Title: Wolfsbane
Author: 427-67Impala
Rating: M
Warnings: Violence, blood and gore
Word count: 24,077
Setting: Mid-late season 4

Summary: Sam and Dean have been going stir-crazy at Bobby's, with no leads for almost two weeks, so something leaving a trail of torn-up bodies across the northern states is just the kind of distraction they're looking for. Set mid-late season 4, written from Sam's POV.

A/N: This was written for the first Supernaturalaholics Big Bang Challenge (August 20, 2011). SPNaholics on Twitter - follow them!
Thanks (and lots of M&Ms) to Melanie for being so helpful with my questions about Pennsylvanian winters (we don't get a lot of snow in Melbourne, you see) and for the translation of my Australian colloquialisms into something that might actually come out of Sam and Dean's American mouths. I maintain I'd like them to use the word 'carpark' - just once. ;)

As we know, Sam and Dean belong to Kripke & co. - I'm just borrowing their toys...

Chapter 1
Williamsport, Pennsylvania

It's cold at night in Pennsylvania in February. I mean, seriously cold - sensible people that don't want hypothermia stay inside. As you've probably guessed, Dean and I weren't inside - we were, in fact, in a graveyard. Naturally.

It was a clear night, but the stiff breeze was freezing and a series of light snow showers throughout the day had coated everything in a thin layer of powdery white like icing sugar. Under the light of the full moon, Wildwood Cemetery looked like something you might see on a Christmas card - you know, if they put cemeteries on Christmas cards.

The headstones and crypts were dusted with white snow that reflected the moonlight, making it seem almost luminous. It was kind of pretty, the way the snow contrasted with the dark green of the grass and evergreen trees and shrubs that showed through in places. It's strange what a hunter finds appealing, I suppose. But I digress.

Dean was standing under a huge old evergreen, holding his stainless steel Taurus tight with gloved hands, and I was sitting on a branch eight feet off the ground above him with a weapon of my own. When I'd first climbed into the tree nearly half an hour before, every movement sent a small shower of powdery snow raining down on him - consequently, and with much complaining, he'd pretty quickly moved slightly off to my right.

Look, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering why we were freezing our asses off in a cemetery at night in a Pennsylvanian winter. There's only ever really one reason, isn't there? We were on a monster hunt.

Well, more precisely, we were waiting for the monster to start hunting us.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Four weeks earlier

This whole fiasco started late on a drizzly Monday morning at Bobby's place. Dean was stretched out on the tattered red couch in the library thumbing through a relatively recent issue of Hot Rod magazine, a two-foot-high stack of old hardcover books by his left arm serving as a makeshift coffee table. His half-finished can of Coke sat on the tattered cover of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, obscuring Huck's face.

While Dean was relaxing, I was sitting behind Bobby's desk actually working. I'd shoved piles of dusty, tattered lore books off to the side and managed to clear enough space to accommodate my laptop, and I was scouring the internet for a job. A sniff of anything that might even possibly turn into a job, actually.

You see, I was starting to get desperate. We'd come to visit Bobby after winding up our last job, a simple salt-and-burn in Minnesota; after we'd filled in the grave and finished packing the Impala, I opened my big mouth and suggested we make a quick trip to the neighbouring South Dakota. It sounded like a good idea at the time: we hadn't seen Bobby in a while, and since he was the only family we really had left (and vice versa) we'd kind of made a habit of spending New Year's in Sioux Falls if we could. But that had been almost two weeks ago.

I swear, when we landed on Bobby's doorstep, every supernatural creature in the Lower 48 went underground just to spite me.

I'd spent the last ten days looking for our next job. Usually there was only a few days between cases if there was any time at all, so I was surprised when a week went by with almost no weird newspaper articles or suspicious obituaries. And the few times I did find something within 500 miles of us, one of Bobby's pals was already on it. It's rare that there are more hunters than jobs - and you'd think with Lilith trying to start the Apocalypse, things should be getting busier. But business wasn't just slow, it was dead. So to speak.

I looked up from the laptop and over at Dean, sprawled out on the couch and forming each word with his lips as he read. He had no clue he was doing it, and usually it didn't really bother me, but my nerves were as tight as bowstrings and that day it was driving me crazy. He wasn't actually saying the words, but I could hear his lips moving. My eyes narrowed slightly as I watched Dean turn the page, totally oblivious.

To be fair, it wasn't Dean's fault. He'd spent our first few days at Bobby's going over the Impala with a fine-toothed comb, doing all the little jobs that had been piling up since the last time he'd had some time to give his baby a little TLC. He cleaned the car inside and out (a long-overdue exercise, if you ask me), touched up stone chips in the paint, changed the oil and brake pads, rotated the tyres and chased down an intermittent rattle in the engine. He also spent a whole day on a heap of little engine tweaks that were a total mystery to me, and involved him almost totally dismantling the top half of the Impala's V8.

But, by about day four, Dean was getting bored. So bored in fact that he'd resorted to emptying, vacuuming and organising the hidden compartments in the trunk, and polishing every square inch of the body to such a high shine that it actually hurt my eyes to look directly at it. It was at that point Dean started to seek out other forms of amusement.

I know he loves me more than anything, but when Dean gets bored his favourite source of relief is to drive his long-suffering little brother crazy. And he's good at it. He knows exactly how to push all my buttons, because he's spent the last 20 years fine-tuning his technique.

It started with small stuff, like short-sheeting my bed. From there it escalated to hiding the laptop, itching powder in my clothes - a tried-and-tested method he knows is guaranteed to drive me mad - and then on to a new prank he'd never had the opportunity to play before: Dean hid every single sock I possessed, then watched with shameless amusement as I all but turned Bobby's house upside down looking for them.

I know, I know - why didn't I just buy new ones? Well, it can be tricky to find socks that fit me, and most of the ones I had were pretty much brand new, so I had no choice but to look for them. Also, having to buy new ones would've meant Dean had won. And I couldn't have that.

I searched Bobby's house from top to bottom for almost an hour, and even then I still had two mismatched socks - a white one and a black one. Dean, of course, just sat on the couch grinning like a Cheshire cat and either couldn't or wouldn't tell me where those last two socks were. It's that kind of juvenile stuff that absolutely does my head in.

So after more than a week of being Dean's entertainment, I was just about ready to leap across the desk and strangle him. I was actually semi-seriously considering what would be the best angle of attack after I vaulted over the desk when Bobby averted a Winchester-on-Winchester death match without even realising he was doing it.

Bobby was in the kitchen, talking on the phone as he made a cup of coffee, and snippets of the conversation drifted through into the library. "That idjit Clay Reynolds went after the thing? After it killed Eddie and Jake?" Bobby scoffed, and I looked up towards the kitchen. Dean tore his eyes away from Hot Rod and craned his neck to look through the open doorway.

There was a short silence. "I know, Rufus, but what the hell kind of thing does that?" Bobby asked, in reply to whatever had been said on the other end of the line. Dean sat up and his gaze shifted to me, eyebrows raised. Sounds like a job. I nodded, looking back at him. Definitely.

God, I hoped it was a job.

When Bobby hung up the phone and turned around, cup of coffee in his hand, he found Dean and I looking at him expectantly from our seats. He sighed, came into the library and sat on a chair in front of his desk - he knew full well that now we knew something was up, he'd have to tell us the whole story.

"Spill it, Bobby. What's going on?" I prompted, trying to keep the enthusiasm out of my voice - I was curious about the subject of Bobby's phone conversation, yeah, but mostly I really, really wanted it to be a new case. He took a sip of coffee, peering at me over the rim of the cup.

"There's something up around Pennsylvania way that's racking up one helluva body count. It's taken nearly forty people over the last few months, three hunters among them. Rufus was calling to tell me it got Clay Reynolds last night."

Dean blinked. "Forty people? In the last few months?" he repeated incredulously, and Bobby nodded. "Thirty-eight to be exact, since October last year. Literally torn apart. It started in Maine, moved on to Massachusetts, then Connecticut, and now it's in Pennsylvania."

I tilted my head to the side as I considered that. "Around the full moon, right? Like the one tomorrow?" I asked, and Bobby nodded. "The thinking is that it's a werewolf. Rufus couldn't tell me much about the case - seems all the places this things hits are keeping it pretty quiet. Not good PR to have a wild animal tearing your citizens apart, I guess." Bobby took another sip of his coffee, and I did my best to suppress an entirely inappropriate grin. It was definitely a job - finally! I couldn't help but smile a little, and it earned me strange looks from both Bobby and Dean.

"Well, it has to be a werewolf, right? The lunar cycle is pretty convincing." I said, before either of them could ask why I was so happy about a trail of mangled bodies strewn across four states. "I don't know, boys. It looks an awful lot like a werewolf, but something don't feel right about it. This thing might be slaughtering folks under a full moon, and eating bits of them to boot, but it ain't acting like a werewolf. They're not usually so, well, bloodthirsty." Bobby sighed. He had to know we were going to want to go and hunt this werewolf - or whatever it was - but not being able to arm us with all the facts obviously made him uneasy.

"All right - that's all I need to hear." Dean clapped his hands together as he got up off the couch. "Get your stuff, Sammy, we're heading for Pennsylvania." And with that he headed upstairs to get his things together, leaving me with Bobby in the library.

"Your brother's easy pleased - a pile of ripped up bodies isn't something that makes a lot of folks happy." Bobby observed, and I chuckled. "Me and him both. No offence, Bobby, but one more day stuck here without a case and I might actually have had to murder him." I replied drily, and it was Bobby's turn to laugh.

"That boy knows how to push your buttons, Sam. I've been waiting for you two to get into a bare-knuckle fistfight for days now." he winked, and I gave him a smile before I went upstairs to pack up my own stuff. By the time I was done Dean was already waiting impatiently for me in the kitchen.

Bobby walked with us through the drizzle out to the gleaming Impala, now covered in tiny beads of rainwater. "You boys be careful, now. Whatever this is has killed two of the best hunters I know." he warned, as we threw our bags into the trunk. "I thought it killed three hunters?" Dean raised an eyebrow, looking back at him. "It did. But Clay Reynolds was an arrogant, incompetent ass." he replied, deadpan, and got a laugh from both of us.

"Nice, Bobby, nice." Dean grinned as he shut the trunk. "Call us if you get any new info, huh?" he added, getting into the driver's seat. "Will do." Bobby replied, the worry lines more noticeable than usual at the corners of his eyes. Something about this case was making him nervous, and he hadn't put too fine a point on it, but it wasn't often that three hunters in a row got torn apart by the same monster. This was a seriously dangerous hunt we were heading into.

"Don't worry, Bobby. We can handle this." I told him, leaning on the roof of the Impala, and he gave me a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "If anybody can, it's you two. But if you get eaten, so help me God..." he warned, leaving the sentence hanging, and Dean laughed. "What? You'll kill us?" he grinned, and Bobby chuckled. It almost disguised the anxiety, too. Almost.

"Get outta here. Go kill the thing before it eats any more innocent people." he made a shooing motion with his hands, and I joined Dean in the car. He turned the key and the engine roared to life, and we left Bobby standing in the rain trying not to look as worried as he obviously felt.