Big Bang 2013: Leaving Footprints behind Chapter 12
Dean woke slowly, feeling groggy and confused. The last thing he remembered was a woman standing at his front door pointing a gun at him. Dean had been so busy staring at the gun that he hadn’t seen the man with the chloroform soaked cloth until the rag was being held over his nose. By then, of course, it was too late and he had passed out.
Dean glanced around the room and saw that he was in some kind of dormitory; there were twelve beds, spaced out in two rows of six on either side of the room. The smell of bleach and ammonia told him that someone had recently given the room a quick cleaning. He tried to guess where he was but the only thing the cross on the wall and the stained glass windows told him was that he was in a church.
“Welcome back, Mummy,” the woman from the house greeted him in a far too cheerful voice, considering the fact that she’d kidnapped him.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Dean asked, pissed that she’d tied his hands together and tethered them to the bed.
“Come on, Dean,” she tsked, “just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you get to play the damsel in distress card. Believe me, it won’t do you any good so please man up.”
“He’s pregnant and hormonal, so I don’t think that he even has to ability to man up any more,” her accomplice laughed.
“Suck my dick,” Dean snarled at the blonde man.
“Now, boys, play nice. You remember David, don’t you, Dean?’ she asked in that same polite manner. Her English accent made her sound as though she actually cared whether or not Dean remembered the man.
“No, I don’t remember David and I sure as hell don’t remember you, so please let’s just cut to the chase here and you tell me what you want. Or better yet, let me go,” Dean demanded; just because he was pregnant didn’t mean that he was weak. He didn’t know what they had in store for him, but he would do his part and stay alive until Sam found him.
“Sorry, love, can’t do that,” she apologized to him. “We came for the baby and we won’t leave here until junior makes an appearance.”
“Don’t do this please,” Dean pleaded, instantly forgetting his bravado at the thought of them hurting his child. He could not believe that he’d gone through all of this shit only to have his baby stolen from him by a pair of pyschos.
“You and Sam took from us,” she explained, “so now we’re going to take from you.
“I don’t know what you think I did, but believe me this is not the answer,” he said as he unconsciously tried to hug his stomach; unfortunately, the ropes around his wrists prevented him before doing so.
“Isaac and I should have turned and run the first time we met you and Sam,” she spat at Dean. “Even though you opened the Devil’s gate, we still thought that you were harmless, sort of like a real life version of the Hardy Boys.”
“Who’s Isaac?” Dean asked, suddenly very confused because he thought that the woman’s partner’s name was David.
He was not prepared for the harsh slap across his cheek and it jerked his head back into the pillow behind him.
“Don’t you dare pretend that you don’t remember him when you left him to die in that bar full of demons?”
“I really don’t remember him, but then again I really don’t remember a lot. The spell that allowed me to become pregnant also caused a major memory loss,” Dean explained.
“Oh,” David replied, with barely restrained anger in his voice, “so I suppose that if I asked Sam about his memory, he wouldn’t remember my wife? Wouldn’t remember fucking her then killing her so she couldn’t act as leverage for the demon he was supposed to be protecting her from?”
“It seems that as long as you Winchesters get your demon, the collateral damage doesn’t matter,” Tamara surmised.
“I can’t help what you believe, and I really can’t tell you what Sam does or doesn’t remember, but I do know that if you hurt me or his child, he will remember killing you both.”
Sam smiled as he pulled into the driveway of the home he shared with Dean. The thought of them having a place to call home still sent a thrill through him, even though they’d been here for months. More often than not, it was Sam driving Dean’s baby now because they never knew when Dean was going to have another episode with something changing within his body, and they didn’t want to chance something happening while he was driving. So Dean had stopped driving unless Sam was with him and it was making him crazy. It didn’t help that Dean was stuck in the house alone all day while Sam was out driving the Impala without him.
Today was the start of the weekend and Sam had ended his last case this morning and hadn’t received anything new, so with the holiday on Monday, he had a long weekend to spend with Dean.
He had plans for them to just laze around the house, maybe throw something on the grill, hence the trip to the grocery store for the steaks and the trimmings currently sitting on the back seat. He knew that Dean was going to be in a good mood because he’d had the chance to get out of the house and have lunch with Eva. Dean and Eva were friends; Sam could honestly say that he’d never seen that one coming.
Normally, he would just pick up some take out for dinner but Dean’s tastes were so …different now that Sam had learned that it was best to find out what Dean was in the mood for first, if he didn’t want to be making two food runs. Tonight, though, he’d taken a chance with the steaks.
When he reached the front door, Sam attempted to put his key in the lock but the door just swung open when he touched it. Cautiously, he entered the house, calling Dean’s name. When he received no answer, even though nothing was out of place, his gut told him that something was wrong.
As Sam walked down the hall and out of the foyer, he stood in the middle of the den and again noticed that nothing was out of place. Everything was as it should be; no furniture was overturned and there was no blood anywhere. But there was also no Dean.
“Eva,” Sam barked into the receiver after dialing the young woman’s phone number, “did Dean go somewhere else after you guys had lunch today?”
“We didn’t have lunch,” she barked right back. “The doctor had a hunter come in today who said that his partner had been killed by another pair of hunters. I called him and left a message saying that I couldn’t make it. Sam, is he really that mad that I stood him up?”
“No, Eva, he’s not mad, he’s missing,” Sam informed her.
“Are you sure? Maybe he just went somewhere to get out of the house,” she suggested, but Sam could tell by her tone that she didn’t believe it any more than he did.
“No, Eva, he’s gone and I think someone took him,” Sam replied, his tone leaving no doubt that Dean was missing. “Gotta go,” he told her before ending the call.
Sam thought about what Eva had said; maybe Dean really had just gone somewhere to get out of the house, maybe he’d just been careless and left the door ajar. Maybe he’d just wanted to get out and mingle with people like Sam did at his office all day.
When Sam had reminded him that the two of them were often alone in hotel rooms, cut off from other people, Dean had just told him that he wasn’t alone then because he had Sam.
Before Sam started his search, he needed to be sure, so he dialed Dean’s cell and waited. When he heard the Back in Black ringtone coming from near the front door, he knew that he’d been right, knew that someone had taken Dean and that he wouldn’t rest until he had him back.
Replaying Eva’s conversation in his mind, Sam wondered whether Dean had gone somewhere to get out of the house and something had happened to him. Something like his body going through one of those weird transformations. If someone had found him, they would’ve taken him to the hospital, so that was Sam’s next call. There were three hospitals in the immediate area and Sam called them all, but no Dean Smith had been bought into any of them.
Sam spied the garden spade on the coffee table as he went to sit down and decided to check the backyard to see if Dean was there. He realized that he was still holding the grocery bags and placed them on the counter before heading outside.
His heart was beating so loudly that he could actually hear it as he ran those final steps to the backyard in search of Dean, but he wasn’t there. Dean was gone and Sam was scared shitless.
As he ran back through the house and out to the car, Sam scrolled down his contact list until he found the number he was looking for, then pressed the call button. “Garth, stop whatever you’re doing and get your ass to Lawrence, now!” he ordered as soon as the other man picked up.
Sam drove around the neighborhood checking to see if Dean had passed out anywhere, or if he had just taken a walk, but his brother was nowhere to be found. He would’ve started knocking on the neighbors’ doors, but he knew that Dean hadn’t befriended any of them because of the pregnancy.
It took Garth eight hours to get to Lawrence, and that was seven hours and fifty-nine minutes too long for Sam. As he settled in for the long wait, Sam decided to search the house for clues. When Dean had been doing his renovations, he’d included devils traps at every entrance in invisible paint, as well as sigils warding against every evil thing that they’d been able to think of, so the house was protected against everything. Everything except humans. That’s when he realized that hunters had taken Dean.
“What’s going on, Sam?” Garth asked as Sam let him into the house
“I don’t know, Garth, but I believe that hunters have taken Dean.”
“Why, Sam?’ Garth asked, “Why, and why now? I mean, you guys have been here for months with no problems from the supernatural or from the people who hunt them. Were you guys working on a case?”
“The only time I work on something supernatural now is purely by accident and, even then, I call you to get someone on the job. The only reason I can think of for them taking him is the baby. Maybe because he’s pregnant, they think he’s a monster now.” Sam trembled at the thought because he knew all too well how ruthless hunters could be. Even to this day, he remembered the way Gordon had hunted him down. He remembered how relentless the man had been, how he hadn’t stopped until Sam finally put him down.
“It really doesn’t make sense to me, Garth; I mean the King of Hell has kept his hands off Dean but pair of dick hunters think that they can fuck with him?”
“Sam, I know you’re worried because this is Dean, but you need to calm down and not let your emotions get the better of you. If you go about this halfcocked, that could get Dean hurt, or worse, killed.”
“Don’t you dare tell me how to act, Garth; it’s not your family that’s missing and I…I can’t…” Sam tried to defend his actions. “Help me find him, Garth. I didn’t look for him while he was in Purgatory and it took a long time for us to get past that. I have to find him before they hurt him, before they kill him, because I can’t let him die thinking that I didn’t look for him, that I didn’t tear heaven and hell apart trying to find him. He can’t die not knowing how much I love him.”
“He’s not going to die, Sam; we’re going to find him. Alive,” Garth reassured him.
“Now we have a case to work and it’s time sensitive so let’s get started.”
Garth made his way into the den and the two men sat dawn on the sofa where Sam began to tell the other hunter everything he knew. It really wasn’t a lot. Sam knew that later on he was going to question his decision about relying on Garth, but right now, he couldn’t concentrate on that.
Sam figured that the best place to start would be with Dean’s phone, so he began to scroll through his brother’s call log to see who had called him last. This turned out to be another dead end because the last person to call him was Eva. He listened to her voicemail anyway, just in case, but the message played out exactly as she’d said it would.
He knew that Dean had taken precautions while restoring the house, but he could have missed something and Sam wasn’t about to take something like that on faith and have it come back and bite him in the ass. Case in point - Bobby; Dean had showed him all the evidence that Bobby was haunting them, but because Sam had consulted a talking board and had gotten bad results, he’d ignored it. As it had turned out, Bobby had been haunting them and Dean had been right.
He and Garth covered every inch of the house but there were no hits on the EMF, no smell of sulfur, no indication of anything supernatural, so they were back at square one, with square one being that a human had taken Dean. And that that human was a hunter.
Despite the fact that his memory was failing and that he was forgetting people, Dean hadn’t forgotten how to hunt. In that area, the only thing slowing him down was his baby bump.
“Okay, Sam,” Garth broke into his reverie, “concentrate on what’s different. Think about what’s changed today that made someone feel comfortable enough to take Dean from his own home in broad daylight.”
“Nothing.” Sam wracked his brain trying to figure out if something had changed or if something had been different at work today, but again, he came up with squat.
“Okay,” Garth nodded. “Well, what about Dean’s day? Did anything change for him?”
“No,” Sam repeated, with a shake of head. But, almost as soon as he’d said it, he realized that something had changed and added, “He was supposed to meet Eva for lunch but Dr. Robert had an emergency and she had to help with a hunter whose partner had been killed.”
“Sam?” Garth questioned, “have either you or Dean seen any signs that pointed to there being a job in Lawrence?”
“No, not since…fuck?” How had he over looked that bit of information? Why else would a hunter be in Lawrence if there wasn’t a job? Was Dean the job? He knew that if other hunters got wind of Dean’s pregnancy, they would come gunning for him; that was one of the main reasons why they were keeping a low profile.
With an unspoken agreement, both men headed for the door to make the short trip to Missouri’s. From there, they’d find that injured hunter and see what had bought him to Lawrence.
When the duo arrived at the medium’s house, she answered the door with her usual style. “Should have known once there was trouble you’d show up sooner or later; my house has turned into grand central station. You know where the doctor is,” she told him as she stepped aside and let them enter.
When Sam entered the room and saw who was lying there, he had to refrain himself from pulling the hunter from the bed and finishing the job. It was Walt. He hadn’t seen the son of a bitch since in years, but it might as well have been yesterday. He and his partner had killed him and Dean because of their role the apocalypse; obviously, God had had other plans and had bought them back, but that didn’t change the fact that the men had shot them. He hoped that the dead hunter Eva had mentioned was Roy, because Sam couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t kill the other man on sight.
The helpless man lying in the bed was terrified and it showed on his face when all six feet four inches of Sam Winchester stood over his bed. The hunter clearly knew that he deserved whatever Sam wanted to do to him, but that didn’t mean he wanted it to happen.
“You can relax,” Sam told him. “I don’t fuck with the injured. But here’s the thing, Walt, you owe me and you sure as fuck owe Dean, so you need to tell me everything you know. Because if you don’t, I just might change my mind, and then all the work the good doctor put into saving your sorry ass would’ve been for nothing.”
“And you talk about my bedside manner,” Eva snapped at Sam as she walked into the room.
“Trust me, this is much better than he deserves after what he and his buddy did to me and Dean.” Sam looked back at the man in the bed and barked, “Start talking, Walt.”
“You know how it is, Sam; sometimes a job is too big for two people so you call in other hunters to help you,” he stopped to take a deep breath. “If it’s someone you know or have worked with before, when they call, you help no questions asked because you never know when you’re going to need a favor. So we went.”
“So you know the people who did this to you?”
“Yeah, um we got a call about a week back from this couple that we’ve worked with about three maybe four times over the past six months. So when we got this one it was no big deal. We finished up the job we were working just outside of Portland and hauled ass down here.”
“It was a trap this time, huh” Sam stated rather than asked.
“It was and we walked right into it. The chick, she shot Roy just as he walked into the door of the motel room, and the guy shot at me but I ran, and he caught up with me and the two of them beat the holy shit outta me. I’d probably be dead too if someone hadn’t come and interrupted them. They shot him in cold blood, how could they do that?”
“Please don’t expect me to feel sorry for poor dead Roy when Dean and I woke up to eating the lead from your guns for breakfast. So just cut through the self-pitying bullshit and tell me who was it that did this to you Walt?”
“Tamara and David,” he answered.
“What is the name of the hotel, Walt?” Sam demanded.
“The Flamingo, it’s that pink joint just off the highway, you can’t miss it.” Walt told him.
Sam nodded at Walt in a manner that told the broken man that if this information was wrong, Sam was going to take it out of his ass.
Walt was right; the pink crack hotel was easy to locate, just off the highway. Sam and Garth located the room that Tamara and David had rented, in true hunter style paid two weeks had been in advance and the room wouldn’t be touched until the two weeks were up so that if they needed to run, they’d be long gone before anyone noticed
On the way to the room in the back of the motel, they passed several crack heads and pros looking for a date and the need for a fix made them not want to take no for an answer. Sam wouldn’t pay them for sex, but he would pay them for some answers and in a place like this, twenty dollars could get you a lot.
Garth found a girl who rented the room next to Tamara and David who gave them some of the answers they needed. Sam picked the lock to the door of the room and they pulled the girl inside to question her.
Under the dim light of the hotel room, Sam got a good look at their informant, she couldn’t be a day over sixteen, she was tall, thin, and pale with greasy dirty blonde hair and completely strung out. Her pink Hello Kitty t-shirt paid homage to an innocence lost long ago and the short blue jeans skirt did little to hide needle marks and bruises in the shape of fingers from where her customers had been rough with her.
She was jonesing so badly for whatever her drug of choice was that she couldn’t keep still and drove Sam crazy as she bounced from foot-to-foot, as she alternated from rubbing her hands along her biceps as though she was cold and picking at one of the numerous scabs on her face.
“What’s your name sweetheart?” Garth asked her gentler than Sam had the patience to be.
“Candi, with an ‘I’” she answered shyly.
Sam wanted to take the girl and shake her to speed this interview along, but he knew that he wasn’t going to get much information from her if he did, but surely, Garth could move faster than this. The big man was itching to tear apart this room to find the clues that would lead his to those bastards who were holding Dean captive.
“Okay, Candi with an ‘I’, what tell us about the couple that were staying here.” Garth asked as he shot Sam a glare because of his impatience.
“Sometimes when I get my stuff, I-I like to sit behind the window at the back of this room ad shoot up, and that’s when I heard them. They were talking about monsters and how this one pretty monster was going to give birth to the devils spawn, but they would take the baby and keep it safe from the two monsters no matter how good they are.”
“Where were they going to take the …monsters baby?” Garth coaxed.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry ‘bout the monster, as soon as they get Evil? Easy? Yes, evil, because they will kill Evil and the monster once the baby comes,” she announced triumphantly. “Do I get my money now?” She asked as she held out her hand.
“When you give us something we can use,” Sam snarled at her, any pretense at niceties gone. “Where are they taking the monster?”
“Her older sister Celine,” she slurred and began singing what sounded like, My heart will go on, and it was so out of tune Sam expected Randy Jackson pop in and break the news that she wasn’t going to Hollywood.
As far as Sam was concerned, she gave them nothing and didn’t deserve the twenty they’d promised her, but Garth over rode his protests and paid the girl before quickly sending her on her way.
“That was a waste of our goddamned time and money,” Sam told the hunter before he even had a chance to close the flimsy door.
“Do you give up so easily on your job Sam?” Garth questioned the fuming man. “Do you just give up because the answer you’re looking for doesn’t reveal itself when you first start looking?”
“No, Garth, but…” Sam started.
“No buts Sam. I know that you and Dean are the hunting world’s superstars, but that doesn’t mean that you know everything. There could be something in that gibberish she just told us, and it could mean nothing, but we can’t just dismiss it out of hand.”
Sam knew that Garth was right but he felt helpless. He had grown complacent living his normal life, going to work and coming home to Dean he’d believed the prophesy, that Dean was going to have this baby and the pair of them wouldn’t live their lives looking for the supernatural. I guess this is what happens in a normal life, normal people don’t die from attacking monsters, they die at the hands of monster like people.
He and Garth looked at the things that Tamara and David left in the small room. All of their research was still there as if to mock Sam. It was taunting him saying we knew you’d find this room, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find Dean.
“Come here Sam, and take a look at this, It appears as though they’ve been following you guys for quite some time,” Garth surmised from looking at the pictures they found taped to the back of the closet door.
It did look that way. There were pictures from where they’d first ran into the couple all those months ago when they did the salt and burn for Monica Love. The pictures even show that the couple was in Metairie and have been following them around Lawrence for some time. There were even photos of Sam when he was in Omaha.
The bitch had been stalking them.
Chapter 11 Chapter 13
Dean glanced around the room and saw that he was in some kind of dormitory; there were twelve beds, spaced out in two rows of six on either side of the room. The smell of bleach and ammonia told him that someone had recently given the room a quick cleaning. He tried to guess where he was but the only thing the cross on the wall and the stained glass windows told him was that he was in a church.
“Welcome back, Mummy,” the woman from the house greeted him in a far too cheerful voice, considering the fact that she’d kidnapped him.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Dean asked, pissed that she’d tied his hands together and tethered them to the bed.
“Come on, Dean,” she tsked, “just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you get to play the damsel in distress card. Believe me, it won’t do you any good so please man up.”
“He’s pregnant and hormonal, so I don’t think that he even has to ability to man up any more,” her accomplice laughed.
“Suck my dick,” Dean snarled at the blonde man.
“Now, boys, play nice. You remember David, don’t you, Dean?’ she asked in that same polite manner. Her English accent made her sound as though she actually cared whether or not Dean remembered the man.
“No, I don’t remember David and I sure as hell don’t remember you, so please let’s just cut to the chase here and you tell me what you want. Or better yet, let me go,” Dean demanded; just because he was pregnant didn’t mean that he was weak. He didn’t know what they had in store for him, but he would do his part and stay alive until Sam found him.
“Sorry, love, can’t do that,” she apologized to him. “We came for the baby and we won’t leave here until junior makes an appearance.”
“Don’t do this please,” Dean pleaded, instantly forgetting his bravado at the thought of them hurting his child. He could not believe that he’d gone through all of this shit only to have his baby stolen from him by a pair of pyschos.
“You and Sam took from us,” she explained, “so now we’re going to take from you.
“I don’t know what you think I did, but believe me this is not the answer,” he said as he unconsciously tried to hug his stomach; unfortunately, the ropes around his wrists prevented him before doing so.
“Isaac and I should have turned and run the first time we met you and Sam,” she spat at Dean. “Even though you opened the Devil’s gate, we still thought that you were harmless, sort of like a real life version of the Hardy Boys.”
“Who’s Isaac?” Dean asked, suddenly very confused because he thought that the woman’s partner’s name was David.
He was not prepared for the harsh slap across his cheek and it jerked his head back into the pillow behind him.
“Don’t you dare pretend that you don’t remember him when you left him to die in that bar full of demons?”
“I really don’t remember him, but then again I really don’t remember a lot. The spell that allowed me to become pregnant also caused a major memory loss,” Dean explained.
“Oh,” David replied, with barely restrained anger in his voice, “so I suppose that if I asked Sam about his memory, he wouldn’t remember my wife? Wouldn’t remember fucking her then killing her so she couldn’t act as leverage for the demon he was supposed to be protecting her from?”
“It seems that as long as you Winchesters get your demon, the collateral damage doesn’t matter,” Tamara surmised.
“I can’t help what you believe, and I really can’t tell you what Sam does or doesn’t remember, but I do know that if you hurt me or his child, he will remember killing you both.”
Sam smiled as he pulled into the driveway of the home he shared with Dean. The thought of them having a place to call home still sent a thrill through him, even though they’d been here for months. More often than not, it was Sam driving Dean’s baby now because they never knew when Dean was going to have another episode with something changing within his body, and they didn’t want to chance something happening while he was driving. So Dean had stopped driving unless Sam was with him and it was making him crazy. It didn’t help that Dean was stuck in the house alone all day while Sam was out driving the Impala without him.
Today was the start of the weekend and Sam had ended his last case this morning and hadn’t received anything new, so with the holiday on Monday, he had a long weekend to spend with Dean.
He had plans for them to just laze around the house, maybe throw something on the grill, hence the trip to the grocery store for the steaks and the trimmings currently sitting on the back seat. He knew that Dean was going to be in a good mood because he’d had the chance to get out of the house and have lunch with Eva. Dean and Eva were friends; Sam could honestly say that he’d never seen that one coming.
Normally, he would just pick up some take out for dinner but Dean’s tastes were so …different now that Sam had learned that it was best to find out what Dean was in the mood for first, if he didn’t want to be making two food runs. Tonight, though, he’d taken a chance with the steaks.
When he reached the front door, Sam attempted to put his key in the lock but the door just swung open when he touched it. Cautiously, he entered the house, calling Dean’s name. When he received no answer, even though nothing was out of place, his gut told him that something was wrong.
As Sam walked down the hall and out of the foyer, he stood in the middle of the den and again noticed that nothing was out of place. Everything was as it should be; no furniture was overturned and there was no blood anywhere. But there was also no Dean.
“Eva,” Sam barked into the receiver after dialing the young woman’s phone number, “did Dean go somewhere else after you guys had lunch today?”
“We didn’t have lunch,” she barked right back. “The doctor had a hunter come in today who said that his partner had been killed by another pair of hunters. I called him and left a message saying that I couldn’t make it. Sam, is he really that mad that I stood him up?”
“No, Eva, he’s not mad, he’s missing,” Sam informed her.
“Are you sure? Maybe he just went somewhere to get out of the house,” she suggested, but Sam could tell by her tone that she didn’t believe it any more than he did.
“No, Eva, he’s gone and I think someone took him,” Sam replied, his tone leaving no doubt that Dean was missing. “Gotta go,” he told her before ending the call.
Sam thought about what Eva had said; maybe Dean really had just gone somewhere to get out of the house, maybe he’d just been careless and left the door ajar. Maybe he’d just wanted to get out and mingle with people like Sam did at his office all day.
When Sam had reminded him that the two of them were often alone in hotel rooms, cut off from other people, Dean had just told him that he wasn’t alone then because he had Sam.
Before Sam started his search, he needed to be sure, so he dialed Dean’s cell and waited. When he heard the Back in Black ringtone coming from near the front door, he knew that he’d been right, knew that someone had taken Dean and that he wouldn’t rest until he had him back.
Replaying Eva’s conversation in his mind, Sam wondered whether Dean had gone somewhere to get out of the house and something had happened to him. Something like his body going through one of those weird transformations. If someone had found him, they would’ve taken him to the hospital, so that was Sam’s next call. There were three hospitals in the immediate area and Sam called them all, but no Dean Smith had been bought into any of them.
Sam spied the garden spade on the coffee table as he went to sit down and decided to check the backyard to see if Dean was there. He realized that he was still holding the grocery bags and placed them on the counter before heading outside.
His heart was beating so loudly that he could actually hear it as he ran those final steps to the backyard in search of Dean, but he wasn’t there. Dean was gone and Sam was scared shitless.
As he ran back through the house and out to the car, Sam scrolled down his contact list until he found the number he was looking for, then pressed the call button. “Garth, stop whatever you’re doing and get your ass to Lawrence, now!” he ordered as soon as the other man picked up.
Sam drove around the neighborhood checking to see if Dean had passed out anywhere, or if he had just taken a walk, but his brother was nowhere to be found. He would’ve started knocking on the neighbors’ doors, but he knew that Dean hadn’t befriended any of them because of the pregnancy.
It took Garth eight hours to get to Lawrence, and that was seven hours and fifty-nine minutes too long for Sam. As he settled in for the long wait, Sam decided to search the house for clues. When Dean had been doing his renovations, he’d included devils traps at every entrance in invisible paint, as well as sigils warding against every evil thing that they’d been able to think of, so the house was protected against everything. Everything except humans. That’s when he realized that hunters had taken Dean.
“What’s going on, Sam?” Garth asked as Sam let him into the house
“I don’t know, Garth, but I believe that hunters have taken Dean.”
“Why, Sam?’ Garth asked, “Why, and why now? I mean, you guys have been here for months with no problems from the supernatural or from the people who hunt them. Were you guys working on a case?”
“The only time I work on something supernatural now is purely by accident and, even then, I call you to get someone on the job. The only reason I can think of for them taking him is the baby. Maybe because he’s pregnant, they think he’s a monster now.” Sam trembled at the thought because he knew all too well how ruthless hunters could be. Even to this day, he remembered the way Gordon had hunted him down. He remembered how relentless the man had been, how he hadn’t stopped until Sam finally put him down.
“It really doesn’t make sense to me, Garth; I mean the King of Hell has kept his hands off Dean but pair of dick hunters think that they can fuck with him?”
“Sam, I know you’re worried because this is Dean, but you need to calm down and not let your emotions get the better of you. If you go about this halfcocked, that could get Dean hurt, or worse, killed.”
“Don’t you dare tell me how to act, Garth; it’s not your family that’s missing and I…I can’t…” Sam tried to defend his actions. “Help me find him, Garth. I didn’t look for him while he was in Purgatory and it took a long time for us to get past that. I have to find him before they hurt him, before they kill him, because I can’t let him die thinking that I didn’t look for him, that I didn’t tear heaven and hell apart trying to find him. He can’t die not knowing how much I love him.”
“He’s not going to die, Sam; we’re going to find him. Alive,” Garth reassured him.
“Now we have a case to work and it’s time sensitive so let’s get started.”
Garth made his way into the den and the two men sat dawn on the sofa where Sam began to tell the other hunter everything he knew. It really wasn’t a lot. Sam knew that later on he was going to question his decision about relying on Garth, but right now, he couldn’t concentrate on that.
Sam figured that the best place to start would be with Dean’s phone, so he began to scroll through his brother’s call log to see who had called him last. This turned out to be another dead end because the last person to call him was Eva. He listened to her voicemail anyway, just in case, but the message played out exactly as she’d said it would.
He knew that Dean had taken precautions while restoring the house, but he could have missed something and Sam wasn’t about to take something like that on faith and have it come back and bite him in the ass. Case in point - Bobby; Dean had showed him all the evidence that Bobby was haunting them, but because Sam had consulted a talking board and had gotten bad results, he’d ignored it. As it had turned out, Bobby had been haunting them and Dean had been right.
He and Garth covered every inch of the house but there were no hits on the EMF, no smell of sulfur, no indication of anything supernatural, so they were back at square one, with square one being that a human had taken Dean. And that that human was a hunter.
Despite the fact that his memory was failing and that he was forgetting people, Dean hadn’t forgotten how to hunt. In that area, the only thing slowing him down was his baby bump.
“Okay, Sam,” Garth broke into his reverie, “concentrate on what’s different. Think about what’s changed today that made someone feel comfortable enough to take Dean from his own home in broad daylight.”
“Nothing.” Sam wracked his brain trying to figure out if something had changed or if something had been different at work today, but again, he came up with squat.
“Okay,” Garth nodded. “Well, what about Dean’s day? Did anything change for him?”
“No,” Sam repeated, with a shake of head. But, almost as soon as he’d said it, he realized that something had changed and added, “He was supposed to meet Eva for lunch but Dr. Robert had an emergency and she had to help with a hunter whose partner had been killed.”
“Sam?” Garth questioned, “have either you or Dean seen any signs that pointed to there being a job in Lawrence?”
“No, not since…fuck?” How had he over looked that bit of information? Why else would a hunter be in Lawrence if there wasn’t a job? Was Dean the job? He knew that if other hunters got wind of Dean’s pregnancy, they would come gunning for him; that was one of the main reasons why they were keeping a low profile.
With an unspoken agreement, both men headed for the door to make the short trip to Missouri’s. From there, they’d find that injured hunter and see what had bought him to Lawrence.
When the duo arrived at the medium’s house, she answered the door with her usual style. “Should have known once there was trouble you’d show up sooner or later; my house has turned into grand central station. You know where the doctor is,” she told him as she stepped aside and let them enter.
When Sam entered the room and saw who was lying there, he had to refrain himself from pulling the hunter from the bed and finishing the job. It was Walt. He hadn’t seen the son of a bitch since in years, but it might as well have been yesterday. He and his partner had killed him and Dean because of their role the apocalypse; obviously, God had had other plans and had bought them back, but that didn’t change the fact that the men had shot them. He hoped that the dead hunter Eva had mentioned was Roy, because Sam couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t kill the other man on sight.
The helpless man lying in the bed was terrified and it showed on his face when all six feet four inches of Sam Winchester stood over his bed. The hunter clearly knew that he deserved whatever Sam wanted to do to him, but that didn’t mean he wanted it to happen.
“You can relax,” Sam told him. “I don’t fuck with the injured. But here’s the thing, Walt, you owe me and you sure as fuck owe Dean, so you need to tell me everything you know. Because if you don’t, I just might change my mind, and then all the work the good doctor put into saving your sorry ass would’ve been for nothing.”
“And you talk about my bedside manner,” Eva snapped at Sam as she walked into the room.
“Trust me, this is much better than he deserves after what he and his buddy did to me and Dean.” Sam looked back at the man in the bed and barked, “Start talking, Walt.”
“You know how it is, Sam; sometimes a job is too big for two people so you call in other hunters to help you,” he stopped to take a deep breath. “If it’s someone you know or have worked with before, when they call, you help no questions asked because you never know when you’re going to need a favor. So we went.”
“So you know the people who did this to you?”
“Yeah, um we got a call about a week back from this couple that we’ve worked with about three maybe four times over the past six months. So when we got this one it was no big deal. We finished up the job we were working just outside of Portland and hauled ass down here.”
“It was a trap this time, huh” Sam stated rather than asked.
“It was and we walked right into it. The chick, she shot Roy just as he walked into the door of the motel room, and the guy shot at me but I ran, and he caught up with me and the two of them beat the holy shit outta me. I’d probably be dead too if someone hadn’t come and interrupted them. They shot him in cold blood, how could they do that?”
“Please don’t expect me to feel sorry for poor dead Roy when Dean and I woke up to eating the lead from your guns for breakfast. So just cut through the self-pitying bullshit and tell me who was it that did this to you Walt?”
“Tamara and David,” he answered.
“What is the name of the hotel, Walt?” Sam demanded.
“The Flamingo, it’s that pink joint just off the highway, you can’t miss it.” Walt told him.
Sam nodded at Walt in a manner that told the broken man that if this information was wrong, Sam was going to take it out of his ass.
Walt was right; the pink crack hotel was easy to locate, just off the highway. Sam and Garth located the room that Tamara and David had rented, in true hunter style paid two weeks had been in advance and the room wouldn’t be touched until the two weeks were up so that if they needed to run, they’d be long gone before anyone noticed
On the way to the room in the back of the motel, they passed several crack heads and pros looking for a date and the need for a fix made them not want to take no for an answer. Sam wouldn’t pay them for sex, but he would pay them for some answers and in a place like this, twenty dollars could get you a lot.
Garth found a girl who rented the room next to Tamara and David who gave them some of the answers they needed. Sam picked the lock to the door of the room and they pulled the girl inside to question her.
Under the dim light of the hotel room, Sam got a good look at their informant, she couldn’t be a day over sixteen, she was tall, thin, and pale with greasy dirty blonde hair and completely strung out. Her pink Hello Kitty t-shirt paid homage to an innocence lost long ago and the short blue jeans skirt did little to hide needle marks and bruises in the shape of fingers from where her customers had been rough with her.
She was jonesing so badly for whatever her drug of choice was that she couldn’t keep still and drove Sam crazy as she bounced from foot-to-foot, as she alternated from rubbing her hands along her biceps as though she was cold and picking at one of the numerous scabs on her face.
“What’s your name sweetheart?” Garth asked her gentler than Sam had the patience to be.
“Candi, with an ‘I’” she answered shyly.
Sam wanted to take the girl and shake her to speed this interview along, but he knew that he wasn’t going to get much information from her if he did, but surely, Garth could move faster than this. The big man was itching to tear apart this room to find the clues that would lead his to those bastards who were holding Dean captive.
“Okay, Candi with an ‘I’, what tell us about the couple that were staying here.” Garth asked as he shot Sam a glare because of his impatience.
“Sometimes when I get my stuff, I-I like to sit behind the window at the back of this room ad shoot up, and that’s when I heard them. They were talking about monsters and how this one pretty monster was going to give birth to the devils spawn, but they would take the baby and keep it safe from the two monsters no matter how good they are.”
“Where were they going to take the …monsters baby?” Garth coaxed.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry ‘bout the monster, as soon as they get Evil? Easy? Yes, evil, because they will kill Evil and the monster once the baby comes,” she announced triumphantly. “Do I get my money now?” She asked as she held out her hand.
“When you give us something we can use,” Sam snarled at her, any pretense at niceties gone. “Where are they taking the monster?”
“Her older sister Celine,” she slurred and began singing what sounded like, My heart will go on, and it was so out of tune Sam expected Randy Jackson pop in and break the news that she wasn’t going to Hollywood.
As far as Sam was concerned, she gave them nothing and didn’t deserve the twenty they’d promised her, but Garth over rode his protests and paid the girl before quickly sending her on her way.
“That was a waste of our goddamned time and money,” Sam told the hunter before he even had a chance to close the flimsy door.
“Do you give up so easily on your job Sam?” Garth questioned the fuming man. “Do you just give up because the answer you’re looking for doesn’t reveal itself when you first start looking?”
“No, Garth, but…” Sam started.
“No buts Sam. I know that you and Dean are the hunting world’s superstars, but that doesn’t mean that you know everything. There could be something in that gibberish she just told us, and it could mean nothing, but we can’t just dismiss it out of hand.”
Sam knew that Garth was right but he felt helpless. He had grown complacent living his normal life, going to work and coming home to Dean he’d believed the prophesy, that Dean was going to have this baby and the pair of them wouldn’t live their lives looking for the supernatural. I guess this is what happens in a normal life, normal people don’t die from attacking monsters, they die at the hands of monster like people.
He and Garth looked at the things that Tamara and David left in the small room. All of their research was still there as if to mock Sam. It was taunting him saying we knew you’d find this room, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find Dean.
“Come here Sam, and take a look at this, It appears as though they’ve been following you guys for quite some time,” Garth surmised from looking at the pictures they found taped to the back of the closet door.
It did look that way. There were pictures from where they’d first ran into the couple all those months ago when they did the salt and burn for Monica Love. The pictures even show that the couple was in Metairie and have been following them around Lawrence for some time. There were even photos of Sam when he was in Omaha.
The bitch had been stalking them.
Chapter 11 Chapter 13