Chapter Two
They were stopping to fill up on gas (Dean's allegations about the milage perhaps ringing a bit true now) and Castiel took the moment to go inside, on to relieve his bladder, and two to buy more water bottles. He found he was needing to sip the cool liquids constantly or his throat itched and scratched until it erupted into a coughing fit that left him gasping with tears beading in the corners of his eyes. Sam had stopped the car after one of them, but Castiel waved him on, and tried to just keep drinking after that. He was nearly out of water now. He was pondering the claims of the cough drops that lined the shelves, when his phone rang. He pulled it out hurriedly, even though he knew it wasn't the jarring electric guitar that designated Dean's phone, but rather the generic ringer.
"Hello?" He croaked, and had to pull the phone away to clear his throat. He grabbed the cough drops and went to the checkout stand, with that and the water.
"Hello, is this... Cas?" It was an older sounding man, and he stumbled over his name.
"Yes, who is this?" Castiel said, pulling his wallet out to pay, nodding at the cashier as she passed him his receipt.
"My name is Bernard. I was the one who called Dean Winchester a few days ago. He left your number."
Castiel stopped on the concrete outside the store, his eyes flashing to Sam, who looked up from where he was pumping the gas as if he felt it.
"Where is he?" Castiel demanded, clutching the phone tightly.
There was noisy breath. Sam finished with the car, and jogged over. Castiel stood absolutely still, only lifting a finger off its grip on the phone, motioning for Sam to wait.
"I don't know how much he told you about the case we gave him, but it was supposed to be simple. Hardly a case at all. We already had the name. After Dean burned the corpse we thought it was over. But then another kid went missing, and Dean did as well soon after."
"Why didn't you call me then?" Castiel said, his body strumming with angry tension.
"We didn't know at first, that he'd gone after the missing girl. When I couldn't get a hold of him, I went to the motel he was staying at, and I bluffed my way into his room. I have his notes and everything, but we just can't go out after him ourselves..."
A flash of rage heated Castiel chest, and he barked at the phone.
"Why not?"
There was an uneasy chuckle, and Bernard spoke again.
"We're both quite old, you know, son. My wife, Ethel, is nearly blind, and I've got the arthritis bad. It's why we called Dean in the first place."
Castiel stifled a cough, and spoke again.
"We're already on our way to Washington."
"How long will you be?"
Castiel went to answer, and choked, that cough coming back with a vengeance. Sam grabbed the phone while he coughed, and spoke to the man.
"Hi, yeah. I'm Sam, Dean's brother. We're on our way...yeah, we can get there by four or five. Sounds good. Thank you."
Sam hung up the phone, and put a hand on Castiel's curved back, steadying him until the fit died down. He dug into the plastic bag he's been clutching, realizing his fingers had white marks across them from gripping so tightly, and opened a bottle of water.
"You okay?" Sam asked, eying him. Castiel nodded. "They're in Auburn, about five hours away from here. You good to go?"
Castiel took another drink from the bottle, and nodded again, tired of having to assure everyone that he was alright. He put his hand out.
"I'll drive."
The retirement community Bernard and Ethel lived in was near the southeast portion of Auburn. Castiel pulled into the well tended neighborhood around six, and shook Sam awake from his doze. He straightened up, and looked around.
"We here?"
Castiel grunted an affirmation, and rubbed his head, closing his eyes against his fingers. It had been a long (though beautiful) drive through Western Washington's landscape. His stress had at some point just solidified into a knot of white worry behind his breastbone, and the last of the drive had been made in a sort of daze.
"Which house is it?" Castiel asked, and Sam squinted at the numbers on the outside, and then pointed.
"That one."
They knocked on the door, and after a long few minutes, a woman answered. She was small and brown and wrinkled with laugh lines and fairly glowed with good cheer. She smiled widely, her face pinched, eyes nearly shut in an effort to see them. This must be Ethel. Castiel remembered what her husband had said about her being nearly blind, but it didn't seem to deter her as she grabbed them around the middles for a hug.
"Boys! You must be Cas and Sam!" Ethel exclaimed, pulling back, and turning to call over her shoulder. "Bernie! It's Cas and Sam! Get your lazy ass out here!"
There was a muffled call from the other side of the small house.
"I'm coming, I'm coming!"
Ethel turned back to them, her strong hands still gripping one each of Castiel's and Sam's arms.
"It's good you're here. We were so concerned when young Dean didn't show up for breakfast, he promised he would. You boys hungry? Of course you are, you had a long drive, didn't you?"
Castiel had his eyebrows raised. It was rare that he got such an enthusiastic reception, and he wasn't quite sure what to do with it. Sam was smiling weakly, trying to remove his bicep from her fingers.
From a room at the end of the short hallway, a door opened, and a taller man with a head of wiry white hair limped out towards them. He smiled as wide as his wife had, and put out a knobbly hand first to Sam, and then to Castiel.
"You must be Dean's family. We're so glad you came."
Sam smiled in greeting, and nodded.
"I'm Sam, Dean's brother. This is Cas."
Castiel nodded, gripping his hands together. His anxiety was building, now that he wasn't moving, and he wanted nothing more than to go out to the car again, and go off to wherever Dean had gone. He felt so close.
"Well, you boys must be starving, what with driving from...where was it again? Oh, no matter..."
Ethel tugged them into the tiny kitchen, chattering about diner and the foods she loved to cook, and Castiel felt something in him snap.
He pulled his arm out of her grip, and ground his teeth.
"Cas-" Sam started.
"Where is he?" Castiel growled, so very done with these polite niceties. "Dean's been missing for four days. He could be hurt, or worse!"
Sam put a hand on his shoulder, and Castiel turned his head to yell at him too, for not worrying as much as he should have, for hiding it better at least, but Sam cut him off.
"He's right. We need to find him now."
Bernard rubbed his knuckles together.
"Of course, you must be worried."
He led them to a table in the kitchen, this one piled with papers and a older laptop computer. Castiel saw maps, sigils scribbled on scraps, old books on ghosts and wendigos.
"We still like to help, keep a lookout for strange things, you know. We found the case a few weeks back, just in some forum thing on the internet. There's a drive in movie theater here, used to have been running for years, but it's been threatening to close for the past few of them. This year it got made official.
"Anyway, through the years there have been ghost sightings. Just a little girl, laughing or playing. Then, the place closes down.
"There are a couple of missing kid cases in town, there always are, but this post swears that it all has to do with the closing of the drive in theater. Then, a body was found, two months ago. One of the missing kids, dead of exposure and starvation. The police are saying that he ran away, but no one can account for why he'd stay out at that place long enough to starve to death. I'm thinking, the ghost kept him out there."
Sam was looking ponderous.
"It got lonely. I've seen that before."
Castiel looked at the case files that Bernard handed around, showing a young boy, maybe nine or ten, smiling at the camera.
"Yup. So it was easy enough to find out who the girl was. Emily Cooper, hit by a car on the lot in 1983, hit her head on a metal pole and died from complications. That's when I call Dean, ask him to do the digging, which he does, night he got here. Case closed, we thought."
"What happened then?" Sam prompted, when Bernard looked away, frowning.
"Ethel invited him over for breakfast before he headed out. Not a lot of room, or we would have let him stay here. Wish we would have done that now. I talked with him on the phone right after he burned the body, and he agreed to swing by in the morning, but he never showed. After that, everything happened like I told you on the phone. Got the stuff from his room, and found out about the report of another missing girl, Sylvia Lambert. He must have gone after her, but he never came back."
Gritting his teeth, Castiel refrained from expressing how much of an idiot Dean was sometimes.
"Where is this theater?" He asked, setting down the case files. Sam, beside him, was tense and attentive.
Bernard nodded, and gestured. "About fifteen minutes north of us. I'll draw you a map."