Deanne laughed at her surprise. "You scared the crap out of me," Sam said. "That's 'cause you're out of practice," her sister said smugly, and Sam's eyes narrowed. Just as Deanne was registering that as a bad sign, Sam grabbed her wrist and yanked, using the leverage to swing them both over so that her sister was face down on the floor, one arm wrenched up behind. She got her knee into the center of Deanne's back and pushed just enough to make her point.

"Or not," her sister said, not nearly as grudgingly as Sam had expected. Sam just waited. "Get off of me." Sam gave it another second and then let go and rolled to her feet, and gave Deanne a wary hand up.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Sam asked bluntly. Her sister grinned, trying for casual, but Sam could read the set of her shoulders even under her bulky jacket; two years wasn't enough to dull everything. "Well, I was looking for a beer," Deanne said. Sam waited a beat and then, in precisely the same tone, repeated, "What the hell are you doing here?"

Deanne sighed and said, "Okay, all right. We gotta talk."

Sam rubbed at her face with both hands. "The phone?"

"If I'd called, would you have picked up?" Sam was trying to work out a decent answer to that when the lights flicked on.

"Sam?" Jess said. They both turned to look. Jess was wearing only the plaid flannel pants he'd gone to bed in. Flustered though she was, Sam retained enough presence of mind to want to roll her eyes at the way Deanne was eyeing his torso.

"Jess, hey. Deanne, this is my boyfriend Jess," she managed. The situation was starting to feel like a scene from a farce.

Jess said, "Wait—your sister Deanne?" Sam nodded and Jess's face broke into one of his smiles, like the sun coming out. And Deanne, of course, took a step in Jess's direction. "You know, I love plaid," she said. "And you are way out of my sister's league."

Jess, bless him, let that one sail right over his head. "Just let me go put a robe on," he said, and turned.

"No, no, wouldn't dream of it," Deanne said. Sam wondered irritably what it was about that voice that worked on guys. "But I gotta borrow your girlfriend here for a little talk about some private family business. But, you know, nice meeting you." It was a dismissal, and that was quite enough of that, as far as Sam was concerned.

"No," she said, and went to Jess's side, slipping her arm around his waist. He draped his over her shoulders, fairly vibrating with curiosity. "Whatever you want to say, you can say it in front of him." She gave Deanne a look that clearly said there wasn't going to be any argument on this score, and saw her sister read it as easily as she could see the tension in the way Deanne stood.

"Okay…" Deanne said slowly. "So. Um. Mom hasn't been home in a few days." Sam did not quite roll her eyes. "So she's been spending too much quality time with Jim Beam. She'll stumble home sooner or later."

"She's on a hunting trip, and she hasn't been home in a few days," Deanne said, and for the first time sounded actually worried. Sam willed her face still as Jess gave her a curious glance and thought fast. In the end the decision didn't take long, but that didn't mean she had to like it.

"Jess," she said reluctantly. "We have to go outside. I'll be right back."

*.*

Sam took a moment to throw jeans and a sweatshirt on over the cami and panties she'd worn to bed before she met Deanne at the door. As they walked down the stairs, she said quietly, "Deanne, this is not okay. You can't just break in, middle of the night, and expect me to hit the road with you."

Deanne, sounding slightly exasperated, said, "You're not hearing me, Sammy. Mom's missing. I need you to help me find her."

"Yeah-you remember the poltergeist in Amherst? Or the Devil's Gates in Clifton? She was missing then, too. She's always missing, and she's always fine," Sam said, a trifle more crisply than she'd intended. Deanne stopped on the stairs, and perforce Sam did too. "Not for this long. Now are you gonna come with me or not?" Deanne asked.

Put that way, there was only one answer. "I'm not," Sam said.

"Why not?" Deanne asked.

"I swore I was done hunting for good," Sam said simply.

Deanne made an annoyed face and said, "Come on. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't that bad." She started down the steps again.

Sam went with her. "Yeah? When I told Mom I was scared of the thing in my closet, she gave me a forty-five." Deanne paused at the outside door and threw a puzzled look back. "What else was she supposed to do?"

"When your nine-year-old tells you she's scared of closet monsters, you're supposed to tell her not to be afraid of the dark," she said. Her sister snorted.

"Don't be afraid of the dark? Are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark. You know what's out there," Deanne said.

Sam tilted her head, conceding the point. "But still," she said. "The way we grew up, after Dad was killed, and Mom's obsession with finding what killed him. That wasn't exactly a normal life." Deanne's body language was getting more restless by the second. "And she still hasn't found the damn thing. No matter how many other things she kills."

"We save a lot of people from those other things," Deanne said pointedly, aligning herself with Mom and the hunt as if Sam didn't know where her loyalties lay.

Sam paused until her sister would meet her eyes squarely. "You think Dad would have wanted this for us?" she asked. Deanne rolled her eyes and hit the crash bar on the door. Sam followed again into the parking lot, where Deanne's ancient Chevy Impala sat parked like a monolith. "Come on, Dee. The weapon training, melting silver into bullets? We were raised like soldiers."

Deanne's stride had gone stiff and angry, and her voice matched it as she demanded, "So what are you gonna do? You're just gonna live some normal, apple pie life? Is that it?" They reached the car and Deanne put a hand out to caress it as if drawing strength from it.

"If you want to call it normal when I can't even tell my boyfriend, well, pretty much anything about my life before," Sam said. "Me, I call it safe."

"And that's why you ran away." Deanne looked away, but Sam could hear the bitterness perfectly. She tried not to sound angry herself when she said, "I was just going to college. It was Mom who said if I left I should stay gone. So that's what I'm doing."

"Yeah, well, Mom's in real trouble right now, if she's not dead already. I can feel it," Deanne said, catching her eye again. Sam didn't know what to say to that, exactly; Deanne seemed to take her silence as encouragement. "I can't do this alone," her sister said.

Sam almost laughed. "Yes, you can."

Deanne broke eye contact, and said, "OK, then. I don't want to."

Sam sighed and looked down at her hands. She really, really did not want to get sucked into this. But this was her sister asking, and family got a little slack. "What was she hunting?" she said, right before the silence would have been way too long. She tried not to see the flash of delight that went over Deanne's face as her sister turned to jam her keys into the trunk lock.

The trunk itself was empty, of course, but Deanne pulled up the lid of the spare tire compartment to reveal the arsenal and propped it with a shotgun, which Sam devoutly hoped was unloaded. "OK, where the hell did I put that thing?" Deanne muttered.

"So when Mom left, why didn't you go with her?" Sam asked, as Deanne pawed through the clutter.

"I was working my own gig," Deanne said. "This voodoo thing, down in New Orleans."

Sam blinked at the side of her head and tried not to sound too skeptical. "Mom let you go after something by yourself?"

Deanne paused, her hand on a folder, and gave her a look. "I'm twenty-six, babe," she said dryly, and pulled a few papers from the folder. "All right, here we go. So Mom was checking out this two-lane blacktop just outside of Jericho, California. About a month ago, this guy—" she handed over one of the sheets "—vanished. They found his car, but he's completely MIA."

It was a printout of an article from a paper called the Jericho Herald. The headline read "Centennial Highway Disappearance" and included a shot of a middle-aged man captioned "Andrew Carey MISSING." The date was September 19th. Sam looked up at Deanne and said, "So…maybe he was kidnapped. It does happen."

"Yeah," Deanne said. "Well, here's another one in April. Another one in December oh-four, oh-three, ninety-eight, ninety-two, ten of them over the past twenty years." She dropped a printout onto the arsenal for each date. "All men, all the same five-mile stretch of road," she said, and gathered the printouts again, taking the one Sam was holding. "The frequency started picking up, so Mom went to go dig around. That was about three weeks ago, and I haven't heard from her since, which is bad enough. But here's the kicker. I got this voicemail yesterday." She picked up a little handheld tape recorder and hit the button. The recording was bad, full of static and the dropouts of bad signal, but their mother's voice was recognizable.

"Deanne...something big is starting to happen...I need to try and figure out what's going on. It may... Be very careful, Dee. We're all in danger." Sam's eyes widened as Deanne stopped the recording. Behind the voice and the static, there was something else. She looked up at her sister and said, "You know there's EVP on that?"

Deanne grinned at her. "Not bad, Sammy. Kind of like riding a bike, isn't it?" Sam just shook her head, and Deanne shrugged and continued, "Have it your way. I slowed the message down, ran it through a filter, took out the hiss, and this is what I got." She hit play again, and another woman's voice said plaintively, "I can never go home."

"Never go home," Sam repeated. Deanne hit Stop and dropped the recorder back into the clutter. She pulled the shotgun out of its place, set it down, and slammed the trunk with a little more force than necessary; Sam could see her trying to work herself up to something. Finally Deanne leaned back against the trunk, her arms crossed in front of her. "You know, in almost two years I've never bothered you, never asked you for a thing," Deanne said, and then stopped as if that were all she needed to say, and Sam sighed because it pretty much was.

"All right. I'll go. I'll help you find her," she said, feeling as if the words were being dragged from her. In a rare display of empathy, Deanne just nodded. Sam continued, "But I have to get back first thing Monday. Just wait here." She turned to go back across the parking lot, but stopped when Deanne asked, "What's first thing Monday?"

Sam gritted her teeth. "I have this...I have an interview."

"What, a job interview? Skip it," Deanne said, and that was just so Dee that it made Sam want to rip her hair out. She tried not to snap, but she knew her tone was tight when she replied, "It's a law school interview, and it's my whole future on a plate."

"Law school?" Deanne sounded faintly scornful, and even more faintly impressed.

"So do we have a deal?" Sam asked, but her sister didn't reply.

*.*

Sam was sliding her large knife into her duffel bag when she heard Jess come into the bedroom behind her. Fortunately her body blocked his view.

"Wait. You're taking off?" he asked. She looked up at him and his face changed from faint annoyance to concern. "Is this about your mom, is she all right?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "You know, just a little family drama." She still didn't know what to tell him, how much to tell him. She was pretty sure she'd have to break the news at some point, but right before leaving for two days probably wasn't the best time to start trying to convince him the world was scarier than he thought.

"Your sister said she was on a hunting trip?" Jess asked. He went and sat on the bed. He sounded a little surprised, but not incredulous; Jess's family was the hearty outdoorsy type, so the concept of a woman going hunting wasn't completely alien to him. Sam went over to the dresser and turned on the lamp to better examine the contents of her t-shirt drawer.

She pulled out a few things and tossed them towards the bag. "Oh, yeah, she's up at the cabin, probably got Jim, Jack, and José along with her. I'm just going to go bring her back."

"What about your interview?" Jess asked. Sam paused in putting her shirts into the bag and smiled at him. "I'll make the interview," she said. "This is only for a couple days." She zipped the duffel and slung it over her shoulder, trying to look reassuring. He stood as she took at step towards the bedroom door.

"Samantha. Just a second, please," Jess said. She stopped and turned, looking up at his face from under her bangs. "Just stop for a second. You sure you're okay?" Jess said. There was only concern in his expression. She chuckled, trying to demonstrate how not a big deal this was. "I'm fine," she said. He didn't look convinced, and stepped closer, setting his hands on her shoulders.

"It's just...you won't even talk about your family. And now you're taking off in the middle of the night to spend a weekend with them? And with Monday coming up, which is kind of a huge deal," he said.

"I'll be back in time, I promise," Sam said. "Everything's going to be OK." Jess bent down to kiss her and she threaded one hand through his hair.

"Just tell me where you're going," Jess said against her lips.

"I'll be back in time," Sam said again. And then she turned away, fast, so she wouldn't have to watch him look worried anymore.