DJ looked away from his drink, sweating on its coaster on the end table as the ice slowly melted and watered down the whiskey. He checked his phone again, less a habit and more a nervous tic now that he was aware that the twins were on the road again. Nothing. Goddamnit. Usually, he would have found the low, murmuring tones of nostalgic conversation emanating from the kitchen soothing; he might have even wandered closer and listened to their hushed remembrances of the good old days and loved ones lost. However, for the past hour he'd been eyeballing the steadily disappearing bottle of Johnny Labinski and wondering whether Jody or Donna had even noticed how much of that was his dad's doing.
"Still nothing?"
DJ startled as Patience dropped unexpectedly onto the other end of the couch. It was approaching midnight; Alex and the boys had long since taken their leave and gone home, and he'd thought that Patience had turned in for the evening. Apparently not.
"Uh, no. Not yet," he said, smiling tightly.
"I could scry on them for you," she offered, almost flippantly. "If you want."
He bit his lip and stared hard at the idle thread for a beat, sorely tempted. Then his dad laughed in the kitchen—a guttural, discordant sound—and DJ looked up again, frowning.
"No thanks," he sighed, picking up his own drink and clinking the ice against the side of the glass. "They're not really big on witchcraft."
"Suit yourself," Patience adjusted her bonnet and settled deeper into the couch. "You should let me teach you my tracking spell, at least. You know they don't have their GPS on; they don't want their daddy tracking them down."
DJ did know; he'd already tried that. Patience smirked at him knowingly.
"Fine," he agreed, turning to face her and tucking his feet up under him. "Show me."
Clearly pleased, Patience hooked her ankle around one leg of the coffee table and dragged it nearer. From the pocket of her robe, she produced a drawstring leather pouch and her own phone, setting both on the table.
"Got a picture?" she asked, more instruction than question in her voice.
Obediently, DJ scrolled through his saved photos until he came across one he thought would do the trick; he showed it to Patience, who nodded approvingly.
"Cute," she said. "Set it down here with the rest."
She took a moment to open the navigation app on her phone before emptying the contents of the little bag into the palm of her hand.
"Lithomantic gems," she explained, holding them out for his inspection. "Most of these were my dad's; I've added a few of my own over the years."
He looked but didn't touch; most of the collection were recognizable precious or semi-precious stones no larger than a thumbnail, but there were a few polished pieces he didn't know on sight. Patience sorted through them with her fingertips and plucked out several of them, slipping the rest back into the bag.
"You can choose the stones you need based on the question you're asking," she continued, snagging him by the wrist and turning his hand palm up. "Right now, we're asking for location and condition; we wanna know where those boys are, and how they're doing."
Patience tucked the stones into his hand one at a time, delineating their meanings and uses as she transferred them.
"Moonstone, for the boys' personal stone; they are werewolves, after all. It should resonate well. We've got a piece of silicon, since we're not going analog. Hematite to ground the spell—it'll zero in on where the energy we channel is coming from. The diamond will let us know whether they're in any danger; I'm also going to use my opal, but just keep in mind that it tends to get a bit dramatic—very doom and gloom. The citrine will let us know if they're having any luck; malachite if they're finding the answers they need. Now, the jasper has layers of meaning, but essentially we're going to use it to see if the boys need anything; we'll probably get a positive read off of that one, because hunters always need something. Combining it with other stones will get you more specific answers, which is what these other little beauties are for; we'll see how you feel about those after you cast them."
She closed his fingers around the stones and gestured to the space on the table between their two phones, indicating that he should roll the stones out on the table like dice.
"Is there an incantation?" he asked, shifting them thoughtfully in his hand.
Patience shook her head slightly, earrings jingling.
"There are lots of different methods for casting stones—you can use all clear crystals and read the light signatures, you can cast your whole collection and read the patterns, you can cast just two stones for yes or no questions, you can use a divining circle, some folks pray—but there's no incantation that I know of; it's mostly intuitive," she narrowed her eyes at him and gestured again. "Go on."
"Yahtzee," he muttered, flicking his wrist to scatter the stones.
The malachite went flying off the table, but the rest skittered and spun, rattling across the tabletop for an indeterminate period before coming to rest. The digital map on the screen of Patience's phone immediately began to scroll and swirl around.
"You're a little heavy-handed," Patience informed him archly, raising one eyebrow.
"I'm guessing that's not great," DJ said, pointing to the striated blue-green stone that had bounced and rolled across the floor.
Patience chuckled warmly and clucked her tongue.
"Not especially," she replied, picking up her phone. "They're in Lincoln; that's a long way from Quad Cities."
DJ furrowed his brow, perplexed.
"Why would they leave if they haven't solved the case?"
"Hold your horses, sugar," Patience admonished. "Let's finish the reading before we jump to any conclusions."
He returned his attention to the table and nodded, abashed.
"Right; so what am I looking for?"
"For a reading like this, the personal stone is going to be the center of the casting. The closer the other stones are, the more likely they are to be important. You're going to ignore the hematite and silicon, though," Patience clarified.
DJ's fingers itched for something to write with as he studied the pattern in front of him; there seemed to be a lot going on. The citrine and moonstone were nestled beside each other, which seemed at odds with the malachite that was halfway across the room. If he superimposed a mental image of concentric circles, the diamond and opal were the next nearest to the moonstone, even though they were about as far apart from one another as they could get within that orbit. True to Patience's word, the jasper had its own small collection of satellite stones in varying colors and levels of opacity, and he couldn't make heads or tails of it. He looked up at Patience after several long minutes of study and shrugged helplessly.
"Come on, boy! At least give me your first impression. Prove you were at least listening to me," she demanded, throwing up her hands.
"I was listening," DJ said defensively. "It just doesn't make any sense. They're in luck, but they don't have any answers? They may or may not be in danger? They need things, but you already told me that, and you didn't tell me what any of the other stones meant. Oh, and they're in the wrong fucking city. State. Whatever."
Patience sighed and shook her head, looking disappointed.
"It's too bad you're not a psychic like your daddy," she commented ruefully. "This is a lot harder when you have to rely on books."
"Dad's not psychic," DJ mumbled, propping his chin up on his hands to scrutinize the stones some more.
Patience scoffed.
"Honey, just because he's scared of his gift doesn't mean it isn't there," she informed him briskly, rolling up her sleeves. "I'm just sorry he didn't pass it on to you. I wouldn't mind a student."
He didn't have time to formulate a response, as she had already launched into a rather dizzying interpretation that had him scrambling to keep up. It turned out that he wasn't all that far off; she mostly filled him in on the specifics of what Cass and Sam might need—food, money, rest, time—and fretted a bit that her opal might need to be recharged, whatever that meant. DJ struggled to pay attention; the rising volume and darkening timbre of the conversation in the kitchen was distracting. Patience noticed it too, pursing her lips disapprovingly as she gathered up her gems.
"Jody and Donna might need a hand in there," she said, nodding meaningfully in the direction of the raised voices.
As a general rule, his dad seldom drank to excess. Even when he did indulge, he tended to be a happy drunk, giggly and overly affectionate. But every now and then, when he'd had a few too many, he'd slip down into the maudlin. He tried, DJ knew, not to let his son see him that way. But he stood head and shoulders over both of his drinking buddies, and Aunt Jody had a bum leg; there was no way either of them were up to wrestling him down the hall to sleep it off. DJ sighed and pushed himself up off the couch.
"Thanks for the lesson," he said earnestly to Patience, pocketing his phone and leaning down to pick up the malachite.
She accepted it from him without comment, but he could feel her eyes on his back as he padded across the floor and slipped through the dining room into the kitchen. He came around the counter to find his dad slumped on the floor with his back against the refrigerator and his head between his knees, grumbling into his folded arms. Donna, bleary-eyed and swaying, was patting him awkwardly and attempting to glare at Jody, currently in possession of the near-empty bottle of whiskey and looking suspiciously sober.
"I told him he'd had enough," Jody said, answering DJ's unspoken query. "He didn't agree."
DJ rolled his eyes and crouched down in front of his dad, tugging his hands away from his face and setting them on his own shoulders.
"Come on, old man," he urged quietly, catching him under the arms to haul him upright. "Let's get you to bed."
"Dean?" Dad groaned, lurching unsteadily to his feet.
Donna hovered, hands fluttering, until DJ waved her off.
"I've got him," he assured her, adjusting to get a better grip.
"Dean, you're the best," Dad mumbled into his shoulder as they staggered out into the hall.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," DJ muttered, steering them towards his dad's room. "I'm awesome."
"Nooo," the older man slurred, dragging out the vowel. "The best, Dean."
"Okay, Dad," he replied agreeably, shouldering the door open and fumbling for the light switch. "Here we go."
"The best thing I ever did," Dad went on, pawing at DJ's face and neck as he sat him down at the foot of the bed to unlace his boots. "The only thing I didn't fuck up."
"Shut up, Dad," DJ shushed him, throat tight. "Go to sleep."
He shoved at his dad until the older man dragged himself up the bed to bury his face in the pillows, still murmuring soft, sad nonsense. DJ tucked one of the blankets around his shoulders, kicked his boots under the bed so that he wouldn't trip over them in the morning, and flicked the lights off again on his way out. Shutting the door behind him, he leaned against the frame and compulsively checked his phone, just once more.