Skipping Stones, Altar Stones
"Will you shut up back there? Damnit Sammy, I'm trying to listen."
Annoyed, Sam rolled his eyes, but Dean was already lost in his music, eyes closed and fingers drumming on the dash. Sam figured he'd be forty before anyone let ever him ride shotgun and even then, they'd probably be telling him to shut up. But he was used to the back seat. It had been one of the only places he could call his own.
But Sam had been sharing the backseat, and God, that took some getting used to. Even though Sam was the only one who could hear her, it was wearying trying to hold up his end of the conversation without attracting Dad or Dean's attention. She never stopped talking, and not only that, the tourist act was getting old fast. Sam couldn't blame her. Ghosts didn't have a lot to look forward to.
"Oh wow, did you see that one?" she asked, practically gouging his eye out, pointing out the window.
Sam had to duck around her arm to look. It was weird – she was just as real to him as anyone else, but to Dean and Dad, she was empty space. He'd already watched as Dean walked right through her. There was a lot he didn't know about ghosts, which Sam held against his dad. When it came to his eleven year-old, Dad only doled out details on a "need to know" basis.
Sam whispered back, "Yeah, I saw that one. Just like I saw the last dozen hawks you wanted me to see."
"C'mon, it hasn't been a dozen. Don't act like you're too cool to care."
Sam wasn't the least bit cool, but it made him grin to be called it. Dean would have laughed his head off, pain in the ass that he was. Sam had to admit that the hawk was pretty cool though.
Out the back window, Sam watched the hawk dip and soar until it was lost in the trees. He normally didn't look out the window much. He usually read through the endless hours in the Impala, but Sam hadn't gotten all the way through a book since Emily had started haunting him.
She wasn't a typical ghost, even in Sam's limited experience. For one thing, she claimed she couldn't remember how she died. Said she couldn't even remember her old name but that he could call her Emily. Said she'd always liked that name better than her real one. Sam tried to ask how she could remember that she liked the name "Emily" better than her own, but she didn't want to talk about it. An unquiet death took something out of you.
Usually, it was pretty easy to figure out what had killed a ghost. Sam's first ghost had a huge maw of a wound gaping out of his neck, which left Sam unable to sleep alone in his own bed for nearly a month. The second was a child who'd drowned in a tub of bubbles and kept screaming that the water was going to overflow, and the third was a car wreck victim who showed up in the parking lot outside their motel room wailing that she really hadn't been driving drunk. That last one reeked of malt liquor and was enough of a pain in the ass that Dad hunted her body down, salting and burning her bones the next night.
Ghosts were just a part of life, but Emily didn't seem to care about anyone but him, and it wasn't like she was doing any harm. At first, he'd thought there'd be no way he could keep them from finding out, but Sam soon realized that Dad and Dean didn't pay a lot of attention to what was going on in the backseat. It was easier to keep a secret than he'd thought.
"Hey look, there's a deer," she said and elbowed him.
"Ouch!" he hissed. "I see them. You don't have to keep poking me."
Dean threw an empty soda can over his shoulder, and it hit Sam on the head. "I've had it with the whacked out street-guy act, Sammy. I can't hear a thing over you jabbering to yourself."
Dean flipped up the volume, and Sam scowled. He'd hardly even been whispering—there was no way he could be bugging Dean that much. Sam gave the seatback an irritated kick, forgetting for that moment that Dean shared the bench seat with Dad.
"Hey!" Dad said. "I'm going to miss the turnoff if you two don't quit it. And if you mess up my car, Sam, you're going to have a lot more to worry about."
Kicking the front seat of the Impala was never a good move, but it didn't escape his attention that Dad blamed everything on him like usual. It was just a car, he thought to himself moodily, but they acted like it was their own precious flesh and blood.
"Yessir."
Emily smiled, and when he glared at her too, she grinned. Even though she only hung out with Sam, she liked watching all of them. Sam figured she probably missed her own family, but he wished he knew what she was thinking when she looked at his dad and brother like that.
Emily leaned in and whispered in his ear, "Do you know how to fish?" When he shook his head, she said, "I'll teach you."
"Like Dad'll ever let me out long enough to fish," he whispered back, and the truth of that rubbed him wrong, like a mosquito bite.
Sam hated backcountry jobs. In a city or town, at least he had some freedom. He could go where he wanted as long as he was home by dark and let Dean know where he was going. When they worked rural gigs, Dad ordered him to stick close and stay inside, particularly when he and Dean were gone hunting. Too many bad things roamed in the woods. No point in taking chances.
Because of that, Sam couldn't count how many of his eleven summers he'd spent cooped up in a hunter's cabin in the middle of nowhere, staring at the ceiling while lying on a cot that reeked of cigarettes and old hunter sweat. It was always the same… Dad's idea of a summer vacation.
Dean put in a cassette he knew Sam hated and cranked it up, while Dad muttered, "I knew I was going to miss the turnoff."
Emily put her hand on her knee. "We'll find time to go fishing. You need to be a kid too, Sam."
It was comforting in a weird kind of way, how important it was to her that he have some fun. She'd been saying stuff like that since she'd first showed up at the beginning of summer.
It had been the beginning of June, and Sam had been furious that they were leaving town two weeks before the end of the school year. For once, he'd wanted to stay long enough to clean out his desk and take everything home in a brown paper bag, even though he'd known Dad would throw it out as soon as it started cluttering the kitchenette table.
As usual, there'd been no warning that they were starting a new job. Just a "pack your bag, we've got to go," and Sam was expected to get with the program and not ask questions.
There was no point in arguing with Dad. So Sam had been venting his anger by throwing rocks at a dumpster behind their motel, noting how they dented the corrugated metal with a satisfying clang.
He'd been by himself – Dean was loading the car-- but then she was there, surprising the hell out of him with a touch of her cold, dead hand.
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your life's not over."
It had been such a strange thing for a ghost to say that he didn't scream for Dean to grab the salt. He wasn't even scared. She looked older than him, but not that much older, and had blond hair and blue eyes and freckles on her nose that reminded him a little bit of Dean. She was really, really pretty, but not in a creepy sort of way like most little girl ghosts.
"What are you?" he asked, backing away. He still had a rock in his hand that he knew full well wouldn't do a thing to a ghost.
"Thought you might want some company for a while, since you're just going to drive your dad crazy if you sulk your way across the country."
Sam had to smile. Score one for the ghost. "I'm not feeling sorry for myself," he'd said, used to arguing. "I'm sick of leaving all the time and always being by myself"
"I know," she said. "I'll come with you if you want."
Sam had shrugged, but he hadn't said no. She followed him to the car that day and climbed into the back seat after him, like she'd been doing it all along.
"Our secret, Sammy," she'd said. "We'll have fun."
He should have told Dad. He should have told Dean. Everything about it was wrong. She'd called him Sammy, and it soon became apparent that she wanted him to think that being a kid was fun.
Being a kid was a liability. As far as Sam was concerned, his real life would start once he got out of the back seat of the Impala.
In the front seat, Dean was laughing hard at his own dirty joke, and his dad was swearing that the gravel on the road was going to pit the windshield.
"There's always a lake in the woods. Sam, we'll skip stones."
This wasn't going to be a nice little trip to the woods. But Sam didn't say anything. Didn't want to let her down. She'd find out how it was, soon enough.
***
Typical. Sam wrinkled his nose as he tried to scrunch some life into the old pillow. But the mattress was lumpy, and Dean was tossing and turning in the upper bunk, making the old springs creak and groan. Sam would've preferred sleeping outside on the porch, but there was no way Dad was going to let that happen on a job.
Because there was something in the woods. Something bad. Not that anyone would ever tell him what it was.
Sam hated hunter cabins. There were more than a dozen, built and abandoned over the years, situated way off the beaten track in places that nobody but hunters cared about. Dad said they were like old line shacks, carefully stocked with burlap sacks of salt, boxes of pilfered crosses and amulets, and enough ammunition to put the ATF on their tail if anyone ever called it in.
But nobody accidentally stumbled onto these places. Either you knew where they were or you didn't, and if you didn't, you had no business being there anyway. Hunter cabins weren't put up in pretty Bambi-like forests. If a bunch of hunters were interested in a stretch of woods, most likely nobody else wanted to be there.
Dad was still out scouting and most likely wouldn't be back until morning. Dad never slept the first couple days on a job, but Sam always hated when he was gone the first night. Even with Dean there, it took time to get used to the sounds and the shadows in a new place. The cabin was still hot and stuffy, and Dad wouldn't let them leave the window open, lest anything disturb his precious saltline. It felt like the place was fermenting.
Sam sighed. "Dean?"
"Shut up," Dean growled. The top mattress heaved on its springs as Dean rolled over again.
"I have a question."
"And I have a .45 under my pillow and I'm not afraid to use it. Sleep, Sam."
"You're not supposed to keep it under your pillow. Dad said the safety's broken."
"Dad's not here. I'm keeping watch, so shut your trap. I know my way around my own gun."
"Got a question."
"Alright, Sammy, it better be the best question you ever asked in your whole pathetic life."
"Can ghosts follow people around?"
"What kind of dumbass question is that? That's like Ghosts 101!"
"No, I don't mean like stalking. I mean like going from place to place with them."
"Ghosts don't go on road trips, freak."
"But what if they do?"
"They don't. Ghosts are stuck. You know that."
"Do they ever get stuck to a person?"
Dean hung upside down over the edge of the bunk, his face backlit by moonlight.
"Something you need to be telling me, Sammy?"
"No. Just curious."
"Bull. You're never curious about anything unless you have a reason for it. You messing around with something I should know about?"
"How could I mess around? You're always with me." Sam yanked his pillow out from under his head and swatted Dean in the face with it.
"I gotta know everything about you, Sammy." Dean pulled himself back up, and Sam could hear him scooting back into the sleeping bag. "That's my job. If you're in trouble, you gotta let me know. I won't even tell Dad if you don't want me to."
Now, that was interesting. Dean not telling Dad something was A Very Big Deal, and Sam was tempted. He didn't like keeping things from Dean. But the family business was getting rid of ghosts, and even though Sam knew Emily deserved to be laid to rest, he liked having her around. She wasn't just a salt and burn job.
"So you gonna tell me what this is about?"
"I can't sleep. This mattress is lumpy." Sam knew it was lame, but it was the first thing that came to mind, and he really was uncomfortable.
Dean snorted. "Princess and the pea, Sammy. Time to man up."
Sam smiled and might have let it go after that, but a scratching at the window got his attention. Emily. Sam was sure she didn't like being left outside. At some of the motels they'd stayed at, he'd been able to sneak her inside, but here, the first thing his dad had done was lay out the salt. Sam felt bad for her, outside and alone, and he could see her now waving impatiently at him through the window. Carefully, he pulled out of his sleeping bag and tried to quietly get down from his bunk.
"What the hell are you doing now?"
"Need to pee." Sam jammed his toes in his sneakers without untying them. It drove Dad crazy when he did that. "I'll be back."
"Damnit, Sam, you should've gone when I told you to go. The outhouse is a mile away. Now I'm going to have to get dressed to take you, you idiot."
"It's not a mile away. It's just down the hill, and I'm old enough to take a leak by myself. Go back to sleep."
Sam held his breath, but Dean grumbled and rolled over. "Fine. Take the flashlight so you don't fall in."
"Fine."
"Fine."
He'd take the flashlight but he didn't need it. Ghosts could see just fine in the dark.
TBC