CHAPTER TWO
No-One Said It Would Be Easy
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"Dean, what is it? What does that mean?" Sam pressed, on seeing his brother's reaction.
Dean was quiet for a little while longer, then he shifted uncomfortably. "Uh, I have no idea."
Sam was taken aback. This hadn't been what he was expecting. Dean had clearly been affected by the words, shaken even, and now he was lying to Sam's face. Badly. "You have no idea?" Sam repeated, skeptically.
"Isn't that what I just said?" Dean barked, but his eyes wouldn't meet Sam's.
Sam couldn't believe what he was witnessing. "You really have no clue as to what you could have meant by 'eight-hundred days'."
"I told you, no," Dean insisted, sliding out of the booth. "Let's pay for this and get some sleep."
Sam just watched his brother head over to the counter for a moment and wondered what to do next. From Dean's profound reaction, Sam was certain something was up, but what possible reason could there be for him to lie so blatantly? He'd have to decide later, Sam realised, as his brother was impatiently beckoning him to hurry up.
The twin room was nothing special, but to Sam it looked like the Four Seasons. He crawled onto the bed by the window and just soaked up its comfort for a minute before rolling over onto his back and glancing over at Dean. He looked more than preoccupied. Sam knew he had to protect Dean, otherwise he wouldn't have had the vision. Even if Dean wouldn't co-operate, Sam would find out what was going on without his help if that's what it took.
"Hey, which bag is dad's journal in?" he called, suddenly getting an idea.
"It's in the black one," Dean replied, emerging from the bathroom with a glass of water and a packet of aspirin. "I thought you were tired," he added, then wordlessly putting the pills on the bedside cabinet and pushing the glass over to Sam.
"Thanks," Sam said, mildly surprised. He hadn't even asked for the pills, and he'd thought given the way Dean had acted only minutes ago in the diner, that he was pissed off with him. "I was tired. I am tired. I just need something to read while...I wait for these to kick in," Sam improvised, downing two pills with the water. It wasn't a total lie.
"Whatever," Dean said, digging out the journal and handing it over. Then he went back into the bathroom and closed the door.
Sam flicked through the journal and found the pages he was looking for. The brunette had made an educated guess as to the meaning of Dean's words. Eight hundred days ago worked out as roughly two years and some change, so Sam would have just left for Stanford and Dean and their father would have been hunting together. Maybe something happened back then, and maybe their father had written something about it.
There were three entries made around the time. Sam recognised them because he'd read them before. A kind of vain curiosity had driven Sam to read them month ago, to see if John had written anything about him leaving. There had been a brief 'It's just me and Dean now' but that was all. The name 'Sam' wasn't even mentioned, and it didn't appear in the journal after that. Sam pushed away the sore memories surrounding that particular time and read on. The first entry was scribbled in John's typical script.
May 2nd North Adams
Received call from Peter Grave. Entire town acting bizarrely. Reminiscent of cult mentality.
Church source. Priest possessed. Exorcism was messy. Priest didn't survive. Town back to normal, already talking about 'leaking gas pipes' causing the odd behaviour.
May 10th Bridgestone
Braken (Soul Eater). Surface interval? ONE SOUL. Banishing ritual 'Expulsum atrum'.
May 26th Eastbergh
Edward Stevens, Blue Hotel
Double Poltergeist. Routine purge.
Sam frowned. He'd never heard of this 'Braken' demon, but other than that, the entries were unexceptional. Unexceptional to a Winchester, of course. If something had happened to Dean, or something had gone seriously wrong with a case, their father would have written about it. Unless he didn't know about it. That particular avenue caused Sam trouble. Dean keeping things from him was out of the ordinary, true, but him keeping things from John?
Dean returned from the bathroom ready for bed. Sam set the journal on the side, took off his shirt and kicked off his shoes. He hadn't the energy to do much else; his eyelids were already dropping. By the time Dean had climbed into his own bed and switched the light off, Sam was asleep.
Dean found he could not succumb to the same luxury. He lay in the dark thinking about what Sam had told him. It didn't make any sense. He had finished it over two years ago, why would Sammy see him in a vision saying what he said?
Dean looked over at his brother, who was highlighted by the purple glow of the coming dawn and the yellow street lamps outside. He knew Sam would keep pushing, keep investigating, with or without any help. He wouldn't find anything though. There was nothing in dad's journal because John didn't know anything about what happened. No-one did. It was a secret Dean had kept for over two years, and he intended to keep it for a lot longer.
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It was 8pm when Dean decided he'd had enough of not sleeping. He had dozed off one or two times but he always woke before he could slip any deeper. He nudged his brother's arm and told him to get up before hitting the shower.
Forty-five minutes later both brother's were dressed, packed, and in the car; well-practised after so long on the road. Dean had graciously let Sam get a cheeseburger to go from the diner, after he'd complained and pointed out that they did sleep through lunch.
"I can drive, if you want," Sam offered. In the cheeseburger-induced bliss he was in, he'd forgotten that Dean had been driving non-stop recently, and he wasn't exactly looking so great either. "Did you get any sleep?"
"I'm fine," Dean replied, ignoring the question and the offer at the same time.
After a few minutes on the road in silence, Dean spoke up again. "I got all we need ready for this next job. A few latin 'get the hell out's and we're done. But since you had this vision, we'll take the shotguns as well as the holy water, just in case."
Sam nodded in agreement, but it was obvious his head was elsewhere. "Are you alright?" he asked out of the blue.
Dean looked over, then back at the road, a little surprised at the sudden question. "I'm fine. Any particular reason you keep asking?"
"Come on. You haven't been sleeping, you're hardly eating. You're hardly talking," Sam listed. "I mean...we're okay, right? Since that argument..."
"We're okay, Sammy," Dean lied. It was easier to lie than to deal with all the crap that had been knocking around in his head the last few days. Nothing was okay. It was all...it was all just happening around him and he was watching it. Since Burkitsville and that phone call, since that stupid argument about dad, since he'd been left on his own, again, Dean had been sorely pissed off at the world and everything in it. What was Sam going to do about it, anyway? As much as he hated it, Sammy was part of the problem.
"Are you sure?" Sam asked again. "'Cause I'm sensing otherwise."
"'Sensing'? What, you're like Counsellor Troi now?" Dean shot back.
"Dean, I'm being serious."
"Yeah, you did always have the knack for that."
"Stop avoiding talking about it!"
"About what!"
"Whatever it is that's got you brooding," Sam replied. "Seriously, dude, you're so emo. All you need is black nail varnish and a few dozen piercings."
Dean couldn't help laughing. "Emo, huh?"
Sam let a smile slip too. Damn, how did Dean always do that? "This isn't over," he threatened, the smile fading.
Dean held his hands up, keeping his palms on the wheel. "I didn't even know it had started."
Dean sighed internally. He'd dodged a bullet for the time being, but Sam never let up. He was, however, easily strayed off course; a fact that Dean had used to his advantage on many an occasion. Dean really did wish nothing was wrong. Thanks to John Winchester, he'd built up a solid wall to block out all the emotional crap that only served to get in the way of the hunt. But for some reason his wall was crumbling, and it was getting in the way. Sam had been right about the sleeping and eating thing. Dean was worn out, and god, he really did need some sleep.
Dean switched back to business mode when he realised they had reached their destination. The journey had gone quickly. Their target was a house, off the main residential street and down a long drive. It was a huge place. The grounds surrounding it hadn't been kept, and the plants were growing wild.
When they reached the end of the drive, Dean parked to the side of the house. "You ready for this? Or do you want to talk about how I'm feeling some more?" he asked sarcastically, getting out of the car before Sam had any opportunity to answer.
"We didn't talk about it in the first place," Sam muttered, and got out the car too. He still wasn't sure going into to this place was a good idea, but Sam knew Dean would insist, most likely with a 'if you're not coming, I'll do it alone' threat. Sam couldn't allow that. If they were going in, he was sticking to Dean like glue.
Equipment ready, the brothers found the front door ajar. "Guess you don't need a security system when you got evil spirits," Dean said.
"Is the owner meeting us?" Sam said, trying not to let Dean's attempts at humour distract him. He still had his vision to think about.
"Nah," Dean replied. "We do our thing, let him know, get a 'job well done', yadda yadda yadda. So impersonal, but what the hell. We're not in it for the glory, right?"
Sam considered posing the question of exactly why they did do it, but decided a conversation that heavy could wait until another time. Besides, Sam had switched to hunting mode, and his every sense was on alert.
"Not getting any readings in this room. Why don't you check out upstairs and I'll take downstairs?"
"No, we should stick together on this one. My vision, remember?"
Dean remembered it all too well. "Right, right. Fine, let's start down here," he said, heading for a door on the left. "This place is huge, this is going to take forever."
"Not if we get lucky," Sam replied. The sooner they were out of there the better. "Besides, spirits usually like to mess with people. Maybe it'll find us."
As the made their way through the house, scanning for any strange activity, Sam couldn't help but be impressed by the place. It was no doubt worth a hell of a lot of money now, and would be worth more if it were to be fixed up. It looked as if it had been tried before; there were paint cans, ladders and tools lying in some areas, abandoned.
Twenty minutes later, they were still on the ground floor. Suddenly the EMF metre got a reading. "Got something," Dean announced. "It's coming from this next room. You got the incantation ready?"
Sam nodded.
Dean went to open the door but before his fingers touched the handle, it opened on its own. "I guess we're invited in."
"This isn't right. This thing is supposed to be violent, why's it opening doors for us?"
"I know, smells like a trap," Dean agreed, "but we've gotta get close to bind this son of a bitch."
Sam knew Dean was right. They had to follow the readings, regardless. With caution, the brothers moved onwards into the room.
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End of Chapter Two
Next Chapter: Harbinger