Enter light/ Come dawn…
When did Sammy go upstairs? I have no idea. The second I had her in my arms everything else just faded away. Nothing else mattered. When the song was over I noticed how truly tired she was. I wanted to kiss her… God but I wanted to kiss her! But I didn't. Instead I gently traced the raccoon-like circles she had around her eyes with a finger. "We're going to have to do something about these hmmm?" "I haven't slept much in the last month or so. I don't plan to either until this whole mess is over." That's my girl. Oh she's always been a fighter. Sure I'm proud of her for it but that doesn't mean I'm going to let her get away with it this time. So I tucked a stray strand of gold behind her ear and looked her straight in the eye. "Get some sleep. Sammy'n I are here, you're safe." She arched an eyebrow at my no-nonsense tone. "Oh really? And while the two of you take care of everyone else who takes care of you?" Her mother's daughter alright. "We take care of each other. Now off with you to bed." I turned her around and pointed her at the stairs. I should have known better than to try and tell her what to do. She just dug her heels in. I couldn't budge her. "I'm not going anywhere. First of all this is my house, second you were never able to tell me what to do and third if you want to move me you'll have to pick me up and carry me." I knew better than to argue. Hanging my head I sighed and conceded and said the words I never thought I'd ever say. "Can we compromise then?" Yes, Dean Winchester the stubborn 'my way or the highway' guy suggested compromise. Get over it already. Man am I glad Sammy was already in bed. I'd never hear the end of it.
"Get the quilt and curl up on the couch while we work and if you start feeling tired close your eyes." It was reasonable and I knew she couldn't argue it… well she could try but I would either win or pick her up and physically make her do it in which case I would also win. Thank god she decided to go with reason because I'm not sure I was up for wrestling with her given how little sleep I've had myself lately.
So while she curled up with a book I checked the windows and doors, bolting everything securely shut for the night in case we should get some late night furry visitors. I found Sammy fast asleep with a book on his chest. As usual he'd fallen asleep reading. I shut off the light, marked the page he was reading before putting the book aside and pulled the blanket up over him. He might be an adult now, but I'm still his big brother.
Annie was already fast asleep by the time I got back from doing my rounds. It's still so hard to believe that she's not some sort of hallucination. She's alive and she looks just the same as she did sixteen years ago only older in a curvy, delicious sort of way. Yeah, delicious is most definitely the word I would use to describe her.
I think I fell asleep somewhere close to one again. I remember reading a passage in this really old book of German legends about a human skin belt… really disgusting stuff… I blinked and I was smack in the middle of a dream again.
It was dark, so very dark. Dad and I were following wolf tracks up the Franconia Notch trail. Annie was gone and I wanted them all dead too. Dad had given me one of the shotguns loaded with silver bullets. We weren't really sure if it would work… there were quite a few variations to the legends and it was hard to tell which one was the right one to go with. They all had one thing in common though: kill the alpha wolf and the rest either change back or die too. That was the plan. Kill the alpha wolf and get the hell out of there.
We found them just before midnight in a clearing about halfway up the foot trail. The sound of water surrounded us from the Flumes but even that didn't drown out the wet cracking sound of the wolves enjoying their meal. They'd somehow dragged up a cow. How the heck they'd got it up the rickety wooden stairs that were the only way up the flume walls I'll never know. There they were, ten of them crunching away at the Holstein's insides. Thank god it hadn't been a human, I think I may have thrown up. I was awfully close already.
It wasn't hard to tell which one was their leader. He had glowing black eyes, nasty sharp looking fangs and his pelt was tinted a light grey in the moonlight. Whenever he moved the wolves closest to him cringed away to a respectful distance. That was the one we needed to kill.
Dad took the first shot. It hit square in the old wolf's chest. The thing reared up on its hind legs and let out a blood curdling howl. I felt his hand on my shoulder telling me to stay hidden right where I was before he moved a couple of feet away to take his next shot. We must have been downwind because one of the younger wolves in the pack had scented him. He was attacked as he took the second shot. The shot went wide and my heart stopped as I saw them both go down. Dad pushed its head as far up above him as it would go. "Do it now Dean!" he shouted, and I fired. I'll never be positive of what happened next… it happened so quickly and I was so scared. It could have just been my imagination but I swear that as it fell off dad it changed to human form and then back again. It was Jack. I swear to god it was Jack. That's when I gave us away. I screamed his name long and loud.
I woke with his name a whisper on my lips, panting and heart racing as if I'd been running for hours. Annie was still fast asleep, though now she had her head on a pillow on my lap. I looked down at her immediately relieved and that's when I heard it again. It was the sound that woke me. Outside. It was coming from outside. Somewhere near the kitchen… scratching? No… too heavy for scratching. It was a heavy sound, like footsteps. My eyes drifted to the window hoping to see a tree branch or something so I wouldn't have to get up and wake Annie and Sammy. There was no branch, of course. The nearest tree grew close to ten feet away on the property line. No, instead there was a face. Jack's blue-gray eyes met mine through the window and I jumped up and off the couch, screaming his name as I had in the dream. In that moment I blinked and he was gone. Had that been part of the dream too?
Suddenly Sam was running down the stairs and Annie was next to me. They both were looking to me trying to figure out what was wrong. "Dean?" Sam asked. "I saw Jack in the window." I hate that my voice was shaking, my hands were too when I looked down at them. "Could it have been a dream?" Annie asked. "I mean, I'm the one who identified the bodies. Eight years old… that kind of thing stays with you. I'm positive he's dead." "I don't know Annie. I thought the alpha wolf was dead too, and I'm pretty sure he's still alive. It's possible that I dreamt it but I'm pretty sure I didn't. He was real."
"Well, there's only one way to know for sure, isn't there?" Good old Sam. What would I do without him? Our eyes met over Annie. We'd have to dig him up. It was the only way to be sure. She wouldn't like it and I wasn't looking forward to telling her… but it had to be done and we'd have to do it during the day. If that truly had been Jack he'd sleep with the rest of the pack during the day. It wasn't safe for Annie to be out at night. Now more than ever I was positive that they were back to finish the job. They wanted Annie and to get her they'd have to go through me.
As for Jack… well if it really was him I saw we'd cross that bridge when we came to it.
"Okay, so what have we learned so far? What of all this." I asked, waving at the massive piles of books that peppered the living room and dining room "can we use against these things." "Well for one" Sam answered "we know that, although they posses near invulnerability, they can be killed. It's just a matter of process of elimination to find out which method is the right one to kill them off." "Right, well I think we can eliminate the one that says we have to break the buckle on the human skin belt." Sam nodded agreement with me. "I like the sound of the silver bullet to the heart theory, but somehow it seems too easy. I mean, if that were the right one then this whole thing would have ended with you and Dad years ago."
"Okay, so we're looking for commonalities then, right?" We met Annie's question with nods. "Well what about this 'Beast of Gevaudan' legend. It shares something in common with just about every legend, and it has a plausible way to kill them that also agrees with most of the theories we've come across so far."
Okay, I was willing to buy into it and said as much. "As much as I hate to say it, I think she's right Sam. I mean, most of the kids that went missing were young girls." Sam picked up on my train of thought. "It wasn't until Dad shot the thing in the head that it finally fell off of you, right?" "Right. So we have a huge arsenal of silver bullets. We could use those for good measure…that way we're covering all of our bases. Aim for the head and the heart on the alpha dog and according to the legends we'll wipe out the whole pack at the same time. Those too far gone to turn back will die like their leader, the rest turn back into humans. I say once we kill the damned thing off we burn it too, like they did to the Gevaudan beast the second time around. Dad and I obviously did something wrong last time and I'm not taking any chances." "You did the best you could Dean…" I heard her words, I just didn't believe them. In my mind we definitely could have done more. So I did what I do best when it comes to emotions like those, I ignored them and changed the subject.
The next step was to find out if Jack was actually dead and buried, and then pick up the trail of the wolf pack. According to the legends, once a werewolf has a lair it tends to stick to it. They're not really into change. So it's a pretty safe bet that we were going to pay a late night visit to Franconia Notch again. Only this time we were going prepared. This time the s-o-b would die, and I was going to be damned sure his death would be permanent.
Six degrees of separation
Grave digging is nasty business no matter how you cut it. Doing it in broad daylight with a priest, the cemetery caretaker, the sister of the deceased and your little brother in a monkey suit posing as an FBI agent working a lead on a case makes it that much more awkward. The only possible consolation I could get out of this was that I was completely destroying my own hated monkey suit. The thought made me grin. One less costume for Sammy to make me wear…I could see the tear in the corner of his eye as he silently mouthed the word 'Armani'. Personally I didn't care who the hell made the damn thing. As long as I never had to wear it again it was all good. The thought had me shoveling away with a vengeance. It came as a surprise when I hit something solid somewhere around six feet into it.
Annie had mentioned life insurance and the inheritance her parents left her. She was very much a no-frills kind of girl so it was a bit of a surprise to find such an ornate and obviously expensive casket. At eight years old she hadn't been able to handle any of the funeral arrangements, the insurance company had handled it all for her. Maybe it was the media coverage, maybe it was just because she had lost everything and they felt badly for her… whatever the reason the insurance company had spared nothing for Annie and her family.
Now, during a 'normal' late night grave-digging expedition (if there is such a thing) I wouldn't take the time to pull the casket out of the ground. I'd just break right through the top of the casket or box and work with what I found. This time Sam, Annie and I had gone to more than a little trouble to convince the caretaker and the parish priest (who had inconveniently been visiting the cemetery when we arrived) that we were FBI agents investigating the Morgan family deaths. The cover wasn't very far from the truth: we suspected there had been another player involved who was not related to the family. The reason for digging up Jack's body? He was supposed to have died in the house at the time of the murder suicide two weeks before his freshly murdered body had been found among several others on the Franconia Notch Flume foot trails. We were hoping to find the evidence we needed with Jack's body.
Annie didn't have to act much for her part, she was visibly shaken by just the thought of digging up his grave. I would have liked to be the one comforting her as Sam dug up the casket… but I had more experience with this kind of thing and also better aim with a shovel. Had Sammy done it not only would our cover have been blown but we'd all have been covered in dirt before he got a foot into the ground.
As it was, Sammy held Annie close as the caretaker pulled up the casket with the same machine usually used to lower them into the ground. All the while I prayed silently that it had all been for nothing. We'd crack the thing open and be greeted with the stomach turning smell of decomposing body and be able to call it a day. Of course it couldn't have been that easy… it's never that easy. I pried the lid off myself. There was no stench, there was no body, there was nothing at all but the satin covered inside of a new-smelling casket. Five people to witness it, one unanimous reaction: "What the…!" followed quickly with my own personal "Oh shit!" I got a condemning glare from the preacher for that one, but what the hell did I care? Jack was a werewolf and he was on the prowl somewhere near here. Annie now knew for sure that he was alive…although to what extent none of us were quite sure. I was pretty sure he had passed the point of no return years ago and would die with the alpha wolf. Ultimately Annie would be the one to bury him a third time sixteen years after the fact of his original death and I would be the cause of his death… again.