REST AND RELAXATION

Chapter 9

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Dean was lost, floating unconsciously in a haze of nothingness. His mind and body felt leaden; all he could do was sleep, yet somehow still be aware enough to hear Sam's voice somewhere far away in the distance. He couldn't hear Sam's words, but he could hear the timbre of his voice and that's all Dean needed to hear to know that Sam was worried out of his mind.

People came and went. Unfamiliar voices accompanied unfamiliar hands that poked and prodded him in places where he really didn't want to be poked and prodded; well, not by them anyway.

He wanted so much to comfort and reassure Sam, but the words wouldn't come; his mouth wouldn't move. He couldn't even lift his eyelids to look at his brother as his traitorous body simply lay in immobile silence, refusing to function. All it wanted to do was to rest, and sleep; for ever.

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An evening of sitting on a far-too-small and far-too-hard plastic chair, squinting at a laptop screen in a darkened hospital room had left every part of Sam aching. The parts of him that weren't aching were cold, stiff and bone-weary instead, and that really wasn't much of an improvement.

Absently rubbing his stinging eyes, he stiffly reached over to one of the seven styrofoam cups sitting abandoned on the nightstand and drained the neglected dreg of coffee that remained in it, grimacing as the stone-cold liquid trickled into his mouth.

A night of intense research had gleaned very little information that might have been of any use. All Sam had were fragments of answers to confused and fractured questions; Googling 'how do you break a curse that turned a nice young girl into a succubus nearly two hundred years ago?' hadn't exactly gleaned a wealth of useful information.

Adele herself hadn't been able to tell him how to lift the curse, only that doing so would release her, and by extension, Dean, from its insidious grip. Even now, Sam's naturally cautious streak meant that he wasn't one hundred percent sure that he could really trust her, but a lack of meaningful options meant that lifting the curse was as good a place to start as any.

About the only thing that Sam was sure about was that lifting the curse would involve finding out more about the woman who originally placed it upon Adele, the proverbial mother in law from hell. A salting and burning may well be required. Heck, Sam would happily toast the bitch purely and simply because doing so would make him feel damn good.

Armed only with a name and an approximate date of birth, he knew a long day and probably another even longer night of research, this time trawling through the Massachussets census records, was ahead of him; but first he had to eat, drink something that wasn't sugar-laden caffeine and try to regain some modicum of circulation in his stiff legs.

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Dean heard the scrape of plastic chair legs against linoleum and the shuffling of unco-ordinated feet. Then he heard the door click closed. He had no idea what was happening, his mind was way too stuffed with fog to think straight – or even think at all. Where was he? What was that whooshing sound? That beeping? Why couldn't he move? What had Sammy got his boxers in such a knot over? Why did he appear to have a length of hosepipe shoved down his throat? Why did he feel like he'd been run over by a truck?

Random thoughts, random questions. All just floating there, taunting him, never quite coming together.

This, whatever this was, totally sucked.

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Sam hadn't been wrong when he'd steeled himself for a long night of research. After a brief respite for food and fruit juice followed by a walk through the hospital, and a freshen-up in the mens' room, he'd felt vaguely human again; but now several mind-numbing hours and zero success later he was feeling like a wreck again.

Anastasia Kingburne. That was the woman's name. Not exactly a common name, so on the face of matters, Sam could have been forgiven for thinking it would be quite easy to find her amongst the town records.

But when had his luck ever been that good?

He'd been searching the birth, death and census records of every sizeable town in Massachussets, followed by the not-so-sizeable ones. He'd trawled the records for every possible variant of Anastasia and Kingburne, searching for other Kingburnes and finding several, all from around the same area and the same time, so presumably the rest of the family, including one Thomas Clarence Kingburne; heir to the Kingburne estate, Adele's erstwhile husband and, it seemed, all-round obnoxious asshole.

The guy had been dead a hundred and thirty years and Sam only knew him via words on a computer screen, but that didn't stop him wanting to punch the jerk's lights out.

But records on the final resting place of the mortal remains of the elusive Mrs Kingburne remained infuriatingly consipicuous by their absence. He couldn't even find a date of death, a cause of death, or place of death reported anywhere inamongst any of the interminably long lists of names he'd spent a day and a night examining.

Looking up over the top of his laptop at the stricken form of his brother, Sam suddenly had a moment of clarity. He could almost hear Dean's voice in his head, the really smug, annoying voice that Dean reserved purely for the purpose of pissing Sam off, and he could hear it, clear as a bell, mocking him for not thinking of this straight away.

She's a witch, genius.

What if you can't find any record of the cause of her death because there wasn't one, and what if there's no sign of a final resting place because there isn't one.

What if she's not dead?

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tbc