Chapter Four

And the ravens have clouded the sky, so that the sun which once lit thine hair is now black

Sam was right in his assessment of Dober's streets, but when was the kid ever wrong? The fact that Sam was hardly if ever incorrect about anything was enough to make Dean's blood boil, but the events unfolding before him were sufficient in flushing his veins with ice water, buckets and buckets of ice water.

Pierre Street, on the outskirts of town, was where all the action was taking place. As Dean pulled Black Beauty to the curb under an ancient oak tree, he stared through the reflections of the police cruisers' lights at the ranch house mobbed by emergency personnel. It was nothing he hadn't seen before, but something about hearing the anguishing screams of Jo, something about seeing Trude sitting on the trunk of her car with her knees to her chest and muddy sneakers dirtying a fine paint job made him want to slit his wrists – the human suffering, not the dirt flaking off and adhering itself onto the other Impala though it was very much wrong.

Trude, understandably so for a woman who had to witness her parents slaughter, sat in a completely trance-like state as she answered a policeman's questions. She looked not only broken, dazed, but…practiced, as if she had done this so many times it was a routine.

If Jo was used to anything it was the screaming she contributed to the moments in which Trude slipped into an offbeat coma. Two police officers were trying to calm her down, or hold her steady long enough for a man in a white lab coat to appear out of nowhere and pump her full of sedatives, but she wouldn't hear of it; she wanted to yell, wanted to grab at her hair with shaking hands, and by Hell she was going to do it. Her knees buckled, too, when the EMS team wheeled the body bag out of the front door and to the waiting ambulance.

It didn't help the moment at all that this was happening on a bright, sunny summer afternoon with not a cloud in the blue sky. By all rights it should be nighttime and a thunderstorm should have been raging or at least a light drizzle, but this kind of weather made the situation downright strange and even more awkward than normal. Even the people in their yards, splitting blinds and curtains if they were stationed within their homes, surveying the actions the sisters took and stamping check marks onto their Approved Reactions of a Death sheets in broad sunlight was close to dark comedy.

But it was evident that the McFarland sisters found nothing amusing about Herb's death. Whether he was their brother or a cousin five times removed didn't matter, what did matter was the fact that something killed him – heart attack or evil paranormal force – and if what the women in the gossip ring said and what Dean recounted rang true Trude McFarland knew about it before anyone else.

Neither Sam nor Dean was holding the card of how Trude knew or why, but the most important thing at the moment was that something came over her and made her start up Soft Top and drive like a bat out of the underworld to this house. The fact that she had blood on her and Jo didn't said something else: one of them went further into the house than the other and Dean would've guessed that Jo was forced to stay out by the car while her sister ran into the house to check on the status of Herb.

But how did she know? Actually, Dean already knew that. Whatever force made him feel like he weighed nothing, whatever being made its presence known in the wax job of Trude's car, whatever thing was humming told Trude what was going to happen. That had to have been it or she wouldn't have been so freaked out, wouldn't have said something so unlady like as "oh, shit". The better question: What the hell told her?

Dean had not a clue to that, but thought if maybe he started at Trude long enough, hugging herself so pathetically, he'd get the answer. Was he dealing with some kind of angel here? A poltergeist, a demon like the one who crashed those planes and the brothers had to exorcize, the ghost of a monkey pissed off for having to dance for quarters when it was alive? Currently there was no way to tell, because unless it showed itself or made contact with Dean again it could have been a stupid gnat for crying out loud.

Too bad he couldn't take his gun and shoot at it, that might help things along a little bit.

"Come on," Sam broke what little silence there was. "We're going to talk to the neighbors."

Dean could have kissed his brother for giving him an accuse to not focus on Jo's breakdown, but instead got out of his car and walked with him over to the closest lump of people to Herb's house. A man and young daughter of about thirteen, standing by a tractor mailbox and shaking their heads, still holding their gardening tools.

"Excuse us," Dean asked softly, "but what happened?"

The father, greying early for his age, moved his eyes away from the ranch house he shared a hedge fence with and to the brothers. "Came driving down the road like a maniac and barely shut the engine off before she was yelling at Josephine to stay in the car – we were planting some bulbs so we saw the whole thing – and ran inside the house. Nothing happened for a while, but when she came out with Herb's blood on her shirt sleeves that's when Josephine started acting up. Not long after the first of the police came."

For a thirteen-year-old the daughter was horribly short, but to make up for it she didn't destroy the English language like most of her peers. "Trude used to babysit me," she explained while craning her neck up to fawn over Sam, who completely missed the self-satisfied "Didn't I tell you?" look Dean gave him, "but not anymore of course. It's not that I don't like her, but she gives me the heebie-jeebies."

"Why?" Sam questioned politely, apparently using his nerdy good-looks to make her feel a little more comfortable, make him easier to talk to. "She seems like a nice enough person to me."

"Oh, and she is," the teenager agreed, "but she always seems to be bothered by something that's not really there. I never say anything about it to her because that would be rude, she might have a medical condition or something, and mentioning it might make her self-conscious. Lord knows if everyone in town thought she was loopy they wouldn't read her column and she works so hard on it."

Sam looked to Dean, then back to the girl. "That's very sweet of you…."

"Anna." She smiled shyly. "My name is Anna."

Dean, never one to like being left out of a conversation, leaned forward with his best swoon producing smile. "Such a pretty name for a pretty girl."

She blushed, but most likely would have giggled without any sign of stopping if the compliment had come from Sam who said, with a nod, "Thank you."

Together the Winchester brothers turned away from Herb's neighbors and made their way across the grass and through a rather large gap in the hedge with every intention of speaking with Trude about what really happened. How that was going to happen when every police station in each state of the union had a picture of Dean pinned to their bulletin boards was something they were going to have to find out as they went along.

It might have been a good sign that no one came running at them with batons at the ready when Sam and Dean came out of the hedge, stepped onto the concrete of the vast driveway, and it might also have been a good sign that neither of them was sprayed in the face with awesome amounts of pepper spray when they walked calmly to Trude's Impala. But taken into account the way the policeman talking to her looked at them when they came up to him and she those other two points seemed like one runt ant trying to keep a human dam from breaking.

With the nice policeman standing right there Dean didn't have the option of running away when Trude looked up at him, when he saw something dark pass not across her eyes but one of her dangling silver star earrings. It was creepy because by all rules of nature Dean should have been the only one to make a shadow like that dance across those earrings, but a.) the shadow came several seconds too late and b.) it was only her left earring and not her right (he knew because they rocked forward when Trude lifted her head and he could see both of them simultaneously). Gratefully, there was no humming accompanying that shadow and no sense of weightlessness.

"It's all right, Mark," Trude told the suspicious officer, "they're not strangers."

What was odder? The fact that Trude knew this policeman on a first name basis or how she barely knew Dean and Sam but didn't have them carted off the premises?

"They are to me, Trude, but if you say so…. I have everything I need here, I'll let you be now."

Trude, coming far enough out of her trance to smile softly at Mark the police officer, said a meek farewell to him. When he had gone, she said nothing to Sam or Dean and bade her time by staring at a fresh gasoline puddle on the driveway.

Sam was the one who tried to break the ice by explaining why they were there gently as he could. "We were passing through and saw the lights. Are you and Jo okay?"

It looked like Trude wanted to laugh there for a moment, but her face went back to being blank and she kept dissectingthat grease spot with her eyes. "We're fine, thank you, it's just…I came here with Jo and we found Herb, our loveable deadbeat cousin, in the hallway. Actually, I did. I made Jo stay in the car."

Dean sat down on the trunk beside Trude, more like leaned against it actually so he wouldn't damage it in any way, and watched the grease puddle with her. "Why?" After a long pause in which he received no reply, he tried a new tactic. "Sammy had a fire in his apartment a few weeks ago – seems like it's been months now. I had just left to go back to my car, drive off, but I turned around and when I busted open the door I just barely had time to pull him out of there…. It was like this voice in my head told me to go back, you know?"

Sam shifted his weight to his other foot, crossed his arms over his chest.

"Something like that," Trude replied. "Intuition."

The shadow now twisted across the face of her watch, Sam saw it, but there was no physical being in front of her.

"I'm a grief counselor," Dean fabricated suddenly. "If ever you want to talk about your feelings, about what happened in there, that voice in your head–" he slipped one of his emergency girl picking up numbers he kept in droves into her hand "–give me a call."

"Since when do grief counselors wear leather jackets, ripped jeans, and drive around in cherry Impalas?"

Dean smiled, stopped leaning against the trunk and out of mindless habit straighted out that leather jacket. "I like people to be comfortable with me so they feel more inclined to talk and if it means wearing ratty jeans and caressing classic cars so be it."

Trude might have smirked, even laughed, but the shadow now skipping across the jewels in her rings made her stop.

"I want you to call me, Trude. Everyone encounters shadows in their lives, demons that whisper things in our ears at night, but the trick is to defy them by living through them."

She met his eyes.

"Sam and I lost our parents, too, Trude so don't think I, we, won't understand you." He could feel Sam bristle as he said that, could see the look in his eyes in his mind: "Dad's still alive! We didn't lose him too. Just shut up!"

Trude, thinking over what Dean had said to her and finally making the connection between his choice of words and her little problem, nodded. "Alright, I will."

"That's a girl," Dean stated cordially. He apologized to Sam through his eyes, trying to communicate through their tied gazes that they were starting to get somewhere, but it didn't work so well. Sam was angry, his stare worse than anything the Ice Queen could come up with, and Dean could only frown.

Then something funny happened – funny strange, not funny ha ha.

Dean turned back to Trude to say good-bye, but when he locked on to her eyes he was losing weight at a rapid succession, so much so that he felt like if he didn't grab hold of something he'd float away like a balloon. He had nothing to hold on to and dared not risk grabbing at Trude because he might get himself thrown in jail for it. So he stood there, falling into her eyes which were wider than any Olympic sized swimming pool and bluer than Dober's sky.

The shadow crossed those eyes, darted from left to right, and brought with them that humming Dean had heard earlier. Only it wasn't humming, it was a song. The Dreidel Song of all things to sing, but there was a menacing quality to it and he couldn't make out the words. But he knew damn well that there was a kind of terrifying tone to it that would have made Dean wet his pants if it hadn't stopped just as suddenly as it had started.

Trude moved her eyes away from Dean same as last time this happened, to something behind him, and when he turned to see what she was looking at he was met with the vision of an oak branch breaking from the tree with a horrendously loud crack! and crashing down onto his beloved.

As if a hot fireplace poker had sliced clean through it, Dean grasped at his heart with one hand, reached toward his automobile with the other. "My car," he croaked weakly. "My beautiful car!" He ran over to it like if he didn't the very fabric of the universe would unravel, like if he didn't that large, broken piece of oak would slice Black Beauty in half with the ease of a warm knife through butter.

Dean put his hands out to her, but kept pulling them away in such a manner one would have thought the car was radiating a thousand degree heat. But, though he was petrified of touching her and causing her to be razed more, Dean made a mantra out of the words "steel frame" and began repeating them over and over again, in a way begging to some higher power for the Impala's steel frame to have miraculously saved its engine.

Too shocked to cry, but with words rising to such heights in spite of that, Dean tried to comfort his car the best way he could. "It'll be okay, girl. We're going to get this off of you and you'll be all right." His voice clutched in his throat, proof he didn't believe his own words. But maybe….

At the angle the limb had fallen on it, it looked as though the Impala's frame had absorbed the whole of the blow. The oak branch hadn't slid either, but remained lodged in the dent – dear, God, that dent! – on the roof; eighty percent of it was resting away from the engine.

It was with this realization that Dean noticed Sam and Trude standing on either side of him, Sam with his hand on Dean's shoulder.

Trude, for being both cursed and a death magnet, had the remarkable ability to bounce back to normalcy with the agility of a circus flea – that or she relished not having to face Herb's death. As she swatted at something to her right, make-believing it was a fly, she looked to the brothers. "If you can get the limb off her I can have a look at the engine. I used to be a mechanic before getting my job at the Chronicle; you can't trust cars this old with the guys in this town, I'm afraid."

Dean whimpered, causing Sam to squeeze his brother's shoulder. "At a time like this?"

"It's the least I can do for Dean allowing me to talk to him. I've told the police everything they need to know, Jo can answer some questions for a while. I'm sorry to say you can't used a chainsaw–" again Dean made a sad baying noise "–for this and risk cutting into the sheet metal, but it's pretty thin for a tree limb and doesn't look that heavy, maybe we could roll it. It'll scratch up the paint, but something has to give – Dean, I'm so sorry."

He shrugged, eyes glossy, growing increasingly numb to the world and would continue doing so as long as Black Beauty had a tree branch pinning her to the ground, an engine that was quite possibly broken beyond repair, and a connection with some kind of horrible creature he wanted nothing to do with. Especially if said creature was the thing Dean heard cackling, faintly like it was being carried on the breeze to him from a great distance, but cackling nonetheless.