Part Two
The cast had been pried off of Dean's right arm hardly a month before, and his arm still felt a little strange, like all of the commands that he was giving his fingers were taking an extra half-second to be relayed from elbow to wrist. He flexed his hand into a fist frequently and forced himself to use the arm as much as he could in order to build the muscle back up. The last thing that he needed was for his strength to fail in a crucial moment.
'The West coast' was not a very big lead to go on, but it was the best that Missouri was able to give him based upon whatever oogie-boogie wavelength that she was tapped into. Dean wondered if she was able to be more specific with his father when he came to visit her over twenty years before, or if he was sent to wander the wilderness with the same load of burdens and doubts.
Thinking of this, two weeks before he had stopped by a drugstore and bought a notebook with a heavy spiral spine that could take a lot of abuse. His mother's child, Dean thought ruefully, even a bit wistfully. If only.
It did not take Dean long to find the likely focal point for this fight that Missouri could feel brewing, in bright San Francisco rather than an out of the way town with nothing better to do than wait for an apocalypse. He found an enormous newspaper article detailing how one of the oldest homes in the city had exploded without warning one night the previous May, erupting into flames that had had lit a half-dozen other homes on fire and burned two of them entirely to the ground before firefighters were able to put them out. The mention of flames piqued Dean's interest, and he thought that his heart actually stopped in his chest for a moment when he read that three women died inside. Though he scanned quickly through the article and found that one of the women had been married only a few weeks before, none of them had children.
Dean leaned back in his chair and shoved the newspaper away from himself in disgust. "Back to square one," he muttered, rubbing his hand over his face and feeling stubble rasping against the palm of his hand. Sam would probably have been able to find out everything about these women from their shoes sizes to how many fillings each one had in her teeth within thirty minutes, but Dean was not Sam. He did not like this line of thought, anyway, and shut it off before it could go too far.
Two of the women were sisters, Dean read on when he finally cracked and pulled the paper back towards himself. They were survived by a third, as well as her husband and children. There was a picture of a pretty brunette, a blond man, and two small boys accompanying the article. The older boy looked like his father. Even though he probably could not even walk yet, Dean could tell at a glance that the younger one was going to grow up to be his mother's son.
"Piper," Dean muttered to himself as he read the caption beneath the photo. "Wyatt, Chris, Leo." The perfect family. Well, until their house blew up. "I know the feeling," Dean whispered to the picture before he cleared his throat and trailed his finger down the page until he found an address. "Bingo."
Dean gave the librarian a smile as he left, the kind moderated with just the right amount of charm. Too little, and he would stand out in her mind as the surly guy. Too much, and he was the one that she would remember because she really would have liked for him to stay and flirt for a little bit longer. He already had a reputation with the police for coming back from the dead; the last thing that the needed was for people to start making note of him as he passed. When she colored briefly and looked back down at her countertop, Dean knew that he had struck the right balance.
The date on the newspaper article was nearly a year previously, so Dean was not expecting a pile of rubble with tendrils of smoke still rising from the wreckage. He did think that after this much time there would surely be the beginnings of new construction, not this great empty scar marking the landscape. The foundation had been cleared of rubble and a chain link fence thrown up around the property, but that was all that had been done. There were even still scorch marks and the occasional scraps of wood left to litter the cement. A bit of stained glass crunched beneath Dean's boots as he hopped the fence and strode across the law, stopping finally at the edge of the foundation and looking down into what he guessed was the house's basement. The EMF reader that he slid from his jacket pocket was Bobby's, one more reminder that everything that he, Sam, and Dad had managed to accumulate over the past two decades had been taken away in the ruined Impala, but it did the job. It began to beep as soon as he switched it on, and so energetically that he swore under his breath.
"What are you doing here?" Dean had been so focused on the beeping of the EMF that he had not heard the sound of a car pulling up to the curb behind him or the sound of the gate being unlocked and opened. When the woman's voice sounded out, he startled hard and only by the grace of fighter's reflexes managed to keep himself from tumbling over the edge of the foundation and into the basement. Dean quickly switched the machine off and shoved it into his jacket pocket as he turned to face the owner of the voice, but not before it gave a particularly loud and unrepentant squawk.
The woman standing behind him had long brown hair and equally brown eyes, and she was holding the hands of the two little boys who were standing on either side of her. The smallest of the boys looked up at his mother for a moment, gauging her expression, and then screwed up his face in preparation to cry. If Dean had not recognized the woman before, then surely the resemblance between the two of them would have been enough to light the final bulb for him.
"Piper," Dean nearly said, and bit the words back just in time. "Mrs. Halliwell," he said instead, doing his best to strive for a courteous, polite, and reserved tone. None of these were exactly his strong points, but he gave it a shot all the same.
Piper's eyes had been firmly fixed onto the pocket of Dean's jacket from the moment that the EMF had given its final shriek. When she looked up at Dean's face again, her expression suggested that it would be very wise of him to take his usual lines and put them into retirement for now. When Dean spoke her name, her entire face slammed shut. It was akin to watching a shutter fall down over a window. "How do you know who I am?" she snapped.
Damnit. Dean pulled both of his hands free from his pockets and held them out, palms up, in the universal gesture of peace. He misses Sam so much that it was a physical ache. Sam would have flashed this woman a look from beneath his lashes that made him look at least five years younger, invoked the maternal in her, and would have had her eating out of his hand in under a minute. "I'm sorry, ma'am," Dean began again, flashing Piper the same smile that he had given the librarian a few days before. "I didn't mean to scare you."
Rather than tightening her grip on her children's hands and then tugging them closer against her body as Dean would have expected a mother to do, Piper released them both. Wyatt, the oldest, immediately went over to his younger brother and stood in front on him, while Chris peeped out from beneath Wyatt's elbow with large, dark eyes. Piper curled her newly-freed hands into fists as if in preparation for a fight, though she was carrying no weapons that Dean could see. Some people didn't need them, he reminded himself, even women with two children at her side.
"I'm not scared," Piper said crisply. What she was was angry, but she didn't need to say that out loud in order for Dean to read all of the signals loud and clear. There were two points of color high up on her cheeks, like inexpertly applied rouge, and her eyes were narrowed into slits. Her hands had still not uncurled themselves from their fists. "I'm waiting for an answer. Why are you here, and how do you know who I am?"
The smile did not seem to be gaining him any ground, so Dean let it slide from his face. He still kept his hands where Piper could see them so that he did not alarm her or the little boys any more than he had already. Wyatt and Chris were both clutching flowers in their hands. "I'm sorry," Dean said again. "I'm a journalism major at UCSF-" Piper ran her eyes across him from head to foot, her expression showing clearly her disbelief. Dean was aware that he was getting past the age where the bright-eyed freshman story was believable. He grinned and shook his head. "Yeah, I know, I switch my major one more time and I'm going to become one of those perpetual students who totters across the grounds with their walkers. I'm doing an article on this place, you know, one of the oldest buildings in the city, long history-" For the first time, Dean made the connection between the date mentioned in the article and the flowers that both boys were clutching in their hands. He swore inwardly, a blistering oath that would like as not have had Missouri smacking him upside the head again if she had been there. Dad would not have missed that detail. Sam would not have, either. Not for the first time, the weight of trying to be both at once was staggering.
"Populated by three crazy women, blew up one year ago today," Piper finished for him. Apparently deciding that being obnoxious did not qualify him as an actual threat, she extended one of her hands out to her boys again. Wyatt took it solemnly and hung onto Chris with his other, so that the three are linked in a human chain of big to small. He looked up at his mother for a moment before he mimicked her stance of resigned defiance. "So maybe you're a student and maybe you're not, but I'll give you the same advice that I've given all of the others: until I decide to sell this property, I get to decide who walks on it and who doesn't. If I see you again, I'm going to call the police and file charges against you for trespassing."
Dean smiled again as he realized that all of his attempts to charge Piper were at best going to fly right over her head and at worst were only going to piss her off further. He held up hands up further and said, "Didn't mean to upset you ma'am, really. Guess I just don't have the touch. I've been thinking of giving accounting a whirl, though." He strode past the three figures, two of which were standing ramrod-straight like soldiers and the third of which was clinging to his brother and watching Dean with big eyes. The EMF had shrieked in the second between Dean turning to face them and switching the machine off. There was no way of knowing which one of them it had been indicating. Perhaps even all three, but the signal that he had gotten off of them was by far stronger than the one that he had been getting out of the house itself. That was not something that he planned to ignore.
"Hey, buddy!" Dean heard Piper call from behind him. He turned to see that she had cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. "Most reporters bring a notebook or a tape recorder with them with they're hoping to catch a free story."
Dean forces himself to grin again and spread his hands even further apart. "Accounting," he repeated. "I'm better with numbers than I am with words, anyway."
Piper did not look as if she believed him, but so long as he was willing to leave she was willing to let him go. "Here's hoping." She turned back to view the wreckage of her house, and Chris followed her lead and turned back also. Only Wyatt remained craned around so that he could watch Dean go. If it was possible for a kid of no older than four or five to look threatening, then Wyatt was doing his very best.
"Creepy little shit," Dean muttered as he walked back to his car-a legitimate one this time. He wondered if that sentiment could be extended to the family as a whole.
Dean had been sloppy and out of practice during his first visit to the house, he was willing to admit that. There was a groove to hunting alone that he either could not or would not slide into, and it was tripping him up. He would not do that again. Dean returned to the Halliwell site shortly after midnight, carrying with him the flashlight, the EMF, and a gun loaded with rock salt, just in case he should wander across anything unfriendly while he was there. He did not think that he was dealing with ghosts here, but with three sudden, violent deaths occurring at the same time and the way that the EMF had gone insane earlier he was not going to take anything for granted. He knew from his own experience that a load of rock salt to the chest would put just about anything to the ground, supernatural or not.
The neighborhood was quiet as Dean hopped over the chain link fence for the second time, but the sky flashed and danced with the beginnings of an electrical storm. Dean stared up at it, frowning, as he walked across the lawn.
Dean's assurances to himself did little to settle his nerves, and remembering about how a whole trunk's worth of weaponry did nothing to save his brother or his father did even less. He tightened his jaw until he could feel a muscle in his cheek ticking as he scrambled down the foundation and into the basement himself. So basically he was starting out on his own with nothing more than a car, a half-dozen or so weapons that he had collected in the months since then, and a stubborn refusal to quit. And some people still said that time was not a great big wheel, always looping back around to where it began again.
Before Dean could even turn on the EMF again to get a reading, almost before his boots even touched the basement floor, the knew that what had occurred earlier in the day was not a fluke. His body was enveloped with cold so strong and so sudden that it snapped his jaw shut and made his entire body break out in prickles of gooseflesh. At the same time, he thought that he could feel fingers drifting across his face, smelled perfume, and saw the faint outline of a woman's form from the corner of his eye. She was gone by the time that he turned his head.
Dean started to raise his gun before he remembered Missouri's words and lowered them again. If this place was the epicenter of whatever it was that Missouri felt brewing, then a few restless spirits ought to be the least of its problems. "Sorry, babe," he said to the presence that was making the air tremble all around him. "The star-crossed love affair might make for a good movie, but I really don't see us working out." The female presence retreated. Dean thought that he might even have amused her. If there was one ghost in this place that had proven itself to be friendly, then that left two more probable ones that had proven no such thing. Dean reminded himself not to relax and pulled the EMF from his pocket. Clenching the flashlight between his teeth and maintaining his grip on the gun with one hand, Dean used the other to turn on the machine. It immediately began to squall, loudly enough to make Dean cast a quick glance at the top of the foundation for curious neighbors.
He let out a low whistle when he saw the reading that was being spit back at him. Yeah, that wasn't coming from a few restless spirits, and he was willing to bet anything that it was not a faulty gas line that blew the entire house sky-high and three blocks over. Missouri was looking more and more right by the moment. Not that it was going to stop her from being a complete pain in the ass whenever Dean had to admit it to her.
"Why, Mrs. Halliwell," Piper breathed as he continued to stare down at the glowing, dancing numbers of the EMF, "I'm beginning to think that you weren't being completely honest with me." Not that he had been given the chance to ask her any real questions, the way that she had spun herself into protective mother bear mode and come after him so quickly, but he could have put a few interesting ones to her that she would have had some trouble answering. Especially if he had been given a crack at this kind of data first.
Dean shut the EMF off abruptly and shoved it back into his jacket so that he could grip the flashlight and the shotgun again. As he looked for a handhold that he could use to climb up the basement wall again, the sky above him was cracked into pieces by lightning, yet there was no hint of rain on the wind. Dean looked up, scowling. "I haven't forgotten, you son of a bitch," he vowed. Did this count as ripping open those wounds that Missouri had so scolded him about? Well, he had never been that good a student. She would have to forgive him.
Meanwhile, there was power in this place, and a hell of a lot of it. It if was the source of whatever it was that was rippling out as far away as Missouri in Lawrence, then it was also going to be too much for him to handle with a flashlight and a rifle filled with rock salt. He needed bigger and badder weapons, because when he came after that monster, he meant to put it down so that it couldn't get up ever again. It might not be the demon that was making was making this place light up like a supernatural Christmas tree, but if it led him to it then Dean would still count it as time well spent.
He had been willing to back off of the demon that killed his mother in order to keep the rest of his family safe once, Dean remembered. It seemed like an altogether different century and different version of himself that had made that decision. Standing on the other side of that fence, he wondered if he would ever be able to be that person again. Maybe there was a trick to running on nothing more than revenge and will, some kind of harnessed fire that Dad and Sam were able to tap into that thus far had nothing but elude him. It had been less than a year, but already he felt as if it was going to burn him alive before he ever figured out the secret.
There was a draft across the back of Dean's neck as he finally found a place where the cement was scorched and pitted enough to so that he could get a good handhold and pull himself up. He much preferred his magnetism when it applied towards actual living women. Dean swatted at the back of his neck and said, "All right, the first time was kind of flattering, but now it's just getting weird." The fingers on the back of his neck changed abruptly, going from the teasing touch of the first ghost and into something cruel and unyielding as iron. It tightened on the back of his neck and yanked him backwards from the wall without preamble. Dean landed on the basement floor with enough force to knock all of the air out of his lungs, making the world go black around the edges. He wheezed out an obscenity with what air he had left and threw himself to the side on pure instinct to avoid the blow that he knew was coming. The nails that slashed at his throat missed cutting his jugular by less than an inch; Dean raised the rifle and fired the rifle at the place where the woman would be standing if she was still alive.
The rock salt cut through the air, and an unearthly squeal followed. For a moment, the outline of a woman stood in front of Dean. Even with nothing more than the dim light from the streetlamps and the stars, he could see that she had been pretty when she was alive, with long, red-gold hair and a pixie's face. That beauty was destroyed by the sneer that the sneer that was twisting her features now.
There had been three people killed in the explosion, Dean remembered. Two were Halliwells, and the third had never been identified. After Piper herself had professed ignorance and no family members had come forward, the assumption had been that she was a runaway who had been cutting across the front lawn at the wrong time.
"Either that's one nasty runaway, or your sister's a real bitch, Piper," Dean muttered. He fired again as the ghost advanced, and she disappeared in a whirl of mist. Dean ground his teeth together and wondered how much of a needle in a haystack it would be to find a grave for a Jane Doe. The police would probably love for their suspected murderer to crop up again lighting graves on fire for no apparent reason.
"Journalism student, my ass," a voice said from behind Dean. He twisted around and caught a glimpse of brunette hair before there was a flash of ozone-
-and Dean was craning his head up to look at the sun, just rising high enough over the horizon for its first rays to burn away the dew. "The fuck?" he muttered, getting back up to his feet and twisting to work the cricks out of his back. It had been less than half an hour after midnight when he had climbed down into the basement, and now he was watching the sun rise from a vantage point on the Halliwell lawn.
"Nice try, Mrs. Halliwell," Dean said. He could feel his expression darkening as he spotted the remains of his EMF scattered several feet away. It looked as if Piper had had a stiletto-heeled tantrum all over it before she left. "Now that's just vindictive."
As Dean was working the last of the stiffness from his back and running through a list of creatures powerful enough to throw a whammy on him lasting for several hours, his cell phone rang. "Better shuck your buns, sugar," Missouri said before Dean even had the chance to greet her. "It's coming to a head, and fast."
"Did you pester my dad like this?" Dean asked her. His voice was more snappish than he had intended, but so far as he knew Missouri would have been able to pick up on his mood even if he had tried to behave himself.
Missouri made an impatient noise. Even without being able to see her face, Dean knew that if he had been standing next to her he would have earned himself a swat. "Your daddy didn't tell you everything," Missouri said. Yeah, Dean was starting to realize that. "Just take the help when it's offered. And be careful." Dean was so surprised by the offer, and by the worry in her voice, that it was not until he had already hung up the phone that he realized that he had forgotten to thank her.
End Part Two