Running, desperate... Pain! No, not quite... The threat of pain, the anxiety and pressure that comes right before the pain... Can't breathe, can't see, can't hear—emptiness... A wall. A wall with no end, and before it, nothing but the memories of all that had just happened in the last few weeks. Running...
"Sam! Sam!"
Sam Winchester came awake with a gasp. He panted hard as the sunlight slapped him in the face. The motel room ceiling spun above him, then settled as his consciousness returned. He rolled over and looked at Dean, who was watching him with deep concern.
"What?" Sam muttered, sitting up. "Was I sleepwalking or something?"
Dean blinked, and the worry vanished under a mask of his "we're fine" expression. "No; but I just saw something interesting in the paper today." He laid out the copy of The Oregonian.
Sam mused at how quickly he had forgotten they were in the Northwest; Blame it on the motels, he thought. They all look the same from the inside.
The article in question wasn't front-page news. It wasn't even in the first section. It was in the Neighbors section, just a single paragraph.
"HUNT FOR MISSING WOMAN CONTINUES.
In Leavenworth, Washington, the search for Isabella Lebedova continues. The 23-year-old resident was reported missing on February 8, and the authorities are still searching for any leads as to her location. Speculation does include sightings of the Bavarian Beast but this is also a popular urban legend among residents of the town. Authorities are willing to allow that perhaps she lost herself in the mountains."
Sam already had his computer open while Dean read the article.
"Leavenworth?" He said. "That's—wow, almost three hundred miles north of here."
Dean raised an eyebrow. "So aren't we talking Canada at that point?"
"No," Sam turned his screen to show his brother the map. "Just really deep in the northeast side of the state."
Dean shrugged. "So, do we think there's a case here?"
"Well," Sam consulted the newspaper again, "February 8, that would mean the girl has been missing for almost a week. If she was really lost, either she should have found her way back by now or she may be running out of provisions to survive." He inhaled and waited, practically letting the word "OR" float out of his head in the silence.
Dean knew what his brother wasn't saying. He shrugged. "All right, let's check it out. What's the idea behind this Bavarian Beast legend?" In their line of work, every legend had a monster at its center that they could find.
"That is a legend brought over from Germany, dating back to the 1300s," Sam stated, pulling up another webpage. "The... Tötenberg Curse," he squinted and butchered the foreign word, "is an enchantment that turns selfish, vain men into hellish monsters. In order to regain their human forms, they must find a young maiden willing to fall in love with them, and this act of selflessness lifts the curse."
A smirk crept across Dean's face. "So... What are we talking about Beauty and the Beast kind of thing?"
Sam scanned the page as he scrolled. "Well, it may be that the fairy tale was inspired by the legend. Kind of a more romanticized take on it."
Dean snorted as he shoved the last of their belongings into the duffel. "Romantic, my ass! A monster kidnaps you and holds you prisoner till you go all Stockholm on him..." He shook his head. "Does it say what happens if the girl says no?"
Sam finished reading and closed his computer. "All the stories either talk about the girls who end up happily married to hairy-faced newcomers or, uh, the ones that tried to escape and, um... Died."
Dean checked the sights on his pistol with a tight-lipped expression while Sam tried to search for eyewitness accounts of any "Tötenberg" sightings around the time of Isabella's disappearance.
"Dean," he said, his eyes glued to the screen, "look at this: 'I was sitting on the porch watching the moonlight when I heard the most awful sound coming from the cliff behind our property. It sounded more beast than man, but the creature that made such a noise had to be at least as large as a man, if not bigger, by the noise of it.'" He scrolled a little further down the page. "Here's one: 'My grandfather tells of the time when he saw the Tötenberg Beast in the Black Forest. He was hunting deer, and he says he actually found the monster's den by accident. He says he knew it was the Beast's lair because there was a beautiful young woman trapped behind a wall of rock inside, with her hands and feet tightly bound. My grandfather immediately went to help her, but before he could get her out, the Beast returned. He said it had two small horns like a goat, claws and an ugly snout like a huge wolf, and walked upright on two claws like a man. He claims to have escaped with only scars, but his doctor, when he stitched him up, said the wounds were more consistent with a bear encounter. To this day, no one can confirm or deny my grandfather's story. Nobody knows what woman he found, or what became of her. All we know is that it's a miracle he's alive.'"
Dean's head snapped up at the last sentence. Something came over his face, but Sam couldn't figure out what.
"Fair enough," Dean said with an unreadable expression. "Let's go bag ourselves a monster."
Sam watched his brother climb into the black Impala. The older Winchester was usually the most expressive of the two; he wore his inner turmoil on his face. Sam could practically smell his brother's moods... But ever since Sam's return from—well, ever since coming back to life, Dean had been crazy uptight about something that had happened while he was hunting alone. There had to be something Dean wasn't telling him, but he knew his brother would do anything to avoid facing what happened over the last year—till it blew up in their faces. Sam just hoped it wouldn't be too great of a catastrophe when that happened.
