Two hours later they were checked into a room outside Carson City with Sam at his laptop and Dean warming their tacos on the engine block. Pushing dinner toward Sam, Dean tore open a pack of index cards and began a flow chart on the mirror with HPL at the center, stealing glances at the back of Sam's neck. "Anything in the news feeds around Arkham?"
Unwrapping a taco, Sam said, "Yeah. Torrential rainfall last night, out of nowhere. I found files of institutions in the county that reported unusual amounts of inmate violence."
He took a bite, chewed, clacked a few keys on the laptop. "And this is weird. There were so many 911 calls about domestic violence that the cops were swamped, and it turned out that most of them were people screaming in their sleep. It was such a big deal it made the papers."
Dean added this to a yellow post-it, noting the date on the news article and sticking it beside his notes for the previous day, the mirror filling with index cards until he was boxed in by his own timeline. Dean sipped coffee and shut his eyes and forced them open again, swaying on his heels. "Awesome."
The sun sank behind the mountains. In the reflection, Sam turned his head, finger pressed to a book, profile lit in pinks and shadows as his lips moved through a Latin translation. Dean must have stared for a good thirty seconds before Sam noticed and he cleared his throat. "I'm gonna...ask the front desk for a newspaper, see if there's anything else connected to this."
"All right," Sam said, looking up from his work. "Can you see if they have coffee? I still feel like I'm freezing."
When Dean came back, a newspaper under his arm and two cups of burnt-smelling coffee in his hands, he found Sam's clothes piled neatly on his bed, heard the rush of the shower. He took a seat at the table and began perusing the paper, sipping at the bitter coffee.
Sam emerged a few minutes later in a cloud of steam. A towel was loosely wrapped around his hips, and droplets of water shined on his chest and stomach. His hair hung in damp tendrils around his flushed face.
"Thanks," he said, walking to the table to grab a coffee. He blew across the top of the cup, took a sip, and winced.
Steam coiled and broke apart around Sam's face. Dean watched, waiting for Sam to look up and lock eyes with him. He didn't. The newspaper had gotten his attention, or at least the part he could get to. Dean had unintentionally fortified his side of the table so that anyone wanting to get near him would have to step over luggage and milk crates full of books.
"Um," said Dean, re-reading a sentence for the third time, "Found this article about an investigation in the Arkham area, some rock band got arrested after the audience broke into a riot and, quote, 'began crawling into the ocean on their hands and knees.'"
He tossed down the newspaper, taking out pencil and scissors so he wouldn't have to look up. "It gets better, 'The CDC has issued a statement that all rock music is dangerous, and directs the constituents of greater Arkham to turn off all radios, televisions, CD players, or other sources of music until a thorough investigation is completed'."
As he read he cut out the article and underlined important points and stared at it, blanking on what he'd planned to do with it. Ammo, ear plugs, radios in case the cell towers were out. He talked out loud, his mouth making equipment lists while his brain kept screaming at Sam to make him shut up.
"Sounds good," Sam said, placing his cup on the table. "I just can't help but think there should be more info on the woman."
He went to dig in his duffle, his back to Dean, and dropped his towel to pull on a pair of sweatpants. Then came back, digging in the milk crates to pull out old journals. "I'll have a go at HPL again. See if he had anything to say about her. I wasn't aware of her the first time I read through, so I may have missed something."
He looked up at Dean, whose eyes were guarded. "What?" Sam asked.
"It's nothing, it's..."
Dean twisted around in his chair and made for the mirror. "We don't have near enough guns this time around. All the military support, all the experts on whatever we're up against, that's gone, and..."
He slapped the article to the glass, tearing the tape with his teeth. "...and that woman can't be anything good if she survived the mindwipe, and..."
He finished and kept his hand on the mirror, cotton shirt stretched tight across the back of his shoulders. "...and if there's any kind of ward against that language I am tattooing it to your ass tonight just so I don't have to play field surgeon tomorrow." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "Cuz damned if I'm gonna have the strength to cut into you a second time."
Sam rose. He walked up behind Dean, wanting to lay a hand on his shoulder, to reassure him. Looking over Dean's sprawling flowchart, he said, "Dean. I'll find something. We'll find something. No way we're going into this unprepared."
In a gap between newspaper clippings, he saw the reflection of Dean's eye, green and intense. Dean's back was a tense line, and again, Sam wanted to reach out, to comfort him by touch. He tentatively rested a warm hand between Dean's shoulder blades. "And if you think about it, we survived the mindwipe, too. It's not all there yet, but it's coming back. I remember a little more every hour… words, spells, images. And it's not like there are other monsters this time. There's just her."
Dean tensed, wondering what Sam might already recall. In an effort to distance himself from possibly worse revelations, he gently dislodged Sam's hand and rummaged around in his own bags. "You're right. All these outbreaks in the news gotta have a common thread that'd lead us to her, we do enough background checks tonight and something'll pop up."
Dean pushed aside clothes until he produced a fat man's hoodie he'd once stolen off a laundry line. It could have housed conjoined twins. "Lift your arms," said Dean, averting his eyes, "I'm cold just looking at you."
Sam laughed a little and did as he was told, let Dean slide the hoodie over his head, and for the first time in decades he felt small, dwarfed by his clothing, like it was another one of Dean's too-big hand-me-downs. Already much warmer, he glanced at Dean's crates of books and files.
"You know… " he said, his brow wrinkling in a thoughtful frown. "There's nothing that says we couldn't have had warding tattoos before. It only makes sense. And if they could wipe our minds, it would be simple to get rid of tattoos. I mean, Cas burned mine away in a second." Sam unconsciously raised a hand to press it over his heart. He still felt the loss of the anti-possession sigil sometimes, wanted to match Dean once again, wanted the security of it.
"I'll look through the files and see if there are any notes," Sam said. "You check out the news and stuff."
Dean managed an awkward head tilt as thanks, though whether it was for the tattoo or the sweatshirt, Sam could not tell, and spent the next hour combing police records. When Sam next looked up, Dean had fallen asleep with his cheek on his fist.
Sam smiled and kept crawling through his mountain of file folders. He felt, he realized, unexpectedly cheerful. They had a case in front of them, a whopper of a case with a monster at the end that was as terrifying as it was mysterious. It was intimidating; it was exhilarating. That old mantra: saving people, hunting things. And they would save so many people.
Then there was Dean. It had been months since they'd enjoyed the easy harmony of the last few days. Before this, there had been anger, betrayal, suspicion, secrets… but the vestiges of all that had burned away when they'd spent that freezing night in the desert, trapped in dreams. You and me against the world, he thought, pressing his thumb against the small cut in his palm that Dean had made to link them together.
They were a team again. They were in sync. It had taken this much-a mind-blowing, unbelievable conspiracy-to push them back together, but here they were. Sam heard Dean breathe, and he realized that his own breaths were matching Dean's same rhythm.
He watched his brother for a few more minutes, his messy crown of hair and the crooked bridge of his nose and the drool shining on the edge of his fist, and then he went back to work.
Long after the sun went down, Sam turned a page and sat bolt upright.
"Dean," he said, reaching out to shake Dean's shoulder. "I found it, this is it!"
Dean jerked awake and rubbed his stubbled mouth. "Found what?"
"The warding." Sam passed a piece of paper to Dean, which held a precise rendering of a protective sigil, text whose origins Sam couldn't identify contained inside a wavy, symmetrical border. "This must be it, look."
He handed Dean a small sheaf of photographs, the torsos of men and women with the tattoo, all of them fit and strong. Their codenames were stamped across the tops of the photos. The tattoos were anywhere, on their chests, between their shoulder blades, on their biceps. One was unmistakably Dean's body, the tattoo on his pectoral opposite the demon-warding sign.
Dean's chair shot back, his weariness forgotten. "Hot damn, let's go!" he said, stuffing his arm into a jacket and pinging around the room snatching up items for the road, wallet, keys, phone, "I saw a tattoo parlor off the exit ramp, we get there now they could probably fit us both in before close."
In his haste to escape the hotel, Dean looked at Sam's boots and knelt to re-tie the laces. "You are gonna trip and break your teeth one of these days."
Sam grinned, once again feeling like a five-year-old with Dean looking after him.
An hour later, he was lying face-down on a padded table, feeling the buzz and sting of the tattoo needle pricking his back. Dean was on the table next to him, getting the identical tattoo between his shoulder blades. Sam watched the tattoo artist swab Dean's skin before placing the needle against it again, and his chest prickled with dull pain where he'd had them replace his anti-possession symbol as well.
When they were done, bandages over the fresh tatts and tubes of cream stuffed into their pockets, they sat in the Impala, and Sam smiled at Dean. "That's done, then. Do you feel any different?"
Sam did. His skin seemed to tingle and tighten all over his body. He felt more secure with the knowledge that there would be no more brown-outs, no more parasitic worms attaching themselves to his spine, some protection against things to come. And he felt better in a spiritual way knowing that he had the twin to Dean's anti-possession sigil on his chest, identical marks linking them together again.
Dean drummed his hands on the steering wheel, happy to have something concrete to keep Sam out of harm's way. "I feel great. You know how great? While we were in there I think I pieced together why Arkham lost it's cookies," said Dean, pointing first at himself and then at Sam, "Us."
Sam was about to protest, but Dean held up his hand. "Here's my theory. This guy Lovecraft knew everything about this party years before it happened, getting visions and translations and insider knowledge, while he sat thousands of mile away in his crappy fishing town. He was a receiver. So what happens if you broadcast Mermaid Radio, but there's no receiver to take the signal?"
Dean made a broad hand gesture at the street before them. "The radio waves wash over the whole neighborhood. I checked and re-checked the reports, none of the people arrested were in any way connected via family, work, church, nada, but, they all lived within a mile of Lovecraft's house and all went nuts around the same time we played the phonograph in the Bunker. We turned on the radio. But the old antenna is gone. So now all of Arkham is tuning in."
"Huh," Sam said. "That makes sense. So, we go to Arkham, and… what? Any ideas on how to fix it? We can't exactly unplay the record."
Dean shrugged. "Depends. Maybe the effects are temporary this time around and it'll go away on it's own. And if it's not, and everyone's brain-fried...we'll know more when we get there."
"Okay." Sam blew out a breath. "Arkham, here we come."