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You fit into me like a hook into an eye.
A fish hook. An open eye.
(Margaret Atwood)
1.
On the New Year’s Eve, in the last hours of 1988, Black Betty dreamed of boys. Her leg twitched within a cozy blanket cave, in a cabin deep in the Montana woods, but her spirit soared up high over melting fields of rye. Her spirit, shaped today like a dirty bird – which she hated but tolerated – circled above the road that cut through the fields with barely a twist in sight, and above the black car running along it, and above the two boys melting, sweating inside the car. Betty could see them simultaneously from above and from all sides, since this was her dream and she was free to have as many eyes here as she wished. And Betty wished for many eyes.
They were brothers: she could tell by the way they blended in with one another, as if there was something non-physical between their bodies that kept getting mixed up, some unseen continuity across the front seat of their mean car. The older one drove with one hand on the wheel, his elbow resting in the rolled-down window. Betty saw beads of sweat on his face and the back of his neck. It was hot wherever – whenever – they were, far and long from her cabin. The youngest boy was reading a book, and within her dream Black Betty knew that the book belonged to a library from another state, and that they stole it, and that the boy felt guilty about it, but there was something deeply and casually criminal about his entire life that made book theft ultimately acceptable. There was a gun stashed away under the seat next to his brother’s leg as further proof.
High as she was, Betty could hear nothing but the roaring of air currents under her wings, and there was nothing to hear in the car, as the boys weren’t talking, but she saw the older one wince and twist the dial of the radio. His lips moved. His brother glanced up for a moment and returned to his reading again with the faintest of smiles lurking in the corners of his mouth.
A wind rose and crumpled the rye fields on both sides of the road, fluffed the pages of the stolen book, threw a strand of hair into the younger boy’s eyes, cooled the sweat on the older one’s neck. The gust hit Betty’s soaring spirit under the wings and sent it tumbling through the air. She lost her feathers and watched them swirl up in a ragged vortex to the high afternoon sun. She fell backward and downward, and as she fell she became a mean skinny dog. She fell barking and growling back into her own sleeping body in Montana at the very tail end of 1988, and barking and growling she bolted up from under her mount of covers.
Betty sat in her dark bedroom, with her uncombed black hair hanging about her head like a curtain. Some amount of light crept through the open door from the kitchen at the other end of the hallway. Betty parted her hair and wiped the spit from her lips with the back of her hand. The clock in the corner read twenty past six in the evening, but this deep into the winter, the night had already fallen over the woods outside her window.
Betty’s days of empty dreams about boys were long in the past, and she wasn’t about to write this one off as some resurgence of teenage silliness. She was an old thing, a very old thing who didn’t get to be this old by ignoring her dreams. Her momma beat that lesson into her when Betty was still a pup. Wash your hands, bury your sweetest bones deepest, and never ignore your dreams.
Tossing the covers aside, Betty climbed out of bed and put a cardigan over her nightgown before heading out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where she heard a knife knocking against a cutting board. Sarah was probably in the middle of cooking their holiday feast. Betty would talk to her about the boys while she worked. No, not boys; the men, the witch hunters. Now that the dream had settled in the back of her skull, Betty knew them for what they were, the same way she knew about the library book.
But it wasn’t Sarah in the kitchen. When Betty walked in, her claws making soft clicks on the bare floorboards, Clementine looked up from behind the work table. Chopped vegetables lay scattered around her board. She had a knife in one hand and a stump of a carrot in the other. Naturally, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Clem’s nasty dead fingers with their greenish-white skin were all over that carrot. Presumably, they had already touched the rest of the food.
“Hi, sleepy head,” said Clementine and waved with the knife. “Had a nice nap?”
Betty looked down at Clem’s dead hands where they were touching their food and twisted and twisted her mouth, until a tip of her yellow canine started poking out from under her lip.
“Oh, right!” Clem giggled, put the knife down and wiped her hands on her apron before reaching for a pair of gloves. Betty could see a small piece of her skin clinging to the apron, and she wondered where else she was going to find Clem’s skin later tonight.
“Where’s Sarah?” she said, deciding that tearing out some of Clem’s hair could always wait for a better time.
“She went to the barn to check on the animals and to get some water for Cutie Pie.”
Betty moved to the kitchen window and pulled aside the lace curtain. The snow outside the cabin glowed blue in the moonlight, with a single track of deep footprints leading from the back door to the barn. Otherwise, the white cover lay thick and undisturbed. A few fresh flakes swirled in the air. A square of yellow light fell out of the open barn door from Sarah’s lamp, and Betty could hear Sarah speaking softly to her animals – the stupid goats and the nasty ostrich.
Betty thought dreamily of the way Sarah could scratch under the chin, and she suddenly wanted those fingers fondling her own throat. Sarah’s fingers always smelled of mosses and milk.
“I had a dream about hunters.” She let the curtain drop back across the window and turned around to see Clem freeze. Clem’s fingers smelled of nothing but dead fish, no matter what she did.
“Where? How much time do we have?” Shadows of trout swam back and forth behind Clem’s stupid blue eyes, which was always a sign of worry for her. “Are they going to hurt Cutie Pie?”
Betty thought of the stolen book again, and just like that, she knew that the book and the big black car were removed from the Montana cabin by two decades. The grandfather of the rye that would give rise to the rye from her dream hadn’t yet been sown.
“It’s a couple of decades away,” she said. “But it must be important. I have to tell Sarah.”
“Oh, decades,” said Clementine, forever the airhead, and rolled her eyes. One of them popped out of the socket with a small splash of murky water. Betty winced, watching that eye dangle from the optic nerve next to Clem’s nose. Clem left it there, because things like this happened a lot to her, and got busy peeling ginger. “In that case, I’m certain that it can wait until after dinner.”
“Idiot.”
“Sticks and stones.” Clem shrugged. “Be nice, Betty.”
Betty was about to tell her where she could shove her nice – and then to leave it alone and go see if Sarah had already roasted the birds and if she could steal a wing – she was going to, but just then she saw the child.
It’s no wonder Betty only just saw him now: he was sitting perfectly still in the very corner of the cage by the pantry, his knees drawn up to his chest, and only the tiny shiver of shoulders betrayed how fast he was breathing. Otherwise, the boy looked like a stone idol. He had dark hair, though Betty couldn’t tell in the shadows what color it was. There was just enough of that delicious plumpness of childhood about him that let Betty guess he was about five years old. He stared, too scared to blink. His face was a mess of red and white splotches, with smudges from where he tried to wipe the tears with dirty hands.
“What is this?”
“You like?” Clem hurried around the table and stood next to Betty. “I found him wandering around all on his own. I thought we could have a special treat tonight.”
The boy whimpered.
And Betty was all for a little sweet morsel to toast away the 1988 and greet the new year, but something about this child covering in the corner of the cage bothered her dog senses.
“I was careful,” Clem went on. “Nobody’s going to miss this one. Kids like him go missing all the time, and nobody notices.”
Betty could see Clem’s simple calculations all the way through: the boy was clearly too small to be left alone by a responsible adult, and no caring mother would’ve allowed her child to run around with this wild hair and unwashed hands. Betty could also see where Clem was wrong: a rip on the child’s sleeve had been carefully stitched, someone else must’ve tied his shoes that morning, and someone’s loving hand had been feeding him and keeping him free of disease. He wasn’t the favorite child of some well-to-do Missoula family, but he wasn’t unloved either. Someone was going to come looking for this boy, but that wasn’t what made Betty’s nose itch and her eyes water.
There was a tiny mole by the side of his nose, and when Black Betty saw it, she also saw the fields of rye rippling in the afternoon heat and the black car with the gun hidden underneath its front seat. She saw him as an adult, with his eyes moving back and forth across the page and a smile hiding in the corners of his mouth, for something his brother said. The snapshot of the dream was so clear that Betty could distinguish the tiniest of veins in the man’s eyelid.
“Isn’t he sweet, Betty?”
“Clem,” Betty said. “Get away from him.”
But Clementine had already dropped to her hands and knees and crawled to the cage with the boy inside. “Look at him,” she cooed. “Aw, who’s the honey bunny? Who’s Clemmie’s sweet little shrimp?” And she stuck her waggling finger into the cage.
The boy went from a frozen idol to a wild animal in a split second when he lunged forward and clamped his teeth on Clem’s disgusting dead finger. It came clean off. Clementine fell backward, shrieking and shaking her hand. Half-congealed blood flew all across the kitchen and stained the bottom of Betty’s nightgown. The boy made a distressed wail and spat out the finger, but he did so out of Clementine’s reach.
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! You witch!”
“You give that finger back!” Clementine yelled.
The boy started crying again, but he took the finger with him when he tried to press further into the corner of the cage.
“You give it back!”
He stomped on the finger, which made the dead skin come halfway off. “Leave me alone! My dad is coming to get me! He’s gonna— gonna—!” But he couldn’t finish the threat and cried harder. “Daddy! Dean!”
“What’s all this noise?”
Sarah stood in the kitchen doorway, still flushed from the cold outside and smelling of snow, more snow melting in her hair and on the soles of her heavy work boots. At the sound of her voice, Clem stopped screaming at the kid and turned around. Betty felt a sweet shiver start at the base of her spine, like a tail wanting to wag, and she dropped to the floor on her hands and knees and crawled to Sarah across the kitchen floor. Sarah was wearing her red skirt, and Betty pressed the side of her face through the fabric to Sarah’s knee and rubbed lovingly.
“Hey, Betty, hey, girl.” Sarah’s hand brushed behind her ear and scratched, and it was the sweetest thing in the world. Long blades of wild grasses came out of her sleeve, from under the skin on her wrist, to tickle Betty’s face. Even the kid in the cage fell quiet.
Betty stood up once she was sated with the scratching. Sarah had plucked the enoki mushrooms from her nostrils for the holiday, but she left the oyster ones growing out of her ears, which gave her face some strange elegance in Betty’s eyes. Forget-me-nots swaying from her scalp among the dark strands of hair matched her eyes and the earrings she picked for tonight. Looking at her, smelling her, Betty was momentarily overcome with puppy love.
“I got us a little holiday cookie, Sarah,” said Clem. She was still sitting on the floor in front of the cage. She waved her hand with the missing finger in the air. “Look, it’s got teeth!”
“I need to talk to you about this,” said Betty. “I had a dream about hunters. Turns out, Clem here brought one of them into our kitchen.” And Betty bared her teeth at Clem, and Clem stuck out her tongue.
“Be nice,” said Sarah.
“We weren’t fighting.” Clem got up from the floor and started dusting off her skirt. “Honest.”
Sarah approached the cage with Betty at her left shoulder and Clementine at her right. She tipped her head, making the forget-me-nots sway, and looked in the boy’s face. He had stopped crying and now sat quietly, staring at her. “Looks like a yummy little thing.”
“My daddy’s coming,” said the boy. “And my big brother.”
Sarah nodded. “I know, sweetie. My goats and my ostrich heard your daddy in the woods. They told me just now. You know what an ostrich is?” The boy didn’t answer. “It’s a bird, love. A big bird, big enough to swallow little things like you.” Sarah stroked the grasses growing out of her wrist. She looked her best in those tail hours of 1988, so strikingly beautiful. “Now, you sit tight. The girls and I are going to go outside and wish your daddy a happy New Year, and then we’ll all come back in, to have dinner. I imagine your dad is quite old, but he might do for a stew.”
She winked at the kid and headed for the back door, and Clementine and Betty followed. Where Sarah went, they always followed.
~~~~
Weird how the world could suddenly become so narrow and simple in a way it never had been before. You do this, or you die. There was nothing else to it, and the simplicity filled him with horror. Dean had lost his yesterday, his tomorrow and his belief in eating breakfast in the car in a few hours. In fact, everything was gone, except for the knife, the stack of snow-covered crates and the high kitchen window. Dean couldn’t even see the woods around him. Somewhere in the woods was— No.
Dad? The thought was a terrified little squawk, which he bit down on, hard.
Large waves of shivers were passing through Dean’s entire body, making his teeth clatter, making cold sweat break out on his skin. He wanted to wipe his hand on his pants to make the palm less slippery, but he didn’t dare let go of the knife even for a moment. What if the witches came around the house just then? What if they let that big bird of theirs loose and it was out there somewhere right now?
Listen, he told himself, momentarily relieved to have remembered something of what he was supposed to do. Listen, since you can’t see inside. One witch wore boots and the other one had claws that clacked on the floor when she walked, and the third one stomped a lot. He heard the back door open, heard footsteps, though now it was impossible to tell the three footfalls apart. He definitely heard the boots, but was there stomping? And was there stomping with the claw clicks, which was different? Dean listened so hard, but the sounds were gone so quickly, and there was no way to bring them back and play them slower, until he could be sure he got it all. He couldn’t tell if all three left the kitchen.
But then Sammy started crying again, and no one laughed at him or said anything to him. Sammy was having an all-out, hiccupping kind of private cry.
Dean let out a shaky breath. The kitchen window was too high for him to reach, but the crates stacked underneath it looked like they could hold his weight. They smelled of dirt and snow, and of something earthy, perhaps some vegetables that were once inside. Dean would have to put away the knife to climb them. Shit. You should never climb with a knife, or you could fall on it. But the witches could come back any minute. After a moment’s hesitation, Dean put the knife away into his coat’s pocket and straightened up, finding suddenly that his knees had gone numb and his legs were almost too weak to support him. He waivered, but stayed upright. There was nothing else to it. Either you do it, or you die.
Inside, Sammy went on crying, a heartbreaking sound.
Dean found a purchase for his foot, pulled himself up and kneeled on the top crate, to peek into the kitchen. The window he found was a small one, and rarely used, judging by the collection of old spider webs from years past. It was over the stove, probably meant to vent the steam from cooking. There was a large pot of stew bubbling away right under where Dean was sitting. He got scared by the sight of it, thinking that it was full of blood, but realized that the brew was orange, not red, and smelled like curry. The kitchen itself had a huge table set by one wall, with chopped vegetables abandoned on it in a messy pile. Dean saw a multitude of knives with mismatched handles hanging from a modern magnet strip over the table. He wiped the condensation from the half-opened window and pressed his nose closer to the glass, trying to see into every corner. Sammy’s crying was coming from somewhere left of the stove, too close to the wall for Dean to see from his position. There was a door leading outside, probably the way the witches left, and a dark mouth of a hallway that scared Dean the most because there was no door in it and no light, and anyone or anything – a big bird – could jump out of there at any moment.
But it wasn’t going to. Dad was out there in the woods, distracting them, to give Dean an opportunity to free his brother. And that opportunity was going to be wasted, all Dad’s hopes wasted, if Dean, if he….
Dean pushed the window open. There was just enough room for him to squeeze through. He pulled a knee up on the ledge, pushed both legs in and lay on his stomach, grabbing onto the frame as he slowly started to lower himself to the stove, toes stretched out to find something to stand on. His shirt and jacket pushed up, and the edge of the window pressed painfully into his stomach.
A shotgun blast came from the woods like the world exploding, scaring birds, but Dean didn’t see them rise up into the sky with indignant cries, because Dean lost his grip on the window’s frame just then. The moment the shotgun boomed, Dean came crashing down onto the stove. His foot knocked the stew pot off, and the orange brew cascaded over his jacket and the kitchen floor. The sound of the pot thundering down was even louder than the shot, and in a moment it was followed by Dean’s falling off the stove. He didn’t see or register any of it right away, only heard the boom and saw the world spin, and then he was lying on the floor. It happened too fast. He scrambled up to his knees, pressed into a corner and belatedly covered his ears. He waited for the witches to bust in, for the pain of a knife wound to come, for death.
Nothing happened. Dean’s back hurt from where he whacked it across the stove on his way down, his ankle was throbbing, and there was an intense burning all over his hand and wrist that felt like his skin might start peeling off. His clothes were covered in the witches’ stew. The rest of it was now spreading slowly across the kitchen floor, steaming. Outside, the birds complained loudly. And Sam was very quiet.
“Sam,” he tried to say. His throat was so tense that the name came out barely louder than a breath and hurt on the way out. Dean swallowed. “Sammy?”
“Dean?”
The sound was coming from the left, somewhere next to the pantry. Dean hurried around the stove, splashing through the cooling orange lake, and there was Sam clutching the bars of a cage. His eyes were red and puffy and his nose was running, but he looked unharmed, and Dean felt something inside of him, some tightly wound spring, let loose.
“Sammy, hey, I’m here.” He grabbed Sam’s outstretched hand and squeezed while looking for a lock pick in his pocket with his burned hand. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“Dean, they’re witches. They wanted to eat me and Dad.”
Dad, like a dull needle to the heart. Dad.
Dean started poking around inside the lock. “Don’t be stupid, there are no such things as witches. They’re just crazy.”
“No, Dean, but this one was like a dog.” Sam grabbed onto his coat through the bars with both hands while Dean worked the lock. He was still hiccupping from crying. “And this other one had mushrooms in her ears. I saw them!”
“They’re just crazy. I’m gonna get you out.”
“Where’s Dad?”
The lock clicked, and Dean was saved from having to answer the question. Once he swung the door open, Sam came tumbling out and immediately threw his arms around Dean’s neck. Dean let him, even though it was hard to breathe. “Okay, Sam, okay. Come on, we gotta get out.” But he held on just as tightly as Sam, unable to move for a moment, because if he moved, that would bring them both to the second part of the task.
And that was when the sound came from behind Dean that made his blood run cold and made Sam stiffen in his arms. It was the sound of boots by the back door, more than one person coming, and the next moment the door swung open.
A blonde woman that looked like something from the bottom of a lake that’s been dead for quite a while fluttered into the kitchen and stopped when she saw Sam and Dean. The second witch that was following closely stopped in the doorway with one foot across the threshold, and that foot, Dean saw, that foot was bare and red from the cold and had long claws, round and dark, like a dog’s. She looked like she’d have her hackles raised, if she had any.
“Oh,” said the dead one.
“Great,” said the one that was like a dog.
“What, what?” said the third witch, pushing past her into the kitchen. She had long hair, among which grasses and flowers grew, and there were mushrooms behind her ears and something like lichen on her neck in uneven patches. She was cradling her hand, and Dean saw that it was covered in blood, with two fingers missing and the flesh of her palm torn up in a way that made his stomach turn. “Well, would you look at that!”
Something odd happened to Dean at that moment. He felt calmness come over him. He realized, suddenly and with perfect clarity that he wasn’t going to make it. There would be no breakfast in the car for him, no Dad, no morning, no next year, no anything at all, except for this kitchen. And the kitchen was where he could make it count.
He pressed his mouth to Sam’s ear. “Go up on the stove and out the window, find a road, stop a car, don’t stop running. I’ll distract them.” But Sam grabbed tighter onto his neck. Dean had to pry his hands off. He found the knife in his coat pocket and waited.
“This must be the big brother,” said the mushroom witch, coming into the kitchen. Her wounded hand was bleeding and badly swollen, and Dean caught a gleam of a shotgun pellet embedded in the flesh. “Well, isn’t it great to have the whole family for dinner!”
The dead one clapped her hands. “I call the leg from this one. The leg is mine, Betty!”
The one that was like a dog shot her a dirty look but spoke to the mushroom one, “Sarah, I saw them both in my dream. I saw them grown up.”
The mushroom one – Sarah – chewed her lip for a moment, studying Sam and Dean. Then she shrugged. “Perhaps we can discuss this over the holiday roast, what do you say, Betty?” She came around the table to get closer to the cage. “Clem, dear, would you get me a bandage?” The dead one hurried out of the kitchen. Sarah stopped in front of Dean and stared down at him. “You must be Dean.”
She was standing too close, and Dean saw that if he tried to get up, she’d just slap him down like a puppy before he could even lift the knife. She was wearing boots, old leather worn and creased, and without steel toes. They were right under his nose, and they were now all he could see. The world shrunk to the size of the witch’s boots, if only for a moment.
Dean didn’t try to get up. He threw his body forward from the knees and he plunged the knife into her foot as hard as he could, landing on top of it with his entire weight. It was the sickest sensation – a moment of resistance before the blade went through the boot and the flesh, the squeak of leather and the scrape of a bone, and then he was lying on top of it. The witch screamed, and Dean rolled to the side and away. He thought she was going to stomp on his head, but she pulled her foot up with the knife in it, which didn’t go all the way into the floor after all like he thought it did. She hopped around the kitchen, screaming. Betty dashed in the narrow doorway like an agitated dog and made sounds that were a lot like barking. Clem came running back into the kitchen but stopped and clutched her chest when she saw Sarah grab onto the knife’s handle and yank it out. Sarah lost her balance, landing with a crash and bringing down a rain of dishes and cutlery from the table.
Dean only had enough time to push Sam onto the stove. They could still make it. Sam was pulling himself up to the window. Dean tried to follow him, but his injured ankle turned, and the pain was like fire. It made him fall back down, and then the dog witch was upon him. She kicked him in the stomach, knocking all air out of him and making him double up in pain. She picked him up easily, like he weighed nothing, threw him into the cage and threw Sam after him, locking the door. And there was that. There went Dean’s rescue operation. Just like that.
“You little shit!” Sarah tossed the knife across the kitchen, where it hit the fridge and left a long scratch. “You little shit, oh, fuck you!” She was sitting on the floor, cradling her foot with her good hand. There were tears in her eyes, and her blood all over the kitchen now. Dean could smell it, too, so much copper in the air. “Goddamn little fucker, I’m gonna skin you alive.”
“Sarah!” Clem kneeled next to her and tried to touch her foot, but Sarah jerked away. “Your poor foot!”
“You leave us alone!” Sam yelled. “Bitch! Leave us alone!”
Betty bent down to the cage, and Dean saw a flash of powerful teeth in her mouth. Her jaw looked longer than normal, close up. “You know what I’ll do? I’m going to knock all your teeth out and make you suck on a soap bar if I hear another bad word out of you, ‘cause I’m not eating something this dirty. That’s less than my momma would’ve done, if I had a mouth like yours. She would’ve cut my tongue out.”
Dean grabbed Sam without a word and hauled him away from the bars, away from the witch with a dog’s face. Sam felt small in his arms, and he was trembling, though Dean couldn’t tell if it was from fear or from anger.
“Where’s our dad?” Sam said.
It was Sarah who answered. “What, baby needs his daddy? I turned him into a moose. A big, fucking stupid moose.” She stood up with Clem’s help, keeping her weight off the injured foot. Ferns had shot out of her chest at some point, and now their coiled green tendrils were bursting her shirt open, exposing a white lace bra. “He’s out there now, trying to figure out how to work a shotgun with hooves. In a minute, Clementine will go and cut his big stupid heart out and leave the rest of him for the animals.”
“I will, I will,” Clem said. “You sit down, Sarah.”
Sarah batted her hands away. She hopped over to the cage, where she grabbed Betty’s shoulder for support. She leaned down, until she was looking into Dean’s eyes, completely ignoring Sam. She had gone very pale, almost as pale as the dead Clementine. “I want to give you a little gift, for the year leaving and the year coming.”
“What do you want to give him anything for?” Betty said. “We’re just gonna eat them both.”
Sarah shrugged, straightening up while Betty held her by the waist. “Well, you know, just in case. You’re my smart one.” She turned to look at Betty with so much pride and smacked a passionate kiss on her cheek. “What if you’re right, and they do, somehow, grow up and come back to us? This has certainly been an unpleasant evening.”
“They won’t grow up,” said Clem. “Betty was wrong.”
“My Black Betty is never wrong. So there, a gift for the New Year, for a boy who fucked up my foot. What shall we give him?”
“Gangrene,” Betty suggested.
“Love,” said Clementine. “It’s so much worse than gangrene.”
A moose, Dean thought. They didn’t, really. It’s a lie. The witches’ words about gifts and gangrene were barely registering in all the mess in his head. Sam shook and shook in his arms, and Dean had no idea what to do.
Sarah nodded. “Love, yes, I like. How about the ugliest fucking whore in the world?”
“Who’d that be?” said Betty.
“Oh, I know, I know!” Clementine bounced, stretching her arm up, like she was in a classroom. “There’s some duchess in Europe, looks like a platypus. I saw her picture in a magazine once.”
Sarah considered it. “Nah. What’s the use of him falling in love with some ugly duchess in Europe that he’s never even going to meet? How about that syphilitic crackhead that hangs out by the church on Main?”
“How about his brother?” said Betty.
That made the other witches pause. In silence, Sam breathed very fast, and Dean tried to figure out what it was exactly that they were planning to do to him and Sam. They were talking about making him love Sam, which was odd. What kind of a curse was that? There was a trap there somewhere, and Dean tried to see it, he really did, but the thoughts of a moose kept intruding and wouldn’t let him focus.
“Oh,” Sarah said. “Oh, Betty, you’re the smart one. You are.”
“That’s so sick!” Clem squealed. “Do it, Sarah, do it!”
Sarah bent down again and put her hand between the bars. Dean saw that hand coming, but the time didn’t stretch for him like in the movies while he tried to think of something to do, somewhere to go, some way of shielding Sammy. She touched his forehead. There was a brief burning sensation, something warm spreading from his head down, and then she was pulling her hand away.
Sam bit her, quickly and quietly and viciously.
Sarah yelped, jumped back and landed on her injured foot. Dean yanked Sam away, trying to hide him behind his back, the burning in his head forgotten. Sarah kept screaming and crying while Betty tried to keep her upright and Clementine dashed around the kitchen uselessly.
“Leave him alone!” Sam was yelling, right into Dean’s ear. “Leave him alone! Fuck you!”
Dean felt vibration through the floor before he recognized the sound of hooves with so much screaming. Not knowing what to do with any of it, he just held onto his brother and squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for it to be quiet again. Because his eyes were closed, he didn’t see the back door getting kicked in, but he felt it. He didn’t see a huge animal burst into the kitchen, but he caught its sharp wild scent and heard its roar. He thought it must’ve been a bear – a dinosaur! – but it was a moose, very large and very angry. Dean didn’t see its hooves crush Sarah’s skull, but he heard that, too.
~~~~
Dean nibbled on cold fries from McDonald’s as the car flew south, watched the skies turn colors, counted the trucks and didn’t think of much at all. Montana receded into the back window, overhung with low snow clouds. Dean watched it go, kneeling on the front seat, with his arms folded on the headrest. Ibuprofen helped with the pain, but he hunched his shoulders to guard his stomach and made sure his twisted ankle was positioned so that he wouldn’t hit it on anything if the car found a pothole. A fresh bandage was covering the burn on his wrist, and its whiteness was distracting in the corner of Dean’s eye.
If he looked away from the back window and just a little bit below, there was Sammy sleeping on the backseat. He wrapped himself in a blanket like a caterpillar, so that only a tuft of hair and a corner of his face were showing. They told Sam that the witches were a bad dream, and Dean wondered if he was still young enough to trust everything his family told him without question. He seemed to have believed them, although reluctantly.
Whenever Dean looked at his brother, his head felt a little hot. So he watched the sky, the road and the trucks passing in the opposite direction, toward Montana. He ate his fries and licked the salt off his lips. It was good – to be able to lick salt, after everything. It was a relief.
“Dean.”
It was the first word Dad said since leaving the McDonald’s drive through. It made Dean jump a little. He’d been worried, for the past hundred and fifty miles, that Dad might be angry at him, even though Dad hugged him and Sam after it was all over and held on for the longest time. But who could tell? Somewhere in this mess something was Dean’s fault – he could feel it. Not getting Sam out fast enough, falling off the stove, not being able to move away when the mushroom witch – Sarah, Sarah of the big bird, Sarah of the crushed skull – reached into the cage and touched his head.
Dad’s hand rested on his shoulder. “Deano. You alright?”
So Dad wasn’t mad after all. The relief was so great it stung in his chest and almost made him cry like a little baby. He forced the shakiness down and turned to look. Dad was watching the road but sneaking glances at him, and his face wasn’t angry in the least. There was a sizable lump in Dean’s throat.
“Are you in pain? Does your hand hurt?”
Dean swallowed. “No, I’m okay.” Sam slept in the backseat, oblivious. Something warm was spreading through Dean’s temples. He could still hear the sound of bones breaking, and his hands ached with the feeling of a knife pushing through a human foot, so horrible that he didn’t think he’d ever get rid of it. He smiled and turned around to sit facing forward. “Where are we going?”
“I’m gonna drop you guys off at Bobby Singer’s.” Dad put his hand back on the wheel. “Then I’m going back to deal with those other two.”
Those other two. The dead Clementine and the dog-faced Betty. Betty fled, but Dad backed the other one into a corner. Dean had opened his eyes by then and saw the enormous moose occupying half of the kitchen, saw the blood and the strange way Sarah’s head looked where she lay on the floor. He could see it now all over again, clear as if he was back in the house. The moose had Clementine in the corner, but it waited and stared at her, until she touched its nose, and then it started folding in on itself, twisting. The moose screamed in Dad’s voice, and the witch ran past him and out the door. He couldn’t chase after her.
Don’t go, Dad. He said instead, “You think maybe Uncle Bobby knows someone who can—?”
“No.”
“He knows a lot of people.” Dean had long suspected that there were others like Dad out there, other superheroes, maybe even as many as five. Bobby Singer kept in touch. Perhaps he could pay one of his friends to go to Montana, and Dean could repay him one day, when he was old enough to make money.
John rubbed a hand over his mouth, scratched at the stubble. “I’m sure he does. But this is nobody’s business – not Bobby Singer’s, not anybody’s.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” John nodded. “Don’t worry, Dean. They won’t get me twice. Hand me my sunglasses, will you?”
The highway had started twisting to the east, and the morning sun was now in their faces, unobstructed by the ragged clouds. The entire plane was sunlit, covered by a snow blanket and fully exposed from horizon to horizon. The snow hurt to look at. Dean reached into the glove compartment, pushed aside takeout menus from seven states over, a gun and some stray map that didn’t belong in there by itself, and handed John a pair of glasses.
“I won’t take long,” John said.
Dean nodded, and before he could change his mind, said quickly, “Are you mad?”
“What?” Dad turned away from the road to look at him. “Why would I be mad?”
Because I fell off the stove and made so much noise. Because I couldn’t save Sammy by myself. Because I didn’t tell you what Sarah said about that duchess from Europe. Dean shrugged. John blew out a breath and pulled Dean’s head closer to kiss the top of it and ruffle his hair. It made a new kind of warmth, a good kind.
“You did good, Deano. You did really good.”
They drove in silence for a little longer, until John put on music, turned low because Sammy was still sleeping off the rough night. Dean finished his fries and licked his finger, so that he could pick the last grains of salt from the bottom of the bag. Sam was going to be happy that they were driving to Bobby Singer’s. He liked the books and the dogs there. Dean wished he had time to speak to Bobby before Dad left, to ask him about sending one of his friends to Montana. But Dad was probably going to leave immediately after dropping them off and go back to look for Betty and Clementine.
Dean felt very small and very helpless, so much like a little kid. Insignificant was perhaps the word.
The highway was heading straight east now, to South Dakota. The sun had shifted since they got into Wyoming, but the view hadn’t changed one bit. Johnny Cash sang. Sammy slept. And Dean thought about love and tried to understand, from his tangled memories, what exactly Sarah did to him before she died. She wanted him to fall in love with a whore when he grew up. Was that bad? He knew, of course, what whores made bad wives, but he’d seen Dad talk to them occasionally at truck stops, when he thought that his sons were asleep. Whores didn’t seem like the worst people out there, and far better than witches. And then Clementine said something about that duchess, and Sarah mentioned a crackhead. Well, he could just stay away from those two, couldn’t he? Then Betty said something about loving Sammy. That made no sense at all, because it didn’t seem like a bad thing, and because Dean loved his brother already. So what was the big deal?
No, it must’ve been about the ugly duchess.
“Dean,” Dad said, and Dean jumped a little. “Did those witches do anything to you? Or to Sammy? It’s really important that you tell me.”
“Like what?”
“Like a spell, or a ritual, like how they turned me into a moose. They didn’t do anything like that to you, did they?”
Dean saw Sarah’s hand reaching through the bars, the grasses growing through her skin like long fur. The ugliest fucking whore in the world. How about his brother? There was blood on her hand, and her fingers were sticky with it when she touched his forehead. That’s so sick, do it, Sarah.
There are things one can’t talk about at the age of nine, not for anything. Things too embarrassing to give voice to, even in the middle of a highway in the emptiest of states, no matter how important it is to tell, and love was one such thing. Love was a stupid, embarrassing subject. At least it was for Dean. How should he know about any other nine-year-olds?
“No, sir. They didn’t do anything like that to us.”
2.
May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.
(Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club)
Sam was growing like a weed – that’s what Mrs. Westmoreland often said. Growing like a weed. Sam didn’t think he imagined the undertone of longing in her voice, and he didn’t miss the way her eyes would go all misty. Mrs. Westmoreland’s own sons certainly weren’t growing much, at fifteen.
Sam thought about that as he pedaled up the street to where the Westmorelands’ house sat on the hill, in the upper middle class neighborhood that Dean avoided like the plague and Sam rather liked. There was some cheap irony involved here. Sam lived down by the railroad tracks, in a house with a leaking roof and wore his jeans rolled up, to hide how short they were getting for his legs. The Westmoreland twins could afford custom made pants, but no amount of money could buy extra inches for the three legs they had between them. Fifteen. Nobody should stop growing at fifteen. Sam suffered growing pains and strain after strain, and every time he felt that sharp yanking pain down his leg, he told himself to be grateful. At least he was growing.
The Westmoreland family lived in a two-story beige house surrounded by a rose garden. Sam fantasized about owning a house like this someday, though he didn’t particularly like it. It represented the type of life he wanted. Maybe. On a good day, when he wasn’t too paranoid and didn’t picture a survivalist’s outpost in the desert instead. He pushed harder on the pedals and stood up in his seat on the last few feet going up the hill, one final effort before the pavement evened out. Sam jumped off the bike, dropped it on the front lawn next to a yellow rose bush, and ran up the porch, skipping over the middle step. He pressed the buzzer and waited, his heart still beating fast but settling in his chest.
Mrs. Westmoreland answered almost immediately. “Hello, Sam,” she said, stepping aside to let him in. She was dressed in a pants suit and heels, obviously on her way out the door.
“Hi, Mrs. Westmoreland.”
“I have to run,” she said, picking up her purse. “The boys are having lunch. You eat something, too, okay?”
Sam flushed, which she pretended not to notice. She knew what neighborhood he lived in, knew that his family was poor and probably suspected that at fifteen Sam was always hungry. Growing like a weed and hungry. Dad would’ve had a fit if he knew that Mrs. Westmoreland was feeding his son extra lunches, but Dad wasn’t there to have a fit about anything. Dad was hunting something in the woods, and Dean, left in charge, had too much practical sense to complain about free food.
“Thank you.”
She left, and in a minute Sam heard the engine of her car start out front. He toed off his shoes and padded into the large, bright kitchen. Luke and Matt were busy arranging sandwiches on the center island. They looked up when Sam walked in. Matt waived with the butter knife he’d been using to smear mustard on a piece of bread, and Luke grinned. He used to greet Sam with an upside-down nod, but the mannerism had become painful for him since his spine problems started to worsen. Sam dropped his shoulder bag by the door and clasped each of the twins’ hands in turn, performing the secret handshake that they developed.
“Hey, Sam,” said Matt. “Want some sandwiches?”
Sam nodded. “Starving. How are you guys?”
“Ah, you know,” Matt said, rolling his shoulders, and Luke interrupted with, “Suzanne stopped by earlier.”
Matt shot his brother a furtive look and pretended to be absorbed by the task of arranging ham slices on the bread. Suzanne was their mother’s personal assistant, twenty two and extremely attractive. Both boys were secretly in love with her, even though she was engaged and they were, well, underage and joined at the ribcage and pelvis.
“She smelled real good,” Luke added, leaning forward.
Sam grinned. “Yeah?” He’d never actually seen Suzanne, but had formed a clear picture from his friends’ descriptions.
Matt rolled his eyes and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. Here, have some.” He pushed bread and the lunch meats towards Sam.
They ate their first servings in silence, all three too busy sating their hunger to talk. The twins were still hungry like other teenage boys, except that the food was doing nothing for their growth rate, especially not for Luke. He stopped growing about six months before his brother, and the two legs that he controlled were now a good inch shorter than Matt’s one leg. Luke wore shoes on a platform, to compensate for the height difference and ease the strain on their pelvis. It was a mixed blessing when Matt stopped growing as well.
“So,” said Sam, shaking the crumbs off his lap, “you ready for the grammar quiz?”
“Yeah, yeah, piece of cake.” Matt shrugged and started making another sandwich. Sam followed his example. “What should we do after, though? Mom’s not coming back until at least seven.”
“And Dad even later than that,” said Luke. “We’re on our own for the whole day.”
Matt split the sandwich and gave half to his brother. Sam took a bite out of his and thought as he chewed. “You want to play video games? Or, we could toss the ball out back.”
The twins exchanged some encoded look between them. “Have you been down to the park lately?”
Sam stopped chewing. “The park” was an old amusement park, now overgrown and abandoned, a little ways down from where Sam and Dean lived. All of the expensive rides had long been sold, and only some rusted skeletons remained, along with the wooden tracks of a former roller coaster without any cars left. Sam liked to climb those tracks, and to swing upside down three feet over the nettles until his head felt like it was going to explode.
“Sure,” he said. “You guys want to go, or something?”
There was no way in hell the twins with their three mismatched legs were going to climb the roller coaster. There was no way in hell their mother would ever let them to even think about it.
“We’d like to, yes.” Luke nodded gravely. “That’d be very cool.”
Sam must’ve looked worried, because Matt nudged him. “Come on, man. Mom’s out for the day, and we can always do English later.”
Well, Sam thought, we don’t have to climb the roller coaster. And that was how, half an hour later, he ended up rolling his bike down the hill with the Westmoreland twins standing on the back. All three whooped as the bike picked up speed, with the fall wind in their faces. Sam concentrated on keeping the balance with the uneven weight behind him. Down and down the hill they went, down the class ladder as the housing developments grew poorer. The elevation ended in the middle class neighborhood, and the bike almost reached the end of it by inertia alone. Sam pushed down on the pedals, passed the crossroads with the traffic light swinging in the wind above it, and they broke into the working class cluster of streets, which comprised most of the town. Five minutes later, they were down by the railroad tracks. Sam caught a glimpse of the house the Winchesters were staying in, two blocks over, and stretched his neck out to see if Dean was in the yard.
“Sam!” the twins yelled together, and Sam barely managed to swerve around a post.
People started as they went by, just like they always stared at the Westmoreland twins. Sam felt the looks, saw heads turning around and hated it. He breathed easier once the three of them left town and rolled down the quiet road along the tracks. By then, Sam was sweating from having to propel the extra weight forward, but there was something enjoyable about the way his leg muscles strained and burned and carried the three of them along.
Sam took a left turn – Luke stuck out his leg for balance – crossed the tracks and started down the unused lane that once led to the park. The asphalt was cracked, with weeds growing through. A billboard by the entrance read “NO TRESPASSING”.
“Cool,” said Luke when Sam slowed down. “This is the furthest we’ve been without the car.”
Sam took them all the way to the desolate pavilion where electrical cars used to run. “Come on.” He waited for the twins to climb down and dragged the bike into the bushes where it wouldn’t be seen from the path. “Check this place out.”
All the cars were long gone, and the hollow structure was filled with several years’ worth of rotten leaves. Graffiti covered the supporting columns, and there was a distinct smell of old urine, but none of the boys minded. Sam got busy trying to pry a tile off a column while the twins kicked the leaves around, looking for interesting things underneath.
“You don’t go out much, huh?”
The twins stopped messing with the trash and stared at Sam with equally puzzled expressions. Sam shrugged, thinking of a life inside, of being stuck in a single house year after year after year. “Must be annoying,” he said, “people staring at you all the time.”
“We throw rocks if they stare too much,” Matt said.
“Don’t tell Mom,” Luke added.
Sam promised to keep the secret. The twins seemed to like the park, and Sam began to wonder if this wasn’t a good idea after all to bring them here. They finished examining the pavilion and wanted to see the roller coaster. Some of the highest loops were visible from where the three were standing, rising up over the treetops.
“I can never reach that one,” Sam said, pointing out a high section of the rail that, he suspected, offered a great view of the entire park. “A bunch of ties are missing from both ends. But I’ll make it up there before we leave.” He stepped out of the pavilion and into the tall grass, heading for the roller coaster loading platform.
The twins behind him fell quiet. “When are you leaving?” said Luke.
“Could Mom, like, pay you more to tutor us in English, so you could stay?”
I wish. Sam shook his head. “Nah. It’s my Dad. We move a lot for his work.” And he walked a little faster, to end the conversation. The twins followed in silence.
Once they reached the roller coaster’s platform, half-buried in ivy and raspberry bushes, the Westmorelands forgot all about Sam’s impending departure. And it really was a cool place: rusted rails and the splintering ties between them, rusted metal latticework with ancient paint peeling off it, the roof long gone. There were no cars, but this was a nice place to start climbing the tracks, which Sam often did. Today, though, he stood on the platform, hoping to show an example.
It didn’t work. Luke and Matt went over to the rails, and Luke put one tentative foot on the tracks.
Sam shivered. “Hey, don’t.”
Luke looked like he might listen, but Matt just waved him off. “We’re just looking. Chill, Sam.” He pulled his brother forward, and Luke followed easily.
“That thing is rotten through. Guys.” Sam was suddenly sweating in the cold air. The twins were standing firmly on the tracks. Sam reached out for them, but Matt jerked his shoulder out of his reach.
“We’re just gonna look.”
“Get back here.”
A wind rose in the woods and rustled the foliage. It blew old leaves and dust in Sam’s face, tugged on the twins’ clothes. The roller coaster made a sound, so much like a sigh, like an animal turning in its sleep. It didn’t seem like a sound an inanimate object should ever make.
~~~~
At least Dad wasn’t home. Thank god for small mercies.
Aliens was on when Sam walked in, perhaps the last half hour of the movie. Dean’s head popped up from around the back of the couch but dropped back down. The living room smelled like pizza. Sam followed his nose into the kitchen, where half of a large one was waiting on the counter. Sam picked up the whole box and took it with him back to the living room. Dean bent his legs to let him sit.
“You want some of this pizza?”
“All yours.” Dean didn’t look away from the screen, though they both must’ve seen the movie a hundred times.
Sam chewed his first slice and eyed Dean’s feet, which were officially too close to his food, but he didn’t feel like complaining. They were just feet. It was just Dean. Sam finished two slices while thinking of what he wanted to say, the cold pizza sitting like stones in his stomach.
“I got fired today,” he said. Dean looked at him, and in the dark his expression was hard to read. “From my tutoring job.”
“That English gig with the freak twins?”
The freak twins. “Yeah, that one. They were my friends, actually.” Past tense, definitely.
“Okay.” Dean pushed himself up against the armrest a little, to be able to see Sam better. “What happened?”
Sam had an entire speech that ran through his head over and over again as he walked home, the bike forgotten back at the park. There were all these words in him, about personal freedom, and responsibility, and about what it was like to live your life bent to somebody else’s will. Somehow, the sick and disabled were always expected to give up a part of their freedom, as if a leaky mitral valve rendered one incapable of making decisions. He wanted to say this. But a few blocks away from the house, somewhere on the edge of the urban ruin, the indignation fled Sam.
“They wanted to go to the theme park,” he said. “And then they wanted to climb the roller coaster.”
“Can they? I mean, are they coordinated enough?”
“No. I told them not to, but they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t come down from there.” Sam omitted the part where the roller coaster sighed like a living thing and he got spooked, because the place looked nothing if not haunted, though it was probably just the wind. “I had to call the cops to get them down. They stopped talking to me. Now I’m fired, and they’re probably under house arrest until they’re forty.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam realized that the Westmoreland twins were probably never going to live to see forty. They had two hearts between them, both with congenital conditions – unclosed holes in them, as if their bodies couldn’t figure out which way to grow. Luke’s heart was weaker, and Matt’s was already enlarged from trying to compensate.
“Ah, don’t sweat it, Sammy,” Dean said, and poked him on the shoulder with a foot as some sort of a hands-free pat. “We got enough money from my job. It’s no big deal.”
“Jesus, Dean! That’s not why.”
“Whatever. Eat your pizza.”
On the screen, the three survivors were getting into the escape capsules. Sam opened his mouth and tried to say something, to explain, to accuse Dean of being deliberately dense. He sat there, but the words didn’t come. He finished the pizza instead.
~~~~
“Hello?”
“Dean?”
The sleep was suddenly gone. “Dad.” He found his wristwatch and squinted at it until he could make out the faintly glowing numbers. It was just past two in the morning. “What’s going on?”
“You tell me. Who’s Sophia Westmoreland?”
Dad sounded pissed, not worried, which still didn’t necessarily mean that Dad wasn’t in trouble. “Who?”
“Some woman named Sophia Westmoreland left me a screaming message, something about how Sam almost killed her sons. The hell is she talking about?”
“Oh, that.” Dean sighed and rubbed his chest, feeling as though something had just let go inside, like waking up after a nightmare and realizing that none of it actually happened. “Sam is friends with her sons. They’ve got a shit ton of health issues, and Sam took them to that closed theme park down the road. They were just playing. She flipped.”
Dad sighed, and there was silence on the line. Dean strained his hearing but heard nothing, absolutely no background noise. Dad was probably deep in the woods, up at night to be on the same clock with the predators, supernatural or otherwise.
“That’s it?” Dad said. “That’s what she’s screaming at me for – boys playing in the park?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Some people.” Civilians, Dean practically heard, Dad was thinking it so loud. “Are you boys alright there?”
“Sure.” Dean fingered the light switch, but decided against turning it on, in case it woke Sam up for good. He turned on the kitchen exhaust light over the stove instead and sat on the counter. “How are you, Dad? How’s the hunt going?”
“I’m looking. Haven’t found anything yet. Alright, I gotta get back to work, you handle the—.”
“What is it?” Dean interrupted quickly, before Dad could hang up. “What are you hunting?” Dad didn’t answer, and Dean rushed on forward. “You know, in case we hear anything in town that might be connected.”
Dad didn’t like to talk about his hunts until they were finished – perhaps out of superstition, perhaps out of his secretive nature. Dean couldn’t even count how many nights he spent sleepless, staring at the ceiling and imagining the worst monsters, some evil personified, all teeth and claws, maybe even infectious. The only time Dean was honest-to-god scared of monsters was when his dad was out there, fighting them without backup. And fuck scared anyway, but this secrecy was just impractical. What if he needed to come rescue Dad? Wouldn’t it help to know what he needed rescuing from?
“The town is out of its range, as far as I can tell,” Dad said finally, sounding grumpy. Dean crossed the fingers on his free hand for luck and waited. “It’s killing teenagers, thirteen to sixteen. Bodies have been showing up in the woods, one every year or so, no signs of violent death on them.”
“No mutilation?”
“There’s some animal activity, but nothing unusual, not with how long the bodies were exposed to nature. Nothing’s consistent either. The coroner didn’t seem puzzled.” Dad sighed, and Dean heard the scratch of nails against stubble. “I have a list of things that could be doing it, but it’s a long one, and I’ve got no other clues to work with.”
“Okay.” Dean bit his nail, thinking of the little things, stupid coincidences, patterns and random encounters. You spend your whole life looking for patterns in everyday occurrences, and then you try separating truth from paranoia. He eyed the bedroom door, but everything was quiet there. “Dad, you sure this has nothing to do with the town?”
“Why?”
“Those kids that Sam is friends with are Siamese twins. How many of those have you seen, ever? There’s a dwarf at my work, and I’ve seen three more around, not related. The cashier at the store has four fingers on each hand, born that way. I dropped by Sam’s school once or twice, and you know how many kids with birth defects they have there?” He left it at that, letting Dad absorb the information and measure it against whatever research he’d already done for the case.
“Huh. It’s an industrial area around here. Could be just plain contamination.” He didn’t sound too sure though. “Alright. I still think it’s out of range, but you look into that.”
Dean grinned. “Got it. Hey, good hunting!”
Dad grumbled something and hung up. Dean sat on the counter in the dark house, tethered to an old wall phone, and thought about all the deformed, disabled people he’d seen around. Was it that unusual, or did he notice because he was looking? The phone line started to beep, so he hung up. It could’ve been pollution, not necessarily anything supernatural.
After a while, he went back to the couch, picked up the blanket from the floor and tried to go back to sleep, unsuccessfully. Siamese twins, for fuck’s sake. How many of those were even around, in the whole country? What that had to do with some dead teenagers turning up miles away was anyone’s guess, but it was interesting. There was no sleeping after that, so Dean got dressed, scribbled a quick note for Sam and went outside for a run.
This late at night, the town looked dead. A cold fog hung over the lower parts like milky pools, so thick that Dean could hardly see anything beyond ten feet. No streetlights worked on their abandoned block, and the semaphore light over the train tracks was a faint smudge of color in the white. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all to go for a run in this. How dumb would it be to break his neck? But the thought of going back to the couch seemed repulsive. Dean picked a direction and set off at a light jog, picking up speed as he went. The empty neighborhood was soon behind him, and he had a weird thought that Sam was now the sole living, breathing person in a four block radius there. And speaking of Sam, didn’t he leave that bike he loved so much in the amusement park? The park was as good a destination as any, so Dean adjusted his course and headed west. His body warmed up as he ran, and the cold soon became a skin-deep thing, something he felt but wasn’t bothered by.
Once he reached the park’s overgrown road, Dean slowed down to a walk and switched on a flashlight. Who the hell could even tell what sort of construction debris could be hiding in the grass? Far from human habitat and busy roads, the place was eerily quiet. Dean walked to a former electrical car rink, shining his flashlight into the bushes, looking for a glimpse of metal.
The quiet was definitely getting on his nerves. Dean hummed a few notes under his breath, the first song that came to mind. “Black Betty had a child, bam-ba-lam, the damn thing gone wild, bam-ba-lam.”
There, over the tall bushes and the roof of the former pavilion, poking out the fog, was a hump of a wooden roller coaster, shiny from condensation. Dean stood still for a minute, holding the structure in the flashlight beam, until he realized that he was waiting for something to happen. He picked up a rock and loped it at the roller coaster, just to see if he could hit it. A crack of rock on wood echoed over the park.
“Hey!” The echo picked up his voice and bounced it around. “Hey, roller coaster!”
Don’t call out to ghosts in empty places. There was an older, wiser voice that sometimes sounded in Dean’s head and had saved his ass in the past. It was probably right this time, too. He shook his head and dropped the second rock, turned around to leave and almost tripped over Sam’s bike.
He was walking back, pushing the bike along and not thinking about much except getting back to sleep, when the memory caught up with him, sharp and sudden like a bite, out of nowhere. It was a woman's voice laden with a deep Southern accent, and it said, How about his brother?
~~~~
Something was wrong. Sam wrapped his arms around himself and shuffled from foot to foot on the bare floor of the hallway. The light was weird. Where was it coming from? He looked over to the couch, but Dean wasn’t there, only his blanket. Where did he go at this hour?
“Dad?”
Sam took a small step into the living room, and John jumped and turned to him. He smiled, wiping a greasy hand on his jeans. He was terribly pale, or perhaps it was just the light. There was dried blood on his wrist, and something that looked like teeth marks, in a semi-circle. Sam backed away into the living room, until his knees hit the couch. Dad took a step closer. There was dried blood on the couch and all over the blanket. Dad smiled, and there was blood on his teeth as well.
“Sam. Is there anything to eat around here or what?”
Sam bolted up from his bed, gasping for air. He sat there for a minute, waiting for the world to stop spinning, for the real memories to untangle themselves from the nightmare, for stability. None of that happened, he realized, feeling the rabbit-fast fluttering in his chest. None of it. Diffuse light of an early morning crept in around the curtains, perfectly ordinary. Dad was out on a job, and Dean was probably still asleep on a Saturday morning. Sam pressed his face to his bent knees and took a few deep breaths. He had to get out of this life, somehow. He had to get out before it got him killed or drove him nuts.
Somebody was moving around in the kitchen.
Quickly and quietly, Sam slipped from under the blankets and pulled on the clothes he dumped on the floor last night. He stepped out into the dark hallway, just like he did in the dream. He made himself slow his breathing down as he tiptoed toward the living room and the kitchen. Five long steps. Sam peered around the corner, from the shadows. But it was only Dean in the kitchen, with the phone in his hand, eyeing it like a man contemplating a cliff dive. Sam had seen guys look at loaded guns like that.
“Don’t call him.”
Dean looked up and frowned at him. “What are you doing creeping around there?”
Is there anything to eat around here or what?
“Nothing.” Sam stepped out into the living room and gave Dean the most innocent smile. “I mean Dad, don’t call him. You know how he hates to be interrupted on a job.”
Dean looked suspicious for a moment, but he shrugged and hung up the phone. Sam squeezed past him to the fridge to get the milk. For some reason, Dean pressed himself into the counter to let him through, as though he didn’t want even the smallest contact. Sam drank the milk from the bottle and watched his brother from the corner of his eye. Oh, he thought, oh, it was going to be one of those days. Not even ten minutes in, and the morning was already going sideways.
“Don’t eat yet,” Dean said, popping some pieces of dry cereal into his mouth. “We’re going for a run to that theme park of yours.”
“Why?”
“I wanna check it out. The place gives me the hibbie-jibbies.”
What was great about Dean and sucked about Dad was that Dean had no problem admitting to the hibbie-jibbies, while Dad kept his to himself. Dad never admitted to having a bad feeling about something because bad feelings were too flimsy for him, but Sam suspected that he got them anyway, like everybody else.
“Okay, hibbie-jibbies it is, let me get changed.” And when Dean turned away, Sam reached out, quick, and touched the back of his neck. Dean swatted his hand away but didn’t take the bait and didn’t turn around. It was definitely a sideways sort of morning.
Outside, Dean set out at a fast pace, too fast for conversation. Sam played along, watched him while Dean wasn’t looking, and waited for his moment.
They passed the dead block, accelerating, jumped over the flooded storm drain at the end of the street and turned onto the road that led out of town. The gas station down the road was empty of customers, but Veronica was cleaning the windows. She turned to wave at them, and Dean made some dorky salute her way that made Sam laugh, breathless. They settled at a steady rate Sam welcomed. He savored the hot flow of blood in his muscles, the flushing of his skin that kept off the cold, his lungs expanding, heart pumping, the impact of his feet on the asphalt. It made him feel real, grounded him, and the nightmares gradually drained away. They splashed through a shallow puddle, both noticing it too late to avoid it. Sam kept watching Dean and saw the tension leave his body little by little, until he looked normal again, not like the wary, suspicious thing Sam found in the kitchen earlier.
Dean had the advantage of being more in tune with his body and the disadvantage of bowlegs. Sam had the advantage of long bones and the disadvantage of not knowing exactly what to do with them.
The park’s billboard with missing tiles showed up ahead once they turned the corner, and both picked up speed. They ran over the railroad tracks and onto the unpaved road overgrown with weeds, where their feet slipped on pebbles. They passed through the former parking lot at breakneck speed and reached the park’s ruined walkway with Sam slightly in the lead. It made his blood boil – thinking that Dean let him win at the last few feet, like he was some little kid.
Sam saw the opening he’d been waiting for all morning when Dean beamed at him and leaned forward with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. Sam had just enough rage and exhilaration built up. He jumped on Dean’s back without a word, clamping his knees around Dean’s sides like he used to do when he was smaller.
Dean had time to breathe out, “Fuck,” before they both went down.
They landed in the uncut grass, bringing down a shower of dew. Sam’s nostrils filled with the smell of the woods, overwhelmingly strong. His heart was beating too fast, he couldn’t get enough air and his head was spinning from adrenalin and lack of oxygen. Dean was right there, Sam had his limbs wrapped around him. Dean was all solid muscle, skin too hot and freezing at the same time, like it could only be after a run. He was right there, and he was everything that was right with the world and everything that was wrong with it, and Sam didn’t know what to do with him. They rolled through the grass in a confused tumble of limbs, Dean trying to shake Sam off, and Sam couldn’t tell from the sounds he made if his brother was mad or happy. Hell, Sam couldn’t tell which emotion there was more of in him. He bit Dean’s shoulder through the soaked shirt and knew immediately that it would bruise.
“Sam, dammit, you little shit!”
Sam held on with his teeth, his arms and legs, feeling like he was holding for dear life.
Dean managed to get a good grip under his knee and on his thigh, twisted and dragged Sam off his back. He was laughing, though, definitely more happy than pissed, and he didn’t fight it when Sam sat on his stomach. Through his hand on Dean’s chest, he could feel the hammering of Dean’s heart. It was good, really damn good to be this close, to feel that drumming. Sam felt suddenly like his hands were on fire, like his head was on fire, and he couldn’t tell then why he grabbed Dean’s ears and kissed him on the mouth.
Dean’s lips were burning hot, and his nose was cold. Everything went perfectly still for a moment.
The slap Sam got on the side of his head was open-handed but the hardest Dean had ever hit him. It threw him clear off Dean’s chest. Sam sat in the grass with his ears ringing, feeling for a moment like the world had gone sideways again, this time literally. Dean was getting up.
“Okay, Dean, you know what?” Sam shut his eyes, to get rid of the spinning. “That wasn’t even—I didn’t mean—.”
“What’s that?”
Sam raised his head and started to speak, but Dean wasn’t even looking at him. He was staring off to the right, where the roller coaster tracks arched up over the treetops. Sam turned that way, too, still rubbing at the side of his head, and his hand froze. There was something up on the tracks, on the highest part. It was a human-shaped something, lying with that perfect stillness that only the dead have. The light morning breeze was tugging on the fabric – clothes? – the thing was wrapped in.
Dean offered him a hand without looking, and Sam grabbed it and stood up next to him. Neither took his eyes off the object on the tracks. Nothing alive could ever be this still.
Sam moved first, down the familiar path trodden through the grounds, circling around a cluster of bushes to where the platform was. Dean followed closely. They climbed up onto the platform and the tracks, and both looked up the slope that led to where the thing lay. From the new angle, Sam saw that it was dark, oddly shaped and wet with morning dew.
“That’s a body,” Dean said. “There’s a shoe.”
Yes, Sam saw, there was a white training shoe, small as a woman’s or a child’s. Now that he saw the foot, he also saw the leg in dark sweat pants, and the sweater that had ridden up, and the strangely delicate curve of a belly underneath.
Dean gave the ties a probing kick, found them solid enough and climbed to get a little closer. He wasn’t going to be able to go all the way – there was a large section missing. Sam had tried. However the person ended up there wasn’t without help.
“Be careful, Dean. It’s rotten.”
“Got it. Stay there.”
Sam knew better than to follow him up, order or no order. He backed away in the other direction, to the shallower slope where the carts used to roll back down to the platform. He felt numb and very cold. From the new angle he made out another shoe, and a bent knee, and there was a third one. Sam frowned, stretching his neck. It didn’t look like there was enough room on the tracks for more than one body.
“Aw, shit,” Dean said, voice small in the huge and empty park.
There was no fourth leg, because it grew at a bad angle, and a surgeon amputated it shortly after birth. Sam had finally climbed far enough, and now he saw Matt Westmoreland’s slack mouth and half-closed eyes. Luke’s face he couldn’t see from where he was standing.
Dean called the police from the gas station, like Sam did just the day before. Veronica stood by the counter with her hand clasped over her mouth the whole time. Sam bit his thumb nail and stared at the way Dean kept rubbing the bruise on his shoulder, under the shirt. They had to go back with the deputies and show exactly where they walked. Nobody mentioned the bite or the kiss, and Sam had no idea why he even thought of that. There was crime scene tape, a homicide detective showed up, and a forensics unit rolled in an hour later from Pittsburgh, as the county didn’t have its own. Sam kept waiting for Mrs. Westmoreland. No, the detective told him, nobody was going to call the mother to the scene. But Sam couldn’t shake the thought that she’d know, somehow.
~~~~
When he stopped feeling like there was unexploded tension in his body, Sam just stared at the tree branches against the piece of night sky he could see outside the window. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the curve of the twins’ belly under the sweater. But he felt a little better, so he lay quietly and waited, figuring that he’d fall asleep eventually.
“Sam.”
Somehow, Dean managed to open the door without a sound. Sam lifted himself on his elbows and moved his legs to let Dean sit down on the edge of the narrow bed.
Dean cleared his throat. “Sorry about your friends, dude.”
“Yeah.” Sam stared at the ceiling, where the previous owners at some point put fluorescent stars that now glowed a faint green, like a pack of tiny ghosts. “I really didn’t know them that well.”
“What are you upset about then?”
Mrs. Westmoreland, he thought, the police, taking the twins to the park, the fucking roller coaster, wanting out of this life, recurrent nightmares about Dad. It was all of that, and it was probably also the shock of being stuck in the middle of a homicide investigation. He didn’t want to explain any of it to Dean. He shrugged.
“You and the drama, I swear.” Dean sighed, and Sam felt himself beginning to smile, though it was all dirty lies about him and the drama.
He freed one leg from the tangle of blankets and gave Dean a light kick on the shoulder, to make a statement. Dean caught his foot and tickled the bottom of it while sitting on Sam’s other leg to stop him from kicking, and he went on doing that until Sam was laughing.
“Well, since you’re done crying,” Dean said, after he finally let Sam’s foot go.
Sam kicked him in the shoulder again. “Fuck you.”
“Since you’re done, I talked to a buddy at the sheriff’s office.” Dean had buddies everywhere, made them almost instantly in every town they went to. “The coroner thinks it was a heart attack, from exertion. They had pretty fucked up hearts, apparently.”
They had septal defects and a pacemaker on Luke’s side, and they knew better than to climb roller coasters with that. “Dean, I tried to climb that loop, and I couldn’t. They’d never make it.”
Dean nodded. “Teenagers dying in the woods of apparently natural causes. That’s the case Dad is working.”
Is there anything to eat around here or what?
“Don’t call him yet.” Sam felt Dean’s suspicious look, even though he couldn’t really see it. He shrugged. “Let’s look into the roller coaster’s history first, so we’d have something to call with. He’s going to put us on that anyway, right?”
“Okay, point.” He stood up to leave. “Get some sleep.”
He wasn’t going to talk about it, Sam realized. He remembered then, with perfect clarity, the feel of Dean’s mouth against his, and his cold nose pressing into Sam’s cheek.
“Hey, sorry if I freaked you out earlier.”
Dean froze halfway to the door. “What?”
“You know, with the,” Sam shrugged, feeling stupid, “the kiss.”
“Okay. Just never do anything like that again.”
Oh, so not only was Dean not going to talk about it; he was going to bury it in the deepest dungeons of his memory, and perhaps he’ll dig it up every few years or so, to have a nightmare about getting a kiss from his brother. Like he didn’t have anything better to have nightmares about. Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re such a freak, man.”
“I’m a freak? You whip out incest, and I’m a freak?”
Sam felt his ears starting to glow and hoped it didn’t show in the dark like the stars on the ceiling. “Fuck you, incest! It was just a kiss. You’re my brother, Dean, I didn’t mean it like ‘Rip my clothes off, you manly man you!’” He delivered the last part in a high squeaky voice.
Dean stood silent for a moment, gaping at him, but the voice got a little chuckle out of him, and Sam saw the tension drain out of his shoulders. Sam flopped down on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes dramatically. “Oh, Dean, your emerald eyes kill me dead!” Sam kicked his feet in the air and clutched his heart. “I can’t take all this manly muscle! Take me, Dean, I’m yours!”
“Shut up, Sammy. Your boobs are too small.”
Sam felt his chest experimentally. “Aw, shit. I guess they are.”
~~~~
(Gold-digger, Sam thought in the library, over his notes.)
Perhaps she was, and perhaps she wasn’t. The two were married a week later. The young woman’s name was Sarah Barnard, and she came from a long line of South African white landowners, though she was rumored to be part-black. It would’ve been a big scandal if those rumors were ever confirmed, but they never were. Sarah Atkins nee Barnard was the perfect hostess at social gatherings, a great lover of animals and an amateur botanist whose private garden was an object of wide admiration. She was, despite all of that, not well loved. Women found her strange; men found her crass and unladylike; and babies of both sexes cried in her presence.
In 1926, Florida’s real estate market had begun to collapse, and many land developers like Thomas Atkins went bankrupt. Atkins didn’t. He died suddenly of an aneurysm a year prior, leaving his considerable fortune to his wife. Young, exotic and newly rich, she was expected to remarry. Instead, she moved to Pennsylvania and started building an amusement park, at the heart of which was a wooden roller coaster. The project was quite a success and would’ve made her even richer. But only five months after the construction was finished, widow Atkins sold the park, withdrew all of her late husband’s money from the bank and dropped off the face of the earth, along with the two weird friends she picked up somewhere. Soon after, the Great Depression hit. It was as if Sarah Atkins could see the future.
~~~~
Sam thought about Sarah Atkins and her roller coaster as he rode home, because that was better than thinking about Dad and stirring up the anger that never left him. Sam got curious when it turned out that the park was built by a woman in the 20s, and, once he looked her up, wondered what sort of name Barnard was. And there she was, in an old family portrait, in her white dress and holding a sun umbrella, tiny flowers in her hair and something vaguely unpleasant in her smile. The first time Sam saw her face, he felt a pinprick of déjà vu, but the feeling was too fleeting to catch. Perhaps she came up in some other research he’d done in the past, which was more the reason to suspect her.
He took a detour to avoid passing by the Westmorelands’ house.
Down the hill and far away, a freight train blew a whistle as it approached the town limits. Sam glanced that way and saw the train drawing in, on the outskirts of town that was shrinking and decaying from the outside with every year. There, among the dark silhouettes of houses, was a single light coming from the kitchen window where Dean was probably cooking dinner. Today, Sam could pretend that it was just the two of them and that Dad wasn’t going to show up and drag them off across the country. No. Don’t think about the white elephant.
The front door stood open.
Approaching the house from the side, Sam didn’t see it immediately but saw the rectangle of light falling on the porch from an open doorway, and for a second or two, he continued pedaling, thinking that Dean had seen him coming and opened it. But there was no shadow of a person, just an empty patch of light. Realization that something was wrong came like a flood of cold water, up from somewhere in Sam’s stomach and filling him instantly, making the breath catch in his chest. There was no shadow, and the door stood open. Now he could see a wet spot just past the threshold, where the rain had blown in.
Sam hit the brakes hard and half-jumped, half-tumbled from the bike in front of the house. The TV was on inside but otherwise everything was silent.
His first instinct was to run in through the front door, screaming his brother’s name, and Sam ignored it. He padded across the front yard, dropping his backpack along the way, and crouched underneath the kitchen window. From there, he could hear the TV better, but still no other sounds came. Sam peered over the windowsill into the kitchen. A pack of hotdogs was sitting on the tabletop, next to canned beans. It looked like Dean started pulling out food to make dinner but abandoned his task mid-way. The cans were heavy, good as an improvised weapon, and a large kitchen knife lay next to them. So Dean didn’t think he’d need weapons, or didn’t have a chance to grab any. Sam looked for moving shadows but saw none. A corner of the bathroom mirror was visible from where he was sitting. Nothing moved there either.
Fuck you, Dad, you should’ve been here, Sam thought, and was momentarily terrified by the intensity of the thought. He shook it off and tried to focus on what was in front of him – the apparently empty house and the dark yard where anything could be hiding.
Quietly, he slipped through the front door, looking for movement, listening for sounds of it. There was nothing. Sam’s heart was beating in his throat, too loud. The goddamn TV was too loud, too, but he didn’t dare turn it off. Whatever possessions he and Dean kept in the living room were all in place, nothing disturbed. Sam moved quickly into the kitchen and pulled a spare Glock from the drawer, checked the clip, pulled the slide back.
Dean’s boots stood by the door, and his jacket lay across the back of the couch, where he usually tossed it when he returned home. A round of the rest of the house showed it to be just as empty and undisturbed as the living room and the kitchen, so Sam grabbed a flashlight and headed back outside.
Somehow, in his initial hurry, he missed the flowers. Sam froze in the doorway now, staring at them in the front yard, clusters of tiny summer flowers on thick stems, growing in patches among the withering fall grass. In the light from the doorway, Sam saw that they were blue. Forget-me-nots, like the ones Sarah Atkins – Sarah Barnard – wore in her hair in that old photograph. They were surrounded by lush green grass, and when Sam kneeled next to one, he saw that the patches of it were shaped like human footprints, all the way across the lawn.
Sam didn’t need to follow the footprints to know where they led, but he noticed them as he pedaled out of town, toward the railroad tracks. Grass broke through the concrete sidewalk, nettles, flowers, mosses, all green and fresh among the yellowed October vegetation and on completely bald patches of land. There were green tendrils peeking out among the gravel on the railroad embankment. Sam pushed harder, half-blind on the unlit back road. Too many thoughts at once kept running through his head, like, No, and Dean, and Pater noster, qui es in caelis….
A wind rose and chilled the wetness on Sam’s face, rustled the foliage and carried a low moan from the amusement park. It sounded like eighty-year-old untended timber, or like a malformed old monster. Sam aimed his bike for the source of that sound.
The park was dark under the shade of trees, only partly lit by the moon showing through the clouds. Every shape was moving, every shadow alive now, and Sam cursed himself for being so stupid before, for running through this place like a dumb kid and not paying attention. Hibbie-jibbies, Dean had said. Haunted, Sam himself had thought. And still, he kept coming here, alone and with his friends and with his brother. Stupid, god, so stupid.
The highest loop of the roller coaster rose over the treetops, and moon shadows rolled down its tracks like ghost cars. But there wasn’t a body up there. Sam breathed a little easier. Those dead teenagers showed up all over the surrounding area, sometimes miles away, but maybe that was later. Maybe the first step was the high loop, like presenting your kill to the moon before devouring it.
Maybe it didn’t finish eating the twins, whatever it fed off in a human body, before the police took them away. What if it was pissed and still hungry?
Sam abandoned his bike where the broken road disappeared in the undergrowth, and proceeded on foot. He didn’t think the gun would do much, but its weight in the back of his jeans was reassuring. The low moan came again – the sound of a wooden frame swaying in the wind, almost like words. Heeeere, it said. Clooooser. Sam didn’t think it was talking to him.
“…the food isn’t the best in the country, I mean, not the kind I’d eat anyway. I hear they’re great with seafood, but hell, if it’s got scales or more than four legs, I’m not sticking it in my mouth, no sir.” It was Dean’s voice coming from a few feet away, and Sam felt a flood of relief. He was alive then, and conscious. “And it rains there, damn, it rains like nowhere else, ten months straight, swear to god. And when it doesn’t rain, it seems like it’s going to. Yeah, you’d rot there in under a year, buddy.”
Noooo, creaked the old timber, no rot-ta-ta-ta. The later sound came like a series of snaps, something giving in and breaking. Then again, Coooome.
Sam didn’t bother trying to be quiet since no one seemed to pay him any attention. He broke through the thicket of intertwined branches, guarding his eyes. The bushes left scratches on his hands and forearms. He emerged on the edge of a moonlit clearing near the platform, and there was Dean kneeling on the ground. Spring grass and summer flowers burst all around him. He looked unharmed, though his face was pale, and Sam saw the way he clenched his hands into fists. He was shivering visibly, dressed only in jeans and a thin shirt. His teeth clattered when he spoke.
“We lived there in Tacoma last year, and there was this chick, Mandy Something, with the biggest pair of tits. Real, too. I checked.”
The shadow of the roller coaster lay over the clearing like that of a sea serpent. It shifted, paled and sharpened again as the clouds rolled over the moon.
“Dean,” Sam hissed. And then louder, “Dean!”
Dean shot him a look, eyes crazed and dark shadows under them, and went on with his tale of food, weather and girls, which now shifted to Oregon.
Sam wondered what would happen if he just strolled across the clearing, under the loops of the roller coaster, and then he was walking on shaky legs, before he could even complete the thought. The flashlight quivered in his hand – he didn’t feel it but saw the way the light was jumping and jerking. His insides felt like jelly. His gun hand was probably shaking, too, but he thought that might be okay. What was a 9mm going to do to a target the size of a building? He walked, and waited for a crossbeam to fall on his head.
The roller coaster was chattering without pause now, calling and begging and threatening. Noooo, it moaned as Sam laid a hand on Dean’s shoulder. The ferns and the grasses retreated from him, hissing.
“No,” Dean echoed. “No, Sammy.” His skin was cold and wet from the rain.
“Come on, Dean. Let’s go home.”
Something huge shifted behind Sam’s back, sending shivers down his spine. He didn’t turn around. The enormous shadow flowed, and for a moment it didn’t look like a roller coaster at all, but then the moon hid behind a cloud again.
“Dean.” Sam dropped to his knees and held his Dean’s face between his palms. Dean stared at him like he couldn’t quite figure out what Sam wanted. “Dean, it’s me. Let’s go home.”
Deeeean.
Dean’s eyes shifted to it, and Sam slapped him. His hand stung, and the print of it burned on his brother’s face, bright on bloodless skin. “Look at me.” Dean squinted, trying to focus. “Look at me. Let’s go see the Impala. You wanna? Let’s go see Baby, she’s waiting for you.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, slowly. “Yeah, see her. I wanna.”
“Okay then, let’s go.” Sam twisted both hands in the front of his shirt and tried to lift him, but it was useless, Dean wasn’t moving, wasn’t even looking at him anymore. His eyes had shifted over Sam’s shoulder, to where something huge stood over the park. Sam tugged and pulled. “Come on, Dean. You have to.”
Coooome. Deeean.
Slowly, Sam turned around. The many spines of the roller coaster dragon were swimming in and out of focus, but Sam saw them moving very clearly. His gun might as well have been a fly swatter, for all the good it was going to do against the thing.
“You,” Sam stopped and swallowed, not sure what he was going to say to it, only that he needed to say something and buy time. “You hungry?”
Saraaaah, it said, Saraaaah.
“Sarah. Sarah made you hungry?”
It sighed, and Sam felt its breath like a blast of wind, smelling of rot and engine grease. Behind him, Dean started crawling toward the roller coaster on all fours, head hung low.
“No, no, no.” Sam caught him by the shoulders and felt how tense they were, every muscle hard like Dean was fighting for every inch. “Dean, don’t go to it. Come on, man.” But he couldn’t even get Dean to look at him.
Coooome.
It was starving, Sam thought, and before the line of thinking could register all the way, he had dropped the Glock and was grabbing for Dean’s knife, the huge thing he always carried with him. The roller coaster was left in the woods by its mother to starve, malformed, twisting the growth of everything around it, eating teenagers. It must’ve wanted something that was growing, unlike it, and teenagers were easier to catch alone than little children. The twins must’ve been dissatisfying. Now, for some reason, it wanted Dean, and it wasn’t going to let him go until it got something to eat. Sam pulled the knife out of its scabbard. The blade caught the moonlight with a sudden terrifying flash.
The thought of what he was about to do hit like a cement truck and almost made Sam drop the knife. He was still holding Dean back, but Dean was fighting the pull as well, and if Sam moved quickly, he could distract the roller coaster before Dean made it all the way to the tracks. He let his brother go and turned around.
“Hey, roller coaster!”
It was ignoring him, this huge thing, as it cooed and called to Dean. Sam pulled his right shoe off and then the sock, and set his bare foot in the mud. It was a big foot, fit for an adult man which Sam wasn’t yet. Sam saw with unbelievable clarity the tendons and the veins, and the five toes that – he just realized – he loved very much. They were his toes. He saw them curling almost involuntarily, sinking into the mud. His toes, a part of his body, something deeply and intimately his.
Sam grabbed his little toe and flexed it to find the pharyngeal joint. It had a tiny wrinkle over it. Jesus, this was going to hurt. He set his foot on a stone, swept the rainwater off his skin. His chest felt so tight that breathing was getting difficult. When he looked up for a moment, Dean had moved forward a couple of feet, and the shadow of the roller coaster almost covered him.
Sam looked at his little toe again, felt a pang of love for it, and positioned the knife – lightly, as to not scare himself prematurely with pain from a cut. The angle was awkward, and he wondered if it was going to make things worse. He took a deep breath. And then he pushed the knife down with both hands.
The pain was worse than he expected. It went all the way to his jaw like a blow. The pain was a blinding flash of red, and then there was blood on the stone and the little severed toe that had been his a second ago and wasn’t anymore. Sam clamped one hand over the wound, grabbed the toe, which was still warm, and tossed it at the roller coaster.
The blood had brought stillness to the woods, and now as the toe went flying through the air, Sam felt the monster’s attention shift away from Dean. He felt himself watched again, but only for a second, before his toe landed between the tracks. Something happened then that Sam wasn’t sure he saw properly. The spines shifted, the shadows collided, and with a great whooshing sound the roller coaster rushed into its own center, like many predators falling on a single piece of meat. But Sam blinked, and the wooden structure was still there. Only the shadows of its tracks made a twisting, growling pool over where the toe fell.
“Oh god.”
“Sam!” Dean was by his side in a second, grabbing him and pulling him up to his feet. “Let’s go, it’s—”
Sam had managed to forget about his toe, and when he put his foot down, the pain shot up his entire right side once again, making him scream.
“What?” Dean looked down, and Sam saw even in the dark the horror on his face. Sam didn’t offer an explanation, too busy compressing the bleeding and trying not to scream again. “Okay, okay, climb on my back.”
They left the park at half-run, with Sam riding on Dean’s back. Dean was still out of it, mumbling under his breath and shaking his head like he was trying to physically shake off the hypnosis, but he carried Sam out of the park. Sam held on, with his face pressed to the back of Dean’s head, and tried to deal with pain coming in throbs like waves rolling through his body. They made one quick stop once outside the park, to put on a bandage, then went on, moving as a single unit, each locked in his own head by pain and deep confusion. Dean mumbled as he walked, something incomprehensible about Montana, probably more of the same about food, girls and weather. Blah blah woods, blah blah, witch.
From behind them, the roller coaster called out. But it sounded like barely more than timber groaning.
Sam had his knees clamped tightly around Dean’s sides. He hoped that he wasn’t too heavy to carry, since he couldn’t possibly offer to walk on his own. He thought about the toe he left in the park, and about his brother he got out of there instead.
Blah blah duchess, blah blah, never. Never.
“Never, Dean,” Sam whispered. “Never, never. It’s okay.”
“Sam, I wouldn’t. You know that, right?” His speech was getting a little less slurred, but he was still shaking his head, like he hoped that his thought process would finally fall into place correctly.
Blah blah, moose, blah blah, dead.
Sam wanted to keep going. His fingers hurt from the cold and from gripping Dean’s clothes so tightly, but the thought of letting go even for a moment made him nauseated with terror. Dean didn’t show any indication of wanting to bolt and run back to the park, but what if he did it anyway? Sam could probably trip him and sit on him until dawn, when the roller coaster and things like it grew weaker.
They kept walking.
By the time they got back to the house, Dean had started to lose his voice, but he regained some sense. He moved and talked in a sleepy, confused manner, like a person coming out of anesthesia, but there was awareness underneath it. Sam could see in his face how hard he was trying to concentrate.
The house had grown cold in their absence, with the door left open. Sam climbed off and pushed Dean to the bathroom, where the window was too small to climb through if the sudden urge came over him again. He followed, hopping on one foot while the other one throbbed with every movement. There were pain pills in the bathroom cabinet, strong stuff that Sam hated taking, but he swallowed three now, wishing they had morphine around. Morphine would’ve been awesome.
Dean had wandered off and returned with some old jeans and sweaters. At least he had his mind back together enough to get tops and bottoms. He stood there for a moment, frowning at Sam, then gestured to the toilet. “Sit.”
Sam did. Watching Dean unwrap bandages, he had a childish urge to tell him not to touch. “We need to go to a hospital,” he said instead. He looked away when Dean took off the makeshift bandage, not ready to see it yet.
“Oh, man,” Dean said quietly. Sam clenched his teeth.
Dean worked, going on muscle memory more than conscious thought, and Sam heard him mumbling under his breath every few minutes. When he was done, he went back to the living room while Sam took a moment to get himself back together. Covered by a fresh dressing, his foot looked almost normal.
“Hey Dad,” Dean was saying in the living room, and Sam suddenly had to close his eyes. Your fault, all your fucking fault, you and your hunting. He thought for a moment that a vein was going to pop in his nose, so sudden was the surge of anger.
“…a little off, sorry. The roller coaster is what you’re hunting. Bring dynamite, come during the day. We’re leaving right now. Sam got hurt, but he’ll be okay. Meet us in Pittsburgh. Hey, good hunting!”
The pain killers had started working, and Sam must’ve fallen asleep for a minute, because the next thing he knew, there was a hand in his hair. He looked up.
Dean just smiled at him, and Sam forgot to breathe. The expression on Dean’s face was so ridiculously open, so happy and lovesick. Sam had seen mothers look at their kids like that, like they could die of love on the spot, like they had too much of it and didn’t know what to do with it. Dean never looked at him like that, not even when very, very drunk. In that minute, in the bathroom’s flickering light, with the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the leak in the kitchen, Sam felt like a small boy again who knew for sure he was loved and never questioned it, not from his brother and not from his father. It was an embarrassing, goofy smile, and Sam wanted to keep it for himself forever.
“I never tell you,” Dean said, voice hoarse from the cold, “but I really, really fucking love you, man. You know? I mean, not even like the duchess, but just you. I never tell you because of the duchess, but I do.”
Sam felt his ears turning red, something hot starting deep in his chest, too. “You’re going to be so embarrassed.”
Dean made a face at him and pretended to lock his lips and swallow the imaginary key. It’s been years since he’d done one of those pantomimes for Sam. Something kept burning hotter and hotter on Sam’s inside, until it was behind his eyes, until he realized that he might cry like a little girl.
They took the road south out of town, going further away from the abandoned park. Sam had a homemade cast on that let him move on his own, and he kept one hand twisted tightly in the sleeve of Dean’s jacket, in case the roller coaster called to him again. Sam walked with his thumb out, but the occasional cars passed them in a mist of rainwater without slowing down. Outside the town’s limits, Dean silently unclenched Sam’s fingers from his jacket. He didn’t talk, so Sam kept his mouth shut as well and only snuck occasional glances out of the corner of his eye. He could only see Dean’s profile in the dark, and it was calmer now, expression not closed but not open anymore either. Dean was locking himself down. And still, every time Sam looked at him, he felt that something rekindling again, that even heat that reminded him of red pepper or eucalyptus, only ten times stronger and right there in the core.
It was love, and it was loved, and Sam didn’t know why he ever questioned it.
Dawn found them at a bus stop in the middle of a woodsy nowhere, waiting for the first bus of the day to pull in. Dean had completely restored his mental function, judging by how quiet he was. He gripped Sam’s shoulder once two hours ago, in the dark, out of nowhere, scaring Sam shitless. Sam had mouthed, You’re welcome and that was the end of it.
Sam sat down on the ground with his back against the bus stop post and looked up at Dean, who was lighting a cigarette.
“Dad will kick your ass for smoking.” It was the first thing said between them since they left the house.
Dean shrugged, keeping his eyes on the trees across the road. “Don’t tell him.”
“I won’t. Let me try.”
“When you grow up, Sammy. These are bad for you.”
Sam snorted. “Yeah, like you’re so much older.”
Dean hesitated for a moment but offered his cigarette. Sam took it awkwardly, bumping his fingers against Dean’s, put it between his lips and inhaled.
“I don’t smoke that often.” Dean took the cigarette back while Sam was coughing. “Fucks up your breathing.”
“Hey, Dean.” Sam dragged in a lungful of fresh air and tried again. “Who is this duchess you kept talking about?”
Dean just looked at him funny. “What duchess? I was out of my mind there. Must’ve dreamed about someone. Look, there’s our bus.” He offered Sam a hand to help him off the ground. Looking up at him, Sam understood then, inexplicably, with the sense of a younger sibling, that Dean was lying. Dean was lying about a duchess.
“Come on,” Dean said. “ER for you, squirt.”
3.
Struggling with the weight of a watering can, Clementine shuffled into the greenhouse and stopped to catch her breath. Water was so heavy. She of all people should know – she had been carrying about a gallon in her lungs for ages and feeling the weight of it every day. Water was no good. Clementine wiped her forehead and stared down into the can. Maybe this was why Cutie Pie wasn’t growing. Maybe Cutie Pie didn’t like water either. But Sarah’s notebook clearly said “water three times a week”, and with Cutie Pie so weak, Clem and Betty didn’t dare deviate from the instructions. Just look at what happened to that roller coaster, Sarah’s first baby. Feed it white mice every night, she said, and only white mice. Then some imbecile of a construction worker went and left his unfinished ham sandwich on the tracks, and the baby ate it and grew all crooked. Not even Sarah could fix it after. One ham sandwich!
They did have to build the greenhouse over Sarah’s garden though, against the instructions, when Cutie Pie started to circle the drain for real.
Circle the drain! Clem chuckled, amused by the thought, and dragged the watering can across the earthen floor to Cutie Pie’s stem. It looked like an enormous bone fit for an elephant sticking out of the ground, and back when Sarah was alive it used to have that lovely pinkish-brown color of a living bone, pulsating with internal life and almost translucent. These days, it was more yellow, and dry as, well, a bone. Cutie Pie grew three inches since they buried Sarah in the garden all those years ago. And it used to make three inches per week!
Clem knocked on the stem. The sound was dull and dry. She kissed it and felt the coldness of it even with her dead lips. “Grow big, Cutie Pie,” she said.
Water, when she poured it, turned moist soil under Clem’s feet to mud. Cutie Pie hadn’t been drinking again. She finished pouring, then splashed ankle-deep back out of the greenhouse, dragging the now empty watering can along. At the door she stopped and looked back for a moment. Cutie Pie was just a stem, just a sad stem, and not a single joint appeared on it.
Clem left the watering can in the shed and, remembering at the last moment, washed her feet under a spigot. Betty would growl at her if she tracked mud through the house. Betty was always growling about something these days, and sometimes she bit, and then Clementine would hit her with a spatula, and then they’d be rolling on the floor, tearing out hair until they were out of breath, and no one would be there to drag them apart. Things were not the same without Sarah.
Betty was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. She looked up when Clem came in, and her eyes immediately travelled down. Clementine wiggled her clean toes and headed over to the fridge.
“How is it?” Betty asked behind her.
What a depressing question it was, and yet they both asked it, whenever the other got back from the greenhouse. Clem shrugged. “Not drinking.” She moved aside a milk bottle and poked at a halved squash in the back of the fridge. “We should measure it again soon. Ah!” A neglected jar of maraschino cherries was hiding behind the squash, with a few of the little darlings still floating in the fluid. Clementine pulled it out and stuck three fingers inside, trying to grasp a stem. “Listen, I was thinking. Maybe Cutie Pie doesn’t like water. I sure don’t. You think we’ve been watering it too much?”
Betty chewed her lip. By the look on her face, the thought had occurred to her as well. “I don’t know, Clem.”
“How much harm can we do if we go easy on the water?” She stuck a cherry in her mouth and spoke with the stem sticking out between her lips. “It’s not growing as it is. Here, you want?”
Betty eyed the offered cherries as if Clem handed her a frog, and shook her head. Clem shrugged, popping another one in her mouth. The cherries were dissatisfying on their own and left an overwhelming chemical taste on her tongue.
A sudden good thought struck Clementine. “You want ice cream?” She giggled. “You know, ice cream?” It was a code for ‘child’ that Clem started using and had been trying to get Betty to pick up. “I’ll drive to Missoula.”
She had the keys in her hand and was half-way out the door when Betty said, “Butter pecan.”
Clem rolled her eyes. The left one popped out. “Silly goose. I mean a kid.”
“No, Clem, ice cream. Butter pecan, or I’ll bite you.”
Clem waited. The silence stretched, and Betty still didn’t take it back. Oh god. Betty meant for them to actually go without meat, on top of the fights, on top of Cutie Pie hovering on the verge of death, on top of the leaky pipe in the basement, on top of the mice, on top of everything. “Really?”
“Really, Clem. Look at this.” She pushed the paper toward Clem across the table.
On the folded page was an article with a photograph of an entirely uninteresting middle-aged man. He was bald and had large glasses on, and looked exactly like Clementine imagined all bankers and accountants did. She traced her finger along the small print under the photograph, moving her lips as she read: Ge-rald “Lu-cky” Cai-ne. After that came too many long words. She tossed the paper back at Betty.
“You know I hate reading. What does it say?”
“It says that he died.” Betty made a pause, and Clem realized that she was supposed to react somehow, but she still had no idea who this banker-or-accountant type was. Betty bared her teeth at her. “Clem, you empty-headed parrot!”
Clem gasped. “Parrot?”
“That’s the pedophile guy. That’s the guy we’ve been hiding behind, the one that took the first girl.”
“Oh.” Three months ago, a toddler got kidnapped in Missoula. It was a big tragedy for the city, a big story for the papers, and a blessing for two lonely, hungry witches in the woods. Betty and Clem cooked up the plan together – take the kids and let the police blame it on the man they were already hunting. Betty, a huge CSI fan, even had the idea to take only girls of approximately the right age. Clem liked the taste of boys better, but she wasn’t about to get picky. They ate like queens in the five months that followed.
“Exactly, oh. He’s dead. The police found the first girl’s body, and they’re looking for the rest. We take any more now – they’ll know he didn’t take the others.”
Clem bit her lip. Lucky was staring at her from the newspaper. No more candy. No more sweet, sweet ice cream. The stupid asshole just had to go and die. “What happened to him?”
“He got shot. Some vigilante got to him probably, I don’t know.” Betty picked up a tiny cake fork she’d been playing with and scratched her scalp with it. “So that’s it, then. We’re back to one a year. Get butter pecan.”
Sometimes Betty could be a malicious bitch who just liked to suck the joy out of life. “The world is full of pedophiles. Remember how we looked at that sex offender registry? They’ll find somebody else to blame it on.” Betty narrowed her eyes. Clem took a deep breath and felt the stagnant water shift in her lungs. “Just some tasty treats. That’s all. What’s wrong with a bit of comfort when a girl needs it?”
Twenty minutes later Clementine stomped out of the house with a crumpled twenty in her pocket, wrapping a head scarf as she went to cover a missing patch of hair. She yanked the cake fork out of her arm, tucked the eyeball back into its socket, got into the car and slammed the door, to let Betty back at the house know how she felt. Butter pecan! What was butter pecan going to do for a broken heart?
The old Subaru didn’t want to start. Clem swore and pumped the gas pedal until the thing came to life. She wanted to tear out of the yard, but the road was narrow and the sun has set a couple of hours ago, so Clem drove slowly and boiled on the inside. Fucking Black Betty. If it wasn’t for Cutie Pie, if either one of them had the tiniest chance to raise him alone, they would’ve split years ago. And Cutie Pie had been half-dead for years. If only—
“No, no, no.” Clem shook her head and kissed the locket hanging around her neck with a tiny round bone inside. “No, baby, Clemmie didn’t mean that.”
The nearest store that could have butter pecan was forty minutes away, a Safeway sitting by itself in a huge and nearly empty parking lot. Clem left her car between two parking spaces just because she could, put on a pair of big round sunglasses that made her half-blind but hid her ghoulish eyes, and went inside.
Etta James was singing quietly on the intercom, and an elderly store employee swayed to the music as she restocked the shelves. A man stood in the beer isle with a phone pressed to his ear, frowning, lost to the world. Satisfied that no one was paying her any attention, Clem hurried to the freezers. Perhaps she could use one of those machines to pay and get out before—
Sarah.
Clem froze. It wasn’t a thought that passed through her head but rather a feeling, as if Sarah herself, twenty years dead, had reached out and touched the back of her head. It was something so long forgotten, so familiar and unexpected that it nearly brought tears to Clem’s eyes. It was the smell of milk and mosses, the taste of honey on her tongue, the warm touch of lips to her forehead. Clem stood in the isle and shook with the feeling and didn’t dare move, lest it went away. Then she turned around.
The man with the cellphone stood with his shoulders hunched like people always do when they want privacy in their telephone conversations. He looked like he’d been on the road for too long, going by the dusty leather jacket, the worn jeans and the way his left hand looked several shades darker than his right one. He looked tired, too. In passing, Clem noticed that he was handsome, just the type she would’ve liked to stare at any other night.
Tonight, she didn’t care if the stranger looked like a sewer troll or Prince Charming. He had Sarah all over him.
“What’re you doing, man?” he said into the phone. “Quit jerking off and pick up your phone. Whatever, I’ll get you tortilla chips.” He hung up and looked straight at Clem.
It was an awkward moment. Clem could see herself in the glass of the freezer behind him – an extremely pale woman with sunglasses covering half of her face. He could probably see himself reflected in her glasses.
The man sighed. “Look, lady—”
Clem turned and almost ran out of the store, dived into her car and moved as far down into the foot well as she could. There she waited. If Clem still had a beating heart, it would be hammering right now, but her heart was a shriveled-up plum, and so Clem sat in the dark and listened to the lake water sloshing, settling, inside her body. In her head was Etta James’s voice, running on loop: baby, baby, I’d rather be blind. On her tongue was the taste of honey.
“Sssh,” she told herself and kissed her locket for good luck. “Sssh, Clemmie.”
Then she waited for the man to come out of the store.
~~~~
Still, he checked his mirrors all the way to the motel. It’s been a long week.
The news channel was on when he got back. Sam had apparently just gotten out of the shower and got stuck to the TV mid-way through dressing. He was standing there in his sweatpants, frowning at the screen. He didn’t even turn around when the door opened. Dean threw the bag of chips at him, kinda hoping it would bounce off his head, because that would’ve been hilarious. But Sam caught it in the air, nodding “thanks”. Maybe next time.
“What are you watching?” Dean dumped the rest of the bags on the table and kicked off his boots.
“Maybe our case is a bust after all. Salsa?”
Dean tossed him the jar, and Sam sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV. Some things never changed. While he was busy opening the salsa jar, Dean sat down next to him and took the opportunity to steal the first handful of chips. The best ones were always at the top. He ate them slowly one by one, licking the salt off his fingertips. On the screen, a woman with beehive hair was talking.
“…following an anonymous phone call, found the body of Gerald “Lucky” Caine, a registered sex offender wanted on suspicion of kidnapping of six girls in the Missoula area over the past five months. He was hiding in an abandoned house, where a body was found buried in the backyard. The police hasn’t confirmed anything, but the speculation is…”
“Good old humans,” Dean said.
Sam was giving him a puzzled look. “How do you eat them just like that?”
“Who?”
“The chips.” He offered the opened jar to Dean. “Don’t you want salsa?”
“Nah. Better this way.”
They sat side by side on the floor, staring at the TV, and methodically went through the bag of chips. The channel was a local one, not many stories to report, and this had been a major one in the area. The reporter was giving it a good long coverage, going into Lucky Caine’s biography, in the best traditions of all news stories like this one that loved to focus on the killer. Dean got sick of the asshole’s face after the first thirty seconds and studied Sam out of the corner of his eye instead.
“I don’t like it,” Sam said when the commercials started.
Dean snorted. “Six dead kids – what don’t you like?”
“Six, that’s my point. That’s a lot in five months for one guy. I told you in Ohio, when we first found the case, remember? That’s a lot.” Sam believed in his theory more and more as he spoke, and now he forgot the TV. He had that spark in his eyes. And all Dean wanted was to eat the chips and not talk about pedophiles right before bed.
“Look,” Sam went on, “this guy—”
“Lucky.” Fucking ridiculous how they kept calling the dude by his nickname.
“Whatever. This guy behaved himself for ten years. Then wham – six kids in under half a year? The police got a description from the first kidnapping. He went into hiding – why didn’t he stay down? And no one has seen anybody like him around the other five before they disappeared. And there is only one body.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Sam, what the hell, you’re Lucky’s defense attorney now? So he buried the other five better. The cops aren’t even done searching yet.”
“Okay. Maybe he did. What about everything else I just said?”
Dean thought it over, staring at the mole by Sam’s nose because it was a good place to fix his eyes and it made Sam squirm funny. Hell, six kids was a lot for one pervert in such a short time. “You might have a point.”
The news story went on. Dean couldn’t care less, and Sam had stopped paying attention as well. “So,” Dean said, “another pervert or one of our usual clients? If it’s one of ours, it’s gotta be smart, right? Smarter than your average grab-and-eat. It found just the guy to blame it on, followed his pattern and everything.”
Sam picked that thought right up. “And if it’s ours, there might be an old pattern of disappearance in the area.” He got up. “I’ll look.”
“Dude, it’s one in morning.” But Sam was powering up his laptop already. “Fine. You do that, and I’m gonna take a shower.”
Hot water felt good after a long day and a long week. Dean was determined not to think of pedophiles, or child-eaters, or their disgusting hunting habits. He thought about Dr. Sexy instead, focusing on the non-existent Seattle Grace he may or may not have looked for on a map once, and the cowboy boots, and the sexy but difficult—
Do it, Sarah.
Hot water was still pounding on Dean’s shoulders, but his entire body had gone cold, except for the weird, bad sort of warmth that went crawling through his head, spreading inward. He took a few deep breaths, almost having to force them in while his heart beat too fast. Goddammit. Stop it right now. But the tiny panic attack went on as the warmth spread through his head and made him shiver.
The woods, and the snow, and the orange brew bubbling away below the window, smelling like curry. He could hear the song in his head: oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. There was an old pattern in the area alright. He thought of the roller coaster then, and of something he had seen but didn’t fully register until much later – Sam putting a knife over his toe, both hands over the blade, pausing for a second to collect his courage.
“Hey,” Sam called from the room. “You alright in there?”
How did he even know? Dean jumped a little, but Sam’s voice was grounding, pulled him back into the real world. “I’m fine, dude.”
He fell asleep fast that night and dreamed of something awful that he only remembered for a moment when he woke up in the depth of the night.
~~~~
Something was in the room.
Sam felt a sudden rush of cold down his spine, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up straight. The fear was paralyzing for a moment as he imagined, involuntarily, masked men with rifles, a vampire, a demon, one of the hundreds of things that liked to hunt at night. He concentrated on keeping his breathing even but felt sweat breaking. Then came the sound: quiet dry rustling. Slowly, Sam opened his eyes.
He didn’t see anything at first, just Dean sleeping on his stomach with one leg sticking out from under the covers, arms folded under the pillow. Sam was trying to see the bathroom door out of the corner of his eye when the rustling sound came again and the covers moved on Dean’s thigh. What Sam had taken for a fold rose up and became a long flexible neck – no, a long body with triangular head. A huge black snake was standing up between Dean’s knees, and its scales sliding against one another made that sound as its body uncoiled. The snake seemed to stretch, readjusted itself, and lowered its head to the back of Dean’s leg.
“Dean!”
Sam fell out of bed and punched the snake for lack of better ideas, a second before Dean rolled off his own bed, knocking Sam off his feet. They landed in a pile. Sam’s elbow struck the nightstand and went numb. Dean was swearing, tangled up in the covers, and Sam couldn’t see the snake, couldn’t figure out if it was still on the bed or on the floor with them.
“What, Sam, what, where?”
“Shut up!”
There was a hiss so low it almost sounded like a growl, and Sam saw a dark shape make a dash for the bathroom. It must’ve been six feet long. It disappeared inside the bathroom, and soon after came a splash of it diving into the toilet.
They sat still for a moment, both breathing heavily, and waited. Waves of crawling sensation kept rolling down Sam’s arms, over and over again. Finally, Dean got up, grabbed a gun from under the bed and headed for the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway to turn the light on. Sam couldn’t see inside, now that Dean was blocking the way, but the snake must’ve been gone because Dean kept his gun pointed at the floor. He dropped the toilet lid down and quickly stepped away.
“Now I want to sit on it all night, but I also don’t, you know?” He gave Sam a crooked smile. “Dilemma.”
Sam checked under both beds for more snakes, but there were only dust bunnies. He pulled himself up to the bed and sat waiting, letting his heart settle down. Dean had dragged a chair into the bathroom and was trying to set it on the toilet lid.
“It’s too light,” Sam said.
“I guess.” Dean made a face and gave the chair a little push. It fell off. “Damn. I hate snakes, you know.”
“I know.”
Just then Dean turned around, and Sam saw, at the back of his knee, something that made his breath catch. A small trickle of blood was running down his calf, from two puncture wounds. “Dean.”
“You’ve always had a hard on for them. I remember. Always—”
“Dean! You’re bleeding.” Sam was off the bed and dropped to his knees where Dean was standing, to grab his leg and hold it still. Dean immediately tried to twist around. “Stand still, dammit!”
“Shit. Is that a bite?”
Sam looked up and saw his face, unevenly lit by the bathroom light. Dean’s eyes looked huge. His hair was standing up straight on one side where he had his head against the pillow. Sam had a sudden feeling of déjà vu wash over him, and thought that he’d give anything – all of his toes, his hands, his heart, his head – for Dean not to be taken away again.
“Come on.” He grabbed the car keys and pulled Dean to the door. “Come on, we’re going to a hospital.”
Dean didn’t object to him driving the car but sat quietly in the passenger seat all the way, squeezing his thigh over the bite site and frowning at the road ahead. He mumbled something when Sam took a turn too fast, and once said, “Man, they won’t have fucking cobra antivenom at the Good Samaritan, or whatever it’s—.”
Sam said, “Shut up.”
The county hospital was a small two-story building, looking lonely in a parking lot that was mostly empty at this time. Sam spotted the bright red sign of the emergency room and headed that way, but Dean slapped his shoulder. “Stop here. We’re not going in there before shit hits the fan. Sam!”
“Fine.” Sam stopped the car twenty feet away from the emergency room and shut off the engine. Dean had gotten his leg up on the dashboard and was trying to study the bite marks. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.”
“You should’ve felt something by now, right?”
Dean shrugged, still poking at the back of his knee. “Fucked if I know. We wait.”
They waited. Ten minutes went by, measured by the ticking of Sam’s wristwatch that he was acutely aware of. A nurse came outside the emergency room and stood there for a few minutes, smoking and looking at them. Sam waved. The nurse waved back, finished her cigarette and went back inside. A feeling of great relief had started to creep over Sam. He squashed it out of superstitious fear, but it came back again, making his hands shake.
“I think it drank my blood,” Dean said. “I’m a little lightheaded. Shit, man, I don’t even have any pants on.”
That was funny, unexpectedly. Sam laughed briefly and surprised himself by it. It was probably just the relief.
“Lend me yours?” Dean said. “Come on, Sam, you got to wear pants on the drive here. It’s my turn.”
“Get out of the car and let me look at the wound.”
“The nurses are gonna look at us funny.” But he got out and stood by the passenger door with his arms folded on the roof. Sam took some time to make sure his hands had stopped shaking while he got out their first aid kit and a flashlight.
The two puncture wounds on the back of Dean’s knee didn’t look very deep. It was as if the snake knew to go just deep enough to get the vein. Surgical work for a big animal like that. Sam poured a little water on a piece of gauze to clean off dried blood, and felt a muscle in Dean’s leg jump at the contact. He washed carefully around the wound, which didn’t look inflamed, he was glad to see.
“I saw some strange chick at the store last night,” Dean said. “Gave me the hibbie-jibbies.”
“Yeah?” Sam took the gauze away and waited to see if the wound was going to bleed more, but it didn’t. He wetted another piece of gauze with peroxide and started swiping the site.
“She was pale, but I guess normal otherwise. She had these huge sunglasses on in the middle of the night. She just stared at me and ran away. I thought she was….”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Admiring you. You thought she was admiring you.”
“Hey, that’s happened before!”
“Sure.” Sam covered the bite mark and stared at the white square at the back of Dean’s leg, too exhausted to think. He couldn’t figure out if it was okay to leave now, or if they should wait some more for some delayed reaction. Dean kept going on about women – a clear sign that he was alright. Sam closed his eyes and pressed his face against the back of Dean’s thigh, and kissed it above the bite. Dean’s skin was warm and a little sweaty from the leather seat. Sam squeezed Dean’s thigh, felt his fingers digging into the muscle, and suddenly he was hard, in the hospital parking lot at three in the morning.
Dean had fallen silent. When Sam opened his eyes and looked up, Dean was staring down at him over his shoulder. It’s been long, he thought, way too long since they’d done this – the nastiest, dirtiest, best thing they had between them, and Sam had missed it.
He said, “You drive.”
Dean didn’t take the car back to the motel but went the opposite way, until there were no lights of human habitat and only yellow road signs flashed out of the dark whenever the headlights hit them. Sam picked at a cuticle and wondered if Dean was headed for Canada. There was tension and longing in his entire body that made him restless. Finally, Dean picked some unmarked dark lane he liked, and Sam started pulling his shirt off before the car stopped. He couldn’t see Dean anymore, but he could hear him breathing and felt his body heat.
Dean’s hands were on the waistband of Sam’s training pants, pushing them down, fingers burning against his skin, and then Sam had a wild suspicion hit him. “Dean, I swear, if you’re just trying to steal my pants, I will kick you in the fucking ear.” Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Not giving Dean a chance to argue, Sam found the back of his neck and pulled him into a hard kiss and shoved his hand down Dean’s shorts but missed in the dark and scraped at his thigh.
“Almost put my eye out just now with all that face-grabbing, you freak,” Dean said when his mouth was free again.
Sam thought, You’ll live, licking a trail up Dean’s neck and feeling the intake of breath against his tongue.
~~~~
“Ssh. I’m awake.”
Sam shifted a little on the bed to get closer. They got a king this time, because it was more difficult to fall asleep that way and easier to keep an eye on one another. It would also be easier to grab Dean and hold him down if he tried to escape. Sam had some extra plans for tonight. “So I thought it would be a good idea to know what we’re up against.”
Dean, lying on his stomach, lifted his head enough to give Sam an incredulous look. “Sam. We’re on a fucking stakeout. Can this wait?”
No, because I don’t think you’d talk to me unless it’s in the dark. He said, “The snake probably isn’t coming tonight anyway.”
“Yeah? You’re a snake mind-reader now?”
“Probably doesn’t speak any English.”
“Fuck me.” Dean pressed a hand over his eyes. “Doesn’t speak any English? Seriously?”
“Dean, I need to know about the snake. I’m hunting it with you, so you don’t get to keep secrets.”
“What secrets? What makes you think I know anything about the snake?”
“Who’s Sarah Barnard?”
Dean went very still, if only for a second, and Sam thought, Ah. He felt the anger then, creeping in slowly around the corners, thickening. It wasn’t just Sam’s imagination after all. Dean knew, he’d known for a long goddamn time, and he didn’t even say anything. Sam had half-hoped that he was wrong, but there it was now, some secret he didn’t know existed, betrayed by the tiniest catch in his brother’s breath. He clutched a sheet in his fist and waited. It was weird – lying this still when he kinda wanted to drag Dean off the bed and have nice fight just about now.
“Who?”
“I was looking for that pattern today, and guess whose name came up? Sarah Barnard. Remember that roller coaster in Pennsylvania that wanted you, even though you didn’t fit its pattern?”
Dean sighed. His head was still turned the other way, and Sam wanted to grab it, make him look. “Sam, we’re on a stakeout. I really want to get this snake, because I’d like to get some sleep for real sometime soon. Can we talk about it later?”
“The snake, exactly. The snake that, I’m pretty sure, is connected to the child disappearances in the area all the way from 1988, unless you and I just stumbled upon some supernatural convention. And if it’s connected to that, it’s connected to Sarah Barnard, and for some reason to you, just like that roller coaster that almost killed you back then. You don’t get to keep this shit from me now, man.”
Dean was quiet for a long time. Sam listened to the wind outside and waited. Not a sound came from the bathroom. Sam could only hope that he didn’t ruin the hunt, that the big black snake wasn’t somewhere in the dark, listening. In the end, the information would be worth it. Out of nowhere, for the first time in years, the thought came to him about Kipling’s Chuchundra, the muskrat that crept along the wall all night, believing that he was safer from the snakes if he didn’t run into the center of the room. Sam imagined that snake in the dark now.
“Sarah was a witch,” Dean said, “but she’s been dead a long time. There were two others with her. Dad went after them, but either he couldn’t get them or only believed that he did. He never told me.”
“So Dad killed Sarah, and the other two want revenge?”
Dean shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know what the deal was with the roller coaster, I swear.”
“Why you and not me?”
“I don’t know. You were five or something back then. Maybe they didn’t recognize you. Can we hunt some snakes now?”
“It’s not here.”
“Yeah, and it’s never going to be unless you shut up.”
Sam kicked him under the blankets. “We don’t drag each other blind into a case, Dean, and you should’ve told me about Sarah. Who’s that duchess of yours?”
Dean lifted himself on his elbows. The look on his face that made Sam think they might get into that fight tonight after all, snakes be damned. “What.” The way he said it wasn’t a question.
Sam met his eyes in the dark. “I grew up with you, Dean. Every time you’re out of your head, it’s duchess this and duchess that, and then you lie about it. Who or what is the duchess?”
“That,” Dean said slowly, like he was holding back, “that has fuck all to do with anything and is none of your business.”
Sam could push it, and then there would be a fight for sure. Dean might smash Sam’s nose into the floor, or Sam might end up sitting on Dean’s head, but in either case, the subject of the duchess would be closed forever. “Okay,” Sam said. Dean was still glaring at him. “Okay then. I’ll leave it alone.”
Dean lay back down and hugged his pillow, gripping the knife under it. The room was silent again, with the wind rustling in the trees outside. Sam waited ten minutes to let Dean cool off and dropped a hand on his back – a silent apology and a ‘thank you’. Dean’s muscles were tense. Sam rubbed circles over his shoulder blades until he relaxed, until he stopped radiating fury so strong that the snake could probably feel it in the sewer pipes, wherever it was.
The time was past five, the night almost over, when a soft splash came from the bathroom. Sam wasn’t drifting off but wasn’t entirely focused either, and the sound brought him back to reality like a slap. For a minute or two, everything was still, then came more splashing, and something wet slid out of the toilet bowl. Sam looked at Dean across the bed. Dean winked at him and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. Give the man a hunt and a toilet snake – and he’s happy. Sam closed his eyes as well and listened.
Something large went dragging through the salt ring, crystals scratching against the floor. The ring was there for show more than anything else, but now that the night visitor had crossed it, Sam became convinced that it was a witch – one of Sarah’s friends, still human enough to not be repelled by salt.
If they were of human intelligence, it made no sense that they wouldn’t know that Sam was also John Winchester’s son. It made no sense that they’d been out for revenge for twenty years and never researched John’s family.
The snake made its way into the room and stopped in the bathroom’s doorway. Sam squeezed the gun under his pillow and focused on keeping his breathing slow and even. Next to him, Dean was faking sleep remarkably well. The snake made some noise, a lot like a chuckle, and Sam thought, The bed. She knew they were brothers, she had to. The snake slithered across the floor, closer and closer, her belly scales making a dry rustle against the linoleum. She passed under the bed. Sam felt tingling along his spine and in the tips of the fingers as the long thick body dragged on so close below him. In his mind’s eye, he could see the snake flicking her tongue to feel the air. She lifted herself up and onto the bed – Sam felt the way the mattress dipped under the added weight. She must’ve crawled right over Dean’s leg. Fucking nerves of steel. Then the snake was up on the bed, and Sam was momentarily afraid that Dean had actually fallen asleep. The snake did keep him asleep that last time.
“Hey, Black Betty,” Dean said.
Sam pulled the gun from under the pillow, taking aim by the hissing at the snake’s head raised above the mattress, and he pulled the trigger before he was fully oriented in the dark. He saw the snake’s open mouth in the flash when the gun went off, her long teeth and her venom glands. The bullet went through the snake’s head and threw her body backward on the floor, where it lay still.
Somebody had fallen off their bed in the next room, and there was the familiar panicked commotion behind the wall. Dean switched on the bedside lamp to check that the snake was dead. “Nice shot, Sammy. Let’s go.”
They wrapped the body in a garbage bag, in case she was going to turn human again after death and get the police particularly interested, and hurried to the car. Back on the road, they heard the sirens approaching, but the sound disappeared in the distance soon, when the police car turned into the motel’s parking lot. With the windows rolled down, the car was a wind tunnel. Dean laughed and slapped Sam on the shoulder, looking like a maniac with a blood splatter on the side of his neck. And all Sam could think was, Black Betty.
~~~~
Rip your tongue out? Dad said. Did your brother read you a scary book?
Rip his tongue out, knock his teeth out, kick him in the stomach until he was dead – that was Black Betty of Sam’s early childhood. She was vicious, though he didn’t know the word then. She was a mean lady-dog that waited in the dark. She was a figment of his imagination, and he had forgotten all about her until Dean called the black snake by her name.
~~~~
At eight, Clem made a round of the house, pausing at the door of Betty’s bedroom to peer inside, in case she somehow sneaked in. She walked twice through every room, marveling at how her footsteps sounded in isolation. This was new. This was nothing like the misery of losing Sarah, but this was interesting. Different. Unexpectedly, one could say it even stung a little.
Around nine, when the sun was up, Clem finally switched on the tiny black-and-white TV set in the kitchen. What she was looking for turned out to be a brief mention on the local news station: shots fired at the Mountain View motel last night. A pool of blood found on the floor in one of the rooms wasn’t human. The police were investigating. Clementine switched off the TV and stood in the middle of the kitchen, listening to the overwhelming silence of the place that was now entirely hers.
“Free!” The echo carried her voice around the house. Clem threw her arms open and whirled on the spot. “Free! Free!”
First, Clem put on music, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” on an old turntable. She turned it up until the wondrous voice of Mama Cass rang through every room. Next, she pulled from the fridge the remainder of the blood Betty brought back the night before, mixed it into water and went down to the greenhouse. Cutie Pie had come back to life. Clem paused to admire the changes brought by the little blood laden with Sarah’s spellwork. The brown-red color was back in the bone. Cutie Pie had grown an elbow and half a forearm, with a single dose of blood. Who even knew how much of it had grown under the ground? It was beautiful, Clemmie’s little pumpkin. Sarah sure had a touch for growing beautiful things.
“Clem’s gonna take good care of you,” she told it as she poured the bloody water into the soil. “Call me mommy, baby buns.”
So maybe those kids knew now, Clem thought later as she powdered her face and wrapped a silk scarf over her head. It was bound to happen eventually. Betty called them witch hunters the first time she saw them in her dreams. So maybe Clem couldn’t turn into a big snake and creep into their room to drink the older one’s blood at night, to feed to Cutie Pie. Oh well. Clem shrugged and winked at herself in the mirror before putting on a large pair of sunglasses that she imagined made her look like Audrey Hepburn a little bit. Clem wasn’t planning on crawling through the sewers for a pint of blood. She could get the whole boy to come running to her doorstep, carrying Sarah’s touch in his flesh. She made him run to her in 1988, if unintentionally.
For the first time in decades, Clementine headed out of the house in the daylight, to look for Sam Winchester.
~~~~
Fuck.
He was lying on wooden floor of a dimly lit room. Sam blinked a few more times, but the light didn’t improve. The keys in his pocket were jammed into his hip uncomfortably. He tried to straighten his legs and hit a wall. Not good. There were vertical metal bars in front of him, sunk into the floor. Sam reached out and grabbed one, missing on the first try. His arms felt shaky, too heavy and uncoordinated. He held onto the bar and waited for the room to focus, for his own thoughts to stop squirming and getting tangled up. The room he was in appeared to be a large kitchen, judging by the work table in the middle and an array of pots and skillets hanging from the ceiling above it. The light and the music were coming from somewhere down the hallway, but where from Sam couldn’t see from this angle. There was also a back door and a window by it, which was dark. So it was nine twenty at night, and Sam was out for several hours.
Sam got up on his knees, holding onto the bars, and almost brained himself on the roof of the cage. He was locked inside a niche in the wall, large but not large enough for a grown man. He twisted around until he could sit and gave the bars an experimental kick. They held.
He took a look around the kitchen from the new angle and felt an unpleasant tug somewhere under the diaphragm. It looked familiar. It looked like someplace he’d seen before, and a bad place, a place that was larger the last time he was here.
A woman popped her head around the corner. He hadn’t heard her coming. They stared at each other for a minute, he craning his neck up and she tilting her head to the side. The woman had river grass tangled up in her dirty blonde hair, her eyes were milky, and her chest and neck bore patches of decomposition. Sam felt that odd jolt again and knew for sure that he’d seen her before.
“Hi, pumpkin!” She waived, coming into the kitchen. “Remember Clemmie?”
Sam wasn’t sure what to answer, so he kept quiet. The woman squatted before the cage. She looked even worse close up, and Sam caught a whiff of river mud and rot, weak but noticeable. A small fish fell from between her legs and flopped on the floor, which she ignored. Clemmie, he though. Clem. Clementine? With the name came the thought of Black Betty again, the way she was in his childhood nightmares.
The woman wagged her finger at him. “I’m not putting anything in that cage with you this time, oh no.”
“I guess we’ve met. I’m Sam.”
“I’m Clementine. Remember me?” She stuck out her index finger, which looked like the upper half of it had been roughly reattached with thick thread. “My poor finger has never been the same again.”
Something resurfaced briefly, a memory of a memory – of being locked in a cage like a circus animal from old movies, and of a dead woman wagging a finger at him. Except that was just a bad nightmare, wasn’t it?
“You’re Sarah’s friend,” he said, and then, because the name also brought a face, “the mushroom witch.”
She pursed her lips. “Yeah, that was Sarah. Thanks to your daddy, now it’s only me and Black Betty. Oh wait.” She got up and stomped off to the stove, dusting off her skirt. “Betty who?”
Sam found a more or less comfortable position with his back against the wall. He couldn’t stretch his legs all the way, but it was good enough for now. He could see the edge of Clem’s skirt as she moved by the stove, making tea. “Lucky for you,” she went on, “I’m not a mean person. Betty only got what she deserved.” She’d been stirring sugar into her tea, and now the spoon stopped and Clementine made a tiny sniffling noise.
“You miss her? I bet someone misses their baby somewhere.”
She kicked the bars. It tore off her toenail. Clementine paid no attention and sat down at the table with her mug of tea that said St. Catherine’s University School of Nursing. Somewhere outside glass shattered.
“So,” Sam said quickly. “Here we are. What now?”
“Now we wait for your brother to show up for you again, silly goose. I suppose you heard that window breaking. That was probably him.”
So much for a surprise. But then again, Dean wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t going to count on surprise alone. Just then another memory came back, something about a rescuer being turned into an animal, though Sam was unsure if it really happened or if some old fairytale got mixed up into everything.
“Boy, am I ready for him,” said Clementine and wriggled her eyebrows. “Has Clemmie got someone for you two to meet!”
Someone to meet? “There’s nothing like good old revenge. My dad knew all about that.”
She spat on the floor with a globe of gray-green mucus. “Revenge is for stupid men like your dad. Me, I’m busy. Got a baby to raise.”
There was a sound of breaking glass from outside again. She heard it and rolled her eyes at it. Sam had a sudden chilling realization that he and Dean both never had a stellar record of cunning rescue attempts. The witch had said something about a baby. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re a great mother.”
“As a matter of fact I am, mister! Do you know that he almost died? A lesser woman would’ve taken him to the compost pile.”
“Compost pile?”
Clementine thumped her chest with a fist for emphasis. “But not I! I watered him three times a week for twenty years. It’s not my fault I can’t grow things like Sarah. And now I’m sitting here, all alone, waiting for a big thug like that brother of yours to show up – all for Cutie Pie.”
How do you get like this, Sam wondered. How do you eat a kid each year, and five in five months, then get offended when someone questions your mothering skills?
“You brother is taking all night,” Clementine complained, swinging her feet. “I do hope he’s not going to break all my windows.”
There had to be a reason for all the noise. Dean must’ve known he’d be heard inside the house. “Since we’re waiting anyway, will you tell me something? Who’s the duchess?”
She looked puzzled at first, but then she made a small sound and her face changed to an expression of happy amazement. All of a sudden, Sam wanted to take it back. The thing he wondered about for years, some secret his brother kept close, was finally in front of him, and Sam didn’t want to know it. He had asked on a whim, to keep her from paying too much attention to whatever Dean was doing in the yard.
“Wait,” he started to say, “it’s not—”
“But that’s you. You’re the duchess.” She gave him a toothy rotting smile. “It was the last thing Sarah did before your dad, that big stinker, killed her. That’s why your brother’s blood has been so good for Cutie Pie. Sarah planted a seed in his head.” Clementine tapped her own head with a tip of her finger. There was a noise of breaking branches near the house, but neither Clementine nor Sam paid it any attention. “We wanted to make him fall in love with someone embarrassing, and then Betty suggested you, and Sarah—”
The kitchen door came crashing in, ripped off the hinges by a great blow from the outside. Clementine shrieked and fell off the chair when a skeletal arm reached into the house, knocking down furniture. It must’ve belonged to a creature forty feet tall. Wetly gleaming deep musculature was clinging to the bones, with ropes of new nerves and vessels twisting over it and through it. Clementine yelled something at the arm that Sam couldn’t hear behind the crashing of furniture and dishes raining down from shelves. She threw her arms open as if to greet the monster, and the skeletal hand grabbed her and squeezed. Sam heard bones break, so many at once. The arm retracted through the doorway, taking the witch’s body with it. In the yard, great jaws snapped and started grinding.
Sam had backed further into the cell and couldn’t see out the window anymore. The creature made a disappointed wail. Somewhere in the woods, dozens of birds rose into the air, crying, disturbed by the sound. Where the arm had been before, a portion of a dirt-covered face appeared in the doorway. Its muscles were almost complete and covered with translucent skin that gave that face a deep red color. Hair was growing on the scalp in uneven patches, hanging long and matted. The creature turned its head this way and that, trying to fit it through the door. In his cage by the stove, Sam tried to stop breathing. The creature drew a sharp breath through its nose – once, twice, sniffing the air. Its face disappeared, and the arm reached inside again, looking for the cage.
~~~~
Dean looked down at the gun in his hand. It could probably make a hole in an artery if he managed to hit it somehow.
The monster dropped down to its hands and knees and jammed its face right up to the doorway, sniffing. It looked delighted and reached inside again, and Dean couldn’t just stand there anymore, had to do something, anything, because Sam was inside and maybe unconscious.
“Okay,” Dean told himself, “okay.”
He went into the clearing at half-run with the machete, looking for a weak spot to hit. There was a rush of crazy energy pumping through his body, getting stronger. The wind changed, and Dean caught a lungful of the creature’s smell – thick and meaty, clogging. Dumb, greedy fucker, Dean thought. If it was him, he would’ve stayed in the ground until he grew some real skin, but these things, these child-eaters, always stomach over mind….
The creature screamed and yanked its arm back out. One of its fingers was broken off, hanging by the tendon. And Dean was already there, enough crazy energy in him that the monster didn’t look so big anymore. The thing shook its hand in the air with the broken finger flapping. Its foot was right in front of Dean, big as a tree trunk, and there, open to the air, were shiny white tendons attached to the heel bones, with clots of dirt stuck between them.
“Fuck yeah, Sammy!” And he brought the machete down hard on the Achilles tendon. As it went down, he had a brief mental image of the blade bouncing off, but it was a sharp weapon aimed at a good angle, and the tendon snapped.
The creature made a sound – not so much enraged monster as an upset baby that almost made Dean burst out laughing. It twisted its head, looking for what hit it, but Dean had moved on, saw a tendon stretched under its knee and went for that one. It snapped off, an artery that got in the way splashed Dean with blood, and monster tilted sideways, spread its arms trying to catch balance, but its knee wasn’t holding anymore. Dean saw it waver, saw the moment when its weight shifted too far and thought, for one heart-stopping moment, It’s going to fall on the house. But it didn’t. The monster threw itself back to stop the fall, overcompensated and crashed backward instead.
Way to go, dude. Now he can crawl after you. Dean wiped the blood out of his eyes with a sleeve and went after the fallen monster again. He wanted to get his gun but didn’t think he had time to do it. He wondered if the tendons had dulled the blade. But if he stopped to think for a second now, if he stopped moving, either the monster would get him or his own fear would. He could see John Winchester suddenly, explaining the basic rules of going up against monsters. Move fast and don’t hesitate. Dean dove under a flailing arm, skidded through the dirt and came within a foot of a great snapping jaw that looked like it could break his spine in half like a toothpick. Strands of blonde hair were caught between the monster’s teeth – the hair of a woman who raised the dumb, evil shit. Dean saw that he couldn’t chop that head off, not with a machete, so he hit what he could see – vessels, tendons, ropes of muscle, cartilage rings of the trachea. Blood went up in a fountain, and Dean couldn’t see his targets any longer.
The creature roared, wheezed and gurgled, flailing its arms and shaking its head. Dean felt like he was caught in an earthquake, when the sense of up and down was gone and everything was shifting, crashing and shaking. He didn’t know where to run anymore, couldn’t see anything but movement. The smell of blood was overwhelming. The mud was turning into a swamp under his feet. Dean jumped aside to avoid a hand falling on him from the sky and got tangled in the monster’s hair.
It was never going to die. He hurt it and pissed it off, and it was never going to die.
Ages passed, and the struggling grew weaker. The monster scraped at its throat a couple of feet away from where Dean was trying not to move, caught in the hair. The huge skeletal hand with its broken finger twitched one final time and fell limp. The wheezing stopped.
~~~~
Sam felt a slight shake start in his shoulders and gripped the lock tighter.
The birds and the frogs had been quiet, scared by the noise the monster made. Then a single frog croaked. Then another one. Sam strained his hearing and waited. A sound came from the yard, like mud squelching. The frogs were getting started up for good again, and Sam wished they’d shut the hell up. That sound came again – footsteps, like those of a person, not the earth-shuddering walk of a monster. And then Dean stood in the ruined doorway, looking like something out of a horror flick. Dirt mixed with blood covered his clothes and face, and he was grinning. He looked like a monster-killer, like a big brother.
“Ding-dong,” Sam said – the first thing that popped into his head, “the witch is dead.”
Dean crossed the kitchen in three seconds, jumping over broken furniture, and kneeled before the cage. He reached inside and grabbed Sam’s shoulders, pulling him in. Sam had dropped the fork to take a fistful of Dean’s jacket. He let his face get smashed to Dean’s chest between the bars, sat there breathing iron of the monster blood, soaking in the feeling of alive and brother.
~~~~
And then one day Dean got it. The witch had told him. No, really, sometimes Dean wondered if Sam got dropped on his head one time too many when he was little.
Still, how do you bring up something you’ve kept silent about for over twenty years? Dean was very tempted to take Sam’s unspoken offer of privacy and forget the whole business all over again.
They were headed to western Washington, all the way to the coast where some simple salt-and-burn awaited, and there weren’t many places better suited for private conversations than Washington coast. Sam wasn’t paying attention to where they went, finishing up his book with a flashlight, so Dean found the loneliest place he remembered from a long time ago and took them there. Sam raised his head from the book when the car stopped, blinked at the black sky over the sea and shone his flashlight through the windshield. Dean had already gotten out and was pulling blankets from the trunk. He could see the look of pleasant surprise on Sam’s face when he stepped out. This was a good place – a rocky beach fringed with pines stripped bare and polished by the storms, with more broken enormous tree trunks washed ashore. This was a perfect place to watch the stars, or to drag out dirty old secrets. In the dark, the Pacific sounded like it was taking huge whooshing breaths.
The cold was a good thing. Maybe they wouldn’t have to talk that long.
“Nice place,” Sam said.
“Yup.”
They settled on a piece of driftwood – a pine trunk perhaps fifty feet long tossed onto the beach. Out here, the stars gave so much light that Dean was sure they didn’t need the moon or the flashlights to see.
“Okay,” he said. The speech he prepared on the way here had fled. Sam was looking at him, probably frowning, though Dean couldn’t see his face very well. “Okay. I’m not some pervert.”
“I’m pretty sure we both are.”
That wasn’t in the script. “What?”
Sam ran his hand over Dean’s thigh as some way of explanation, intimate. At least it wasn’t his dick. Dean would’ve fallen off the tree because talk about bad moments. Sam shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
What is your fucking excuse? Dean almost asked. He had wondered ever since they started this a few years ago. “Well, I’m not talking about that. I mean I am, but.” Shit, where was he planning to go with this anyway?
Sam shone a flashlight in his face, probably as some kind of joke designed to lighten the mood. Dean knocked it out of his hand, and it rolled down into the surf. The waves picked it up and dragged it back and forth, the light winking, until it got smashed against a rock and went out.
“That was a bad move,” Sam said. Maybe he had a point. “Going to break our necks on the way back.”
“Sam, I’m doing this for you, man, and if you’d rather not, I’d love to never bring it up again. How about that? Only you have to quit staring at me.”
“What’re you even talking about?”
“The duchess. I’m trying to tell you about the duchess.” And he could almost hear Sam’s mouth clicking shut, whatever joke he was going to crack forgotten. “I put a knife through Sarah’s foot, and she said she’d make me love someone. You. I mean, do you get how stupid that sounds?”
Sam nodded. “So what happened then?”
That was a good question, and the one Dean kept asking himself throughout the years. “The thing is, I don’t know exactly. It’s not like I turned into Lucky.” Sam frowned at that but didn’t ask. “You were still my little brother. I was nine, girls had cooties, I probably didn’t know that guys were an option. I knew kids who hated their brothers, but maybe those kids were just assholes, not a norm.”
“But now,” Sam said, “now can you tell what difference it made?”
“Dude. Do you think when you’re fifty you’ll remember what it was like to have ten toes?”
Sam glanced down at his right shoe automatically. “So do we fuck because of the spell?”
Of course he’d think that. Dean put a hand into Sam’s hair, gripped the roots at the back of his head just a bit too tight like Sam loved. “What’s your excuse then?”
“Aw shit, don’t have one.” Dean saw his teeth flash in a smile in the dark. “Is it gone? Now that all three are dead?”
Dean dropped his hand. He had asked himself this question as well and hadn’t been able to come up with an answer. He woke up one night with an idea that Sarah lied, that she never did anything other than heat up his forehead a little, and he got all twisted on his own, with the power of a suggestion.
“I don’t know, Sam. I could never tell anyway.”
What he wanted to say was, I don’t love you like a woman. I don’t love you like a man. You don’t love me that way either. Even if he sometimes forgot himself for a moment and treated Sam like a woman he was very much into, even if Sam sometimes treated him like he probably did Jessica – it was like a kneejerk reflex. He was wary for years, afraid that he’d suddenly turn into a pedophile if Sam just looked at him wrong. He went digging in his head for that seed that the witch planted and he never found it. He sometimes suspected that whatever Sarah planted simply got buried under this other family love and its perverted manifestations. Having been involved in fraternal incest for years, Dean could now proudly call himself an expert and say that the reasons for fucking one’s brother had nothing to do with tastes, romantic love or conventional attraction.
He thought about it for a moment and repeated the last thought out loud, fraternal incest and all. Sam was quiet for a long time, until Dean started to think that he was laughing on the inside, sure he was. But Sam just threw an arm over his shoulder. His fingers were cold, and he made sure to hook a freezing thumb into Dean’s collar. Dean sat facing the surf, with the weight of Sam’s arm on him and the imperceptible tidal motion of Sam’s breathing next to him making him think of a smaller, secret kind of ocean. In his mental eye Dean saw once again that weird sight they passed on the way here – huge boulders balanced on top of skinny tree stumps, some sort of lumberjack art. He pictured those boulders tumbling down now, one after the other, and it felt good to watch them fall, to feel the weight of them shifting.
The black sky full of stars was hypnotizing. If Dean looked to the side, there would be an outline of Sam’s face turned toward the Pacific. Behind them, skeletal trees stripped bare by storms jutted up, like arms of huge monsters growing underground.
THE END