Chapter 3

"Get your asses out here, you fairy motherfuckers!" Dean stood in the center of the fairy circle, shouting at the top of his voice. "Come out and talk to me, or I swear to god, I'll torch your fucking dance floor and salt the earth, don't think I won't!"

Nothing. Silence except for the gurgling of the stream and the faint rustling of trees in the wind. Dean clenched his fists, took a few deep breaths, and forced himself to think. Calm. He needed to be calm. This wasn't like the time in Minnesota. Fairies were well-known for carrying people off, but they weren't especially known for murdering them. Sam was probably -- almost certainly -- definitely -- alive. And he knew enough not to take candy from strangers. Dean could get him back. Would get him back. He just needed a plan. Standing in the middle of the woods and shouting was not a plan. Calm. He needed to be calm. He needed to know what he was dealing with.

His watch said it was eleven o'clock. He had no idea how the fuck it had gotten to be eleven o'clock, but it meant that the library and all the bookstores would likely be closed. Well, it wasn't as if that had ever stopped him before. Dean switched on his flashlight -- not his, Sam's flashlight, which he was going to return as soon as he got Sam back, which he definitely would -- and began the long trudge back to the car.

The library in Asheville was closed, but their security was a joke. By midnight, Dean was seated at a rickety table in the back, staring grimly at the pile of books he'd picked out as possibly useful. The Complete Brothers Grimm. Early English Ballads. Folk Tales of the British Isles. Not the sort of thing he generally dug up for research, but probably the best thing he was going to find in a small-town library in North Carolina. Dean sighed, propped the flashlight against a pile of reference books some previous patron had left behind, and flipped open the Brothers Grimm.

Three hours later, he had little to show for his efforts beyond a pounding headache and a general conviction that the Grimms were sick fucks. The stories in all the books seemed to repeat each other over and over, and most of them confirmed what he already knew, but none contained any useful instructions. And for once, his father's journal had nothing helpful to add, either. John Winchester had done the Minneapolis job solo, and would neither speak nor write about it afterwards. Dean eyed the folk tales book, and wondered uneasily if his father had a geas on him. It wasn't a particularly helpful thought, so he shoved it aside and went back to his reading.

By five in the morning, the words on the pages were beginning to look like meaningless squiggles, and Dean decided it was time to quit. He was bleary-eyed and shaking with exhaustion, but he had a basic idea of what he needed to do next. The fairies couldn't be forced, at least not by the likes of Dean Winchester, but they could be bargained with. It was just a matter of finding one to talk to. And Dean was pretty sure he knew where to look.

Ranger Carlisle must've been sleeping the sleep of the not-entirely-innocent, because it took two minutes of pounding on the cabin door to bring him shuffling out in his robe and pajamas. He leaned against the doorframe and blinked sleepily at Dean.

"You're that detective from yesterday... do you have any idea what time it is?"

"Do I look like I care?" Dean shoved his shoulder against the door, forcing Carlisle back a step. "Where is it? I want to talk to it."

"Talk to what?" Carlisle's expression was still confused and sleepy, but a hint of apprehension began to creep in. "You can't just barge--"

"Your brownie, kobold, whatever it is. The thing that does your cooking and cleaning for you, the thing you leave the milk out for." Dean gave another shove and squeezed through the gap in the door before Carlisle had a chance to close it. "And don't you dare try to tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. I don't want to hurt the thing, okay? I just want to talk to it."

"I--" Carlisle shifted from foot to foot, watching Dean with wary eyes. Dean supposed he was looking pretty psychotic by that point, but he figured he had good reason. Still, he forced himself to stay where he was and to speak in a quiet, reasonably steady voice.

"Look, Carlisle, if you know they're here, then you must know what they've been doing. They took Janet Macalvie, and last night they took my brother."

"Your brother?"

"Yes. Look, I'm really not in the mood to explain right now. I just need to talk to the fairies." Dean winced and rubbed his eyes as the utter insanity of that statement caught up with him. If he was wrong, if Carlisle was just a kindly old coot with a neatness fetish, then this conversation was likely to end with Dean locked in a padded room somewhere, and then there'd be no one around at all to haul Sam's sorry ass out of trouble.

Well, the words were out of his mouth now. Nothing left to do but carry on. "Look, I don't want to mess with them, all right? I'm not stupid. I just want to talk with them, make a deal. So just call up... whatever it is you call up, and we'll work it out like civilized people and elves, all right?"

Carlisle still hesitated, and Dean had to fight down the urge to grab the bastard by the front of his flannel jammies and shake him till his teeth rattled.

"I'd like to help you," he said finally, "but I can't make him come on command, and I can't make him talk to you, either. Come back at midnight, and if he wants to be seen, you'll see him."

"Midnight?" Dean heard his own voice rising, eliciting a twitch and quick step backwards from Carlisle. "It's six in the goddamn morning!"

"I'm sorry." Carlisle really did look sympathetic, which only made Dean want to punch him all the more. "But if you really know what you say you do, then you know I can't do any better than this. Come back at midnight, and maybe Tam will speak with you."

For a moment, Dean was tempted to plant himself on the couch and stay there until Carlisle gave him a better answer, but he could see it was no use. He was fairly sure the ranger wasn't lying, and picking a fight with the only person around who might help would only make things worse. Dean rubbed his face, and bit back an exhausted sigh at the thought of the drive back to town. He needed sleep, and food, and more time to think. It wouldn't do Sam any good if Dean keeled over in the middle of a rescue attempt.

"Midnight," he muttered. "Fine. I'll be here."

It was one of the longest days of Dean's life. He spent most of it at the library, alternating between reading his way through the folklore section and simply sleeping with his head down on the table. The librarians gave him funny looks from time to time, but made no attempt to actually throw him out, for which he was grateful.

He thought he knew now why Sam had been taken. "Young and good-looking" might be a necessary condition for fairy abduction, but it was not always sufficient. The Fae went for artsy types, and for the magically sensitive. Margaret Benning had been a witch. Two of the other missing persons on Sam's list had been musicians. Janet Macalvie was a photographer, which apparently qualified. And then there was Sam and his Shining, which apparently doomed him to go through life with the psychic equivalent of a "kick me" sign on his back.

Dean tried to look on the bright side. It seemed that the Fae only swiped people they actually liked, which meant murder or torture probably weren't part of the plan. Unless Sam managed to piss them off somehow, but Sam hardly ever pissed off people who weren't blood relatives. Dean kept telling himself that as he popped an aspirin and tackled The Great Encyclopedia of Faeries.

By the time the library closed, he was so twitchy he was practically vibrating. The afternoon-shift librarian looked distinctly relieved to close the door behind him, and Dean himself was relieved to just be moving. He spent nearly two hours wandering in circles around downtown Asheville trying to walk off the jitters, returned to the hostel for dinner, then went out and walked some more. All this endless not doing anything was driving him nuts. He wanted to be out questioning somebody, looking for something, driving somewhere, beating something up... hell, just sitting down someplace quiet and cleaning the guns would be a constructive thing to do, except there wasn't enough privacy at the hostel.

Eventually, aimless walking began to feel no better than doing nothing, so he got into the car and drove back to Pisgah, found the clearing again, made yet another inspection of the fairy ring. There was nothing new to see, of course, just grass and toadstools again. If the fairy host were having a hoe-down in there, they were doing it invisibly. And very quietly.

He did see some birds fluttering in the trees above the stream again, but it was getting dark by then, and he couldn't make out the markings.

At eleven-thirty, he stood on Carlisle's front porch and banged on the door until a very annoyed Carlisle came to let him in.

"You're early," he grumbled.

"Deal." Dean planted himself on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. "So, you sure you can't make it pop up a few minutes early?"

Carlisle looked even more annoyed. "I told you, didn't I? I don't make him pop up at all. Tam comes when he wills, and that happens to be midnight."

"Fine." Dean folded his arms across his chest and slouched a little deeper into the sofa cushions. "That's all I need in my life, punctual fairies. If this Tam is so freaking independent, how'd you get it to keep house for you?"

"I didn't. He just showed up one night three years ago, and took it upon himself. Once I realized what was going on, I started putting the milk out." Carlisle's expression shifted from irritation to faint amusement. "After all, I don't especially like cooking and cleaning for myself."

"Three years." Dean shook his head. "You've known they were here for three years and you never did a thing."

"They've never done any harm before! And what exactly was I supposed to do -- report them to the National Forest Service?"

"Yeah, well..." Dean couldn't argue the point, really. "You have to do something now, you know that, don't you? Rope off that clearing. Declare it a pollution hazard, or an endangered mosquito species habitat or something, I don't care. We can't have people being carried off every few years."

Carlisle shook his head. "It doesn't work that way, son. I don't tell the Forest Service what to do anymore than I tell the Folk. Besides, short of paving the place over with cold iron, there just ain't no way of keeping people out, or keeping them in. Some things, we just have to live with."

"Speak for yourself," Dean said.

Carlisle made no reply to that, and Dean wasn't especially in the mood to continue the conversation, either. They sat in stiff silence on opposite ends of the couch, barely looking at each other, until the digital clock on Carlisle's desk showed two minutes to midnight. Then Carlisle got up, looking wary, and headed for the kitchen. Dean started to rise, too, but Carlisle waved him back.

"Wait here. I'll call you when it's all right to come in." And he shut the door behind him. Dean started to rise, then gathered the last remaining shreds of his temper and stayed put. He'd waited all day. He wasn't about to fuck it up now because he couldn't wait two more minutes.

But if that thing in there doesn't tell me where Sammy is, I'm going to kick its fey behind back to the old country.

There was a burst of noise from the kitchen, as if all the dishes in all the cabinets were rattling against each other. Dean jumped to his feet, but the racket was followed by Carlisle's voice, low and indistinct. Dean couldn't make out what he was saying, or if anyone was speaking back, but at least the man wasn't screaming for help. Dean stopped a couple of paces away from the door and told himself that if this... this whatever-it-was has spent the past three years cleaning Carlisle's house and cooking his meals, it probably wasn't going to suddenly rip his throat out just because he asked it to talk to somebody. Probably.

More clanking, more quiet muttering, and then the door swung open.

"Come on in," Carlisle called out.

Dean stepped into the kitchen. It was a long, narrow room lit by a single bare bulb in the center of the ceiling. Carlisle stood leaning against the refrigerator door, looking tense but not frightened. Perched across the room from him, on the counter next to the sink, was a creature that looked like a cross between a very small old man and a very large toad. It had a bald head and a huge, bushy brown beard through which a wide, thin-lipped mouth was visible. Squatting, it was maybe a foot tall, and the beard hid its body except for the twiggy arms and legs that stuck out the sides at sharp angles, the hands and feet much too large for the limbs that held them.

The sink next to it was filled with water and billowing suds. Cups and plates and the occasional piece of silverware bobbed up and down in the suds, occasionally clanking against each other while a scrub brush scoured them clean.

"Cool," Dean said. The brownie stared at him with huge, unblinking eyes, all green iris and black pupil, not a hint of white visible at the corners. Dean thought it didn't look pleased.

Carlisle cleared his throat. "Tam, this is Rob Ha--"

"Dean Winchester," Dean said quickly. Everything he'd read indicated that lying to fairies was a really bad idea, especially if you wanted to bargain with them.

Carlisle frowned at him, but didn't press the point.

"Dean Winchester, this is Tam. He's agreed to help you."

"Thanks." Dean stepped forward and held his hand out to shake, but Tam skittered back, bristling. The dishes above the sink all collapsed noisily into in, splashing droplets of soapy water all over the place.

"Keep back." The brownie's voice was low and raspy, like the dry scrape of wood against wood. "Got the stink of cold iron all over you."

Well, excuse me for living. Dean shoved his hands in his pockets. "Okay, fine, I'm keeping back. This far enough for you?" He moved to stand next to Carlisle, the fridge at his back. "I'm not here to keep you from your housecleaning, okay? I just want--"

"I know what you want," Tam rasped. "Green Lady took a mortal last night. Your brother, I hear."

"Yeah." Dean's chest felt tight all of a sudden. He'd thought he'd been dealing pretty well, but hearing the whole mess summed up like that by a stranger -- a not even human stranger, looking at him with something like pity in those weird green eyes -- gave him the chills. He found himself pulling his jacket tighter around himself, huddling into the protective embrace of worn leather, clenching his hand around the car keys in his pocket.

Buck up, Winchester, you'll be wishing for a security blankie next. Dean stood up straight and glared at Tam, who glared back, unimpressed.

"This Green Lady -- she's your queen?"

The noise Tam made at that really did sound like a toad croaking. It took Dean a moment to figure out that it was probably a laugh.

"Likes to say she is. And there's some that like to believe her. Others say she ain't. Me, I do my work and pay no mind."

"Right," Dean rolled his eyes. "I'm not too keen on your court politics either. All I want to know is, how do I make your green bitch give my brother back?"

"You don't." Tam made the croaking sound again, and the tightness in Dean's chest threatened to choke him. "Proper queen or no, the likes of you don't make the Lady do anything."

"The likes of me," Dean said tightly, "are going to do a lot of damage to the likes of you if I don't get a better answer than that."

Carlisle coughed nervously beside him, but Tam looked more amused than threatened. Or at least, Dean thought that weird scrunching of the brownie's face was amusement.

"I said you can't make her. Can strike a bargain, though. Get your hands on something she wants, and you can trade with her."

"Something she wants." All right, that made sense. "How do I find that?"

And now there was a definite grin on Tam's face, flashing teeth like yellow marbles.

"Seen any interesting birds around lately?"