Chapter Thirty-One

Amie finished paying for the two motel rooms at the Destinations Inn, the first motel they had seen after pulling into town. She took back her credit card, the one with the name Stephanie Nicks on it, and stepped out into the dark night. She pulled her jacket closed and zipped it up, the cold catching her off guard. She searched the parking lot to see where Dean had parked the Impala.

She finally spotted it, at the back, in the shadows. Of course. The boys were standing by the trunk, talking, their heads close together. Amie stopped to watch them for a minute. She always liked catching the brothers in what their friend Charlie liked to call their "broments." They were closer than any other siblings she had ever met and she envied their relationship. No matter what, they always had each other. She didn't have any siblings of her own, so after she lost Frank and Joseph, she was truly alone, with no one to turn to. Amie knew that Dean felt like he lost everyone he cared about, but at least he always had Sam.

Dean's voice interrupted her thoughts. "There you are. I was going to come looking for you." He sounded relieved. She was actually surprised he'd let her go pay for the rooms. She knew he was making an effort to not be his normal overprotective self and she really appreciated that he was trying.

Amie handed Sam and Dean their room keys and pocketed hers. "Okay, the rooms are adjacent with a connecting door. Second floor—207 and 208. We can park around the back; there's an entrance back there that opens with a room key. Stairs are right there and they practically lead straight to our rooms." She climbed in the back as the boys got in the front. Dean put the car in gear and drove around to the back of the building.

She and the boys made quick work of unloading their bags and weapons from the trunk. They made their way up the stairs and found the rooms. When Dean started to follow Sam into one of the rooms, Amie cleared her throat.

Dean looked back over his shoulder. "What?" he asked, looking slightly confused.

"Okay, if you want to stay in Sam's room…," Amie shrugged and unlocked her door.

"Oh, hell, no," Dean grinned. "I was just trying to be good and give you your space. You don't have to ask me twice." He followed Amie through the open door, smirking at Sam. Sam just shrugged and closed his door.

Amie caught Dean's smirk out of the corner of her eye. He opened his mouth and she just knew something snarky was going to come out.

"Can it, Winchester," she warned. "Or you'll wish you'd bunked with your brother."

Dean shut his mouth and instead laughed a deep, throaty laugh. He flipped on the light switch by the door.

It was a typical, shabby, motel room. It still looked cheap, even though the management had tried to hide it by decorating it with a 'vacation destination' theme. It looked like the theme of this room was the Grand Canyon. A huge painting of it dominated one wall and the room was painted in muted desert tones. There were even several fake cacti. It was the kind of room she'd basically lived in for the past three years and the kind she remembered from her childhood. They all started to look the same after a while.

Amie threw her bag on the bed and pulled her laptop out of her backpack. She had emailed her parents' former ranch foreman, Mitchell, before they left the bunker. All of her father's belongings had been put in a storage unit in Coeur d'Alene after his death and she was hopeful that Mitchell could get a hold of her father's journal and send it to her. If anyone knew where it was, it would be him.

Amie watched Dean walk the perimeter of the room and check the windows while she waited for the wi-fi to connect. He was always so meticulous about their safety no matter where they were. He brushed a hand across her shoulder as he passed, his touch sending a tingle down her spine.

He knocked on the door between the rooms, waiting impatiently for Sam to open it. Once he did, Dean strode through it, shouldering him aside. Sam looked at Amie, eyebrows raised. She heard him yell Dean's name as he followed him into his room. She laughed to herself, then turned to her computer. She saw that Mitchell had finally replied to her.

"I have the journal. I can send it to you ASAP. Let me know where. Hope you're well. Miss you kiddo—M."

Amie typed up a quick reply, giving Mitchell the address of the motel and the name she was staying under. She asked him to send it next day air. She wanted to go through it as soon as possible.

One she finished the email, Amie went into the other room to see what the boys were up to. Sam's room was decorated in a Hawaiian theme, right down to the tiki torches and flowered print on everything. Dean was repeating his perimeter walk in this room as well. Once he was done, he flopped down in one of the motel chairs, his feet on the table.

"That should stay unlocked," Dean said, pointing at the door between the rooms. "Just in case. In the morning we'll see if we can find a local address on Gibbons. We can use the FBI identities at the banks, maybe catch a break."

"Works for me," Sam said.

Amie sat on the end of Sam's bed, lying back to stare at the ceiling. "Mitchell answered me. He's sending Daddy's journal. Hopefully it will shed some light on this werewolf. I wish I could remember if he and I ever hunted one, but for the life of me I can't. Maybe when I was really young. I was 11 the first time he took me hunting. A lot of it's a blur, there were so many over the years. He was so driven, all about the kill. I remember that." She sat up. "Dammit, I need that journal!" She stood up, pacing the room, her head spinning. She felt like she should remember something about the werewolf, anything. She'd gone on so many hunts with her father, killed so many monsters. There'd been the djinn in '89, the ghouls in '87….

"Amie? Amie!" Dean's deep voice broke through her musings.

She stopped long enough to look at Dean. "What?" she asked.

"Honey, you need to calm down. The journal will get here and tomorrow we'll find Gibbons. Come on, let's leave Sam alone," Dean said, coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her waist. He picked her up and carried to the other room, her feet dangling a foot off the ground. "Later, Sammy. Keep the door closed and don't worry about any moans you hear."

Sam was laughing, but Amie wasn't amused. "Dean!" she yelled, batting at his hands. She tried kicking his shins, but that wasn't working either. He started tickling her as they walked. "Let me go!" She squealed, trying not to laugh.

"I don't think so, gorgeous. You need to relax a little. I'm gonna take care of that. I promise," Dean breathed in her ear, kicking the door closed as they entered their room.

Amie hurried up the stairs to their room, the large envelope clutched in her hands. Her stomach was flipping nervously, though she wasn't sure why. It was a book, just a stupid book where her father kept notes on the things that went bump in the night. She unlocked the door and stepped inside. She could hear Dean and Sam in the other room, talking. They'd been researching the addresses they got at the bank and credit union, trying to decide which of the three they wanted to go to first, when the front desk had called about the package. She'd gone to get it, assuring Dean she would hurry back.

She closed the door as quietly as she could, wanting just a few minutes to look through the journal on her own. She sat on the bed and ripped open the envelope, dumping its contents on the bed. The journal fell out, along with a slip of paper. She picked up the paper and read the note from Mitchell: "I've been waiting for you to ask for this. Your dad left specific instructions. He said he knew you'd want it one day and when you did, to make sure you got it. I guess that day has come. Be careful.—M." She set the note aside and picked up the journal.

Amie was surprised at the weight of the book, how much had been added to it after she had left. She ran her hand across the plain black cover, worn from years of use. She flipped through the pages, not looking for anything in particular, just remembering. She could still see her father hunched over it, scribbling notes. When she started travelling on his hunts with him, he would sometimes let her add her thoughts to his, supervising as she carefully wrote in the journal. When she was 16 and had killed her first vampire, he had let her post an entire journal entry. She remembered how good it felt knowing she had made her daddy proud.

She wiped the tears from her cheeks, startled at the emotion she was feeling after such a long time. She'd always loved her father, in fact she'd been a total daddy's girl, and walking away from her family had haunted her every day of her life. Holding her father's journal in her hands just reminded her of how painful leaving him had been. She hadn't realized the extent of that pain or how much she had pushed it away until just now. She regretted so much all of the years she had lost because she and her father were both too stubborn to apologize—her for leaving and him for being too damn stuck in his ways.

Amie wiped her eyes again and pulled herself together. She needed to figure out what this pureblood's connection was to her father and to her and she was pretty sure the answer was in her daddy's journal. If she wanted to get through it, she needed to get past this and get to work.

As she picked the journal back up, she noticed Dean standing in the doorway between the rooms. He was just leaning there watching her, not saying a word. She nodded at him, indicating she was okay. He smiled and mouthed 'I love you' before going back to the other room.

An hour later, Amie sat up on the bed so fast that she nearly spilled the bottle of water she had leaning against her leg. She flipped forward several pages in the journal, skimming her father's notes. Once she realized that this was what she had been looking for, she bolted off of the bed and ran to the other room.

Sam was at the table, his laptop open and a book on his lap. Dean was sitting on the bed, a beer in one hand, the remote in the other. He muted the television as soon as Amie came through the door.

"I've got it," she said, moving across the room to stand by Dean. She held the journal out to him, showing him the page she was reading from. "It's dated June 1999. I was already gone by this time, had been for a while. That's why I don't remember anything about it. Daddy describes a hunt for a werewolf, one that isn't like any he had come across before. He said it could transform and kill at any time, that there didn't have to be a full moon. He said that it seemed like it had more human-like qualities even when transformed. He had been tracking it all across the northwest, but he suspected that it was from this part of Idaho. He came here and tracked it to its home. When he went there, he found what he says was a pack—a group of werewolves living together. He killed them, all of them. Or so he thought. When he got back to his hotel, he says he was attacked, by a werewolf. He shot it, but didn't kill it. It got away. But it had ransacked his room, taking as much stuff as it could find. Apparently, one of those things was a picture. Of my family. Joseph was just a baby then. Daddy notes in his journal that he was worried that it would come after me, for revenge."

Amie stopped and took a deep breath, trying to keep the tears at bay. "The last entry in the journal says that he had a lead on the werewolf and he was going to try to find it before it found me. That was the hunt he was killed on. I never knew what killed him just that he'd been on a hunt when it happened. It had to have been the pureblood. Then it killed my family. And I'm pretty sure it wants to kill me. Full circle, revenge complete."

Amie sat down next to Dean on the bed, finally out of things to say. Dean slipped his arm around her and she leaned against him. They had to find this monster and kill it. Not just for what it had done to Frank and Joseph, but for what it had done to her father. She was going to make sure that it knew whose daughter was ending its life when she put a silver bullet in its heart.