fixed the line across the door.

“Boys, this isn’t funny now,” the voice so like Bobby’s placated. Heavy footfalls came up the steps, the boards creaking as the thing stomped back and forth across the porch, its shadow passing subtly over the windows in the darkness. The air was heavy again with its menacing presence, but Dean quickly realized that—with the iron door handle, the iron lock, the carvings, the sigils, the salt—the thing, whatever it was, couldn’t get inside. It couldn’t even try. At least not yet. Dean shook his head, trying to ignore the mutterings of the thing outside.

“I think Bobby sent us to a safe house,” Dean said under his breath as Sam huddled with him against the door, out of view from the windows. From the corner of his eyes, Dean could see the red sigils get brighter when the footsteps outside went past them.

Sam turned to speak directly into Dean’s ear, tickling the little hairs when he whispered, “Or a monster sent us to a trap. We could’ve made it to Wyoming by now.”

Dean shook his head, cheek against Sam’s. “Why would a monster send us to a place full of wards it can’t cross? Nah, I think Bobby knew somethin’ he wasn’t lettin’ on, and he sent us here to be safe.”

Sam shifted slowly, fingers crawling up to Dean’s necklace and hooking over the amulet. “But what happened to Bobby? What is that thing out there?”

Dean wished he had a better answer than, “I don’t know, but at least it seems like it can’t get in.”

“Yet,” Sam added, echoing Dean’s thoughts, and Dean felt the tug on his necklace get a little tighter as Sam stuck his thumb in his mouth.

Dean rubbed Sam’s back, swallowing his fear like bile rising in his throat, and thought about what to do. He had five shots left in his gun. His extra ammo was at the bottom of his duffle across the room. They had no electricity, no well pump without the electricity, two almost-empty water bottles and very little food. At least they’d gotten some sleep, but they could’ve done with more. There was some thing outside that wanted them—that had come here specifically for them— and had somehow used Bobby to find them. They had no idea where the real Bobby was, except that it had probably been him on the phone before, and so he would’ve been on his way here. So this thing, whatever it was, must’ve intercepted Bobby somewhere. Maybe even worked him over for information, since it had taken so long to find them here.

Dean wished he knew what those glowing red symbols were for, so he knew how to fight.

“Sammy, you recognize those glowy sigils at all?”

“Mn-mnn,” Sam supplied in the negative, thumb still firmly in his mouth, choking Dean a little with the necklace as he shook his head.

Dean put his hand over Sam’s and tugged to remind him he still needed to breathe. Sam let up a little, and Dean patted his back some more, trying not to have a mental breakdown over his little brother’s increasing regression. “C’mon, Sammy. We’re gonna be fine, okay? I got your back, and you got mine…right?”

A little hesitation, but then Sam hummed in assent, “Mm-hmm.”

“As long as we’re together, nothing can get us,” Dean barreled on. “Right, little brother?”

Finally Sam’s thumb popped audibly out of his mouth and he leaned back the slightest bit so Dean could see the utter belief in his eyes. “Right.”

Dean clapped his hands over Sam’s shoulders, imbuing them both with confidence. “Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” Dean said as quietly as possible, before breaking into a mix of hand signals, eye movements, and barely uttered words.

Sam signaled with a nod that he got it, but before Dean could signal for ‘go,’ Sam grabbed the head on Dean’s amulet again and closed his eyes like he was making a wish, and kissed it. When Sam opened his eyes, the ‘don’t get dead’ look at Dean was crystal clear. Dean nodded, eyebrow raised to indicate to Sam he was a sentimental bitch, and Sam mouthed ‘jerk’ at him. Dean smirked and gave the ‘go.’

Dean picked up his gun and turned towards the window, covering Sam as they crept through the shadows towards their duffle bags. Along the way Sam picked up the snack bag, adding his flashlight and salt canister to it as he dragged it along.

The symbol by the nearest window flared bright, and they flattened themselves against the wall as the thing passed.

“Daddy sure will be disappointed to hear how quickly his boy gave up…” it taunted, voice straining to continue the charade. It sent a chill down Dean’s spine. “Sammy, don’t you want to find him? Don’t you want to save him?”

“You’re not Bobby, you son of a bitch!” Sam suddenly screamed, and Dean scrambled to cover his mouth with one hand and keep his gun trained on the thing’s position with the other.

“Why, Sammy, of course I am,” the thing said, the words reverberating with a distorted growl. Dean could hear it start to grin. “I’ve got control of his body, at least.”

Dean felt his blood run cold, and could feel Sam having a similar reaction, his little brother’s breath going fast and shallow. Possession? Ghost? Spell? Maybe even… a demon? What were their options now?

Dean gave himself and Sam a shake, remembering their task, and Sam started digging in Dean’s duffle for his ammo, handing it to Dean and shoving the snack bag into the space created. Dean refilled his gun and slung his bag over his shoulder, wondering if he could actually shoot Bobby if it came down to it. He looked over at Sam—too scrawny for his growing shoulders, bitten down fingers digging in his bag for the rosary Pastor Jim had given him—and knew with the swoop in his stomach that he could and would.

Sam found his rosary and grabbed their water bottles. There was maybe a couple ounces left in each of them, but it would have to do.

“Any time now, Sam,” Dean urged as Sam started muttering a prayer over the water. Outside, the thing controlling Bobby was moving off the porch, and Dean strained to follow it with his hearing.

“We drank out of it, Dean, I have to purify it first,” Sam hissed back, sighing and starting over.

Dean twisted his mouth at Sam’s fastidious nature—Dad’s canteen holy water worked just fine without the extra steps—but he held his tongue and let Sam finish. Dean moved over to the window and peered out, but despite his eyes adjusting more to the darkness, the fog obscured anything he might’ve seen anyway.

Sam finished preparing the holy water, dropped the rosary around his neck, and slung his duffle across his back. The flashlight he held as a weapon, still turned off. Dean grabbed his own flashlight off the side table and quickly flashed it on and off at the space under the bed. Their faces lit up when they saw what had to be a rifle box underneath. When they pulled it out, the box felt so dusty Dean knew there was no way he was letting his little brother try to shoot that gun before it was properly maintenanced, but the iron barrel would still be useful as a warding weapon.

It was heavier than a regular rifle when Dean picked it up to make sure the barrel was empty, but he offered it to Sam, anyway. Sam took it, nodding when Dean mimed swinging a bat, and Dean stuffed the shells from the box into his jacket pockets.

“Ready,” Sam confirmed softly. “Now what? Think he’s telling the truth?”

“Could still be a shifter. Wish we had some silver,” Dean said, lamenting the polished wood of Sam’s rosary in particular.

“Silver bullets?”

“I’ve got them alternated with iron in my magazine, but I don’t have any more than that.”

“I guess it’s not a great option if you’d have to shoot Bobby to test him, anyway,” Sam said.

Dean let Sam interpret his silence however he would.

A rifle shot rang out, then another, and Dean covered Sam with his body as buckshot pelted the front of the cabin and through the far window. They heard the faint but familiar sound of a double barrel being reloaded, and Dean shoved Sam under the edge of the bed as more buckshot flew in, glass shards spraying with it. Dean imagined the carvings on the outside must be destroyed now. Bobby’s heavy footfalls crunched over gravel and stomped onto the porch again. They could hear him breathing through the broken windows, and knew that the next sound would be the glass being knocked out before that barrel was aimed directly at them. Instead, the sigil under the window flared bright, and Bobby swore as he was apparently flung off the porch by the force of his own attack.

Sam pushed Dean off of him and they looked at each other wildly, scrambling over to the window to see for themselves.

They could see a shadowed form, its breath puffing out visibly in the cold dark, struggling on its back on the ground but quickly getting to its feet. Then it disappeared into the fog. Sam and Dean shared another look.

Dean knew the only way out of this was to get to one of the vehicles, but without being able to see where Bobby was their escape could be over before it even began. Sam looked sharply towards the back door, and Dean only had a moment to remember that, yes, that one was warded and locked, too, before another two shots rang out, clanging against metal and followed by a much louder bang.

“He blew up the generator,” Dean surmised in quiet horror as the too-familiar sound and smell of a growing fire filled his senses, and the back doorway started to fill with smoke.

Before Dean even realized he was moving, he’d unbolted the front door and pulled Sammy outside. He knew it was a trap, but it didn’t matter—they weren’t dying in a f*cking fire. They leapt over the porch steps, not bothering with them, and though their height difference made them stumble, they were both well-practiced in recovering by pushing through. They kept running without stopping, and Dean could see the fog thinning out as they neared the Caprice—almost home free.

“Duck!” Sam shrieked, practically jumping on Dean and pulling him behind the car a split-second before the windshield was shattered with buckshot.

Before Dean could recover his senses, his little brother had dropped his bag and leapt towards the attacker that Dean still could barely see as more than shapes in the fog. He didn’t need to see to know the grunts and thuds he was hearing was Sam going to town with that iron barrel, though, and hurried to join him. He got there just as Sammy hit the stock of Bobby’s gun like a homerun, and as the rifle flew from his hands Sam didn’t hesitate to hit Bobby’s chin with the iron barrel. Dean could see some sort of reaction happen at the contact—some sort of dark, shimmery ripple. As Bobby fell backwards Sam fell on top of him, bracing Bobby’s large body with his meager weight hunched over the iron barrel across Bobby’s arms, desperately reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the thing controlling Bobby. And, somehow, it was working; Bobby was being held down.

Dean didn’t waste any more time being amazed. He could see the thing in Bobby trying to regain power, and he couldn’t let that happen. Dean put the safety on his gun and tucked it into the back of his waistband, and poured his and Sam’s bottles of holy water over Bobby’s face as Sam got to, “deliver us from evil.” There was no reaction other than Bobby’s smile widening. Not a demon, then. And not a ghost, or it would’ve been driven out by the iron already.

A witch’s spell, then.

“Hex bag, Sammy, hex bag,” he said urgently, starting to search Bobby’s clothes as Sam started another prayer.

Bobby tried to buck Sam off, but Dean added his weight over Sam on the rifle and held Bobby down, the old man’s knees driving into the bulk of his duffle bag as Dean held on. “Sammy, I got this. Find the hex bag!”

Obediently, Sam squirmed out from between them and continued Dean’s search, slapping at Bobby’s hands as they tried to grab him.

“Truck, Sammy! Check the truck!”

Dean could hear Sam clamoring over the gravel and into the truck, throwing sh*t around, and Dean told himself he’d hold out here until Sam found it. It felt like he was riding a bull, though, and he honestly didn’t know how his little brother had driven the enspelled Bobby down all by himself in the first place.

“I got it! I got it, I got it!” Sam shrieked frantically, and Dean smirked into the enraged look Bobby’s witch master had put on his face.

“Burn that f*cker, Sammy.”

Dean heard a lighter, and a moment later there was another oily shimmer over Bobby that took a form like a bubble and popped. All of a sudden, Dean was fighting nothing, as Bobby’s body went lax and his eyes seemed to clear. Dean didn’t let himself relax, though. Instead, he lifted up the rifle, and whipped the stock across Bobby’s face, knocking him out cold.

“Jesus, Dean,” Sam chastised when he found his way back to them, lighting up Bobby’s swelling face with his flashlight.

“Motherf*cker shot at us,” Dean said breathlessly.

~*~

Bobby’s suspension was f*cking shot, Dean thought as he took another rut in the road with more force than he intended and heard a coinciding thump in the back. Sam was beside him, turned sideways with his feet on the seat, holding Dean’s gun trained out the back window at Bobby, who was tied up in the bed of the pickup. All of their things, plus Bobby’s gun and toolbox, were in the truck cab with them. Dean had tested Bobby with a silver bullet—pressing one against his skin while he was unconscious—and confirmed for himself and Sam that Bobby was real and not a shifter. Dean was pretty sure Bobby would be Bobby again when he woke up, but they couldn’t take any chances.

They’d done their best to wipe their fingerprints from the Caprice and left it parked back at the burning cabin, full of busted glass and a few holes in the hood. Now Dean was just looking for somewhere inconspicuous to crash and interrogate Bobby.

Up ahead, he saw a skeevy-looking road motel with a vacancy sign, and decided that was good enough.

~*~

“I f*cking…hate witches…” Dean puffed irritably, struggling to carry most of Bobby’s weight as he and Sam dragged him into the motel room.

“You’re the one who knocked him out,” Sam reminded unhelpfully.

Dean gave Sam a dark look, but his little brother just shrugged and jostled Bobby’s legs to remind Dean to keep going.

They dropped Bobby in a chair, and Dean propped him up while Sam tied Bobby to the chair. When he was secure, Dean sent Sam to get ice while he double checked Sam’s knots.

“They’re okay, right, Dean?” Sam asked when he came back faster than Dean expected.

“Yeah, dude. They’re good,” Dean agreed, plucking the taut rope.

While Sam made up an ice pack with a damp towel for Bobby, Dean inspected the cuts on Sam’s face and checked him over for leftover glass. They’d shaken themselves off at the cabin, but glass had a way of sticking around unpleasantly.

“Dean, I’m fine,” Sam complained as Dean picked through his hair like a school nurse.

“You’re not fine, you’ve got cuts all over your face,” Dean said matter-of-factly, pinching a tiny, glistening shard out of Sam’s scalp with tweezers. He held it up for Sam to see, “And in your hair.”

Sam made a face at him, but otherwise didn’t reply, focusing on Bobby’s injured face and letting Dean preen as he wished.

By the time Bobby started coming around, Dean had found three more shards and touched up Sam’s cuts with ointment.

“I think that’s enough ice now. You’re turnin’ me into a popsicle.” Bobby said, stiff and groggy but familiarly cantankerous.

“We’re not untying you. Not yet,” Dean warned as Sam removed the ice pack from Bobby’s face. Dean grimaced, seeing the shine it was taking already. “Sorry about your face.”

“I’m sure it’ll add to my rugged charm,” Bobby mused grouchily. “You did what ya had to do. If I lose my fingers from this shibari deal, I’m gonna take it personally, though. I assume you’ve already tested me since the hex bag, so get with the interrogatin’.”

“What do you know about Dad?” Sam asked, at the same time that Dean asked, “How did you let a witch get the drop on you, Bobby?”

Sam and Dean looked at each other, and then tried again.

“Why would a witch want me?” Sam asked, overlapping with Dean’s, “Where were you supposed to take us?”

Dean’s breath caught when he processed what Sam had said, and he added, “I’m gonna gank that bitch.”

Bobby looked between the two of them and sighed through his mustache. “How about I just start from the beginning so we can get this over with and you can untie me?”

~*~

Bobby had gotten on the road pretty quickly after he wired the money to Dean, he said. He was making good time, but had planned a couple stops to try to dig up intel on John. Bobby’s contacts had confirmed that John Winchester had finished a job in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and left town three days ago—no major injuries accounted for. Nobody knew where he’d gone, and Bobby had done his part in keeping what Dean had told him as close to the chest as possible—you never knew who might be listening.

But apparently he’d said enough, and someone had been listening. Probably at the second roadhouse he stopped at, he figured, because his memory got real fuzzy after that.

No, he didn’t know what the witch wanted from them, or where he was supposed to take them—she’d been in his head, but he wasn’t in hers.

He didn’t even know what she looked like.

Yes, he’d sent them to a safe house. Not because he knew something would be after them, but because they were on the road without their father and no safety net.

The sigils the boys didn’t recognize on his walls had been witch wards. And Bobby was pretty pissed off about losing that cabin, because they were wards he couldn’t replicate.

“Let’s just say I had a thing a few years ago with a very possessive priestess, and leave it at that,” Bobby said when pressed.

Dean had the sudden realization that Bobby and his Dad and all the old guys they know must have some wild stories that didn’t involve monsters, but he quickly pushed that thought into a shadowy part of his mind.

Despite everything, though, Bobby did have info about John. Or, rather, he had a well-informed hunch.

Back at the roadhouse in Nebraska, there’d been a collection of newspapers people had picked up along the road, plus the usual scuttlebutt, and Bobby had pieced together a trail of supernatural activity—freak electrical storms followed by a rash of mass animal deaths. Wild birds, cows, deer, chickens—it was different all over, but the pattern was there if you paid attention.

“And the fires,” Sam said, staring off into the middle distance, and Dean felt a chill down his spine.

He didn’t know what to say to cover for Sam being a weirdo. He hadn’t mentioned the nightmares to Bobby because he hadn’t wanted to sound childish—chasing after John on Sam’s fears and a run of the mill John Winchester lie—but in the moment Dean felt more terrified of what Bobby would do if he knew the type of images Sam had described to him, with blood and tears drying on his face.

But Bobby only raised an eyebrow and said slowly, “Yeah, a bunch of house fires along the route of the electrical storms. Local authorities attributed it to lightning strikes and poorly grounded construction.”

Bobby had figured that John would’ve made the same connections he had: that there was something evil moving northwest. Why John wouldn’t have told his kids that instead of his little ruse, though, was anyone’s guess. It wouldn’t exactly protect them none to keep something like that a secret, and he had to have known his kids were too smart for his story to last long.

And Dean thought, ‘ Unless he’s testing us…’

~*~

Bobby made some calls to his contacts to warn them about the witch, but had told his buddy Bill Harvelle he would have to leave the witch hunt to him. Bobby wasn’t letting the Brothers Winchester keep going after their dad all alone. Dean wasn’t thrilled about it, and not just because some witch had just used Bobby himself against them. Bobby’s truck was a disaster waiting to happen, and Dean couldn’t understand why he’d even chosen that truck for a long distance drive. But Bobby had said he wasn’t paying for double the gas when they could all fit into his truck. It had been hard to argue with that since Bobby had just wired him $100 the day before. On top of that, Dean would have to steal a whole new car.

Sam had been fine with the hypothetical arrangement, until Bobby insisted that they stay at the motel and sleep a good eight hours first.

Bobby wasn’t having any of their bellyaching, though, and went and got his own room to sleep so he wouldn’t have to listen to their bitching. An hour later, Dean could still hear Bobby snoring through the thin motel wall as he and Sam lay in the near-dark, bathroom vanity casting a rectangle of light across the room.

“Dean?”

Dean tried to breathe like he was asleep, but Sam wasn’t fooled.

“Did you tell Bobby about my nightmare? About what’s gonna happen to Dad?”

“Of course not,” Dean answered, turning his back to Sam. “It’s just a nightmare, Sam. You’re just worried about Dad, and your brain is doing stupid sh*t with it. Now go to sleep.”

It was quiet for awhile. Dean listened for his brother’s breathing, but all he could focus on were Bobby’s snores sawing through the wall.

“What if it–it’s not just a nightmare, Dean? What if it really happens? What if—”

Dean sighed loudly, “Don’t be stupid—”

“I’m not stupid, Dean,” Sam’s tearful scream was like ice water in Dean’s veins. “It’s not stupid! Dad’s in trouble and we’re just laying in a motel room instead of looking for him!”

Bobby’s snoring had stopped abruptly on the other side of the wall, and Dean could hear Sam’s congested sniffles; the little whine he made when he held in a sob. Dean turned onto his back and pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes. He wanted to yell back that Dad was fine— that he didn’t even need them looking for him—but Dean didn’t need to take the title of ‘stupid’ for himself. They’d already established that something weird was going on, and that whoever hexed Bobby had some sort of inside knowledge…

Dean pushed those thoughts away with a sigh, digging fingers into his temples and scalp to massage away a growing headache. None of that had to have anything to do with Sam’s nightmare, beyond Sam having a vivid imagination inside his worrywart head. “We need sleep to drive, Sam.”

“I don’t. I got plenty of—”

“No, Sam,” Dean interrupted. “You are not driving the three of us, in Bobby’s deathtrap of a truck, across state lines, while me and Bobby are sleeping. Not happening.”

“Dean—”

Dean cut Sam off the way Dad does, “No, that’s enough, Sam. Go to sleep.”

Sam was quiet for awhile; long enough that Dean had almost started drifting off, when Sam rasped in the darkness, “I don’t want to dream again, Dee.”

Dean inhaled sharply. Sam hadn’t had a nightmare as bad as the nosebleed one that started this since they’d gotten on the road, but despite all his sleeping in the car, Sam had started to look more like a zombie than a kid—purple smudges under his eyes, accentuated with squint lines and red eyes, and a face much paler than normal. Dean had been trying to ignore the signs of his brother’s troubled sleep, but there was no denying it when Sam said it so plainly. Dean resisted the urge to sob helplessly, holding his breath until it passed.

What was he supposed to do? He didn’t know how to help Sammy at all, and when he tried to think of what Dad would do, all he got was static and a pit in his stomach. Between Sam’s exhaustion, anxiety, and stomach issues—why did his little brother have to have all the problems at once? Dean felt frozen, and there was no one he could ask for guidance. Dad wasn’t here. There was just Dean, so he’d have to figure it out.

“C’mere, Sammy.” Dean patted the bed beside him. When Sam didn’t move, Dean cajoled, “You don’t have to sleep, but I need to, and I’ll sleep better if I know you’re safe right here.” It felt like giving away too much, but Dean was too tired and strung out to hold it in. He was already holding in so much.

Dean heard Sam sliding off of his bed and across the floor to Dean’s, and then Sam was nestled in his arms under the covers. Dean briefly hoped they wouldn’t get too warm again, but he was too tired to do anything about the heater setting now. He was getting too familiar with the sensation of being choked by his necklace, and winced when he heard the amulet click against his little brother’s teeth when he stuck his thumb in his mouth. Sam’s fingers dug into Dean’s side through his shirt, as if to prevent him pulling away—as if Dean could. Dean just wrapped his arms equally tightly around Sam, nosing into the crown of his head and searching for the comforting baby brother scent underneath the stench of anxiety and unwashed hair; breathing deeply as if he could siphon Sam’s fears away.

~*~

Bobby woke them earlier than Dean expected in the morning, but he’d slept a solid six and a half hours, and it was checkout time. Sam appeared to have slept a little bit too, waking up and stretching when Dean tried extracting his necklace from Sam’s fingers. He was still skittish, though, avoiding Dean’s eyes as he got up and dressed. Dean wished he felt better about being handed the opportunity to ignore a chick flick moment, but he felt like sh*t.

Dean expected a gas station breakfast and the highway. He didn’t expect to be promised diner pancakes, only to be tricked into a trip to Goodwill first.

“Bobby—” he and Sam both protested the delay as they parked in the shopping center across from the diner. Bobby cut them off with a noise they’d heard him make at his dogs when they were barking at tow trucks.

“You two idjits are gonna freeze your behinds off if we don’t get you some real winter coats before we get more north. Or haven’t ya noticed how you’re rattling your bones over there, Mister Canvas Jacket?” Bobby asked, lifting his eyebrows pointedly when Dean forcibly stopped his teeth from chattering. “And Sam’s practically turnin’ blue. I’ll look like a damn neglectful father if I take you into that family diner with no goddamn coats. Now get in there.”

Dean felt weird about Bobby wording it like that. It was true that that’s what they’d look like—just a father and his two sons on the road. For the sake of stealth, that’s what they should look like to outsiders. But Bobby didn’t have to word it that way, heavily implying his viewpoint on John Winchester’s parenting. Dad had left them in Texas—they hadn’t needed heavy coats. Dean suppressed the urge to rebuff Bobby, and got out of the truck.

Bobby set them loose in the thrift store, but they stayed pretty close together until they’d each picked out parkas and some extra hoodies. Then Sam had tugged on Bobby’s sleeve and whispered in his ear, looking suspiciously over at Dean, and Bobby had nodded and handed Sam some cash. Dean frowned, wondering if Sam was telling Bobby he needed underwear or something. Sam could be really weird about privacy sometimes, but more than that, Dad always said underwear and socks were worth buying new. By the time someone donated them, all the life would be worn out of them. Sometimes Goodwill got donations of unopened packages, though. Maybe Sam had spotted some.

Dean went to look at the boots—another thing Dad preferred to buy new, but they couldn’t always afford to be picky about foot impressions in used shoes. Dean’s toes could really do with some more space lately. Unfortunately, most of the shoes were for ladies. Dean grabbed a pair of red high heels and snickered to himself as he scoped out the area for Sam and spotted him over by the books and movies.

He snuck up behind Sam and propped the pair of shoes on his shoulder. Sam flinched and turned around fast. “Dean!” he squeaked, pushing him away.

“Found you some shoes to go with your new coat, Sammy,” Dean laughed.

Sam looked at the shoes like he’d just noticed them. “Pfft, those are more your size, Dean.”

“What?!” Dean squawked, and then flinched when Bobby suddenly put his hand on Dean’s shoulder from behind, which made Sam laugh until he snorted.

“You ladies finished over here, or are we going to miss breakfast for your shopping spree?”

“It was your idea to come here,” Dean groused.

“And whose idea were those shoes?” Bobby asked wryly. “They’re not your color, kid.”

Dean blushed and went to put the shoes back on the rack.

“Hey, Dean, go grab you and Sam some of those gloves from the bin,” Bobby said as soon as Dean caught up to him and Sam in line at the register.

Dean clicked his tongue but went and dug around in the bin for some gloves. He brought back a well-worn leather pair with a soft lining threatening to split at the seams, some faded red mittens that would almost match Sam’s new parka, and a couple pairs of one-size-fits-all knit gloves.

This time when he got back to the register, Bobby was there but Sammy was gone.

Dean’s heart stopped and he felt himself getting lightheaded as he looked around for that familiar shaggy hair and didn’t see him anywhere.

“Don’t get your panties in a twist. Sam went out to warm up the truck,” Bobby said, grabbing Dean’s handful of gloves and handing it to the cashier.

“You sent him to start up that thing by himself?”

Bobby co*cked him a look, “You disparaging my truck, boy?”

“You own a junkyard, Bobby. You couldn’t have chosen a better vehicle for this trip?”

“Keyword there is junk, Winchester. And I’d just used up my good one on a different job,” Bobby said under his breath as the cashier bagged up their purchases. Bobby paid and he and Dean grabbed the bags. “My truck don’t look like much, but it’s reliable.”

Dean wanted to disagree, but he knew better than to keep going down this road.

As promised, Sam was sitting in the idling truck outside, literally twiddling his thumbs. Dean climbed in next to him, Bobby in the driver’s seat, and they drove across the street to the diner, and the mountain of pancakes and coffee awaiting them.

~*~

Dean stuck the needle through the soft glove lining and into the leather cuff, wiggling it through the tougher material there and hooking through the slack from the previous stitch to lock it. The work was painstaking, but Dean knew these gloves would be worth the effort, so he was giving it his best wound stitching treatment. He tried to keep an eye on the road to watch out for those unexpected potholes that would shake the whole truck for days—he’d even agreed to have a turn in the bitch seat, hoping the wiggling wouldn’t be as bad in the middle of the bench—but every so often Bobby caught a rut and Dean would stab into his thumb or finger. Usually his calluses saved him from these types of mending annoyances, but Dean didn’t often sew under these conditions and the needle kept catching him in unexpected spots—like his cuticle. It caught in his thumb again when the leather under his next stitch was a lot thinner than expected, and Dean hissed and sucked on it to ease the pain.

“When it's time to get tough,” Dean sang absentmindedly as he tightened his stitch and started the next. “I'm masculine (Masculine, masculine)!” Another pothole, but Dean was ready, leaning into the jiggling of the truck. “When she wants to play rough—” His voice hiccuped as his body bounced— “I'm masculine (Masculine, masculine)! Oh, masc—”

“Dean, for the love of—” Bobby cut in after about ten minutes of Dean’s repetition.

“I can’t help what’s stuck in my head, Bobby. Maybe if you had something other than a radio that can’t pick up any channels—”

“You know as well as I do ain’t nobody picking anything up out here.”

“You could install a tape player, Bobby. There’s no reason to be living like a caveman!”

Bobby harrumphed an old man sigh. “Sam, you plannin’ to put him outta my misery any time soon?” Bobby hollered across the seat, over the raucous sound of the truck eating up the highway.

“Bobby!” Sam hissed like Bobby had given away a secret.

Dean looked at Sam quizzically. “What…”

Sam was blushing and avoiding Dean’s eyes. What the f*ck.

Sam sighed, “It’s in my bag in the back. But it’s too early!”

“Early, my foot. It’s tomorrow already in Tokyo,” Bobby said, neither of them explaining anything to Dean yet.

Sam and Bobby had a little staring contest until Bobby decided to look at the road again, but he said loudly, “It’s about time we stopped for gas.”

They were about an hour from Sheridan now, but Bobby’s gas gauge was already at a quarter tank again. It guzzled gas faster than the impala, and Dean wondered again what sort of condition Bobby’s “good” vehicle had been in after his last job.

They rumbled onto an exit ramp and down to a little highway pump, and Bobby gave Sam a pointed look as he got out and went inside the station. Sam got out, too, but jumped into the truck bed and started digging around in his duffle. Dean stuck his needle into the fabric for safekeeping and craned his neck back to try to see what Sam was doing. Before he could, though, Sam was jumping down and hopping back into the truck cab with Dean.

Sammy was blushing even more than before, though Dean told himself it could just be from the icy wind outside.

Sam got all settled in, keeping Dean in suspense. Then he reached into his parka pocket and struggled to pull something out of it, handing a brown paper-wrapped package to Dean without meeting his eyes.

“What’s this?” Dean asked, looking dubiously at the tightly rolled edge of what he now recognized as a paper grocery bag from Goodwill.

Sam finally looked at him, apparently incredulous that Dean was dragging it out of him instead of just opening it. “For your birthday, stupid.”

Dean’s heart and stomach did this weird flip flopping thing when he realized tomorrow was January 24th. He was almost fifteen but his ID said he was almost twenty-two, and Dad was missing but Sammy had gotten him a birthday present at the Goodwill.

Dean unrolled the bag and reached inside. His heart jumped in definite excitement when he felt what was there. “No way!” he said with a grin, pulling a walkman and headphones out of the bag. There was still some weight inside, and he dumped the contents into his lap: three cassette tapes, two of which he recognized from their time in the Caprice. The third cassette was all black, with the outline of a coiled up snake in the corner. “What?! You found the Black Album at Goodwill?!”

Sam sighed, “Are you really about to rant about the betrayal of someone donating Metallica, or are you gonna listen to it?” Sam looked eager, and honestly a little apprehensive.

Sam was right: some idiot’s loss was Dean’s gain, and he had the best little brother in the world.

“Awesome present, Sammy,” Dean said, ruffling Sam’s hair. “Nice find.” Dean let his hair ruffle turn into a side squeeze, and he resisted the urge to kiss Sam’s head the way he did when he was little. Sam hugged him back, and for a minute Dean forgot everything else.

Then Bobby walked out of the gas station convenience store, and Sam pulled away.

Dean picked up the other tapes and gave Sam a wry look. “Meat Loaf, okay, but The Carpenters? Really?”

“Don’t act like you weren’t singing all the words to “A Song For You,” jerk. You like it,” Sam insisted, definitely blushing now.

“Yeah, okay, bitch. Just admit that one’s for you,” Dean teased.

Sam punched his arm and Dean grinned. He put the Metallica cassette into his walkman with a satisfying thunk.

When Bobby finished pumping his gas and got in the car, he handed each of them a Hostess apple pie in a paper wrapper. “It ain’t much, but it’ll tide you over,” he said, tearing open his own pie wrapper and biting into it.

It wasn’t quite as good as a real apple pie, or even a fried hand pie from McDonald’s with cinnamon and sugar on the top, but it was pie and it was good and Dean ate it with “Enter Sandman” blasting in his headphones.

~*~

Dean had been looking at Sheridan, Wyoming as their destination for so long that it was hard to accept it when they got there and couldn’t find a trace of John Winchester. Not when they showed his picture around the Sheridan Memorial Hospital, or at the VA Medical Center, nor at any of the motels and highway inns they checked along the way. They headed to the library—a standard John Winchester haunt—expecting more of the same.

What they weren’t expecting was a crime scene. Yellow police tape across the entry door was accompanied by a computer printout that read “Library Closed Until Further Notice, Please visit our other branches. Sorry for the inconvenience.” There were no cop cars to be seen—or any other cars, they realized—and the brick alcove at the entrance shielded them from view as Bobby took his lock pick case out of his coat. Dean kept a lookout, determined not to get complacent, and Sam moved closer to Bobby, watching him work.

Dean thought idly that if Dad did get Sam a gun for his next birthday, maybe Dean could get him a lock pick kit.

It didn’t take long before they were inside, looking at the remains of a bloody ritual. The putrid stench of meat and copper paired with the unpleasant sound of buzzing flies, and Dean saw Sam cover his mouth and nose with the bulky sleeve of his coat. In the beams of their flashlights, Dean saw symbols carved into the wood of the front desk to make an altar, lined with bowls of different things: food, herbs, water, and something charred that Dean couldn’t recognize. There was also blood splashed everywhere, and a dead rabbit with a large knife stuck through it and into the main altar carving.

“Man, what did Thumper do? Goddamn,” Dean lamented, slowly stepping closer and concentrating his light on the little, bloody carcass.

“Witch altar?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“Looks like,” Bobby said, shining his light on splashes of blood fanning out from the altar area, working towards the epicenter where the amount of blood staining the chair and floor looked like too much to be from the rabbit.

“Maybe Dad killed her,” Dean said hopefully. Dad didn’t usually leave such obvious scenes, though.

Bobby sniffed, and Dean felt compelled to follow suit, trying not to gag. Under the decomp he smelled rotten eggs and looked fearfully over at Bobby.

“Demon’s been here,” Bobby confirmed.

Sam whipped his head around at the two of them so fast Dean worried he’d hurt his neck. But what chilled Dean about it was that Sam wasn’t reacting to what Bobby had said. He was pointing at something behind the desk, burned into the carpet: He Will Be King

Next to the charred words was an upside down cross.

~*~

The papers didn’t give many details, but linked the library “incident” to a spate of vandalism in the area involving occult paraphernalia, which had obviously escalated two nights ago.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Dean said when Sam read it out.

“They don’t seem to think anyone died,” Sam said in confusion, adding, “other than the rabbit…? They don’t even mention the rabbit.”

“That’s crazy, there was too much blood. And the rabbit is still right f*cking there! Nobody’s missing?”

Sam looked at him with wild eyes. “What if it was someone from out of town? What if it was—”

“It’s not Dad,” Dean cut him off. ‘I would feel it,’ he thought with conviction.

“It could’ve just been pig’s blood,” Bobby offered, trying to settle Sam down. “Lots of teens like to pull that devil worship crap to be rebellious. It could be completely unrelated. The papers did say this stuff’s been going on for weeks.”

“Exactly,” Sam said. “For weeks! And maybe that’s what brought Dad here, and all those storms and omens are connected.” Sam’s eyes widened and he started shuffling through the stack of newspapers they’d gathered.

Figuring Sam would be a while now that he was preoccupied, Dean gave Bobby the all-clear sign and put his headphones on.

Twenty minutes later, Bobby was walking back into their motel room with bags of burgers, and Sam sprung up out of his chair with multiple newspapers folded up to the important parts, laying them across the table for Dean and Bobby. “Look at this! A bunch of the occult scenes that were reported on match up with an event on the omen route—storms, fires, animal deaths—there were a bunch of rabbits found dead on a farm nearby on Friday night, and the library was found vandalized when they opened Saturday morning. They’re connected! They have to be!”

Bobby gave Dean a grave look at Sam’s revelation, and Dean wondered if he was thinking about the sulfur like Dean was. He made a face, hoping Bobby wouldn’t mention that part. Maybe Sam hadn’t noticed. Maybe he’d forgotten.

Bobby got the hint, though he didn’t look happy about it. “It’s not too late yet. I’ll get cleaned up and go see what the cops know.”

“We need to see their crime scene photos and witness lists,” Sam said.

Dean nodded, “If Dad found this connection, he would’ve talked to them first.”

“And maybe they’ll have a clue about your Dad,” Bobby agreed.

~*~

Bobby made them stay at the motel while he went to talk to the cops. He told them to take the opportunity to shower, and Dean sniffed himself curiously and then looked at Sam with a shrug. He was a little ripe, but they’d both been worse. The look on Sam’s face said he was on Bobby’s side, though.

Dean did not pout. Instead, he called first dibs on the shower and made sure to use up all the hot water before he got out. But when he came out of the bathroom, smirk on his face, Dean found Sammy fresh and clean on the bed, watching Nick at Night.

“What—”

“Showered in Bobby’s room,” Sam answered absently, absorbed in the episode of Bewitched. Darrin was mad at Samantha about her magic again.

“You tell her, Darrin,” Dean said, only half-joking. They always played the magic for laughs, but Dean knew what real magic was like, and it was anything but funny.

“Shut up, Dean. Samantha’s a good witch,” Sam said defensively, pale cheeks turning pink.

“No such thing,” Dean said, opening up his duffle and pulling things out to reorganize it. Dean wondered if Sammy had a little crush on Samantha Stephens, and felt a quick tug in his heart when he thought again how much his brother was growing up. It wasn’t quite pleasant. He pointed at the TV. “Look what she just did to Darrin! That’s her husband and she just pantsed him to get her way.”

“You pants me during training all the time, Dean!”

“That’s tactical,” Dean said matter of factly. “ I Dream of Jeannie better be on after this, or I get the remote.”

I Dream of Jeannie was not next, and Dean snatched the remote and started flipping through the channels.

“Dean, wait, go back!” Sam said, waving his hand urgently.

Dean flipped back until Sam waved at him to stop and turn the volume up. The banner on the screen said Breaking Live, and showed a reporter standing on the side of a snowy highway with emergency vehicles behind her. She reported that she was at the scene of a brutal murder that had been discovered on the highway southwest of Sheridan, on US-26 heading towards Dubois. A police officer had pulled over to check on a car parked on the highway, and found the driver with their throat slit, drained of blood. There was no official time of death yet, due to the freezing temperatures, but snow and salt buildup on the car suggested it had been sitting there at least a day

The car was indistinguishable in the dark, blurry background of the live video—but it looked big and black.

“Dean!” Sammy screeched.

Dean wished he didn’t know exactly what Sam was thinking.

“It’s not—”

“Stop freaking saying it’s not him, Dean,” Sam said, voice somehow stronger than Dean had ever heard it. His nostrils flared and his chest heaved inside his oversized hoodie. “It’s like what happened in my dream.”

“Sammy, you know Dad wouldn’t go down like that,” Dean insisted, ears burning; guts churning. It was still just coincidence. There were a lot of key components to Sam’s nightmare than simply a slit throat. Those were details the cops probably wouldn’t want broadcast on live TV, though.

“We have to go find out,” Sam said.

“Bobby will be back soon.”

“He’ll take too long. We can leave him a note, Dee. We should go now!”

Dean felt the same, but what would they do when they got there? Knock over a sporting goods store for guns and cash? Pretend to be cops? Run a distraction and sneak into the morgue? Maybe go up against a demon alone?

Suddenly Sam was crying, huddled with his legs tucked into his baggy hoodie. He let himself fall back and rolled to the side, in a weird fetal position, head ducking down inside so all that showed was his mop of hair and his forehead.

“You’ll hate me, Dee. If Dad is dead…” like in my nightmare hung heavily in the space between them, “you’ll hate me forever.”

Dean didn’t have to reply to that ridiculous statement, because Bobby got back just then.

~*~

Bobby had heard about the murder, too—at the station—and was able to tell the boys it wasn’t their father.

“They’re not announcing it to the public yet, but it was a girl named Marnie Wilcox. Local folklorist that worked part-time at the library,” Bobby said in a defeated tone. “She was supposed to stay with her parents in Dubois for a few days while the library is closed. Cops said she’d been really shaken up by the sight of the library when she came in Saturday morning.”

Dean felt guilty at the relief that came over him when he realized the highway victim wasn’t his Dad, but Sam put his hand in Dean’s and squeezed, and he realized he wasn’t the only one.

Bobby seemed like he had more to say, but hesitated.

“What is it?” Dean asked.

“Something was really strange at that police station,” Bobby said. “They’re really treating the library like your standard teen prank. I mentioned the rabbit—y’know, it’s pretty f*ckin’ weird it’s still sitting there rotting on the altar instead of in an evidence room, even for a small town.”

“Yeah,” Sam said thinly, shuddering.

“But those guys at the station just laughed. It wasn’t natural laughter, neither. Gave me the creeps. Couldn’t wait to get outta there, but I was makin’ us copies of the evidence—what little they collected.”

Bobby tapped on a large envelope with a brass clasp that he’d set on the table.

“Did you test them, Uncle Bobby?” Sam asked.

“Check for hex bags?” Dean added.

Bobby nodded and then shook his head. “Only a little. I didn’t want to give myself away, but the Lord’s name should still work if you’re sayin’ it in vain.”

Sam and Dean looked at each other, confused.

Bobby shrugged, “I was cussin’ at their copy machine as a cover. Well…half cover, half real.”

“Sulfur?” Dean asked.

“No idea. Someone had microwaved fish in the breakroom and the whole place stunk.”

“Yeah, all these interesting coincidences smell pretty fishy, too,” Dean said. Dean narrowed his eyes at Bobby, “Christo!”

Bobby didn’t flinch; he just stared at Dean in exasperation. Dean breathed easier.

“So now what?” Sam asked.

~*~

Marnie Wilcox’s body was being taken to the Fremont County Coroner—a four hour drive from Sheridan, and Dean wasn’t looking forward to another long drive in Bobby’s truck. They still needed to interview witnesses here, too, but they wouldn’t get much out of people this late at night. Plus Bobby had heard the Sheriff say he was heading down to the coroner’s, and none of them liked the idea of the local cops getting too much of a head start.

“You any good at drivin’ in snow?” Bobby asked him.

“I’m alright,” Dean said co*ckily. Roads around here were salted, and it was barely snowing. “Your tires got any tread left?”

“They’re alright,” Bobby returned.

He still looked extremely distrustful as they loaded into the truck with Dean behind the wheel, but Bobby had driven all day and it was obvious he’d been looking forward to another sleep in a bed. For now he had to settle for drowsing in the passenger seat. Sam sat in the middle of the bench between them, shining his flashlight on the contents of Bobby’s evidence envelope in his lap.

For a moment, when Dean glanced over at Sam, he remembered the way Sam had been hunched over a textbook Friday night, studying for a quiz on Monday. Here it was, Sunday night, and Sammy hadn’t even mentioned school once since leaving his books behind Friday. Dean hoped his brother would be back to whining about his attendance real soon.

~*~

Bobby and Sam had both fallen asleep less than an hour into the drive. The batteries in Dean’s walkman had died shortly after that. And then the snow had started really coming down.

Dean was over four hours in now, gritting his teeth against his nerves, sitting forward to fight the juddering of the truck over the snow-packed road. The weather had slowed him down a little, but he was feeling wide awake, despite the alternating snores beside him.

“Something's wrong, shut the light! Heavy thoughts tonight, and they aren't of Snow White! Dreams of war, dreams of liars, dreams of dragon's fire, and of things that will bite! Yeah…” Dean sang to himself, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and squinting through the snow to read the road signs. He tripped over the next verse as the lyrics he’d sung hit him for a second, and started humming instead as he saw his next merger coming up for US-26.

Just a little bit longer.

“Dean!” Sam suddenly screamed, and Dean nearly had a heart attack, swerving and then trying to correct himself without spinning out and losing control.

Dean glanced at his brother in concern, then quickly back at the road, then back to Sam. Sammy was squirming like a newborn puppy, eyes fluttering, whites showing. His initial scream had turned into distressed muttering, and in the radiance cast from the falling snow, Dean saw his little brother’s nose start to drip blood.

“Sammy,” Dean called, urgently shaking him awake.

Sam woke in panicked confusion and belatedly put his arm over his nose to stem the flow of blood, pinching the bridge with his other hand.

Bobby snorted, but kept sleeping as Dean kept looking worriedly over at Sam.

“Nightmare?”

Sam looked guilty as he nodded a slow affirmation. Dean glanced past Sam at Bobby again. He looked asleep, but…

“We’ll talk about it later,” Dean said, his tone more severe than he’d intended.

“Okay,” Sam said, voice clogged and muffled.

Sam held his nose a little longer and then swiped at the blood on his face a few times with his red coat sleeve. The blood looked black against the faded fabric. Dean wished they could’ve found him a darker coat, and hoped he could wash the stain out later.

He felt Sam looking at him, and caught his gaze. “You good?” It had left his mouth like a compulsion, and now Dean was silently begging for his little brother to lie to him and say he was fine.

Sam started to shake his head ‘yes’, but his eyes turned pleading and he shook his head ‘no.’

“Gonna puke?” Dean asked, dreading the answer.

Sam shook his head ‘no’ more slowly.

“Was it…new?” he asked in trepidation.

Sam did this weird nod/shrug roll of his neck, his mouth an apologetic grimace.

Dean looked at Bobby again. Something had changed in his breathing, and Dean wasn’t sure he was fully asleep anymore. He gave Sammy a meaningful look and grabbed his hand, squeezing— later. Sam squeezed back, starting to bring his thumb to his mouth. Dean squeezed twice and Sam jolted, course correcting and reaching for the radio instead.

They were close enough to civilization to pick up some radio waves, and Sam settled the tuner on Garth Brooks crooning about friends in low places.

~*~

It was just after 5 AM when Bobby led them into the coroner’s office. He’d wanted the boys to stay in the truck, but Dean had reminded him that they were hunters, too—John Winchester’s kids—and Bobby gave up the fight with a grumble about Winchesters that Dean didn’t quite hear.

“No, it can’t be her,” a woman at the desk was yelling when they got to the morgue. “I need to see—”

“Mrs. Wilcox, Sheriff Johnson and Sheriff Anderson were able to identify her so you don’t have to put yourself through that. Everyone agreed that would be best, even Mr. Wil—”

“I didn’t agree! I won’t believe it’s her until I see her myself,” Mrs. Wilcox cried. “She’s my daughter. I have the right!”

The desk attendant looked stricken and sympathetic, coming out from behind the desk. “I understand your feelings, Mrs. Wilcox. Of course you have every right. Let’s just call your husband down for support first, okay?”

She corralled Mrs. Wilcox down the hallway and through a set of doors, not once looking in the hunters’ direction.

“Okay,” Bobby said in a hush as the doors closed, a hand out signaling them to stay against the wall. He pointed up at a security camera, and then another. “We’re in a blind spot right now, and that’s the morgue right over there. Follow me and we should avoid notice.

They followed Bobby quickly, more than aware that someone could come back any second, and slipped through the morgue doors. It was chilly in there, and even colder as they started opening drawers looking for Marnie Wilcox.

“Maybe Sam should stand by the doors,” Bobby suggested not-so-subtly.

“Sam isn’t a civilian, Bobby. He’s seen a dead body before,” Dean said smugly, before looking over at Sam’s drawn face and remembering why this body in particular might be different. “But it would help to have someone on watch,” he said to Sam.

Dean could tell that Sam knew what he was doing, but Sam took the offer anyway and went to guard the door.

“Found her,” Bobby said, and Dean went over to him.

She looked young, Dean thought. Younger than he usually expected a librarian to be. The slit in her throat was deep and grisly.

“No hesitation marks,” Bobby commented, dismayed. “Looks like they cut her open in one blow.”

Dean kinda wanted to be sick, but he tightened his stomach. Sam was watching, and he couldn’t lose his cool in front of Bobby either, when he’d made such a stink about coming in here.

“Uh, you guys…” Sam said in a worried stage whisper, signaling to them that people were coming.

Dean tried the door to the attached office and waved Sam and Bobby inside when it opened. Sam seemed to teleport across the floor as Bobby tried to close the corpse drawer quickly and quietly. They slipped into the office one after the other, and Dean closed the door just in time, as a second later three sets of footsteps entered the room.

The drawer was opened again and they could hear Mrs. Wilcox’s moan of terror and disbelief. Then she gasped, “It’s not her.”

“Darling…yes, it is,” a man that must be Mr. Wilcox said placatingly.

Dean ducked his head, feeling sorry for them; sorry that their moment of pain wasn’t private. But looking down made him catch sight of Sam, and how his eyes had widened. When Sam saw Dean looking, he tried mouthing something at him, but Dean couldn’t quite catch it. Sam looked at him, disappointed.

On the other side of the door, Mrs. Wilcox’s voice was getting hysterical, “It’s not! I’m telling you, it’s not Marnie! Look at her! Look!”

“It is. Sweetheart, it’s Marnie,” Mr. Wilcox said, and Dean started to get suspicious of the man’s calm tone. It was one thing to be strong for his wife, but he seemed completely unconcerned. “It is Marnie. Darling. This is Marnie. This is our Marnie. Your Marnie.”

The repetition felt almost hypnotic, but Dean still could’ve written it off as grief if the third person in the room hadn’t suddenly joined in on the chant.

“Your Marnie. Marnie Wilcox. This is Marnie. Your Marnie.”

As their voices overlapped, Dean looked from Sam to Bobby and knew he wasn’t the only one getting creeped out. He resisted the urge to shiver, looking at Bobby with a clear question of what to do.

Bobby just shook his head, eyes wide and hands poised like he thought he’d have to grab Dean and prevent him from doing something completely idiotic. Dean wanted to laugh incredulously, but Sam grabbed his hand and squeezed— wait.

Dean realized then he’d moved a hand to the door. He put it down, and they waited, tension high.

The chorus stopped, and for a moment there was silence. It felt like that moment when Dean was hotwiring the car, waiting for the engine to turn over. Then—

“Of course. This is our Marnie. My Marnie.”

—Mrs. Wilcox said, like she was showing someone a beloved picture and not looking at a dead body.

“My Marnie…my…Marnie…” her calm composure started to break down as the apparent brainwash breached the emotional barrier, and the other people in the room ushered her out as she started sobbing.

Dean, Sam, and Bobby looked around at each other before breaking into action, checking for any files or paperwork related to Marnie Wilcox, but all they could find was the report from the scene last night. Dean looked around for a nonexistent copy machine, while Sam got out his flashlight and started reading the report.

~*~

“What did you say it said again?” Bobby asked again as he got onto the highway.

Dean gritted his teeth at the unmoored feeling of not being behind the wheel.

“He will be ours,” Sam answered, sounding spooked.

“That mean somethin’ to you?” Bobby asked suspiciously.

Sam looked at Dean; looked down; shook his head. ‘Smooth,’ Dean thought.

“I mean,” Sam said, trying to salvage it, “it-it might mean something. Remember the words at the library? ‘He will be king’?”

(—and then he snapped his fingers and the–the words burned into—)

Dean shook himself. “What the f*ck does it mean?”

“I don’t know, yet, but I say we go have a look at that car,” Bobby said. “The sheriff’s impound is a thirty minute drive, but I can make it in twenty if the snow doesn’t start up again.”

“Dean, seatbelt,” Sam said, frantically pawing at Dean as Bobby put the pedal to the metal.

~*~

The sheriff’s impound was stupidly easy to get into with Bobby’s bolt cutters. It put Dean on edge, head on a swivel. Sam was sort of hunched over, not looking around at all, but he made Dean think of a cat with its hackles raised, ready to jump at the slightest perceived threat.

“This is it.” Bobby found the car—a black Buick Electra—and they all gathered around it with their flashlights.

It didn’t look nearly as similar to the impala in person as it had on the news.

“This isn’t right,” Dean said, shining his light on the seats and the dashboard panels.

“No, it is,” Sam said, shivering as his flashlight lit up the words burnt into the faux-wood paneling on the console. Sam opened the passenger’s side door and crept inside to rub his finger over the charred letters.

Dean tapped his flashlight against the window intently, shifting Sam’s attention. “Where’s all the blood?”

There was speckling and splashing, but there wasn’t any spray and the pooling was weird. The blood stains weren’t right. Dean had seen enough bloody bodies in his life to know it didn’t add up.

“Marnie Wilcox—or whoever she really was—couldn’t have been murdered here,” Dean said.

Sam looked at him sharply. “What if the body was moved? What if this was staged?”

“Yeah, but why?” It didn’t make any sense to Dean. The pieces weren’t fitting together into a coherent picture.

“Why, to keep you away from Daddy, of course,” an unknown voice said—way too close for comfort, and accompanied by the distinct smell of sulfur.

Before any of them could react, or get a good look at their attacker, Dean and Bobby were thrown by an invisible force across the lot. Dean managed to keep his face from getting road rash, but the burn in his palms told him his hands weren’t so lucky. He hoped Bobby was okay, but he couldn’t take the time to check as he forced himself up with his skinned palms and started looking around for Sam. Dean didn’t see him anywhere as he started zig zagging through the cars back to the Electra. Then relief swept over him when Sam’s face slowly peeked out the window, still inside the car.

There were gunshots from Bobby’s position, and Dean saw Sam’s eyes go impossibly wide before his mouth opened in a scream, and Dean tore back around towards Bobby. All he caught was a blur of motion as Bobby was flung between a row of cars and the demon followed after him. He could hear Bobby grunting and groaning as he banged against vehicles—unnatural bangs, Dean thought—too hard; too fast. Dean’s heart pounded as he pulled out his gun and tried to remember what his next shot was: silver or iron? Would iron do anything? Would it be enough?

Dean’s thighs felt like they were burning, but he pushed through it. The amulet beat against his chest and the inside of his loose coat as he ran; a comforting weight. He’d lapped the entire lot chasing after Bobby and their attacker, and finally caught up to them near where they’d been attacked initially, but closer to the building. Bobby was on the ground, his revolver nowhere in sight, head bleeding, and the demon was raising its hand—

“Get the f*ck away from him!” Dean yelled, distracting the demon from whatever it had been about to do to Bobby.

Dean co*cked his gun, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The demon barely flinched as the shot went through its shoulder. Must’ve been a silver bullet. Dean took another shot. It went through the other shoulder, but the demon just co*cked its head at Dean and grinned. It turned bodily towards him, eyes swirling black.

“You want my full attention, Winchester? You’ve got it,” the demon said, and Dean could see now that it was wearing the sheriff’s uniform. Dean wondered if he was the one from Sheridan or the one from Dubois. He wondered, deliriously, if it even mattered.

Suddenly there was the growl of an engine roaring to life, and the Electra came barreling towards the Sheriff. Dean felt like he was watching in slow motion as the driver’s door opened and Sammy jumped out, tucking and rolling as the car smashed into the demon and the building behind him, pinning him in steel and rubble.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Sam screamed as he and Dean helped Bobby to his feet and ran as best as they could to the open gate.

Dean thought there was no way they were going to make it all the way out and into Bobby’s truck, but they did. They put the impound lot far behind them before the sun had even properly risen.

~*~

“We should go back to Sheridan,” Dean argued.

“No, Dean, don’t you see?”

“He said he lured us there to ‘keep us away from daddy.’ That means Dad is in Sheridan.”

“Sheridan was part of the trap,” Sam said with conviction.

“How do you know?”

Sam gave him a look, and Dean could read way too much in it. You don’t want to know—You didn’t want me to talk about my dream in front of Bobby—The words, Dean. You know it’s the words. “Going back to Sheridan will waste time we don’t have.”

“How are we supposed to find more clues about Dad, then, huh brainiac?”

And why was there a connection between Sammy’s nightmares and these monsters? How were they getting to him? Dean really wanted to know.

“Considering that was the sheriff of Sheridan we left in the rubble back there, I’m not sure we’ll be allowed to find more clues up in Sheridan,” Bobby interjected, cradling his head and nursing a full body bruise along with his road rash. “And my head injuries would thank you kindly for a stopover.”

“I’m sorry about your head, Bobby, but this is important. Dad could really be in trouble—”

“Oh, now you believe it. But you still won’t listen to me!” Sam accused.

Bobby shushed them miserably and rested his cradled head against the window.

“You don’t know,” Dean said again, weakly, but took the turn for US-26 towards Dubois like Sammy said.

After several minutes Dean angled for something to lighten the mood. “So you hotwired that Electra back there and saved us,” Dean said, tone cool. “Nice job!”

Sam gave him a suspicious look, like he was analyzing Dean for signs of teasing, then brightened into proud little brother mode when he realized Dean’s sincerity.

Sam blushed gently. “You didn’t see how long it took me to find the right wires.”

“Hey, you did it all by yourself, and you did it in time! I practiced in Bobby’s junkyard a billion times before I had to do it for real.”

“When was your first real time, Dee?”

Dean didn’t look at Sam as he answered truthfully, “The other night, when I was teaching you how.”

When he heard Sam gasp, Dean blushed harder.

“I’m glad I got to be there,” Sam said, sounding quite pleased indeed.

Dean put an arm around Sam’s shoulder and snugged him in close. “I’m glad you were there tonight.”

Dean didn’t know how the hell they could’ve gotten out of there alive if Sam hadn’t gotten the car running just in time.

~*~

Dean hated to waste the time stopping to rest, and he didn’t need to hear Sammy’s whining to know how much his little brother hated it, too. But they were all battle-worn and exhausted. Dean thought he might even be too tired to eat, but changed his mind as he rolled Bobby’s truck into the Gas ‘n Sip parking lot and thought of their corndogs rolling under the heat lamp. He wished he had the luxury to wash it down with one of Dad’s awful beers right now, instead of the coffee he was going to fill a styrofoam slurpee cup with. He hoped he would get to drink awful beer again with Dad real soon. Maybe he could give Sammy a taste, too. They both deserved it after all this.

When they walked into the mini-mart, Sammy made a beeline for the restrooms while Bobby followed Dean to the hot food and cold drinks. Bobby made himself an ice pack, nuked a breakfast burrito, and went to stock up on first aid supplies. Dean got his corndogs set up and was about to stuff one in his face, when his eyes caught on the answer to finding their next clue. The morning news was announcing the death of hometown sweetheart, Marnie Wilcox, and they had included where to send flowers and condolences: the Dubois public library, where her mother Marianne Wilcox was the director.

~*~

Dean had felt a little bad going in on a pretense, knowing this woman was likely under some type of spell and her daughter had just died—or maybe not, but either way it was the same to Mrs. Wilcox. Her daughter Marnie was dead, Dean figured, even if the body in the morgue hadn’t been her—but knowing she was being controlled didn’t make her any less of a wild card. So Dean went in with his local-boy-grieving-favorite-librarian story, and he’d taken Sam with him for the puppydog eyes. It never hurt.

Sam had felt even more guilty than Dean about the situation, of course, but he’d gone along for the same reasons Dean had landed on. They’d lucked out that Marnie had been a folklorist, really—something Dean and Sam both regularly studied.

In the end, it was easy to get Mrs. Wilcox to talk about her daughter. She’d come into the library expecting to, after all. She told them about Marnie’s love of folklore and local legends growing up, and how they used to take hiking trips around culturally important areas, gathering stories to take back with them. She told them how Marnie had liked to dabble in a bit of everything she learned, and had made friends with all sorts of “spiritual” people. Mrs. Wilcox even had their contact information, if they wanted it. And, of course, a wallet size picture of Marnie—that had an uncanny similarity to the face Dean had seen in the morgue, but wasn’t quite the same.

While Sam and Dean gathered Mrs. Wilcox’s stories, Bobby weaved through the shelves nearby, keeping his eyes and ears open for any threats. And when they finally made it through five minutes of polite goodbyes, they met back up at the truck, and discussed their next plan of action.

~*~

They’d split up in two separate motel rooms again—more for the phone usage than the bed usage, despite how much they all longed to lay down for a good few hours. Sam and Dean had both suggested Bobby should be in a hospital getting checked for internal injury, but Bobby had poked at himself and told them he wasn’t leaving them alone out here. They couldn’t let themselves forget that the sh*t might hit the fan again at any moment, and they couldn’t just stay around here either if there were more demons and witches here—which, at this point, seemed all too likely.

Dean called around to Marnie Wilcox’s friends and got as much out of them as he could, and in his own room Bobby was checking in with his buddy, Harvelle. He said he would see if Harvelle could come deal with the Wilcox situation, and try to ID the lookalike. Bobby had also taken half of Marnie’s friends list.

While they did that, Sam had pulled his practically-empty backpack out of his duffle and gotten out his notebook, writing up the things they knew and trying to piece it together.

As Dean was wrapping up his last phone call, Bobby knocked on their door and came inside with bags of delicious-smelling food.

“Well, I’d hoped we could’ve stopped at the Cowboy Cafe while we were here in Dubois, since it’s your birthday an’ all,” Bobby said regretfully as he started pulling styrofoam containers out of the bags. “But I don’t think we’re gonna have time for a nice sit-down this time.”

Dean’s ears perked up along with his nose. “Cowboy Cafe?”

“Cowboy Cafe,” Bobby repeated. “Best pies you’ll ever eat. I got us a smorgasbord. Happy birthday, kid.”

Dean wished he had time to enjoy it in the cowboy atmosphere—wished that Dad was there to share it with him. Shoved that down and shoveled delicious food into his mouth while explaining his phone calls—and Marnie’s recent changes in behavior—to Bobby.

Everyone had wonderful things to say about Marnie and her many gifts, but the most notable part was how withdrawn she’d become over recent months. Canceling plans left and right, turning down outreach opportunities in the library and community, staying holed up in her room whenever her roommate was home. And then there was the smell. People didn’t seem to know how to describe it, and Dean could get them to dance around the idea of sulfur, but not commit to it. Her roommate had gotten up the courage to try to describe “unwashed period smell” to Dean, but Dean got the feeling she didn’t think he was getting it. And well, maybe he didn’t quite have enough experience to know that particular smell, but he’d been around old, congealed blood often enough that he could guess what they were really smelling around that girl. Especially when the roommate mentioned the missing pets. And the deep voice in her room when they thought she was alone. The one she called Dagon.

But the part that stuck out the most was the library coworker who had seen Marnie talking to a strange guy in a leather coat on Friday…and how, afterwards, Marnie couldn’t stop grinning disconcertingly.

When it was time for pie, it was finally Bobby’s turn to speak. And he also had revelations.

~*~

Bill Harvelle and a couple of his buddies had tracked down Bobby’s witch assailant and found her painting symbols with pigeon blood onto an old church in Nebraska. She’d written some words, too: “He will be tested on the proving grounds and the armies of hell will”

Unfortunately, they didn’t know what the full message was going to be, since they’d interrupted her in the middle of it and she hadn’t lived long enough for them to ask.

But that wasn’t the most important part anyway. The important part was what happened on Bobby’s call to Marnie Wilcox’s psychic friend, Madame Crow. She was an older lady, with many kind words and memories of Marnie. She’d taught her divination through tarot, and the girl had a knack. “Not a psychic, no,” Madame Crow had said, “just a talent.” Marnie loved to entertain her guests whenever she would visit.

And, why, wouldn’t you know it—Marnie was coming to visit today, actually. She’d set up a reading for a friend of hers the other day, and had called just that morning telling Madame Crow she might come surprise him.

Madame Crow lived just on the Idaho/Wyoming border.

“That’s just two hours. We can go now!” Sam exclaimed.

Dean was so sleepy after eating and sitting and still not getting to nap, let alone a decent night’s sleep, but the prospect of finding Dad at the end of this gave him a burst of energy.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

~*~

Dean drove again because of Bobby’s head injury. Bobby insisted he was fine now that he was patched up, but Dean wasn’t taking that chance right now. Sam tried to keep Dean awake and entertained by telling him everything he could remember from various lore books about witches and demons, but it started making Dean’s eyes cross and he made Sam stop rambling.

The most important thing to remember, Dean thought, was that witches got their power from contracts with demons. They went hand in hand. Dean had all iron in his gun now, they had iron shot for the rifles, extra salt, and had restocked on holy water. Sam had put on his rosary, and did his little good luck kiss to Dean’s amulet.

“What do we do when we get there, Dean?” Sam asked, speaking around a finger he didn’t even seem to notice he was chewing on. Watching him made Dean’s skinned hands ache inside the gauze bandages Sam had applied earlier.

“We’ll figure it out,” Dean promised, hoping he was right.

~*~

For all the trouble it had taken to get to this point, driving down the little art district and seeing the impala just sitting there, parked in front of a quaint purple cottage next to an orange Geo Prizm felt pretty anticlimactic.

“It’s not over yet,” Dean reminded himself and the others, though it came out as a breath of relief.

They still had to actually see Dad face to face, make sure it was really him, and deal with whatever the Marnie situation was. He couldn’t let his body relax yet.

Dean wished they had the space of the impala for getting their gear ready, but somehow they managed well enough while squished in Bobby’s truck. All three of them had a gun and some holy water—Sam carrying the cabin rifle without shells still, because Dean hadn’t had time to test it.

Bobby went round the back of the house. Sam and Dean walked up to the front door, listening.

“It’s…buzzing…” Sam said, sounding confused and apprehensive. Sam laid his hand on the closed front door, and Dean watched as Sam’s hair started standing on end. “Dean?” Now Sammy sounded scared.

Dean put his hand against the door, and he could definitely feel tingles—like that fuzzy static electricity on the TV—but nothing like Sam. Dean pulled Sam’s hood over his hair in a panic he couldn’t seem to control, but he only hesitated a second before he tried the door and it opened.

Nothing could’ve prepared them for what they would walk in on.

~*~

Dean woke up in a hospital bed, the familiar rhythmic beeping and pumping of his monitors and I.V. a weird comfort as he slowly rejoined the land of the living. His body and thoughts were groggy as he tried to replay his last memories and reorient himself.

He remembered Sam, warm at his back. He remembered the energy. The way it zapped along his skin; the way it slowly made him sick. He remembered Sammy’s hair standing up like it wanted to walk off his head, and giggled a little deliriously until he dropped back off into foggy sleep.

In his sleep, Dean reached desperately for the images beyond the fog. The glimpse of the kitchen; the linoleum floors; the round table; the purple tablecloth. Three people sitting there, holding hands around a bowl.

The frost of Sammy’s breath; the blood dripping down his nose, over his lips, past his chin, onto the rosary floating around Sam’s neck—

The next time Dean woke up, Sam was there, and Dad was too.

“Hey, dude,” Dad said, patting Dean’s shoulder and shaking him gently.

“Hey, Dad,” Dean coughed and tried to lick his lips. Sam held a little cup with a bendy straw up to Dean’s mouth.

“How ya feeling?” Dad asked.

“Like I got thrown against a wall a few times.”

“Yeah,” Dad said, a bit of amusem*nt in his regretful voice. His eyes looked wet, but maybe the pain meds were just making Dean’s eyes blurry. “That sounds about right.”

Dad stood up and put his hand on Dean’s head a moment. It was warm.

“Gonna go pick us up some dinner from the cafeteria. They’ve got you on a jello diet, but I’ll see what I can do about sneaking you some fries.”

Small tap to Dean’s bed as Dad left, and that’s when Dean noticed the cast on his leg.

When Dad’s footsteps in the hallway had faded, Sam scooted his seat closer.

“This is your twenty-first broken bone ever,” Sam informed him matter-of-factly.

“Hey!” Dean rasped, holding his thumbs up. “If my broken bones were a person they could drink now.”

Sam snorted, “Your bones are a person, idiot.”

They lapsed into quiet. Dean didn’t realize he’d zoned out mapping the new stitches on Sam’s face until Sam moved and suddenly Dean needed to blink. Sam grabbed at the crochet blanket covering Dean and started fidgeting with the edge. Dean closed his eyes and just breathed.

“What do you remember, Dean?”

The question jolted Dean out of his light doze.

“Most of the basics, I think,” Dean said, shrugging. He knew he’d dreamed about a lot more of it than he could remember when he was conscious, but maybe it was for the best. But he knew Sam wouldn’t stop pestering him about it until he gave up some details. “Madame Crow’s house… that weird energy… the kitchen.”

Sam jolted but tried to cover it by wiggling in his seat so he could sit up on his knees. “What do you remember from the kitchen?”

Dean laid his head back against his pillow to think. If Sammy kept making him answer brain questions he was going to get a bigger headache. “Dad was in there… holding hands with Marnie and Crow. Madame Crow was channeling someone. Her eyes were weird.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Anything else?”

“Marnie was channeling someone, also. Her demon master, I guess… do we know his name?”

Sam shrugged, but Dean didn’t believe Sam’s tense shoulders.

“They were arguing… it was weird. I don’t think all of it was in English.”

Sam jolted again, blinking.

“What? Could you understand it?” Dean asked.

Sam shook his head ‘no’ quickly. Dean closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“They called each other zealot and apostate and despot… didn’t know I would need a dictionary for a fight. Their voices…” Dean thought about it a little too long and had to reach for the nearby emesis bowl. “Wait, did Madame Crow have two things possessing her?!”

Sam shoved a red-bitten finger into his mouth and nodded. Dean didn’t call him out.

“Don’t understand a lot after that. Everything seemed to happen at once. One minute I’m trying to figure out what these assholes are arguing about… demon faction sh*t, I guess. The next minute your hat is off and your nose is bleeding. Me and Bobby are puking. I get flung—we all get flung. But it was from the wind, I think, as the demons left. Like there was a–a vacuum or… whatever you call it.” Dean trailed off, yawning.

Sam smiled his fond ‘stupid Dean’ smile.

“That about it?”

“Yeah,” Sam said thinly, leaning up to hug Dean tightly. “That’s about it.”

Dean decided it was okay not to mention the yellow eyes, or the way even through the demon garble it had felt like they were fighting over Sam and Dad, or how Dean’s exhausted brain had made it seem like Sammy had tossed the demons away from Dad when he was threatened. Or the way Dean had hallucinated one of the yellow-eyed demons saying, “That’s my boy,” as Sammy flung them out of the house.

And he definitely wasn’t mentioning any of that to anyone else, either.

“Was anybody else hurt?” Dean asked.

“Well…Bobby’s in a room down the hall, and Dad and I got checked out, but Marnie Wilcox is dead...”

“Well… she was a witch, so that’s good. What about the old lady?

“Madame Crow is in intensive care. It looks like… possession is really hard on the body. Even when it’s not real possession.”

“What, that wasn’t real possession?”

“No, it was more like… a phone call.”

“Does anybody know why they did all this sh*t?!” Dean asked.

“Well… Bobby’s friend said as soon as everything went down here, most of the demons and witches controlling Sheridan ran off.

“So… what?” Dean asked incredulously. “Was it a turf war?!”

Sam smiled sadly. “Looks like.”

~*~

Dean was cleared to walk with crutches around the hospital hallways the next day, and took the opportunity to visit Bobby while Sam was asleep on the visitor chair in Dean’s room. When Dean got to Bobby’s room, though, he already had a visitor—John Winchester.

Dean stood just outside the door, frozen listening.

“—offered to tell me about the devil’s gate, before that other one showed up.”

“You missed the boy’s birthday, John.”

“Don’t think I don’t know that. I figured the best birthday present I could give him would be for this business to finally be finished. I had to follow this lead, Bobby.”

“And? What’d you get in the end? Your boys attacked on the road twice, and a whole lotta nothin’ out here. I’m glad that group up north dispersed before you could up and leave again.”

“It wasn’t nothin’. I got closer, I know it. I looked into those eyes. They were scared, or they wouldn’t have lured Sam after me.”

“So you agree that Sam was their target? You plannin’ on tellin’ your boys it wasn’t even you on the phone that night?”

“You know I’m not,” Dad said, in his don’t-be-ridiculous tone. “It’s safer this way.”

“Safer for them, or easier for you?”

Dad didn’t answer.

“You know Sam already noticed your leg ain’t broken,” Bobby said.

In the hallway, Dean’s head felt like it was spinning.

In the room, Dad said, “He just thinks I lied about it to give myself time.”

“Your house is your business. But if you think this will keep your boys safe, you’re a damn fool, Winchester.”

“You really think it’d be any better for them, looking over their shoulder all the time, never knowing who to trust?”

“You say that like you’re not describing their lives right now, John. I can’t believe you didn’t call them the whole time you were on this stupid quest. If I hadn’t been there to answer their call—”

“Way I hear it, they would’ve been in a lot less danger without you.”

“Yeah? And how do you think they’d have done on the road without any money? In case you didn’t notice, while you were off chasin’ your personal demons, I’ve been supporting your household. Not that that’s new. You plannin’ on squaring me away any time soon?”

“You know I don’t have it, Bobby. I haven’t had time to hustle or make honest work in weeks.”

“Winchester, you’re lucky I’m so patient and like those boys of yours. Here’s me given’ away my services again, but I’m gonna teach you the art of credit card scams so you can stop being a nuisance to my wallet, if not a nuisance in general. And you better be sure to leave a card with the boys when you get ‘em, so they don’t keep needing bailin’ out— or worse,” Bobby finished, with obvious meaning.

Dean shuddered, and decided he’d heard enough of the conversation. He’d visit Bobby later.

“I hate to think what Dean might’ve…” Bobby’s voice trailed off as Dean hopped down the hallway as quickly as he could.

~*~

“They still goin’ at it?” Sam asked when Dean got back to his room. He was sketching in his notebook, wearing Dean’s headphones, not really expecting an answer.

“You heard them?” Dean questioned, worried what Sammy might’ve heard. He wondered how long Sam had been awake.

Sam shrugged, sticking his tongue out as he concentrated on shading whatever he’d drawn. “They’re just always going at it.”

Dean flopped onto the seat next to Sam, and he shifted so Dean couldn’t see what he was drawing. Dean could just barely catch the hint of what his little brother was listening to, and lifted one side to listen in.

“And when my life is over, remember when we were together! We were alone and I was singing this song for you. We were alone and I was singing this song… for… you…”

Goosebumps broke out on Dean’s skin immediately and he let the headphones fall back into place, moving back to his bed to face Sam. Sam winced and rubbed his ear, frowning at Dean. The walkman stopped and Sam pulled the headphones down around his neck.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been thinking…” Dean trailed off, but Sam didn’t take the snark bait. “...about everything that happened this weekend…”

“...me too.”

Sam suddenly looked stricken, and Dean wondered what he was thinking. Wondered what parts Sam had left out of his own stories. He wondered if he could ask without everything falling apart.

“Thinking about what happened at the cabin, mainly,” Dean said instead, skirting all of the issues—even the real reason for this. “What if Bobby hadn’t had those witch wards at the cabin? How long would it have taken us to figure him out?”

Sam shrugged, but Dean could see in his face he was really thinking about it.

“We need to start thinking about code words before we’re in that kind of situation again, Sammy.”

~*~

Epilogue

~*~

They let Dean leave the hospital on day three. Sammy had a snarky comment about how they’re lucky all of Dean’s broken bones aren’t actually on record, but Dean didn’t let that sour his day. He was so ready to leave the hospital and get into the impala again.

The nurse wheeled Dean down to the patient pickup doors, and Dean hopped onto his crutches and over to where Dad had opened the back door for him. They got Dean settled across the backseat, cast elevated on a stack of wool blankets from the trunk.

Sammy turned around in the front seat, and Dean couldn’t help grinning at his little brother’s pink, smiling face welcoming him home. Maybe it was just the light, but his eye bruises looked a little brighter today, and his nails looked like he hadn’t bitten them in at least twenty-four hours. Sam turned around, but Dean could still see almost his whole head—somehow, Sammy had suddenly gotten taller since a week ago. Or… Dean counted for a little bit and realized it had been at least three weeks since he and Sam had been in the impala together. Damn.

“Oh, hey, Dean. I still need to give you your birthday presents.”

“Presentsss, plural?” Dean asked, excited.

He never really expected anything for his birthday, in general, so whenever it happened it was awesome.

“It’s that box on the floor,” Dad said.

The box was clearly a boot box with a bow around the corners, and Dean laughed.

“I know you can’t wear them right away,” Dad said wryly, “but you need some new ones, and that cast will be off in no time.”

Dean nodded, his toes truly grateful. “Thanks, Dad.”

“And then there’s this,” Dad said, motioning for Dean to hold out his hand.

Dean eyed him dubiously, wondering if Dad was going to hand him a Hershey’s hug or kiss for the dad joke. Not that Dean minded chocolate, of course, but it was always half melted after those jokes.

“It’s a ring,” Sammy said, obviously not at all interested in the suspense.

Dean didn’t want to blush at that, but his face was getting hot anyway. A ring? He wasn’t a girl…

“Sammy told me about everything that happened while you two were on the road. I’m really proud of how you two handled yourselves out there.”

Dean’s heart hurt a little bit.

“But Sam’s informed me we need more solutions for silver testing besides bullets. So I was going through my silver salvage, and I think this one should fit. You might have to try a few fingers.”

“Then you can just slap somebody with your ring hand and check them for silver allergy!” Sam sounded way too happy about that, and Dean shook his head in amusem*nt.

Dean tried the ring on his fingers until one fit just right.

~*~

End

~*~