Hey everyone! Thank you to everyone for reviewing! You keep a girl going! ^^ Here's the next chapter! Short mention to "Lassi Did a Bad Bad Thing."

Disclaimer: I don't own Psych, nor do I own certain details belonging to Supernatural.

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Chapter Four

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"Hey Dad. Don't worry, I'm still coming over for dinner tonight, but I might be running a little late. Just got a couple of things I want to straighten out on a case first; unless, of course, you want to go over case files with me, cause I could come over right now if so... Hm? No? Didn't think so, but riddle me this: What 'evil and nefarious' things could a therapist possibly be doing and is a fluffy white cat and world domination plans involved? Heh, no, I'm just kidding. See you tonight!"

"To replay this message, press one. To delete, press two. To return the message sender's call, press three. To save, press four."

Beep.

"Message saved. You have no new saved messages. To return to the main menu, press-"

Click.

Henry closed his cellphone and set it down on the coffee table with a sigh. He'd lost count as to how many times he had listened to that message over the past seven or so months. It was at least twice a week. At first, he had been listening for clues and even after the SBPD had investigated everything Shawn had talked about in the phone message, Henry still told himself that he was listening for clues, for a lead of any sort, but as the first few months passed by, he knew he was just listening to it for the sake of hearing his son's voice.

'See you tonight!'

He still cursed himself for not knowing that anything was wrong when Shawn failed to show up for dinner that night all those months ago. Logically, he knew that it was a classic 'boy who cried wolf' scenario. Shawn was always blowing off dinner plans or plans to help Henry with a choir of some sort, why should that night have been any different?

Fatherly instincts, however, refused to listen to logic. Henry still beat himself up over the fact that while Shawn was getting kidnapped, he had eaten his dinner and gone to bed early thinking his son had once again skipped out on him. He should have known that something was wrong, he should have sensed something. Even the next day when Gus called him looking for Shawn, he hadn't suspected anything. When any call to Shawn's cellphone had gone straight to voicemail, still he hadn't suspected anything. Several hours after, when both he and Gus were still unable to get a hold of Shawn, Henry had thought for a fleeting moment that maybe Shawn had taken off again, but that was the only thing he had suspected at the time.

Then Gus told him just what sort of case they had been investigating, a missing person's case, and Henry began to feel a sliver of worry that maybe there was something more to Shawn's sudden disappearance. Looking back on that day, Henry remembered how, as he told Gus not to worry, that it still hadn't been twenty-four hours, he had been thinking about how similar the whole situation was to the Drimmer case. He had called Karen, told her to let him know if Shawn showed up at the station, and then joined Gus in a search of Shawn's favorite hangouts.

When the next day rolled around, and they still hadn't heard from Shawn, they went to the station to report their suspicions. The investigation picked up quickly, and Henry had followed the whole thing closely. The first few days had been a blur of activity, but pretty soon, they had run out of leads. Shawn's cellphone couldn't be tracked and the APB on his bike and on Shawn himself turned up nothing.

Throughout the hysteria of the first few weeks of the investigation, Henry found himself hoping that Shawn really did just run off because that would mean that he had left of his own free will(Henry wouldn't put it past his son to find a way to block his cellphone signal if he didn't want to be found). He ran his mind in circles thinking about it, sometimes working himself up into a rage that Shawn would run off like this again and make so many people worry (because it was so much easier to get angry over the thought of Shawn purposely running off than to be worried or scared that his son might have been kidnapped and is being held somewhere against his will).

He had been so wrapped up in the investigation that it took him two weeks to realize that he hadn't called Madeline with the news. Once he remembered that, it took him another full day get up the courage to actually call her. Part of it was because he really didn't want to be the one to call up his ex-wife, Shawn's mother (mama-bear), and explain to her that her son had been missing for two weeks and she was only just hearing about it now, but it had also been because a part of him had wanted to believe that that's where Shawn disappeared to, and he knew that the second he called Madeline, that hopeful theory would most likely be disproved.

"Is Shawn with you?" was the first thing he had asked once he had manned-up enough to make the call.

"No," she'd said, sounding confused. "No, I haven't seen him since the last time I was in Santa Barbara. Henry, what's going on?"

She had taken the rest of the call surprisingly well, the information not yet fully sinking in the same way Henry himself hadn't quite believed it the first few days Shawn went missing.

"Are you sure he didn't just take off again?" she had asked more than once, concerned but hopeful that this whole thing was just Shawn being Shawn.

"We can't completely rule that possibility out, but... I really don't think that's the case this time," he had said quietly.

She had wanted to fly straight out to Santa Barbara, but Henry had talked her out of it, telling her that she'd be more useful keeping an eye out on things at her end in case Shawn showed up there. The call had ended with him promising to keep her updated on anything new with the case.

There wasn't any news though, not until the middle of the second month when they found Shawn's bike at a junkyard. It was the discovery of that bike that killed any hope Henry had that his son had willingly left. Shawn loved that deathtrap and Henry knew he'd never just toss it aside that, and the condition the bike had been found in couldn't mean anything good. Either Shawn had been in a bad accident when he was taken, or someone had purposely smashed up the bike before bringing it to the junkyard, probably to make sure the bike would remain in the junkyard rather than being sold to another person who would have it out on the streets in plain sight. Although neither was an appealing theory, Henry sincerely hoped it was the latter.

The bike was the only lead they really had going for them, and even that was a dead end. Any evidence that may had been left on it had been destroyed due to the bike being left out in the rain, and nothing ever came up on the red-haired woman who had delivered the bike in the first place.

Henry knew after that first month that the odds of finding Shawn were not in their favor, but he held out hope. Even as the months continued to pass by with no real progress, and the cop in him listed off all the statistics of kidnapping cases and how it'd be more likely that they'd be finding a body if they found anything at all, Henry continued to hope, because although he hadn't sensed anything the night Shawn had been taken, he felt that he'd know if Shawn had been... if Shawn was...

He couldn't even think it. Thinking it put him in a dark place. It made it seem too real, too likely.

'Which it's not,' he thought, burying his face in his hands, exhausted. 'because I would know. I would feel it if it happened.'

Standing up from the couch with another sigh, he grabbed the keys to his truck. He couldn't bear to sit around in his empty house any longer, staring at the blank spaces on the walls where photos of Shawn once rested (taken down and packed away in a box around a month ago after a particularly nasty bought of drunken depression), thinking about how Thanksgiving was approaching and that even after seven long months, his son was still missing.

He needed to go for a drive and clear his head, something that he found he had been doing frequently for a good couple of weeks now. He never really had a destination in mind when he went out for a drive like this, he just drove until he left Santa Barbara behind (too much in that town reminded him of his son), and then drove the roads surrounding it for awhile before returning home.

This time, like many other times, he traveled the roads running through the Los Padres National Forest.* He'd found in the past that the large forest was a good place to go driving in. Rather than think about Shawn and the case, he could concentrate on safely traveling the long winding roads weaving through the forest.

The sun had been setting just as he had left Santa Barbara, and when he next looked at the clock in his truck, he was surprised to see that it was nearing ten O'clock. He had been so wrapped up in driving, he hadn't realized how late it was getting. Slowing down and checking to make sure the road was clear, he pulled a U-turn, deciding it was time for him to be heading back.

He hadn't been driving for very long when it happened. An animal stepped out in front of his truck. It happened so suddenly, he couldn't even process whether it was a dog, a coyote, or a deer. He barely even had a second to realize that he wouldn't be able to stop in time before his truck was bearing down on the unlucky creature. He stepped on the brakes anyway, automatically shutting his eyes against what was sure to be a messy collision.

An icy cold sensation suddenly washed over him like a wave...

...but that was all that happened.

His eyes shot open as his truck screeched to a stop. There had been no thump, no jerk of his truck hitting something or running over it. There was nothing but a biting cold feeling that sent shivers down his spin and left him seeing his own breath despite the truck's heater running. The rush of cold dissipated just as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a lingering chill that gave him goosebumps. Wondering if he had imagined the whole thing, Henry twisted around in his seat and gazed at the road behind him.

Standing a short distance away from the back of his truck was the animal. It was cast in a red glow from his brake lights, looking perfectly alive and intact and most definitely canine in appearances. Squinting more closely at it, Henry could just barely make out a collar around its neck.

'Not a coyote then,' Henry mused. 'Must belong to some campers and gotten lost.'

Henry couldn't understand how he had missed it though. Not that he was complaining about the animal's fortunate stroke of luck, but he just couldn't understand how it had managed to dodge his truck when it was just seconds away from colliding with his bumper.

'Maybe I clipped it,' he thought as he unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the truck. He wouldn't feel right if he just drove off without at least checking to make sure the dog was okay.

Closing the truck door behind him, he raised his hands in a non-threatening manner and slowly approached the dog who appeared to be frozen in shock. As he neared the animal, the night air seemed to grow colder around him, adding to the chill from before. He stopped a few feet away from the dog (knowing that a frightened animal could easily become dangerous) and crouched down, patting his legs.

"C'mere, boy... or girl," he called, whistling. "You're okay."

The dog's ears, which had been lowered defensively before, perked up at Henry's calls; both pointed like a Husky's, but with one bent over in the middle in a crooked manner. Wagging its long, furry tail, the dog stepped one paw forward when suddenly it flickered like an unstable TV picture, and Henry questioned if there was even a dog there at all. It being a hallucination would certainly explain how he had missed hitting it.

"Great," he muttered as he straightened up. "This is the last thing I need right now."

He turned back to his truck, planning on hopping inside and driving the rest of the way back home where he would go to sleep and pretend none of this ever happened. What stopped him from carrying out this plan though was one word.

"Dad?"

Heart suddenly in his throat, Henry whipped around in place. His eyes darted all around him, searching through the darkness for the familiar form of his son. Seeing nothing there, his eyes were drawn back to the dog standing before him. The animal was watching him closely, its head tilted to the side questioningly as its tail wagged slowly behind it.

"Shawn?" the name escaped his mouth before he could stop it.

That acknowledgment alone seemed to be enough for the dog, as it was suddenly walking towards him, tail wagging a mile a minute, and it (a dog) was talking, but it was talking using Shawn's voice.

"Dad," it said, not only sounding relieved, but sounding exactly like how Shawn sounded from the voicemail Henry had been listening to over and over again. "I'm so glad you're here. I didn't know where I was and I was trying to find people, good people, but no cars were coming and... I'm just... I'm just so glad you're here."

'No... no, this isn't happening,' Henry frantically thought, his breath catching in his throat.

Henry backed away from the dog, but the animal simply followed after him, so caught up in its joy that it didn't seem to notice just how its presence was affecting him. He stopped when he was at the driver's side door of the truck, his eyes not leaving the dog as his hands fumbled with the door's handle. The door wouldn't open though, the damn thing must be jammed again (it was one of the reasons he'd been thinking about getting a new truck).

Burying his face in his hands, Henry sank to the ground because he just couldn't deal with something like this right now. It had been hard enough just seeing pictures of his son every time he went home for all those months and torturing himself with an old voicemail message, not knowing where Shawn was but knowing that he was in trouble and that there wasn't anything Henry could do about it. To have this hallucination added on top of it though? To be hearing Shawn's voice and having this dog act as if it was Shawn, talking to Henry as if everything was all right, being just a single foot away as if it was all over and Henry would be able to take Shawn home when in truth Henry knew that Shawn was still missing and that he may never see his son again, may never know what happened to him...

No...

It was too much to take...

Henry felt the weight of a cold paw rest on his knee. He lowered his hands, just now realizing that the dog stopped talking. He couldn't see much, now sitting outside of the glow of the taillights, but he could see that the dog's ears were lowered, almost sadly. For a long moment, he just stared at the dog, finding it hard to ignore how very real the pressure from that paw felt on his knee. Raising one shaking hand, he hesitated for a moment before running his fingers through the thick fur of the dog's neck. It was cold to the touch, just like the paw, but it was also soft and felt very real. His fingers stopped at the collar, feeling the thick leather, before pulling his hand back and resting it on his knee, right on top of the large paw.

"Dad?" Shawn asked hesitantly. "You okay?"

"Why are you wearing a collar?" Henry found himself asking.

The drooped ears pulled back, almost giving him an affronted look.

"Because," Shawn said after a short pause, sounding confused. "I'm a dog. Dogs wear collars."

Henry blinked in surprise, not really knowing what to say to that announcement. Yes, clearly Shawn looked like a dog, but he wasn't actually a dog.

Before Henry could really come up with a response to that, the furry ears lowered back to their 'sad' position and Shawn asked in a quiet, tired voice, "Can we go home?"

Hallucination or not, it was a request Henry couldn't ignore, not when it was said with that voice, not when it was said using that tone.

"Yeah, sure son," Henry said, sounding just as tired.

He got to his feet. After a few minutes of struggling with the stuck driver's side door, he managed to get it open. Shawn hopped in first and climbed over to the passenger's seat before Henry climbed in himself. In the light of the truck, Henry finally got a clear look at the dog (at Shawn). He took in the sight of the brown fur with the darker brown markings, but it was Shawn's eyes that really made him pause. Although the eyes were that of a dog's, their color was the same hazel color he knew to be his son's.

Henry swallowed thickly as he buckled himself back in and turned his gaze to the road. Shifting into 'Drive,' he started off down the road heading back to Santa Barbara. He really didn't know what to make of this whole situation. If this really was just a hallucination brought about by stress or who-knows-what, then why was it... well... like this? If he was going to hallucinate that Shawn was there, why would he be seeing him as a dog rather than as Shawn himself? Why would Shawn believe he was a dog? While he was on the subject, could someone actually feel a hallucination?

What did it mean then if there was something real about what was going on, and which parts of it all was real? He could have sworn that he had hit Shawn with his truck, and yet he didn't, so did that not happen? He was hearing Shawn's voice, but seeing a dog; a dog whose fur felt real, who wore a real collar, yet flickered once like it wasn't there and felt far colder than seemed healthy or even possible.

'Flickering, almost unstable,' his mind told him as he watched Shawn out of the corner of his eye. 'Very cold, like a cold spot. Impossibly missing him with the truck...'

'Stop,' he told himself, yet he still opened his mouth and asked, "Shawn, where... where were you before? ...What happened?"

What did it say for his mental state that he was even asking this question? Henry was sure that if Madeline was here, she'd have quite a bit to say on this matter.

Henry slowed the truck down and as he waited for an answer, a ridiculous yet fatherly part of him noted that Shawn should be wearing a seatbelt.

Shawn shrank down in his seat with a quiet whine that sounded far too dog-like for Henry's liking. With his ears pressed back against his head, he finally said, "I was in the woods. I know that something happened, but... I can't remember what."

Henry's hands tightened against the wheel as he recalled stories of people's loved ones needing their help moving onto... onto the afterlife... Stories of lost, restless spirits just drifting, not knowing... and continued drifting until someone helped them. Madeline loved those sort of stories, mostly due to the psychological aspect of such an event, and Henry was pretty sure she was the one who told him most of them.

Those stories were just a bunch of bull though, no matter how similar this situation seemed to it. Yes, it may explain the flickering and the cold sensation that still seemed to linger even now with the truck's heater running, but it didn't explain the dog thing and as Henry pointed out earlier, he would have known if Shawn had... if his son was...

'But what if this is Shawn's way of telling you?' his mind asked.

Henry shook his head and pushed the thought away. He didn't even want to think about it, didn't want to think about the possibility that he and the police department were already too late. He had to hold out hope, even against all of the odds, even against the proverbial neon sign sitting next to him in the passenger's seat, and if it wasn't really Shawn sitting in that seat, then Shawn was still out there, alive, and they were going to find him.

Henry was going to drive Shawn home anyway though, even if it was very likely that there wasn't anyone sitting in the passenger's seat.

"You're not a dog, Shawn. You know that, right?" Henry suddenly said, surprising even himself. The silent drive had been getting suffocating (it just wasn't normal for Shawn to be that quiet for that long), and when he had opened his mouth to say something, he hadn't been expecting to say that. It must have been bothering him more than he thought, the way Shawn had said before, with such conviction, that he was a dog.

Henry slowed the truck down again and glanced over at Shawn, about to further explain his random, unexpected statement when suddenly Shawn flickered again and sitting in the dog's place was his son, his very human son who had dark circles around his eyes, his pale lips twitching up into a strained smile, and the blood-

Henry stepped on the brakes, forcing himself to start breathing again after the truck screeched to a stop; there was once again a dog sitting in the passenger's seat. There was no ignoring what he saw though, the blood staining his son's clothes and painting the right side of his son's head, running down his face in streaks.

"Oh, god," Henry breathed, resting his forehead against the steering wheel. He felt sick thinking about all of that blood and what it could mean. A quiet whine drew his attention back to the passenger's seat. Shawn was crouched down against the seat, as if trying to hide.

"You okay?" Shawn asked fearfully.

"Yeah," Henry croaked after a few deep breaths. "Yeah, I'm okay."

After taking a moment to compose himself, Henry turned his eyes back to the road and continued driving. He kept his eyes forward as he drove them back to Santa Barbara, afraid of what he might see the next time he looked back over to the passenger's seat. When Shawn answered his previous question by stating that, yes, he was in fact a dog, Henry didn't look over, and when Shawn curled up next to him, pressing a cold but furry canine head against his side, Henry wrapped a protective arm around the dog, but continued to keep his eyes on the road.

They were just barely re-entering Santa Barbara when the truck's engine suddenly shut off. Running only on momentum, Henry pulled the vehicle off to the side of the road and pulled it into park. He turned the key in the ignition a few times, trying to see if he could restart the engine, but he didn't even get a sputtering sound in response.

"Dammit," he swore, slamming a fist against the dashboard. He could feel Shawn shrink away from him when he did. Finally looking down at his son, he said with a sigh, "Sorry."

His truck breaking down was one of the last things he needed at this moment in time. He didn't really want to have to explain a dog who may or may not be there to a tow-truck driver or anyone else he could call to come get him. He tried the ignition a few more times, wondering what could have happened to completely kill his engine. Getting no response, Henry grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment (as the only streetlight on the stretch of road they were on was flickering erratically), and reached for the door handle, planning on getting out to see if he could spot what was wrong.

He froze with his hand on the handle when he heard Shawn whimper from beside him. Frowning, Henry looked back over at his son and said, "I'm just going to check and see what's wrong. It's alright, Ill be right back."

Shawn didn't appear to have heard him and, peering through the front windshield, he fearfully said, "That man..."

Following his son's line of sight, Henry was surprised to see the silhouette of a man far in the distance who, as far as he could tell, hadn't been there a moment before. Still, they were back in Santa Barbara and even though they were still on the outskirts of town, it wasn't too unusual for someone to be walking around.

"What about him?" Henry asked.

Ducking down in the seat so that he couldn't be seen through the windshield, Shawn fidgeted in place and said quietly but quickly, "We need to go. I think he's here to get me."

Eyes darting from his son back up to look out the windshield, Henry was surprised to see that the man was suddenly a lot closer to the truck, and that even in the glow of the streetlight, the man was still as much as a shadow before. Before he could even contemplate this, the man flickered the same way Shawn did and was suddenly directly in front of the truck.

"Run!" Shawn shouted, the passenger's side door somehow springing open all on its own.

"Wait!" Henry called, reaching out to grab Shawn, but his son was already out of the passenger's side door, running in the opposite direction of the man, and Henry was scrambling to open his own door to go after him. A few precious seconds passed by before Henry was out of the truck and standing on the gravel roadside. Shawn was still within his sights, running for all he was worth. Just as Henry began to turn and confront the man Shawn was so frightened of, a rush of cold passed by him and suddenly the dark form of the man was standing in front of Shawn, reaching down and grabbing hold of his collar.

"Dad!" Shawn shouted a second before he and the man disappeared in a flicker.

The streetlight stopped flickering and all was silent.

"Shawn?" Henry called out, somehow knowing he wouldn't receive an answer. He raced over to the spot his son had been only seconds before. "Shawn!"

He was gone, again, and Henry had no idea where he had been taken, again.

Henry stumbled back to his truck, feeling like he was in a trance. This time when he turned the key in the ignition, the truck started up just fine, as if there had never been a problem to begin with. He didn't know how long he sat in his truck on the side of the road, but at some point he had closed both doors and had pulled back onto the road because when he finally started thinking again, he was well on his way home.

'That man... that thing, took my son,' he thought, hands tightening around the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. 'It was able to take my truck out of commission the same way it affected those streetlights... God, what is going on?'

As easy an option as it would be, he couldn't pass what just happened off as a wild hallucination. If there was even the slightest chance that any of this was real, he couldn't risk ignoring it, and if there was a chance that Shawn ended up back on the roads of the Los Padres National Forest, Henry would be there to get him. He'd find a way to combat whatever-the-hell that shadow man was, and if Shawn didn't end back up on the Forest's road, well...

"I was in the woods."

The Los Padres National Forest was a lot of forest to search through, but it was the best lead he had.

"Hell, if this is just me going insane, why not leap headfirst into the insanity?"

He'd sleep tonight, as everything was closed already, but come the next morning, he had some work to do.

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End of chapter four. Hmm... I feel predictable with this chapter... *shrugs* Oh well.

*(special note) - I don't live in California (yet *shifty eyes*), so I don't know how the roads around the Los Padres National Forest really are, if they're good for driving or not, so I'm just guessing about that.

I hope you're all still enjoying this.

Review please!