Their destination, as per Crowley by way of Victor, was Mammoth Cave National Park, in Kentucky.

Which, as it turned out, was apparently one of Sam's many, many pet interests.

Lucky Dean.

"It's the longest cave system in the world," Sam was explaining excitedly. He did a lot of gesturing when he was really into something. "There are - miles and miles and miles of these natural tunnels, and what we've explored, I-I mean, it's really only a tiny fraction. Most areas are just too small for a human to get into. Have you ever heard of Floyd Collins?"

"Nope."

"He was a really experienced spelunker, early in the twentieth century. During the Cave Wars." (Dean swallowed back his automatic Excuse me, the what? Didn't need to point that particular detour out to Sam.) "He was exploring a cave that was pretty much just a hole in the ground, barely big enough to crawl through, and he accidentally dislodged some rocks. He got stuck. People could hear him from above, everyone knew he was there, but they couldn't get him out in time. He starved to death."

"Son of a bitch." Sam was the one with claustrophobia, but Dean found himself rolling his shoulders over and over under his jacket to get rid of a persistent, prickling case of the heebie-jeebies.

"Yeah," Sam agreed, but he sounded morbidly gleeful about it. "Kentucky, especially the park, is riddled with caves like that. Or massive caverns that you can't reach because the only access point is small, or remote. As far as unexplored caves go, we really don't even know what we don't know…and there could be anything in there. The stuff we've already found is insane. Velvet worms, olms, cave angelfish…and that's not even getting into the bugs."

"Bugs," Dean echoed flatly. "Awesome."

"What I'm saying," Sam went on with oblivious enthusiasm, "is that there's technically a non-zero chance here we could be actually, y'know, 'hunting' a wendigo." When Dean glanced over at him, he amended, "Or whatever animal inspired the original legends. Something that nobody's ever seen or classified before. That's…kinda cool to think about, isn't it?"

"Not really," Dean answered honestly.

"Dude," Sam began, "how do you not think caves are awesome?"

His voice had begun to climb into the range he used exclusively for complaining. Somehow, it didn't grate on Dean the way it used to. "It's a dark, wet hole in the ground. Apparently one that's full of bugs and dead bodies and places you can get stuck and die. Excuse me if I'm not into it."

Sam snorted, and Dean challenged, "Hey, you were the one who was dreading crawling through these things with Art and Victor. What happened?"

"I don't know. Guess I found the bright side." When Dean turned to eye him, Sam asked, more than a little defensively, "What?"

"Nothing," Dean replied, and gave Sam an exaggeratedly tight smile. "Just so glad that hangover cure worked for you."

Sam rolled his eyes, but Dean meant it. Even with the morbid cave lecture. Helping people, taking care of them, had always made him feel better. After last night and this morning, that kind of grounding effect had been exactly what the doctor ordered.

Not that he was going to mention that to Sam. He could only imagine the psychoanalysis that would generate.

They reached the motel they'd been instructed to hit not too far into the evening. The Cave Inn, which Dean couldn't help thinking was just a tad inappropriate, especially after that story Sam had told him. The whole place was kitschy, themed; foam stalactites, painted brown and gray, hung from the ceiling in the lobby. The front desk had, through some abomination of DIY-ing, been made to look like what somebody probably thought was a big boulder.

"Reservation under Winchester…yep, here we go," the receptionist said, head bobbing. "Lucky. Your friends just managed to snag it when they got here a couple hours ago. It's our busy season."

Dean exchanged a look with Sam. Castiel was supposed to have made their reservation. "Our friends?"

"Uh huh. Real thick accent on one of 'em?" The receptionist clicked around, oblivious. "We already had a reservation on the books, but whoever took it screwed up. We wouldn't have got it fixed without 'em, so, y'know. Maybe buy 'em a beer."

Dean felt his jaw work, then cleared his throat. "Right. Yeah. What d'you mean by that, exactly?"

"Oh, well…" The receptionist looked up, and seemed to realize for the first time something was up. "The, uh. The first one was two queens, and. You guys need one king." A pause. "Right?"

"No." Dean put up a hand. "No, no, no, no, no." Next to him, Sam was shaking his head, pinking up with embarrassment. "Absolutely not. Listen, you're gonna need to change that back right now." When the receptionist sucked his teeth, he demanded, "What? No. Don't tell me you're booked solid."

"'Fraid so."

"Oh, my god," Dean muttered, glancing up at the stalactites and then turning to Sam. "Again? Are we being pranked? Does Cas have, I don't know, some kinda hidden camera on us or something?"

"It's just bad luck," Sam said.

"No, it's fucking Art and Victor."

Dean turned back to the receptionist, who quirked an eyebrow, and asked, "Trouble in paradise?" Dean felt a muscle in his cheek twitch, and it must have done something to his expression, because the receptionist audibly gulped and brought his hands briskly together. "Okay, guys. What can I do to fix this?"

"How 'bout you swap us with our 'friends'?" Dean asked. "Bet they've got two beds in their room."

"Does the room you gave us have a couch in it?" Sam asked, hitching his backpack a little higher up onto his shoulder.

"No, but I'll see if I can rustle you guys up a cot," the receptionist answered, and flashed Sam a pair of finger guns. Dean rolled his eyes.

"Great, yeah, okay. Thanks."

He grabbed the room keys off the front desk and turned away. They'd barely made it two steps before the receptionist asked, "So y'all aren't a couple, then?"

God, was Dean ever getting tired of this. "No," he stated firmly, turning back around. "We're brothers."

The receptionist didn't say anything, just glanced back and forth between them, eyebrows raised skeptically. Dean sucked in a breath, held it for a four-count, let it slowly back out. It only shaved the edge off the annoyance.

"Oh, shut up," he said irritatedly, before stomping out of the front office with Sam on his heels.

They dumped their stuff in their room, which was decorated just as obnoxiously as the rest of the motel and did indeed only have one bed. And, yeah, Dean was mad about it, shaking his head and swearing under his breath. But not as mad as he'd been when they'd showed up to their first hotel and found out they were sharing a room.

Just like with Sam's whiny bitch-voice, it wasn't getting as deep under his skin as it had used to. Maybe because he didn't have a migraine this time, maybe because he'd settled deeper into his undercover role after last night's chick-flick moment with Sam and things weren't chafing as much anymore. Whatever the reason, probably didn't bear thinking too hard about.

"Art and Victor want us to meet 'em in the lounge," Sam said, staring down at his phone.

"Awesome," Dean said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, struggling not to roll his eyes yet again. Yeah, he had other things to focus on.

The lounge was empty except for the two hunters, sitting on either end of a small leather couch with a manila folder between them. The theme carried through here, but whoever the Cave Inn had employed as their interior decorator had started half-assing it once they hit this room, apparently baffled by how to make a circle of couches and a few mini-fridges full of refreshments resemble a cave. Looked like they'd mostly just decided to let a wholly brown color theme do most of the heavy lifting.

"Fuck you," Dean told Art and Victor, as soon as they were within earshot. Maybe he just should have let it go, but…hey, this was in character, right? Grumpy hunter. He and Sam were supposed to be brothers. He was an only child, but he was decently sure siblings weren't usually thrilled about being treated like couples. "Dickbags."

Victor's eyebrows rose in an exaggerated expression of shock and innocence. "Now, what brought this on?"

"The room," Dean answered acidly, dropping onto the couch across from them. Sam joined him.

"Got no idea what you're talking about, unfortunately. Art's the one who fixed it up for you."

Victor jabbed a thumb at him. Art blinked slowly, looking like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "My apologies…I really did think I was doing y'all a favor."

"Yeah, sure you did," Dean responded. "Fuck off."

Art eyed him, leaning back and steepling his fingers in front of himself. "Sure is a challenge for you to keep a civil tongue in your head, isn't it, Mr. Winchester? Shocking." He shook his own head in disapproval. "You kiss your brother with that mouth?"

Victor turned away, doing an awful job of disguising a snort of laughter as a cough, and Dean felt the first true spike of anger since Art had walked into their room that morning. Like his stomach being pinned to his spine with a red-hot nail. As Art sat there, smiling oh-so-politely, he opened his mouth, but a hand landed on his shoulder before he could say anything.

"Dean," Sam said quietly, with a meaningful look. "C'mon. Let's just focus, okay?"

And much as Dean did not like the idea of having to be handled by a junior agent, Sam had a point. Just like he'd had a point last night. Getting into a brawl with their contacts wasn't going to get them any deeper into the organization. So he looked away from Art, went through a few breathing cycles, and slowly unclenched hands he hadn't even realized he'd made fists of.

"Yeah," Dean agreed eventually, and glowered at Art. "Not worth it."

Art smiled back. Luckily, Victor took over the conversation before Dean could start getting himself worked up again…just like he had back in Wisconsin.

That was something to take notice of. In their partnership, Victor ran point. He'd probably been doing this longer than Art had.

"Crowley faxed over all the info we needed right after we got in," Victor started, after clearing his throat. He picked up the folder between himself and Art, flipped it open, and started spreading things out on the coffee table at the center of the couch formation.

"'Faxed?'" Sam repeated with a frown.

"Yep," Victor confirmed without looking up from the papers. There were a lot more in this folder than there'd been in the last. "Lot harder to track than email."

He didn't elaborate, and they didn't ask, but Dean found himself trading a glance with Sam. It might just be healthy paranoia rather than well-founded suspicion, but these guys were afraid of being watched. Something else to keep in mind, to keep their steps light, and probably something to pass on up the chain of command.

In the meantime, Victor launched into the briefing. "One of these two guys," he began, pointing to a pair of grainy, black-and-white printer pictures, "is our wendigo. Mark Higgins and Dave Kitchener."

Dean looked down at the pictures. Two guys, probably in their mid-thirties, completely unremarkable. They were pretty physically fit, but other than that, they could have been the guys Dean had talked to the last time he'd gotten his tires rotated.

"Friends since college," Victor went on, "experienced spelunkers." Just like Floyd Collins, Dean couldn't help thinking. "They disappeared here back in 2015. The search party found their backpacks in one of the more challenging caves; they'd taken them off to get through a narrow choke point. They lost the trail, search was called off, they're declared dead."

"So we think the two of them got lost," Sam began quietly, "got stuck…"

"And one of 'em dined out on Mark or Dave tartar," Dean finished. He expected a disapproving look from Sam, but didn't get it.

"Cannibalism by necessity does not a wendigo make," Art said, with the tone of a teacher imparting a lesson. Dean barely managed not to turn to Sam and roll his eyes. "More likely they got stuck, one of 'em snapped, ate the other. Might've killed him first, maybe he was already dead. Particulars don't much matter at this point." He shrugged. "We're not holding a trial here. Just hunting this thing down and killing it, before it can eat anybody else."

"Pretty much," Victor agreed. "Only thing we really know for sure is it's one of these two guys. The timeline matches up, and people have been going missing at a regular pace ever since they disappeared."

"Not that it's that unusual for people to turn up missing, in this part of the country," Art cut in. "'Specially cavers, which most of them are."

"But the numbers here are a little higher than normal." Victor fanned out another collection of pictures, just as grainy as the first two, but of men and women from all over the spectrum of age and race. There were well over a dozen.

Dean stared down at them. He hadn't wondered very much yet, outside of the conversation with Castiel and Kevin, exactly what they were up against here. Animal, person, natural phenomena. Now he did, though. He couldn't help remembering a map he'd seen once, missing persons cases overlaying major cave systems in the US, demonstrating how the clusters matched up almost perfectly. Maybe that was just this. A normal spike in the natural cycle of the way the earth swallowed the people who lived on it.

Not that that really made him feel any better about it.

"There's been sightings from survivors, too." Art reached forward to indicate a stack of what looked like police reports, printed out. "Something moving in the woods, in the caves. Something too tall and thin to be a person, ragged ears, face like a skull…wendigo classic model, in other words."

"Awesome." Dean cleared his throat, rubbing his palms along his thighs. "What's our plan of attack?"

"That's where the two of you come in." Wrists on his knees, Victor leaned forward, lowering his voice. Like all the people who weren't in the lounge might hear them all of a sudden. "See, we're gonna do all the usual footwork. Talk to the vics' relatives. Retrace Higgins and Kitchener's steps to see if we can't triangulate where the thing's lairing. Get in with the park rangers, all of that. But, before we hike out there and crawl head-first into whatever cave this thing's taken up residence in…well, Art and I have never actually hunted a wendigo before."

"Seriously?" Sam's surprise was obvious in his voice. Dean guessed that explained why Victor had been so eager to have them along on this one.

"They're about as rare as a monster gets." Dean bit back an Almost like they're not real, and Victor's voice turned dry. "Frontier used to be lousy with 'em back in the day, but seems like cannibalism's fallen out of favor in the last decade or so. Never mind that, though." He brought his hands together. "What we need from you two's to know how you did it."

Sam opened his mouth, but Dean could hear him hesitating next to him, trying to come up with a story. Probably should have done that already, considering he was the one who inserted the whole wendigo thing in the first place, but whatever. Dean could cover him.

Contrary to what Sam had seemed to think a few days back, Dean actually had skimmed the packet of information Kevin had given them. Very, very lightly, because the thing had roughly the same density as a loaf of three-year-old fruitcake and he hadn't been trying to fall asleep on the plane. He just hoped that wendigos were one of the many things he remembered hunters thinking you could kill with fire.

"Uh, flare gun." Dean coughed. "We used a flare gun. It was in Dad's camping stuff, so we had it on us when we ran into the wendigo. Actual guns didn't work, so I took a chance, and…yeah." He mimed an explosion with his hands. "Fwoosh. Blasted the damn thing open, basically roasted it alive from the inside out when it hit its chest cavity. Definitely wasn't expecting it to go up that fast, but…it sure did the trick."

Sam was staring at him. So were Victor and Art. Dean was suddenly, horribly sure he'd fucked up, a bitter taste crawling up the back of his tongue as he started to count exits and try to figure out how to get himself and Sam out of here alive - and then Victor slowly started nodding.

"Okay," he said, leaning back. "Yeah, a flare gun would definitely do it. You boys got damn lucky."

"Yeah," Sam agreed quietly, "we know."

He was looking at Dean, and when Dean looked back, he saw - well, probably not pride in Sam's expression, but definitely an acknowledgment of a job well done. And damn if that didn't give him all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings he could have done without.

"Probably not such a great idea in a tight cave," Victor went on, "but we'll take flare guns anyway, just in case. Easier to get than napalm, at any rate, which is the other thing I've heard sworn by." He paused, then snorted. "And flamethrowers'd be even worse in close quarters."

"Put together some Molotovs." Art rubbed his hands together, in apparent glee at the prospect of getting to light something up. "Tried and true."

Dean eyed him. Pyro. Not a surprise, considering these people were all fucking psychopaths. Somehow, knowing that Art was a firebug didn't make him like the guy any more…not that they were all that far south of hate, as things went right now.

"All right, so we know how to kill it," Dean stated. "How're you planning on finding this thing?"

"One of us will be interviewing the families of the local victims, and of our wendigo suspects…probably Art, since I imagine he'll get the warmer welcome," Victor replied, beginning to gather everything back into the folder. "I'll talk to the park rangers, scout out the area. We'll be posing as US Marshals, investigating the disappearances. One of you will go with Art…" He glanced at Dean, then to Sam. "And one of you will come with me."

Sam going with Victor, poking around in caves. Walking through the forest in an area known for its sinkholes, and its thousand tiny, hidden cave entrances, and its missing, trapped dead. Dean thought about Floyd Collins…yet again, that one was going in the classics reel of his nightmares. He thought about the closet back at Little Amityville. Victor was almost finished tidying up, but he paused when Dean cleared his throat.

"No," he said, shaking his head, "nah. You're not splitting us up."

He could feel Sam staring at him. Glaring, really, while he tried to rein himself in, maybe not wanting to make a scene, maybe wanting to give Dean the benefit of the doubt. Dean could read his thoughts as well as if they'd been laid out in a file in front of him: he was wondering why in the hell Dean was keeping them together when it would be better for the case, easier to pump Art and Victor for info, if they split up. He was thinking he didn't need a goddamn babysitter. And he was really getting his boxers in a twist over Dean telling him what to do or thinking he knew best for him or both, especially so soon after he'd spilled his guts over exactly how he felt about that.

Didn't matter. They could split up and Sam could do his own thing on the next hunt. One that didn't involve tiny, dark spaces.

Victor arched an eyebrow, looked back and forth between the two of them again. "You know," he began, "you two aren't exactly doing a whole lot to disabuse us of the notion you only need one bed."

"Go fuck yourself," Dean answered promptly. It was reflexive. Sam exhaled hard next to him, and Victor laughed.

"Well, like I said on the last one: far be it from me to break up the dream team." His voice was dry enough to convey that he was having second thoughts about having asked Sam and Dean along on this one. Maybe their pain-in-the-ass-to-usefulness ratio was getting a little heavier on one side than the other; Dean was going to have to slow his roll. After all, he was supposed to be trying here. "You guys can hike out into the park, take a look at the last known locations of the missing, see if you can't pick anything up. Art'll do the interviews, I'll talk to the rangers. Alone. We're all Marshals." He eyed Dean. "You got a problem with anything in that plan?"

"No," Dean answered, and hoped that Sam appreciated the effort he expended not to tack a sarcastic sir onto the end of it.

"Good." Victor stood, folder in hand. "We're not getting anything done today; sundown's in less than an hour. We'll get a good night's sleep, touch base in the morning, and then get to work. Sound good?"

After a round of muttered agreements, they broke up, Art and Victor heading off in one direction and Sam and Dean in the other. Looked like they were staying on opposite sides of the motel; small miracles. When Dean opened the door to his and Sam's room, there was an air mattress in it, halfway between the bed and the door and neatly made up.

Sam cleared his throat. "Bed looks pretty comfortable." It did. And that almost sounded like an invitation to share it again. But obviously it wasn't, and even if it had been, it wouldn't have been a good idea.

Dean held out a fist. "Throw for it."

Sam won, with a rock to Dean's scissors. Automatically, Dean swore under his breath, and Sam offered, "Best two outta three?"

"Nah." Dean waved him off. "You got a hangover to sleep off, I don't." He nodded to the mattress. "'Sides, this is a pretty long way from the worst thing I've ever slept on."

It had the added benefit of being closer to the door than the bed was. Made Dean feel better. Especially since Art had apparently decided he was A-okay barging into their room whenever he fucking wanted. Next time, Dean was putting a boot in his face, case or not. They knew the guy was a murderer.

"Okay." Sam seemed unconvinced, concerned, but not enough to argue about it. "Lemme know if you change your mind."

Dean didn't realize, until he was laying down in the dark and listening to Sam breathe in the empty spaces left by the cycle of the air conditioner, that he'd been bracing himself this whole time for an argument about him insisting he and Sam stay together.

But Sam hadn't even seemed all that upset about it.