Sam pulled into the gas station and cut the engine on the Impala. For a moment, he sat there, head against the seat rest, eyes closed. He just breathed, enjoying the silence, one hand on his forehead, rubbing, trying to work out the headache.
"You okay?" came Nathan's voice, sleepy and slow.
"Yeah. Just a headache."
"Yuck. Hate those."
A hand rested on Sam's neck. Nathan began squeezing the muscle in Sam's neck, massaging gently.
Sam laughed faintly. "Thanks. That's not where the headache is, though. It's sitting right behind my eyes."
Silence. Then, "Well. I know a pretty sure fire way to get rid of headaches," Nathan purred in a seductive voice.
He laughed again. "Yeah, that doesn't work well with me. If I have a headache, it just sort of makes it worse."
"You're not doing it right, then." Nathan began to move in his seat. His seatbelt unclicked.
"I swear to God, Nathan, if you climb on top of me while we're sitting in a gas station in full daylight, I will strangle you."
"So… Can I climb on top of you when we get to our motel tonight?"
Sam opened his eyes, just managing to refrain from rolling them. "I'm getting gas. Why don't you get some coffee? I'm going to make you drive the rest of the way." He climbed out of the car.
Nathan followed, his door slamming shut. "You take it, what? One sugar no cream?"
"Two sugars."
He clicked his tongue and pointed at Sam, fingers mocking guns. "Coming right up." He wandered off to the mini mart, rubbing his eyes as he went.
Sam laughed as he watched Nathan go and started to gas up the Impala. It had been impossible to get Nathan up that morning. He was worse than Dean and Rachel put together. At least those two got out of bed at the promise of coffee; Nathan had to be dragged, shoved into the car where he then lay, motionless against the window, snoring. And drooling. Which he didn't do while he was in bed.
Not that Sam had firsthand experience. But he hadn't heard Nathan snore all night. As for the drool… well. He was only assuming.
Sam had been fine with driving. Dean loved to drive and Sam rarely got the chance. But with the increasing headache, he just didn't want to. Let Nathan have a shot.
God. Dean was going to kill him when he found out. He only just started letting Rachel drive, and that'd only started after a hunt where Dean and Sam had both gotten banged up really bad. They'd both gotten head injuries, and Rachel had refused to let either one drive. Dean had breathed down her neck the entire time, but, after that, she'd been allowed into the rotation.
Sam was cleaning the windows when Nathan came back with two large cups of coffee. He stayed silent, merely handing it off, then leaning against the hood. His brow was furrowed, eyes narrowed. He sipped the coffee and looked off into the distance.
"Something on your mind?" Sam asked. He set the squeegee back into the bucket.
"Yeah. What do you think happened to her stuff?"
He frowned. Followed Nathan's eyes. "You think whoever took her donated her clothes to a thrift store? Seriously?"
"Well. The hotel would have kept the stuff after the missing persons report came through. But it was already gone. But there you guys said that it wasn't her clothes and stuff at the cabin. So. What happened to her stuff?"
"It was dumped."
Nathan shook his head. "No." He pulled away from the car. Stared walking to the store.
"Nathan? Nathan, come on, man." Sam followed him shaking his head. "This is crazy. Her stuff got dumped. Probably some homeless people found it, if that. It's gone."
"She was taken by someone she trusted, Sam," Nathan said. "We know that. Someone who burned the bodies for her. Who eased her foot out of that crack. Who took care of her out there."
"That doesn't mean…"
Nathan turned around, walking backwards. "What if the demon didn't possess whoever took her until later? Or, like, it was inside him, but didn't take control until the cabin?"
"What if it did?"
"Then they must have passed through this town. Road goes right through it. And if Rachel passed through any town with that demon, she would have tried to escape, even if it meant jumping out of a moving car. We would have heard about that. There was an APB out for her here, right?"
Sam nodded. "We called every town. Dean and I came through here. We checked."
"So?"
"No one had seen her."
"So, there you go."
"Except, no had seen her. Even if they donated her stuff… and why would they? How would they? They'd be seen by whoever was accepting the donations."
Nathan pointed at the drop off in the parking lot. Outside the truck were bags and boxes, people who had dropped things off with no attendant. "Besides," he added, "she probably stayed in the car. Whoever she was with did the drop off."
"That still doesn't answer why."
They were at the door now. Nathan smiled at Sam, batted his eyelashes. "Rachel would have done whatever she could to get clues to us. Even something as farfetched as this." With that, he pulled the door open and stepped inside.
The thrift store looked just like every other thrift store Sam had ever been into. Racks of clothes everywhere. Furniture and jumbled electronics. Books, tapes, records. The stale smell of dust mingled with some kind of cleaner.
"Nathan, this is crazy. We're not going to find anything. And I still think you're grasping at straws. Maybe she wasn't even in the car. Maybe she was in the trunk."
Nathan was heading straight to a rack of women's tee shirts. At Sam's comment, he shrugged. "They make 'em so you can open trunks from the inside now."
"Maybe it was an older model."
"Like we haven't locked each other in the trunk a million times to practice getting out."
"Please say that isn't true."
He smiled at Sam. "Okay. It isn't true."
"And I thought me and Dean were screwed up." He ran his hands through his hair. "Okay, but Nathan, think. Even if she got free or even if she managed to convince who she was with to donate her stuff, how we know it was even this town?"
Nathan didn't answer. After placing his coffee on the floor, he began pushing shirts on the rack aside, each movement harder than the last.
"Nathan," Sam said, voice softer, coming up next to him. "There's no way to know where they might have stopped. Maybe they stopped somewhere else."
"Then we stop at every town on the way."
"What?"
"I said we stop at every town from here to there!" Nathan shouted, rounding on Sam. "She would have found a way!"
"Nathan…"
"Stop arguing and start looking, dammit. Or go wait in the car!" He turned back to the shirts and continued looking.
For a moment, all Sam could do was stand and stare stupidly. Nathan was… good tempered and easy going. He didn't…snap.
Except, apparently, he did.
After a moment, he turned to the rack behind him. Sipped his coffee as he looked through the rack of tee-shirts. Tank tops. Like all thrift store clothes, they were a mishmash of "so new, why is it they here" to "dear God in heaven, why wasn't this tossed and what is that stain?"
And then…
"Nathan."
"What?"
"Look." He pulled the white tank top with Yale scrawled across the front from the rack. The top he'd seen a million times as Rachel had paced the room at night, before she disappeared into her and Dean's room where, Sam knew, it usually ended up on the floor until morning.
To Nathan, it was a lifeline. His eyes widened and mouth split into a grin. "Rachel!"
And, just like that, the search was on. They tore through the racks like madmen, looking for something, anything else they recognized. Sam found a couple shirts that looked familiar. Nathan snagged a jacket that still had her purple pen stashed in the inside pocket.
"I have no idea about pants," Sam said after they'd finished going through the shirts and jackets. "She wears jeans."
Nathan waved his hands dismissively at them. "Let's look at the books." He held the jacket against his chest tightly, like he was afraid to put it down. His knuckles were white as he clutched the fabric, but his face was set. Determined as he walked across the store to the books. "Look through the journals," he said when they got there. "See if any of them are written in or anything."
"Okay." Sam scanned the books until he saw some journals in the bottom bin. He crouched next to them and began flipping through.
He was surprised at how many journals there were. Most had pages ripped out, but some were practically brand new. The strangest were the scant few that still had writing in them. There was one written by a little girl about ten years old. Her picture was in it, a movie stub, and some drawings. There were only five entries, all about school and friends. He wondered what had happened to the girl. Why her journal was there.
Then he set it aside, a little creeped out. Reading other people's lives, especially mundane stuff like the thoughts of a ten year old kid, was uncomfortable.
That was the only journal with anything significant written in it. The rest had curse words scribbled across a page or doodles. Nothing much. Sam went through the whole box before pushing it back.
"No journal. Find any books?"
"Her Modern Demonolatry book and one of her books on magic charms," Nathan said absentmindedly. He was looking at a paperback book in his hand, frowning. Sam stood and looked over his shoulder. Nudged him. "Didn't think romance books would be your genre," he remarked on seeing the title. "No. But… I think this was Rachel's." He snorted. "Yeah, right. She doesn't read romance. She makes fun of them every time we go into a store. Does the dramatic readings of the back." "Yeah, she and I used to go to the bookstore all the time and do that," Nathan said a tad wistfully. He smiled up at Sam. "We were so obnoxious." "You, obnoxious?" Sam nudged Nathan again with his shoulder. "I can't imagine." Nathan beamed up at him before turning back to the book. "No, I just, okay. It's A Dark Night written by Rachel Fisher. There hero in it is Sir Nathan something or other. If I remember correctly, she bought it as a joke." He opened the front over. The author's name was underlined. When he flipped to the summary on the back, they saw Rachel underlined again and the name Nathan boxed. "This was hers," Nathan said. "There's gotta be some kind of message in here. I'm taking it." "Taking?" He rolled his eyes. "Buying, whatever. Come on. Let's buy this stuff and hit the road again. We've got a cabin to explore."