Four days and three cheap motels later the Winchester boys finally arrived at Knoxville. It was Sam's turn to drive and Dean was sleeping in the passenger seat, so Sam pulled up at a gas station to fill the tank and grab a local newspaper. He fell back into the driver's seat with a dull 'thunk' as he read the headline in the paper and set a fresh cup of coffee in the cup holder for Dean when he woke up. In bold print on the front page of the paper were the words "Woman killed in freak animal accident; family grieves". Skimming through the article, Sam stopped when his eyes reached a picture.
There was the family of the deceased, before the woman had died. A father, tall and strong looking, a twitch of a smile playing at his features, dark hair, eyes twinkling with nothing other than love, the woman (the mother Sam assumed) standing next to him, long blonde hair flowing, soft features shown only in a side-profile as she kissed her husband on the cheek, then there were two children; a boy and a girl. The boy looked older than the girl, and the caption underneath the picture said that he was 13 years old. He had blonde hair like his mother and green eyes, a smile brightening his face as he looked at his dad with that superhero adoration. The little girl was what had really made Sam stop, though. It was the girl from his vision. The same dark, long hair braided into pigtails. Still, the difference was drastic. In his vision this girl had looked terrified and pale. In the picture she looked happy and carefree, her teddy bear present in her arms and her blue eyes sparkling with energy, not paled with fear. The caption said that this little girl was 8 years old. Well, they were on the right track. Whenever John Winchester's coordinates matched up withSam's visions, there was no denying there had to be a connection.
Sam was about to wake Dean up when he saw his older brother rolling around as much as the passenger seat of the Impala would allow and changed his mind, deciding to let the smell of coffee wake him up. In the meantime, Sam read the article over more thoroughly.
"Get this. This family has had two deaths already, and they've both been passed off as animal attacks," Sam said, typing a series of search words into his laptop.
Dean walked out of the hotel bathroom with one towel wrapped securely around his waist and another in his right hand, drying his hair. "Either they've got some seriously vicious animals around here or the government is once more trying to explain the unexplainable."
Dean's naturally sarcastic nature didn't fade one bit as he spoke about the government. The older Winchester grabbed a pile of autopsy pictures that his baby brother had managed to hack his way into. The people in the pictures, or rather remains of what used to be people, were torn, mauled, and disfigured beyond anything an animal could do. They weren't even recognizable. Whatever had happened to this girl, it was their area of expertise, not the science department of Tennessee's. The police didn't know what was really going on here. Not that they ever did. They just always seemed to manage to find a way to explain it, when it obviously wasn't that easy. Dean supposed it was easier for them to make it out as something they could understand, to enable them to place the blame on something tangible, rather than leave it unsolved, even if they still knew, in the back of their minds, that it would always be unsolved to them. But not to the Winchester brothers. Finding out what was really going on was what they did, and it looked as though they were going to have to do it once again. Dean pulled on a pair of faded blue jeans, a white t-shirt with a dark red collared shirt over it and his signature leather jacket.
"Anything on what this could be?" He asked.
Sam shook his head quickly before biting on his thumb and typing in a few new search words. This damned thing was proving harder to find than the youngest Winchester had expected. He clicked on a link and shrugged in his brother's direction before Dean could ask him again.
"I'm not sure yet. There's plenty of demonic animal lore, but so far nothing describes the….deformation of the wolf-like thing I saw."
"When was the last death in the family? Before the most recent one, I mean," Dean said, a hunch creeping into the back of his hunting mind. John Winchester had taught his eldest son well. He could grasp a hint of a clue long before someone else.
"2 months ago," Sam said, scrolling down farther in the hospital files he had managed to hack into after a good hour and a half.
"What about the first one?" Dean repeated his question.
"5 months ago," Sam said, now looking at his brother and realizing that the small glow behind Dean's eyes meant they may just be getting somewhere with this, "Why?"
Dean shrugged and put his watch on his right arm. He wasn't entirely surewhat he was cooking up in his mind, but he knew it was an instinct, and instincts were major for hunters. You followed them, it was just common sense. Dean knew that. Plus, he now seemed to have Sammy's interest.
"I'm just thinking…maybe it's not a demon. See if you can find anything on local hauntings, or rituals to bring an animal back in spirit…you know, summoning the spirit?"
It took Dean a moment, but right before Sam started typing in new search words the older brother spoke up again. "And then do me a favor and check past obituaries around 5 or 6 months ago. Look for a family dog."
Sam looked up from his computer once more with curiosity in his eyes and held Dean's gaze for a moment before speaking up himself. "What are you getting at, Dean?"
"Maybe something bad happened to this thing. Maybe it used to be just a dog, but it died. Then, you know some of those whack families that are way over attached to their pets and severely need therapy, maybe this family is one of them and went somewhere to contact the spirit and when they did it went way off the beaten path and the family accidentally brought their puppy pal back to life," Dean was about to continue when Sam finished for him.
"And now the dog wants revenge," he paused for a moment, realizing how absurd that sounded, "Can dogs even want revenge?"
"Hell yeah. A vicious spirit of anything can latch onto a family until they're all dead if that's what it wants."
Sam's eyebrows raised and he typed in a brand new string of search words originating from Dean's new thought while Dean himself poured them both a cup of coffee and picked up their dad's journal on the way back to where Sam sat. He gave Sam his cup of coffee and took a drink of his own. Untying John's journal, Dean flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He stopped at one particularly yellowed page with a couple drawings, an article from a past newspaper and a whole lot of small, cramped handwriting.
"Looks like Dad has already dealt with this sort of thing. It's one of his more vague entries, but listen to this: July, 2004, Tennessee. Angry spirit of horse after family. Local psychic may be cause," Dean read aloud, "It stops there, so he must have either put a lid on it or was forced to move on to bigger things. I'm going to go downtown and check out the local psychics, call me if you find anything."
Dean walked out the door and headed down the road before flipping his cell phone open. He punched in a series of numbers that happened to belong to his father's cell phone and waited for the voicemail to pick up. He hadn't expected John Winchester to actually answer, though it would have been nice. Once his father's voice gave way to the beep Dean started talking.
"Dad, this is Dean. We got your coordinates, but I've got to say this is something new. Animal spirits? What's with that? I mean, we could be working on something much bigger, leading to the thign that killed mom, and you've got us playing ghostbusters? Anyways, just letting you know. Bye."
Back at the hotel Sam was busy clicking, reading, hacking, and cross-referencing. He hadn't found much for angry animal spirit stories, but it turned out that Dean had been right, the family that seemed to be targeted did have a pet that died 5 and ½ months ago. Not only that, it had been a husky and had been caught in farm machinery. He had to give it to his big brother. When Dean got a hunch he knew what he was doing. Now they had to figure out what made the thing come back for revenge. It had been lying low, or whatever animals brought back from the dead did, for 2 months, so why now? What was so special that it could make the vengeful spirit come back? That was the question that Sam was falling short on answers with. He finished off his cup of coffee and grabbed his cell phone off the bedside table. Sam knew that as soon as he knew something Dean would want to know it. Not to mention Sam was hoping Dean would have an explanation to the spread-out killings. After dialing Dean's number Sam sat back down at the computer to keep searching.
Dean was at the 5th psychic building he had found so far when his cell phone rang. He picked up and answered.
"About time. Find anything?"
"A little bit. The family did have a dog. A husky, died 5 and ½ months ago after it got caught in farm equipment," Sam took a moment to look up a couple more things, "There's not much about animals being brought back from the dead, but from what I can gather you need someone to keep control of it once it's back or it won't be able to distinguish between friend and foe, it'll just kill anyone."
Dean took a moment to process the information and move outside. This wasn't exactly a conversation he thought the whole lobby at the psychic building needed to hear. "So there's no emotional attachment between the dog and the family?"
"Nothing other than it used to be theirs, and maybe someone in the family is controlling it, but I'd put more money on a psychic with much free time on his hands. How's that going anyway?" Sam asked.
Dean ran a hand through his hair and sighed. Psychics seemed to be everywhere, which was weird for a hick town, but not a single one of them specialized in the summoning of animal spirits.
"Well, from three different psychics I've found out that I'm going to have good luck in love, not that that's news to me, and one other told me that I needed a serious aura cleansing, but not a single animal spirit summoning relating to the family," Dean said, "Still, there's an insane amount of psychics around here. Apparently the good people of Knoxville have some bad uncertainty issues."
"Keep trying, oh sex god, I'm doing my best over here. I just need some more time," Sam said before both brothers bade the other goodbye and hung up their phones.
Dean stashed his cell in his pocket and went back into the latest psychic building. There had to be about 25 people in the lobby, and according to the sign hanging over a desk there were 3 psychics in right now. Either there were a lot of gifted people in this town or a lot of phonies faking it to make a buck. Dean could only hope for the former. Either way he had to keep going until he found something, any trace of a connection to the family. After about 15 more minutes of waiting, Dean's number was called (yeah, a psychic building with a number system) and he got up, following a man into a darker room with a more mystic atmosphere. The man sat down in a chair on one side of a small round table and gestured for Dean to sit down at the other. He obliged and took a seat. He hoped this would be the lucky one because if one more psychic told him he needed an aura cleansing he was going to give up.