Neither Sam nor Dean knew what to make of the duo that greeted them at the front door. They had returned to Garth's farmhouse, having been invited the night before to come for dinner. Dean had spent much of the car ride over explaining to Sam how the meal would be different from what he might be accustomed to. Having previously shared a meal with a family of werewolves, Dean considered himself an expert on the situation.
"…and they mostly eat with their hands, especially the raw meat…"
"Dean, you mostly eat with your hands…now would you please just shut up…"
But it was not Garth, or even Bess or Emmie, who responded to their knock this time. Instead the Winchesters found themselves smiling tentatively at a very tiny, very wrinkled old Hispanic woman and a skinny, grinning little Hispanic boy.
"Hola!" the little boy piped up. "I'm Mateo. And you're Mr. Sam and Mr. Dean. It's very nice to meet you."
Mateo shook hands with a robust enthusiasm that belied his small frame. The little woman beamed at him for a moment, love and pride shining from her eyes, then she reached up and cuffed him on the back of the head.
"Muy bien, mijo. Pero que hay de mì?"
"Sì, Abuelita, sì," Mateo responded to her with an affectionate laugh, rubbing his head. He turned back to Sam and Dean. "And this is my grandmother. Her name is Señora Delfina, but everyone here calls her Granny, I mean Abuelita."
Abuelita stepped forward and clasped Dean's hand in both of hers. Her hands were rough and knobbly, with the papery thin skin of the very elderly, but the grip was strong.
"Mucho gusto, Señor Dean, muy bien." The old woman reached out one hand to pull Sam into the greeting, cricking her neck to look up into his face. "Y mucho gusto, Señor Sam."
"Uh…hey, hola…uh…" Dean was floundering, and he looked up with relief when he heard Garth's voice.
"Dean! Sam! I see you've met Mateo and his grandmother."
"We did, Garth," Sam said, smiling down at Abuelita who continued to hold his hand. "Mucho gusto, Doña Delfina. Còmo està?" The old woman broke into a wide, toothless smile and laughed heartily.
"Muy bien, Señor Sam, muy bien!"
"Abuelita, could you get Emmie from her room? And Mateo, please tell Justin that it's time for supper."
Mateo and his grandmother hurried away immediately to follow Garth's instructions. The brothers watched them in bemusement, then turned to Garth with eyebrows raised in question.
"Two of our Lupercal House residents right now," he explained. "They came to us about six months ago."
"Oh…oh…so they're both…uh…?" Sam fumbled as part of his brain started to blurt out the word "werewolf", while another part remembered that Garth preferred the designation "lycanthrope". Dean was less sensitive.
"You're telling me those two are werewolves?"
"Actually, only Mateo," Garth answered, his voice hardening. "We think it was probably the same monster that turned Emmie. Giving little kids the 'gift' was apparently his MO."
Mateo, his mother, uncle, and grandmother, had immigrated to the United States some three years previously, as far as Garth had been able to ascertain. Mateo had been somewhere around seven years-old at the time. After several months of struggling along on subsistence jobs, both Mateo's mother and his uncle had become involved in drug use and trading. Abuelita had been furious. She had refused to allow either of them any contact with Mateo when they were using or when they were with their new business associates. Eventually, both the mother and the uncle drifted away. Abuelita and Mateo had not seen either of them for over a year.
The young boy and his grandmother had been living in Phoenix, cycling through the city's offerings of rescue missions and homeless shelters, always moving on as soon as Abuelita sensed that someone in authority was growing too interested in Mateo. She was terrified of having her grandson taken from her, and Mateo was equally desperate to stay with the one person who had been his anchor of love and stability throughout his tumultuous early life.
They were living in a homeless encampment when Mateo stumbled onto the werewolf finishing off one of his victims. Staring at the creature, its claw-like nails and canid teeth covered in blood, the little boy had been too shocked and frightened to escape. But, just as he later did with Emmie, the werewolf had not attacked Mateo. Instead, he had promised him a gift, and then given the boy a deep, painful bite on the shoulder before disappearing into the night.
Mateo had returned to the little cardboard and tin shelter where he and Abuelita were sleeping, curled into a tight ball, and cried himself to sleep. Abuelita had woken in the morning to find him burning with a fever so high that the young child should have already died. She had been prepared to rush out to seek help for him, authorities be damned, when she spotted the bite on his shoulder.
"I don't know how, man, but she knew what that meant," Garth said, shaking his head in wonder.
The grandmother had half-carried, half-dragged the unconscious boy to an abandoned factory that stood nearly a quarter-mile away, and tied him up in a dark corner of the basement there. And then she sat with him, murmuring prayers in Spanish and Latin, as he changed into a different creature. She was amazed to find that he was still able to talk to her afterwards, still able to make sense, only crying and pleading with hunger.
She brought him rooster carcasses that she found thrown out behind a building where cockfights were held, and Mateo devoured them, ripping them apart with his teeth and bare hands. After that, he seemed better, almost normal again.
"The one who bit him, and probably Emmie, too, must have been a pureblood," Garth explained. "There's a hell of a lot we don't know about lycanthropy, but awareness of the change occuring, ability to control the change, and behaviour of a bitten individual seem to be based on a combination of the sire's bloodline and the personal temperament of the victim."
Sam's eyebrows shot up.
"Wow, Garth, that was quite an analysis" he said, obviously impressed.
"I do have a medical background you know. I'm treating this like a research project, gathering as much data as I can."
"Yeah, so what did that whole mouthful mean, Dr. Werewolf Dentist, M.D.?" Dean asked, obviously less impressed.
"It means, if you were a great little kid who got bitten by a pureblood, then you've got a really good chance of living a full life with lycanthropy as a manageable condition, like diabetes or something."
The back door of the farmhouse flew open at that moment, banging loudly into the kitchen countertop, and all three men turned towards the noise. Dean and Sam immediately took defensive stances, and Dean already had his hand on the pistol tucked into the back of his waistband. Garth, however, looked as if the commotion was not unexpected.
"And if you're a punk troublemaker, the jury's still out on your life expectancy," Garth added, the irritation obvious in his voice. "That would be Justin." He nodded towards the surly young man striding in through the back door.
Justin looked as though he was somewhere in his early twenties. He was short and wiry, with a shaved head and tattoos covering one pale arm and crawling up the side of his neck. He barged past Mateo, and only halted his advance at the last possible second to avoid running straight into Bess who was carrying a serving dish to the table. Justin ungraciously waved her past, and then slouched into a seat without offering any assistance in the meal preparations.
"What's his story?" Sam asked.
"Did he get bit by a werewolf-jackass hybrid?" Dean added, glowering at the back of the young man's head with eyes narrowed in disapproval.
"I think the jackass part was already there," Garth responded with a shake of his head. "About a month back, Kevin White and Ronny Hall took out a pack in Detroit – near twenty or more. The top werewolves were running it like a gang. They'd find dead-end kids like Justin there and bring them into the "brotherhood" or some BS like that. Mostly, they'd use them as runners, send them out across the city to find kills that wouldn't be missed."
Kevin and Ronny had been trailing the pack leaders separately, but when the hunters ran into each other and compared notes, they realized that they were on to something much bigger than a couple of individual werewolves. Once they had figured out the immense size of the pack, they called in reinforcements and made a raid on the headquarters. The contingent of hunters had successfully taken out all but one of the creatures.
That last one, Justin, had not attacked or fought back like the others. Instead, he had been discovered cowering in a corner. A vicious bite had been visible on his upper arm, but even as they watched, it had faded to a faint pink. And then he had started to turn right before their eyes – his face contorting to accommodate the powerful jaws and teeth of a wolf, hands curling as thick claws began to extend from his fingertips. A half-dozen pistols and shotguns were instantly cocked and pointed at his head. But, somehow, Justin had managed to fight the transformation – forcing the canid teeth to retract, the brutal claws to recede.
"See? See? I can control it. I don't want to hurt anyone, I swear…" panting with effort and terror, the young man had wailed and pleaded for his life. "Please don't kill me, please don't kill me…"
"So, they brought him here," Garth ended the story. "And he's been nothing but trouble ever since."
To Dean's amazement, the meal was nothing like the one he had previously shared with werewolves. Each plate had vegetables on it, each diner had a set of silverware. None of the plates contained anything that looked like an animal heart. Dean's plate, along with Sam's and Abuelita's, contained a beautifully cooked steak. Every other plate had what appeared to be a pile of finely chopped raw beef with bits of onion and peppers mixed in, looking for all the world like a plate of steak tartare that would have been served in an elegant restaurant. And no one ate with their hands, not even Emmie.
Noticing Dean's disgruntled look, and Sam's barely concealed grin as he watched his brother look around disbelievingly, Garth explained the change in circumstances.
"Gotta use the utensils, dude. We're all trying to learn how to live in the regular world, ya know?"
"Yeah, because we're all just regular pathetic people…" Justin muttered under his breath. Garth pointedly ignored him, but Dean turned a hard eye on the young man. Sam looked up with concern, too. Justin's words suggested a potentially dangerous attitude that Dean and Sam had encountered before – an attitude of disdain for humanity. It could definitely be a step in the wrong direction. Justin refused to make eye contact with either of the Winchesters.
"I was just surprised." Dean said, still staring at Justin. "Last time there were a lot more hearts, a lot less rare steak."
"Oh, it's still hearts…" Garth started to say, but Bess interrupted him.
"And spleens, and kidneys, and lungs, and livers," she said. "We try to use all the organ meat, but I fix it like this so everyone can practice eating properly." Seeing that Dean looked almost disappointed, Bess added, "but for desert, we do have blood popsicles."
Dean turned to Sam with a look of supreme triumph.
"Please don't encourage him," Sam said to Bess, and she and Garth both laughed.
They had only been seated a few more minutes when Justin, having shoveled the food into his mouth in a way that could only be very loosely described as "properly", jumped up from the table and turned to leave.
"Justin," Garth said. It was just the one word, but his voice held a tone of harsh command that Sam and Dean had never heard before from their easygoing friend. For a long moment, Justin merely glared at Garth. Garth held his gaze.
"May I be excused?" Justin finally snarled.
"You may," Garth's voice was still hard. "Clean up your dishes and finish your chores."
Justin stomped to the sink, banged his dish down with force just short of breaking it, and then slammed the kitchen door behind him.
"Malo," Abuelita said to the young man's receding back. "Muy malo."
After that, an unspoken tension seemed to leave the room. Garth and the Winchesters were soon reminiscing about old hunts, carefully editing their stories for the young ones at the table. Bess and Mateo were laughing aloud, and Abuelita was able to follow enough of the stories to understand the humor. Her wrinkled face broke into a wide smile. Emmie laughed, too, simply because it was now her habit to imitate everything Mateo did.
"Someone's ready for bed." Bess said after a while, looking over to see Emmie watching Mateo with heavy eyes, her head starting to nod gently. Despite the little girl's sleepy protest, Bess picked her up, brought her to Garth for a goodnight kiss, and had her wave good-bye to Dean and Sam. Then Garth urged a protesting Abuelita to follow Bess upstairs and get some rest herself and sent Mateo along to get cleaned up and headed to bed.
"Hey, you guys don't have to help," Garth waved the Winchesters aside as they began stacking dishes to carry to the kitchen. "I'll get all that in a bit. Tell me what you've found out about the deaths."
"Don't be crazy," Sam responded, as he and Dean continued clearing the table. "We can do dishes while we talk."
"Yeah, I'm more of a cook," Dean interjected, "but I can do dishes, too."
They carried dishes into the kitchen where Sam ran a sink full of hot water and began washing. Garth handed Dean a drying towel and then took the dry dishes from him and put them away. As they worked, Sam and Dean took turns adding bits to the story of what they had found out about the case.
"So, basically," Sam said, "there has to be some connection between the vamp and the victims…"
"But we don't know what the connection is, yet," Dean said, tossing the dishtowel across his shoulder as he leaned against the kitchen counter. Sam reached over and snagged the towel to dry his hands.
"I think our next stop is going to be talking to Tom Garner – the ex-husband of our vamp and the new husband of our victim," Sam finished. "We'll try to hit him up first thing in the morning."
