Note: This isn't too clear in the previous chapter—that's what comes with not working with a beta reader—but the way John and Dean became alarmed when Sam held down the button on his radio was that their radios started receiving a signal. This is against walkie-talkie protocol because the radios aren't designed to talk over each-other (don't quote me on this). Whether or not they were able to make out garbled words transmitted from Sam's radio, the only possible explanations for someone signalling on their frequency without saying anything would be that someone was sitting on the talk button, Sam was deliberately holding it down to be annoying, or the radio was being convulsively gripped in someone's cold, dead fist as a mysterious final warning for the rest of the group. In any case, someone was due for an ass-whooping, at the very least for misusing communications equipment.

Dad stalked back to the car and opened the driver's side door. Dean sat at attention, like a retriever or—like he was prostituting his human agency for social approval. No. "We finish the hunt," Dad announced, and Sam held his tongue.

"Yessir."

"Sam, you're coming with us. Dean, move the car into reserved parking; that might buy us some time if any security comes around. We got two more bags to place, and we got to check Grisham's work."

"What if he comes back?" Sam asked softly. "Sabotages the car, follows us out?"

"He has a gun with him," Dad said. "If he was going to—Dean, you see him again, you shoot to kill, understand? He knows better than to come around, but if he does, don't let him get close."

He'd had a gun, Sam thought. He'd been so angry he'd rocked the car with an unconscious shove, and he'd had a gun the whole time.

"Radios?" Dean asked.

"Leave 'em."

Sam got to see a real life hex bag planted for the first time. Dean scuffed a hole in the dirt at the fenceline with the toe of his boot, dropped the bag in, and kicked leaves and twigs on top. Later, on the way to the South end of the mine property, they startled a rattlesnake, which Dad didn't let Dean shoot. Sam startled at every rustle and snap of leaves. Sometimes he would turn toward a noise, and when he turned back, would find Dad facing the same direction.

The sun dropped low.

Walking the South fence, they discovered Grisham's hex bag tied to the base of the chain link. Dean checked the binding, but the seal looked intact, same as when he'd knotted it. Without breaking it open and in the process breaking its power, that was as sure as they'd get that Grisham hadn't sabotaged the entire hunt.

The West end, the site of the last bag, was exposed to the brightest of the twilight, though Dad and Dean still waved their flashlights over the low-hanging branches and Sam peered peevishly into the gloom, wishing for his own. The old pit mine was in the way, from before the industry had switched to leach extraction, so they had to skirt it—and maybe Sam was some kind of hybrid freak, because he felt more than cold in the breeze that stirred with nightfall. Before the chill could sink past his skin and into his mind, they broke through the edge of the woods and Sam caught his first real view of the old excavations.

He'd thought the environmental impact reports he'd read had exaggerated the scale of the dig; he'd seen a few gravel quarries as he'd cris-crossed the US, and while their fifty-foot cliffs would hurt to take a dive from, they had nothing on nature for grandeur. They were just gouges, like road cuts in the Rockies, a few weeks' work with dynamite and backhoes. But this mine was the work of years. The pit gaped as deep and wide as the hills around were high, its walls solid gray rock. Truck-wide terraces spiraled into its shadowed depths, ten yards down at a time, marking its growth like the rings of a tree. The destruction was incredible—the mass of a hill, the volume of a lake, all crumbled into granite boulders and trucked away, year by year, the walls warping and twisting to chase veins of ore, leaving nothing of the old landscape but cracked bare rock and harsh right angles—but it was beautiful, too, in a way, like a moonscape or a temple. The long ramp that made up the shelf below led down and down. The madly-warped walls had begun to crumble in spots, sprouting weeds and saplings and strewing the old spiral path with mounds of jagged stone. The weak slanting gold of dusk petered out far above the bottom of the pit, leaving a deep black mystery that could have touched the center of the Earth.

Dean, already familiar with the mines, ranged ahead, scrambling around the edge where tree roots and thin soil gave way to blasted rock face, scouting for obstacles. Sam and Dad followed slower, taking the shortcuts Dean found for them. Sam wondered if it was Dad's knees or his worry for his youngest that made him let Dean take point.

"Look sharp," Dad had murmured in Dean's ear before letting him run ahead. "Just because the job's three-fourths done doesn't mean the curse is three-fourths broken."

Some dumbass British general who couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight—no. Sam never thought that, but why was he surprised when Dad's grip had lingered too long on Dean's shoulder, and now when half the time Dad's flashlight was on Dean instead of his and Sam's own path?

"Dad?" Sam asked softly. "Are there . . . monsters that can read your mind just by looking at you?"

"A few," Dad said, surprised. "Crocattas, changelings, Korrigans . . . Things that need to keep a human alive to feed have ways to keep us from running, and sometimes that means knowing what we think."

"Are there monsters that know the future?" Sam continued, glad to have caught Dad in a revelatory mood.

Dad's jaw twitched. "Not that I know."

"What about psychics?" Sam asked. A low continuous rustle of leaves sounded to their left, and the wind crawled down his collar. "Are there any that aren't just cold-readers? Seers, mind-readers?"

"What's got into you?" Dad asked, grabbing his arm.

Sam listened to the leaves. He didn't want Dad fighting his battles for him, didn't want Dad interrogating him, but Dad had already scared off Grisham and maybe the interrogation could go two ways. "Grisham knew things," Sam said vaguely. "About me."

Dad hissed through his teeth. "What?" Dad rumbled, his hand tightening.

"He said . . ." Sam took an instant to calculate his angle. Dad was quick—any waffling and he'd wise to the game. "He told me I'd never get out," Sam confided, listening to Dad's breath and feeling the twitch of his tense fingers. "He said . . . Mom died 'cause of me."

It was as if Dad died for the instant the words hung on the air; his grip slipped and his breath halted. He swayed on his feet, and Sam's heart raced at Dad's weakness and the confirmation of Grisham's words.

Then Dad shook him. Dad shook him once, twice, and dropped his hands as though Sam's jacket burned him. "What else did he say?" Dad growled. "Tell me! What else—"

"So you knew," Sam challenged, stepping back. His throat was hot and tight. "All this time, there's something—about me, you knew?"

"It wasn't your problem."

"It's me!" Sam snapped. "I'm my problem."

"Tell me what that bastard said to you!"

"Why, so you can keep your story straight?"

"Sam!" Dad barked, looming over him. "You don't want to go there. Everything I do, I do to keep you boys safe—"

"Well, I've finally got a reason to believe that," Sam snarled.

Dad broke away. "Son, you can't believe everything you hear."

"That's been pretty clear so far, sir," Sam hissed.

"No!" Dad snapped. "Listen! For once! There are things out there, that will lie to you. They might mix in some truth, but there's always a lie; you can't listen to them!"

"So what was Grisham, Dad?" Sam demanded. "If he's one of those things?"

"I don't know!" Dad scowled into the dark. "I don't know. But if you'd told me soon enough, I would've killed him when I had the shot."

Sam dropped his head. "'Cause he's a monster?" he asked softly.

"Because he's a threat to you."

Dad's flashlight had dropped to his side, splashing against loam and gravel, lighting the sides of their faces as they stared away into the dim woods. The continuous crackling hiss of leaves grew louder and nearer, and Dad flicked the light at it, expecting, perhaps, a maple bent sideways in a draft of wind funneled by the topography.

It wasn't a tree. The light struck a tall ribbon of motion swaying between two pine trees, built of flickering horizontal bands and perhaps three feet wide at its narrowest. A plume of leaves and dirt rose from its base. It shimmied, advancing a yard, then Dad's full weight slammed Sam to the ground. The rattling noise ceased and Sam heard a spatter of impacts—rock striking trees, dirt, boulders, leather and denim and bone. Dad grunted. A rock struck Sam's shoulder and he yelped.

A dust-devil of gravel. By the time Sam had begun to wrap his mind around the thing, Dad had his arm clamped in his grip and was hauling him up. "Dean, get away from the pit!"

"Dean?" Sam yelled.

"Yessir!" Dean shouted back, his voice wary and puzzled. Dad burst into a limping jog, taking the light with him, and Sam followed, wishing he knew whether the splash of dark on the back of Dad's thigh were shadow or blood.

They heard a rumble, and Dean shouting, "Holy shit!"

"Dean!" Dad roared.

"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back. "Just—rocks're a little—goddammit—unstable—"

"Get away from the rocks, now!" Dad bellowed, lurching into a sprint on his dark-splotched leg. They saw the winking of Dean's light among the boulders as they drew near the edge, and heard a crack like muffled gunfire to their left from the base of a spreading pine. Dad jagged toward the noise. "Sam, run!"

Sam, already running, twisted after him until he looked up at the black canopy that clawed the air beneath the fading dusk, saw the devouring sway, and bolted away from the tree. Dad twisted midstride, stagger-sprinting to Sam, and yanked him back. "This way!" he insisted, still running, but hampered by the hand he had wrapped in Sam's sleeve, and they charged toward the trunk, the canopy looming larger and larger overhead, until the tree began to tilt in earnest, crashed against the ground, and Sam and Dad were long out of its path, looking back on the sky-reaching roots, still shaking and dripping fresh dirt, and the massive trunk behind them.

"Dean!" Dad bellowed, taking off toward the pit again. "Something's here!"

Dean replied, as they closed on the pit and finally spotted him, perched on a peninsula flanked by two gouges of fresh scree and clinging to a spindly dogwood, "I know. It's coming toward you."

"What?" Dad panted, so soft that only Sam heard him.

Dean's little tree shivered, and the craggy stone peninsula wrinkled and crumbled, the whole bulk of it slumping intact before great cracks splintered it, gouging out terraces of raw stone that Dean vaulted over, his light jumping, legs springing, losing ground as the rockslide accelerated, staggering over plate-sized shards of granite, and finally stumbling, falling, and drifting down into the dark of the pit as the stones swallowed him up.

The rocks stopped. There was a jagged pile of boulders leaning against the wall of the pit, obliterating the rocky shelves. Dad's light rested on the place they'd seen Dean last.

"Dean!" Sam shrieked, and from behind him, like an echo but much deeper, he heard, "Dean!"

A human shape bounded out of the woods and down the fresh rubble, slip-sliding down the loose-packed rocks to the flashlight beam. It latched hold of a stone and flung it away, digging desperately.

Dad tugged Sam's arm, and they scrambled down the torn slope, slipping and wobbling, listening to the harsh pants and the clatter of rock from the man in the dark digging for Dean. Sam Grisham.

Grisham's hands were bleeding by the time they reached him. Dad aimed his light in his face. "Look at me!" he bellowed, and as Grisham looked away from his work, his eyes wide and wounded, Dad shouted, "Christo!"

Sam dropped to his knees and began to tug at the heavy rocks that hid Dean. "Give me your weapon," he heard Dad bark.

"There's a poltergeist," Grisham panted as he passed Dad a massive semiautomatic. "Went after me when I tried to leave. The curse, or the suicide or the murder, attracted a poltergeist, and now its reacting to the bags. It'll just get worse until we get 'em all planted."

Dad grabbed Sam again, pulling him away from the rocks, and handed him Grisham's pistol. "Check it." Sam opened the slide, ejected the clip, and found eleven rounds. "Keep it." Sam secured the gun in his inner jacket pocket, and Dad passed him his flashlight and the last hex bag. "Plant this. Keep yourself safe." He man-handled Sam around to face up the slope, and shoved him. "Go, Sam!"

A poltergeist, Sam thought dully. An intelligence, reacting in self-defense to the incomplete cleansing spell. He ran up the slope, the flashlight slick in his palm. He would reach the fence. He'd plant the bag. Dad and Grisham would stay back and dig, and he'd pray Dad and Dean were alive by the time he killed the thing.

The trees were moving.

The trees bowed their branches toward him like supplicants at a faith healing, and Dean could be dead, and as the dusk faded, Sam turned to the stars to find his way West. He ran, flashlight bobbing crazily. The width of the pit had forced him off-course, and he drove himself over the loam and roots, punishing his shredding lungs and rubber-weak legs. It felt like the last leg of a five-mile when Dad was pacing him with the car. It felt like training. Dean could be dead, and Sam's stupid legs thought they were just running for training.

Something screamed off to his left, and Sam just ducked in time for a flailing raccoon to fly through the air over his head, white teeth and green eyes flashing in the edge of his light. It struck something deeper in the woods and was silent. Sam kept running, and saplings bowed to meet him.

Vines unspooled from tree trunks, reaching like tentacles.

Dean could be dead. Sam coaxed more speed from his legs, and the mesh of the fence glimmered ahead of him, in a clearing just beyond the shadow of the tree-trunks.

A soft gasp of triumph escaped him, and he found sprint in him he hadn't known was there. He checked his jacket pocket and felt the last bag, Air, soft under his fingers, light in his hand. A vine shot out like a harpoon, the slender green growth at the tip crumpling against his jeans, and as Sam leapt away forward, it recurved like a snake and snapped out again, stabbing old wood and bark through Sam's shin.

It yanked Sam down with a savage shredding tear. The flashlight fell from his hand, and the hex bag flew into the dark.

With a snarl, Sam squirmed forward, fear and fury steaming through him. More vines latched onto him by his legs, his arm, his chest, binding and crushing his waist. Sam yanked at a vine fingering along his shoulder with his free arm, just as another looped over his head.

Bark tightened coarse and cable-strong about his forearm and the nape of his neck, sawing at his skin as it advanced probing leaves around his throat, tickling under his clothes. Sam's thin muscles burned against his outsized bones, and his body began to lift off the ground with the vines' tension.

The poltergeist was going to draw-and-quarter him.

"Stop!" Sam gasped. "Stop! Please! I'll destroy the bag!"

The vines stopped lifting. Sam heaved a breath. His left arm was numb from the elbow and his impaled shin was burning, lightening flaring from it with each throb of his pulse. "You kill me, and my family's gonna finish the job," Sam panted. "My dad and my brother. They're tough, and they're real good on revenge. Let me go—" let go, let go— "and I'll break the spell. I'll tell 'em the job's done, and if you keep quiet 'till they leave, they'll never know. I'll say I did it. Please."

The vines tightened again, the one around Sam's throat cutting off his air, and he bucked like a dying animal, rage and panic stealing his body and smothering his mind. They relaxed after a minute that felt like an hour, and Sam gasped, dragging air in through his half-closed throat. His face felt hot and fat with trapped blood. "I know you can hear me, you sonofabitch!" he rasped. "I swear—I promise you, I'll do it! Just let me get the bag before my dad finds me gone—cause he's smart, he's a great hunter. He'll find a way to kill you! You won't stop him!"

Another tornado of rocks bloomed under Sam's nose, a scale model of the first one, dim and half-seen in the glow of the flashlight that the woods threw back. It drilled a little hole in the dirt, and its rocks were just pebbles and grit. It was a witness, Sam thought, not a weapon. The vines were the weapon.

"I swear," Sam repeated. The vines lowered him six inches, until his knees and hips just brushed the ground, but no further. The little rock dust-devil wriggled. "I said I swear," Sam insisted, hope revving up his heart and sending more blood to his strangled head. "I swear on my life. I swear before God—before the Great Spirit. I swear by the All-Maker. I swear by my dad. I swear by my brother. I swear on my brother's life. Let me go and I'll break open the bag, on my brother's life, and you'll never hear from us again!"

The little tornado contracted, then exploded, bruising Sam's face with a splatter of rock like a ricochet of buckshot. The vines unwound, scraping Sam's skin and grating against the bone. A dribble of blood joined the pins and needles flaring in his limbs.

Sam gasped a few breaths, lying on the dirt and feeling his limbs come back online. He'd need them . . . the thought of things that could read minds flashed past, and he cleared his. Had to get the bag. Everything was going to be okay. He'd sworn on Dean's life.

Sam struggled to his feet, and his shin screamed at him. He gritted his teeth and bounced on the leg, punishing it into submission until his entire body was electrified with ceaseless, featureless pain, then stepped firmly to the flashlight. He found the hex bag at the base of a vine-wrapped aspen, and retrieved it with a wary eye on the foliage.

He began to fiddle with the ties as he backed away from the trees, away from the vines, toward the western fence. "Damn, Dean got these on tight," he muttered, staggering backward and letting his limp explain the four or five steps it took him to catch his balance. Dean could be dead. "I can't," he whimpered. "I don't have my pocket knife—I'll get it open, I just gotta—"

He bolted toward the fence, and heard the the woods hiss behind him.

The trees thinned. The poltergeist had less to throw at him here in the clearing, but Sam heard a rumble as he closed on the fence, pain stabbing up from his shin at each step to jolt his heart and stop his breath. The rumble behind him built as he neared his goal, ten yards, five yards, three—Sam took a last leap from his good leg and dove at it, flinging himself blindly through the air and crashing to the ground, just as a clammy weight of earth and grass pounced on him from behind, flattening him. Coughing dirt, Sam gouged out a hole with the handle of his flashlight and stuffed the bag in.

The night went still.

Sam sat up from under a foot-deep blanket of dirt and wobbled to his good leg, steadying himself against the nearby chainlink. A broad strip of sod had been disturbed, doubled up at Sam's end and dragged forward six feet from the unbroken turf at the other, exactly following his path from the treeline. The bag was in place, but Dean could be dead.