Chapter 9 Love Bites
I-80 E, Nebraska
Dean rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. He'd been driving for seven hours, and he needed more food, more coffee, someplace to stop, to get out of the car, to get away from his brother.
Beside him, leaning against the window on the passenger side of the car, Sam was silent. The silence had started three hours ago, and would last until he said something, offered some kind of conversational hook to his brother, he knew. Sam's ability to withstand it was a lot better than his own, especially lately. He looked down at the stereo and pulled out the last tape, grabbing another one and pushing it in, without looking at what it was.
Gunter glieben glauchen globen.
All riight. I got somethin' to say, yeah. It's better to burn out, yeah, than to fade away.
His mouth tucked in slightly at the corners, and he twisted the volume knob to the right, thumb tapping against the steering wheel as the music filled the car. He could feel Sam's sour sideways look at him, ignoring it. Just like old times, he thought with an inward grin of satisfaction. The long screech of a nail dragged up a string, the twist of the bass riff throbbing through the chassis into his feet, the music matched the pounding beat in his bloodstream, the one that hadn't gone away since he'd returned, the one that woke him up at night, feeling that they shouldn't be there, that they should keep moving, they needed to go, there was nowhere that was safe …and it took that heavy throb and lifted it up with the soaring chords, lightening his heart and giving the underlying savagery something to sing with.
The miles disappeared under the black car's wheels and as it rocketed along the road he could feel a very faint but growing sense of reconnection. With the car. With the road.
With himself.
Coralville, Iowa
Sam looked up as the door opened and Dean – he assumed it was his brother, since he couldn't see anything but a pair of legs and a pile of boxes – came in, extracting the key from the lock and kicking the door shut behind him. The boxes landed in a pile on side of the table.
"What's this?"
"Stuff," Dean said, dropping the key on the table and pulling off his jacket. "I had a look through the trunk and this is the stuff we used to have but I can't seem to find now," he added shortly.
Sam sighed, looking at the pile. Police scanner. A pair of throat mikes and earphones. A small digital video camera. He saw a hand-held black light on another box, "Great for Parties!", and a number of plain brown boxes marked simply "Components". Dean had cleaned out Radio Shack.
"It's at the cabin in Whitefish," Sam said. "I didn't need it anymore."
"Anything else up there that I should know about?"
"Bobby's library, and what we found of Rufus' journals." Dean wouldn't try and carry that amount of books around with them, he knew.
"Any way we can get those books into a format we can lug around easily?" Dean ripped open the topmost box and pulled out the scanner components.
"Yeah, if you're okay with us sitting around about a month while we scan them into a database, check that the OCR has reproduced them correctly, and write a bit of software so that we can search them easily," Sam said, leaning back in his chair.
"Huh," Dean sat down and disappeared behind the rest of the boxes.
"Didn't think so," Sam said softly.
"How's the search for Kevin coming along?"
"It's not."
"What's the problem?" His brother leaned out from behind the pile and looked at him.
"He's not an idiot and he's laid about ten false trails to cover every single real one."
"So no leads, then?"
"Didn't I just say that?" Sam looked at him irritably. "No, no leads."
"Okay."
Sam woke up to the sound of the shower running. He picked up his watch from the nightstand, squinting at the small glowing figures. Three-thirty. In the a.m. Dean's bed was empty, but it looked like his brother had been sleeping in it. The linen was in a tangled ball down the end, half-fallen to the floor. He looked at the closed bathroom door. Nightmare?
Pushing the covers back he got up, knocking once on the door before he opened it. Behind the glass screen, the shower was thundering down into the cubicle and from the lack of steam in the tiny room, Sam guessed that it was just cold water. He couldn't see a figure in there.
"Dean?"
Sam walked to the screen and saw him then, crouched down in the corner under the fall of water, dressed, by the looks of it, head tucked into his arms which were wrapped around his knees.
"Dean?" He opened the door and felt the icy spray from the shower, flipping off the flow and seeing that Dean was shivering uncontrollably, completely soaked through.
"Dean, what are you –"
He reached down to touch his shoulder and Dean's head snapped up, his eyes wide and dark and – not seeing him, Sam thought. It was the only thought he had time for as his brother jack-knifed to his feet, arm sweeping his own aside, the shower surround disintegrating as Dean threw himself at him, knocking him to the floor, one hand crushing his throat, the other raised in a fist above his face.
"Dean, it's me! Dean!" Was he asleep? Sam looked up at him and saw the muscles in shoulder and chest tighten; lifted his forearm to try to block the blow that was coming. He closed his eyes and turned his head away.
"Sam?"
His brother's weight on him was gone, and he looked up to see Dean pressed back against the far wall.
"Yeah, it's me," he said, coughing a little at the soreness of his throat. "What happened?"
Dean stood there, shivering with the cold that had returned, just looking at him.
"You have a nightmare?" Sam turned on the tap over the sink and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of water, feeling the cool water ease the pain immediately. "Dean?"
He looked obliquely into the mirror, watching Dean looking around, at the broken shower screen across the floor, at his own soaked clothing, the scrapes and cuts over his knuckles.
"Do you remember what happened?" Sam turned around slowly.
"I was asleep," Dean muttered.
"You had a dream," Sam said. "And came in here, turned on the shower and got under it."
Dean shook his head. "No."
Sam watched him look again at the soaked clothes, brows drawing together tightly as he took them in.
"I came in and you were under the water," he continued quietly. "When I tried to get you out, you came through the screen and knocked me to the floor."
Dean looked at the floor, shaking his head. "I-I –"
"You don't remember," Sam said.
What the fuck was going on with him? A fugue state? Sleepwalking? He wasn't sure if it was a good idea to get closer to him.
"Dean, what do you remember?"
"I was asleep, I woke up and you were lying … there." Dean looked down at the floor again, his face screwed up with the image in his mind.
"Get dry, I'll get you some more clothes," Sam said, turning for the door and opening it.
"Sam, I –" Dean stood with his back against the wall, his expression shocked and vulnerable.
"It's okay," Sam said, looking at him. "We're good."
He nodded uncertainly, his gaze dragged back to the broken shower, to the floor.
Sam looked around as he heard a mutter from the bed behind him.
"What time is it?" Dean asked, propped on one arm as he rubbed his eyes.
"Eight," Sam said. "How're you feeling?"
Dean looked at him, hand still over half his face. "Fine, why?"
Sam turned in the chair, brow wrinkling up. "Why? Because you had a nightmare last night and came within about an inch of killing me."
"What?" Dean's voice held that particular deep, disbelieving tone he usually reserved for denying adolescent impulses. "I was asleep the whole night, practically."
Sam smiled humourlessly. "Your clothes are still dripping in the bathroom. You had a nightmare and gave yourself a cold shower – fully dressed."
Something flickered in his brother's eyes, too fast to see. Dean got out of the bed and walked barefoot to the bathroom, opening the door and staring in.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I woke up and you were in the shower. Dressed. Cold water turned on full. I tried to get you out and you came through the shower screen like a – a – commando, knocked me to the floor and –" He stopped.
"And what?" Dean turned back to him.
"I thought you were going to kill me," Sam finally said bluntly. He lifted his chin. The handprint bruised into the skin was clearly visible. "I don't think you were conscious when you were doing it."
Dean walked slowly over to him, looking at the mark around Sam's throat. He frowned as a flicker of memory came and went, too fast to make out. He looked back at the bathroom. His clothes were in there, wet and dripping from what remained of the frame that had surrounded the shower cubicle.
He sat down in the chair opposite his brother. "I don't remember that."
"Yeah, I know," Sam said.
Dean looked down at the table, his face shuttered. It had to have been a nightmare, he thought uneasily. Something he'd been trying to wake up from? To block out? He didn't know. He could feel Sam's eyes on him, worry radiating out from his little brother like heat from a fire. Probably fair enough. The bruising was dark, and clear. He'd obviously been putting a lot of pressure on. He felt his stomach roil and shunted the image that appeared in his mind away.
"Well, a nightmare, I guess," he said, looking up at Sam.
"Yeah," Sam agreed readily. "About what, Dean?"
"I don't remember." That was true enough, although he knew all the contenders. "I'll, uh, it'll be fine."
"Dean."
He looked up. "I'll get something, Sam. To help me sleep, okay? It'll be fine."
Sam watched his expression tighten, saw the decision made. He let out his breath. Maybe it would. Until the next time.
"You find anything?" Dean looked at the open laptop on the table.
"Maybe," Sam said, glancing back at the screen. "I was looking through flagged cold cases on the feds database. There might be something in Dexter."
"Dexter … where?"
"Dexter, Michigan."
Dexter, Michigan
Sam brought up the case photographs. "It's old, alright? From 2001."
Dean leaned on the table, eyes narrowed as he looked at the pictures that Sam scrolled through. Four victims in four weeks. All the bodies intact, except that their hearts were missing. The coroner's reports had indicated that the hearts had been removed without the use of a blade, by force alone.
"Werewolf," he said, looking at Sam.
"I'd agree … except for the dates," Sam agreed, bringing up the police report. "The first vic was found the day after the full moon, no arguments, good for the werewolf. But the next three were a week apart from that date. The moon was waning to half, quarter then the last vic was attacked on the dark phase."
"Not a werewolf," Dean looked around and dragged the other chair over, sitting down. "What else takes the heart?"
Sam smiled. "Nine-hundred year old Mayan god-buddies. Skinwalkers. A witch might, if it was for a spell, though I'm guessing they'd probably use a knife."
Dean nodded, running a hand over his jaw. "Yeah, alright. Back to the suits."
He looked at his duffle bag irritably.
"I don't know that we're going to get much help from the police on a case this old, Dean."
"We ask to see the files. There might be something in there, something they missed."
Dean fiddled with the scanner, leaning back in the chair at the table. The files had been the same as the ones Sam had already found. Nothing new. Something had been here, had killed four people, taken their hearts and disappeared. And hadn't reappeared.
"Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, what's your twenty, over?"
"Dispatch, Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, location corner of Seventeenth Street and Maple, over."
"Ten-four, Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, ten-forty-nine Block One, Seventeenth Street, rear of the building. Resident called about a ten-fifty-four."
"Ten-four, Dispatch, out."
Dean sat up and looked at the scanner. A few minutes later it crackled into life again.
"Dispatch. Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, I have a possible ten-ninety-one attack, Seventeenth Street, Block One. Eleven-forty-four and require a team to that location, over."
"Ten-four, Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, there is a team en route to your location. Coroner advised. Please advise status of ten-ninety-one attack. Do you require a ten-ninety-one-golf, over?"
"Dispatch, negative on ten-ninety-one-golf. Animal has gone. I cannot advise status of ten-ninety-one at this time," the voice on the scanner was shaking. "Ten-fifty-five will also be required, and Patty, get hold of Doc Reynolds ASAP, over."
"Ten-four, Kilo Alpha Tango One Four Seven, out."
Dean looked at the scanner, then at Sam. "Did you hear that?"
"It's an animal attack, Dean, could be anything."
"That cop didn't sound like he'd seen anything like it before," Dean said, getting up and dragging his suit jacket back on. "Come on, we'll take a look. He called the coroner and I guess the doc's the local medical examiner so it wasn't a straight case of missing throat action either."
Sam sighed and got up.
Dean looked around as he turned into the rear driveway. Place was a circus.
"I hate college towns," he said sourly, pulling up and turning off the engine.
"Thought you loved college towns." Sam glanced at him, seeing the tension was back. "All the girls."
"I hate college towns when there's a murder," Dean clarified. "Kids all turn into ghouls and idiots." He got out and looked at the scene, ducking under the crime-scene tape and pulling out his badge. On both sides of the scene, there were students, or residents or gawkers, a couple with video cameras, for god's sake.
He looked at the body, chastely covered by a broad white cloth, blood seeping through from the wound that was, naturally, in the centre of the chest. Scanning the faces that surrounded them, he felt his instincts prickle slightly at the avid look on some of those faces. Chance to be on the nightly news, he wondered or to see the handiwork of the night before.
Ahead of them, a man in a brown suit looked up and walked over, the flat, grey light gleaming on a hairless pate.
"Special Agent Rose, and this is Special Agent Hudson," Sam said.
"Detective Young. What the hell are you guys doing here?"
Dean looked around. "Our jobs. You want to tell us what's going on?"
"Got a call from a woman that lives upstairs," Young looked from Dean to Sam curiously. "Said she heard an attack, came down, found her neighbour here. Name of Jacob Carter, student."
"Is the witness still home?" Sam followed Young to the body.
"Sure is. She's … uh, not the most reliable type. She said she heard some kind of growl, like there was a coyote down here." Young looked down at the body. "Wasn't a coyote, I can tell you that. Coyotes are scavengers, they'll eat the hands and feet, go for the soft organs that are easy to get to – they don't start breaking through rib-cages."
"And it's just the heart that's missing?" Dean's glance flickered along the watching crowd, picking out the two kids holding their cameras right on them. He'd wait for the autopsy to look at the body.
Young nodded. "Just the heart."
"Awesome."
Sam looked at him. "I'll take the witness. You going with the body?"
He nodded and tossed Sam the car keys. "Yeah, I'll meet you at the coroner's office."
Sam climbed the stairs to the apartment of Marlee Adams, Jacob Carter's worried neighbour. He knocked on the door and stepped back a little when it opened and a gust of gin-flavoured air wafted out.
"Ms Adams?" He looked at her, ducking his head a little to meet her wandering gaze. "I'm Special Agent Rose, of the FBI. I'd just like to ask you a couple of questions about your neighbour, Mr Carter."
Marlee lifted her head. She was, Sam thought, in her late twenties, but it was hard to tell because the alcohol had already taken a toll on her skin and hair, drying them out. Dark brown hair, unwashed and unbrushed, fell back from her face and the blue eyes were bloodshot, ringed by deep purple shadows.
"Jacob?" She looked past into the hall. "He died. There was a noise – I don't know what it was, sounded like a horror movie or something out there – but it wasn't human, I can tell you that for sure."
Sam kept his face neutral. "What time was that, Ms Adams?"
"Last night, early this morning. Before it got light," she said, leaning against the doorframe. "I couldn't sleep." She looked away and her face crumpled up slightly.
"I can't sleep mostly, most nights," she started again. "And I was nearly out of cigarettes, which makes me kind of anxious, especially if it's a holiday or sometime when the stores aren't going to be open for a while, and I was looking at the window, wondering when the sun would come up –" She leaned forward to him and almost fell, her foot sliding out in time to keep her upright. He watched her straighten up without acknowledging the near-faceplant.
"Jacob screamed – just once. And there was this noise. This growling noise," she glanced back into the single studio apartment behind her. "You ever watch the Discovery channel?"
"Yeah, sometimes," Sam said uncertainly. "Why?"
"I watch it a lot. I know the sounds wild animals make when they – when they – when they're eating. This noise sounded like that." She closed her eyes.
"Uh, thank you, Ms Adams, that's been very helpful," Sam said, taking a step back. "If we need anything else, we'll come by."
"Yeah," she murmured softly. "Always here, between midnight and midday, seven days a –" She looked up and turned around and the door closed behind her.
Not the world's most reliable witness, he thought, turning to head back down the stairs, but what she'd heard had been interesting. He came out of the building through the rear door and looked around. The body had gone, and with it, his brother, and the bystanders had finally disappeared as well. The crime-scene tape still fluttered in the wind that came around the corner of the big block and he turned along the wall, looking carefully at the ground, at the wall, and at the greenery that crowded close to the far end of the building, trees and shrubs and bushes all a perfect hiding spot for something that was waiting to feed.
Sam drove into the parking lot behind the coroner's office and pulled into a vacant slot beside the door. He got out and walked to the door, almost running into Dean as the door was pulled open and his brother strode out.
"Good timing," Dean said, sidestepping him as if he'd been expecting it and walking straight to the car, hand held out behind him.
"That was fast," Sam tossed the keys and watched Dean catch them without looking, opening the driver's door and getting in.
"Doc Reynolds is backed up today, apparently three people in the old folk's home on the other side of town got food poisoning last night. He'll do the autopsy on the kid in the morning," Dean said, yawning.
"Well, our not-so-reliable witness was pickled," Sam got into the passenger side as the engine started. "But she watches the Discovery channel and she knows what a wild animal sounds like when it's eating."
Dean's mouth tucked in at the corners. "Does she?"
"Yeah, doesn't narrow it down much."
"We need to check the people in that neighbourhood, see if anyone heard anything." Dean twisted around to back the car out. "Or if we get any vibes from anyone."
"Seems like mostly kids living off campus around here," Sam said, looking at the big houses and small apartment blocks. "Try the college for a list of addresses first?"
"Yeah, and the students. Someone must have known something about Carter."
The wide halls of the administration building were surprisingly busy and the suits garnered them more curious looks than Dean felt comfortable with. Intellectually, he knew they couldn't get the information they needed without the damned things. Emotionally, he wanted to burn the two he owned and be comfortable again.
He dodged another group of students and almost walked into an older man heading up toward him, fair head bent over a thick sheaf of papers he held in one hand, several heavy books tucked under the other arm. Dean felt a sharp prickle on the back of his neck as he sidestepped adroitly to avoid the man and looked back at him for a second. What had that been, he wondered?
He stood to one side of the office, half-listening to his brother haggling with the dean over the privacy issues of the students versus the jurisdiction of the government to get answers on a possible homicide case, repressing the urge to pull out his gun and shoot the obnoxious paper-pusher, and thinking around the issue that had been hiding in the back of his mind since he'd looked into the bathroom back in Iowa and seen the shattered shower screen and his clothes dripping onto the floor. He couldn't take the pills he'd picked up. They dulled everything down so far he felt like a zombie, even after he'd been awake for a couple of hours. He figured that his compromise, sleeping about an hour in every four, was a reasonable solution. It didn't let him get down to a dream-state, not really, and he was still able to function at full power through the day. He felt his jaw tighten as he stopped another yawn.
Sam turned away from the man with an air of triumph and Dean nodded to the man coldly as he turned and followed him out of the office. They waited while the secretary pulled out the two lists and walked out, retracing their steps back down to the parking lot.
"Where do you want to start?"
Dean shrugged. It was almost dark. "Let's get something to eat, then we'll start on campus. We can door-to-door tomorrow and give the doc some time to get through his surplus."
Sam nodded, getting back into the car. He saw Dean yawn as he started the engine and thought about the bottle of pills sitting untouched on the nightstand in the motel room. Of waking and seeing Dean's face lit up by the screen of the laptop. There was nothing he could do about it, except try to sleep lightly himself.
Dean looked around sharply at the scrape of a shoe over the asphalt surface. Beyond the lit area of the college's indoor sports building, the shadows filled the spaces between the mature trees. He stared at the nearest, watching a leaf trembling on a sucker growing from the base of the trunk. There wasn't so much as a slight breeze to cause that tremble.
He started to turn toward the tree as Sam finished up with the two students.
"Alright, there is not a –" Sam started to say, and he turned back, cutting him off.
"There is a case here. You're rusty. We just got to dig a little deeper, come on."
He ignored his brother's deep sigh and walked back to the car, forgetting about the trembling leaf. He could feel the case. He didn't need to justify that feeling to Sam.
"Dean?" Sam propped himself onto his elbow as he saw his brother pacing along the wall of the room, the curtains partially pulled shut but the lights from the street still coming through enough to see by.
"Yeah?"
"What's going on?"
He heard Dean's deep exhale. "I can't take the pills. They make me too dopey."
"All right, but why aren't you sleeping?"
"Don't want to wake up in the shower," Dean said lightly.
"What happened to you?" Sam sat up, staring at his outline against the backlit motel curtains. "What's eating at you?"
"Sam … I can't … talk about that," Dean stopped moving and stood by the foot of his bed. "You want me to stop having nightmares? Then leave it alone. They'll stop coming when I stop thinking about it."
"That's not how it works," Sam said tiredly.
"It is for me, just let it go, man."
"This is exactly why we're here, Dean," Sam said in exasperation. "We used to talk about this stuff." Some of the time, he amended silently.
He saw a pale gleam of white as Dean grinned. "No, we didn't, not much." And what little I did tell you about, you threw back at me, used it to stab me whenever you weren't in control, he added in his mind. So no, Sam, I'm not going to talk about it, not with you.
"How do you think we're ever going to be able to keep working together if you won't trust me?"
"C'mon, Sammy," Dean sat on the end of the bed. "Working together is how we built the trust in the first place."
"No. It's not," Sam said. "Look, I know I shouldn't talk about trust, okay? I know that what I did, my mistakes, ended up wrecking the trust we had more than anything else."
Mistakes? Dean closed his eyes. He didn't want to go there. Not tonight. Not ever.
"Sam, that's done. All right? That's gone." He looked at him, barely able to make out his brother's outline. "We're just starting again, okay?"
Sam heard the deep weariness in his voice, and stopped the retort that rose. Starting again. Was this the third or fourth time they'd tried it?
"All right," he said. He dropped back to the pillows behind him and rolled over. Dean watched him for a long moment, then rubbed his eyes. He could probably catch an hour now.
Dean climbed the steps to the porch, following Sam. This was block two, he thought tiredly. Sam's patter had become entirely predictable. He stood behind and a little to one side of him as the door opened and a kid looked out.
"Hi, there," Sam said, pasting on a smile.
"Hi," the dark-haired kid said automatically, looking up.
"Special Agents Rose and Hudson." He lifted his ID and Dean pulled his out, holding it up and putting it back. "We wanted to ask you a few questions about the murder that occurred a few blocks from here. Did you know the victim, Jacob Carter?"
Brian glanced at Dean. "Um, no, not really."
"Do you remember anything unusual about that night?" Dean asked automatically.
"Not that I recall," Brian said, his expression a little worried.
"Right. Have there been any reports in the neighbourhood of dog attacks? Or pets disappearing?"
"Uh, pardon me?"
"Humour me." Sam looked at him patiently.
"No, I-I don't think so."
The kid thought they were both nuts, Dean thought. And since when did a bunch of kids living together in a house notice what was happening in the neighbourhood? He looked around the other houses on the street. They needed a neighbourhood full of retirees to get the low down on what happened every day. Every minute.
"All right." Sam nodded. "Thanks for your time. If you hear anything strange... call us." He pulled a small white card from his wallet and handed it to the kid. "No matter how late," he added.
Brian looked at the card and nodded, and Dean repressed a smile at the image of the card fluttering into a trash can before they were even back in the car.
"Thank you," Brian said nervously, as he closed the door.
"So, what do you think?" Dean turned to his brother, one brow raised.
"Well, based on what we've got so far, we could be dealing with another Mayan god," Sam looked at his notes.
Dean smiled, looking down at the car. "Ah, that's fantastic, 'cause the other one was such a joy."
"Yeah. The timing is what's screwy on this," Sam followed his gaze. "Otherwise, I'd be inclined to agree with your first assessment."
"Yeah. Well," he started to walk down the steps. "We've still got to talk to the coroner."
Sam nodded, following him down to the street. They needed knowledge, lore, information. He hadn't realised how much they'd depended on Bobby being on the other end of a phone line to call and ask about the weird ones that came up. Their father had kept a journal – all the old-timers had – he wondered if he should be doing that as well, just writing down every case they handled, everything they found out, so that at least they had something to look through. He thought of what he'd told Dean about putting Bobby's library into a database. Might be a job he could do bit by bit, after they found Kevin, of course.
The scanner crackled and Dean looked up, chewing the burrito faster.
"Dispatch, this is Foxtrot Golf Delta Two Fiver Zero, we have another ten-ninety-one. Ten-fifty-five, over."
"Ten-four, Foxtrot Golf Delta Two Fiver Zero, what's your twenty, over?"
"Dispatch, we're on campus, eastern parking lot. Twenty yards from the edge of the lot, over."
"Ten-four, Foxtrot Golf Delta Two Fiver Zero, ten-fifty-five on their way, out."
Sam pushed his food aside and stood up, pulling on the suit jacket from the back of his chair. Dean looked down at the half-eaten burrito and sighed, getting up and hooking his jacket from the back of his chair as he followed Sam out of the room.
Detective Young turned around as they came under the tape.
"Figured I'd see you guys again," he said.
"Well, if you did your job right, we wouldn't be here," Dean remarked. Sam shot him a look and he turned away, looking down at the body.
"Alright, what have you got?" Sam interjected.
Detective Young gestured down to the body on the ground. "His name is Scott Parker, looks like the same thing that killed the Carter kid got Mr Parker here."
"The same thing?" Sam asked, looking at him curiously. Thing seemed a stretch for a cop.
"Look, I-I-I'm only the local yokel," Young said, holding up his hands helplessly. "But this kid was shredded … by an animal." He glanced from Sam to Dean and looked at the body again, taking a few steps back.
"Where's his heart?" Dean said abruptly.
"Patrolman found it, up the way there," Young waved at the path that ran through the trees. "Eaten, mostly."
"Show us." Dean looked at the path.
"Yeah, yeah, okay," Young said, and led them away from the body. Dean felt Sam's gaze on him and ignored it. It was a case, a heart-snatching-and-eating case. And he wanted whatever what doing it.
The Coroner's Office was a low brick building a couple of blocks from the police station. Dean waited at the counter for someone to appear, finally turning and walking down the corridor when it seemed whoever was supposed to be manning the front desk had gone AWOL. He opened the first door he came to.
"I'm looking for Doc Reynolds?"
The two paramedics standing by the coffee machine looked at each other. "He's down in the morgue, last door on the right."
"Thanks." He shut the door and kept walking.
The last door on the right opened into a wide, clean room, two stainless steel autopsy tables, floor-to-ceiling cupboards and beyond there a cold room with a thick, steel door.
The old man who looked up as he came in was scowling at him. "Gloves and mask, goddammit!"
"You Doc Reynolds?" Dean ignored the scowl, looking around the room.
"That's me. Who're you?" Reynolds said truculently, his hands and arms red to the elbow as he lifted them out of the cavity and waited.
"Special Agent Hudson, sir," Dean said, looking at them. "I'm here about the, uh, animal attacks."
"Judy's taking care of them, across the hall, son," the doctor said, looking back down and gathering up the kidney he'd just freed.
"Judy. Right. Thanks," Dean stepped back and closed the door. He turned around and went to the door opposite. It was another autopsy room, smaller though. A small woman was stripping off her gloves and dropping them into a trash can when he looked inside.
"Ah, Doc said Judy was doing the posts on the animal attacks?"
"Just finished," she said, going to the sink. "Your interest?"
"FBI. Special Agent Hudson," Dean said, walking into the room.
"Got some identification?" She dried her hands on a paper towel, turning back to him.
He walked to her, pulling out his badge, brows rising as she took it from him and looked closely at it. It appeared to satisfy her, though. She handed it back.
"What did you want to know?"
"Uh, everything, I guess," he said, looking at the body on the table.
"Cause of death was a missing heart," Judy walked to the door, taking her jacket off the hook beside it and shrugging it on. "Everything else looked normal and present."
"Cop said he'd been shredded," Dean commented, following her out and down the hallway.
"That Frank Young? He exaggerates everything. Got a hangnail and thought his finger was falling off," she said dryly, opening the rear door to the parking lot. "I've got about five minutes to get myself a sandwich before I have to get back into it."
"Uh, okay." He stopped next to her outside the building. "How was the heart taken?"
"The skin was cut, pulled back from the breastbone. Breastbone was broken and the ribs pulled aside. Heart was torn out, not cut free," Judy looked up at him.
"But the cuts – was a blade used?" Dean frowned.
"Cut marks on both vics are clean but have the curvature of animal claws. I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a wild animal on the loose? Biggest animal in the county is a raccoon." She looked up at Dean apologetically. "Those claws were long, at least four inches, by the single swipe measurement I got. But you know, you hear about big predators being kept privately by people, let go when they can't afford to feed them, or just escaping. That's about the only theory I've got."
"Yeah, uh. Thank you for your time," he said, shaking her hand and turning away. Some loose animal that preferred open heart surgery. No.
He looked up as Sam crossed the parking lot, heading for him.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"So, what did I miss? Anything?" he asked, looking from his brother to the rear door and back.
"Not unless you want to put an A.P.B. out on Rocky Raccoon," Dean said sourly. "Heart was removed by curved claws, according to Judy, assistant coroner. Long claws, but no animals larger than a racoon in this county."
Sam shook his head. "Great. What now?"
"Time to hit the books and feed the monster," Dean said, turning away to look for the car.
"What books are we talking about? The half-dozen in the trunk?"
"Santos used to have a good collection," Dean said, remembering the rooms full of books in the old house in New Mexico.
"Didn't Bobby say he died – leviathans got him last year?"
"His daughter might still be alive."
"Might," Sam repeated, with a sigh. "Right."
The cafeteria was a high-ceilinged room with booths along the outside wall and a mix of large and small tables across the floor. Sam walked down to a small table far enough away from the students to be somewhat private.
Dean looked around. Not a single person over thirty in here, he thought, except for us. And this is what Sam wanted? He sat down with his back to the wall and his field of view encompassing the entire room.
"These are the only books we have on hand that have anything to do with lycanthropes," Sam said, passing him a thick tome and a battered, leather-bound journal. "The journal is one of Rufus'."
Dean flipped it open and started to read as Sam put another heavy book on the table.
"What're you studying?" The waitress might've been a little older than the rest, Dean thought, looking up.
"Uh …," he said, smiling as his mind blanked out.
"Ancient history," Sam supplied, closing the book as he took the menu.
"Two burgers, fries," Dean said, shutting the journal.
"Nice suit," she added to him with a smile. He nodded and looked back down at the journal under his hand. Sam lifted an eyebrow and handed her back the menu.
"And a cob salad, thanks," he said, glancing at his brother again when she turned and walked away. Dean had opened the journal and was reading again, head bowed over the page.
"We're getting nowhere, fast." Sam pulled out a handful of papers from the file in his bag and shuffled through them. Copies of police reports. Copies of coroner's reports, autopsy reports, tox screen reports. There was nothing in them that they didn't already know.
Dean looked up at him. "Takes time, Sam."
"We're supposed to be looking for Kevin, you remember that?" Sam said moodily.
"Yeah. I remember," Dean looked back at the journal, skimming over the hunts that didn't match up with what they had. He hadn't been through this one before, he realised, stopping every now and then and smiling inwardly at Rufus' particular turns of phrase. He'd have to read it thoroughly when he had the chance.
The waitress came up to the table and they looked up, closing the books and files and pushing them to one side as she set down their plates.
"Awesome. Thank you," Dean looked at the burgers, his stomach rumbling.
Sam leaned back a little as she put his salad in front of him. "Thanks." He looked at Dean's plate. "Dude, two burgers?"
"Hey, I didn't eat at Big P's for like a year, okay?" Dean picked one up and looked over at Sam defensively. "Clear eyes and clogged arteries – can't lose." He took a bite.
"Talk about the sounds wild animals make when they're eating," Sam muttered to himself, picking up his fork and stabbing it into the salad.
Dean closed his eyes, focussing his attention on what it all tasted like. Despite the fact that he'd never felt hungry down there, he'd come back topside a bit lighter than he'd gone down. The constant running and fighting might have had something to do with that too, he thought dryly. He wondered how Benny was finding it, the need to eat, to sleep, to rest. Wondered uneasily what his friend was feeding on. They hadn't heard anything but it was a big country. He pushed the thought away, knowing that it would lead to more thoughts that he didn't want to entertain.
He opened his eyes as he finished the first burger and reached for the second. Sam's gaze had cut away, back to the book open beside his elbow, but Dean had felt it on him anyway. He wanted to know about Purgatory. Wanted to know about the changes he'd seen in his brother. Wanted to know what had happened and what it meant. He sighed inwardly. Let's see, how to summarise in fifty words or less … within the first five minutes, Cas had disappeared and he'd spent the next two months – or it might have three or four, it'd been hard to tell – hacking and torturing his way through various monsters, trying to find him. After a while the torturing part had felt kind of familiar, strangely … safe. Then he'd met a vampire who'd promised him a way out. And despite starting off all surly and mistrustful, he'd found the vampire to be a damned good backup, and then a necessary friend. He'd found Cas, and lost him again, and discovered that everything he'd learned and felt and done in Hell hadn't gone at all, it'd just been buried, waiting for the opportune moment to come roaring out again.
He stopped chewing, staring down at the table, feeling his stomach twitch as the memories pressed closer. He swallowed and pushed them back. More than fifty words. Fail.
He looked at the burger, and took another bite. It stayed down, hunger more powerful than the memories for the moment, anyway. He'd known it back there, that he wasn't going to be able to tell his brother about what had happened, what he'd done. He'd also known that it would fuck up their already shaky foundations, those lies, those omissions. There was nothing he could do about that.
He looked at the journal and pushed it aside. Rufus hadn't hunted a werewolf that could buck the lunar cycle. He opened the large book next to it, instead, burying himself in werewolf lore as he ate.
Sam heard the fork scrape at the bottom of the glass bowl and looked up. It was empty. A shadow passed beside him and he raised his head, seeing the waitress' smile as she collected the empty plates.
"Alright, this is a bust," Sam said, shutting the book. "Everything in here, we already know."
Dean looked at him, head resting against his hand and nodded. "Plan B."
"Call Mariana?" Sam's mouth twisted up. "You got a number, even?"
"Got three," Dean said, pulling his phone from his pocket and scrolling through the address book. He punched it in and listened for a moment. "Ringing."
He handed it to Sam as it was picked up.
"¡Hola, Mariana?" Sam grimaced at his brother as he heard a woman's voice at the end of the line. "Si, este es Samuel … uh, Winchester. Si, si."
Dean grinned at him.
"Mi hermano? No, no, no lo he visto desde hace años. Sí, él es un idiota," he looked at Dean and made a face.
"Mariana, we need some information, from the library of your father. Sí, I am sorry for your loss. About werewolves. Sí."
He covered the end of the phone as he waited, looking at Dean. "You slept with her?"
Dean sat back, trying to remember if he had. "No. Possibly. I can't remember."
"You know, there are a lot of –" Sam stopped as Mariana came back on the line. "Sí, gracias, Mariana. We're, uh, estamos buscando a un hombre lobo que se puede cazar en cualquier parte del ciclo?"
"Okay, hang on, I need to write this down," he said, grabbing a piece of paper and gesturing to Dean for a pen. Dean looked at him and shook his head disbelievingly.
"A what?" Sam reached down to the leather satchel at his feet, and rummaged through it until he found a stub of a pencil, pulling it out and writing fast on the back of the police report. "Yeah, I got that. Si, sí, gracias. Anything else?"
"Is there more than one source for this, Mariana? Si, yeah, I remember," he said, writing another set of notes. "Don't black out, sí … what about the vulnerability – uh, la debilidad? Still silver, good, gracias, muchas gracias, Mariana."
He finished writing and looked at his brother as he listened, holding the phone slightly away from his ear as the volume from the other end increased. "Sí, si yo nunca lo volvería a ver, voy a decirle que. Gracias."
He cut the call and handed the phone back to Dean.
"What was the last bit?" Dean asked, not sure he wanted to know. It hadn't sounded like a compliment.
"She thinks you're a dick," Sam said acerbically. "Alright, Santos had a lot of stuff about werewolves. She found this in the oldest book, written in the fourteen hundreds. The first human to be turned by the goddess' firstborn – which would be the Alpha – is considered a pureblood and the founder of a distinct and unique line. Purebloods, and the werewolves created over the first four generations of the pureblood, have significantly more control over the aspects of the curse than later generations."
"What kind of control?" Dean tried to read his brother's notes upside-down.
"These creatures can transform at any stage of the lunar cycle, and are not governed by the bloodlust that characterises those made later in the line. They must take a heart, for the heart is the symbol of life, essential to the continuation of the line. It doesn't have to be a human heart, however; the hearts of animals can sustain the pureblood or its descendents as well. The pureblood can control their impulses, making them extremely difficult to find and thus kill."
"You wrote that down word for word?" Dean stared at him. "Alright, so a purebred is a werewolf turned by the Alpha and it can control itself – and it passes that on to the people it turns for – what? – four generations."
"Yeah. It can be killed by silver like any other werewolf. To the heart," Sam read back what he'd written.
"Reassuring, since we don't have anything else on hand," Dean said, leaning back in his chair. "Told you there was a case here. Now we just got to find it and kill it."
"The first killing was in 2001, Dean. This is a college town, people come and go all the time, how the hell are we going to be able to find this thing?"
"One killing in 2001 then nothing till now. So maybe it's been living off of animal hearts, and recently got a sudden urge for human again. So whoever it is, they stayed," Dean said, drumming his fingers on the tabletop as he pieced it together. "County'll have records of residents who became permanent, won't they?"
"Maybe, if they bought. We can check against the census database, same occupancy." Sam chewed on his lip, thinking about it. "Utilities records will be the quickest. We'll start with those."
"Right."
"County and the utility offices'll be closed until morning," Sam looked at his watch.
"Well, we'll have to pay them an unofficial visit. We can't wait till morning," Dean said, stacking the journal on top of the book and getting up. He pulled his suit jacket on and picked them up. "Let's go."
They got back to the motel just after midnight. Sam dumped the printouts onto the table and made a fresh pot of coffee.
Sam checked the property records, while Dean went through the electricity accounts. It took two hours to narrow down the same names repeating in both piles.
"How many?" Dean looked up at him. "I got six."
"Same here," Sam rubbed a hand over his face tiredly. "We'll start with the closest residences to the campus."
Dean looked out the window, seeing nothing, the blackness making the glass a mirror inside. He wondered if he'd just gone wandering around the campus grounds over the last couple whether he'd have drawn an attack. One bite up here, he thought. Sam wouldn't have agreed. Might have saved on all the reading.
"Professor … Gordon Atbody," Dean read from the list. They needed to see this dude, then one other chick, and then they were out of options again. He walked along the corridor, glancing into the open office doors as he passed them.
The sound of smashing furniture echoed through the empty corridor, catching their attention and they ran for the office ahead of them, Sam shouldering through the door and sending a shower of glass across the floor.
"Hey!"
A man was standing in the corner of the room, reaching up and into the top shelf of a bookcase, pulling at something. Dean and Sam caught his arms and yanked him back from the shelf, tossing him onto the desk top and releasing him as he slid along the surface and fell to the floor at the end.
The noise that came out of his throat was human, but only just, Dean thought, a deep-chested rolling growl that grew as he scrambled to his feet and hunched over, the muscles over his back and shoulders straining against the white shirt he wore.
Dean reached out to grab his arm and was thrown backward into a built-in, glass-fronted bookcase, and Sam felt himself lifted and shoved backward with ease into the opposite wall, his elbow going through another pane of glass. A hand closed around his throat and he felt the prick of the claws breaking through the end of the fingers, stabbing into the side of his neck as the creature pressed him into and up the wall. Behind him, Dean got to his feet, shaking off the glass and lifting the Colt automatic in a two-handed grip.
The shot was loud in the small space, the werewolf dropping Sam and falling to his knees, a small red stain in the centre of his chest growing and spreading as he looked down.
"Thank you," he said softly, then hit the floor.
"Never killed a pureblood before," Dean said, looking at the body, then wondered if that was true. In Purgatory he hadn't been asking for pedigrees.
Sam leaned back against the wall for a moment, his fingertips cautiously exploring his throat, feeling the new bruises rising over the old ones. He looked around the room absently, his gaze stopping and sharpening when it reached the corner they'd found the professor in. "What was he looking at?"
Walking across the room, ignoring the crunch of glass and wood under his feet, he looked into the corner of the bookshelf. The round black lens was easily visible to someone looking for it.
"What the hell?" He reached up and pulled it free.
"What it is?" Dean came around the other side of the desk, seeing the camera in his brother's hand. "He was under surveillance? By who?"
"I don't know, but we're gonna find out," Sam said, tucking the camera into his jacket and looking around the office. "What do you want to do about this?"
"Leave it to the cops," Dean shrugged. "We got it, it's over."
Sam touched the camera lightly. "Maybe not. Come on."
Sam sat at the table with a magnifying glass, looking over every square inch of the camera. He couldn't see anything etched, scored, written or painted on it anywhere. The serial number had traced back to an online store that hadn't kept its records straight.
On the other side of the table, Dean unpacked his electronics boxes, assembling a new electro-magnetic field meter, with a set of micro-tools that had been unpacked from another box. The unit squawked once as he turned it on, then settled back to silence, the digital read-out reading zero point zero. He set it aside, and pulled the box containing the ultraviolet light toward him. It was just a wand, really, a long narrow tube with a cord attached to one end. He looked around for a socket, and plugged it in.
"Unbelievable," Sam said softly, smiling.
"What?" Dean looked up from the socket.
"He used a fluorescent marker," Sam held up the camera. On the side, a name and address glowed blue in the ultraviolet light.
Dean looked at it. "Brian Wilcox. Didn't we go to that house?"
"Yep," Sam said, getting to his feet.
"Hey!" Dean flicked off the UV light. "No "gee it's lucky you went and replaced all our old gear, Dean"?"
Sam looked at him, dimples deepening. "No."
The two-storey house wasn't markedly different from any of the others along the street. The neighbourhood might've been more family-oriented once, but was now pretty much dedicated to student off-campus accommodation, easily discerned from the bedsheets used as curtains, and the beer cans that filled the trash cans in the front yards.
Two-two-three was silent when they came up the steps to the porch. Two bicycles leaned against the side of the house near the driveway, both spotted with rust from being left out. The windows were closed, the sheer curtains drawn.
Sam knocked at the door and waited. There was no movement on the street either, Dean thought, looking around. All either at jobs or in class. Sam knocked again, more loudly.
"Kick it," Dean said, moving to one side to cover his brother as Sam slammed his foot into the door just above the lock. It swung open and they moved inside, guns drawn, safeties off. Music played quietly from the living room.
Sam covered the rooms on the right and centre, Dean checked the rooms to the left and went upstairs fast, checking the bedrooms and bathroom before coming down again.
"Whoa," Sam said softly, looking into the living room. He walked to the nearest body, the one that had been covered, and nudged it with his foot.
Dean glanced around the room, noting the blood spray over the walls, the bodies, one covered by a sheet, the other out in the open on the floor. The music in the living room was still playing, some current song he'd never heard of before. He looked around and saw the square black box, the iPod sticking out the top and glowing. Pulling it out, he looked back to Sam, crouched beside the covered body.
"Rest of the place is clear."
Sam glanced up at him. "Yeah. Uh... no ID on this one. And uh... no clue who is painted on the walls." He looked around the room.
"Well, whatever happened, looks like we missed it," Dean said, turning around.
"Yeah. Great." Sam got to his feet. "Wait a sec."
He pointed to a long desk with two chairs near it, against the other wall. On the crowded surface, a half-open laptop shed a little blue light onto the desk's surface. Stuck to the lid, the small hot-pink note instructed them to "Play Me".
"What the hell?" Dean stepped toward the desk, lifting the lid and glancing back at his brother. Sam shrugged and pulled out one of the chairs near the desk, sitting down.
Dean took the other chair, pulling it over and taking the mouse. He clicked on the application in the centre of the screen. A window loaded and a film began to play.
The film had been shot by the students in it, a hot-potch of scenes that loosely covered the last four days. There'd been three kids – Michael, Brian and Kate – and Dean watched the awkward but predictable triangle playing out in front of him with little surprise.
The girl – Kate's – face filled the screen. "I'm leaving. And you'll never hear from me ever again. Look, I know that there's another way. I can eat animal hearts."
"I've never hurt anyone. Nobody human, anyway. I didn't choose this. Please... please give me a chance."
When the screen went to black, then closed, they sat in silence for a long moment.
"Well," Sam said finally. Dean nodded.
"Yeah, never give your powers to the girl whose boyfriend you just ganked, right?" he said, turning around in the chair and looking at the bodies. "Okay, so, uh..."
He got up and walked to the sheet-covered body. "This ..." He lifted the sheet and looked at the face of the young man lying underneath. "Yeah, … is Michael, which means that that is ..."
Sam got up and looked at the torn-apart body close to the wall. "Brian Wilcox, our friendly neighbourhood cameraman."
"Right," Dean said, staring at the remains.
Sam exhaled gustily. "All right, so ..."
He looked at his watch, calculating the time that had elapsed since the film had been finished. "What, she's got about a half-day jump on us?"
"Mm-hmm." Dean nodded slightly.
She was a monster, it wasn't like that was debatable. She'd killed Brian, ripped through the guy's throat and yanked out his heart. Of course, he'd been a monster too. Kind of saved them the trouble.
Sam looked at him, brow creasing up. "You all right?"
"Mm-hmm."
Benny was a monster. A vampire who'd told him that he drank from donated bags. It could've been the truth. It might not've. He couldn't go and verify it. But he'd believed in him. Believed that he'd tried to turn himself around, believed that he'd stopped drinking people. A thought of Lenore flickered through his mind. Another one. She'd kept her nest drinking animal blood.
Maybe it was possible. Maybe it was possible that Kate would never touch a human being, never know the difference between an animal heart and a human one. Without knowing, without tasting it, it was easier to keep it under control, he thought. He thought of the wire. What he'd done. Snap judgements on right and wrong didn't come quite so easily on the subject of monsters now.
"Look, Kate's right. She hasn't hurt anybody – well, anybody human at least," Sam said quietly, not sure what his brother was thinking about, just recognising that he hadn't immediately turned around and leapt for the car. It had to mean something.
"No. No one human," Dean said, nodding. No one human. And we all kill monsters, don't we? Killing monsters, that was allowed. As long as they weren't your friends. "Alright. Let's give her a shot."
"Seriously?" Sam stared, not quite sure he'd heard right.
"Yeah," Dean said, looking around at the blood-soaked room. "Yeah."
"And, look," Sam turned to the desk. "If Kate pops back up, I mean, if she strays, then no questions asked." He unplugged the hard drive and the laptop and picked them up, looking back at Dean.
"We do what we got to do and, uh, we take her down," he finished, eyes narrowing a little as he took the expression on his brother's face. He looked … lost, almost.
"We leaving this all like this?" Dean's attention came back into focus.
"Do you want to clean it up?"
"Not especially," Dean said, looking at the walls and furniture. "But we left prints."
"Yeah, I'll chuck these in the car, come back." He turned and walked out the front door.
Dean retraced his path from entering the house to this moment and pulled a soft, clean cloth from his jacket pocket. He walked across the hall, wiping the door knobs, the newel post of the staircase, going upstairs and wiping down the knobs he'd touched up there. When he came down, Sam had wiped down the desk and the docking station and the iPod.
"Clean?"
"Yeah."
They walked out through the front door and down the steps, splitting up to go around to their respective sides of the car and getting in. Sam looked around as Dean pushed the key in but didn't turn it.
"Sam?"
"Yeah?"
"Do I really say 'awesome' a lot?"
"No," Sam said, straight away, shaking his head. "No."
I-94 W, North Dakota
Dean watched the road as the headlights illuminated it, fifty yards at a time. Sam was sleeping and the car was quiet, just the rumble of the engine and the thrum of the tyres under him.
He thought of Benny, somewhere out there in the night. Was he feeding or was he keeping his nose clean? Did it matter? He was a vampire.
No matter how hard you try, you are what you are. You will kill again.
He rubbed his hand over his jaw, rasp of stubble over the palm and fingers, hearing the words – his words – in his head again. Was that going to happen? He didn't know. Didn't know how to tell, didn't know how to be sure.
Did he owe Sam an explanation? Of that part of Purgatory, and getting out, at least?
Trust me, I'm an expert. Maybe in a year, maybe ten. But eventually, the other shoe will drop. It always does.
An expert. God. Who the hell had he been back then, anyway? What if she hadn't killed again? The way he was hoping that Benny wouldn't? Or Kate, who he'd just let walk into the sunset without so much as a second thought? What the fuck was happening to him that his priorities, the things he'd thought he'd known were all getting so screwed up?
He looked down at the speedometer and eased his foot back off the accelerator. Sam had been right about that. No Bobby to call off the cops or the feds or anyone they handed out their little white cards to. No backup. No verification. It was a big, empty world he was in now.
He stared at the road, black, delineated with white lines that sped past in the brightness of the headlights. He wanted to tell Sam. He wasn't sure when he'd started to want that, but he thought that his brother might've been right about rebuilding the trust between them. And he'd been right about working together without that trust. It wouldn't work. It couldn't work.
No, he thought, fingers tightening around the wheel. He couldn't. Couldn't see the look in Sam's eyes. Couldn't ask him to understand. Not now. And what if it opened other secrets? Secrets that he would die before admitting to? No. Sam would never find out. There was no way he could, so it didn't matter if he didn't tell him.
You thought that about Amy, too, didn't you? The small, sly voice in his mind said. That was different. Yeah, it's always different. How about Ruby? How did that feel, when you found out about it? Found out that your little brother had been keeping that a secret?
Only truth is freedom. Complete truth. From the heart. Everything else … that's a cage.