"What the hell, Dean?" Sam clicked between photos of the print. "Bigfoot? Jolly Green Giant? I've never seen anything like this."
Back at their cozy little cabin, both Dean and the stuffed bear head peered over Sam's shoulder at the laptop screen. They'd downloaded their camera phone photographs to the hard drive; the images displayed their mystery print with digital precision.
Dean shook his head. "I dunno, man, it's a new one on me."
Sam selected a corner of a photo and zoomed in. "Maybe it's like that X-Files with the lake monster – you know, some guy makes fake monster boots and goes traipsing around the woods."
"No, whatever made those tracks had some weight behind it." Dean leaned a little closer, pointed at the clearest part of the print. "Look at how deep they are."
"Great," Sam said. "So it really is the Jolly Green Giant."
"That, or one of those six-hundred-pound dudes you see on the Springer show."
Sam closed out the pictures and opened up one of his favorite databases. "Think maybe it could be another wendigo? We're only a few hours south of Blackwater Ridge."
Dean took the seat across from Sam, shuffled through the stack of papers on the table till he came to the detailed map of the area they'd bought when they hit town. "That thing only left tracks when it wanted to. Besides, it was nowhere near as big as the Johnny Jumbo that owns this foot." His fingers traced lines on the map, highways and rivers, county lines. "Check out Indian myths."
"Native American, Dean."
"Yeah, well, we've got two Ute reservations close to here, not to mention Navajo and Jicarilla Apache just over the state line." Dean bit back any number of responses, most of which contained variations on college boy and go fuck yourself. All the Indians he knew referred to themselves as Indians – and in this business, buying herbal remedies and researching fucked-up creatures, he'd gotten to know quite a few.
He realized he was grinding his teeth. He focused on his breathing, forced himself to relax.
With Sam busy clicking away, there wasn't much to do. Dean leafed through a couple of their standard texts on demons and monsters, but didn't see anything that caught his eye. He briefly considered checking Dad's journal, but the thought still left him cold. He practically had the damn thing memorized, anyway.
Outside the cabin's small window, a lurid sunset painted the mountains red. Dean watched the sky darken and headlights cut through the dusk. Picked at a worn spot on his jeans that would soon become a hole. He stood and stretched, the movement pulling at the scratches on his back. Maybe he should be taking antibiotics. Human bites were full of nasty things.
He sat, running his fingers over the map again, as if he could feel the ridges of mountains, like on those old-school globes. To the north and west of Durango, he found Disappointment Creek. Hell. Felt like he'd lived there all his life.
Without warning, Sam threw down the pencil he'd had clenched in his teeth. "Would you quit fidgeting for five seconds, Dean? Some of us actually have something useful to do."
Fine. Wallet. Keys. Phone. Dean opened the door.
"Where are you going?"
Maybe I'll find some Injuns and ask them to do a rain dance. "Out," he said. "Don't wait up."
In the dark and smoke, the soft neon glow, Dean found the magic hour: that golden sliver of time when he'd had a few beers but wasn't quite drunk, buzzed just enough to leave him feeling lazy and loose-limbed, to liberate a lithe grace, to slide a sloppy smile across his face. He hefted his cue, tested its balance, its weight.
Nothing finer than the crack of the cue ball hitting its mark. He watched balls scatter and sink, close now to reeling in tonight's chump, some frat-boy looking kid, blond and strapping Hitler Youth type from Fort Lewis College. Kept calling Dean "pretty boy." Dean had already forgotten the kid's name, but started thinking of him as "Hans."
The jukebox started in on Molly Hatchet, "Flirting With Disaster." Dean had to laugh. He purposely missed his next couple of shots, playing at being a little more drunk than he really was. Let the kid and his friends talk him into a Jack and Coke. Then another.
Hustle the poor drunk, some drifter past his prime. Dean almost laughed out loud. He could damn near play with his eyes closed. Once, while Sam was at school, he ran the table even with a cast on his left hand and one eye swollen nearly shut.
Little bit tipsy? Piece of cake.
Time for the kill. He circled the table, gauging his shots, enjoying the simple geometry, the bright colors against green felt: wildflowers dotting a smooth prairie. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a girl watching, whispering to her friend. Glossy black hair falling in waves to her waist, perfect porcelain skin, with a wry enough grin to tell him she was no china doll.
He aimed a grin back at her, the toothy, almost-real one. Lined up and sank his last shot. Pocketed the easy four hundred dollars he'd just made. He put up his cue, headed over to say hello to that girl.
Hans intercepted him, all puffed up with righteous indignation. "You fuckin' hustled me," Hans said.
A brilliant conversationalist as well as a master of billiards. Dean figured he should stick to single syllables. "No," he told Hans. "You just suck."
Of course things went south after that. Hans threw a punch that Dean easily ducked, and then the two of them were on the floor, rolling through gritty peanut shells and sticky puddles of spilled beer. Even drunk, Dean had the advantage, hammering the little shit with hard lefts so he wouldn't hurt his trigger finger. Damn, felt good. Then the rest of the Hitler Youth joined in, one of Hans' pals catching Dean with a clumsy but heavy shot to his temple.
Things went black for a few seconds. Dean felt himself hauled off of Hans. Those meaty fists started pounding his body, his face. A shot to the gut; the night's whiskey and beer came up in a rush. He took a couple of boots to the kidneys, the ribs, before some beefy bouncer broke things up.
The next few minutes weren't entirely clear. He pushed himself up to all fours, peanut shells and broken glass grinding into his hands and knees. The girl had turned away, stricken face partly hidden by the fall of her hair.
Two thoughts occurred to Dean simultaneously. One, that he must not look quite so pretty now. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor. And two – he'd held on to that fucking cash.
Sam feigned sleep when he heard the key turn in the lock. A little after 2:30 the last time he'd looked at the bedside clock. The cabin was silent but for the occasional car passing on the state route and, now, Dean's drunken fumbling: a too-loud click as the door fell shut, a shuffling step. A thump as he tripped over something – "Fuck!" – probably the chair Sam had purposely left out of place.
Dean made it to the bathroom without further incident. The light didn't come on; the door didn't close. Instead, Sam heard more shuffling, a sucked-in breath, then silence.
Sam flicked on the lamp between the beds. "Dean?" No answer. He got up.
He was expecting a shitfaced Dean, possibly with hurling involved. He did not expect a beat-to-hell Dean, sitting hunched in on himself, scooted back into a corner like a wounded animal trying to hide. Dean blinked at the sudden light. " 'M fine, Sammy," he slurred. "Just need to rest a minute."
Though Sam was no doctor, he was reasonably sure no medical professional would describe Dean's condition as "fine." Blood caked around his mouth and nose, covered his hands. One eye was swollen to a slit. From the way he held himself, Sam guessed that either his arm or his ribs had taken some punishment.
"Jesus, Dean," Sam said. "What the hell did you get into?"
Dean fished around in a pocket, came up with a fat wad of cash. "Just bringin' home the bacon," he said. "Y'know, bein' useful and all." He passed the roll over to Sam. He smiled, showing blood in the cracks between his teeth.
Sam took the money, stared at it for a bewildered moment. "Jesus, Dean." He set the cash aside on the bathroom counter, wrestled Dean upright and led him over to sit on the closed toilet seat.
Dean reeked of beer, smoke, and sweat, with an underlying bouquet of vomit and coppery blood. As Sam wiped his brother's face clean, he found a split lip, a fist-sized field of blossoming bruises, a cut along the left cheekbone. Dean's hands were in worse shape. Sam spent a good half-hour picking out slivers of amber glass. Looked like Dean must have crawled through the debris of a broken beer bottle, which meant – Sam looked down, and, yeah, though his jeans had protected him from the worst of it, there were spots of blood on Dean's knees.
Through it all, Dean was silent, watching sleepily, sometimes dozing off. He didn't make a sound till Sam had peeled his henley and T-shirt off, pressed against his ribs to check for damage. "Christ, Sam!" His bellow echoed through the tiled room. "Ow. Fuck!"
"Broken?" Sam asked.
Dean shook his head. "Just bruised, I think." Still, he wrapped an arm around his ribs, took slow, measured breaths. His face had gone pasty, showed a fine sheen of sweat.
Once all the wounds had been cleaned and dressed, Sam half-dragged Dean to bed. They were out of those fancy chemical cold-packs, so he made a quick trip to the ice machine next to the motel office, fashioned a makeshift ice pack from an empty plastic grocery bag. It would work for the moment. He shook Dean awake, handed him the ice, then brought him a glass of water and a Vicodin out of Sam's own prescription for his hand. He was a little surprised when Dean took it willingly, almost gratefully.
With Dean settled down, Sam hit the lights, got back in bed. A few minutes passed with no more sound than the rustling of sheets, the soggy crinkling of Dean's Wal-Mart ice pack. A thin bar of light from the parking lot fell across the beds. Sam resisted the OCD urge to pull the curtains closed.
"Hey, Sam?" Dean's voice was low, rough.
"Yeah?"
Another beat of silence. Then: "I fuckin' hate it when it's kids."
Dean woke to that fucking bear head staring down at him, a big ol' toothy grin. Not exactly the most desirable image coming out of a hung-over Vicodin haze.
He shifted a bit. The clacking of the laptop keys ceased. "Hey, man." Sam kept his voice low. "You awake?"
Dean grunted, let his head loll to the side. Sam sat against the headboard of the second bed surrounded by computer, books, and legal pad. A row of perfectly sharpened pencils lay within arm's reach on the bedside table.
Dean licked his lips, made a face. He had a wicked case of cottonmouth, compounded by the stale tastes of vomit, alcohol, and blood. Lovely. He pushed himself up to sit. When he tried to speak, it came out as a croak. He cleared his throat, tried again. "Water?"
Sam set the computer aside, fetched a bottle from the mini-fridge. Dean nodded thanks, started with a few careful sips.
Sam must have let him sleep in; the clock read 9:38. He took quick stock of his injuries. His ribs and the small of his back still hurt like hell, seemed to be the worst of it. Nothing for it, really, other than to get moving and stay that way to keep from getting stiff. The cuts on his hands stung, but he could flex his fingers without much pain. The swelling around his left eye had gone down quite a bit. He found the Wal-Mart bag in a leaky pool on the floor; he must have dropped it sometime during the night.
Worth four hundred dollars? Maybe. Maybe not. But it was damn sure worth the feeling of smashing his fist in to that dude's face.
He looked down at his bruised and scraped knuckles, felt a twinge of a smile. Turned to face Sam. "Find anything?"
Sam nodded, leafed through the pages on his legal pad. "Think so. Siants."
Dean frowned. "What now?"
"In Ute legends, Siants were a race of 'monstrous cannibal humanoids.' All but one version of the story describe Siants as female, sometimes looking like 'a wrinkled old witch.' They seem to prefer children, but some versions have them going after grown men. One source described them as having breasts full of poisonous milk. Any child who suckled from them would die and then be eaten."
"Ew." Dean swallowed hard, hoping the water would stay down. "That sounds appetizing."
Sam winced. "Sorry." He hooked a foot around the trash can between the beds, shoved it closer to Dean's. "Apparently they're fond of snatching naughty children who wander too close to the woods."
"Classic nursery bogie."
"You got it."
Dean took another sip of water. "So how do we kill it?"
"They are impervious to all human weapons, except – " Sam turned a yellow page. " – an obsidian arrow."
Dean mulled it over. Nodded. "I think we can swing that."
He felt better already.
The arrowheads proved surprisingly easy to find. A little gift shop in town sold all sorts of fossils and rocks – souvenirs of the Rockies – as well as "authentic" Native American crafts. Dean picked out a handful of arrowheads appropriate for "big game," and threw in a couple of obsidian blades for good measure. Sam found a few gemstones they could use in rituals for protection and grounding: amethyst, hematite, bloodstone.
Dean sat cross-legged on the cabin's hardwood floor, assembling arrows, cutting several down a few inches to fit their crossbow. The bow he would be using was made from osage orange, the arrow shafts from ash, fletched with the feathers of a red-tailed hawk. Both were left over from a hunt some years back. Sam watched the process from his seat at the room's small table. "So what the hell did you and Dad need homemade arrows for?"
For a moment, Sam was sure he'd crossed some invisible line. Dean kept his eyes on his work, lashing an arrowhead to a shaft with strips of rawhide. Hell, if they'd had more time, Dean probably could have flaked the damn things himself. He'd always been good at this hands-on kind of stuff.
Finally, Dean said, "It was some friggin' possessed wolf tearing people up in Minnesota. I never did find out the whole story. Need-to-know basis, you know." He looked up at Sam, then back down at his work. "Anyway, I guess this thing was a stickler for tradition. Dad knew some guy who tried modern crossbow arrows, nearly got castrated for his trouble. So Pastor Jim hooked us up with this Ojibwe medicine man who told us to go with the old school. We ended up playing ice fishermen. Minnesota in the middle of January. Damn near froze my balls off. But," he shrugged, "we waxed the thing. Caught some muskie in the process that tasted pretty damn good the next day. And we had some arrows left over. So, all in all, not a bad hunt."
Sam had to grin at the image of Dad and Dean as hardcore anglers, bundled in arctic parkas. He was willing to bet Dean had been at his comedic worst, cracking bad puns and outlandish metaphors starting with, It's so cold that . . . He felt a twinge of regret for all the good times he'd left behind along with the bad, all the stories he might never get to hear.
He'd let the silence drag on too long. Dean cleared his throat, moved on to the next arrow. "So, any bright ideas on how to find this thing?"
Sam shuffled through their research for the map. "That's gonna be the fun part," he said. "I can't find any source that specifies the Siants' preferred lair. There's a lot of forest out there, and a lot of caves and mines. My gut says we should start in the area where we found the footprint, but the search party hasn't been called off yet."
Dean looked up from his work. "Maybe we just split the difference. Start someplace central to all the disappearances." He finished the last arrow, stood to look over Sam's shoulder at the map.
They'd marked the locations of the children's homes. While it didn't form anything as neat as a circle, the sites did point in a general direction to a section of forest. Unfortunately, considering this thing's massive stride, they could be looking at a territory of hundreds of miles.
Dean sat, poked at the cut under his eye. "Christ, what a nightmare."
"Yeah, this is gonna suck pretty hard." Sam stood and stretched. "Why don't we go grab some grub. Make sure we've got our supplies together. And then in the morning we can start hiking."
"Just so long as there's no camping."
While Dean hit the head before they left, Sam picked up one of the finished arrows. He ran his fingers over the smooth black stone, the solid leather lashing. Hell. Politically incorrect Dean probably knew more about native ways than any Stanford professor.
If anyone asked, they were out for a backcountry hike, just enjoying nature's gift of a beautiful autumn day.
Not that they expected to run into anyone.
Dean parked the Impala at one of a line of tourist cabins, in heavy use during the summer months, nearly abandoned now. Their starting point was close enough to wilderness, far enough from prying eyes, but hopefully easy to get back to.
They headed out at first light, dressed in layers for warmth, packing water, sandwiches, jerky, and trail mix. Sam, at a disadvantage because of his cast, had the crossbow. Dean had the old-school bow, just in case this thing was one of those sticklers for tradition. They each carried an obsidian blade, as well as an assortment of other knives, Dean's favorite shotgun, and Sam's preferred Taurus, loaded with silver rounds. A little of everything, in other words, just in case.
Dean took point out of habit. Sam didn't mind so much; it gave him a chance to watch Dean, make sure he wasn't pushing himself. Whether his ribs were cracked or just bruised, they still had to hurt like hell. And Dean had just been off lately. Maybe it was Dad's death, maybe the aftermath of Dean's roadside confession, or maybe it was just this case. All Sam knew was that Dean was on edge, and that could be a scary thing.
The sun streamed down in shafts through the canopy of trees, barely reaching the forest floor. The brothers seldom spoke, relying mainly on hand signals. They moved at a moderate pace, fast enough to cover some ground, slow enough that they'd catch any tracks or sign.
Around noon, they stopped for lunch next to a shallow, trickling stream, sat back to back on a broad, flat outcropping of rock. Before starting out again, they checked both GPS and map. The last thing they needed was to get lost, or stray too far from the car. Dislike of camping aside, spending the night in the wilderness with the thing they were hunting could very well be suicidal.
Dean picked up a trail mid-afternoon, spotty partial footprints and the occasional bit of broken brush. Of course, with their luck, it led deeper into the woods. The trees closed in around them; the sun disappeared. Dean's posture tensed, bow and arrow held at the ready. His face went blank, a stoic slate of concentration.
Sam took his cues from his brother, his senses on full alert. He tried to keep one eye on the dark forest, one eye on Dean. If they got separated, things could go south real fast.
Deeper into the sunless forest, all sound ceased. No birds or insects made a sound, no creatures rustled the brush. Dean's nostrils flared. A second later, the smell hit Sam, too: death.
Dean shot a look back at Sam, a quick flick of the eyes that said, I don't like this. That said, watch your ass. He pushed aside boughs of pine, crept forward. Ducked his head against the smell. The sight.
In a small clearing where the sun didn't reach, a body hung upside down from a tree, gutted, bled dry. Field-dressed like a deer. Long, dark hair fell around the child's face. Pudgy little hands dangled below her head. Teresa Sandoval, or what was left of her.
Sam's brain gave him a few seconds to take this all in. Next thing he knew, he was bent over losing his lunch, leaning heavily against a tree. Christ. He gasped for breath, wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve, the crossbow still dangling awkwardly from his casted hand.
When he turned back, Dean hadn't looked away from the scene, eyes a dark and sober green, staring grimly at the girl's body.
Cannibal monster or no, what the hell could do such a thing – treat a child as a side of beef? Sam stepped closer to Dean, taking in the clenched jaw, the dark fury written in the shadows of his face. No sound in the clearing, not even the low buzz of flies. Sam felt a prickling at the back of his neck. "Dean – " he breathed.
A shadow dropped out of the trees, a massive slab of gray-brown flesh that reeked of blood and stale breath. It landed on Dean, taking him down with a thud, then backhanded Sam. The force of the blow sent him flying. He slammed into a tree, slumped breathless.
Before either of them could react, the thing was gone, bounding from the clearing in a crash of brush. "Fuck!" The shout came from Sam's left. At least it sounded like Dean was okay. Sam caught his breath, pushed himself up to his elbows. Dean was on his feet looking no worse for the wear. "You all right, Sam?"
Sam nodded. "I'm good."
Dean watched him for a second, looking for a lie. He nodded once, grabbed the arrow he'd dropped, and took off after the thing at a full run.
Shit. Sam scrambled to his feet, found his crossbow, headed after Dean. He couldn't hear Dean's pursuit for his own crashing, but it wasn't exactly a careful chase: bent brush and broken branches showed the way. He heard another shout of "Fuck!" Poured on the speed. He hit another clearing, skidded to a stop before a ravine leading down to a creek.
In the creek bed stood a soaking wet Dean, wringing water from his clothes. He looked up at Sam. "Fucking thing's just too quick. Lost it after about ten yards."
"Shit." Sam gave Dean his good hand, helped him up the slope. They made their way back to the clearing in silence. Teresa Sandoval's body swayed in the wind.
Hot water beat down on Dean's neck, his bowed head, sluicing off the points of his nose, his chin.
He sat in the bathtub with his knees pulled up to his chest, the emotions of the day spilling out in the shakes. All those years on the road with his dad and brother, the shower was the only privacy he ever got. It was where he jerked off, or cried, where he let himself fall apart, where he got his shit together. Where he could wonder what kind of a person didn't lose his shit when faced with the gutted body of a six-year-old girl. Sam still had the humanity to heave his guts up at such a sight. When had that been burned out of Dean?
The anger, guilt, and fear shook their way out of his body, a feeling like sparks dripping down from his fingertips. He sat that way till the water ran cold.
He didn't go out that night.