I am hopeful that someday the story of how Dean and Marcy met will cooperate enough that it gets finished. However, this one decided to get finished first. Stories are very contrary things. Rather like Hannah, come to think of it.
Better Days Coming
Dean found the Reynolds insistence on Sunday dinners (early afternoon, not evening, because Southerners just had to be different) kind of freaky, and not just because he'd never done Sunday dinners or because there were easily fifty adults or near-adults crammed into this oversized house (accompanied by a horde of children that he no longer even tried to count). Even though all of them, down to the toddlers, were well-versed in wheelchair etiquette, the sheer number of people there made getting through them in a chair difficult—although, for that same reason, he and Firth went through the food line first, which was a definite perk. It was easy enough to open up another space at the table, just move some chairs, but as far as the rest of the house— Well, the family hadn't quite adjusted to having two guys in wheelchairs yet, so during the pre- and post-meal mayhem, he and Firth tended to wind up crammed into the same out-of-the-way parking place, the spot that used to be just Firth's. And because the family was so used to dealing with Firth, they had a harder time dealing with somebody who was in a wheelchair but could get out of it, so using his cane to limp around—even to only go as far as sitting in a real chair at the table, or on the couch with Marcy—was problematic.
Not to mention, one good collision with a kid at Mach 7 and Dean might never get back up, and he just did not want to hear that lecture from Sam.
Even with a lifetime spent assessing his surroundings, the sheer numbers meant it took Dean a few weeks to realize that he'd met aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins (good God, the cousins) and even some girlfriends, boyfriends, best friends, church friends, and neighbors, but he'd only met four of Marcy's five sisters. And there wasn't any excuse for it, because Hannah still lived at home—the same home where all these dinners took place, because apparently it was illegal to have family gatherings anywhere but Third and Anne's house.
That wasn't even really the weird part. No, that was how she never came down to eat, and nobody ever made her join them. This despite a few very loud arguments between the parents of the second generation and the stubborn teenagers of the third on that very topic that gave Dean headachy flashbacks to Sam's adolescence. It wasn't just about avoiding the crowd; Hannah didn't come down for smaller gatherings, either. Dean and Marcy had dinner—er, supper—over here at least once a week, and Firth showed up at half of those, so those meals weren't just about Third and Anne trying to get into Dean's head and figure out the magic formula to make him propose to their daughter, and there was absolutely no reason at all for Hannah not to join them.
If Dean were a different kind of man, he might take that personally.
She had to know that Marcy had brought home somebody, and that the somebody was a hunter; big brother Mike was one of the worst gossips Dean had ever met. Everything Marcy told him just reinforced that the three of them—Marcy, Firth, and Hannah—had been damn near inseparable from the day Hannah was born until Marcy went to college, despite the poltergeists, Marcy's injuries, and Firth's paralysis. So why the hell wasn't Hannah at least a little bit curious? God knew Sam was, when he wasn't busy bitching about how Dean wasn't taking proper precautions (and Dean just wished Sam was talking about safe sex).
And why the hell didn't Anne—who accepted absolutely no bullshit from anyone, least of all her offspring and anyone they brought into her house—insist that Hannah join them for the meal itself? So what if a poltergeist tossed the salad? Wouldn't the benefits of having Hannah there with her family outweigh the mess? Just leaving her alone up there seemed— Well, it seemed mean. Like she wasn't really part of the family. Like nobody cared enough to go get her. Which was so un-Reynolds-like that it was laughable.
When he'd asked, Marcy had just shrugged. "She's a grown woman and it's her decision," she said, and sounded about as convinced of the wisdom of it as Dad had been about Sam going to Stanford. "If you really want to meet her, I'll try to get her down this week."
He'd agreed. If nothing else, the odds would be better this week, because it wasn't the big dinner on the last Sunday of the month, and Courtney and Nick and their tribe were at his parents' place. (They had eleven kids and one on the way, and Dean wasn't sure what scared him most: That there were non-religious-fanatics out there who did that, or that nobody in the family even blinked at it.)
It wasn't all about just meeting Marcy's sister (although if Marcy wanted to give him extra points for it, that was her call). No, he'd been minding his own business the other week, going through the most recent stack of clothing donations at work, when another of those damn visions had smacked him. He'd been hoping the one the night he met Marcy was some freak thing, a last flare-up of Sam's transferred ability before it curled up and died like it should, but one call to Missouri had corrected that notion. He was stuck with the things, and they weren't just not going away, they were getting more frequent.
And this one—
Well, nobody deserved to spend their whole lives locked away in a room out of fear of some damn poltergeist, which was where Hannah was headed, and her family was so worried that she'd get hurt that they were letting her. So he was retired. Didn't mean he couldn't help people. Especially if the person was Marcy's baby sister.
Without Nick and Courtney's brats, the crowd of grandkids was thinned enough today that moving through it in a wheelchair was a lot easier. Firth was even giving the very little ones rides and chasing their older siblings all over the back yard, something Marcy said that Firth almost never did, unless he was in a very good mood. Dean just sat on the patio watching, occasionally with one of the littler ones crawling into his lap to beg for a ride. He half wished he could join in, but Firth had a motorized chair because the crash that paralyzed him had also wrecked one shoulder, and Dean's arm-powered one would never be able to keep up (though he did give the kiddies a couple of spins around the patio if they asked nicely). Marcy came up beside him, but he didn't think anything of it until she leaned over and said quietly into his ear, "She says she's not coming down. Dad said it got kinda loud last night, so there might have been one."
He nodded, understanding, and she walked down the ramp, waiting for Firth's next pit stop with a wicked gleam in her eye. All the kids on the patio followed her with ear-splitting shrieks. The chaos was about to get—um—was chaosier a word? Those kids were going to be too tired to eat by the time Anne and Granny and David finished doing whatever they were doing in the kitchen. It smelled delicious, anyway. He wondered what flavor the pie was this week. Anne liked to bake, and she appreciated his pie appreciation.
As he wheeled back into the house, he did wonder if Marcy was conniving with Firth to distract the little kids, the ones most likely to scream bloody murder if they saw him going upstairs. All of them were outside right now, getting chased around the backyard. The only ones left in the house were adult enough to watch golf in the living room with Third or racing in the den with Andy, were introverts who had squirreled themselves into hiding places away from the crowd, or were helping out with the final touches on meal setup. It was the perfect opportunity for Dean to drive over to the stairs without anybody noticing. Something big had just happened in the race, and there was a whole lot of screaming at the screen about somebody not being able to drive. If the race-watchers even noticed Dean, they probably assumed he was headed for the guest bathroom tucked under those stairs.
Dean parked next to the wall, put on the brakes so the chair wouldn't wander off, tugged his cane out of its holder, and levered himself up. Stairs were a bitch, but this one had a sturdy-looking handrail, and once he was upstairs, he could lean against the walls if he needed the extra support.
What he didn't have was an excuse to be wandering around upstairs, and while so far everybody seemed to like him, he wasn't sure how they'd take it if they caught him poking around. But that was before the fight broke out—in the pits, not in the living room, although for a minute he thought that a fight was going to break out here. It must've been their drivers involved in the wreck.
He knew NASCAR was a big thing in this part of the country, but damn. These guys were obsessed.
But as long as they were safely distracted, nobody was going to be stopping him.
Four months ago—was it only four months?—he could have bounded up these stairs two steps at a time, carrying a gun in one hand, a machete in the other, with a packed duffle slung over his shoulder, and not so much as lost his balance. Now—
Slow. Careful. One riser at a time. Cane first, left foot, right foot, lock knees, repeat. He let his hand rest lightly on the rail, so if he lost his balance he could grab it without looking. To accomplish this at all, he had to watch his feet, making sure they were straight and his weight was balanced and his feet weren't sliding on the carpet and he didn't accidentally slam his toes into the risers. It was a good thing that race was so interesting. Nobody glanced his way.
Because it was such slow going, as he reached the top, Dean got a good look at the wards carefully carved into the second-floor baseboards. They were good, but they were anti-ghost, not anti-poltergeist. I was afraid of that. Granny was pretty good, but she was still an amateur, and depending on which hunter or book she'd learned her wards from...
That was the tricky thing about poltergeists, the thing even a lot of hunters never got a good grip on; Dean only knew about it because of Missouri and a book in Bobby's library that had been mis-stacked with the demonology. Ghosts and poltergeists both made noise and threw things, and some poltergeists could even manifest a kind of apparition, but despite the name, poltergeists weren't ghosts. Poltergeists were blobs of energy that developed a mind of their own and wandered around looking for other sources of energy to feed on. Teenagers, usually; all the angst and hormones were fine dining for a poltergeist. Most of the time, nothing happened except a few weird noises. Nowadays, with all the other noise of modern life, most families didn't even suspect they had a poltergeist unless things started flying, and usually, once the kid got older, the flavor of the energy changed and the poltergeist wandered off in search of somebody more interesting.
Most of the time.
Some poltergeists went from awareness to full-on intelligence, and they tended to be bitchy. Since poltergeists only saw energy and didn't recognize "good" or "bad," it wasn't uncommon for them to get pulled into hauntings, like at their old house in Lawrence—or for the ghost to get sucked into the poltergeist, which was actually more dangerous, since that removed a lot of the limitations from the ghost. Those could be weakened if you got rid of the ghost, but that still left the poltergeist to deal with. Too many hunters never double-checked their work to make sure the poltergeist was gone; they just assumed burning the bones dealt with both of them. Even Dad had made that mistake.
And then there were those rare people who, for whatever reason, never outgrew attracting poltergeists. They were like beacons to the damn things, and every poltergeist for miles flocked to them. A herd of even the stupidest and weakest poltergeists could do some serious mental damage, if only through sleep deprivation from the noise. Mix in flying objects, and people could get hurt—ask Marcy. Mix in one of the big bad bitchy ones, and people could get killed—ask Firth, who would have died if the car had crumpled two inches in a different direction. Mix in some intelligence and a mean streak...
Left to its own devices, a smart, powerful poltergeist that found a magnet would linger for years, feeding off the magnet and any lesser poltergeists drawn to it. Hannah wasn't to that point yet, but that was because the really smart poltergeists were rare, and because even the wrong wards helped a little. Charm bags with the right ingredients helped more, but they had to be precisely placed; the house in Lawrence had been aligned with the compass points, but this one wasn't. The best thing was jade—even a small jade charm in every room would keep the things out—but not a lot of people knew about it, and the jade had to be real. Real jade wasn't expensive, but it was one of those gemstones that was easy to fake, and half the "jade" out there was plastic or glass.
Not to mention, that book in Bobby's library was a second edition instead of a first for a good reason: according to the notecard Bobby had glued to the inside cover, several printings of the first edition had a major goof, stating that the jade had to be natural, not just real. Most of the jade out there—at least, the jade cheap enough to be practical—was dyed or chemically stabilized. Jade was apparently one of those rocks that needed help to hold up decently.
Dean heaved himself officially onto the second floor. Now to figure out which room Hannah was hiding in.
There was only one door on his left, and that looked like it was Third and Anne's room, so he tottered down the hall to his right. Most of the doors were open, but the rooms had the empty, non-inhabited feel of guest rooms. There were some scattered toys in the one closest to Third and Anne's, the room the little kids most likely used when they spent the night, and one of the more reclusive mid-teen granddaughters—he couldn't recognize them all yet—was lying on the bed in another with her nose stuck in a Kindle.
The last door was the one he wanted, and it confirmed his suspicion that the kid before Firth (Kim? Ally?) had also still been living at home when Third and Anne built this place. Hannah had two rooms remodeled into a suite, undoubtedly to give her that extra bit of really safe space once she got old enough that her bedroom started to seem cramped. No point in building yourself a cage if it wasn't a comfortable cage, after all.
There were two huge windows in the corner, both propped open for some fresh air; he could hear the screeches of the kids, so they must overlook the backyard. He'd bet those panes were bulletproof, and there was tape over the windows to keep glass from flying if it did break. A desk was set up in that corner, so that she could sit there and look outside—probably the closest she got, under normal conditions. The bedroom wall held a TV, stereo—even a microwave and a fridge, along with supplies, snacks, and paper towels.
It looked normal, at first, until you realized that the neatness was disguising the fact that everything was boxed up or tied down or both. The TV had been built into the wall, and there were tie-downs on the stereo, microwave, and fridge. The assorted supplies were all in sturdy plastic storage boxes. The only books he could see were in a glass-fronted bookcase (with masking tape Xed over the glass doors) that was locked with a padlock. Posters and a ton of old photos were attached to the walls with that sticky blue stuff, not tacks, because tacks could put somebody's eye out if they got sent flying; for the same reason, none of the pictures were framed. Every sharp corner and edge on the furniture was padded, either with cardboard moving sleeves or with makeshifts of fabric and bubble wrap. Every socket not in use had one of those protector things in it that you used to keep kids from sticking forks in them; the slack of every wire was coiled up and tied into neat little bundles. There were no curtains or blinds on the windows. There was nothing in here that was not absolutely essential; the only decorations were the pictures and posters and a whole bunch of pillows made out of old concert T-shirts. No knickknacks at all. Nothing that could be broken and damn little that could be thrown, except for the pillows. And he'd be willing to bet that the stuff causing the texture in the paint was salt.
As for the woman herself, she was sitting at the desk, focused on the screen of a laptop that had a strap running across it between the keyboard and the hinges. She probably lived most of her life on the Internet. Where else was she going to get one? She was lucky, at that. If this had been just ten or fifteen years ago, she wouldn't have been able to have a life. Agoraphobes and rural areas were not a good combo. You couldn't even get pizza delivered out here, let alone anything else, even now. Marcy said that a couple of miles up the road, they didn't even have cable.
Dean eased his weight off the cane, just in case she was one of those people who overreacted when startled and he needed to use it to defend himself, then rapped on the open door.
She whirled around, and he didn't miss, not at all, the way her hand shot under the desk. Going for iron or salt, probably. Neither was as effective against poltergeists as they were against regular ghosts, but they both dispelled some energy. "Living, breathing human here," he said, raising the hand that wasn't on his cane. "Not a ghost or a poltergeist."
Her hand didn't come out from the desk, and he wondered if she had an actual gun under there. In this house, with kids running loose every weekend? Surely not. "Who the hell are you?" she demanded. To his surprise, she had dark eyes, very dark; most of the family had shades of blue or green, except for Marcy's gray. The exceptions were Courtney and Third—which undoubtedly explained where Hannah had inherited them.
"Dean. Marcy's—um—" This was really more awkward than it should have been, but he'd always thought boyfriend sounded ridiculous and significant other was just too much of a mouthful and roommate didn't exactly fit.
"Dude, if you're fucking my sister, you have got to learn to say 'boyfriend.'"
With that mouth, she was definitely Marcy's sister. "I'm working on it." She was younger than he'd realized, too; she had to be two or three years younger than Sam, at least, and that meant she was at least seven years younger than Marcy. That would help explain why the family hadn't really said anything about her little cage. She wasn't to the age where people started thinking awkward things about grown kids living in their parents' houses. Not yet.
Her gaze flicked to the cane. "Guess that's what I get for not coming down and introducing myself. I thought you were in a wheelchair."
"I am. Most of the time."
"Uh-huh. I'm Hannah, obviously. You gonna make an honest woman out of my sister?"
"Your sister doesn't need me to keep her honest." Whole, maybe, but that goes both ways.
"Don't say that in front of Mama."
He raised an eyebrow. Was this new intel on Anne? "I thought your mom liked me."
"She does. She likes you a lot. She won't fucking shut up about you. But it's her goal to see every one of her daughters walk down the aisle wearing her mama's wedding dress, and she's still really pissed that Marcy didn't."
Oh, right. Marcy and the asshole had eloped. "What's that got to do with me?"
"Let's just say Mama's worried that this eloping thing might be a character flaw in the men Marcy dates. Or—you know—whatever."
The memory of that first vision decided this was an excellent time to pop up again. Dean gave it a shove back to where it belonged. "That's not going to be an issue either way." Vision or no vision, matchmaking parents or no matchmaking parents, he and Marcy weren't getting married. Marriage was for normal people, not guys like him. Sure, they were living together—but he'd practically been living with Cassie, too, for a little while anyway, and that hadn't worked out at all. "Shouldn't you be downstairs?"
"I don't like crowds."
"In this family? That's a hell of a birth defect." She snorted. "Mind if I—" He jerked his head toward a chair, and she shrugged. He lowered himself into it carefully. "So, you don't like crowds, or don't want to risk that a poltergeist is gonna hit in the middle of dinner with all those kids down there?" Her jaw dropped. "Marcy told me. Also, I'm a—well, I used to be a hunter. Before this." He tapped his ankle with the cane. "You're not my first magnet."
"Meet a lot of agoraphobes in your line of work?" she asked acidly.
"A few." She was being unpleasant so that he'd leave. The longer he stayed in here, the more nervous she got—and it wasn't the typical nervousness of a woman entertaining her sister's boyfriend in her bedroom. Because she thought a poltergeist would attack? "The wards are intact."
"Like that means shit." The bitterness surprised him. "You want to know how well the car was warded when Firth got hurt?"
"Did the poltergeist get inside the car?" he retorted.
She opened her mouth to argue—then blinked, and actually laughed. It was a little bitter, but it was laughter. "I guess you've got a point."
"Wards have limits, and besides, those aren't the right wards." Panic flashed in her eyes. "Not exactly, anyway, and on things like this, you need exact. They work some, but just enough to keep the really nasty ones out. And the house isn't oriented right for the charm bags you've got." He nodded toward the little cloth bag hanging from a ceiling hook in the corner. "That's south-southwest. You need the compass points."
"So what's your point? I'm not protected, so I might as well walk outside and die in the open air?"
"That's not what I—"
"The last time I went out, my pregnant sister got hit so hard she miscarried. So if it's all right with you, I'll just stay in here and the fuckers can take their annoyance out on me and leave the rest of my family alone." He hadn't heard about that one—but a miscarriage was a different kind of animal than the attacks on Marcy and Firth, way more personal, and combined with Marcy's pregnancy issues, it wasn't all that surprising that she hadn't mentioned it.
Dean glanced over the mass of snapshots that took up most of the wall over the desk, on both sides of the windows. Family shots, mostly, and most were of three kids—the same three kids. The older girl had Marcy's gray eyes, and she and the boy looked a lot alike even then, and the age gap was about right for the little one to be Hannah. There was even one from the hospital after the wreck—Hannah perched on Firth's bed, Marcy sitting next to it. Hannah looked utterly terrified; Firth had his arm around her and Marcy was gripping her hands pretty tightly. Poor kid.
There weren't a lot of outside shots after that. Mostly in the backyard here, a couple of wedding receptions. Lots of pictures here, or downstairs, with the family. No school pictures. There was one of Hannah in a white dress that looked like a tiny wedding dress—First Communion, maybe, but in a bedroom. Not before the ceremony, either, since it was a shot of her kneeling before the priest and he was holding up the wafer.
"Right here," she said, and he looked back at her. "Uncle Paul. First Communion and Confirmation right here, because I wouldn't leave the house. Granny never has figured out how to ward the church parking lot, you see. No school pictures either, you'll notice, because I wouldn't go to school. Not after the first one hit. Mama homeschooled me." She tapped the edge of the laptop. "Meet my college. Modern technology plus a hefty donation, and I didn't even have to go to campus for orientation."
"Jesus," he muttered. Even he'd gotten out of the house—or wherever—more than this. Even after Sam had started the bookworm stage and never wanted to go outside. "And you're okay with this?"
"If it means the damn things aren't killing my family in crazed attempts to get to me? Which one would you pick?" Dean eyed her, wondering just how much Marcy had told her. "Hunters can't fix it," she added, that bitterness there again.
"I didn't say I could fix it," he retorted. "I said I could help."
"Like the last one? The one that told us it was all gone? Marcy was in the hospital a week later. And you can't even walk."
"Neither can Firth, but I don't think you'd tell him there was nothing he could do." That struck home. She actually flinched. "Look, Hannah, this is what I do. What I used to do, I mean. Help people with things like this. And just because I can't go running after the bastards anymore doesn't mean I can't try to get somebody help when they need it. You've got yourself all caged up here and maybe you like it that way, but somebody your age should be out seeing the world and making a shitload of bad decisions and getting laid."
"Nice slogan. Borrow that from the Navy?"
"I'm thinking of becoming a career counselor," he shot back. "I don't pretend to know everything about poltergeists, or even how to de-magnetize—is that a word? Anyway, I don't even know if you can turn it off. None of the others I met ever did. But then, most of them were so terrified they couldn't leave their houses. Ever."
"Great. Now I know what my future holds."
This was worse than talking to Sam. "I didn't say that. They were too scared to look for the answers. You—"
"Yes, Dean, my sister's not-quite-boyfriend, do tell me how much you've learned about me in the five minutes that we've talked."
He laughed. "You know what I've learned? You're a fucking Reynolds." She blinked. "There's only one family on earth that takes less shit than you guys, and that's mine. If anybody can figure out how to turn off this poltergeist magnet thing, it's one of you. The trick is, you have to find the ba—I mean, the guts to come out of your comfy little cave first." He pulled himself up with his cane and limped over to her desk, pulling the things he'd brought out of his jeans pocket. "Here. I brought these for you." He extended his hand, and she automatically opened hers. He dropped the pendant into it. "I got this from the place I work. It's the chemical-fixed stuff, cheap as hell, but I had your dad's jeweler friend check it out, and it's real jade, not glass."
She looked confused. "Jade?"
"Jade repels poltergeists. And I put a couple of blessings on it. Nothing major, just what I could remember. My brother's got most of the books with him, and if I called and asked, he'd have a complete meltdown thinking I was hunting again. You seem nice, don't get me wrong, but I've had enough of his meltdowns for one year."
She stared at it. "It—it really does?"
"Every source I can find says one decent-sized piece of jade in a room will keep them out for good, and wearing a piece of jade will keep them at a pretty good distance. This goes with it." He dropped the business card into her other hand. "Now, you can do one of two things. You can tell your parents what I just said about jade and the wards, and from what I've seen, I'm pretty sure they'll immediately go on a shopping spree and buy jade for every room in every house and every car, and a whole lot of jewelry, and everybody can paint their houses with the right wards, and you'll open your cage enough that you can go see your brothers and sisters in their houses instead of just here. Maybe even work as your dad's secretary, if he buys some for the office. The poltergeists will still be trying to get at you, and if you ever get mugged, you'll be up shit creek, but hey, you'll be able to pretend you've got a real life. Maybe you'll even get to drive that sweet little car your dad fixed up for you."
She gave him a stink-eye she must have learned from Marcy. "Or?"
"Or you can call the names on that card. Those are people way smarter than me. Bobby, there, he's got a whole library on supernatural shit. That's where I found out about jade and the wards. And if Bobby can't find an answer, he knows where to look. What contacts he doesn't have, Ellen will. And somebody out there will know how to make it stop. But they're across the country and they're not going to drop everything and come out here, not even on my say-so, not when the things aren't killing people. So you'd have to leave here and go out there." He gestured toward the window. "Where there's not any wards, even the wrong ones. Where it's just you and that piece of jade against all the spooks." He shrugged. "It's up to you."
They were in bed that night, watching something Marcy had recorded, when Marcy's phone started ringing. She swore, untangled herself from Dean, and grabbed for it. "It's fucking midn— What?"
Dean propped himself up on his elbows. That sounded bad.
"She did. I see. No, don't do that, not yet. Did she say— Of course not. Yeah, probably. I'll ask. I got an idea already, though. Love you too." She hung up and set the phone on the nightstand before turning a glare on him that was so fierce he was momentarily surprised that the sheets didn't catch fire. "Dean," she said, in that soft little voice that meant he was in deep shit, "what exactly did you say to my sister?"
"Which one?"
That earned him a whack with the remote. "You know which one."
"Marcy, I hate to point it out, but I think I talked to—"
"Why did Hannah just pack half her shit into Bret and tell my parents she'd call them when she got to fucking South Dakota?"
Bret? Oh, right, the car. "Damn. I didn't think she'd move that fast."
"Dean—"
"I gave her some contacts that might help. With the poltergeists. You know, so she could get out of her room and live a little?"
Marcy just stared at him—for so long that he began to get uncomfortable. Had he gone too far? But he thought she wanted Hannah to get help— "Dean Winchester," she said finally, "I don't know whether to kiss you or slug you."
"I vote for the kiss."
"You would," she said dryly. "Just— These people— Are they good?"
"The best," he said promptly, but felt obligated to add, "Well, now that I'm not out there." That earned him a punch in the arm. "They'll take care of her," he promised, and reached for his phone. "I'll call Bobby, give him the head's-up—"
She snatched the phone out of his hand and set it on her nightstand, then turned off the TV and gave the remote a toss. "Call him tomorrow."
"But—"
She kissed him, her hands sliding under the covers and into interesting places. "Unless you want another punch instead?"
"First thing tomorrow," he agreed.
the end