Unseen, Unheard

Chapter 2

Sam was in a bad mood.

The first reason for this was the fact that they had woken up in the same area in which they had gone to sleep, and it still offered no clues as to which direction was preferable to the others.

The second reason was that he had once again woken up beneath a cryptic message which he must have written, though he had no recollection of doing so.

The third reason was that Dean was maintaining that their situation was all Sam's fault, and Sam had a nasty suspicion that his brother might be right.

The fourth reason was that he had a blister on his left heel and it hurt like hell.

But the fifth and most immediate reason was that it was raining.

Not just drizzling, but absolutely bucketing down with heavy, icy droplets, which splashed onto his head and dripped off his long hair into his eyes. His clothes, too battered to be water-resistant, if they ever had been, were soaked through, and they hung on him uncomfortably, heavy with water. His feet squelched unpleasantly inside his boots. The tall trees which surrounded them, instead of offering any shelter, seemed to allow the water to pool on their waxy leaves in order to release a shower of droplets when the Winchesters passed underneath, always aimed directly for the back of Sam's neck.

Squinting through the gloom, he trudged on, following the blurry image of Dean's back, which was just about visible through the grey veil of water.

Eventually, the endless trees were bisected by a narrow stream.

'Well, that's new,' Dean commented.

'We should follow it,' Sam suggested, 'that way at least we'll know we're not going in circles.'

Dean shrugged and nodded. He didn't have a better idea. 'Which way?'

'Follow the stream,' Sam repeated.

'Yeah, ok, but which way? Up or down?'

Sam looked both ways like a well-drilled child crossing a busy road. 'Toss a coin?' he suggested.

'No, you choose… maybe your Shining will guide you,' Dean proposed.

Sam glared at him. He didn't want to talk about his 'Shining'. He stood sulking for a few minutes, but Dean did nothing but stand and watch him with wide, impatient eyes. Sam stormed off upstream, taking long strides and hacking violently at the obstructing undergrowth. Dean followed him smirking at Sam's angry retreating back.

It didn't improve Sam's mood when his toe caught on a root and he fell face first into the stream. Dean jogged up to help him, trying to keep his face straight as his brother raged wordlessly at the world in general.

'Look at it this way, Sammy: you couldn't get much wetter,' he said brightly, helping Sam to his feet with a wide grin.

Sam scowled at him fiercely, but found suddenly that he wanted to laugh, and his black temper had melted away. However, when he turned to his brother with a comeback, he found that Dean's attention had been distracted. He was looking past Sam, staring fixedly into the clear water. There were traces of pink in it, diluted a thousand times by the movement of the stream and the ferocious raindrops which shattered its smooth surface. The colour was faint, but unmistakeable. Dean splashed upstream, following the faint, wavering trail.

Sam wasn't sure he wanted to see the source of the trail, but his eye was drawn to it, and he followed his brother up the shallow waterway, moving more slowly and carefully, conscious of the slippery and treacherous footing and unwilling to explore it again with his face.

Dean waded through the knee-deep freezing water, watching the pink threads thicken and darken as he moved upstream. A heavy knot of foreboding grew in his stomach, and he swallowed hard, bracing himself for whatever he was about to see.

It was a girl, lying face up in the shallow water at the edge of the stream, her long red-dyed hair rippling with the current in long, melancholy strands. Her eyes were open a crack, and she looked surprised. The fading touch of summer had left a honey-coloured blush on her cheeks and throat, which made her seem warm even though she lay inert in freezing water. The blood in the water seemed to have come from the small scrapes on her arms and face which looked as though they had been inflicted as she was dragged through the woods to this resting place. However, taking a reluctant step nearer to her, he found that her mouth was stained scarlet, and blood had left a thick trail down the side of her face as it bubbled up between her lips and trickled down into the stream.

He heard Sam gasp softly as he walked up behind his brother. Dean stood unmoving, staring at the body with expressionless eyes. Someone or something would have to pay the price for her life, he thought, and life wasn't cheap. Life was worth more than this.

Sam's fingers plucked at his jacket urgently, in an imploring way that they hadn't used in a long while.

'Dean…'

Dean turned, meeting his brother's panicked eyes.

'What? Are you ok?'

'I feel like I've seen her before.'

Dean frowned. It was only strange if you didn't know Sam. To him, the next question was obvious. 'Did you dream about her?'

'Maybe. I don't remember…' Sam's face was anguished. It was worse than usual. He still hadn't come to terms with the whole idea of having visions, but now he felt that he should know what had happened to the girl, he should be able to avenge her but he couldn't grasp the memory. It was beyond frustrating. It seemed almost as if he had failed the dead girl before him in some way; failed to remember what had happened to her. As if she had reached out to him for help and he had ignored her. He twisted his hands together absently, appealing silently to Dean with his eyes.

Dean knew that look. He couldn't deny an answer to that look. 'Ok…' he began, thinking frantically, his mind one word ahead of his mouth. 'We need to get out of this forest. We'll report her death to the authorities so that her family can have the body for burial. Then we'll… look into it.'

Sam blinked hard, and nodded.

'We can't be that far from the town… if the killer dragged her out here…' Dean guessed, glancing around. The undergrowth was flattened and pulled up in some areas, and on closer inspection he realised that there was a trail leading away from the stream. The trail left by the girl's body dragged unceremoniously across the ground. He followed the trail with his eyes. There was only one logical destination it could lead to. It seemed wrong, somehow, to be grateful for something that had been caused by the girl's death. But still, he was filled with relief.

'You see that, Sam?' he asked, his face relaxing into something that was almost a smile. 'Something we haven't seen in a while. A path.'

Sam grinned, shaking his head and pretending to be pissed. 'Yeah, well, there were a whole lot of paths on that map that didn't really exist.'

'There's a whole lot of crap in your head that doesn't really exist,' Dean muttered in reply, just loud enough for Sam to hear him. He smirked.

Sam heard, but chose to ignore the comment, telling himself that it wasn't because he didn't have a comeback.

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The police thanked them politely for the intelligence, but added that they would have to stay in town and make themselves available for further questioning. Dean had enough experience to gather that the unspoken message was: We're not arresting you yet, but you're officially a suspect.

The Winchester's were mildly surprised to find that the town they found themselves in when they emerged from the woods was the same one that they had started in. However, they were also pleased to discover that the town offered more than one cheap motel: they figured that the owner had probably found Sam's graffiti by now, and so they were reluctant to check back into the same establishment.

The next morning, after a night blessedly undisturbed by weird dreams or cryptic messages, Sam read in the newspaper that the dumped body had been identified as high-school student Louise Brandon. The article was short, as there was really nothing to report beyond the fact that she was dead: the police had no idea who had done it. The coroner had yet to make a full investigation, but his early assessment, according to the paper, was that she had bled to death from internal wounds, although he had no theory about how they had been inflicted.

The brothers headed to the high school, in the hope that some of Louise's friends would be able to shed some light on what had happened to her. The school was a vast, ugly, concrete-and-plastic building, occupying a spacious site on the edge of town.

'Well?' Sam asked, looking in dismay at the students who milled around the school site, seemingly in thousands. 'Who do we talk to first?'

The students manifested the usual teenage blend of pristine fashion, edgy 'individualism' and scruffy jeans, the majority belonging to the last category. Louise had been pretty, but the lack of smudged makeup on her corpse suggested to Dean that the preening young ladies who simpered in one corner of the quad were not her crowd. He scanned the crowded yard, and settled eventually on a mixed group of students sitting casually on the grass, mostly chatting, but one or two were actually working.

'Excuse me?' Dean began, trying to sound official and charming at the same time. It wasn't easy. Authority figures, in his experience, were rarely charming. 'I'm sorry to ask, but – did any of you know Louise Brandon?'

The teenagers' conversation lapsed abruptly into silence. A few members of the group glanced at one individual, a girl with short blonde plaits who wore a pale, shell-shocked expression and clutched a book tightly to her chest. She stood up slowly, and nodded, looking at Dean with haunted eyes.

'Yeah, we all knew her. She was…' she rolled her narrow shoulders awkwardly, reluctant to voice a cliché, but unable to find an alternative way to say it. 'She was my best friend,' she said finally.

'I'm sorry,' Dean said, and meant it. The girl's dull, mourning eyes were one of the saddest things he could remember seeing. 'We have to ask you guys… whether Louise ever said or did anything… strange… before she died?'

The girl looked surprised, but she frowned, thinking. 'Nothing that I remember. Just another day, you know? I spoke to her on the phone earlier on the evening she disappeared, and she was fine. Tired, and pissed off about our biology test… but normal. Then she had to work. The police reckon that she must have been abducted on her way back from work, 'cause her employer said she left the diner, but her parents said she never got home.' The girl's voice broke slightly on the final phrase, and she blinked hard, brushing away the single tear which had escaped with the back of an impatient hand.

'Where did she work?' Sam asked softly, stepping forward so that he stood shoulder to shoulder with Dean.

'At the diner on the main street.'

'Thanks.'

She nodded. Sam turned to leave: she didn't know anything.

Dean paused for a moment. 'Listen… if you hear of anything… unusual… going on, just… let us know, ok? Tell your friends.'

'OK,' she agreed, blinking her tears away until her eyes returned to the calm, miserable state that they had been in to start with.

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Nobody at the diner had noticed anything strange either. Dean was beginning to suspect that her death had been the work of an ordinary person, although he was still mystified by the nature of her injuries: how could you bleed internally without any external damage?

Sam, on the other hand, was convinced that something supernatural must be involved. He was still plagued with the nagging presence of the half-remembered dream. He was certain that Louise was connected to whatever had happened in the dream, so it followed that she was also connected to the messages he had found upon waking. Perhaps she had been trying to reach out with her mind and call for help.

They walked back to the Impala in the high school parking lot after visiting the diner and asking around in the town. School was finishing, so the quad was once again flooded with students on their way home. At the top of the steps, in front of the school doors, Dean caught sight of one of Louise's friends, pointing him and Sam out to a skinny kid in a battered black T-shirt. He paused next to the Impala as the boy hurried towards them.

'Hi,' the teen greeted them breathlessly as he approached. 'Emma said…' he paused, doubtfully. 'Are you guys cops or something? Emma said I should tell you if I'd seen anything weird.'

'We're…' Sam reflected. He tried to avoid lying wherever possible. 'We're looking into Louise Brandon's death.'

'Oh, right. Well… I don't know, this isn't really related.'

Dean stepped in quickly before the kid could turn away. 'Tell us anyway. It might be connected.'

'OK…' He stood awkwardly, hands thrust deep into his pockets, eyes fixed on the ground between his feet. 'Well… there was another guy who went missing, couple days after Louise. And… Monday after school I heard him talking to someone in the hallway. I didn't… go up to them… 'cause I didn't really get on with this guy. Philip, his name was. He was a football player. Thought he was God's gift.'

Dean noted the use of the past tense. 'So… you heard them talking…?' he prompted.

'Yeah. Him and some other guy. I didn't recognise the other guy's voice, but that doesn't mean anything. It's a big school. The guy I didn't know… was pissed off, said something like Philip had abandoned him? Sounded like they used to be friends, but then Philip stopped talking to him. Philip was acting like he didn't have a clue who the guy was, but then he changed… like, all at once, to saying he was sorry. "I didn't mean to leave you," he said, and it was like he was begging. Then I didn't hear anything else, and now this guy, Philip, is missing. I don't know, I thought there might be a connection. I thought it was weird.'

Dean frowned, thinking. 'Thanks,' he muttered, nodding appreciatively at the kid in front of him. 'That's… probably important.'

The kid scampered off hurriedly, merging quickly into the crowd of teenagers.

The Winchesters exchanged looks, both frowning in concentration.

Yes, thought Sam, Something weird is definitely going on.

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