Summary: When Dean goes missing in a room full of mirrors, a hunt becomes personal and much more deadly. Pre-series, no pairings.
As always, guys, this story contains Sara Lucian, a character from several of my other Supernatural stories (which are listed in my profile for anyone who's interested). Reading those stories probably isn't strictly necessary, but might help. Sara is a friend (and nothing more) of Dean's who is also a young Hunter. She specialises in exorcisms and was trained by her mother, just as Dean was trained by John. (Possibly I should rewrite this blurb - any suggestions? I feel kinda like a record stuck on repeat).
Reviews are loved.
xxx
February 2003,
Iowa
It wasn't meant to be like this.
When Dean had suggested working a job together, Sara had leapt at the chance. It beat working alone, and it was meant to be a simple job. Missing people in Iowa, only about eight or nine, but all within six months of each other. The police were baffled, but that was hardly worth mentioning. Dean had outlined the plan: Go to Iowa, find the bad thing, kill the bad thing, celebrate.
Sara was happy to have any plan to follow, no matter how simplistic. Anything was better than thinking about... well, anything.
Adrian accused her of bottling up her feelings. He said it wasn't natural to be functioning normally less than six months after your mother died violently. And he was right. He didn't know everything about Amelia Lucian's death, but he was right.
But Sara didn't much care. Until she had enough time between exorcisms and crises to deal, properly deal, with what had happened, it was way easier and safer to repress. After all, repression and denial had kept Lucians alive for centuries.
Dean understood, or at least tolerated her standpoint. He'd been there when John and Sara had agreed that mourning Amelia would have to wait until after the other Hunters accepted Sara as the new exorcist. And although he'd looked surprised, both at the suggestion and at Sara's ready acceptance of it, he hadn't said anything. Instead, he'd stuck around, forcing her to be human and hold onto what little hope remained. Sara wasn't sure if he knew what Amelia had done, but she doubted it would change much if he did know.
But then she had never expected him to go missing either.
It wasn't meant to be like this!
xxx
When his phone went off, Dean didn't even look over as he scrabbled on the passenger seat for it. It was here somewhere, it had to be...
Finally finding it, Dean hit the 'answer' button and held the phone up to his ear.
"Save me."
Not quite what he had been expecting. "And why should I do that, Sara?"
"Don't you even want to know what you're saving me from?"
"Adrian's bugging you again, right? 'Bout your mom?"
"Yep. Save me?"
"Once again, why?"
"Because I'm an amazing friend? Oh, alright," she added when Dean snorted. "I'll make you more cookies."
"Deal. I was about to come get you anyway."
"Why? What's up?"
"Mysterious disappearances in some random town in Iowa. Want to come?"
Dean almost certainly could deal with this on his own, but Sara was still regaining her balance where hunting was concerned. Asking her to accompany Dean was the easiest way to keep an eye on her and help her sort herself out.
"Sounds good," Sara replied. "ETA?"
"Give me a couple of hours."
"Cool. See you in a bit."
Dean tossed the phone back on to the passenger seat. The seat which was now always empty.
Sara had just lost a mother, but Dean had just lost Sam. Okay, the boy was still alive, but alive and not speaking to Dean, or riding in the Impala or hunting or having anything to do with his family. Although it wasn't much of a family anymore. God only knew where John was these days. We can cover more ground if we split up had somehow translated into fine, you can hunt with Sara, but not with me.
And while Dean wasn't exactly okay with that, he'd take what he could get. Anything was better than that empty passenger seat.
xxx
"Room twenty-seven," Sara said, tossing him the keys.
Dean snatched them out of the air and grabbed his duffel with the other hand. "Why is it that you get us a room with no trouble, but I get the evil eye?"
Sara shrugged. "'Cause I'm more respectable."
"You are so not more respectable than me," Dean said.
"Just a little bit," she replied, fishing her backpack out of the Impala. "And can we avoid getting banged around this time? I don't feel like hearing that 'escape the abusive boyfriend' spiel again."
Dean couldn't help the wince. The last time they'd hunted together, Sara had ended up with one hell of a black eye and he'd been glared at more-or-less continuously by the motel manageress until they left.
"Hey, at least you weren't being accused," he said, unlocking the motel room and entering.
"I'd prefer that, Dean! When I went to check us out, she offered to call the cops for me."
"How'd you persuade her not to?"
"I didn't. Why do think I was so insistent that we left immediately?"
"Huh." Dean shook off thoughts of the pessimistic, man-hating manageress. "You finished reading the case notes?"
"Yeah," Sara said, dumping her stuff on one of the beds. "Nine people, all missing, all in the last six months, no leads, no links, coppers baffled. I miss anything?"
"Pretty much covers it. We need to talk to the families, the authorities. There weren't any newspaper reports to follow, so we're kinda low on details."
"Well, that might actually help us. If no reporters have already covered this story, we've got a perfect excuse to talk to the cops."
"And the relatives, right?"
"We could split up, cover more ground. We really need more information."
"We always need more information," Dean said, grinning. "Okay, you want the cops or the relatives?"
"I'll take the cops. What with being more respectable and all."
xxx
And Sara was more respectable than him, Dean had to admit. While Dean was willing to play by society's rules when he really had to, he generally managed to find a reason why he didn't have to and then go with that. Sara, on the other hand, understood society's rules so well that she could practically bend them in a circle without anyone even thinking she was breaking them. Her appearance helped with that. Few people suspected a short redhead of being up to anything.
Dean dropped Sara off at the police station with a fake ID and a map of the town. Under the guise of a reporter, Sara was going to interview the police and the three families who lived close to the police station. She rolled her eyes when Dean told her to be careful, but he got a flash of a grateful smile just before he drove off.
Since Amelia's death, Sara had been... different. Not just because of her grief, that had been fast and furious and then stuffed away somewhere, but in other things. More and more, Dean wasn't seeing the woman Sara was now, but the teenager she'd been when they first met. Even shorter than she was now (a really late growth spurt in her last year of school had pushed Sara up to 5'3") and stupidly nervous, not about the things in the dark, but about herself, her own knowledge. Somewhere down the line, Sara had stopped questioning herself, but Amelia's death had knocked her right back to square one.
But this was a good plan. Splitting up not only got the most boring bit of the hunt, the research, over more quickly, it also gave Sara a slight confidence boost. And if Dean concentrated really, really hard, he could almost ignore the fact that this was the same way he'd tried to ease Sammy into the world of hunting.
xxx
She loathed high heels. Clearly, some demon had made his way into the fashion industry years ago and designed the only footwear in the world that made it preferable to go barefoot. Misogynistic bastard.
But the hated shoes added precious inches to Sara's small stature and made the entire reporter image that little bit more believable. She had no idea how Dean, with his dratted leather jacket and devil-may-care attitude ever managed to get any information at all. Sara could just about cope with her English accent and manners operating at maximum. And the heels, of course.
Which she kicked off with a sigh of relief, being careful to stuff them under her motel bed. Stupid, stupid shoes, stupider (more stupid?) genes that meant she needed heels to appear to be a normal height!
Yeah, she had to stop hanging around with people over six-foot. It gave her unrealistic expectations.
Sara, her feet now free of the high heels but still throbbing, sat up long enough to recover the notes she'd made at the police station and then curled up on the bed again. Nine missing people, no leads, yada, yada, yada. When the police had some leads, and the sky turned orange and the sun rolled backwards, then maybe she'd be grateful to the boys in blue.
She leafed through the notes from her interviews with the three families. No plans for travel, no messages, no odd occurrences in the days before the disappearance. Whatever was going on here, it was pretty subtle. She'd have to find some excuse to go back to the houses with Dean's homemade EMF detector, just to check. Her own EMF, also made by Dean, had been working brilliantly until a really crotchety spirit had thrown her into a lake. Her phone, on the other hand, had survived the dunking, thankfully. She couldn't afford to keep replacing it.
Almost on cue, the mobile rang. Sara rolled her eyes at the ringtone. That hadn't been the one she'd set it to.
"Dean, if you tamper with my phone one more time-"
And it didn't matter that she couldn't see his face; Sara knew that Dean was smirking.
"Find anything?" he asked, cutting neatly into the threat. He'd heard them all before, anyway.
"Not much. You?"
"So far, nada. Got one more house to check, then I'll grab us something to eat on the way back. Any requests?"
"Just nothing that looks like it could walk here on its own, alright?"
"God, you're such a girl."
"Yeah? Your point?"
"Freak."
"Git," Sara said and ended the call, trading the phone for her laptop. Research beckoned.
xxx
Dean pulled the Impala up outside the last house on his list, narrowly avoiding a large ornamental plant. Stupid things.
This was the oddest of all the houses. The others had all been carbon-copies, manicured lawns and honey, I'm home's. This one though, this one looked like it belonged in a low-budget horror movie.
Which, you know, was sort of appropriate.
When the hair on the back of his neck started tingling, Dean gave into his instincts and took his pistol out of the glove compartment.
The steps up to the porch were old and battered, creaking every time Dean stepped on one. There was no doorbell that Dean could see, so he reached out and hammered on the door, which swung open as he hit it.
"Hello?" he called. "Mr, uh, Parkson?"
He waited for a few minutes and when the old guy still hadn't answered, Dean pushed the door further open and went in.
"Mr Parkson? I'm from World Weekly News," he continued. "I'm here about your nephew."
Looking around for any real sign of life and seeing none, Dean pulled his EMF detector out of his pocket. No harm in checking, after all. The hall gave off barely a flicker on the meter, but when Dean walked past the stairs, it squalled suddenly.
The sensible thing to do at this point would be to back off, get Sara up here as back up, and then go up the stairs.
Dean took the steps two at a time, following the EMF meter. The readings were strongest at the far end of the corridor, by a door apparently no different than any of the others, except for the way the EMF was freaking out.
He tucked the EMF away again and took out his gun. Holding that in one hand, he carefully took hold of the doorknob and gave it one hard twist, shoving the door open suddenly.
Okay, that's just kinda weird.
xxx
Sara jerked awake, the laptop dead on her lap and one hell of a sore neck. She hated falling asleep while researching, but normally Dean woke her up before-
No Dean.
She almost fell off her bed in her hurry to get to the window. Bright sunshine, no Impala. Dean's bed was neatly made, which meant there was no way in hell he'd slept in it.
Sara grabbed her phone from the bedside table and dialled Dean's number. No reply, not even the voicemail message. The number you have called could not be reached.
What the hell did that mean?
She threw the phone on the bed and quickly stripped off the smart clothes she'd worn the day before. She redressed herself in her battered jeans and boots, hair back in a long braid. Hunting clothes. Next her rucksack was fished out and Sara unzipped it, checking through everything. A few basic reference books, herbs, charms. Her Colt revolver, the 9mm Beretta she used when she needed more than six bullets, spare ammo. From the bed, she grabbed the notes on the case and swept them into her bag as well.
Tossing the bag over one shoulder, she grabbed the room key and her phone and headed out. Sara was halfway down the street before one final option hit her. Pulling her phone out again, she scrolled down past Dean's number to his father's.
"This is John Winchester…"
Sara hung up. Voicemail, damn voicemail. That was so typical of John!
Right, so Dean had said he had one house left to check, hadn't he? Sara pulled the list of missing people out of her bag. Those three, she'd seen to, which left six. And it was far too much to hope that Dean had visited them in any sort of order.
Sara had been hunting for too long not to worry about Dean not turning up. Few Hunters skipped out in the middle of a job, even fewer left their partner behind and Dean didn't feature on either list. They always let the other know what was going on, that was and had always been the rule. Even before they'd started hunting together properly, they'd always told each other where they were, what they were hunting.
No, Dean hadn't left. Some thing had taken him.
And Sara was very good at dealing with things.
xxx
Five houses later, she was ready to scream. Yes, they'd all seen Dean the day before, although none of them had called him that. What was it with Dean and rock-star aliases anyway? But none of them had seen him since, none of them had noticed anything odd.
But this last household had been the last straw. The woman had been trying to be nice, Sara could tell, but that didn't help. She knew loads of people had been going missing recently, she knew none of them had been found, and she really didn't want to think about it, thank you very much!
Well, there was one last house to check. If she didn't find any trace of Dean there, she'd have to beg/borrow/steal a car and widen the search area. The town was small enough to make walking from one house to another easy enough, even if this last one was technically outside the town's borders.
As Sara drudged along what she really hoped was the right road, she mentally scrolled through her list of things that go bump in the night. Whatever she was- Whatever they were dealing with, it wasn't a werewolf, black dog, Wendigo or skinwalker. Nor vampire, Woman in White, possession. A ghost seemed the most likely, although the link between the victims eluded Sara completely. Maybe a-
Sara's train of thought derailed and caught fire as she rounded one last corner and saw the Impala in all its glory.
She started running, skidding to a halt next to the car that was as much a part of Dean as his smirk. It looked okay, no broken glass, no blood on the seats. She circled round to the trunk and checked the lock. Still in one piece. Sara didn't have a key to the Impala, never had and most likely never would, but if anything human had had any part in Dean's disappearance, they would have taken the car as well. Sara didn't believe Dean entirely about the Impala's value, but she knew it was worth more than enough to make it worth stealing.
Okay, so no signs of Dean. But that also meant no signs of Dean dead and Sara could cope with that, for the moment at least.
Sara turned to face the house. Ugly, run down, a little creepy. The sort of house that Hunters avoided just on principle, because yeah, ok, we hunt demons, but at least we have standards.
And damn it, she didn't need to hear Dean in her head right now!
She hurried up the steps to the front door, noting that it was open, but not broken open. Dean had a penchant for kicking doors open, breaking locks and splintering wood. But this door was just… open. Like someone had forgotten to lock it properly. Sara pushed the door further open and stepped in.
"Dean?" she yelled. "Dean, you here?"
Methodically, she checked each room. The whole house smelt stale, all the windows were closed and shuttered.
"Current address, my ass," she murmured. No one had lived here for months, at the very least.
It wasn't until she was upstairs, having checked every room but one and found no trace of Dean, that Sara started to panic a little bit. In her world, people vanished without leaving any traces all the time and very few were ever seen again. Which wasn't what she wanted to think about.
One door left, and it was just sheer desperation that made her open it.
And Sara jumped, reaching automatically for her revolver, before realising the face starting back at her was her own. A mirror. No, she realised as she stepped in, an entire room of mirrors. Ten mirrors, sides touching in a sort-of circle, the tenth mirror on the back of the door. Sara was careful to keep the door open. There was just enough of witch in her to make her nervy about being trapped between two mirrors. Being trapped between ten mirrors wasn't even an option.
And Dean's EMF was in the middle of the floor.
Sara picked it up, flicked the power button a few times. The batteries must be dead. If Dean had used it here, then it had been on all night, so that figured.
Handling the EMF in a manner which was part respectful and part downright edgy, Sara put it away in her rucksack.
She didn't like mirrors, not at all. One Sara was quite enough, never mind two. These ten mirrors were reflecting reflections, though, creating an entire army of Sara Lucians. And it wasn't just the mind-spinning image these mirrors created that was weirding her out. There was plenty of folklore about mirrors, most of it bad, more than enough to make any Hunter twitchy.
The room reeked of unnatural power as well, making her shiver. Something big had happened here, something big and powerful. Sara had good instincts where that sort of activity was concerned; she'd been around enough rituals and spells to recognise the after-effects.
So someone was playing with mirror magic. Idiot. Any sort of magic had a hefty price. Even exorcisms, which were about as far from magic as you could get whilst still toying with unnatural forces, had the physical fallout, which was painful enough to offset the bad karma of yanking demons from hosts using nothing but willpower and some Latin gibberish. Mirror magic though, that was downright nasty. The mirrors increased the strength of whatever the spell did, but also increased the cost. Normally, those using mirror magic went insane. Other lost their souls.
And if this room hadn't been specifically built for mirror magic, Sara would eat the damn EMF.
As Sara turned to the door, she saw a flicker in the corner of her eye and spun back before she could stop herself. People moving in mirrors, really! Shaking her head at her own paranoia, Sara left the mirror room, letting the door slam shut behind her.
Dean was standing in front of her.
"Sara, you gotta get me out of here," he said.
Instinctively, Sara reached out for him and nearly cried as her hand went right through his arm.
"You gotta get me out of here," Dean repeated and vanished.
Sara stood still for a long moment before she remembered to breathe. Then she swung her backpack back over her shoulder and flat-out sprinted out of the house.
xxx
It wasn't hard to find Mr Parkson. The man's nephew had disappeared from the same house as Dean, which was Mr Parkson's actual home, and it wasn't a secret in the town that the man had moved out to live with his sister.
In accordance with the universal law of nothing-at-all-ever-going-right-ever, Mr Parkson was at work on the other side of town. By the time Sara made it to the garage where the man fixed cars, she'd crossed the town about four times and her patience had completely run out.
Mr Parkson turned out to be a nice looking, middle aged mechanic, but Sara had long stopped paying attention to looks. The mechanic thing was odder though. Normally, those who used magic to try and even up the world weren't the same people who were able or indeed willing to fix anything the hard way, piece by careful piece.
"Mr Parkson?" she said finally, firmly telling herself that hitting this guy would not solve anything. Well, not yet, anyway.
"Yes?" he replied, offering her a friendly smile which Sara didn't return.
"I'm from-" Sara paused and then chucked the cover story straight out the window. "My friend Dean went to your house last night. I haven't seen him since."
The smile faded. "I hadn't been in that house for four months. I'm sorry, I can't-"
"What about the mirrors?" she interrupted.
"What?"
"The ten mirrors, in the glorified cupboard upstairs?" She paused, noting the man's furious face. "The front door was open, I was just looking for my friend."
"I think you should leave. Now."
Oh, she so wanted to hit him. "You don't want to help me? Fine. But I'll figure out what the hell you've done."
"I am not a criminal here!"
"But you are awfully defensive. Wonder what that could mean?"
She stalked out of the garage, ignoring the glare Mr Parkson was directing at her back. Back on the street, she pulled out her phone. Her research options were somewhat limited. Most Hunters didn't want to understand magic, just stop those using it for evil, and mirror magic was fairly outdated these days.
Unless…
She dialled a number from memory. Maxwell, the psychic in Canada, had helped to train both Sara and her mother and had an occult knowledge to rival the rest of the Hunters put together.
"Maxwell? Yeah, Sara Lucian here. Know anything about mirror magic?"
xxx
Eric Parkson was not a hugely subtle man. Mechanics didn't really need to spend much time sneaking around. But despite his lack of practice, he managed to make it to the back door without the girl outside spotting him. Whoever she was, she worried him. She had asked about the mirrors, for crying out loud, and Eric wanted nothing more to forget about the stupid things. He'd take a crowbar to the entire room if that wasn't a really bad idea.
But the room wasn't his problem. His problem was the nine – or ten by now, if this Dean character really was missing – missing people and a girl who seemed to be linking them to the mirrors. Which was ridiculous, of course, but…
The girl was only a few feet from the door, talking rapidly into a mobile phone.
"Yeah, ten mirrors, sides touching. Shut the door and you're surrounded kinda deal," she said. "Look, Maxwell, I don't care if only two mirrors are used for mirror magic, this room felt wrong. Like… unnatural."
Well, he agreed with her on that. The room was totally unnatural.
"Whoa, Mum did what? Are you sure?" the girl continued. "Do you know when? '93, you sure? Okay, thanks Maxwell. Bye." She slipped the phone into her pocket.
Eric sagged against the wall as the girl walked away. What the hell was going on here?
xxx
Standard deal, guys. Reviews are loved and the next chapter should be up on Friday.