Chapter 12

"You okay back there, Dude?" Dean asked, turning his head to look back at their 'guest'.

"What do you think?" Luke bitched. "I'm still trying to deal with Jessica's horrific death. All I needed was to be kidnapped at gunpoint by two crazy people."

"Listen. We only want to ask you a few more questions and try to work out what the similarities might be between the death of my mom and your girlfriend. We don't mean you any harm," Dean assured him.

Luke nodded towards John in the driving seat. "Does your father see it like that? The way he was staring at me earlier, it seems he'd have liked nothing better than to pull the trigger and blow a hole in me."

John snorted. "I won't kill you, kid. I just want to keep an eye on you. Your girl was targeted for a reason and maybe that reason is you."

"That's nonsense," Luke retorted. "I already told you I'm an exchange student. I've lived all my life in the UK. Why would anyone here have a problem with me?"

"That's what we're gonna try and find out," John replied. "If as you say, you're an innocent bystander, then I'll escort you to the airport myself and put you on a plane for home."

:

With a frustrated sigh, Luke leaned back in the seat. He tended to believe the older man's words. He'd always had a sixth sense of understanding when someone was telling the truth.

Despite his worry about his current situation, Luke's past anguish and lack of sleep caught up with him, and he found himself dozing off, the rumble of the Chevrolet's engine lulling him to sleep.

:

"The kid's nodded off," Dean chuckled. "It seems he feels safe enough with us after all."

"As long as he doesn't turn out to be a monster or a demon, he's in good hands," John grunted. "There has to be something particular about him though, Dean. Why was Jessica Moore chosen to die and not some other girl?

I'll pull in at the next motel and I want you to see what you can dig up about the guy on the internet. Where he was born, what schools he attended…. You know the drill. Maybe something in his past could shine a light on this affair."

Dean turned once more to glance back at the sleeping man. Luke's features had relaxed, giving him the aspect of an overgrown child. He had to admit that something was appealing about Luke Evans, though, for the life of him, he couldn't fathom what it might be.

:

When Dean arrived back at the motel after they had registered, weighed down with bags of food from the nearby diner, he found his dad and Luke glaring at each other.

"There's nothing more I can tell you," the younger man declared in agitation. "I've gone over and over about what happened with Jessica. You've eked out even the smallest details from me. When are you going to be satisfied that I've nothing to do with her death and stop treating me as some kind of criminal? I loved Jess. I had no reason to harm her, nor do I know of anyone else who would. Everybody liked her."

Placing the food on the table. Dean turned to his father. "C'mon, Dad. I'm sure you've been grilling the kid like a sergeant major while I've been away. If you haven't come up with anything suspicious, I think we should let him go."

:

With a grunt of disapproval, John got up and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him, and soon the hiss of the shower could be heard in the background

"Wow!" Luke huffed. "Your dad is something else! If he could have dissected my brain to see if I was keeping something back, he would've!"

Dean clicked his tongue. "Yeah. He can be pretty intense, I'll give you that, but you have to understand that you're the first person he's encountered who's witnessed someone dying in the same way my mom did. "

"Yeah," Luke acknowledged. "I get it but he can't believe I'm implicated in some way."

With a shrug, Dean pushed a bag over to him. "Here, I got some burgers. Eat up. As for Dad, his bark is worse than his bite. "

"So. How's London?" Dean asked, biting into his burger.

"It's fine I guess," Luke replied. "Different from California for sure. My parents weren't happy about me going on a student exchange. We're a tight-knit family. They always say that having adopted me was the best thing to happen to them."

An expression of melancholy flitted across his features. "Maybe they were right to be preoccupied. Maybe Jess would still be alive if I hadn't come to the US."

"You were adopted?" Dean asked, his gut telling him that this detail could be important.

"Yes. I don't know who my real parents were. My adoptive mum told me I was abandoned in an hospital as a toddler. At first, the nurses thought I'd wandered off but when no one ever turned up to claim me, I was eventually put up for adoption."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Luke, " Dean said, and he meant it. Family was important to him.

"It's fine," Luke replied. "My parents are terrific. I'm sure I haven't missed out on anything by not knowing who abandoned me."

Even if he was sorry for the kid, Dean's gut feeling that what he'd just been told was important grew stronger.

:

"So, you don't know your birthday or where you were born?"

Luke shrugged. "My birthday's the 2nd of April 1983. That's what's on my birth certificate, but it's just a guess, though they're sure of the year. The doctors reckoned I was around eighteen months old going by my development."

"Nineteen eighty-three," Dean repeated. "My brother would've been your age now."

"You have a brother?" Luke asked.

"Had," Dean shrugged. "He went missing years ago. I was only six at the time so I don't remember much. Dad was desperate though. He dragged me all over looking for him. That's how he ended up learning about all the weird phenomena that's hidden in the shadows."

"And you've never found any traces of him?"

"Dad tried everything but it seemed as if he'd disappeared off the face of the Earth."

:

Dean hesitated a moment. "He even resorted to off-the-board methods like psychics, but nothing worked."

As Dean spoke, Luke's brain was digesting what he'd been told, and he began to wonder if there was any correlation between all the facts he was hearing. He cast his mind back to his earliest childhood memories but he couldn't quite grasp them. It was as if they were tantalizingly out of reach.

He stared at Dean, studying him. Could there be some truth to what Dean's father had said? Both he and the older man had witnessed a dear one mysteriously dying on the ceiling. Was it too outlandish to speculate that he might be the kid who was kidnapped?

"Uh, Dean. I'm just going to put this out here, and you can call me crazy, but what if…" Luke hesitated.

What he was about to say was such a huge jump based on a very small amount of facts, yet his instinct was telling him there was some connection to the guy sitting in front of him…"I was your brother?"

tbc