"Just a coffee, please."
Liam smiled gratefully at the woman stood beside their table, before she took the menus off the brothers and hurried back to the kitchen to place their orders.
"Aren't you hungry?" Killian asked.
"No. I don't tend to get hungry in the early hours of the morning. You know, that time of the day when I'm supposed to be sleeping."
Killian just seemed to shrug off his brother's comments, as he fished out a familiar looking leather-bound journal from inside his jacket pocket, and slapped it down onto the table between them.
"Dad really left this behind?" Liam picked it up carefully to turn over in his hands. The boys had seen the journal plenty of times before, but neither one of them had ever been allowed to look inside of it.
"Yeah. It's how I knew he was in trouble."
Liam could understand that. The book contained everything their father had learned about the thing responsible for the death of their mother. Brennan Jones would never go anywhere without it unless he was forcefully separated from it.
"Have you looked through it yet?" he asked.
"Nope. I figured we could do that together," his brother explained.
Liam nodded his understanding as he slipped his finger into the edge of the journal to release the catch, before allowing it to fall open. He wasn't surprised to see a number of articles at the very front of the book, all covering the fire that had broken out in their childhood home, and the subsequent death of their mother. A quick scan of each one told him they all said the same thing.
Cause unknown.
"Hey, take a look at these."
Killian slid some more articles over the table for his brother to read. Some had been printed from the internet, and others had been clipped from newspapers. But they all detailed the same thing.
An unexplained house fire that had killed a young mother.
"We weren't the only ones."
"It seems like it." Liam flicked through each of the articles before he laid them out across the table, in some kind of order that made sense to him. "They stretch right across the country," he pointed out, as he placed one about their mother's death towards the end of the line. "Dad found twelve identical cases, all exactly one month apart. That can't be a coincidence, right?"
"One or two, maybe. But twelve…. Twelve's a goddamned pattern," Killian agreed, as he helped his brother to gather everything up the moment he spotted their server. The last thing they needed was for a nosy old woman to start asking questions.
"Thanks, Sweetheart," he told her, as he offered their server a sly smile and a cheeky wink. She set a large plate of bacon and eggs down in front him, before making her way back to the counter with slightly red cheeks.
"Do you ever stop?" Liam scoffed.
"You should try it yourself." When his brother sighed a little over-dramatically, Killian added, "They remember the smiles and winks more than they remember what I'm wearing, or what I'm talking about, or what color my hair is," he argued. "It's a good distraction technique. And completely harmless."
"If you say so," Liam mumbled. He watched as his brother pulled the plate of food towards himself and began digging in before he reached for his father's journal once more.
Brennan had used the small book to keep track of every supernatural creature he had ever encountered, in his quest for information about his wife's death. A number of the hunts he had detailed Liam had vague memories of, from his childhood. There were also a few monsters that he'd never heard of before, and random sequences of numbers that he couldn't make sense of.
But there was nothing more about the series of fires Brennan had found.
"There's nothing in here about his last hunt," he noted.
"Yep. Why d'ya think I came for you?" Killian asked, around a mouthful of food.
"I thought the two of you were working together."
"Yeah, well… you know Dad," his brother said, like that would explain everything.
And in a way, it did.
Liam knew that their father had developed a few issues in the years since their mother had passed, and he knew that Brennan tended to direct his anger at Killian whenever he was feeling particularly low. It wouldn't have been the first time that his brother had taken off alone, but Liam couldn't shake the feeling that it might be the last.
"Where d'ya think Dad would have started?" he asked, instead of voicing his opinions on their father's parenting skills.
"Knowing Dad, I'd say he'd start with the first."
That made sense.
Even for all of his issues, when it came to leads about who was responsible for Alice's death, Brennan was nothing but thorough.
"Except… he left behind the car and that," Killian pointed out, as he tapped the journal with his fork. "Which means that he left fast. The last hunt we were on together is where I found those. And that was in Kentucky. So…"
"It would have been tough for him to get from Kentucky to Washington without a car," Liam finished for him.
Washington was also on the other side of the country. There was no way the brothers would be able to get to the state and back again, in time for him to sit his exam on Monday morning.
"So, I guess we head to Kentucky?"
"Nah. There's nothing there," Killian argued. "I've already checked it all out. Whatever Dad was doing, the only things he left behind were the car and his journal. I figured whatever clues he wanted us to follow would be in that."
"There's nothing in here, Killian. Just a bunch of random numbers."
"Lemme see?"
Liam flipped to the last page that had anything written on it and passed the book back over to his brother. Killian seemed to take a moment to contemplate the series of numbers that were written there while he finished the last of his bacon before his eyes lit up with a theory.
"What?"
He didn't bother answering his brother. Instead, Killian pulled out his phone and tapped away on the screen for a moment, before finally turning it around to show Liam the result.
"They're not random numbers. They're coordinates."
Thanks for reading and reviewing.
For those of you who asked, I have switched the brothers in this one to allow Killian to be the eldest of the two. I figured if I couldn't do that for a Supernatural inspired piece, when could I? ;-)