Sam runs into Roderick again the next outside some mom n' pop coffee place, almost literally.
"Hey" the bespectacled man greets with a raised hand. Sam, a little surprised by his acknowledgement, answers with an "Oh! Hi."
"Hey" Roderick repeats. "Listen, I meant to ask this the other day, but you were already gone: Who are you guys? Vespa says you've been to her place before."
"Mel hired us" Sam lies, "We're Private-Is, my brother and me. Kind of a safety net just in case the trail starts to go cold."
Roderick nods and swirls his coffee thoughtfully. "You know," he says a little off-handedly, "I'm a little surprised she's helping out as much as she is. Vespa, I mean."
Sam gives him a confused look. "Whatta you mean?" Sure, Vespa doesn't seem like the warm and fuzzy type, but who wouldn't take in their sibling after they'd witnessed a murder?
Roderick shrugs. "As long as I can remember, Mel and Vespa have always been at each others' throats. I mean, I know everybody has sibling rivalry, but they got ugly a few times." Sam wonders what 'a few' means.
"If I didn't know any better," Roderick continues, "I would've said they hated each other." He turns to look at Sam. "Guess your true colors come out when push comes to shove, huh?"
Dean and Sam learn from Melissa that Vespa likes to sit by Merimere Reservoir in Hubbard Park. They find her seated cross-legged on a bench, whistling "Hail to the Chief" to herself and weaving some impossible, triangular pattern from a crochet hook. Her whistling and fingers stop when she notices the shadows over her shoulder. She sighs and rolls her eyes skyward at the sight of them.
"You couldn't have just sent the tall one?" she might be praying. She puts down her work and turns in her seat to face them. "What's up?"
"We wanna ask you about something Roderick said" Sam explains, and suddenly she looks angrier at him than she ever has.
"What did you do to Roderick?" she demands, leaning further toward them in her seat.
"Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa," Dean steps between them, "he didn't do anything, okay? He ran into him outside a coffee place, guy felt a little chatty. Said some interesting things. Namely how you and Mel supposedly hate each others' guts."
Vespa glances somewhat guiltily to the side and exhales.
"Okay, look," she starts, "Mel and me... We're not friends. We're not even close, by any means. We both have arrest records, we've even pulled guns on each other, if you can believe it." For Sam and Dean, that's kind of a stretch.
"We've... Said things to each other" she continues, "Called each other things. Even now, I don't take any of it back, and I'm sure she doesn't, either. But..."
She shakes her head slowly. "God, I didn't want this! At least if you're dead, you don't have to watch everyone else living their lives. Nobody's gonna wanna hire her now, and more importantly nobody's gonna wanna touch her." She looks pointedly at Dean at that. She turns her back to them in her seat and sighs, staring at her lap.
"I just wanna know who did this" she says quietly, maybe to herself, "Maybe then I could figure out why."
Sam patrols the area the dog's supposed to haunt that night. It may not be what they're looking for anymore, but it's still the only real lead they've got. Besides, this thing's supposed to like people, right? Maybe it can help them find the dog that's helping kill people.
Okay, yeah, that's stupid, but it's late, he's coffee-deprived-
A branch cracks under somebody's foot, followed by a distinctly canine growl.
That is way too close to be anything other than very, very bad.
Sam whirls around, and there it is. Predictably it's solid black and looks like a wolf, or maybe some kind of Alaskan or Russian breed, and it's huge. Like, Impala-sized huge. Well, maybe; it's a little hard to tell how big it is exactly with its hackles fluffed out like that.
The most striking thing about it is its eyes, though, both for the fiery red irises and the humanoid shape and sclerae. There's something kind of hypnotic yet horrifying about them. Sam really wants to run from it, but his legs won't work.
His arms will, though.
Her raises his gun level with the middle of its forehead. It hunches it shoulders further and spits once in rage. It springs across the twenty feet between them in one leap and rears up on its hind legs; it's about ten or twelve feet tall when it does that. Sam's not sure how, but the dog knocks his gun out of his hands, plants its forepaws on his shoulders, and pins him to the ground.
It takes him a second to get back the air knocked out of him and he gropes for his gun, even though he can't really move his arms with the dog pinning his shoulders down. The dog starts up its snarling at him again when he moves. He catches its eyes again by chance, and again he can't make himself stop looking.
"Dean" he remembers, "Dean!"
The dog narrows its creepy eyes at him and dips its head. Sam bellows in surprise, waiting for his throat to be torn open, but it just presses its slimy-cold nose against his forehead.
And then he's seeing so many things at once that he can't really make sense of it all:
His face; His brother's; one other person's; and then he gets a sensation so powerful he can't help but blurt it out:
"Stay away!"
The dog stops its growling and pulls away, but its eyes stay narrowed at first. Its face finally softens and it steps off of Sam's shoulders. He stares at it in confusion for a second, and then a shotgun shell full of salt explodes over its shoulder.
It hunches lower over Sam and snarls in surprise, and then Dean steps out of the trees toward them, pumping another shot into place. The dog leans down to Sam's chest - he starts again before it registers that only his shirt's been bitten - and chucks him at Dean so perfectly that Sam takes the next salt round right in his left pec. Dean lowers the gun and rushes to his side, and by the time they look up again the dog's disappeared.
"You okay?"
"Yeah" Sam grunts. Dean loops his good arm around his shoulders and helps him stagger a few steps forward until Sam tugs at his jacket.
"Dean... The dog, it... I think it was trying to talk to me."
"What?"
"When it jumped me... It showed me some things."
"Such as?"
"Not much, a few faces. I think it wants us to stay away from somebody."
"Who?"
A/N: Well, I had to give you guys some reason to come back next time, didn't I? Also, Deanus Ex Machina FTW!
