Dean wasn't going to have to worry about finding a way out of the room, anymore pacing and he'd wear a hole in the floor. He stopped and looked down. "Eh, maybe not a bad idea." Digging one heel into the carpet, Dean started checking the floor for weak spots. After a minute, he stopped and glanced cautiously around.
No Trickster.
Not necessarily a good thing. No Trickster with him meant the sadistic bastard was probably with Sam. That thought sent spears of cold shuddering along Dean's spine and through his intestines. Whether or not Sam suspected it was the Trickster with him and not his brother, Dean didn't know, but he was sure by now Sam at least knew something was wrong. The memory of how desperate Dean had been when Sam vanished, taken by Meg, then how immeasurably relieved and happy he'd been when Sam called telling Dean where he was assaulted him. Dean's stomach still churned and his heart still fluttered erratically remembering the drive and then jogging down the hall, checking each door for the correct number.
He'd been so paralyzed with fear of what might have happened to his brother that when he burst through the door and saw Sam sitting there, shirt covered in blood his only thoughts were Sam was alive, everything else was inconsequential and a minor annoyance as far as he was concerned. There'd been so many signs, so many things right under his nose that should have tipped him off that there was something wrong with Sam.
Dean had ignored those signs simply because he'd been separated from Sam long enough that he didn't care about anything but getting his brother back. He'd had no idea what happened to Sam, if he was alive or dead and the first few days were spent in a frantic search of hospitals and morgues in the area. He'd never questioned Sam's story of going out for burgers and not remembering much after that, which should have been a glowing neon sign that something was very wrong with his brother.
His thoughts and memories were swept away when the next sensation came not from within but surrounded him like water over a drowning man. Dean was literally awash in a turbulent sea of confusion and frustration. His inability to rationalize constructive thoughts assaulted him without warning. It was if he'd been plugged into Sam's jumbled psyche, able to feel and see what Sam did. Dean understood exactly how Sam was feeling since he'd felt the same way a few years ago when Meg hijacked Sam.
Losing track of time—there was nothing in this room by which to judge it and his watch didn't work—he had no idea how long he'd been trapped. However, he had the distinct impression enough time had passed that Sam was getting frantic to find him. Which was going to lead to the exact same thing it'd done to Dean. Sam was going to overlook the obvious.
Standing in the middle of the room, it took Dean a few seconds to realize he was rocking back and forth on his heels ever so slightly with his fingers dug into his hair. Just as he'd seen Sam do so many times a few short weeks ago. One image after another tumbled around inside his head, each refusing to stop long enough for him to grasp.
Dean was now convinced Sam knew he was gone and was on a frenzied hunt, tearing up the town looking for Dean.
Emotions boiled through him but, like the thoughts and ideas ricocheting around his head, none took hold long enough for Dean to process properly. Without preamble or warning, a name popped into his head. Emily. Emily wanted vengeance because someone she loved died on her birthday. Sam wanted the same. Find Emily and make…it…stop.
Dean sucked in a deep breath, jerked his hand from his head and staggered back until his legs hit the edge of the bed and he collapsed onto it unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling.
Sam was already wheeling out of control, charging after a sixty-year-old woman with nothing but hate and desperation guiding him. Dean felt the pressure against his feet as Sam's pounded over pavement towards the Impala.
The world above him whited out and simultaneously Dean was hit with a hard, painful force as something tried to cut him off from Sam. He struggled to his side, trying and failing to roll to a sitting position. He barely had time to press his fingers to his forehead when blinding, paralyzing pain hit and dropped him off the edge into a bleak void of white.
Dean scuffed the toe of his worn sneaker along the sidewalk, kicking stones ahead as he went. His Dad had given him twenty dollars to buy food for himself and Sam while they stayed here. He knew Sam very much wanted to have some sort of birthday party for him, and honestly the only reason Dean cared was because Sam did. His life had been a string of forgotten birthdays and Christmases with just himself and Sam; Winchesters didn't do holidays. There was more at stake.
There was always more at stake.
In reality, Dean would have loved some kind of birthday party with his brother and Dad, even with just his brother, but he was a good little soldier. When his father laid one large hand on his shoulder and said, "You do understand, son, right?" Dean had simply nodded. Dad was a hero, and heroes were never wrong. Sam was the one disappointed, someday he'd understand too.
Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes as he pushed his way through the door into the local grocery store. Maybe he didn't want Sam to have to understand. Would having three cupcakes with a candle in one for Dean end the world?
Dean thought not.
He wandered the aisles grabbing food they could eat in the motel. When he came to the row of cookies and cupcakes, Dean stopped. He stood and stared at the cupcakes in their various little plastic containers. His hand moved all by itself, grabbing two, the chocolate kind with a little white squiggly line on top and the kind with coconut and jelly in the middle. A few feet farther down were hooks with plain cream-colored candles, the kind people bought for power outages.
Dean shrugged and grabbed a few of those. A candle stuck in a cupcake became a birthday candle. That was his story and he was sticking to it. If Sam wanted to give him a birthday party, Sam was going to get to give him one.
After paying for his purchases, a bag clutched in each hand he started back to the motel. He hadn't gone very far when he realized it seemed darker near him than it did even three feet from him. There was no drop in temperature yet the hair at the back of his neck bristled. Picking up the pace, a quick glance behind him confirmed it; the air behind him was a few shades darker than the air in front of him.
White-knuckling the bags, he lengthened his stride. When the space around him became even darker, Dean started to run.
Sam drove, fingers tapping the wheel and barely keeping to the speed limit to where Emily's family home had once stood. Now it was a park with an adjoining Quick-Mart. He spent the better part of an hour prowling said Quick-Mart, checking every inch he could see for some clue that would lead him to Dean. He didn't even know what he was looking for. The fact he had been in the store that long before the store clerk kicked him out was amazing. In all honesty, Sam would have kicked out the six-and-a-half foot guy poking under shelves and muttering obscenities too, and in a lot less time than an hour.
Emily had died nearly ten years ago. Questioning the clerk as to where she might be buried was useless, he claimed not to know. Even Sam slamming both hands onto the counter and snarling at him didn't jar the man's memory. What it did do was cause his eyes to widen and his hand to drop to his side, no doubt reaching for a silent alarm under the counter.
Okay, really, why would the store clerk even know? Sam conceded that fact and berated his own stupidity at scaring the man. He left the store, retreating to the safety and comfort of his only true home, the Impala. A home that felt cold and empty without his brother.
Stomach churning, Sam forced away thoughts of hunger or the headache that crept up his neck forming a dull ache at the back of his skull. Bile rose in his throat and he swallowed it down with cold coffee which probably wasn't the best idea he'd ever had.
He should stop and eat, get some water to drink, but he couldn't. There was no time. He had to find Dean before the wraiths could do what they came to do and claim his brother's soul. Everything he did came back to the thought he had no idea how much time he had before Dean was lost forever, only how much time had passed, how much time was already lost. Sam felt closed in, his heart wouldn't beat correctly, and his breathing stuttered more than not. Working out details and patterns was more of a chore and more taxing than it should have been or would have been normally. He felt as if his mind was on constant skitter mode and he was scrambling to catch up with it.
Shoving the key into the door lock, Sam stumbled into the motel room and told himself being off balance was simply the change from bright daylight to darker motel room. He convinced himself the way the room didn't quite keep up with him was because he sat down at the table too fast.
He'd find out where Emily was buried. Only then could he take a minute to grab some food and get something to drink since he'd wait until later that night to dig her up. Find Emily and make her stop. Find Emily and find Dean.
Dean would come back.
The room shifted from colors to shades of gray that oozed into black and white. As Sam started a slow slide from his chair, everything went white and the pain from hitting the floor barely registered.
Sam watched the shadows of the room lengthen and deepen as the light outside the window dimmed. The sun was setting, night was coming. He'd been alone for hours. Dean should have come back by now. Dad left him, and Dean hadn't come back. Sam bit his lip to stop the tears, he was five, a big boy now. There was no reason he couldn't wait a few hours by himself until Dean came back.
Dean never left him alone at night. Most times, Dean didn't want to leave him alone at all, but sometimes Dad made Dean do special chores, training he called it and Sam had to wait by himself. He didn't like waiting by himself, but he saw every time by the look on Dean's face, in Dean's eyes, that Dean liked it less. In fact, Sam was pretty sure Dean hated leaving Sam by himself in the motel rooms.
Sam jerked and snapped his body upright. He'd started falling asleep sitting up. He looked around the room, blurry vision making it hard to focus. The shadows were everywhere, crawling over the room and Sam's feet. Bending his knees, Sam pulled his feet onto the bed and wrapped both arms around his knees. Turning his head so his cheek rested against his knee, Sam watched the door.
"Dean, come back," he whispered and ignored how the patch of jeans under his cheek had an ever growing wet spot.
Sam's eyes snapped open and he gasped, immediately wishing he hadn't. His lips were stuck to the filthy carpeting his face was pressed against. Pulling his arms under him and pushing his hands flat on the floor, Sam eased up on shaking arms.
Dean's tenth birthday. Every detail of it came rushing back at Sam. He'd been left, for the first time ever, alone all night. When Dean showed up the next morning, he claimed he'd gotten lost on the way back to the motel. It was the reason Dean had become lost that Sam didn't believe, never had. Even as a small child, Dean was fearless and had a sense of direction that was downright scary. Dean didn't get lost. Ever. Period. End of story.
What did Dean claiming to be lost then have to do with him being gone now?
Sam eased himself straighter and sagged back against the bed, pulling a few deep breaths into his lungs.
Dean would never leave him willingly, that's what. If they split up for a few hours, Dean would call with updates on their hunt or his search for a decent burger.
Even now, Dean rarely left Sam alone at night. As a child, it was something Dean never did unless forced away by their father—the look in Dean's eyes as he'd leave haunted Sam to this day. Dean didn't even trust John to be watchful enough. Now that they were all grown up, Dean would call while with his flavor of the moment under the pretense of bragging, but Sam knew what it was…I'm fine. So are you…sometimes he'd call to say his girl had a friend for Sam. Once in a while Sam took him up on that offer but not often. He knew those calls were made for no other reason than Dean wanted him to have some fun too and more to the point, to check in with Sam.
Not that Sam didn't do the same thing. It was a rare day they went more than a few hours without checking in with each other if separated by a hunt or just each off on their own for a bit to unwind. Now it'd been days since he'd last heard his brother's deep voice, and he missed it terribly. He missed Dean's dumb jokes and how he seemed to take up every bit of whatever room in which he stood. He missed the ever constant in his life that was Dean's presence. Sam missed it, wasn't sure how to be himself without it, and wanted it back to the point he'd do anything.
Bending his arms behind him, Sam rested his hands against the edge of the bed for a few more seconds before shoving to his feet. Moving to Dean's bed, he dug through his brother's duffel extracting a bag of chips. Dean always kept provisions. The small refrigerator was stocked with bottled water and cans of soda Sam had carted in from the car when they'd arrived.
He sat on the floor in front of the refrigerator munching chips while he drank first a bottle of water then a can of Coke. His head cleared and the world sharpened back into focus.
Twenty four or more hours without food or water was wearing on him. He knew better, this wasn't helping. He wanted to kick the shit out of himself. Dean would kick his ass hard for such stupidity and carelessness. This was a mistake Sam shouldn't have made, it was a rookie move, and he knew it was getting him nowhere.
Glancing out the window, he wondered how much time had gone by since he'd returned to their room. By the way the light was dimming and the room was filling with shadows cast from chairs and beds, he figured it must have been a few hours at least. Lumbering to his feet, Sam grabbed the room key and car keys and headed to the bar down the street for some real food. He had a good five or six hours, at least, to find the cemetery and dig the bitch who'd taken his brother out of the ground.
Sam settled at a table in the back of the bar. He had ordered his food and was waiting for his laptop to boot. At least the place had Wi-Fi, which meant he could have a better meal than the fast food places that normally provided him with free internet offered. He stuck to drinking soda, not beer, and when his meal arrived, he discovered he was indeed very hungry. The food was simple, but very tasty and there was a lot of it. By the time he was finished his head was clearer, his stomach was far happier, his nerves not nearly as jumpy and most importantly he'd completed his search for Emily's burial site.
There were only two choices of cemeteries in the area, and she was in the larger of the two. Sam was relieved her family's burial plots were here and not some other part of the country.
The sliver of a moon was high and the roads fairly well deserted when Sam pulled the Impala out of the motel parking lot with a destination firm in his mind, resolve firm in his heart.
Just outside the cemetery entrance, Sam pulled the car off the road and cut the engine. Silently he retrieved weapons, a shovel, a canister of kerosene, and salt from the trunk. Shovel slung over one shoulder, gun tucked behind his back and more supplies gripped in his other hand; Sam trudged across the cemetery to his meeting with Emily Swartz.
Dean peeled himself off the floor, ignoring the specks of dirt and small things that crawled through the carpet weave. Damn Trickster could have at least put him up somewhere nicer than this dump.
Events from his first trip through the town of Flickerston and his tenth birthday were still clear in his mind. Pictures from that time rolled through his head as if they'd occurred yesterday, not twenty years prior. He'd run down the street and veered off into the woods thinking it was a short cut, in fact was sure it was. Somehow he'd ended up wandering the woods all night, sure every shadow behind every tree was after him. That hadn't frightened him nearly as much as the thought he'd left his tiny, five-year-old brother alone and unprotected in a motel room not much better than this one.
When he'd gotten back the next morning, Sam had wrapped both arms around his middle and refused to let go for hours. It was days before the little boy could be shaken from Dean's side, not that Dean made much of an effort to get free.
Dean would be quite happy to have Sam latched to his side right now. Not sure what the Trickster wanted exactly, Dean knew one thing with absolute certainty. It couldn't be good.
He's got something, something very special. Sammy's a special boy. I like special boys.
The Trickster's words slammed through Dean making him shiver.
Everything was coming to him now. At first it'd been bits and tattered pieces of emotion and a flash of scenery which would change without warning to some other scene. Dean had no idea if they were actual sequences or jumbled in time. They were almost like dream sequences. With each passing hour, the sensations and images cleared and lengthened, came in more detail and with more clarity. Whether it was real or the Trickster's doing, Dean had no clue. It didn't matter. He was being given a very detailed and intense show of what Sam was doing and how he was doing it.
And Sam wasn't doing very well.
For a bit it seemed Sam had gotten a better grip on things, stabilized, and calmed enough to think more rationally. Now he was hell-bent on finding the wraiths he was sure were responsible for Dean's disappearance, sure they wanted to claim Dean's soul. He was charging forward without a real plan or much rational thought. Sam wasn't seeing beyond the fact he thought he'd seen a wraith. He wasn't looking for anything else. It was a mistake Sam shouldn't be making and wouldn't have if it weren't for the fact he wasn't so much searching for wraiths as he was for Dean.
The Trickster wanted Sam's soul, Dean was just as sure.
Staggering to the bathroom, Dean splashed cold water on his face and stuck his head under the faucet, gulping down huge mouthfuls before letting the water run over his head. Living in his own head as well as Sam's was disorienting and taxing to say the least. It was only going to get worse; Dean knew this for a fact.
Sam was frantic and digging furiously…never going to last that way, Sammy, pace yourself…even in the chill January air, Sam was panting, sweat pouring off him. Dean shivered and hugged his arms closer to his body as Sam stubbornly refused to stop and rest or put on something warmer. The thin T-shirt covering him was soaked through. Sam was covered with mud and bits of grass, oblivious to the cold surrounding him or starting to leech into him, making him shiver and cough every few minutes.
"Maybe it's time little baby brother had his big brother back." The Trickster appeared in the mirror long enough to laugh, wagging one finger at Dean.
Sam dropped to his knees and clawed the last bits of dirt away from the grave. Blood oozed from the dried and cracked skin covering his fingers. Shovelful after shovelful of heavy, damp dirt and sod were thrown up and away from the coffin to scatter a haphazard pattern on the ground surrounding the grave. His arms and back ached from the sheer stress of his self-imposed labor. He ignored how the muscles along his shoulders and up his neck stiffened and protested with every sweep of the shovel. Up on his feet a minute later, Sam jumped far enough out of the grave to grab a crowbar.
Anger and frustration built to a boiling point and bubbled over. The crowbar was driven down again and again onto the coffin top. "Bitch! You BITCH!" His scream split the night air as did the echoes of the crowbar against the coffin top. "Give him back! You can't have him!"
Not taking the time to brush away the hair falling over his face, Sam wound up and swung over and over. He ignored the pounding in his ears and head, ignored how every muscle burned and screamed for relief, and ignored how his lungs ached to fill. The words stopped, his shouts escalated then dropped to harsh, uneven grunts forced from his chest with every blow he connected with the coffin. After what seemed forever, the crowbar broke through. Tossing it to the side, Sam ripped at the wood, tearing it away in large chunks and further shredding his hands. Long, shallow, jagged cuts covered his palms. Streaks of his own blood smeared the coffin in a bizarre pattern.
With arms shaky from exhaustion he spread salt was generously over the contents of the coffin. Sam ignored how some of the fine particles worked their way into the damaged skin of his hands, earning nothing more than his lower lip being bitten. Next he splashed on kerosene until the entire inside of the coffin and Emily's body was soaked. Scrambling out of the grave, Sam slowly inched away. Pulling ragged breaths into his lungs, he ignored how his body throbbed with hurt, his head spun and the scent of kerosene burned the inside of his nose and mingled with the acidy taste bubbling at the back of his throat.
Sam pulled a piece of paper and book of matches from one pocket. He literally spat the words of the incantation that would release her anger and send her spirit and soul to wherever it was meant to go. Words tumbled from his mouth without care for their meaning as he shouted them in a vicious monotone. For a minute or two nothing happened and Sam's heart sank, maybe he'd gotten it wrong, recited the incorrect incantation.
A low rumble started somewhere underneath the body. Sam didn't have much time to think about what that might mean before the entire grave, body, coffin and all erupted into a massive glowing orange and red fireball. The compact flames hovered for a few seconds like a giant, flaming beach ball. Sam gulped in a quick breath. As the thought formed in his brain that maybe he should get as far away as possible from the grave and its blazing sphere which was no doubt about to combust, it erupted outward in a giant flash of light and exploding sound that flung him back a few yards. He landed hard on his ass as he was tossed backward with enough force to crack his head. Shocks of pain rocketed up and down his spine. A vibrant constellation of stars detonated over his eyes, blinding him for a few seconds.
The world cleared and came back to him in the form of the sound of pounding feet heading in his direction. Normally Sam would have been up and moving, ready to either take on, or run from, whatever was coming at him.
Not tonight.
Not those footsteps.
Those footsteps he knew.
It had worked. Sam relaxed onto the cold ground and let his body snarl and snap with all the cuts and aches he'd inflicted upon himself. It was as if a suffocating weight simply disappeared from his chest. He could breathe again. He'd done it. Sam cranked his head back and let the tears pricking at his eyes drop across his cheeks when he heard his brother's voice shouting, "SAM!"