The Aspen Spirit
Chapter Seven
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Sam raised his head from his textbook; he leaned back on his chair, raising his arms in a long, slow stretch as he worked the kinks out of his spine. He peered through the window. Dean was still on the bench, something in his posture and the way he was hunched into his jacket suggesting he was cold, or tired, or both.
Sam ambled outside with a casual air and dumped himself down on the bench, his coltish legs sprawling across the walkway.
Dean glanced across at him. "You done studying? You've been holed up in there all day."
"Yeah. For now." Sam tucked his hands into his pockets, dropping his chin. "I'll do some more later on I guess. Swapping schools…" He shrugged. "Just want to make sure I get good grades, y'know?"
"You always get good grades dude."
"Well now they need to be really good. I've gotta think of the future."
Dean turned his head towards his little brother, watching the play of expressions across a face partly obscured by wind-blown bangs. Sam straightened up, turning earnest hazel eyes in his direction.
"I hate it when you get hurt."
Dean frowned, slightly thrown by the sudden fork in the conversational path and sensing that it was heading in a direction he didn't want to take.
"It was just a fight, that's all." He said evenly.
Sam's jaw came up, a fire lighting in his eyes. "No. It was a fight because of the way we live."
"Bullshit Sam." Dean's face tightened.
"It was!" Sam insisted. "If we didn't live like this, if we had a proper home, none of this would've happened. You wouldn't have been fighting, we wouldn't have been up in the mountains…"
"Hey…" Dean cut him off, a sharper tone entering his voice. "I'd probably have been fighting anyway, over somethin'." He really didn't want to have this argument today.
Sam scowled. "If we had a proper father, a responsible parent, you would've been checked out in the hospital, not taken up some mountain to be attacked by a ghost!"
Dean ground his teeth. "This one is on me, Sam. Not Dad. I'm the one didn't say how bad I was hurt!"
Tears of frustration welled in his little brother's eyes. "I hate this! I hate seeing you like this!" He wrenched a hand out of his pocket and swiped his hair away from his eyes. "I'm not gonna keep doing this!"
The lurch in Dean's gut made his face pale; he could actually feel the effect like a cold tingle in his cheeks. He swallowed, not wanting to hear Sam utter something he'd been hinting at for some time.
"Keep doin' what?"
Sam swept his hand dramatically around them. "This! Living like this, watching you get hurt. Hunting! I'm not gonna keep hunting. It's not what I want from my life, Dean!"
The lurch turned into a sick flare of adrenaline, setting Dean's heart thumping and twisting fingers into his sore kidneys. He stared at his brother, wide-eyed.
"Huntin' is what we do."
"No. It's what Dad does. It's not what I want to do. I'm going to college and I'm going to get a career, a normal life." Sam spoke with precision, sounding suddenly calmer, more mature. "This is Dad's fight."
Dean looked away from him, staring across the parking lot. "It's my fight too, Sammy."
"It doesn't have to be." For the first time there was something unsure in Sam's voice.
Dean kept his eyes fixed on the golden aspen tree. "Mebbe I want it to be."
Sam subsided on the bench beside him. Dean froze, almost as though he was scared that any movement on his behalf would prompt more razor-edged words. He breathed slowly through his nose, his pulse skipping along. Somewhere deep inside the pinprick of fear that'd haunted him for months was growing, turning into a black hole he suspected just might swallow him whole one day.
They sat in silence in the cool breeze until Dean gave an involuntary shiver. His brother turned to him immediately, a frown knitting his brows.
"It's getting cold out here." He stood up. Dean considered ignoring the outstretched hand, but he was too tired for playing games. He took a grip of the warm skin and bone with his own chilled fingers and pulled himself up, letting go immediately.
By the time he was inside and his jacket was slung across the bottom of his bed, Sam had already set out meds and a glass of water and was rattling a pan around on the little heating ring. It smelt like mac'n'cheese was on the menu.
Dean swallowed the pills and lay down carefully on top of his bed, watching Sam through tired eyes. Everything was changing and he didn't like it. Not at all.
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Joe, it seemed, wasn't the man he appeared to be at first glance. The top of the range pick-up was a surprise, but when John followed him home and pulled up on the wide sweep of driveway before the ranch-style house he found it hard to keep his jaw from dropping.
Joe held open the heavy wooden door with a hint of amusement crinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes as John stepped inside, feeling suddenly out of place in his worn clothes and dirty boots in this place of understated style and obvious wealth.
Joe ushered him into the comfort of a leather couch and pointed at a decanter of whiskey.
"Help y'self."
John did, sniffing appreciatively at the warm aroma of good liquor.
Joe pulled a leather bound album out of a bookcase that took up most of one wall. He put it on the table next to the decanter and opened it to a photograph of a stunningly pretty young girl.
"Lacey."
"Pretty girl." John acknowledged.
"Yeah she was." Joe poured himself a shot of whiskey. "Like I said, Ben was drafted… we both were. I came home again; he didn't." He swallowed the shot, fast, grimacing against the smooth burn of the whiskey and the bitterness of the memory. John nodded, grim, understanding only too well that some pain never went away, no matter how many years had passed.
"Long before I got home, Lacey had already lost the baby. She'd shut herself up in the cabin Ben built. I tried to help…" His expression turned bitter. "I guess I made it worse. Not surprisin' really." He poured them both another shot, not elaborating.
"Anyhow, when she made it plain she didn't want nothin' to do with me, I couldn't stay round here, too many memories. So I went off for a few years, worked in the oil business; I used to send money to Lacey, though I never heard if she kept it or not. Then I got lucky, made a few dollars, so I came back up here one spring. Turns out Lacey was already dead, killed herself the autumn before." He sighed. "Terrible business. Terrible waste."
He flipped a few pages forwards and pulled out some newspaper clippings.
"The first coupla years after Lacey died, I'd felt a presence up near the cabin. I used to make some 'shine up that way and was storing it in the cabin. The cabin, the land around it, it all belongs to me. On the third autumn, a man hiking up there went missin'."
Joe pushed a clipping towards John.
"Same again the next autumn, and the next…" More clippings. All young men, handsome, their faces full of life in the photographs. "Then there was a gap of a few years. I started to believe it'd all been just a coincidence, but then it started up again. I saw her for the first time that year… scared the hell outta me. She was still Lacey, y'know, but different, harder, less stable than I remembered her back in high school. I guess it was the grief changed her. Ever since then, every few years, happens again."
Joe raked a hand through his hair, tugged at his beard. "I got a preacher up here an' everythin'. Holy water and prayin' all over the cabin and the damn mountainside. Didn't make no difference."
"You've got yourself a vengeful spirit." John stared at the photographs, the same faces as those he'd found in the library back in town. The faces that had sent him running up the mountainside to his boys.
"She buried nearby, Joe?"
"Nope. Cremated. Her and the baby both."
John explained about things that could be holding the spirit, preventing it from moving on.
"I got nothin'." Joe assured him. "Pretty sure there ain't nothin' in the cabin apart from mebbe a few pots and pans. I cleared it all out and burned it years ago. We'll get ourselves up there though and have a good look around, see if y'can see somethin' I've been missin'."
John nodded, absently flipping the pages of the album. Lacey smiled out at him, happiness radiating out of her face as she leaned into a young man, tucked under his arm. John's heart lurched. "Is that Ben?"
"Yeah."
John swallowed. It wasn't Dean, but the physical resemblance was remarkable, although the eyes, like Joe's, were more golden brown than green. He flipped the page, mouth dry as he found another picture of the young man. "He looks a lot like my boy."
"That's not Ben." Joe stared at the photograph, an odd tone in his voice. "That's me." He raised his eyes to John. "Me and Ben were twins."
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"Dean!"
Dean stirred, batting irritably at the hand shaking his shoulder.
"Time for your meds." Sam waved them under his nose, all earnest hazel eyes.
Dean took them and swallowed them with the prescribed glass of water. He sat up groggily, annoyed at himself for falling asleep, again.
"Dad 'phoned."
Dean raised an eyebrow. "What's he say?"
"They're going up to the cabin. Should be back down by tonite." Sam beamed. "Dad says this Joe has an awesome house and we can all stay there 'til you're okay. He's gonna move us over there tonite or tomorrow morning."
"I hope he's got a TV," Dean said grouchily. "This place sucks big time."
""Yeah," replied Sam happily. "A big TV and a study full of books and a hot-tub and everything!"
"Thought you didn't like him, Sam?"
"He's got books Dean, like serious books. He can't be all bad."
Dean stared at his younger brother, incredulous. "You're such a geek."
Sam huffed, indignant, muttering something under his breath about it being nice to have a conversation with someone intelligent for a change.
"What did ya say there?" Dean asked with a dangerous note in his voice.
"Nothin'." Sam beat a hasty retreat, shutting himself in the bathroom and turning on the shower.
A hot-tub sounded good, Dean thought. He stared out of the window; it was raining again, long streams of water running down the glass and distorting the shapes of the cars and trees outside. A large bead of rain collected at the top of the frame and slid down the window, momentarily magnifying the aspen tree and making it seem as though the branches were reaching out towards him.
Dean drew back rapidly, blinking and cursing the meds for making him see things. Even so, he carefully renewed the salt lines across the doorway and in front of the windows before rolling himself back under the covers.
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So… the plot has moved along a little. More action and drama in the next chapter!
Thank you all for reading and thanks so much to reviewers:
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