(no subject)
Title: Beach Blanket Poltergeist (2/3)
Author: hansbekhart
Rating: R
Summary: They come from the north, exhausted by the sprawling highways and overpasses of Silicon Valley.
Notes: Everything you're about to read is true. Same warning as the first chapter, really. Special thanks again to fatale and shored, and there will be a more detailed post after the main chapters are up. There are three complete chapters, and I'll be posting the final chapter tomorrow, along with my research notes. (Part 1 can be found here.)
Sam wakes first to the smell of salt water and sage. The balcony door stands open and through it issues the call of sea gulls. Dean is nothing more than a shape buried beneath blankets as Sam works a pair of jeans up his legs and over his hips, buttons a shirt with slow, leaden movements. He doesn’t make a sound as Sam shuts the door quietly behind him.
He feels surprisingly well. The last shadow of painkillers still lingers in his mind, blurring his thoughts together into a comfortable fog of nonsequitors. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he trudges down a hill and over a short stone bridge in search of the coffeehouse he had noted the previous day. The sign in the second story window says Mr. Toot’s and its interior is awash with sunlight.
A man with an enormous shock of frizzy red hair, tall enough to look down a little to meet Sam’s eyes, takes his order: one house coffee, a couple of pastries and one girly-as-hell-concoction that would guarantee Sam some brotherly torture, were Dean awake to see him drink it. Sam sips it at his leisure instead, propping his elbows on the railing of the bridge and watching the creek beneath him bleed out into the ocean.
His eyes flicker across the water but can’t seem to rest on anything in particular. He woke up feeling all right but his walk has done the exact opposite of what he had hoped. His fingers tap restlessly against the stone of the bridge and there’s a taste in the back of his mouth that not even the coffee can banish, like he’s bitten on tinfoil. He rubs a hand absently across his chest and tries to push the feeling away as he heads back towards the motel.
Dean stirs slightly when Sam opens the door with his shoulder, Dean’s coffee and their breakfast held in one hand. He breathes in deeply and lets it out in a long, thoughtful sigh, and Sam smiles to himself as he locks the door behind him and sets the pastry bag onto the table. Dean is slower in the morning these days, some part of his brain settled with the security of family sleeping close by. He’s no longer prone to reaching for the knife below his pillow if Sam happens to get up before he does, although Sam knows that he still keeps it there.
Sam sets the coffee cup down on the bedside table and sits down on his own bed, elbows resting on knees. Dean is an illusion of carelessly spread limbs, one hand snaked underneath his pillow like it’s unintentional, the other pressing against his eyes. He’s shirtless, a dingy motel towel crumpled beside him as though he hadn’t bothered to kick it off the bed before falling asleep. The sheets are rucked up around his bare legs. Even in the shadows, a smattering of freckles are just visible across the bridge of Dean’s nose that brings a smile to Sam’s face. Their mother had had freckles.
He leans forward to ruffle Dean’s hair and almost gets there before there is an iron grip around his wrist and green eyes are blinking warily at him. “Whafuck?” Dean mumbles, letting go of Sam to rub at his face. He tries again: “Dude, what the fuck? What’re you lookin’ at?”
Sam grins and leans forward with one finger extended that Dean goes cross-eyed trying to look at. “Are these ... freckles?” he says dramatically. “Are you freckling?”
Dean bats his hand away and rolls over onto his back, wincing, and then looks at Sam with deliberately casual eyes. “Why are you up already, anyway? You have another nightmare?”
Sam shakes his head and passes the coffee cup to Dean, who accepts it with a quick nod. “Nah, just ... couldn’t stay in bed anymore, you know? It’s nice out there.”
Dean glances towards the window, his eyebrows raised skeptically, but his expression is satisfied as he lowers the cup of coffee and sits up. There is a bruise at the bottom of his hairline and a cut on his mouth but he seems more focused than he had been the night before.
Dean’s eyes snap back to him. “I got a coffee mustache or something?”
Sam shakes his head. “You still look half-dead, man.”
Dean huffs at him and gets up to paw at the pastry bag. “So what do you think that girl was?” Dean asks, his neck bent over breakfast. He stuffs the apple turnover into his mouth and wanders back to hand the chocolate croissant to Sam.
Sam raises his eyebrows. “I thought we were taking the day off from hunting.”
“What, that means we can’t talk about things that go bump in the night?” Dean asks. He devours the turnover in seconds and is up again as soon as he’s flicked the crumbs from his fingers, pacing around the room looking for clean clothing. Sam eats his breakfast more slowly, his entire body still languid. He can feel stitches pulling every time he moves his shoulders, and digs into their bag to pop something a bit less powerful than the Panadol.
“Winchesters don’t take days off!” Dean bellows, his voice muffled slightly by the bathroom door.
“No, Winchesters don’t complain, bitch, whine or piss and moan,” Sam says, deepening his voice into a piss-poor imitation of their dad.
Dean’s response is nearly instantaneous: “You accomplish all of those every day, so I guess all bets are off, right?”
“Fuck you,” Sam calls, and Dean laughs.
Sam swallows a couple of pills dry and pulls out his other pair of jeans and a decently clean shirt. They’re overdue for laundry, especially now that they’ve only got a single pair of jeans apiece that aren’t covered in blood and dirt. There’s an itch in his palms that won’t go away no matter how hard he rubs them on his thighs and belatedly, he realizes it for what it is: their family’s brand of curiosity, that itch to be on the job, tracking down leads and killing whatever’s in their path.
That must have been what he had felt in the Village. Boredom, maybe; his brain so far asleep that it hadn’t even considered the easy solution. He was stupid to think that it’d been anything else, really.
“Hey,” he calls to Dean, who sticks his head out of the bathroom in response, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “That girl, she definitely wasn’t contemporary to the Ohlone. She looked like she died in the 70’s or something.”
Dean vanishes back into the bathroom and Sam hears him spit into the sink. “So what was she doing down with the Indians?” he says when he reemerges.
Sam shrugs. “Maybe she’s looking for help.”
Dean snorts, taking a second look inside the pastry bag to see if he’d miraculously missed something. “Yeah, a ghost that doesn’t want to kill anybody. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Dean smirks at the back of Holy Cross church when they drive by it, the steeple just visible from the curve of the highway. He takes one hand off the wheel to lay an affectionate slap on the side of Sam’s skull, a sort of well done, we rock movement that Sam has had long years of brotherly abuse to get used to. Dean puts on Houses of the Holy and cranks the volume, his fingers tapping against the steering wheel.
The day isn’t hot enough for the fog to come rolling in, but it’s close. The wind through the open windows blows Sam’s hair into his face.
“Roll up your damn window!” Sam shouts.
“Cut your damn hair!” Dean yells back cheerfully.
The Impala starts rocking side to side as they round the curve of Highway 1. Dean curses the road and the wind and anything else that isn’t a part of his baby and they nearly crash twice before they’re safe in the parking lot of a 7-11. Dean practically vaults out of the driver’s seat and kneels on the ground before his car without heed to the broken glass around him. Sam can hear him swearing through the open window and is curious but not overly concerned until something slams his head back against the seat.
“Shit!” Sam shouts.
Dean’s head pops up into view like a jack-in-the-box. “What?” he says. “What the hell’s wrong now?”
Sam stares up at the Impala’s ceiling, every nerve in his body crawling, and can’t explain.
Dean checks his baby inside and out and finds nothing wrong with it, but as soon as they’re back on the road, it begins again. The radio turns on suddenly and goes from one end of the dial to the other faster than human fingers can turn. The brakes go out at two stopsigns. From time to time, Sam can see flashes of the girl out of the corner of his eye. She’s thumbing on a streetcorner. She’s sitting behind them, smelling of incense and wet earth.
“Get the hell out of my car!” Dean shouts at the rearview mirror, as if that’s going to help.
They have enough of a respite to make it to downtown Santa Cruz, where they head for the Central Branch library. There’s a bewilderingly large section of the library devoted to local history, and it doesn’t take them long to find what they’re looking for.
“Hey, Sam,” Dean says, flinging out his hand to jab Sam in the side. Sam looks over, a little surprised; the last time he had looked over, Dean had been sitting with his hand propped on the ball of his hand, playing Solitaire. “All right, so, you remember that cheesy vampire movie with that blond guy in it, you know, Keifer whatever?”
“The Lost Boys. Dad never stopped bitching about the inaccuracies,” Sam murmurs.
“Like he ever does,” Dean snorts. “Anyway, it was set in a fictional town that was based on Santa Cruz, inspired by this huge string of murders that happened in the early 70’s. All during February, 1973, the bodies of two college students were discovered in the woods, their bodies in pieces, a 79-year-old woman was found raped and strangled in the bath and the bodies of six other victims were found. There was a serial rapist around and it didn’t even stop there. From 1970 to 1973, three people axed at least twenty-six people between them. That’s why this place was called the ‘Murder Capital of the World.’”
“Wow,” Sam says. “Any records of strange weather, planet alignment during that time?”
Dean shrugs. “Some half-baked scientist said that an earthquake big enough to sink California into the sea was imminent or something, but nobody really seemed to care except this one guy who thought it was a good enough reason to kill thirteen people. I’ll try to find tidal charts or something. You check weather or whatever.”
An hour and a half later, Sam slaps his hand down next to where Dean has fallen asleep, his head pillowed on almanacs. “Nothing,” he says sourly. “No freaky weather, no political upheavals, plenty of missing person reports but none that match our ghost. You manage to find anything interesting before you totally gave up and passed out, jerk?”
“Nope,” Dean says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Nothing at all except for a month that nine people were murdered, which is what, one more interesting thing than you found? Shut your pie hole.”
“So what could it be?” Sam asks as they leave the library. Dean squints into the sun and doesn’t look at him as they make their way towards the parking garage where they left the car. “There’ve been too many deaths and incidents to chalk it up to a single force, whether it’s ... a spirit or an elemental or even just the 70’s being a crappy time to move here.”
“You said that the Psycho house or whatever hosted Satanists, right?” Dean asks.
“Yeah, it’s a retirement home now.”
“So what if some dumbass Satanists opened a gateway back in the day and never managed to close it?”
“I dunno,” Sam says doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the attacks come more regularly? Wouldn’t people keep getting killed in the same way? It’s been going on for an awfully long time for nobody to have ntoiced anything, especially in a town like this.”
“People might be getting killed in different ways because there’re different spirits loose in the area,” Dean counters. They’ve reached the Impala and Dean stands with one hand spread flat on her hood, as if contact with his car will help him convince Sam. “We’ve already seen different spirits fucking around -- it could be a ripple effect, like, somebody gets killed by one of the Satanist’s spirits and becomes a spirit themselves who kills other people.”
Dean’s grinning at Sam as though he’s just talked a pair of twins into a threesome, but Sam only shakes his head. “Sunshine Villa was only built in the 1860’s or so, and there was a family living in it back then. Father Quintana outdates the house by fifty years and the Satanists probably weren’t living there until the 1960’s.”
Dean sighs, his fingers moving restlessly over the car. Sam shoves his hands in his pockets and waits. Finally, Dean sighs. “This town sucks out loud,” he says, and Sam almost wants to smack him except for the fact that he’s starting to agree.
“Why do you keep saying that?” he asks instead. Dean’s eyes flick towards him, puzzled.
“What?”
Sam folds his arms on the top of his car and rests his chin on top of his hands. “You keep saying that,” he says slowly. “Santa Cruz sucks. California sucks. I get it, Dean. Shut the hell up and find a new topic of conversation already, ok? Or at least tell me why California sucks so hard that you need to mention it once every five goddamn minutes. I’ve been trying to figure it out but all I see is sunshine, sand and hippies. I’d chalk it up to hippies except that Napa didn’t have any and you were still being an asshole there, so what is it?”
“It is the hippies,” Dean says, grinning. “I could smell ‘em from Napa. The entire state smells like patchouli and body odor. Who wouldn’t love it? Well, other than me, but I’m sorta allergic to that extra stench of self-righteousness.”
“Dean,” Sam says warningly, but Dean is already unlocking the Impala’s door, head down, a chuckle rising in his throat that cuts off abruptly when he opens the door. He staggers away from the car and Sam is about to ask him what’s wrong when the smell hits him too.
“Jesus!” Dean yells. Sam can hear him on the other side of the car, cursing wildly, but all of his attention seems to have been diverted into not puking in the parking lot that they’re standing in.
It’s muddy earth and congealed blood and lower intestines torn open and rotting in the sun. It’s the smell of a body that lays underneath shady trees for months with nothing larger than racoons around to tear it, spoiled meat in a still forest.
“Jesus,” Dean says again, awed. Sam tries to lift his head from the pavement and gags again. He can hear Dean shifting suddenly, his posture stiffening. “Wait a fucking minute,” Dean says slowly, possibilities dawning in his mind. “You think that shit’s gonna stick to my car?”
Laughing only brings the stench into his mouth and lungs, so Sam waits until he’s hauled himself to his feet and gotten a few yards away. From a safe distance, he watches Dean dart back and forth, his shirt sleeve pulled over his hand and covering his nose.
“Maybe she was killed hitchhiking,” Sam says, “and that’s why she’s able to mess with your car.”
“Wish she’d quit it already,” Dean grumbles. “This is worse than when you drove my car into a freaking house.” He squints spectulatively into the car. “What do you want?”
“Can you see her in there?” Sam gasps.
Dean shakes his head. “It’s just the smell, dude.”
He comes round the car and stands next to Sam. They stare at the Impala appraisingly. “She must really wanna tell us something,” Sam says.
Dean doesn’t dignify that with a direct reply. “Heads or tails?”
“What?” Sam asks, bewildered.
“Someone has to go in and tell her to get her ass out of my car before that smell becomes permanent. By the way, if it does, I’m making you clean the interior with a toothbrush until it’s nothing but a memory.”
Sam calls it in the air. Dean catches it one handed and flips it to his other hand. Peeks. Smirks. Sam sighs and trudges back to the car.
The driver’s side door is open and the worst of it seems to have dissapated in the breeze. He can hear Dean cackling behind him as he strips his outer shirt off and ties it around his nose and mouth, bandit-style. It doesn’t help much. He doesn’t look behind him as he slides into the passenger seat, breathing shallowly. He can hear the creak of leather beneath her as she slides forward along the seat. The hands that come up and rest to either side of his shoulders are bloody, fingers twisted and useless, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.
Sometimes, Sam almost forgets how much he actually hates being touched by spirits. It doesn’t happen often; most of them are only solid enough to kill you, and they don’t usually get close enough to touch. There was a ghost in Nebraska that knocked Sam to the ground and stretched out on top of him before Dad could knock it off, and the memory of that not-skin against his own gave him a complex about raw chicken for years.
Her fingers slide along the seat rest and Sam can imagine them catching and digging into the soft skin of his throat.
The stench of her is so much worse up close.
Her mouth brushes his ear and somehow, Sam manages not to flinch away. “Eden,” she whispers. “The Garden of Eden.”
Dean makes Sam crank the windows all the way down before he’ll get near the car, and he drives with a pinched expression. “The Garden of Eden,” he repeats. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Got me,” Sam mutters. He presses his nose against the inside of his wrist the way their Dad taught them, blocking out the rot of the grave with the scent of their own skin. His eyes are closed, his attention focused so completely on clearing his nasal passages that he doesn’t realize that the Impala is stopped until its engine is ticking contentedly in the sun. Dean’s staring expectantly at him.
“Hop to it, Sammy,” he says, and that’s when Sam finally glances around and sees that they’re sitting in the lot of a do-it-yourself car wash. Dean is grinning at him when Sam looks back to his brother.
“You are such a dick,” Sam says with as much loathing as he can muster. Dean only laughs.
“Hurry up. I want her clean before that bitch comes back and stinks it up again.”
“You can barely even smell it anymore,” Sam grumbles, but he heaves himself out of the car anyway and goes to find an attendant.
Dean, for his part, swings his legs out of the car and plants his elbows on his knees, enjoying the prospect of getting Sammy to wash the Impala with what looked like a minimum amount of bitching and a maximum amount of guilt. Cause and effect: you wanted to check this thing out, now my car smells like dirty vag. Sam was right and Dean knew it; when the girl had delivered her stupid, cryptic message (and what the hell was with that, anyway? Did dying just make it impossible for people to just say what they wanted?), she had vanished and taken that awful stink with her, thank Christ.
The prospect of a wash was just too much to resist.
Dean’s back pops when he gets out of the car. The fog that hit them at the beach is just now making its lazy way into town, clinging to the cracked aslphalt and brushing over the cars that rush by them, trying to beat the trafflic light half a block down. Across the street, tanned teenagers pass by on bicycles, surfboards clenched precariously under their arms. On the corner, a person of indistinguishable gender begs for spare change.
Dean surveys all he sees and is unimpressed.
He’s not fond of college towns, not fond of large-ish cities. The rules that they live by don’t always apply; who to go to, to ask questions, to hear about the local lore. Everyone on the street looks homeless to him and he doubts that the punks at the head shops and tattoo parlors would be able to tell him what he needs to know.
He’s been to Santa Cruz before. Sam didn’t ask how he knew to find the only motel in Capitola that would charge them less than 200$ a night, didn’t think to ask, but when Sam’d been at Stanford for about three months or so, Dean and his Dad spent nearly a week holed up in the Harbor Lights Motel. It had been the only time they’d come to California together and they’d lasted for only a few hours in Palo Alto before heading over the hill and losing themselves in their respective intoxicants. Dad’s had come in bottles, Dean’s came in skirts, and he had spent Christmas Eve with two girls and half an ounce of shrooms between them. Christmas Day he and Dad had dried out at the Beach Boardwalk, listlessly flicking cigarette ashes onto filthy sand, before Dad had passed him a printout from a daily rag in Oklahoma, front page full of missing children.
He’d gone back by himself since then, of course, to check on Sammy, make sure he still had all his limbs or whatever, but never again with Dad. It had been a failed experiment and they hadn’t spoken of it afterwards, even when Dean was pretty sure that Dad was making his own trips to central California.
Sam comes back full of attitude and practically pushes Dean away from the car. He gives Dean one last bitchface before driving the car up to one of the service stations, but Dean’s lost interest in Sam doing menial labor, his brain busy turning the ghost’s message over and around.
Fucking cryptic ghosts.
He scans the street as he walks, checking both sides for possibilities. There are a lot of people out but everyone seems to be in motion: on bicycles, in cars, walking quickly down the street without making eye contact. Not a bad policy. Diner, car insurance store, head shop, skate shop, head shop. The next time Sammy has an urge to ‘stay and investigate,’ he’s goddamn going to do it on his own. Dean’s almost ready to turn back and tell Sammy that his goddamn Californian ghosts can eat his asshole - they’re hitting the interstate and not stopping until there’s three thousand miles of cornfields in either direction - when he sees the barn.
At the end of a long parking lot is an enormous metal barn with people bustling in and out of it, their arms full of dubious looking thrift store finds. There are two kids that look about Sam’s age standing at one corner of the lot giving every impression of a disdainful eye in a hurricane, passing a joint back and forth between them.
“Hey, hippie!” Dean calls.
Their heads swivel towards him. The bearded one curls a lip at him. “What, you need directions to your Abercrombie & Fitch photoshoot?”
Dean checks himself about fifteen feet away, resisting the urge to look down at his well-worn flannels, salvaged from St. Vincent De Paul over a year ago. “Actually,” he replies, “I was hoping you guys could direct me to the unemployment line, since it looks like you just came from there.”
Silence stretches tightly and if Sam had been there, he might have laughed nervously and made some lame comment to cover for Dean’s big mouth. Dean, unchecked, lifts his chin and stands his ground.
There is the slightest twitch of an appreciative smirk, mostly hidden in the heavy shadow of the guy’s beard, and then he holds the joint out towards Dean, who accepts it gracefully and takes a long drag.
He coughs a little as he passes it back, and the hippies beam proudly. Stoner’s equivalent of thanking the chef, Dean supposes.
“That’s outdoor organic, man,” says the other. “Grown right here in the mountains.”
“You grow it yourself?”
They shake their heads regretfully. The conversation is interrupted by a shout of “Jimmy Mack!” from behind him. The bearded guy, apparently Jimmy Mack, turns. A hunchbacked man with long, scraggly hair is waving at him cheerfully. “Jimmy Mack, this lady needs a price on this keyboard.”
“I’ll be off my break in just a minute,” Jimmy Mack hollers back. Dean is momentarily distracted by the possibility that normal names are simply outlawed in Santa Cruz when their attention returns to him. “The barn’s gonna close at two, but we reopen at three if you want to wait around.”
“Actually,” Dean says, and nods his thanks as the joint makes its way into his hand again, “I need directions. The Garden of Eden mean anything to either of you?”
They nod nearly in unison. There’s a symbiosis to their movements, a sort of back and forth of unspoken communication that makes Dean wonder if they’re brothers. It would be eerie if it wasn’t so familiar, and Dean relaxes into it unconsciously. “Yeah, of course,” Jimmy Mack says. “That’s an awesome hiking spot. It’s up on Highway 9, past Henry Cowell Park. You can get to it real easy from here, actually.”
“There’s been a lot more tourists out there lately,” the other guy chimes in, “but you can still find some nice spots along the river.” They share a disgusted look between them, presumably at the thought of tourists tramping along the river rather than cluttering up the beaches as usual. Dean remembers that sort of disdain as well; the girls on Christmas Eve had been full of contempt for anyone living on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Jimmy Mack is drawing Dean a map by the time the Impala pulls into the parking lot, Sam’s face peering out the window like somebody’s disapproving grandmother. The car gleams and Dean feels a surge of affection for his brother that probably has more to do with what he’s smoking than he’d like to admit.
“Thanks a lot, man,” he says, they shag ass towards the highway.
Sammy’s got his bitch-face on but doesn’t say anything until they’re winding their way back up the mountains, trees thicker and greener than on Highway 17. There’s an abnormal amount of people walking on the side of the highway, flannel-wearing, bearded mountain people. Sam’s lips thin as he slows to avoid them.
“What the fuck, Dean,” he spits at last. “You have no idea what could be waiting for us up there.”
“Relax, Sammy. I didn’t inhale,” Dean drawls, and then bursts into giggles, proving himself a liar.
“Yeah,” Sam says bitterly. “What do you think Dad would say if he saw you going hunting stoned?”
“He’d tell you to quit being a whiny bitch,” Dean says, as annoyed as he could possibly be, which isn’t much. Santa Cruz organic gives one hell of a body high, apparently, and he grins contentedly out the window at nothing. “I think I can handle a little grave digging.”
Sam is silent for a long time. When he finally speaks, it’s quiet, logical. “Seriously, Dean. Maybe we should hold off on this. At least for a few hours. Wait for you to get your head straight.”
Dean is sidetracked by a train of thought comparing being stoned to drunk driving, trying to figure out how often he’s driven them home from a bar and not heard a friggin’ peep out of Sam, and why does Sammy have to be such a whiny bitch, anyway, when he remembers that he’s forgotten to respond to his brother.
“I’m fine, dude. Seriously. Let’s just get this done and get the hell out of this state,” he says, his eyes sliding closed too easily, head dropping back against the leather seat. He almost keeps his mouth closed around the thought that slides out next, tacked onto the end as an afterthought. “Before you remember how much you liked it here and decide to stay.”
Sam, wisely, doesn’t answer.
Dean is nearly dozing by the time they hit Felton, but he snaps awake as they pass by the green metal gate Jimmy Mack told them would take them to the Garden of Eden. “Sammy,” he says, floundering back towards consciousness. “Sam, you missed it, turn around.”
“It isn’t there,” Sam says. There’s something in his voice that makes Dean turn and look at his brother, something wound so tight that it shakes the timbre of Sam’s words. His long fingers are gripping the steering wheel so hard that the knuckles are white but Sam’s eyes are glazed and shiny, as though he had been the one toking.
“It isn’t?” Dean asks slowly.
Sam shakes his head. It’s barely more than a spastic movement. “It’s a little further up. Not much. Just a little.”
There’s a turn-off on the road that loops behind a thick redwood tree, a narrow roadway for cars to turn around in. Sam pulls the Impala into this space and parks, his jaw working.
“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, his voice low. “Sam? What’s going on?”
It’s an effort for Sam to turn his head. He shakes his head again; he doesn’t have the words for it. “There’s - something out there,” he manages. “I can feel it. I think I’ve been feeling it since we got here.”
“What is it?” Dean asks, but Sam doesn’t know. There’s nothing to describe what’s pulling his mind apart, weaving it into the air around them until Sam could feel the very ground breathe beneath the Impala’s tires. He climbs out of the car and Dean follows, keeping a wary eye. “You gonna be ok to do this?” he asks as Sam digs supplies out of the trunk.
Sam lifts an eyebrow at him. “Are you gonna be ok to do this?” he asks pointedly.
In truth, things feel more or less like he’s the star in some video game. Dean’s hazy enough to be enjoying more than just the feeling of being on the hunt again, clear enough that he knows what’s going on, what needs to be done and - vaguely - what’s expected of him.
Dean finds it first, just the merest hint of a ripple in the clovers that blanket the red earth. Sam leads the way into the trees, pulled forward by whatever was leading him on. They see flashes of the girl in the trees, liberated from the Impala and following them to her final resting place. She doesn’t come close. Slowly, the noise from the road falls away until all they can hear is their own footsteps and the rushing of water, somewhere out of sight.
The trail narrows and takes them up a steep hill, climbing over fallen tree trunks and sliding carefully down the other side. Dean’s brief moment of sobriety has been chased away by the scattering of sunlight across his face and he’s actually sort of starting to maybe think that Santa Cruz isn’t so bad. Sam only glares at him when he mentions it, though.
“So,” Dean says after a while, “You, uh, you having any premonitions or anything? Visions? Anything like that?”
“No,” Sam replies without turning around. “Nothing. I just feel - stretched, somehow.”
“Stretched,” Dean repeats. “Sammy the Psychic Wonder. When are your super powers ever gonna do anything useful? They always gotta be so friggin’ vague?”
“I don’t know,” Sam mutters.
They both feel it when they step into the clearing. It’s soaked with sun, leather ferns growing nearly up to their waists. Beautiful but wrong, somehow diseased and discolored behind their eyes, like the afterimage of the sun. Dean blinks hard and goes to shield his eyes before he realizes that it isn’t something that he’s actually seeing.
“Hey, check it out,” he says. “Your girlfriend’s back.”
Their ghost stands not thirty yards away from them. It’s the clearest view that they’ve had of her yet: tiny, bloodied, her intestines dangling out of her bared belly, dirt smeared across her face and hands. Ghosts aren’t often very expressive unless they’re trying to kill you and Dean isn’t all that surprised when all she does is stare at them for a bit and then fade out of view.
“I think that’s where her body is,” Sam says.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” is Dean’s reply, and he takes the lead.
The girl’s final resting place turns out to be nothing more than a small depression sinking below the level plain of the clearing, the earth claiming her body. The first few shovelfuls of dirt turn up the ragged corner of a polyester jacket and they share a long look before turning back to the work.
Or, at least, before Sam turns back towards the work; Dean seems frozen, testing the air as though he’s a dog. “I’m not digging this by myself,” Sam says without glancing up. He tenses when Dean shushes him, and nearly drops his shovel when Dean’s hand clenches around the back of his neck.
“Do you smell that?” Dean says softly.
Sam sniffs and smells nothing. He looks at Dean expectantly.
“Barbeque,” Dean says at last.
Sam lets out an irritated sigh. “Jesus, Dean, really? Now is not the time to have the munchies. We can stop for something when we’re done with this.”
This time, when Dean’s hand comes down against Sam’s neck it’s more of a slap than a protective gesture. “Jackass,” he hisses. “If there’s a house close enough that we can smell them cooking, then there’s a house that’s close enough that they would’ve been able to smell a body.”
Sam stills, still bent over his shovel, his chin lifted. He can smell the barbeque now, sweet on the wind. “Maybe it’s a house that was built after she was killed here,” he ventures.
Dean shakes his head. “You see any new houses on the way up here? You finish this, I’m gonna go check it out.”
He pulls the shotgun out of their duffel before heading off, and Sam watches him disappear between the trees before he puts the shovel to earth again.
Sam can admit that he’s probably in far worse shape than Dean is, intoxicants or no, even if he’s only admitting it to himself. He’s dizzy, clumsy in his movements as he lays white bones bare in the sun. The movements are familiar and soothing: lifting the heavy shovel, careful to avoid scattering the remains, tossing the dirt away. He’s dug hundreds of graves, with his dad and brother and sometimes even by himself, and it narrows his focus into nothing but the pull of muscles in his back and the sun against his skin.
He hears the whistle of the club as it comes down. It’s enough time to turn slightly but not enough to dodge, and then everything goes black.
The house is old and shingled, a faded red. Dean approaches from the back, shotgun ready. The smell of the barbeque is tantalizing and Dean realizes that they haven’t eaten since the Mexican food this morning, which already seems like days ago. He can hear The Mamas and the Papas playing from somewhere inside the house, quiet and eerie, another ironic soundtrack for their lives.
He eases the kitchen door open; he can see an ancient station wagon parked out front but can’t see anything moving inside. The kitchen is clean enough. Yellow plaid decorations that look older than the station wagon, clean dishes stacked next to the sink, two cups inside it. A stack of mail on the kitchen table addressed to Addison Newell, and Dean nods to himself in smug certainty: not a normal name in this entire county. Dean heads right into a panelled living room, sticking closely to the wall as he whips quickly around it, gun up and ready - and then stops when he gets a good look what’s on the walls.
He reaches out to touch it before he can stop himself, fingers ghosting over the edges of the endless spirals gouged out of the wall. The wood is a deep reddish brown where it’s been hacked into and the color spills out unevenly over the sides. He backs up a couple steps to see it fully, every sense straining for movement or sound.
There’s a mouth on the wall. It’s almost perfectly spherical, no evidence of teeth or tongue, and something about it sends an icy shiver down his spine. Scattered on the floor are similar drawings of an enormous hole (mouth, it’s a mouth), smeared with something that Dean really doesn’t want to touch.
There’s a sound from the other side of the kitchen and Dean turns, immediately alert. He can see the smoke from the barbeque pit through the sliding glass doors and there, on the edge of the door - a bare foot, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.
She looks barely eighteen, naked, pale body criss-crossed with ropes that had long since cut deeply into bare flesh. She isn’t conscious but drowsing close to it, moving her head aimlessly. Alone, as far as Dean can tell, left sitting a few feet away from the barbeque like the world’s most unwilling dinner guest. His knife is out of his pocket before his knees hit the ground, sawing quickly through her bindings, eyes moving constantly around in case whoever did this to her is coming back.
She begins to cry as she swims towards awareness, her fingers weakly scrabbling back along the arms of the chair and Dean speaks in soft, comforting words: you’re gonna be ok, everything’s gonna be all right, I’m here to help, who did this to you? He strips off his outer shirt as soon as she’s more or less free and wraps it around her shoulders, covering the long slash that runs all the way down her sternum and crosses at her breasts.
“Come on, honey, I’m gettin’ you out of here,” he says.
There’s a laundry basket in the small room off the kitchen, full of clean clothing, and he helps her into a pair of sweat pants at least a foot too long for her, kneels down again and rolls them up until she can walk well enough to lean on him. He doesn’t want to stay long enough to find her clothes and she offers no help as to their location. She moves when he moves her but staggers as soon as his arm isn’t around her shoulders. She says her name is Mandy.
He thumbs open his phone as soon as they’re clear of the house. There was a pair of flip flops bigger than even Sam could wear lying next to the door and Mandy stumbles a bit in them. She’s crying almost constantly, little gulping sobs that almost distract Dean from the fact that Sam is not picking up his phone.
It rings and rings and Mandy has suddenly become one hell of a complication. Dean isn’t panicking, but it’s close.
Thank god there’s a spare set of keys hidden snugly in the well of the right back tire. He carries Mandy for part of the way back, after she sags against him and nothing he says will coax her to go just a little bit further. She can’t tell him how she got there or what happened to her and after he tries Sam’s phone again, it’s starting to matter less and less. He puts her in the back seat and takes her carefully by the shoulders.
“Mandy,” he says softly, his tone commanding her attention. “Mandy. I have to go back for something, ok? You’re going to be absolutely safe right here. Will you wait right here for me? You can lock the doors behind me and no one is going to come after you. I’ll be back as soon as I can and we’ll take you somewhere safe, far away from here.”
Every nerve in his body is screaming for Sammy, you’ve left Sam in the woods with a serial killer, but he forces himself to stay still when she grabs his forearms. “I’m not leaving you.” Voice still soothing and she relaxes just slightly, enough for him to free one of his hands and push her long hair away from her face. “My brother is still back there and I need to make sure he’s ok before we can take you some place safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You think you’ll be ok?”
Mercifully, she nods, but her face looks so naked and scared that Dean mentally downgrades her age to maybe sixteen. “You’re safe here,” he says again. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
For a long moment she only stares at him, her eyes searching his face. Then, finally, she whispers, “Thank you, Dean,” and if Dean’s brain hadn’t already been dissolving into panic, he might have realized that he’d never told Mandy his name.
The cellphone brings Sam back to consciousness, the trilling grating in his pocket before there’s a fumbling hand reaching into his pocket and drawing the phone out, flinging it carelessly away. It rings and rings, muffled by the distance and the underbrush and then it stops, and the hand returns and grabs Sam by the ankles to drag him along. His hands are tied securely, wrists crossed over his stomach, rope winding all the way up his elbows. The earth tugs at the stitches running across his shoulder blades and he can’t quite stifle the gasp that rises to his lips.
The man who drags him glances over his shoulder and smiles almost comfortingly. Even flat on his back, Sam can tell that he’s the tallest living person he’s ever seen, one massive hand clenched tightly enough around both of Sam’s ankles that he wouldn’t be able to break free even if his legs weren’t tied together as well. He’s old enough to be Sam’s dad, his hair shot through with gray, face creased into a smile that would almost have made Sam less afraid if the man hadn’t spoken then.
“It won’t hurt much, I promise. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Sam grits out between his teeth.
The man doesn’t turn his head again but he laughs quietly, sadly. “Nothing that you don’t want,” he says, as though he’s still trying to reassure Sam. “I heard you all the way from my house, singing the death song right back at me. There’s usually only one at a time but this is good, this is wonderful. You’ve helped me out a lot, kid I’m really grateful.”
“What do you mean, death song?” His head goes hard over the gnarly root of a redwood tree and Sam winces. He watches the way the man moves, the heavy stoop of his shoulders, looking for an opportunity to fight back. The man doesn’t reply.
The forest isn’t nearly so lovely when his back is grinding over every part of it, his legs up in the air. Sam tries again. “You killed that girl back there, didn’t you?” he accuses. “The one in the ground.”
The man’s voice is disapproving. “She was resting quietly.”
Sam has to laugh at that, thinking of his brother. “No she wasn’t. She was haunting me. That’s how I found her grave.” He almost stumbles over us and turns it to me at the last second. If the man hadn’t caught Dean making a beeline for his barbeque, Sam’s depending on him for rescue and the last thing he wants to do is alert this guy that help could be on the way.
The man only makes a satisfied noise, as if he’s had something confirmed. “Rest easy,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
‘There’ turns out to be a flat rock, nearly long enough for Sam to stretch out on, if he’s willing to let his feet dangle a bit. It’s stained with blood and the earth around the base is as bare as if it’d been scorched. The man lifts him almost carefully, one hand wrapped around the ropes on Sam’s arms, the other cradling his skull. Sam’s back scrapes against the rock nonetheless and he’s settled into exactly the position he had imagined, head against the top, his body hanging off the edge just above his knees, his feet barely touching the ground.
He isn’t afraid when the man brings the knife out, his gaze never wavering from the weapon. Dean has saved him so many times that Sam’s faith is instinctual. His only priorities are stalling for time and getting as much information as he can.
“You’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?” he asks as the man begins to cut away Sam’s shirt, right down the middle of his chest. “You said they usually come one at a time. How many have there been?”
The man shrugs. It’s a graceless gesture on his bulky frame. “I’ve lost count. It’s been a long while.”
“What, thirty, forty years?” Sam asks. His casual tone is borrowed from Dean. “It’s been at least that long, if that girl’s clothes are anything to go by.”
The man’s face darkens and the hand holding the knife trembles, just a bit. His hand is spread flat across Sam’s chest, holding him in place and dashing any hopes that Sam is still cherishing about being able to break away. “She was in ‘73.”
Something sparks in Sam’s brain, some dim connection that starts with Dean telling him to shut the hell up and ends with nine people murdered in a single month, and his mouth opens without concern for the point of the knife held over his heart. “February of ‘73, right?”
The man’s smile is a grimace and the knife presses downwards, shifting up a few inches to just underneath the little dip of his collarbone, running over a single curve of rib until it hits his sternum. The hand not holding the knife twists Sam’s arms above his head without ceasing the downward movement of the other hand. “You’re good,” the man says, his voice rising so that Sam can hear him over his own labored breathing. “She got away. She was one of my first and I -” He breaks off with a muffled laugh, his mouth twisting. “I used to tell all of them how sorry I was, how I didn’t want to be hurting them, but no one ever believed me. Guess I can’t really blame them, huh?”
The man’s brows knit together and for an instant Sam can see deep exhaustion in every crease of the man’s face, true regret and loathing as he drags the knife down, cutting just a little bit deeper into the soft flesh of Sam’s stomach.
“Anyway,” the man continues, “I’ve never let it happen again. I learned my lesson then and I’ve stuck with it all this time, no matter how anyone’s begged or how much I wanted to let them go. I wish it could go better for you, kid. You seem like you’re pretty smart. I’ll try and make it easy on you.” He smiles down at Sam. “The girl’s back at my house. I usually try and give ‘em a nice send-off, you know? A good meal - some of that teriyaki skirt steak from Shopper’s Corner, the real good kind. I’ve got some whiskey in my bag, if you think that’ll help you. I’m sorry you’re not going to be joining us for dinner, but ... you got the look of a trouble maker on you, kid. I don’t wanna risk you trying something stupid. Not when it’s gonna open any day now.”
“I’m not hungry, anyway,” Sam mutters. He twists away from the knife - can’t help himself - as it comes back up, the man leaning over him to keep his hips pinned to the stone, blood smearing along the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
“Your loss,” the man says, shrugging. “It’s melt in your mouth good.”
Jesus fucking Christ, Dean would say, are you really talking about steak when you’re getting ready to kill me? Sam grunts as the knife begins another journey across his skin, starting right below his left nipple and travelling horizontally across his chest to just below the right. “There, now you’re marked,” the man says in satisfaction. “It’ll be able to swallow you now. You want any of that whiskey, kid? This part’s the worst.”
“Sure,” Sam says. Licks his lips. “Yeah, I’ll take some. That’s, uh, nice of you.”
The man smiles as though Sam’s given him a birthday present and stoops to pick a battered pack off the ground without letting go of Sam’s wrists or shifting off of Sam’s torso. So much for that idea, Sam thinks, and then: where the hell is Dean? The whiskey burns and he chokes on it a little, spits a bit to the side as best as he can manage. It goes mostly on the dirty edge of his sleeve and it’s settling hotly in his belly when Sam looks back up and meets the man’s serious gaze. “You want some more?”
Sam weighs a few extra seconds for Dean to reach him versus being too drunk to save himself, and shakes his head. The man nods and flattens the knife against his palm to stroke Sam’s cheek with his fingertips, just once. “It’ll be over quickly, I promise,” he says, and then draws back and positions the knife against Sam’s belly button, the muscles in his arm coiling for that quick downward strike -
The sound of the shotgun being cocked is deafening. It cuts through the panic that was just starting to curl its way through Sam’s stomach, leaving hot relief in its wake.
“You don’t wanna be doing that,” Dean says, his voice level. There’s only the faintest tremor at the edge of his voice.
The man freezes. “Where did you come from?” he asks hoarsely.
“Mom always said the stork brought me,” Dean replies. Over the man’s shoulder, Sam can see the shotgun’s muzzle pressing hard against the back of his skull. “Step the fuck away from him.”
Dean has to reach upwards as the man drops the knife at Sam’s side and straightens, moving slowly away. He keeps the shotgun trained as he picks up the man’s knife and saws quickly through the rope around Sam’s wrists, his eyes flickering back and forth between his brother and his brother’s would-be murderer. He hands Sam the knife once his hands are free but keeps his other hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“Addison Newell, I presume?” he asks. Sam cuts his legs free as he sits up, and pulls the handgun from where it’s tucked into the back of Dean’s jeans, trains it on Newell. The whiskey burn is fading into hot anger and adrenaline.
Newell’s hands are raised, fingers pointing at the sky. “How do you know?” he asks. “You’re not one of them - you’re no use to me -” He stops and his face distorts so quickly that both of them tense, certain that he’s ready to spring. “You were in the house. You were in my home.”
And then just as quickly, the rage is gone and Newell’s face is filled with horror. “Where is the girl?” he breathes.
“Safe,” Dean says and they tense again as Newell falls to his knees heavily, his hands extended out towards them, pleading.
“You don’t understand,” he gasps. “You didn’t see what happened after Mary got away. All she did was die a hundred yards away from that stone instead of on top of it and nine people died. It took me weeks to find a replacement for her but by then everything had happened already and it was all my fault. Please. Please, you have to give the girl back to me.”
“So you can kill her?” Dean bellows. “Hey, get back on your knees until we say you can get up.” His eyes flick to Sam’s: what’s the situation?
Sam leans in close to respond. “He’s been killing people for at least thirty-three years. Remember that thing we found out in the library, February, 1973? He thinks that that’s his fault, that he did something.”
“Maybe he was the one that killed all of them,” Dean mutters back.
“No, I didn’t kill those people,” Newell says brokenly. “Jesus, I’d never do that. But they - they were my fault. It’s my job to keep it closed.”
“Keep what closed?” Sam hisses.
“The mouth to hell,” Newell says and Sam can feel his brother stiffen suddenly beside him. Dean’s voice, when he finally speaks, is quiet, warning Newell against something, something important that Sam has no clue about.
“What did you say?”
“Any day now it’s going to open,” Newell says, his voice getting higher and faster, his eyes panic-wide. His huge hands flex and clench around nothing and he’s got one knee up even though Dean is yelling at him again, get on the fucking ground, “Any day now and I need to stop it, you don’t understand, he needs to die -”
He’s on his feet, launching himself at Sam before they can even process what he’s screaming, that Sam needs to die to save everyone, and then Sam is knocked aside and Dean and Newell go down hard against the rock. Newell’s probably got eight inches on Dean and their bodies are too close together for Sam to see what they’re doing but before Sam can scramble to his feet Dean has Newell’s shirtfront clenched in his fists and he’s using it to turn them, flip Newell over, their feet skidding over the earth.
Newell’s skull cracks against the rock with a wet, sickening sound.
His body spasms, nearly bucks Dean off even as Dean does it again and again, fingers snarled in Newell’s hair and teeth bared. Newell’s grip around his throat loosens until he’s not moving at all and Sam is screaming for Dean to stop.
He can tell it’s too late but Sam still grabs Dean and lifts him bodily away from Newell. There’s brains, fucking brains spread out over the rock in a corona around Newell’s head, blood on Dean’s hands and on his face. Dean’s sobbing for air but he fights hard against Sam for a second before he sags so abruptly that Sam stumbles backwards. He recovers almost as quickly and turns, breaking Sam’s grasp to grab him. His hands clench around Sam’s biceps hard enough that Sam flinches away. Dean doesn’t let him pull away completely, fingers skimming over the cross that was cut into Sam’s skin and his hands rising up to tug hard at Sam’s hair as though proving to himself that Sam is all right, he’s still alive.
“You ok?” he asks at last, voice rough.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “yeah, I’m ok.” He can’t say any more than that. His eyes flicker back and forth between Newell’s corpse and his brother’s face, splattered with gore. Dean’s eyes search his face and he releases Sam abruptly. He gives Sam a final pat on the shoulder before he moves away and picks up his shotgun. It had fallen out of his hands when he pushed Sam out of harm’s way.
“Yeah,” he repeats. He’s kneeling practically at Newell’s feet but his eyes are trained on the shotgun. The body has slid onto the ground, its back propped against the rock as though Newell’s only resting a bit. His hands are spread wide in his lap in mute supplication. Sam can’t stop staring.
“Dean,” he says softly, but Dean cuts him off before he can go any further.
“Yeah, I know.” Dean’s eyes flick up to Newell’s face. The man’s eyes are open, the thin tracery of veins inside them burst and filled with blood, but the way Dean’s looking at Newell, it’s like he wants nothing more than to kill him all over again. “Just a few more seconds and ...” Dean says, so softly that Sam isn’t sure that he’s supposed to hear.
Sam can’t bring himself to say, Jesus, Dean, what did you do, so he says nothing at all. Dean’s fingers are trembling as he breaks open the shotgun, checks inside it even though it hasn’t been fired. His fingers, slipperly with blood, slide over the barrel and he nearly drops the gun. There are rock salt rounds inside that Dean could have shot Newell with a hundred times and never killed him with. Sam’s hand is clenched around Dean’s handgun, still forgotten by its owner, and Sam wants nothing more than to throw it away. His training overcomes irrational impulses easily, however, and he tucks it into his waistband before going over to where Dean is still kneeling at Newell’s side.
“You’ve got, um,” Sam says, gesturing at his own face. Dean nods and goes to swipe at his face with his sleeve before he realizes that he’s only wearing a T-shirt, and frowns. He uses the hem of his shirt instead, leaving tacky copper traces over his cheeks. Sam wants to sit next to his brother and rub the marks away, the way Dean used to do for him when he was small or still does sometimes, when they’re sitting in the car and Dean says he’s sick of Sam looking all gross. His hands have reached out but fall uncertainly back to his sides.
“We need to take care of him,” Sam says, when it begins to look as though Dean won’t. Dean’s head jerks around. His eyes are wide as he stares up at Sam. Sam can practically see the gears turning in Dean’s head, adjusting his thoughts until they make sense again.
“Shit,” Dean says, “the girl, I left her in my car.”
“Ok. You go take care of that. I’ll clean up,” Sam says softly and Dean obeys. He rests the barrel of the shotgun against his shoulder and makes his way back towards what Sam can only guess is the highway. Sam watches his brother until he can no longer see the black of his T-shirt through the slats of dusty sunlight drifting through the trees and then he returns to the girl’s - Mary’s - grave, clears a little firebreak, salts her bones and sets them on fire. Returns to the rock that Newell had tried to sacrfice him on. Drags Newell away from it by his boots. He salts Newell’s body even though he doesn’t have to and he watches the man’s skin bubble and his fat melt away in the heat. He salts it even though Dean isn’t there to see and there’s no one to take comfort from it but him.
Dean’s sitting with a young girl when Sam finally gets back to the car. He’s in the back seat with the door wide open, the girl asleep in his lap, her head curled against his shoulder. His button-up shirt looks enormous on her. He looks up at Sam and says nothing. He arms are curled halfway around her as though he rocked her to sleep.
Sam digs in the trunk for a new shirt before he opens up the passenger side door and sits down. They look out into the forest together. Dusk is finally coming to Santa Cruz; Sam thought that the day would never end. It seems like it was years ago that they fought Quintana. He can’t get the image of Newell’s brains out of his head, splashed around and so much more wet then Sam would have thought, but somehow he doesn’t think that he’s ever loved Dean more than he does right now. It’s bright and it hurts and Sam can barely even look at his brother.
“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says in a colorless voice.
Sam glances over at him, startled. Dean doesn’t look over. “What?” Sam asks, frowning. “What did you say?”
“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says again. “Otherwise known as, we’re totally fucked.”
Part 1 ** Part 3
Author: hansbekhart
Rating: R
Summary: They come from the north, exhausted by the sprawling highways and overpasses of Silicon Valley.
Notes: Everything you're about to read is true. Same warning as the first chapter, really. Special thanks again to fatale and shored, and there will be a more detailed post after the main chapters are up. There are three complete chapters, and I'll be posting the final chapter tomorrow, along with my research notes. (Part 1 can be found here.)
Sam wakes first to the smell of salt water and sage. The balcony door stands open and through it issues the call of sea gulls. Dean is nothing more than a shape buried beneath blankets as Sam works a pair of jeans up his legs and over his hips, buttons a shirt with slow, leaden movements. He doesn’t make a sound as Sam shuts the door quietly behind him.
He feels surprisingly well. The last shadow of painkillers still lingers in his mind, blurring his thoughts together into a comfortable fog of nonsequitors. He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans as he trudges down a hill and over a short stone bridge in search of the coffeehouse he had noted the previous day. The sign in the second story window says Mr. Toot’s and its interior is awash with sunlight.
A man with an enormous shock of frizzy red hair, tall enough to look down a little to meet Sam’s eyes, takes his order: one house coffee, a couple of pastries and one girly-as-hell-concoction that would guarantee Sam some brotherly torture, were Dean awake to see him drink it. Sam sips it at his leisure instead, propping his elbows on the railing of the bridge and watching the creek beneath him bleed out into the ocean.
His eyes flicker across the water but can’t seem to rest on anything in particular. He woke up feeling all right but his walk has done the exact opposite of what he had hoped. His fingers tap restlessly against the stone of the bridge and there’s a taste in the back of his mouth that not even the coffee can banish, like he’s bitten on tinfoil. He rubs a hand absently across his chest and tries to push the feeling away as he heads back towards the motel.
Dean stirs slightly when Sam opens the door with his shoulder, Dean’s coffee and their breakfast held in one hand. He breathes in deeply and lets it out in a long, thoughtful sigh, and Sam smiles to himself as he locks the door behind him and sets the pastry bag onto the table. Dean is slower in the morning these days, some part of his brain settled with the security of family sleeping close by. He’s no longer prone to reaching for the knife below his pillow if Sam happens to get up before he does, although Sam knows that he still keeps it there.
Sam sets the coffee cup down on the bedside table and sits down on his own bed, elbows resting on knees. Dean is an illusion of carelessly spread limbs, one hand snaked underneath his pillow like it’s unintentional, the other pressing against his eyes. He’s shirtless, a dingy motel towel crumpled beside him as though he hadn’t bothered to kick it off the bed before falling asleep. The sheets are rucked up around his bare legs. Even in the shadows, a smattering of freckles are just visible across the bridge of Dean’s nose that brings a smile to Sam’s face. Their mother had had freckles.
He leans forward to ruffle Dean’s hair and almost gets there before there is an iron grip around his wrist and green eyes are blinking warily at him. “Whafuck?” Dean mumbles, letting go of Sam to rub at his face. He tries again: “Dude, what the fuck? What’re you lookin’ at?”
Sam grins and leans forward with one finger extended that Dean goes cross-eyed trying to look at. “Are these ... freckles?” he says dramatically. “Are you freckling?”
Dean bats his hand away and rolls over onto his back, wincing, and then looks at Sam with deliberately casual eyes. “Why are you up already, anyway? You have another nightmare?”
Sam shakes his head and passes the coffee cup to Dean, who accepts it with a quick nod. “Nah, just ... couldn’t stay in bed anymore, you know? It’s nice out there.”
Dean glances towards the window, his eyebrows raised skeptically, but his expression is satisfied as he lowers the cup of coffee and sits up. There is a bruise at the bottom of his hairline and a cut on his mouth but he seems more focused than he had been the night before.
Dean’s eyes snap back to him. “I got a coffee mustache or something?”
Sam shakes his head. “You still look half-dead, man.”
Dean huffs at him and gets up to paw at the pastry bag. “So what do you think that girl was?” Dean asks, his neck bent over breakfast. He stuffs the apple turnover into his mouth and wanders back to hand the chocolate croissant to Sam.
Sam raises his eyebrows. “I thought we were taking the day off from hunting.”
“What, that means we can’t talk about things that go bump in the night?” Dean asks. He devours the turnover in seconds and is up again as soon as he’s flicked the crumbs from his fingers, pacing around the room looking for clean clothing. Sam eats his breakfast more slowly, his entire body still languid. He can feel stitches pulling every time he moves his shoulders, and digs into their bag to pop something a bit less powerful than the Panadol.
“Winchesters don’t take days off!” Dean bellows, his voice muffled slightly by the bathroom door.
“No, Winchesters don’t complain, bitch, whine or piss and moan,” Sam says, deepening his voice into a piss-poor imitation of their dad.
Dean’s response is nearly instantaneous: “You accomplish all of those every day, so I guess all bets are off, right?”
“Fuck you,” Sam calls, and Dean laughs.
Sam swallows a couple of pills dry and pulls out his other pair of jeans and a decently clean shirt. They’re overdue for laundry, especially now that they’ve only got a single pair of jeans apiece that aren’t covered in blood and dirt. There’s an itch in his palms that won’t go away no matter how hard he rubs them on his thighs and belatedly, he realizes it for what it is: their family’s brand of curiosity, that itch to be on the job, tracking down leads and killing whatever’s in their path.
That must have been what he had felt in the Village. Boredom, maybe; his brain so far asleep that it hadn’t even considered the easy solution. He was stupid to think that it’d been anything else, really.
“Hey,” he calls to Dean, who sticks his head out of the bathroom in response, toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “That girl, she definitely wasn’t contemporary to the Ohlone. She looked like she died in the 70’s or something.”
Dean vanishes back into the bathroom and Sam hears him spit into the sink. “So what was she doing down with the Indians?” he says when he reemerges.
Sam shrugs. “Maybe she’s looking for help.”
Dean snorts, taking a second look inside the pastry bag to see if he’d miraculously missed something. “Yeah, a ghost that doesn’t want to kill anybody. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Dean smirks at the back of Holy Cross church when they drive by it, the steeple just visible from the curve of the highway. He takes one hand off the wheel to lay an affectionate slap on the side of Sam’s skull, a sort of well done, we rock movement that Sam has had long years of brotherly abuse to get used to. Dean puts on Houses of the Holy and cranks the volume, his fingers tapping against the steering wheel.
The day isn’t hot enough for the fog to come rolling in, but it’s close. The wind through the open windows blows Sam’s hair into his face.
“Roll up your damn window!” Sam shouts.
“Cut your damn hair!” Dean yells back cheerfully.
The Impala starts rocking side to side as they round the curve of Highway 1. Dean curses the road and the wind and anything else that isn’t a part of his baby and they nearly crash twice before they’re safe in the parking lot of a 7-11. Dean practically vaults out of the driver’s seat and kneels on the ground before his car without heed to the broken glass around him. Sam can hear him swearing through the open window and is curious but not overly concerned until something slams his head back against the seat.
“Shit!” Sam shouts.
Dean’s head pops up into view like a jack-in-the-box. “What?” he says. “What the hell’s wrong now?”
Sam stares up at the Impala’s ceiling, every nerve in his body crawling, and can’t explain.
Dean checks his baby inside and out and finds nothing wrong with it, but as soon as they’re back on the road, it begins again. The radio turns on suddenly and goes from one end of the dial to the other faster than human fingers can turn. The brakes go out at two stopsigns. From time to time, Sam can see flashes of the girl out of the corner of his eye. She’s thumbing on a streetcorner. She’s sitting behind them, smelling of incense and wet earth.
“Get the hell out of my car!” Dean shouts at the rearview mirror, as if that’s going to help.
They have enough of a respite to make it to downtown Santa Cruz, where they head for the Central Branch library. There’s a bewilderingly large section of the library devoted to local history, and it doesn’t take them long to find what they’re looking for.
“Hey, Sam,” Dean says, flinging out his hand to jab Sam in the side. Sam looks over, a little surprised; the last time he had looked over, Dean had been sitting with his hand propped on the ball of his hand, playing Solitaire. “All right, so, you remember that cheesy vampire movie with that blond guy in it, you know, Keifer whatever?”
“The Lost Boys. Dad never stopped bitching about the inaccuracies,” Sam murmurs.
“Like he ever does,” Dean snorts. “Anyway, it was set in a fictional town that was based on Santa Cruz, inspired by this huge string of murders that happened in the early 70’s. All during February, 1973, the bodies of two college students were discovered in the woods, their bodies in pieces, a 79-year-old woman was found raped and strangled in the bath and the bodies of six other victims were found. There was a serial rapist around and it didn’t even stop there. From 1970 to 1973, three people axed at least twenty-six people between them. That’s why this place was called the ‘Murder Capital of the World.’”
“Wow,” Sam says. “Any records of strange weather, planet alignment during that time?”
Dean shrugs. “Some half-baked scientist said that an earthquake big enough to sink California into the sea was imminent or something, but nobody really seemed to care except this one guy who thought it was a good enough reason to kill thirteen people. I’ll try to find tidal charts or something. You check weather or whatever.”
An hour and a half later, Sam slaps his hand down next to where Dean has fallen asleep, his head pillowed on almanacs. “Nothing,” he says sourly. “No freaky weather, no political upheavals, plenty of missing person reports but none that match our ghost. You manage to find anything interesting before you totally gave up and passed out, jerk?”
“Nope,” Dean says, rubbing a hand over his face. “Nothing at all except for a month that nine people were murdered, which is what, one more interesting thing than you found? Shut your pie hole.”
“So what could it be?” Sam asks as they leave the library. Dean squints into the sun and doesn’t look at him as they make their way towards the parking garage where they left the car. “There’ve been too many deaths and incidents to chalk it up to a single force, whether it’s ... a spirit or an elemental or even just the 70’s being a crappy time to move here.”
“You said that the Psycho house or whatever hosted Satanists, right?” Dean asks.
“Yeah, it’s a retirement home now.”
“So what if some dumbass Satanists opened a gateway back in the day and never managed to close it?”
“I dunno,” Sam says doubtfully. “Wouldn’t the attacks come more regularly? Wouldn’t people keep getting killed in the same way? It’s been going on for an awfully long time for nobody to have ntoiced anything, especially in a town like this.”
“People might be getting killed in different ways because there’re different spirits loose in the area,” Dean counters. They’ve reached the Impala and Dean stands with one hand spread flat on her hood, as if contact with his car will help him convince Sam. “We’ve already seen different spirits fucking around -- it could be a ripple effect, like, somebody gets killed by one of the Satanist’s spirits and becomes a spirit themselves who kills other people.”
Dean’s grinning at Sam as though he’s just talked a pair of twins into a threesome, but Sam only shakes his head. “Sunshine Villa was only built in the 1860’s or so, and there was a family living in it back then. Father Quintana outdates the house by fifty years and the Satanists probably weren’t living there until the 1960’s.”
Dean sighs, his fingers moving restlessly over the car. Sam shoves his hands in his pockets and waits. Finally, Dean sighs. “This town sucks out loud,” he says, and Sam almost wants to smack him except for the fact that he’s starting to agree.
“Why do you keep saying that?” he asks instead. Dean’s eyes flick towards him, puzzled.
“What?”
Sam folds his arms on the top of his car and rests his chin on top of his hands. “You keep saying that,” he says slowly. “Santa Cruz sucks. California sucks. I get it, Dean. Shut the hell up and find a new topic of conversation already, ok? Or at least tell me why California sucks so hard that you need to mention it once every five goddamn minutes. I’ve been trying to figure it out but all I see is sunshine, sand and hippies. I’d chalk it up to hippies except that Napa didn’t have any and you were still being an asshole there, so what is it?”
“It is the hippies,” Dean says, grinning. “I could smell ‘em from Napa. The entire state smells like patchouli and body odor. Who wouldn’t love it? Well, other than me, but I’m sorta allergic to that extra stench of self-righteousness.”
“Dean,” Sam says warningly, but Dean is already unlocking the Impala’s door, head down, a chuckle rising in his throat that cuts off abruptly when he opens the door. He staggers away from the car and Sam is about to ask him what’s wrong when the smell hits him too.
“Jesus!” Dean yells. Sam can hear him on the other side of the car, cursing wildly, but all of his attention seems to have been diverted into not puking in the parking lot that they’re standing in.
It’s muddy earth and congealed blood and lower intestines torn open and rotting in the sun. It’s the smell of a body that lays underneath shady trees for months with nothing larger than racoons around to tear it, spoiled meat in a still forest.
“Jesus,” Dean says again, awed. Sam tries to lift his head from the pavement and gags again. He can hear Dean shifting suddenly, his posture stiffening. “Wait a fucking minute,” Dean says slowly, possibilities dawning in his mind. “You think that shit’s gonna stick to my car?”
Laughing only brings the stench into his mouth and lungs, so Sam waits until he’s hauled himself to his feet and gotten a few yards away. From a safe distance, he watches Dean dart back and forth, his shirt sleeve pulled over his hand and covering his nose.
“Maybe she was killed hitchhiking,” Sam says, “and that’s why she’s able to mess with your car.”
“Wish she’d quit it already,” Dean grumbles. “This is worse than when you drove my car into a freaking house.” He squints spectulatively into the car. “What do you want?”
“Can you see her in there?” Sam gasps.
Dean shakes his head. “It’s just the smell, dude.”
He comes round the car and stands next to Sam. They stare at the Impala appraisingly. “She must really wanna tell us something,” Sam says.
Dean doesn’t dignify that with a direct reply. “Heads or tails?”
“What?” Sam asks, bewildered.
“Someone has to go in and tell her to get her ass out of my car before that smell becomes permanent. By the way, if it does, I’m making you clean the interior with a toothbrush until it’s nothing but a memory.”
Sam calls it in the air. Dean catches it one handed and flips it to his other hand. Peeks. Smirks. Sam sighs and trudges back to the car.
The driver’s side door is open and the worst of it seems to have dissapated in the breeze. He can hear Dean cackling behind him as he strips his outer shirt off and ties it around his nose and mouth, bandit-style. It doesn’t help much. He doesn’t look behind him as he slides into the passenger seat, breathing shallowly. He can hear the creak of leather beneath her as she slides forward along the seat. The hands that come up and rest to either side of his shoulders are bloody, fingers twisted and useless, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.
Sometimes, Sam almost forgets how much he actually hates being touched by spirits. It doesn’t happen often; most of them are only solid enough to kill you, and they don’t usually get close enough to touch. There was a ghost in Nebraska that knocked Sam to the ground and stretched out on top of him before Dad could knock it off, and the memory of that not-skin against his own gave him a complex about raw chicken for years.
Her fingers slide along the seat rest and Sam can imagine them catching and digging into the soft skin of his throat.
The stench of her is so much worse up close.
Her mouth brushes his ear and somehow, Sam manages not to flinch away. “Eden,” she whispers. “The Garden of Eden.”
Dean makes Sam crank the windows all the way down before he’ll get near the car, and he drives with a pinched expression. “The Garden of Eden,” he repeats. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Got me,” Sam mutters. He presses his nose against the inside of his wrist the way their Dad taught them, blocking out the rot of the grave with the scent of their own skin. His eyes are closed, his attention focused so completely on clearing his nasal passages that he doesn’t realize that the Impala is stopped until its engine is ticking contentedly in the sun. Dean’s staring expectantly at him.
“Hop to it, Sammy,” he says, and that’s when Sam finally glances around and sees that they’re sitting in the lot of a do-it-yourself car wash. Dean is grinning at him when Sam looks back to his brother.
“You are such a dick,” Sam says with as much loathing as he can muster. Dean only laughs.
“Hurry up. I want her clean before that bitch comes back and stinks it up again.”
“You can barely even smell it anymore,” Sam grumbles, but he heaves himself out of the car anyway and goes to find an attendant.
Dean, for his part, swings his legs out of the car and plants his elbows on his knees, enjoying the prospect of getting Sammy to wash the Impala with what looked like a minimum amount of bitching and a maximum amount of guilt. Cause and effect: you wanted to check this thing out, now my car smells like dirty vag. Sam was right and Dean knew it; when the girl had delivered her stupid, cryptic message (and what the hell was with that, anyway? Did dying just make it impossible for people to just say what they wanted?), she had vanished and taken that awful stink with her, thank Christ.
The prospect of a wash was just too much to resist.
Dean’s back pops when he gets out of the car. The fog that hit them at the beach is just now making its lazy way into town, clinging to the cracked aslphalt and brushing over the cars that rush by them, trying to beat the trafflic light half a block down. Across the street, tanned teenagers pass by on bicycles, surfboards clenched precariously under their arms. On the corner, a person of indistinguishable gender begs for spare change.
Dean surveys all he sees and is unimpressed.
He’s not fond of college towns, not fond of large-ish cities. The rules that they live by don’t always apply; who to go to, to ask questions, to hear about the local lore. Everyone on the street looks homeless to him and he doubts that the punks at the head shops and tattoo parlors would be able to tell him what he needs to know.
He’s been to Santa Cruz before. Sam didn’t ask how he knew to find the only motel in Capitola that would charge them less than 200$ a night, didn’t think to ask, but when Sam’d been at Stanford for about three months or so, Dean and his Dad spent nearly a week holed up in the Harbor Lights Motel. It had been the only time they’d come to California together and they’d lasted for only a few hours in Palo Alto before heading over the hill and losing themselves in their respective intoxicants. Dad’s had come in bottles, Dean’s came in skirts, and he had spent Christmas Eve with two girls and half an ounce of shrooms between them. Christmas Day he and Dad had dried out at the Beach Boardwalk, listlessly flicking cigarette ashes onto filthy sand, before Dad had passed him a printout from a daily rag in Oklahoma, front page full of missing children.
He’d gone back by himself since then, of course, to check on Sammy, make sure he still had all his limbs or whatever, but never again with Dad. It had been a failed experiment and they hadn’t spoken of it afterwards, even when Dean was pretty sure that Dad was making his own trips to central California.
Sam comes back full of attitude and practically pushes Dean away from the car. He gives Dean one last bitchface before driving the car up to one of the service stations, but Dean’s lost interest in Sam doing menial labor, his brain busy turning the ghost’s message over and around.
Fucking cryptic ghosts.
He scans the street as he walks, checking both sides for possibilities. There are a lot of people out but everyone seems to be in motion: on bicycles, in cars, walking quickly down the street without making eye contact. Not a bad policy. Diner, car insurance store, head shop, skate shop, head shop. The next time Sammy has an urge to ‘stay and investigate,’ he’s goddamn going to do it on his own. Dean’s almost ready to turn back and tell Sammy that his goddamn Californian ghosts can eat his asshole - they’re hitting the interstate and not stopping until there’s three thousand miles of cornfields in either direction - when he sees the barn.
At the end of a long parking lot is an enormous metal barn with people bustling in and out of it, their arms full of dubious looking thrift store finds. There are two kids that look about Sam’s age standing at one corner of the lot giving every impression of a disdainful eye in a hurricane, passing a joint back and forth between them.
“Hey, hippie!” Dean calls.
Their heads swivel towards him. The bearded one curls a lip at him. “What, you need directions to your Abercrombie & Fitch photoshoot?”
Dean checks himself about fifteen feet away, resisting the urge to look down at his well-worn flannels, salvaged from St. Vincent De Paul over a year ago. “Actually,” he replies, “I was hoping you guys could direct me to the unemployment line, since it looks like you just came from there.”
Silence stretches tightly and if Sam had been there, he might have laughed nervously and made some lame comment to cover for Dean’s big mouth. Dean, unchecked, lifts his chin and stands his ground.
There is the slightest twitch of an appreciative smirk, mostly hidden in the heavy shadow of the guy’s beard, and then he holds the joint out towards Dean, who accepts it gracefully and takes a long drag.
He coughs a little as he passes it back, and the hippies beam proudly. Stoner’s equivalent of thanking the chef, Dean supposes.
“That’s outdoor organic, man,” says the other. “Grown right here in the mountains.”
“You grow it yourself?”
They shake their heads regretfully. The conversation is interrupted by a shout of “Jimmy Mack!” from behind him. The bearded guy, apparently Jimmy Mack, turns. A hunchbacked man with long, scraggly hair is waving at him cheerfully. “Jimmy Mack, this lady needs a price on this keyboard.”
“I’ll be off my break in just a minute,” Jimmy Mack hollers back. Dean is momentarily distracted by the possibility that normal names are simply outlawed in Santa Cruz when their attention returns to him. “The barn’s gonna close at two, but we reopen at three if you want to wait around.”
“Actually,” Dean says, and nods his thanks as the joint makes its way into his hand again, “I need directions. The Garden of Eden mean anything to either of you?”
They nod nearly in unison. There’s a symbiosis to their movements, a sort of back and forth of unspoken communication that makes Dean wonder if they’re brothers. It would be eerie if it wasn’t so familiar, and Dean relaxes into it unconsciously. “Yeah, of course,” Jimmy Mack says. “That’s an awesome hiking spot. It’s up on Highway 9, past Henry Cowell Park. You can get to it real easy from here, actually.”
“There’s been a lot more tourists out there lately,” the other guy chimes in, “but you can still find some nice spots along the river.” They share a disgusted look between them, presumably at the thought of tourists tramping along the river rather than cluttering up the beaches as usual. Dean remembers that sort of disdain as well; the girls on Christmas Eve had been full of contempt for anyone living on the other side of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Jimmy Mack is drawing Dean a map by the time the Impala pulls into the parking lot, Sam’s face peering out the window like somebody’s disapproving grandmother. The car gleams and Dean feels a surge of affection for his brother that probably has more to do with what he’s smoking than he’d like to admit.
“Thanks a lot, man,” he says, they shag ass towards the highway.
Sammy’s got his bitch-face on but doesn’t say anything until they’re winding their way back up the mountains, trees thicker and greener than on Highway 17. There’s an abnormal amount of people walking on the side of the highway, flannel-wearing, bearded mountain people. Sam’s lips thin as he slows to avoid them.
“What the fuck, Dean,” he spits at last. “You have no idea what could be waiting for us up there.”
“Relax, Sammy. I didn’t inhale,” Dean drawls, and then bursts into giggles, proving himself a liar.
“Yeah,” Sam says bitterly. “What do you think Dad would say if he saw you going hunting stoned?”
“He’d tell you to quit being a whiny bitch,” Dean says, as annoyed as he could possibly be, which isn’t much. Santa Cruz organic gives one hell of a body high, apparently, and he grins contentedly out the window at nothing. “I think I can handle a little grave digging.”
Sam is silent for a long time. When he finally speaks, it’s quiet, logical. “Seriously, Dean. Maybe we should hold off on this. At least for a few hours. Wait for you to get your head straight.”
Dean is sidetracked by a train of thought comparing being stoned to drunk driving, trying to figure out how often he’s driven them home from a bar and not heard a friggin’ peep out of Sam, and why does Sammy have to be such a whiny bitch, anyway, when he remembers that he’s forgotten to respond to his brother.
“I’m fine, dude. Seriously. Let’s just get this done and get the hell out of this state,” he says, his eyes sliding closed too easily, head dropping back against the leather seat. He almost keeps his mouth closed around the thought that slides out next, tacked onto the end as an afterthought. “Before you remember how much you liked it here and decide to stay.”
Sam, wisely, doesn’t answer.
Dean is nearly dozing by the time they hit Felton, but he snaps awake as they pass by the green metal gate Jimmy Mack told them would take them to the Garden of Eden. “Sammy,” he says, floundering back towards consciousness. “Sam, you missed it, turn around.”
“It isn’t there,” Sam says. There’s something in his voice that makes Dean turn and look at his brother, something wound so tight that it shakes the timbre of Sam’s words. His long fingers are gripping the steering wheel so hard that the knuckles are white but Sam’s eyes are glazed and shiny, as though he had been the one toking.
“It isn’t?” Dean asks slowly.
Sam shakes his head. It’s barely more than a spastic movement. “It’s a little further up. Not much. Just a little.”
There’s a turn-off on the road that loops behind a thick redwood tree, a narrow roadway for cars to turn around in. Sam pulls the Impala into this space and parks, his jaw working.
“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, his voice low. “Sam? What’s going on?”
It’s an effort for Sam to turn his head. He shakes his head again; he doesn’t have the words for it. “There’s - something out there,” he manages. “I can feel it. I think I’ve been feeling it since we got here.”
“What is it?” Dean asks, but Sam doesn’t know. There’s nothing to describe what’s pulling his mind apart, weaving it into the air around them until Sam could feel the very ground breathe beneath the Impala’s tires. He climbs out of the car and Dean follows, keeping a wary eye. “You gonna be ok to do this?” he asks as Sam digs supplies out of the trunk.
Sam lifts an eyebrow at him. “Are you gonna be ok to do this?” he asks pointedly.
In truth, things feel more or less like he’s the star in some video game. Dean’s hazy enough to be enjoying more than just the feeling of being on the hunt again, clear enough that he knows what’s going on, what needs to be done and - vaguely - what’s expected of him.
Dean finds it first, just the merest hint of a ripple in the clovers that blanket the red earth. Sam leads the way into the trees, pulled forward by whatever was leading him on. They see flashes of the girl in the trees, liberated from the Impala and following them to her final resting place. She doesn’t come close. Slowly, the noise from the road falls away until all they can hear is their own footsteps and the rushing of water, somewhere out of sight.
The trail narrows and takes them up a steep hill, climbing over fallen tree trunks and sliding carefully down the other side. Dean’s brief moment of sobriety has been chased away by the scattering of sunlight across his face and he’s actually sort of starting to maybe think that Santa Cruz isn’t so bad. Sam only glares at him when he mentions it, though.
“So,” Dean says after a while, “You, uh, you having any premonitions or anything? Visions? Anything like that?”
“No,” Sam replies without turning around. “Nothing. I just feel - stretched, somehow.”
“Stretched,” Dean repeats. “Sammy the Psychic Wonder. When are your super powers ever gonna do anything useful? They always gotta be so friggin’ vague?”
“I don’t know,” Sam mutters.
They both feel it when they step into the clearing. It’s soaked with sun, leather ferns growing nearly up to their waists. Beautiful but wrong, somehow diseased and discolored behind their eyes, like the afterimage of the sun. Dean blinks hard and goes to shield his eyes before he realizes that it isn’t something that he’s actually seeing.
“Hey, check it out,” he says. “Your girlfriend’s back.”
Their ghost stands not thirty yards away from them. It’s the clearest view that they’ve had of her yet: tiny, bloodied, her intestines dangling out of her bared belly, dirt smeared across her face and hands. Ghosts aren’t often very expressive unless they’re trying to kill you and Dean isn’t all that surprised when all she does is stare at them for a bit and then fade out of view.
“I think that’s where her body is,” Sam says.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” is Dean’s reply, and he takes the lead.
The girl’s final resting place turns out to be nothing more than a small depression sinking below the level plain of the clearing, the earth claiming her body. The first few shovelfuls of dirt turn up the ragged corner of a polyester jacket and they share a long look before turning back to the work.
Or, at least, before Sam turns back towards the work; Dean seems frozen, testing the air as though he’s a dog. “I’m not digging this by myself,” Sam says without glancing up. He tenses when Dean shushes him, and nearly drops his shovel when Dean’s hand clenches around the back of his neck.
“Do you smell that?” Dean says softly.
Sam sniffs and smells nothing. He looks at Dean expectantly.
“Barbeque,” Dean says at last.
Sam lets out an irritated sigh. “Jesus, Dean, really? Now is not the time to have the munchies. We can stop for something when we’re done with this.”
This time, when Dean’s hand comes down against Sam’s neck it’s more of a slap than a protective gesture. “Jackass,” he hisses. “If there’s a house close enough that we can smell them cooking, then there’s a house that’s close enough that they would’ve been able to smell a body.”
Sam stills, still bent over his shovel, his chin lifted. He can smell the barbeque now, sweet on the wind. “Maybe it’s a house that was built after she was killed here,” he ventures.
Dean shakes his head. “You see any new houses on the way up here? You finish this, I’m gonna go check it out.”
He pulls the shotgun out of their duffel before heading off, and Sam watches him disappear between the trees before he puts the shovel to earth again.
Sam can admit that he’s probably in far worse shape than Dean is, intoxicants or no, even if he’s only admitting it to himself. He’s dizzy, clumsy in his movements as he lays white bones bare in the sun. The movements are familiar and soothing: lifting the heavy shovel, careful to avoid scattering the remains, tossing the dirt away. He’s dug hundreds of graves, with his dad and brother and sometimes even by himself, and it narrows his focus into nothing but the pull of muscles in his back and the sun against his skin.
He hears the whistle of the club as it comes down. It’s enough time to turn slightly but not enough to dodge, and then everything goes black.
The house is old and shingled, a faded red. Dean approaches from the back, shotgun ready. The smell of the barbeque is tantalizing and Dean realizes that they haven’t eaten since the Mexican food this morning, which already seems like days ago. He can hear The Mamas and the Papas playing from somewhere inside the house, quiet and eerie, another ironic soundtrack for their lives.
He eases the kitchen door open; he can see an ancient station wagon parked out front but can’t see anything moving inside. The kitchen is clean enough. Yellow plaid decorations that look older than the station wagon, clean dishes stacked next to the sink, two cups inside it. A stack of mail on the kitchen table addressed to Addison Newell, and Dean nods to himself in smug certainty: not a normal name in this entire county. Dean heads right into a panelled living room, sticking closely to the wall as he whips quickly around it, gun up and ready - and then stops when he gets a good look what’s on the walls.
He reaches out to touch it before he can stop himself, fingers ghosting over the edges of the endless spirals gouged out of the wall. The wood is a deep reddish brown where it’s been hacked into and the color spills out unevenly over the sides. He backs up a couple steps to see it fully, every sense straining for movement or sound.
There’s a mouth on the wall. It’s almost perfectly spherical, no evidence of teeth or tongue, and something about it sends an icy shiver down his spine. Scattered on the floor are similar drawings of an enormous hole (mouth, it’s a mouth), smeared with something that Dean really doesn’t want to touch.
There’s a sound from the other side of the kitchen and Dean turns, immediately alert. He can see the smoke from the barbeque pit through the sliding glass doors and there, on the edge of the door - a bare foot, the faintest bit of green polish still clinging to the nails.
She looks barely eighteen, naked, pale body criss-crossed with ropes that had long since cut deeply into bare flesh. She isn’t conscious but drowsing close to it, moving her head aimlessly. Alone, as far as Dean can tell, left sitting a few feet away from the barbeque like the world’s most unwilling dinner guest. His knife is out of his pocket before his knees hit the ground, sawing quickly through her bindings, eyes moving constantly around in case whoever did this to her is coming back.
She begins to cry as she swims towards awareness, her fingers weakly scrabbling back along the arms of the chair and Dean speaks in soft, comforting words: you’re gonna be ok, everything’s gonna be all right, I’m here to help, who did this to you? He strips off his outer shirt as soon as she’s more or less free and wraps it around her shoulders, covering the long slash that runs all the way down her sternum and crosses at her breasts.
“Come on, honey, I’m gettin’ you out of here,” he says.
There’s a laundry basket in the small room off the kitchen, full of clean clothing, and he helps her into a pair of sweat pants at least a foot too long for her, kneels down again and rolls them up until she can walk well enough to lean on him. He doesn’t want to stay long enough to find her clothes and she offers no help as to their location. She moves when he moves her but staggers as soon as his arm isn’t around her shoulders. She says her name is Mandy.
He thumbs open his phone as soon as they’re clear of the house. There was a pair of flip flops bigger than even Sam could wear lying next to the door and Mandy stumbles a bit in them. She’s crying almost constantly, little gulping sobs that almost distract Dean from the fact that Sam is not picking up his phone.
It rings and rings and Mandy has suddenly become one hell of a complication. Dean isn’t panicking, but it’s close.
Thank god there’s a spare set of keys hidden snugly in the well of the right back tire. He carries Mandy for part of the way back, after she sags against him and nothing he says will coax her to go just a little bit further. She can’t tell him how she got there or what happened to her and after he tries Sam’s phone again, it’s starting to matter less and less. He puts her in the back seat and takes her carefully by the shoulders.
“Mandy,” he says softly, his tone commanding her attention. “Mandy. I have to go back for something, ok? You’re going to be absolutely safe right here. Will you wait right here for me? You can lock the doors behind me and no one is going to come after you. I’ll be back as soon as I can and we’ll take you somewhere safe, far away from here.”
Every nerve in his body is screaming for Sammy, you’ve left Sam in the woods with a serial killer, but he forces himself to stay still when she grabs his forearms. “I’m not leaving you.” Voice still soothing and she relaxes just slightly, enough for him to free one of his hands and push her long hair away from her face. “My brother is still back there and I need to make sure he’s ok before we can take you some place safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can. You think you’ll be ok?”
Mercifully, she nods, but her face looks so naked and scared that Dean mentally downgrades her age to maybe sixteen. “You’re safe here,” he says again. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
For a long moment she only stares at him, her eyes searching his face. Then, finally, she whispers, “Thank you, Dean,” and if Dean’s brain hadn’t already been dissolving into panic, he might have realized that he’d never told Mandy his name.
The cellphone brings Sam back to consciousness, the trilling grating in his pocket before there’s a fumbling hand reaching into his pocket and drawing the phone out, flinging it carelessly away. It rings and rings, muffled by the distance and the underbrush and then it stops, and the hand returns and grabs Sam by the ankles to drag him along. His hands are tied securely, wrists crossed over his stomach, rope winding all the way up his elbows. The earth tugs at the stitches running across his shoulder blades and he can’t quite stifle the gasp that rises to his lips.
The man who drags him glances over his shoulder and smiles almost comfortingly. Even flat on his back, Sam can tell that he’s the tallest living person he’s ever seen, one massive hand clenched tightly enough around both of Sam’s ankles that he wouldn’t be able to break free even if his legs weren’t tied together as well. He’s old enough to be Sam’s dad, his hair shot through with gray, face creased into a smile that would almost have made Sam less afraid if the man hadn’t spoken then.
“It won’t hurt much, I promise. It’ll be over before you know it.”
“What are you going to do to me?” Sam grits out between his teeth.
The man doesn’t turn his head again but he laughs quietly, sadly. “Nothing that you don’t want,” he says, as though he’s still trying to reassure Sam. “I heard you all the way from my house, singing the death song right back at me. There’s usually only one at a time but this is good, this is wonderful. You’ve helped me out a lot, kid I’m really grateful.”
“What do you mean, death song?” His head goes hard over the gnarly root of a redwood tree and Sam winces. He watches the way the man moves, the heavy stoop of his shoulders, looking for an opportunity to fight back. The man doesn’t reply.
The forest isn’t nearly so lovely when his back is grinding over every part of it, his legs up in the air. Sam tries again. “You killed that girl back there, didn’t you?” he accuses. “The one in the ground.”
The man’s voice is disapproving. “She was resting quietly.”
Sam has to laugh at that, thinking of his brother. “No she wasn’t. She was haunting me. That’s how I found her grave.” He almost stumbles over us and turns it to me at the last second. If the man hadn’t caught Dean making a beeline for his barbeque, Sam’s depending on him for rescue and the last thing he wants to do is alert this guy that help could be on the way.
The man only makes a satisfied noise, as if he’s had something confirmed. “Rest easy,” he says. “We’re almost there.”
‘There’ turns out to be a flat rock, nearly long enough for Sam to stretch out on, if he’s willing to let his feet dangle a bit. It’s stained with blood and the earth around the base is as bare as if it’d been scorched. The man lifts him almost carefully, one hand wrapped around the ropes on Sam’s arms, the other cradling his skull. Sam’s back scrapes against the rock nonetheless and he’s settled into exactly the position he had imagined, head against the top, his body hanging off the edge just above his knees, his feet barely touching the ground.
He isn’t afraid when the man brings the knife out, his gaze never wavering from the weapon. Dean has saved him so many times that Sam’s faith is instinctual. His only priorities are stalling for time and getting as much information as he can.
“You’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?” he asks as the man begins to cut away Sam’s shirt, right down the middle of his chest. “You said they usually come one at a time. How many have there been?”
The man shrugs. It’s a graceless gesture on his bulky frame. “I’ve lost count. It’s been a long while.”
“What, thirty, forty years?” Sam asks. His casual tone is borrowed from Dean. “It’s been at least that long, if that girl’s clothes are anything to go by.”
The man’s face darkens and the hand holding the knife trembles, just a bit. His hand is spread flat across Sam’s chest, holding him in place and dashing any hopes that Sam is still cherishing about being able to break away. “She was in ‘73.”
Something sparks in Sam’s brain, some dim connection that starts with Dean telling him to shut the hell up and ends with nine people murdered in a single month, and his mouth opens without concern for the point of the knife held over his heart. “February of ‘73, right?”
The man’s smile is a grimace and the knife presses downwards, shifting up a few inches to just underneath the little dip of his collarbone, running over a single curve of rib until it hits his sternum. The hand not holding the knife twists Sam’s arms above his head without ceasing the downward movement of the other hand. “You’re good,” the man says, his voice rising so that Sam can hear him over his own labored breathing. “She got away. She was one of my first and I -” He breaks off with a muffled laugh, his mouth twisting. “I used to tell all of them how sorry I was, how I didn’t want to be hurting them, but no one ever believed me. Guess I can’t really blame them, huh?”
The man’s brows knit together and for an instant Sam can see deep exhaustion in every crease of the man’s face, true regret and loathing as he drags the knife down, cutting just a little bit deeper into the soft flesh of Sam’s stomach.
“Anyway,” the man continues, “I’ve never let it happen again. I learned my lesson then and I’ve stuck with it all this time, no matter how anyone’s begged or how much I wanted to let them go. I wish it could go better for you, kid. You seem like you’re pretty smart. I’ll try and make it easy on you.” He smiles down at Sam. “The girl’s back at my house. I usually try and give ‘em a nice send-off, you know? A good meal - some of that teriyaki skirt steak from Shopper’s Corner, the real good kind. I’ve got some whiskey in my bag, if you think that’ll help you. I’m sorry you’re not going to be joining us for dinner, but ... you got the look of a trouble maker on you, kid. I don’t wanna risk you trying something stupid. Not when it’s gonna open any day now.”
“I’m not hungry, anyway,” Sam mutters. He twists away from the knife - can’t help himself - as it comes back up, the man leaning over him to keep his hips pinned to the stone, blood smearing along the sleeve of his flannel shirt.
“Your loss,” the man says, shrugging. “It’s melt in your mouth good.”
Jesus fucking Christ, Dean would say, are you really talking about steak when you’re getting ready to kill me? Sam grunts as the knife begins another journey across his skin, starting right below his left nipple and travelling horizontally across his chest to just below the right. “There, now you’re marked,” the man says in satisfaction. “It’ll be able to swallow you now. You want any of that whiskey, kid? This part’s the worst.”
“Sure,” Sam says. Licks his lips. “Yeah, I’ll take some. That’s, uh, nice of you.”
The man smiles as though Sam’s given him a birthday present and stoops to pick a battered pack off the ground without letting go of Sam’s wrists or shifting off of Sam’s torso. So much for that idea, Sam thinks, and then: where the hell is Dean? The whiskey burns and he chokes on it a little, spits a bit to the side as best as he can manage. It goes mostly on the dirty edge of his sleeve and it’s settling hotly in his belly when Sam looks back up and meets the man’s serious gaze. “You want some more?”
Sam weighs a few extra seconds for Dean to reach him versus being too drunk to save himself, and shakes his head. The man nods and flattens the knife against his palm to stroke Sam’s cheek with his fingertips, just once. “It’ll be over quickly, I promise,” he says, and then draws back and positions the knife against Sam’s belly button, the muscles in his arm coiling for that quick downward strike -
The sound of the shotgun being cocked is deafening. It cuts through the panic that was just starting to curl its way through Sam’s stomach, leaving hot relief in its wake.
“You don’t wanna be doing that,” Dean says, his voice level. There’s only the faintest tremor at the edge of his voice.
The man freezes. “Where did you come from?” he asks hoarsely.
“Mom always said the stork brought me,” Dean replies. Over the man’s shoulder, Sam can see the shotgun’s muzzle pressing hard against the back of his skull. “Step the fuck away from him.”
Dean has to reach upwards as the man drops the knife at Sam’s side and straightens, moving slowly away. He keeps the shotgun trained as he picks up the man’s knife and saws quickly through the rope around Sam’s wrists, his eyes flickering back and forth between his brother and his brother’s would-be murderer. He hands Sam the knife once his hands are free but keeps his other hand on Sam’s shoulder.
“Addison Newell, I presume?” he asks. Sam cuts his legs free as he sits up, and pulls the handgun from where it’s tucked into the back of Dean’s jeans, trains it on Newell. The whiskey burn is fading into hot anger and adrenaline.
Newell’s hands are raised, fingers pointing at the sky. “How do you know?” he asks. “You’re not one of them - you’re no use to me -” He stops and his face distorts so quickly that both of them tense, certain that he’s ready to spring. “You were in the house. You were in my home.”
And then just as quickly, the rage is gone and Newell’s face is filled with horror. “Where is the girl?” he breathes.
“Safe,” Dean says and they tense again as Newell falls to his knees heavily, his hands extended out towards them, pleading.
“You don’t understand,” he gasps. “You didn’t see what happened after Mary got away. All she did was die a hundred yards away from that stone instead of on top of it and nine people died. It took me weeks to find a replacement for her but by then everything had happened already and it was all my fault. Please. Please, you have to give the girl back to me.”
“So you can kill her?” Dean bellows. “Hey, get back on your knees until we say you can get up.” His eyes flick to Sam’s: what’s the situation?
Sam leans in close to respond. “He’s been killing people for at least thirty-three years. Remember that thing we found out in the library, February, 1973? He thinks that that’s his fault, that he did something.”
“Maybe he was the one that killed all of them,” Dean mutters back.
“No, I didn’t kill those people,” Newell says brokenly. “Jesus, I’d never do that. But they - they were my fault. It’s my job to keep it closed.”
“Keep what closed?” Sam hisses.
“The mouth to hell,” Newell says and Sam can feel his brother stiffen suddenly beside him. Dean’s voice, when he finally speaks, is quiet, warning Newell against something, something important that Sam has no clue about.
“What did you say?”
“Any day now it’s going to open,” Newell says, his voice getting higher and faster, his eyes panic-wide. His huge hands flex and clench around nothing and he’s got one knee up even though Dean is yelling at him again, get on the fucking ground, “Any day now and I need to stop it, you don’t understand, he needs to die -”
He’s on his feet, launching himself at Sam before they can even process what he’s screaming, that Sam needs to die to save everyone, and then Sam is knocked aside and Dean and Newell go down hard against the rock. Newell’s probably got eight inches on Dean and their bodies are too close together for Sam to see what they’re doing but before Sam can scramble to his feet Dean has Newell’s shirtfront clenched in his fists and he’s using it to turn them, flip Newell over, their feet skidding over the earth.
Newell’s skull cracks against the rock with a wet, sickening sound.
His body spasms, nearly bucks Dean off even as Dean does it again and again, fingers snarled in Newell’s hair and teeth bared. Newell’s grip around his throat loosens until he’s not moving at all and Sam is screaming for Dean to stop.
He can tell it’s too late but Sam still grabs Dean and lifts him bodily away from Newell. There’s brains, fucking brains spread out over the rock in a corona around Newell’s head, blood on Dean’s hands and on his face. Dean’s sobbing for air but he fights hard against Sam for a second before he sags so abruptly that Sam stumbles backwards. He recovers almost as quickly and turns, breaking Sam’s grasp to grab him. His hands clench around Sam’s biceps hard enough that Sam flinches away. Dean doesn’t let him pull away completely, fingers skimming over the cross that was cut into Sam’s skin and his hands rising up to tug hard at Sam’s hair as though proving to himself that Sam is all right, he’s still alive.
“You ok?” he asks at last, voice rough.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “yeah, I’m ok.” He can’t say any more than that. His eyes flicker back and forth between Newell’s corpse and his brother’s face, splattered with gore. Dean’s eyes search his face and he releases Sam abruptly. He gives Sam a final pat on the shoulder before he moves away and picks up his shotgun. It had fallen out of his hands when he pushed Sam out of harm’s way.
“Yeah,” he repeats. He’s kneeling practically at Newell’s feet but his eyes are trained on the shotgun. The body has slid onto the ground, its back propped against the rock as though Newell’s only resting a bit. His hands are spread wide in his lap in mute supplication. Sam can’t stop staring.
“Dean,” he says softly, but Dean cuts him off before he can go any further.
“Yeah, I know.” Dean’s eyes flick up to Newell’s face. The man’s eyes are open, the thin tracery of veins inside them burst and filled with blood, but the way Dean’s looking at Newell, it’s like he wants nothing more than to kill him all over again. “Just a few more seconds and ...” Dean says, so softly that Sam isn’t sure that he’s supposed to hear.
Sam can’t bring himself to say, Jesus, Dean, what did you do, so he says nothing at all. Dean’s fingers are trembling as he breaks open the shotgun, checks inside it even though it hasn’t been fired. His fingers, slipperly with blood, slide over the barrel and he nearly drops the gun. There are rock salt rounds inside that Dean could have shot Newell with a hundred times and never killed him with. Sam’s hand is clenched around Dean’s handgun, still forgotten by its owner, and Sam wants nothing more than to throw it away. His training overcomes irrational impulses easily, however, and he tucks it into his waistband before going over to where Dean is still kneeling at Newell’s side.
“You’ve got, um,” Sam says, gesturing at his own face. Dean nods and goes to swipe at his face with his sleeve before he realizes that he’s only wearing a T-shirt, and frowns. He uses the hem of his shirt instead, leaving tacky copper traces over his cheeks. Sam wants to sit next to his brother and rub the marks away, the way Dean used to do for him when he was small or still does sometimes, when they’re sitting in the car and Dean says he’s sick of Sam looking all gross. His hands have reached out but fall uncertainly back to his sides.
“We need to take care of him,” Sam says, when it begins to look as though Dean won’t. Dean’s head jerks around. His eyes are wide as he stares up at Sam. Sam can practically see the gears turning in Dean’s head, adjusting his thoughts until they make sense again.
“Shit,” Dean says, “the girl, I left her in my car.”
“Ok. You go take care of that. I’ll clean up,” Sam says softly and Dean obeys. He rests the barrel of the shotgun against his shoulder and makes his way back towards what Sam can only guess is the highway. Sam watches his brother until he can no longer see the black of his T-shirt through the slats of dusty sunlight drifting through the trees and then he returns to the girl’s - Mary’s - grave, clears a little firebreak, salts her bones and sets them on fire. Returns to the rock that Newell had tried to sacrfice him on. Drags Newell away from it by his boots. He salts Newell’s body even though he doesn’t have to and he watches the man’s skin bubble and his fat melt away in the heat. He salts it even though Dean isn’t there to see and there’s no one to take comfort from it but him.
Dean’s sitting with a young girl when Sam finally gets back to the car. He’s in the back seat with the door wide open, the girl asleep in his lap, her head curled against his shoulder. His button-up shirt looks enormous on her. He looks up at Sam and says nothing. He arms are curled halfway around her as though he rocked her to sleep.
Sam digs in the trunk for a new shirt before he opens up the passenger side door and sits down. They look out into the forest together. Dusk is finally coming to Santa Cruz; Sam thought that the day would never end. It seems like it was years ago that they fought Quintana. He can’t get the image of Newell’s brains out of his head, splashed around and so much more wet then Sam would have thought, but somehow he doesn’t think that he’s ever loved Dean more than he does right now. It’s bright and it hurts and Sam can barely even look at his brother.
“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says in a colorless voice.
Sam glances over at him, startled. Dean doesn’t look over. “What?” Sam asks, frowning. “What did you say?”
“It’s a hellmouth,” Dean says again. “Otherwise known as, we’re totally fucked.”
Part 1 ** Part 3