SPN: The Brothers Grimm - Chapter 1
Title:The Brothers Grimm
Beta: skylar_matthews
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: AU, Brothers Grimm verse, Fusion, adventure, horror
Pairings: Dean/Cas, mentions of Dean/Cassie, suggested Dean/Lisa
Spoilers: Some for The Brothers Grimm
Warnings: some sexual situations, violence, abuse of the French language, lots of UST
Word Count: 26 000 (in total)
Summary: Under the new French occupation, Dean and Sam Grimm have made a living conning people into believing that fairytales and monsters are real. But when they stumble upon the village of Marbaden, everything that they thought they knew gets turned upside down and instead of creating fairytales, they find themselves living in one.
A/N: Written as part of the dc-everafter Challenge. This is loosely based on the film The Brothers Grimm starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. Some significant changes have been made compared to the film but there will still be plot spoilers for those who have yet to watch The Brothers Grimm.
Special thanks to my lovely beta reader, skylar_matthews, and to talli_approved for creating the challenge. This was an awesome excuse to fuse the SPN universe with one of my favorite films and I had a great time writing this! Lastly, I want to thank h4ppy-fun-b4ll for creating beautiful artwork to accompany my fic. It was fun working with you, darling! <3
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Epilogue | Art Masterpost
The sun sat low on the horizon, the many brilliant hues of red and gold splashing across the sky as day fell into dusk. Yet despite its beauty, an eerie calm settled over the forest, the absence of life in the outcrop surrounding an old, abandoned tower unsettling for those who dared travel to this neck of the woods. Needless to say, it had been years since anyone approached the tower. Until now.
A young girl stepped through the thick brush of trees, red hair falling over her warm, dark eyes that stared blankly at the path before her. In her trancelike state, she approached the first of the 10 stone tombs that formed a circle around the tower. A growl from behind her and a nudge at her hand made her stop in her tracks.
Pouncing over the tomb in front of her, the sandy-colored wolf that had been following the girl grunted and groaned. It began to moan piteously as all the bones in its body snapped and reshaped, stumbling and shifting until a man stood in front of the girl. Wearing the fur of its shifter form as a cloak, the man looked at the young girl whose eyes remained glued to the tomb.
A crow cawed from somewhere above. The man gazed up at the black bird perched on an old, withered branch of a dying tree, tucked away in the shadows. With the onset of night, darkness had quickly fallen in the forest but his supernatural senses could easily make out the creature and he nodded in understanding.
Reaching out, he lifted the girl’s face until he was staring into those devoid, lifeless eyes. From somewhere, tucked into the dark corners of his mind, he felt a familiar tug, the triggering of a buried memory. But the moment slipped as quickly as it had come and the words that tumbled from his lips no longer felt like his own.
“Time to rest.”
He bent down and removed the covering of the stone tomb with little effort. Then, grasping onto the girl’s hand, he helped her step into the tomb, carefully laying her down with her hands folding gently over her abdomen.
Softly, he touched two fingers to her forehead and whispered, “Sleep.”
The girl’s eyes fluttered closed.
He carefully placed the lid over the tomb. The flutter of wings was the only indication that the crow had left, the woods again falling into a deathly silence. A voice that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere began to whisper in his ear and he knew that he had pleased her.
Falling onto all fours, he groaned once again as the change began. His bones bending, fur sprouting out all over his body and his teeth becoming larger and sharper, the wolf howled and bound into the woods. She was only the first. There was still work to be done.
*
Present day, somewhere outside of Marbaden…
“Trolls, Dean? Really?”
The horses trotted in an easy gallop along the open path, the high noon sun beating down on the pair on that early spring day. It was a bit warmer than usual for April in these parts but Dean welcomed the warmer weather after having spent most of the harsh winter travelling from town to town, looking to bank in on their con game. It hadn’t been as easy since most sensible people holed themselves indoors during the cold season, meaning that Dean and Sam had to get a little more creative than usual.
But they still walked away all the richer (well, rich enough to get by even with Dean’s hard-to-kick habits) so Dean couldn’t really complain.
Throwing a glance over his shoulder at Sam, Dean grinned. “Trolls are all the rage these days, Sammy.”
“And how do you expect Ed and Harry to pull it off?”
“Easy,” Dean said, with a casual shrug. “Sit under a bridge at night, scare people crossing over it. Do this a few times ‘til one of ‘em, pretending to be a traveler, “disappears” mysteriously one night.”
“Right, I remember this one,” Sam said, sarcasm dripping into his voice. “Then we come swooping in, challenge our troll, Ed, and push him off the bridge.”
“You catch on fast, Sammy.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Dean, we’re not pushing Ed off a bridge.”
“Dick deserves it.”
“Dean!”
Dean sighed, gripping on Impala’s reins and slowly down their trot. Up ahead was a tiny village that they would have to pass through on their way to Hamburg and the path seemed to get more uneven and harder on their horses as they came closer to the dwellings. Wary of Impala and Ruby’s weary legs, both the brothers slowed down into an easy trot.
“Fine. But how the hell else do you kill a troll? What’s the lore say?”
He almost regretted the question as soon as he said it. Sam immediately delved into lecture mode and it never failed to remind Dean just how much of a nerd his younger brother was. “There’s not a lot of history on trolls. Some myths say they can take on the appearance of humans though Scandinavian lore depicts them as big, ugly, dim-witted but extremely strong. If you want to scare a troll off, lightning storms do the trick, a belief that dates back to Norse mythology and tales of Thor’s battles against the trolls. If you want to kill one, expose it to sunlight.”
“Sunlight?”
“They turn to stone in the sun. The legends say that tricking it to stay out until sunrise will do it.”
“We can’t just go Beowulf on this thing and rip its arms off?” Dean asked.
“Even if you could make it look convincing enough for a human to rip off a troll’s arms,” Sam said, using his that-sounds-incredibly-stupid-Dean voice, “you’d have to make it look like the thing’s bled to death. And where would we get that much fake blood?”
Sam did have a point. Dean’s head was already trying to wrap its way around pulling this con off but they had neither the time, nor the resources, to get what they needed for a full-on, “bloody” slaying of the beast. By now, Ed would already be in the first stages of the farce and they were due in Hamburg in three days time.
“So unless we get lucky and there’s a lightning storm that night, we gotta find a stone statue of a troll and make it look like the thing got turned to stone?” Dean asked. Already he could feel the beginnings of a headache.
“…I told you it was a dumb idea, Dean.”
Sam’s nagging was not putting Dean in a better mood.
“Dude, I’m just going with what we can work with. Rumors say the bridge to the city’s been haunted for years. And I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ badass like kill a troll.”
Sam looked like he wanted to roll his eyes again but he suddenly stopped Ruby, shoulders tensing. Alarmed, Dean also tugged on Impala’s reins, glancing around to see what seemed to be be making Sam nervous. They had stopped at the edge of the village, a tiny place that maybe had no more than twenty huts and shops at the edge of a dark and slightly ominous looking forest. The path Sam and Dean were on cut through the village and continued on through to the west, through an open field that skirted around the edges of the forest which lined the south end of the village. The village itself was devoid of all life at the moment, save for the squawking of a few chickens. A sudden slamming of a door, not far from where Sam and Dean were sitting on their horses, caused both brothers to jump.
“What the hell’s going on?” Dean whispered to Sam, trying to keep any panic from showing. He was now thoroughly creeped out.
“Not sure,” Sam said, scanning his eyes over the village. From up ahead, he noticed a woman peering cautiously at them through her window and then hastily pulling closed tattered curtains. Sam swallowed uncomfortably and pulled out his map. “Something seems to have them spooked.”
“Well it’s spooking me out. Where the hell you say we were again?”
“Marbaden. We’re still a day’s ride from Hamburg.”
“Great.” They were running low on food and water, meaning they would have to stop somewhere for supplies. But the feel of this town sent a chill to Dean’s bones and the thought of resting here was quickly abandoned. “How far’s the next town? We can refuel there.”
“Another few hours, give or take.” Ruby’s head drooped and Sam stroked her neck sympathetically. “I don’t think we can make it, Dean. The horses are tired and we still haven’t eaten today.”
“I’m not staying in a freaken ghost town, Sammy. 2 thalers says we wake up without our hands if we spend the night in the wonderfully inviting Glücklich Gasthaus over there.” Dean indicated to the dilapidated inn just up ahead, it’s weathered, wooden sign hanging above the entrance weakly by fraying rope. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing happy looking about the Happy Inn.”
The wooden sign crashed to the ground.
“Yeah, I’m with you on that one,” Sam said. “But all we need to do is take a quick break, let the horses rest. We can buy some food and set off to Lüneburg.”
Both Dean and Sam dismounted their horses, Dean cringing as his leather riding boots sank into the mud beneath his feet. Two abandoned pails of water had tipped over from the well in front of them, most likely forgotten in the town people’s scurry to hide from whatever it was they were hiding from. He moodily stepped over them, shooting Sam an annoyed look over his shoulder.
“So, you gonna do the honors or should I?”
Sam took a deep breath. “People of Marbaden,” he called out, walking closer to the well so that he was standing in the middle of the village. “My brother and I are travellers in need of food and supplies. We mean you no harm!”
His voice echoed throughout the village. But as soon as it died down, the village fell back into an eerie, unsettling calm. Dean and Sam exchanged a look.
Sam opened his mouth to shout again when a wooden door creaked open off to his right.
“Travellers, ya say?” a middle-aged man said. His rough hands clutched at the door hesitantly, old and worn eyes looking over the Grimm brothers as if sizing them up. His grip on the door tightened. “We don’t get travellers in these parts. Where ya headin?”
“Hamburg,” Dean answered.
“You boys ‘r comin’ from the east, ain’t ya?” the man continued, eyes narrowing into a glare. “Most folks woulda taken the path through Geesthacht.”
“I told you we should have went that way,” Sam whispered into Dean’s ear, then forcing a smile to try and pacify the man’s suspicious staring. Dean also forced a smile but that didn’t stop him from knicking Sam in the shin.
“Shut up, ya overgrown giant,” Dean mumbled back out of the corner of his mouth.
“What’re your names?”
“I’m Dean and this here is my brother, Sam.”
A tiny head poked out from behind the man, “Dean and Sam as in Dean and Sam Grimm?”
The little girl’s brown eyes went wide as Sam and Dean nodded.
“Yeah, that’d be us.”
“Daddy, daddy! It’s the Grimm brothers!” the girl said excitedly, bouncing out of hut. Still, her father was hesitant and he stopped her from bounding out towards the Grimm brothers with a firm grip on her tiny shoulder.
“Wait a minute, Tessa, we dun know if they’re tellin’ the truth.”
“But daddy, if it is the Grimm brothers, maybe they can help us!” the little girl insisted.
The commotion attracted many of the other villagers, who now began opening their doors and stepping outside. Many of them stared at the two brothers, some of them still very suspicious, with the same calculating look Tessa’s father had given them earlier.
“…help you with what?” Sam asked.
*
The largest building in Marbaden, a one-room house that could have been no more than 7 by 15 meters, served as a little town hall for the villagers. After Dean and Sam had been ushered inside, the 20 some families scrambled to get in as quickly as possible, shutting and locking the doors behind them. The head of this meeting, a man with thinning white hair and one of the few towns folk with gentlemen’s cloaks, stood up in front of the crowd, raising his hands to indicate silence. The hushed whispers quickly quieted as some people claimed the remaining empty seats while others stood.
“Sorry for our rudeness earlier,” the man said, grinning in a way that made Dean’s skin crawl. Not in the way that someone who had something to hide would grin shiftily but more like someone selling snake oil as an elixir to immortality would. “My name’s Zachariah Adler and I am the mayor of this town. Marbaden welcomes you.”
Once the pleasantries had been exchanged, Zachariah, with the assistance of a farmer named Friedrich Thalberg, immediately cut to the chase. “In the last month, we’ve had 6 children go missing. At first, we thought it was unfortunate circumstances but then strange things started happening around here.”
“What kind of strange things?” Sam asked.
“Paths disappearing in the forest, trees seeming to move around at will…cattle’s been acting spooked and all our dogs went missing two weeks back,” the farmer said, shaking his head sadly. His eyes filled with unshed tears and we averted his eyes from Sam, pausing for a moment to take a deep breath. “My little Bela disappeared not 10 days ago. One day she was there and then…”
His shoulders shook with a choked back sob and another farmer standing close by laid a comforting hand on his arm. “S-she’s all I got left.”
And like the force of water crushing a dam built of weak twigs, the stories began pouring out: animals being spooked, the few wild animals villagers have seen in the forest acting strange, some swearing that they’ve seen trees move… The tales of the missing children filling the room with a grief that settled deep in the hearts of all who heard the tragic stories. From something as simple as children disappearing from their beds at night to children not returning after straying too close to the woods, each one causing dread to settle in Dean’s stomach as he realized what it is that these people expected of them.
It was times like this that Dean wished he had listened to Sam.
“You’ve got to help us,” Lisa Brauer begged, tears trickling down her cheeks. Her big, brown eyes and raven-colored hair made Dean weak in the knees. He couldn’t help but think, with some disgust, that if she weren’t a grieving mother, he would have pulled every move out of the book to have her on her back. “Ben’s been gone for a week now and I just-”
She broke down into sobs, clutching tightly at her handkerchief.
“We don’t have a lot of money but if you can stop…whatever it is that’s taking ‘em, we’ll give you all we’ve got,” a man named Hanz Gerste, whose daughter Emma went missing three weeks back, said.
This was making Dean feel increasingly sick and guilty by the second. Not only did they have to reject assisting the townsfolk and get the hell out of their ASAP, but he also wasn’t quite sure how to explain to grieving parents that supernatural things weren’t real and that it was probably some psycho having his sick way with their children.
He looked over at Sam who seemed equally bothered.
“Look, we’ve-there’s this place that we gotta be and…” Dean started.
“We’ll do it.”
Dean’s eyes went wide and he stared at Sam as if he’d grown a second head.
“For free,” Sam continued, earning him an even more bewildered look from Dean, otherwise known as Dean’s Are-you-outta-your-freaken-mind look.
Pulling his journal, quill and ink from his satchel, Sam settled into the desk at the front of the room and beckoned one of the townspeople over. “Alright, so tell me everything you know so far, from the beginning…”
Chapter 2
Beta: skylar_matthews
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG-13
Genre: AU, Brothers Grimm verse, Fusion, adventure, horror
Pairings: Dean/Cas, mentions of Dean/Cassie, suggested Dean/Lisa
Spoilers: Some for The Brothers Grimm
Warnings: some sexual situations, violence, abuse of the French language, lots of UST
Word Count: 26 000 (in total)
Summary: Under the new French occupation, Dean and Sam Grimm have made a living conning people into believing that fairytales and monsters are real. But when they stumble upon the village of Marbaden, everything that they thought they knew gets turned upside down and instead of creating fairytales, they find themselves living in one.
A/N: Written as part of the dc-everafter Challenge. This is loosely based on the film The Brothers Grimm starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. Some significant changes have been made compared to the film but there will still be plot spoilers for those who have yet to watch The Brothers Grimm.
Special thanks to my lovely beta reader, skylar_matthews, and to talli_approved for creating the challenge. This was an awesome excuse to fuse the SPN universe with one of my favorite films and I had a great time writing this! Lastly, I want to thank h4ppy-fun-b4ll for creating beautiful artwork to accompany my fic. It was fun working with you, darling! <3
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Epilogue | Art Masterpost
The sun sat low on the horizon, the many brilliant hues of red and gold splashing across the sky as day fell into dusk. Yet despite its beauty, an eerie calm settled over the forest, the absence of life in the outcrop surrounding an old, abandoned tower unsettling for those who dared travel to this neck of the woods. Needless to say, it had been years since anyone approached the tower. Until now.
A young girl stepped through the thick brush of trees, red hair falling over her warm, dark eyes that stared blankly at the path before her. In her trancelike state, she approached the first of the 10 stone tombs that formed a circle around the tower. A growl from behind her and a nudge at her hand made her stop in her tracks.
Pouncing over the tomb in front of her, the sandy-colored wolf that had been following the girl grunted and groaned. It began to moan piteously as all the bones in its body snapped and reshaped, stumbling and shifting until a man stood in front of the girl. Wearing the fur of its shifter form as a cloak, the man looked at the young girl whose eyes remained glued to the tomb.
A crow cawed from somewhere above. The man gazed up at the black bird perched on an old, withered branch of a dying tree, tucked away in the shadows. With the onset of night, darkness had quickly fallen in the forest but his supernatural senses could easily make out the creature and he nodded in understanding.
Reaching out, he lifted the girl’s face until he was staring into those devoid, lifeless eyes. From somewhere, tucked into the dark corners of his mind, he felt a familiar tug, the triggering of a buried memory. But the moment slipped as quickly as it had come and the words that tumbled from his lips no longer felt like his own.
“Time to rest.”
He bent down and removed the covering of the stone tomb with little effort. Then, grasping onto the girl’s hand, he helped her step into the tomb, carefully laying her down with her hands folding gently over her abdomen.
Softly, he touched two fingers to her forehead and whispered, “Sleep.”
The girl’s eyes fluttered closed.
He carefully placed the lid over the tomb. The flutter of wings was the only indication that the crow had left, the woods again falling into a deathly silence. A voice that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere began to whisper in his ear and he knew that he had pleased her.
Falling onto all fours, he groaned once again as the change began. His bones bending, fur sprouting out all over his body and his teeth becoming larger and sharper, the wolf howled and bound into the woods. She was only the first. There was still work to be done.
*
Present day, somewhere outside of Marbaden…
“Trolls, Dean? Really?”
The horses trotted in an easy gallop along the open path, the high noon sun beating down on the pair on that early spring day. It was a bit warmer than usual for April in these parts but Dean welcomed the warmer weather after having spent most of the harsh winter travelling from town to town, looking to bank in on their con game. It hadn’t been as easy since most sensible people holed themselves indoors during the cold season, meaning that Dean and Sam had to get a little more creative than usual.
But they still walked away all the richer (well, rich enough to get by even with Dean’s hard-to-kick habits) so Dean couldn’t really complain.
Throwing a glance over his shoulder at Sam, Dean grinned. “Trolls are all the rage these days, Sammy.”
“And how do you expect Ed and Harry to pull it off?”
“Easy,” Dean said, with a casual shrug. “Sit under a bridge at night, scare people crossing over it. Do this a few times ‘til one of ‘em, pretending to be a traveler, “disappears” mysteriously one night.”
“Right, I remember this one,” Sam said, sarcasm dripping into his voice. “Then we come swooping in, challenge our troll, Ed, and push him off the bridge.”
“You catch on fast, Sammy.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Dean, we’re not pushing Ed off a bridge.”
“Dick deserves it.”
“Dean!”
Dean sighed, gripping on Impala’s reins and slowly down their trot. Up ahead was a tiny village that they would have to pass through on their way to Hamburg and the path seemed to get more uneven and harder on their horses as they came closer to the dwellings. Wary of Impala and Ruby’s weary legs, both the brothers slowed down into an easy trot.
“Fine. But how the hell else do you kill a troll? What’s the lore say?”
He almost regretted the question as soon as he said it. Sam immediately delved into lecture mode and it never failed to remind Dean just how much of a nerd his younger brother was. “There’s not a lot of history on trolls. Some myths say they can take on the appearance of humans though Scandinavian lore depicts them as big, ugly, dim-witted but extremely strong. If you want to scare a troll off, lightning storms do the trick, a belief that dates back to Norse mythology and tales of Thor’s battles against the trolls. If you want to kill one, expose it to sunlight.”
“Sunlight?”
“They turn to stone in the sun. The legends say that tricking it to stay out until sunrise will do it.”
“We can’t just go Beowulf on this thing and rip its arms off?” Dean asked.
“Even if you could make it look convincing enough for a human to rip off a troll’s arms,” Sam said, using his that-sounds-incredibly-stupid-Dean voice, “you’d have to make it look like the thing’s bled to death. And where would we get that much fake blood?”
Sam did have a point. Dean’s head was already trying to wrap its way around pulling this con off but they had neither the time, nor the resources, to get what they needed for a full-on, “bloody” slaying of the beast. By now, Ed would already be in the first stages of the farce and they were due in Hamburg in three days time.
“So unless we get lucky and there’s a lightning storm that night, we gotta find a stone statue of a troll and make it look like the thing got turned to stone?” Dean asked. Already he could feel the beginnings of a headache.
“…I told you it was a dumb idea, Dean.”
Sam’s nagging was not putting Dean in a better mood.
“Dude, I’m just going with what we can work with. Rumors say the bridge to the city’s been haunted for years. And I’ve always wanted to do somethin’ badass like kill a troll.”
Sam looked like he wanted to roll his eyes again but he suddenly stopped Ruby, shoulders tensing. Alarmed, Dean also tugged on Impala’s reins, glancing around to see what seemed to be be making Sam nervous. They had stopped at the edge of the village, a tiny place that maybe had no more than twenty huts and shops at the edge of a dark and slightly ominous looking forest. The path Sam and Dean were on cut through the village and continued on through to the west, through an open field that skirted around the edges of the forest which lined the south end of the village. The village itself was devoid of all life at the moment, save for the squawking of a few chickens. A sudden slamming of a door, not far from where Sam and Dean were sitting on their horses, caused both brothers to jump.
“What the hell’s going on?” Dean whispered to Sam, trying to keep any panic from showing. He was now thoroughly creeped out.
“Not sure,” Sam said, scanning his eyes over the village. From up ahead, he noticed a woman peering cautiously at them through her window and then hastily pulling closed tattered curtains. Sam swallowed uncomfortably and pulled out his map. “Something seems to have them spooked.”
“Well it’s spooking me out. Where the hell you say we were again?”
“Marbaden. We’re still a day’s ride from Hamburg.”
“Great.” They were running low on food and water, meaning they would have to stop somewhere for supplies. But the feel of this town sent a chill to Dean’s bones and the thought of resting here was quickly abandoned. “How far’s the next town? We can refuel there.”
“Another few hours, give or take.” Ruby’s head drooped and Sam stroked her neck sympathetically. “I don’t think we can make it, Dean. The horses are tired and we still haven’t eaten today.”
“I’m not staying in a freaken ghost town, Sammy. 2 thalers says we wake up without our hands if we spend the night in the wonderfully inviting Glücklich Gasthaus over there.” Dean indicated to the dilapidated inn just up ahead, it’s weathered, wooden sign hanging above the entrance weakly by fraying rope. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing happy looking about the Happy Inn.”
The wooden sign crashed to the ground.
“Yeah, I’m with you on that one,” Sam said. “But all we need to do is take a quick break, let the horses rest. We can buy some food and set off to Lüneburg.”
Both Dean and Sam dismounted their horses, Dean cringing as his leather riding boots sank into the mud beneath his feet. Two abandoned pails of water had tipped over from the well in front of them, most likely forgotten in the town people’s scurry to hide from whatever it was they were hiding from. He moodily stepped over them, shooting Sam an annoyed look over his shoulder.
“So, you gonna do the honors or should I?”
Sam took a deep breath. “People of Marbaden,” he called out, walking closer to the well so that he was standing in the middle of the village. “My brother and I are travellers in need of food and supplies. We mean you no harm!”
His voice echoed throughout the village. But as soon as it died down, the village fell back into an eerie, unsettling calm. Dean and Sam exchanged a look.
Sam opened his mouth to shout again when a wooden door creaked open off to his right.
“Travellers, ya say?” a middle-aged man said. His rough hands clutched at the door hesitantly, old and worn eyes looking over the Grimm brothers as if sizing them up. His grip on the door tightened. “We don’t get travellers in these parts. Where ya headin?”
“Hamburg,” Dean answered.
“You boys ‘r comin’ from the east, ain’t ya?” the man continued, eyes narrowing into a glare. “Most folks woulda taken the path through Geesthacht.”
“I told you we should have went that way,” Sam whispered into Dean’s ear, then forcing a smile to try and pacify the man’s suspicious staring. Dean also forced a smile but that didn’t stop him from knicking Sam in the shin.
“Shut up, ya overgrown giant,” Dean mumbled back out of the corner of his mouth.
“What’re your names?”
“I’m Dean and this here is my brother, Sam.”
A tiny head poked out from behind the man, “Dean and Sam as in Dean and Sam Grimm?”
The little girl’s brown eyes went wide as Sam and Dean nodded.
“Yeah, that’d be us.”
“Daddy, daddy! It’s the Grimm brothers!” the girl said excitedly, bouncing out of hut. Still, her father was hesitant and he stopped her from bounding out towards the Grimm brothers with a firm grip on her tiny shoulder.
“Wait a minute, Tessa, we dun know if they’re tellin’ the truth.”
“But daddy, if it is the Grimm brothers, maybe they can help us!” the little girl insisted.
The commotion attracted many of the other villagers, who now began opening their doors and stepping outside. Many of them stared at the two brothers, some of them still very suspicious, with the same calculating look Tessa’s father had given them earlier.
“…help you with what?” Sam asked.
*
The largest building in Marbaden, a one-room house that could have been no more than 7 by 15 meters, served as a little town hall for the villagers. After Dean and Sam had been ushered inside, the 20 some families scrambled to get in as quickly as possible, shutting and locking the doors behind them. The head of this meeting, a man with thinning white hair and one of the few towns folk with gentlemen’s cloaks, stood up in front of the crowd, raising his hands to indicate silence. The hushed whispers quickly quieted as some people claimed the remaining empty seats while others stood.
“Sorry for our rudeness earlier,” the man said, grinning in a way that made Dean’s skin crawl. Not in the way that someone who had something to hide would grin shiftily but more like someone selling snake oil as an elixir to immortality would. “My name’s Zachariah Adler and I am the mayor of this town. Marbaden welcomes you.”
Once the pleasantries had been exchanged, Zachariah, with the assistance of a farmer named Friedrich Thalberg, immediately cut to the chase. “In the last month, we’ve had 6 children go missing. At first, we thought it was unfortunate circumstances but then strange things started happening around here.”
“What kind of strange things?” Sam asked.
“Paths disappearing in the forest, trees seeming to move around at will…cattle’s been acting spooked and all our dogs went missing two weeks back,” the farmer said, shaking his head sadly. His eyes filled with unshed tears and we averted his eyes from Sam, pausing for a moment to take a deep breath. “My little Bela disappeared not 10 days ago. One day she was there and then…”
His shoulders shook with a choked back sob and another farmer standing close by laid a comforting hand on his arm. “S-she’s all I got left.”
And like the force of water crushing a dam built of weak twigs, the stories began pouring out: animals being spooked, the few wild animals villagers have seen in the forest acting strange, some swearing that they’ve seen trees move… The tales of the missing children filling the room with a grief that settled deep in the hearts of all who heard the tragic stories. From something as simple as children disappearing from their beds at night to children not returning after straying too close to the woods, each one causing dread to settle in Dean’s stomach as he realized what it is that these people expected of them.
It was times like this that Dean wished he had listened to Sam.
“You’ve got to help us,” Lisa Brauer begged, tears trickling down her cheeks. Her big, brown eyes and raven-colored hair made Dean weak in the knees. He couldn’t help but think, with some disgust, that if she weren’t a grieving mother, he would have pulled every move out of the book to have her on her back. “Ben’s been gone for a week now and I just-”
She broke down into sobs, clutching tightly at her handkerchief.
“We don’t have a lot of money but if you can stop…whatever it is that’s taking ‘em, we’ll give you all we’ve got,” a man named Hanz Gerste, whose daughter Emma went missing three weeks back, said.
This was making Dean feel increasingly sick and guilty by the second. Not only did they have to reject assisting the townsfolk and get the hell out of their ASAP, but he also wasn’t quite sure how to explain to grieving parents that supernatural things weren’t real and that it was probably some psycho having his sick way with their children.
He looked over at Sam who seemed equally bothered.
“Look, we’ve-there’s this place that we gotta be and…” Dean started.
“We’ll do it.”
Dean’s eyes went wide and he stared at Sam as if he’d grown a second head.
“For free,” Sam continued, earning him an even more bewildered look from Dean, otherwise known as Dean’s Are-you-outta-your-freaken-mind look.
Pulling his journal, quill and ink from his satchel, Sam settled into the desk at the front of the room and beckoned one of the townspeople over. “Alright, so tell me everything you know so far, from the beginning…”
Chapter 2