In retrospect, Sam could admit that their yeti hunt hadn't been the best thought out of their plans. Partly because they'd been cocky and in a hurry, partly because their equipment had failed and they didn't have a backup, and mostly because they'd thought they were going after a wendigo, not the Abominable Snowman.
But the signs all pointed to wendigo: densely forested isolation, missing campers and hikers over the course of years, no bodies found. And honestly, yetis? The Abominable Snowman was supposed to share a category with Bigfoot, Mothman, and the Jersey Devil: hoaxes.
So they set out for the Minnesota woods, him and Dean and Cas, and it had been downhill from there. They had to rent a couple of snowmobiles, because the Impala wasn't exactly up to off-roading in two feet of snow. It turned out, about half a mile in, that Sam's machine wasn't up for it, either; it broke down in a cloud of black smoke that looked more demonic than mechanical, and Dean's investigative repair attempts had determined that he didn't know "a damn thing about snowmobile engines, and everything these days is freaking computerized anyway."
They had to finish their trek limping along on the single remaining snowmobile, which had been doing all right with Dean and Cas but really wasn't meant to carry three grown men, much less three grown men and all their hunting supplies, which had been riding with Sam. It was slow and uncomfortable going and Dean grumbled the whole way, audible over the howling wind even with Cas as a buffer between them.
After stopping a couple more times to stretch and check their map, they made it to the last GPS coordinates transmitted by one of the missing snowshoers' phones. The snowy forest looked tranquil, glittering with ice crystals and dappled sunlight, without a trace of cannibalized corpses to be seen.
"For all we know, we could be walking on top of half a dozen dead bodies right now," Dean complained as they dismounted. "It's snowed, like, five times since they came up here. We're not gonna find anything. I'm telling you, we should come back in the spring."
"And let this thing eat more innocent people until we get back to it? No way."
Dean rolled his eyes, but his exasperated expression was mostly hidden by the scarf covering the lower half of his face. "Of course we wouldn't just leave it, Sammy, jeez. We go back to town, tell 'em this whole section of forest is closed down until further notice due to, uh, avalanche concerns, and wait for it to thaw out a bit."
"This area wouldn't be threatened by avalanches," Cas pointed out, looking around. "The terrain is much too flat."
He was less bundled than either Winchester; though the loss of his grace had left him human and subject to the elements, he'd turned down the offers of warmer clothing. "I like the cold," he'd said. "It makes me feel... more alive, I think."
"You're gonna feel a hell of a lot less alive after you get hypothermia," Dean had argued, and eventually packed spares of all the winter accessories he could find in case Cas needed them.
"And what happens when they call the actual forest service and figure out we're imposters? Or some teenagers decide to be 'badass' and defy the closure? Or the wendigo hibernates or migrates somewhere else because it's not getting food anymore?" Sam added.
Glaring at both of them, Dean pulled his duffle off the back of the snowmobile and started digging through it. "The same damn thing that'll happen when we go home in disgrace because we can't find anything to hunt in a blizzard. Damn it, Sam, I'm not stoked at the thought of walking away from this one—temporarily!—either. I'm just being practical."
"You're being bitchy, is what you're being. You were all for this hunt this morning. 'Snowmobiles, Sammy!'" Sam mimicked. "'Flamethrowers!' So what's crawled up your ass and died since then?"
"Nothing," Dean said at the same time Cas also said, "Nothing!" in a much louder, much more concerned tone.
Sam figured that answered his question well enough, and determined not to push any further. If it involved Dean and Cas in the Dean-and-Cas way, he didn't want to touch it with a ten mile pole. They were working it out, finally, and he was happy for them. Really, he was. He'd just be a little happier if they didn't both come to him for advice, because it was hard to be a neutral third party between the two most important people in his life.
Changing the subject away from Dean's tantrum and back to the hunt seemed like the safest plan for peace. "Since we're here anyway, how about we just look around and see what we find, all right? We don't want to be here after dark, so if don't find anything in—" He checked his watch. "—four hours, we can head out and come up with a new plan. Sound good?"
"Whatever." Despite his lackluster answer, Dean grinned a little when he pulled out the flamethrower that took up most of the duffel's capacity. They'd only been able to get their hands on the one, so as Dean stepped aside to strap on the tank and sling the nozzle over his shoulder, Sam retrieved the flare guns for himself and Cas.
Since the day's outlook had briefly started to improve, things naturally had to take a turn for the worse. As they crunched through the snow, looking for any signs of a struggle or a conveniently dark and dank shelter—the maps hadn't shown any caves or cabins, but it wasn't uncommon for them to be unmarked in large, not particularly well tended forests—they cursed the increasing wind as bad weather and bad luck. When snowflakes started to fall, at first gently drifting but quickly (and later, they'd realize much too quickly to be natural) thickening into blinding flurries, they gave up and started heading back to the snowmobile, because there was no way they'd be able to find and fight a wendigo in a blizzard.
Dean saw the looming shape before the others, stopping Sam with a hand on his arm and pointing to the growing shadow. Cas, shivering behind them since he'd left the heavy coat Dean brought for him back with the vehicle, halted as well. The figure was barely visible through the white gale, distant but alarmingly large and even more alarmingly between them and the snowmobile.
A glance at Dean told Sam his brother was thinking the same thing he was: they couldn't afford to divert from their path, not with the snow obscuring already their way back to the snowmobile. They could lose the trail entirely, and they didn't want to get stuck overnight. If the thing they were hunting was coming to them, they'd have to be idiots to run from it.
"Pretty sure that's not a wendigo," Dean said, just loud enough to be heard over the wind.
"Yeah, no kidding." It had to be fifteen, maybe twenty feet tall and as wide as three men. It hadn't done anything violent yet, but Sam didn't like their chances against whatever-it-was when it got closer, and the snowstorm seemed to be centered around its mass.
"Well," said Dean grimly, "I've still got a freaking flamethrower, and that'll take down just about anything."
Cas had been quiet, leaning close behind them to peer at the oncoming figure, and Sam felt him tense and draw back. "Dean," he said, "Sam. What do you know about yetis?"
That was when all frozen hell broke loose.
The creature—Sam was still coming to terms with 'yeti'—roared, a loud, deep bellow that shook the ice from the trees rattled Sam's already chilled bones. In the reverberating echo, a wave of snow crashed down on them from all sides like the avalanche Cas had insisted they wouldn't encounter, and the whole world turned white and powdery.
When Sam's vision stopped spinning, he clawed and kicked desperately for the faint sparkles of light he could see through the piled of snow that had crusted over him. He broke through to open air without too much effort to find that the snow flurries had stopped and the air was calm. It took some more flailing in deep drifts, but Sam righted himself just in time to see the yeti crashing away through the trees with a limp body clutched under one arm.
Lunging through the snow past Sam, Dean shouted, "Cas!" But Cas was unconscious, or at least unresponsive, and between the yeti's giant strides and the hindrance of a few feet of snow, Dean couldn't run nearly fast enough to catch them. He still tried, though, and after several yards he tripped and fell face-first into the snow. Sam, close behind, helped pull him back onto his feet. By then, the yeti was far in the distance.
"Fuck!" Dean stared off in the direction the monster and Cas had disappeared, then spun around. He'd gotten separated from the flamethrower during the targeted avalanche, but he stomped over to where it had fallen and swung it onto his shoulders again. "Come on," he growled, pushing through the snow not towards the vanished yeti, but back towards where they'd left the snowmobile and the rest of their supplies. "We're nearly to the snowmobile, it'll be faster."
"We'll get him," Sam promised as they plowed through the snow. He could already see the bright red body of the snowmobile through the trees, dusted with new snow but not covered. "We're gonna find them, kill the hell out of the–the yeti, and Cas is gonna be fine."
Getting on the snowmobile behind Dean was awkward with the flamethrower's fuel tank between them, but he managed to do it and even pull out his cell phone without falling off as Dean gunned the engine—as much as a snowmobile engine could be gunned. He'd hoped to look up something, anything about yeti lore, but of course he didn't have any signal that deep into the woods.
They'd have to go with what they had on hand and hope it worked. He wasn't sure silver bullets would do much against that giant of a snowman, but Dean had the flamethrower. Sam hadn't recovered his lost flare gun, but if they were very lucky, Cas might still have his and recover enough to use it. If those didn't work, well. They'd figure something out.
Finding the yeti's path once they got back to the place of its attack proved to be a simple matter of following the trail of troughs in the snow and broken branches in the trees. It cut a broad enough swath through the forest that they had no trouble following in its footsteps even with the wide treads of the snowmobile, and Dean only rarely had to slow down to take a turn or dodge around a tree.
"Do we have a plan?" Sam tried to ask. Dean either couldn't hear him over the engine and the rush of air, or pretended he couldn't and ignored him. Sam let it go; he assumed Dean's plan was to gank the yeti get Cas back no matter what it took, and to be honest he didn't have any more detailed suggestions. That was probably the best they'd be able to get since they had no idea what they were driving into.
After what felt like hours but was surely only a few minutes, the already frigid temperature plummeted noticeably and a glittering mound of snow appeared on the horizon, a hill the size of a mansion. The yeti tracks led straight to it, but the creature and Cas were nowhere to be seen.
Dean clambered off the snowmobile as soon as it drifted to a halt, skidding slightly in the thick layer of powder. "All right," he said grimly. "Yeti lair?"
"Looks like."
The footprints disappeared into the side of the mound, though nothing looked different enough from the surroundings to indicate an entrance. They approached with caution, taking turns splitting their attention between the hill and the forest all around, but nothing roared or collapsed or jumped out at them. Reaching the base of it, they found that not only was there no way for them to get in at the point where the yeti tracks stopped, but the whole mound wasn't just snow after all. The outside had a shell of hard, crystal clear ice that looked to be at least an inch thick. It was perfectly smooth, and there was no way for them to climb up to the top of the dome without slipping off. Circling around revealed nothing useful, either.
Dean tried kicking at the ice shell, and scraping and stabbing at it with a knife, but it proved impervious to the damage. Even a bullet—a regular .45, not silver—ricochet dangerously back at them, leaving barely a dent. Not even that racket brought an irate yeti down on them, and that only made Dean more upset.
"If it's too busy to worry about what we're doing, then we're done wasting time." He unstrapped the gun of the flamethrower from his back and leveled it at the mound. "Stand back, Sammy."
Before Sam could launch any kind of protest, Dean had pulled the trigger and loosed a blast of flame right at the ice. The jet of fire roared angrily as it licked at the wall. The trouble with flamethrowers, especially questionable secondhand ones, was that they never lasted long. The flame sputtered and died after barely a minute, but finally the ice gave way and a large section had melted into a pool on the ground. Though the snow beneath held its shape, it was just normal snow; Sam could scoop it out in large handfuls.
It would take forever to make a sizable dent in the mound like that, though—longer than they probably had. He kept at it for lack of anything better ideas, Dean joining him, and on his fourth round of sweeping out snow by the armful, his hand struck something solid. Focusing their efforts in that direction, they soon uncovered a leg and then the body it was connected with, which wasn't actually a whole body anymore.
It also wasn't Cas, and Sam let out a prayer of thanks to whatever might be listening for that. It definitely increased their sense of urgency, but fortunately or unfortunately, they'd managed to get the yeti's attention. With another roar it lept from the top of the mound, flying over their heads and landing just past the snowmobile.
"Keep digging!" Dean yelled as it turned to face them, trying and failing to ignite his flamethrower again. He dropped the gun attachment, but didn't have time to unstrap the tank from his back. Instead, he let the nozzle drag behind him as he took off running. His course aimed closer to the yeti than Sam would've liked, but at enough of an angle that he wasn't headed straight for it. He was just drawing its attention away from Sam and the mound.
When it looked like the yeti might ignore him, he drew the gun loaded with silver bullets and fired four rounds in rapid succession right at the yeti's chest.
It worked, to a degree. The creature howled in pain and stumbled, though it didn't fall. Sam redoubled his efforts, mind racing as he tried to come up with a strategy that didn't seem so futile. He could hear the yeti thrashing around and hadn't yet heard Dean getting hurt, but he couldn't turn and look without stopping. He couldn't stop. If Cas was buried in the snow like the corpse they'd just found, he didn't have long.
Just as a loud crashing sent a shiver of fear up his spine unrelated to the biting cold, a hand burst from the surface of the snow where he'd been shoveling it away. Sam stared in shock for a moment, but only a moment; as soon as he processed what he was seeing he was moving faster than ever, one hand grasping the protruding wrist and pulling as the other kept pawing through the snow, clearing it away where it seemed like Cas's head should be.
Cas broke free to the sound of Dean cursing, his lips blue and his whole body shaking with cold. Even in that sorry state, his eyes went immediately to Dean and Sam's followed, to find his brother had been thrown into a tree by the raging yeti. Cas reached a trembling hand into the deep pocket of his soaked trench coat and pulled out the flare gun Sam had given him hours before.
"I can—" Sam started, not sure of either Cas's aim, given his shivers, or the state of the flare, given its exposure to water. But Cas had fired before Sam could finish the offer, and the bright red spark hit the yeti dead-on in its chest.
The yeti gave another tree-shaking roar, its whole body seizing up as the flare burned through its skin. Its cry went abruptly silent, but it stood frozen for several more long moments before seeming to liquefy from the inside, melting in gruesome slow-motion before their eyes.
Before it finished collapsing to the ground, Cas collapsed against Sam.
"Whoa, whoa." Sam steadied him, helping him take the stumbling steps he needed to get to the snowmobile.
Dean, recovering from his flight into a tree, met them there. He'd already unzipped his heavy winter coat and pulled it off to settle it around Cas's shoulders, zipping it up around his unresisting lover. His hand lingered at the base of Cas's throat, then gently traced up to his cheek, cradling the clammy skin in his gloved palm.
"You okay?" he asked softly.
"More or less," Cas croaked out; it sounded strained.
"More less than more, I'll bet. Come on, sweetheart, let's get you up on here behind me—there you go, and Sammy'll make sure you don't fall. We're going to get you back to civilization and warm before you know it, all right?"
"Mmm." Cas leaned his weight forward against Dean, and Sam held tight to keep him stable. "Knew you'd find me," he mumbled into Dean's back.
"Always, Cas. Always."