Chapter Eight
"So, don't wait up, Sammy," Dean grinned as he picked up his jacket, "Mandy wants to wear the cowboy hat tonight, so..."
"I SO do NOT want to know," snapped Sam, starting up his laptop. "Just go."
Dean sighed. "You know, Mandy and I could stay here tonight, and keep an eye on the puppies," he suggested encouragingly, indicating Lemmy and Lars, who were curling themselves together on their blanket to sleep. "Then you could go out to a bar, have a few drinks to relax, maybe find yourself a nice girl who would take you home and be gentle with you..."
"Jerk," muttered Sam, looking at his watch.
"You know, put on some quiet music to keep you calm," Dean went on, "Leave the lights off, maybe even promise to keep her eyes shut the whole time..."
"Will you just shut up and go?" snarked Sam, "I've got research to do if we're going to pull together a list of people to talk to."
"Oh, sounds exciting!" leered Dean, "An evening spent trawling through phone directories and social media, you animal, you! I can see you getting all worked up about the very thought of searching through the local paper's archives. Maybe finding some girl to put her Facebook in your laptop..."
"Dean! Go! Away!" snapped Sam in exasperation with a shot of Bitchface #3™ (I Wish You'd Let Your Upstairs Brain Drive More Often). "Before I decide I want to put your Facebook through the nearest Window and go completely Mozilla on your ass!"
"That alpha male taking charge thing is something that women can find kind of hot, you know," Dean waggled his eyebrows in such a lewd fashion that Sam wondered idly if it was possible for facial hair to combust spontaneously.
"I hate you so much," Sam fumed in a resigned tone.
"You'll thank me one day, little brother," Dean patted Sam on the shoulder as he passed, looking up at the sound of wheels on gravel pulling up in front of their room. He went to draw his gun, but Sam forestalled him.
"It'll just be Kelly," he explained.
"Kelly?" repeated Dean,
"Yeah, Kelly," Sam rolled his eyes. "Is there an echo in here? I asked her over, toOOF!"
Before he could finish his sentence, Dean grabbed him in a manly, back pounding hug.
"Yes! Yes!" he hissed in triumph. "Sam, I just want to say I'm proud of you!"
"What?" Sam pushed his brother away. "Dean, she's going to help me..."
"Oh, I don't doubt it, I don't doubt it for a second!" Dean's smile practically split his head.
"No! It's not like that!" Sam yelped. "She's done some preliminary research, and..."
"That's good, that's really good," Dean nodded encouragingly, "So she already knows what you like, huh? That shows she's keen..."
"Dean!" Sam snapped desperately, as a knock sounded on the door. "She's here to do research! Nothing else!"
"Of course, Sam, of course," Dean smiled soothingly and checked the peep hole. "Kelly!" he enthused, opening the door, "Great to see you again!"
"Eh, yeah," she eyed Dean warily, "It's been a whole two hours since we ate."
"So, I'm going OUT," Dean told her, "I'll be out for QUITE SOME TIME. In fact I probably WON'T BE BACK until tomorrow MORNING. So I'll be OUT OF YOUR WAY."
"Oh, uh, that's good," she smiled and backed away a couple of steps. Behind her, Sam performed a mime sequence that seemed to imply something about forcibly removing someone's head from their shoulders with an unspecified instrument, possibly a kitchen spatula, or maybe a cheese grater.
"You kids have fun!" trilled Dean, giving them a thumbs up as he strolled out to the Impala.
"Is your brother okay?" Kelly asked a little anxiously, as they watched Morgan wrestle briefly with Lars and Lemmy, before all three pups flopped down together on the blanket to snooze.
"He's fine," Sam told her through a forced smile, "He just suffers from congenital annoyingness. So, like we talked about, it could be something to do with these people not being very good at looking after their dogs, so if we start with them..."
They worked for a couple of hours, trying to figure out appropriate ways to approach people who had known the individuals who'd disappeared. Then Morgan stood up, yawned, went to the door, and yipped.
"Hang on, she wants a bathroom break," smiled Kelly, moving to let her pup out.
"She is bright," Sam remarked when they returned.
"It's a trait of the Wildhunt bloodline," Kelly told him, "Quick on the uptake; they're easy to housetrain at a very young age." She gave him a thoughtful look. "I wondered if you'd had a Wildhunt pup before, since you recognised the name."
"No," Sam replied, "But I did meet one, once. When I was a kid. She saved Dean from a demon."
He related the story of how the elderly dog named Kali had helped defeat a demon when they were both just boys, and Kelly started muttering to herself.
"Indian Summer, Indian Summer," she mused, tapping at her laptop, "That sounds familiar... aha!" She brought up a document that turned out to be a pedigree. "Thought so. There, look, six generations back. Wildhunt Indian Summer. Your retired Kali is one of Morgan's ancestors, on her dam's side."
"Well, who'da thunk it?" Sam smiled at the small pup. "If she grows up to be like Kali, she'll be formidable. Do you think they're really descended from a Hellhound?"
"It's a good story, isn't it?" Kelly grinned. "Too good not to repeat, really." "She reached down and ruffled Morgan's ears. "Extremely unlikely. I've seen pictures of Arcadia, the founding bitch. She was big, and she was clearly not a pedigree Shepherd – probably part wolf, part who knows what. She probably ran off and got herself in whelp to something big and nasty and feral. Anyway, it's not as though you can exactly get on the phone to Hell and ask for a copy of the pedigree. Hello, Hell? Yeah, excuse me, I think one of your dogs got my dog knocked up, could you fix the hole in the fence, then come on over and see if the puppies look like any of your dogs?"
"I guess not," Sam smiled.
"A seriously mixed heritage would explain some aspects of the bloodline," Kelly went on, "I studied genetics for a while – before I started Hunting – and trying to work out the line traits for Wildhunt is a bit of a hobby. Sometimes, these dogs are perfect models of Mendelian inheritance, but sometimes, completely inexplicable using the theories of inheritance as they apply to, well, other mammals."
"Yeah?" Sam found himself interested. "Like what?"
"Well, they get the occasional throwback," Kelly elaborated. "Which can happen in any species, but not like this. Aspects of temperament and anatomy that I can't account for through either dog, or even wolf, heritage. I suppose it could be some somatic mutation cluster that just cropped up and surfaces occasionally, which is always a possibility in a selectively bred pedigree. For instance, Morgan's sire was supposed to have been something of a monster, built like a tank – they were going to put him to sleep because he was savage, uncontrollable, until at the last minute he chose a Hunter who could handle him."
"Wow," Sam made a mental note of that, and reminded himself to talk to Bobby and Dean about possible undesirable genetic weirdness in Hellhound descendant pedigrees. "Why did they breed from him, then?"
"He turned out to be so damned good, they wanted to keep the bloodline, but try to dilute it with a completely different pedigree," Kelly explained. "They thought it was worth the risk. And it worked."
"Hell of a risk to take," Sam snorted, looking back at the screen, "If you think you might have a dog that's reverting to something really nasty... huh?" he stared at the document. "Wildhunt Shark Attack? That's impossible!" he blurted. "Mako's been dead for nearly twenty years!"
Kelly stared at him in amazement. "You knew him?" Kelly asked eagerly. "You knew Mako? You never said you knew Mako! What was he like? Was he as big as they say?" She tapped at the keyboard again. "I've never even seen a photo of him. Were his teeth really like that? Did you ever see him in action?"
"Whoa, slow down!" Sam told her, "I never knew him. But I have, er, met his Hunter."
"Wow," breathed Kelly, "I'd love to talk to the guy, pick his brains about training. Of course, he's probably dead by now."
"I guess," Sam agreed carefully, "But what I want to know is, how does a dog that's been dead for twenty years sire puppies?"
"The wonders of artificial insemination, Sam," Kelly grinned. "It's taken them this long to find a suitable complementary blood line to cross him with. I'm glad they did, though," she smiled at Morgan, who was washing Lemmy's ears, which the larger pup bore with good grace. "I'd love to have got a look at him. Even a picture. I've traced his lines, trying to work out where the traits may have come from – if they're not just exaggeration that got better without each retelling – people who breed dogs keep more careful records than most human communities…"
She started showing him some of the sideline work she'd done over the years, and he was amazed at the depth of the research she'd done.
"When I was a kid, Bobby did say that Wildhunt dogs had some Hellhound blood," Sam remembered, "And having seen old Kali in action, well, I'm not inclined to dismiss the possibility out of hand. I mean, stranger things have happened. Hunters know that."
"The thing is, there's no test for Hellhound heritage," Kelly pointed out, "I don't even know if you could do any sort of test on them. It would be like trying to do DNA analysis on a demon that didn't take a human meatsuit. And the idea of trying to get a cheek swab from one to do even a karyotyping or basic genomic analysis, well, probably not practical."
"I guess you could find someone who's made a deal, and when their deal comes due, you could watch them get torn to pieces, then maybe try to swab the wounds for saliva?" postulated Sam.
Kelly gave him a look of amusement and snorted dismissively. "Sam, if Hellhounds are walking the Earth, even to drag evil souls off to the Pit, I for one want to be as far away as possible. Just in case they decide they're still hungry afterwards."
"That's probably sensible," agreed Sam, shuddering at the memory of Hellhounds he'd seen make themselves visible – they were not a species that was ever going to win any sort of beauty contest, unless there was a planet somewhere where animals that could be the size of small cars and looked like they were badly constructed from rotting rhinoceros hide, charred basalt and rusted mediaeval surgical instruments were somehow considered to be attractive.
They finalised their list of people to interview, and were back to discussing the genetics of Hunting dog breeding, when Sam's cell rang. He checked it, and pulled a face.
"It's just Dean," he told Kelly as she cocked an enquiring eyebrow.
"Interesting," she mused, "I thought he and Mandy we be in the middle of Round Two, at least."
Sam's eyes bugged. "You know about Dean and Mandy?" he managed.
"Everybody knows about Dean and Mandy," groaned Kelly. "She was remarkably… graphic about some of your brother's… talents."
"Oh, God," Sam moaned, as his phone chirped with a message.
Hope ur making me proud lil bro make her toes curl
"I'm gonna kill him," Sam muttered darkly.
"Trouble in Paradise?" she enquired sweetly. Sam felt his face flush.
"Er, the thing is," he stumbled, "The thing is, Dean's kind of, well, obsessed with… that kind of thing. He's obsessed with getting laid. Worse, he's obsessed with getting me laid. Seriously, it's his favourite topic of conversation. Although conversation probably isn't the correct word. Discourse, perhaps. Lecture. Verbal diarrhoea."
"I had a Hunt buddy like that for a while," Kelly sympathised, "There were days when I seriously thought that if I heard one more Hot Guys I Have Screwed story, I was going to salt and burn her."
"It's none of his damned business," Sam sighed, "And being able to hold a conversation with a member of the opposite sex doesn't mean I automatically want to jump on her!"
"She used to refer to herself as 'Aphrodite On Earth'," confided Kelly. "Seriously, what sort of sex maniac refers to themselves in the third person in that way?"
"The Living Sex God, that's who," Sam replied glumly. "You do realise that he's going to spend the next several days waggling his eyebrows and making barely double entendres every time we end up in the same grid square?"
Kelly looked thoughtful. "Maybe I should introduce your brother to Natalie," she mused. "If you get two Living Sex Deities together, would they, I don't know, set themselves on fire or something?"
"My luck is never that good," Sam muttered fatalistically, "And even if they did, they'd probably just possess a Ouija board or something, and continue to share the gory details…"
His cell rang again. With a scowl, he made to turn it off but Kelly snatched it from him, and spoke briskly.
"Hello, this is Sam's phone… oh, hi, Dean, yeah, we've got the list together, you can decide who you want to talk to tomorrow… no, I'm sorry, Sam's in the shower. I'm just going to join him. Don't hurry back. Bye!"
Sam stared at her in disbelief as she smiled serenely and handed the phone back to him. "That should shut him up," she said.
"It won't," Sam told her, "He'll be pestering me for weeks for a blow by blow description… oh, God, I don't believe I just said that…"
"Have you tried telling him a tale so tall that it's completely unbelievable?" she suggested. "That approach worked on Nat – I found that mention of chandelier dangling was usually adequate to trigger her I Don't Believe You response."
Sam looked up at the cheap light fitting. "That hardly counts as a chandelier," he observed glumly, "And it wouldn't take my weight anyway."
"Well, just tell him that I was the dangler, and you were the, uh, dangle," she suggested airily, calling Morgan away from her nap. "Give me a call tomorrow when you've decided how we should divide up the interviews. Oh, and I call dibs on not going to the Stitch & Bitch session."
You can read about Sam and Dean's encounter with Kali the elderly Hunter's dog in my Weechester story, 'The Way Of Things'. Anybody who's read 'Best Of Breed' and 'Wolf In Wolf's Clothing' will recall that Ronnie (the Jimiverse's Crankiest Werewolf) had two Wildhunt dogs before she had Joni: Wildhunt Arcturus Rising, or Arko, and before him, Wildhunt Shark Attack, aka Mako. (At the time of this story, she's back home in Oregon with Lars and Lemmy's sister, Lita, who is presumably also learning to control the fire-starting pee thing, and Connor Dean, her own pup with her pair-bond Andrew. Connor would be a couple of weeks old; presumably, it's a household that's not getting mugh sleep…)
PS Will you people stop hinting about the story in which Dean's son RJ is sent to him – there's another damned bunny hopping around, whispering snippets of that one, and it's really annoying, and I do NOT want to have to deal with that one until Randolph has been stomped (it could even be Randolph's brother Nathaniel)…
Reviews are the Astonishing Tales of Shenanigans a la Winchester Related With Relish At The Stitch & Bitch Session Of Life!*
*No chandelier dangling until appropriate safety measures can be put in place.