The Witch Is Dead: Part 3
It was dark by the time Sam left the library, and the wind was dragging a fine drizzle through the streets. Weightless water dust clang to Sam’s clothes and hair and felt like cold hands on his face. He’d warm up once he started pedaling. He thought about digging out his coat from the Impala’s trunk and winced. The coat had a large blood stain - his, too - that never quite washed out, though it wasn’t recognizable as blood on the dark fabric. But wait, Dad drove off in the Impala two weeks ago, along with Sam and Dean’s warm clothes. So much for that idea.
Sam thought about Sarah Atkins and her roller coaster as he rode home, because that was better than thinking about Dad and stirring up the anger that never left him. Sam got curious when it turned out that the park was built by a woman in the 20s, and, once he looked her up, wondered what sort of name Barnard was. And there she was, in an old family portrait, in her white dress and holding a sun umbrella, tiny flowers in her hair and something vaguely unpleasant in her smile. The first time Sam saw her face, he felt a pinprick of déjà vu, but the feeling was too fleeting to catch. Perhaps she came up in some other research he’d done in the past, which was more the reason to suspect her.
He took a detour to avoid passing by the Westmorelands’ house.
Down the hill and far away, a freight train blew a whistle as it approached the town limits. Sam glanced that way and saw the train drawing in, on the outskirts of town that was shrinking and decaying from the outside with every year. There, among the dark silhouettes of houses, was a single light coming from the kitchen window where Dean was probably cooking dinner. Today, Sam could pretend that it was just the two of them and that Dad wasn’t going to show up and drag them off across the country. No. Don’t think about the white elephant.
The front door stood open.
Approaching the house from the side, Sam didn’t see it immediately but saw the rectangle of light falling on the porch from an open doorway, and for a second or two, he continued pedaling, thinking that Dean had seen him coming and opened it. But there was no shadow of a person, just an empty patch of light. Realization that something was wrong came like a flood of cold water, up from somewhere in Sam’s stomach and filling him instantly, making the breath catch in his chest. There was no shadow, and the door stood open. Now he could see a wet spot just past the threshold, where the rain had blown in.
Sam hit the brakes hard and half-jumped, half-tumbled from the bike in front of the house. The TV was on inside but otherwise everything was silent.
His first instinct was to run in through the front door, screaming his brother’s name, and Sam ignored it. He padded across the front yard, dropping his backpack along the way, and crouched underneath the kitchen window. From there, he could hear the TV better, but still no other sounds came. Sam peered over the windowsill into the kitchen. A pack of hotdogs was sitting on the tabletop, next to canned beans. It looked like Dean started pulling out food to make dinner but abandoned his task mid-way. The cans were heavy, good as an improvised weapon, and a large kitchen knife lay next to them. So Dean didn’t think he’d need weapons, or didn’t have a chance to grab any. Sam looked for moving shadows but saw none. A corner of the bathroom mirror was visible from where he was sitting. Nothing moved there either.
Fuck you, Dad, you should’ve been here, Sam thought, and was momentarily terrified by the intensity of the thought. He shook it off and tried to focus on what was in front of him - the apparently empty house and the dark yard where anything could be hiding.
Quietly, he slipped through the front door, looking for movement, listening for sounds of it. There was nothing. Sam’s heart was beating in his throat, too loud. The goddamn TV was too loud, too, but he didn’t dare turn it off. Whatever possessions he and Dean kept in the living room were all in place, nothing disturbed. Sam moved quickly into the kitchen and pulled a spare Glock from the drawer, checked the clip, pulled the slide back.
Dean’s boots stood by the door, and his jacket lay across the back of the couch, where he usually tossed it when he returned home. A round of the rest of the house showed it to be just as empty and undisturbed as the living room and the kitchen, so Sam grabbed a flashlight and headed back outside.
Somehow, in his initial hurry, he missed the flowers. Sam froze in the doorway now, staring at them in the front yard, clusters of tiny summer flowers on thick stems, growing in patches among the withering fall grass. In the light from the doorway, Sam saw that they were blue. Forget-me-nots, like the ones Sarah Atkins - Sarah Barnard - wore in her hair in that old photograph. They were surrounded by lush green grass, and when Sam kneeled next to one, he saw that the patches of it were shaped like human footprints, all the way across the lawn.
Sam didn’t need to follow the footprints to know where they led, but he noticed them as he pedaled out of town, toward the railroad tracks. Grass broke through the concrete sidewalk, nettles, flowers, mosses, all green and fresh among the yellowed October vegetation and on completely bald patches of land. There were green tendrils peeking out among the gravel on the railroad embankment. Sam pushed harder, half-blind on the unlit back road. Too many thoughts at once kept running through his head, like, No, and Dean, and Pater noster, qui es in caelis….
A wind rose and chilled the wetness on Sam’s face, rustled the foliage and carried a low moan from the amusement park. It sounded like eighty-year-old untended timber, or like a malformed old monster. Sam aimed his bike for the source of that sound.
The park was dark under the shade of trees, only partly lit by the moon showing through the clouds. Every shape was moving, every shadow alive now, and Sam cursed himself for being so stupid before, for running through this place like a dumb kid and not paying attention. Hibbie-jibbies, Dean had said. Haunted, Sam himself had thought. And still, he kept coming here, alone and with his friends and with his brother. Stupid, god, so stupid.
The highest loop of the roller coaster rose over the treetops, and moon shadows rolled down its tracks like ghost cars. But there wasn’t a body up there. Sam breathed a little easier. Those dead teenagers showed up all over the surrounding area, sometimes miles away, but maybe that was later. Maybe the first step was the high loop, like presenting your kill to the moon before devouring it.
Maybe it didn’t finish eating the twins, whatever it fed off in a human body, before the police took them away. What if it was pissed and still hungry?
Sam abandoned his bike where the broken road disappeared in the undergrowth, and proceeded on foot. He didn’t think the gun would do much, but its weight in the back of his jeans was reassuring. The low moan came again - the sound of a wooden frame swaying in the wind, almost like words. Heeeere, it said. Clooooser. Sam didn’t think it was talking to him.
“…the food isn’t the best in the country, I mean, not the kind I’d eat anyway. I hear they’re great with seafood, but hell, if it’s got scales or more than four legs, I’m not sticking it in my mouth, no sir.” It was Dean’s voice coming from a few feet away, and Sam felt a flood of relief. He was alive then, and conscious. “And it rains there, damn, it rains like nowhere else, ten months straight, swear to god. And when it doesn’t rain, it seems like it’s going to. Yeah, you’d rot there in under a year, buddy.”
Noooo, creaked the old timber, no rot-ta-ta-ta. The later sound came like a series of snaps, something giving in and breaking. Then again, Coooome.
Sam didn’t bother trying to be quiet since no one seemed to pay him any attention. He broke through the thicket of intertwined branches, guarding his eyes. The bushes left scratches on his hands and forearms. He emerged on the edge of a moonlit clearing near the platform, and there was Dean kneeling on the ground. Spring grass and summer flowers burst all around him. He looked unharmed, though his face was pale, and Sam saw the way he clenched his hands into fists. He was shivering visibly, dressed only in jeans and a thin shirt. His teeth clattered when he spoke.
“We lived there in Tacoma last year, and there was this chick, Mandy Something, with the biggest pair of tits. Real, too. I checked.”
The shadow of the roller coaster lay over the clearing like that of a sea serpent. It shifted, paled and sharpened again as the clouds rolled over the moon.
“Dean,” Sam hissed. And then louder, “Dean!”
Dean shot him a look, eyes crazed and dark shadows under them, and went on with his tale of food, weather and girls, which now shifted to Oregon.
Sam wondered what would happen if he just strolled across the clearing, under the loops of the roller coaster, and then he was walking on shaky legs, before he could even complete the thought. The flashlight quivered in his hand - he didn’t feel it but saw the way the light was jumping and jerking. His insides felt like jelly. His gun hand was probably shaking, too, but he thought that might be okay. What was a 9mm going to do to a target the size of a building? He walked, and waited for a crossbeam to fall on his head.
The roller coaster was chattering without pause now, calling and begging and threatening. Noooo, it moaned as Sam laid a hand on Dean’s shoulder. The ferns and the grasses retreated from him, hissing.
“No,” Dean echoed. “No, Sammy.” His skin was cold and wet from the rain.
“Come on, Dean. Let’s go home.”
Something huge shifted behind Sam’s back, sending shivers down his spine. He didn’t turn around. The enormous shadow flowed, and for a moment it didn’t look like a roller coaster at all, but then the moon hid behind a cloud again.
“Dean.” Sam dropped to his knees and held Dean’s face between his palms. Dean stared at him like he couldn’t quite figure out what Sam wanted. “Dean, it’s me. Let’s go home.”
Deeeean.
Dean’s eyes shifted to it, and Sam slapped him. His hand stung, and the print of it burned on his brother’s face, bright on bloodless skin. “Look at me.” Dean squinted, trying to focus. “Look at me. Let’s go see the Impala. You wanna? Let’s go see Baby, she’s waiting for you.”
“Yeah,” Dean said, slowly. “Yeah, see her. I wanna.”
“Okay then, let’s go.” Sam twisted both hands in the front of his shirt and tried to lift him, but it was useless, Dean wasn’t moving, wasn’t even looking at him anymore. His eyes had shifted over Sam’s shoulder, to where something huge stood over the park. Sam tugged and pulled. “Come on, Dean. You have to.”
Coooome. Deeean.
Slowly, Sam turned around. The many spines of the roller coaster dragon were swimming in and out of focus, but Sam saw them moving very clearly. His gun might as well have been a fly swatter, for all the good it was going to do against the thing.
“You,” Sam stopped and swallowed, not sure what he was going to say to it, only that he needed to say something and buy time. “You hungry?”
Saraaaah, it said, Saraaaah.
“Sarah. Sarah made you hungry?”
It sighed, and Sam felt its breath like a blast of wind, smelling of rot and engine grease. Behind him, Dean started crawling toward the roller coaster on all fours, head hung low.
“No, no, no.” Sam caught him by the shoulders and felt how tense they were, every muscle hard like Dean was fighting for every inch. “Dean, don’t go to it. Come on, man.” But he couldn’t even get Dean to look at him.
Coooome.
It was starving, Sam thought, and before the line of thinking could register all the way, he had dropped the Glock and was grabbing for Dean’s knife, the huge thing he always carried with him. The roller coaster was left in the woods by its mother to starve, malformed, twisting the growth of everything around it, eating teenagers. It must’ve wanted something that was growing, unlike it, and teenagers were easier to catch alone than little children. The twins must’ve been dissatisfying. Now, for some reason, it wanted Dean, and it wasn’t going to let him go until it got something to eat. Sam pulled the knife out of its scabbard. The blade caught the moonlight with a sudden terrifying flash.
The thought of what he was about to do hit like a cement truck and almost made Sam drop the knife. He was still holding Dean back, but Dean was fighting the pull as well, and if Sam moved quickly, he could distract the roller coaster before Dean made it all the way to the tracks. He let his brother go and turned around.
“Hey, roller coaster!”
It was ignoring him, this huge thing, as it cooed and called to Dean. Sam pulled his right shoe off and then the sock, and set his bare foot in the mud. It was a big foot, fit for an adult man which Sam wasn’t yet. Sam saw with unbelievable clarity the tendons and the veins, and the five toes that - he just realized - he loved very much. They were his toes. He saw them curling almost involuntarily, sinking into the mud. His toes, a part of his body, something deeply and intimately his.
Sam grabbed his little toe and flexed it to find the pharyngeal joint. It had a tiny wrinkle over it. Jesus, this was going to hurt. He set his foot on a stone, swept the rainwater off his skin. His chest felt so tight that breathing was getting difficult. When he looked up for a moment, Dean had moved forward a couple of feet, and the shadow of the roller coaster almost covered him.
Sam looked at his little toe again, felt a pang of love for it, and positioned the knife - lightly, as to not scare himself prematurely with pain from a cut. The angle was awkward, and he wondered if it was going to make things worse. He took a deep breath. And then he pushed the knife down with both hands.
The pain was worse than he expected. It went all the way to his jaw like a blow. The pain was a blinding flash of red, and then there was blood on the stone and the little severed toe that had been his a second ago and wasn’t anymore. Sam clamped one hand over the wound, grabbed the toe, which was still warm, and tossed it at the roller coaster.
The blood had brought stillness to the woods, and now as the toe went flying through the air, Sam felt the monster’s attention shift away from Dean. He felt himself watched again, but only for a second, before his toe landed between the tracks. Something happened then that Sam wasn’t sure he saw properly. The spines shifted, the shadows collided, and with a great whooshing sound the roller coaster rushed into its own center, like many predators falling on a single piece of meat. But Sam blinked, and the wooden structure was still there. Only the shadows of its tracks made a twisting, growling pool over where the toe fell.
“Oh god.”
“Sam!” Dean was by his side in a second, grabbing him and pulling him up to his feet. “Let’s go, it’s-”
Sam had managed to forget about his toe, and when he put his foot down, the pain shot up his entire right side once again, making him scream.
“What?” Dean looked down, and Sam saw even in the dark the horror on his face. Sam didn’t offer an explanation, too busy compressing the bleeding and trying not to scream again. “Okay, okay, climb on my back.”
They left the park at half-run, with Sam riding on Dean’s back. Dean was still out of it, mumbling under his breath and shaking his head like he was trying to physically shake off the hypnosis, but he carried Sam out of the park. Sam held on, with his face pressed to the back of Dean’s head, and tried to deal with pain coming in throbs like waves rolling through his body. They made one quick stop once outside the park, to put on a bandage, then went on, moving as a single unit, each locked in his own head by pain and deep confusion. Dean mumbled as he walked, something incomprehensible about Montana, probably more of the same about food, girls and weather. Blah blah woods, blah blah, witch.
From behind them, the roller coaster called out. But it sounded like barely more than timber groaning.
Sam had his knees clamped tightly around Dean’s sides. He hoped that he wasn’t too heavy to carry, since he couldn’t possibly offer to walk on his own. He thought about the toe he left in the park, and about his brother he got out of there instead.
Blah blah duchess, blah blah, never. Never.
“Never, Dean,” Sam whispered. “Never, never. It’s okay.”
“Sam, I wouldn’t. You know that, right?” His speech was getting a little less slurred, but he was still shaking his head, like he hoped that his thought process would finally fall into place correctly.
Blah blah, moose, blah blah, dead.
Sam wanted to keep going. His fingers hurt from the cold and from gripping Dean’s clothes so tightly, but the thought of letting go even for a moment made him nauseated with terror. Dean didn’t show any indication of wanting to bolt and run back to the park, but what if he did it anyway? Sam could probably trip him and sit on him until dawn, when the roller coaster and things like it grew weaker.
They kept walking.
By the time they got back to the house, Dean had started to lose his voice, but he regained some sense. He moved and talked in a sleepy, confused manner, like a person coming out of anesthesia, but there was awareness underneath it. Sam could see in his face how hard he was trying to concentrate.
The house had grown cold in their absence, with the door left open. Sam climbed off and pushed Dean to the bathroom, where the window was too small to climb through if the sudden urge came over him again. He followed, hopping on one foot while the other one throbbed with every movement. There were pain pills in the bathroom cabinet, strong stuff that Sam hated taking, but he swallowed three now, wishing they had morphine around. Morphine would’ve been awesome.
Dean had wandered off and returned with some old jeans and sweaters. At least he had his mind back together enough to get tops and bottoms. He stood there for a moment, frowning at Sam, then gestured to the toilet. “Sit.”
Sam did. Watching Dean unwrap bandages, he had a childish urge to tell him not to touch. “We need to go to a hospital,” he said instead. He looked away when Dean took off the makeshift bandage, not ready to see it yet.
“Oh, man,” Dean said quietly. Sam clenched his teeth.
Dean worked, going on muscle memory more than conscious thought, and Sam heard him mumbling under his breath every few minutes. When he was done, he went back to the living room while Sam took a moment to get himself back together. Covered by a fresh dressing, his foot looked almost normal.
“Hey Dad,” Dean was saying in the living room, and Sam suddenly had to close his eyes. Your fault, all your fucking fault, you and your hunting. He thought for a moment that a vein was going to pop in his nose, so sudden was the surge of anger.
“…a little off, sorry. The roller coaster is what you’re hunting. Bring dynamite, come during the day. We’re leaving right now. Sam got hurt, but he’ll be okay. Meet us in Pittsburgh. Hey, good hunting!”
The pain killers had started working, and Sam must’ve fallen asleep for a minute, because the next thing he knew, there was a hand in his hair. He looked up.
Dean just smiled at him, and Sam forgot to breathe. The expression on Dean’s face was so ridiculously open, so happy and lovesick. Sam had seen mothers look at their kids like that, like they could die of love on the spot, like they had too much of it and didn’t know what to do with it. Dean never looked at him like that, not even when very, very drunk. In that minute, in the bathroom’s flickering light, with the drip-drip-drip of rainwater from the leak in the kitchen, Sam felt like a small boy again who knew for sure he was loved and never questioned it, not from his brother and not from his father. It was an embarrassing, goofy smile, and Sam wanted to keep it for himself forever.
“I never tell you,” Dean said, voice hoarse from the cold, “but I really, really fucking love you, man. You know? I mean, not even like the duchess, but just you. I never tell you because of the duchess, but I do.”
Sam felt his ears turning red, something hot starting deep in his chest, too. “You’re going to be so embarrassed.”
Dean made a face at him and pretended to lock his lips and swallow the imaginary key. It’s been years since he’d done one of those pantomimes for Sam. Something kept burning hotter and hotter on Sam’s inside, until it was behind his eyes, until he realized that he might cry like a little girl.
They took the road south out of town, going further away from the abandoned park. Sam had a homemade cast on that let him move on his own, and he kept one hand twisted tightly in the sleeve of Dean’s jacket, in case the roller coaster called to him again. Sam walked with his thumb out, but the occasional cars passed them in a mist of rainwater without slowing down. Outside the town’s limits, Dean silently unclenched Sam’s fingers from his jacket. He didn’t talk, so Sam kept his mouth shut as well and only snuck occasional glances out of the corner of his eye. He could only see Dean’s profile in the dark, and it was calmer now, expression not closed but not open anymore either. Dean was locking himself down. And still, every time Sam looked at him, he felt that something rekindling again, that even heat that reminded him of red pepper or eucalyptus, only ten times stronger and right there in the core.
It was love, and it was loved, and Sam didn’t know why he ever questioned it.
Dawn found them at a bus stop in the middle of a woodsy nowhere, waiting for the first bus of the day to pull in. Dean had completely restored his mental function, judging by how quiet he was. He gripped Sam’s shoulder once two hours ago, in the dark, out of nowhere, scaring Sam shitless. Sam had mouthed, You’re welcome and that was the end of it.
Sam sat down on the ground with his back against the bus stop post and looked up at Dean, who was lighting a cigarette.
“Dad will kick your ass for smoking.” It was the first thing said between them since they left the house.
Dean shrugged, keeping his eyes on the trees across the road. “Don’t tell him.”
“I won’t. Let me try.”
“When you grow up, Sammy. These are bad for you.”
Sam snorted. “Yeah, like you’re so much older.”
Dean hesitated for a moment but offered his cigarette. Sam took it awkwardly, bumping his fingers against Dean’s, put it between his lips and inhaled.
“I don’t smoke that often.” Dean took the cigarette back while Sam was coughing. “Fucks up your breathing.”
“Hey, Dean.” Sam dragged in a lungful of fresh air and tried again. “Who is this duchess you kept talking about?”
Dean just looked at him funny. “What duchess? I was out of my mind there. Must’ve dreamed about someone. Look, there’s our bus.” He offered Sam a hand to help him off the ground. Looking up at him, Sam understood then, inexplicably, with the sense of a younger sibling, that Dean was lying. Dean was lying about a duchess.
“Come on,” Dean said. “ER for you, squirt.”
3.
Struggling with the weight of a watering can, Clementine shuffled into the greenhouse and stopped to catch her breath. Water was so heavy. She of all people should know - she had been carrying about a gallon in her lungs for ages and feeling the weight of it every day. Water was no good. Clementine wiped her forehead and stared down into the can. Maybe this was why Cutie Pie wasn’t growing. Maybe Cutie Pie didn’t like water either. But Sarah’s notebook clearly said “water three times a week”, and with Cutie Pie so weak, Clem and Betty didn’t dare deviate from the instructions. Just look at what happened to that roller coaster, Sarah’s first baby. Feed it white mice every night, she said, and only white mice. Then some imbecile of a construction worker went and left his unfinished ham sandwich on the tracks, and the baby ate it and grew all crooked. Not even Sarah could fix it after. One ham sandwich!
They did have to build the greenhouse over Sarah’s garden though, against the instructions, when Cutie Pie started to circle the drain for real.
Circle the drain! Clem chuckled, amused by the thought, and dragged the watering can across the earthen floor to Cutie Pie’s stem. It looked like an enormous bone fit for an elephant sticking out of the ground, and back when Sarah was alive it used to have that lovely pinkish-brown color of a living bone, pulsating with internal life and almost translucent. These days, it was more yellow, and dry as, well, a bone. Cutie Pie grew three inches since they buried Sarah in the garden all those years ago. And it used to make three inches per week!
Clem knocked on the stem. The sound was dull and dry. She kissed it and felt the coldness of it even with her dead lips. “Grow big, Cutie Pie,” she said.
Water, when she poured it, turned moist soil under Clem’s feet to mud. Cutie Pie hadn’t been drinking again. She finished pouring, then splashed ankle-deep back out of the greenhouse, dragging the now empty watering can along. At the door she stopped and looked back for a moment. Cutie Pie was just a stem, just a sad stem, and not a single joint appeared on it.
Clem left the watering can in the shed and, remembering at the last moment, washed her feet under a spigot. Betty would growl at her if she tracked mud through the house. Betty was always growling about something these days, and sometimes she bit, and then Clementine would hit her with a spatula, and then they’d be rolling on the floor, tearing out hair until they were out of breath, and no one would be there to drag them apart. Things were not the same without Sarah.
Betty was reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. She looked up when Clem came in, and her eyes immediately travelled down. Clementine wiggled her clean toes and headed over to the fridge.
“How is it?” Betty asked behind her.
What a depressing question it was, and yet they both asked it, whenever the other got back from the greenhouse. Clem shrugged. “Not drinking.” She moved aside a milk bottle and poked at a halved squash in the back of the fridge. “We should measure it again soon. Ah!” A neglected jar of maraschino cherries was hiding behind the squash, with a few of the little darlings still floating in the fluid. Clementine pulled it out and stuck three fingers inside, trying to grasp a stem. “Listen, I was thinking. Maybe Cutie Pie doesn’t like water. I sure don’t. You think we’ve been watering it too much?”
Betty chewed her lip. By the look on her face, the thought had occurred to her as well. “I don’t know, Clem.”
“How much harm can we do if we go easy on the water?” She stuck a cherry in her mouth and spoke with the stem sticking out between her lips. “It’s not growing as it is. Here, you want?”
Betty eyed the offered cherries as if Clem handed her a frog, and shook her head. Clem shrugged, popping another one in her mouth. The cherries were dissatisfying on their own and left an overwhelming chemical taste on her tongue.
A sudden good thought struck Clementine. “You want ice cream?” She giggled. “You know, ice cream?” It was a code for ‘child’ that Clem started using and had been trying to get Betty to pick up. “I’ll drive to Missoula.”
She had the keys in her hand and was half-way out the door when Betty said, “Butter pecan.”
Clem rolled her eyes. The left one popped out. “Silly goose. I mean a kid.”
“No, Clem, ice cream. Butter pecan, or I’ll bite you.”
Clem waited. The silence stretched, and Betty still didn’t take it back. Oh god. Betty meant for them to actually go without meat, on top of the fights, on top of Cutie Pie hovering on the verge of death, on top of the leaky pipe in the basement, on top of the mice, on top of everything. “Really?”
“Really, Clem. Look at this.” She pushed the paper toward Clem across the table.
On the folded page was an article with a photograph of an entirely uninteresting middle-aged man. He was bald and had large glasses on, and looked exactly like Clementine imagined all bankers and accountants did. She traced her finger along the small print under the photograph, moving her lips as she read: Ge-rald “Lu-cky” Cai-ne. After that came too many long words. She tossed the paper back at Betty.
“You know I hate reading. What does it say?”
“It says that he died.” Betty made a pause, and Clem realized that she was supposed to react somehow, but she still had no idea who this banker-or-accountant type was. Betty bared her teeth at her. “Clem, you empty-headed parrot!”
Clem gasped. “Parrot?”
“That’s the pedophile guy. That’s the guy we’ve been hiding behind, the one that took the first girl.”
“Oh.” Three months ago, a toddler got kidnapped in Missoula. It was a big tragedy for the city, a big story for the papers, and a blessing for two lonely, hungry witches in the woods. Betty and Clem cooked up the plan together - take the kids and let the police blame it on the man they were already hunting. Betty, a huge CSI fan, even had the idea to take only girls of approximately the right age. Clem liked the taste of boys better, but she wasn’t about to get picky. They ate like queens in the five months that followed.
“Exactly, oh. He’s dead. The police found the first girl’s body, and they’re looking for the rest. We take any more now - they’ll know he didn’t take the others.”
Clem bit her lip. Lucky was staring at her from the newspaper. No more candy. No more sweet, sweet ice cream. The stupid asshole just had to go and die. “What happened to him?”
“He got shot. Some vigilante got to him probably, I don’t know.” Betty picked up a tiny cake fork she’d been playing with and scratched her scalp with it. “So that’s it, then. We’re back to one a year. Get butter pecan.”
Sometimes Betty could be a malicious bitch who just liked to suck the joy out of life. “The world is full of pedophiles. Remember how we looked at that sex offender registry? They’ll find somebody else to blame it on.” Betty narrowed her eyes. Clem took a deep breath and felt the stagnant water shift in her lungs. “Just some tasty treats. That’s all. What’s wrong with a bit of comfort when a girl needs it?”
Twenty minutes later Clementine stomped out of the house with a crumpled twenty in her pocket, wrapping a head scarf as she went to cover a missing patch of hair. She yanked the cake fork out of her arm, tucked the eyeball back into its socket, got into the car and slammed the door, to let Betty back at the house know how she felt. Butter pecan! What was butter pecan going to do for a broken heart?
The old Subaru didn’t want to start. Clem swore and pumped the gas pedal until the thing came to life. She wanted to tear out of the yard, but the road was narrow and the sun has set a couple of hours ago, so Clem drove slowly and boiled on the inside. Fucking Black Betty. If it wasn’t for Cutie Pie, if either one of them had the tiniest chance to raise him alone, they would’ve split years ago. And Cutie Pie had been half-dead for years. If only-
“No, no, no.” Clem shook her head and kissed the locket hanging around her neck with a tiny round bone inside. “No, baby, Clemmie didn’t mean that.”
The nearest store that could have butter pecan was forty minutes away, a Safeway sitting by itself in a huge and nearly empty parking lot. Clem left her car between two parking spaces just because she could, put on a pair of big round sunglasses that made her half-blind but hid her ghoulish eyes, and went inside.
Etta James was singing quietly on the intercom, and an elderly store employee swayed to the music as she restocked the shelves. A man stood in the beer isle with a phone pressed to his ear, frowning, lost to the world. Satisfied that no one was paying her any attention, Clem hurried to the freezers. Perhaps she could use one of those machines to pay and get out before-
Sarah.
Clem froze. It wasn’t a thought that passed through her head but rather a feeling, as if Sarah herself, twenty years dead, had reached out and touched the back of her head. It was something so long forgotten, so familiar and unexpected that it nearly brought tears to Clem’s eyes. It was the smell of milk and mosses, the taste of honey on her tongue, the warm touch of lips to her forehead. Clem stood in the isle and shook with the feeling and didn’t dare move, lest it went away. Then she turned around.
The man with the cellphone stood with his shoulders hunched like people always do when they want privacy in their telephone conversations. He looked like he’d been on the road for too long, going by the dusty leather jacket, the worn jeans and the way his left hand looked several shades darker than his right one. He looked tired, too. In passing, Clem noticed that he was handsome, just the type she would’ve liked to stare at any other night.
Tonight, she didn’t care if the stranger looked like a sewer troll or Prince Charming. He had Sarah all over him.
“What’re you doing, man?” he said into the phone. “Quit jerking off and pick up your phone. Whatever, I’ll get you tortilla chips.” He hung up and looked straight at Clem.
It was an awkward moment. Clem could see herself in the glass of the freezer behind him - an extremely pale woman with sunglasses covering half of her face. He could probably see himself reflected in her glasses.
The man sighed. “Look, lady-”
Clem turned and almost ran out of the store, dived into her car and moved as far down into the foot well as she could. There she waited. If Clem still had a beating heart, it would be hammering right now, but her heart was a shriveled-up plum, and so Clem sat in the dark and listened to the lake water sloshing, settling, inside her body. In her head was Etta James’s voice, running on loop: baby, baby, I’d rather be blind. On her tongue was the taste of honey.
“Sssh,” she told herself and kissed her locket for good luck. “Sssh, Clemmie.”
Then she waited for the man to come out of the store.
~~~~
Something vague bothered Dean on the way back, some half-formed paranoia nagging at him. It must’ve been the crazy chick at the store. He was cool as a penguin on the way there, and on the way back he checked the mirror a few times and resisted the urge to shut off lights, drive off the road and see who passed by. Dean’s rule about paranoia was that if you couldn’t help feeling it, you could at least be more or less reasonable about acting on it. There was nothing about the late night weirdo from Safeway to get his alarms pinging. Weirdoes always came out at night.
Still, he checked his mirrors all the way to the motel. It’s been a long week.
The news channel was on when he got back. Sam had apparently just gotten out of the shower and got stuck to the TV mid-way through dressing. He was standing there in his sweatpants, frowning at the screen. He didn’t even turn around when the door opened. Dean threw the bag of chips at him, kinda hoping it would bounce off his head, because that would’ve been hilarious. But Sam caught it in the air, nodding “thanks”. Maybe next time.
“What are you watching?” Dean dumped the rest of the bags on the table and kicked off his boots.
“Maybe our case is a bust after all. Salsa?”
Dean tossed him the jar, and Sam sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV. Some things never changed. While he was busy opening the salsa jar, Dean sat down next to him and took the opportunity to steal the first handful of chips. The best ones were always at the top. He ate them slowly one by one, licking the salt off his fingertips. On the screen, a woman with beehive hair was talking.
“…following an anonymous phone call, found the body of Gerald “Lucky” Caine, a registered sex offender wanted on suspicion of kidnapping of six girls in the Missoula area over the past five months. He was hiding in an abandoned house, where a body was found buried in the backyard. The police hasn’t confirmed anything, but the speculation is…”
“Good old humans,” Dean said.
Sam was giving him a puzzled look. “How do you eat them just like that?”
“Who?”
“The chips.” He offered the opened jar to Dean. “Don’t you want salsa?”
“Nah. Better this way.”
They sat side by side on the floor, staring at the TV, and methodically went through the bag of chips. The channel was a local one, not many stories to report, and this had been a major one in the area. The reporter was giving it a good long coverage, going into Lucky Caine’s biography, in the best traditions of all news stories like this one that loved to focus on the killer. Dean got sick of the asshole’s face after the first thirty seconds and studied Sam out of the corner of his eye instead.
“I don’t like it,” Sam said when the commercials started.
Dean snorted. “Six dead kids - what don’t you like?”
“Six, that’s my point. That’s a lot in five months for one guy. I told you in Ohio, when we first found the case, remember? That’s a lot.” Sam believed in his theory more and more as he spoke, and now he forgot the TV. He had that spark in his eyes. And all Dean wanted was to eat the chips and not talk about pedophiles right before bed.
“Look,” Sam went on, “this guy-”
“Lucky.” Fucking ridiculous how they kept calling the dude by his nickname.
“Whatever. This guy behaved himself for ten years. Then wham - six kids in under half a year? The police got a description from the first kidnapping. He went into hiding - why didn’t he stay down? And no one has seen anybody like him around the other five before they disappeared. And there is only one body.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “Sam, what the hell, you’re Lucky’s defense attorney now? So he buried the other five better. The cops aren’t even done searching yet.”
“Okay. Maybe he did. What about everything else I just said?”
Dean thought it over, staring at the mole by Sam’s nose because it was a good place to fix his eyes and it made Sam squirm funny. Hell, six kids was a lot for one pervert in such a short time. “You might have a point.”
The news story went on. Dean couldn’t care less, and Sam had stopped paying attention as well. “So,” Dean said, “another pervert or one of our usual clients? If it’s one of ours, it’s gotta be smart, right? Smarter than your average grab-and-eat. It found just the guy to blame it on, followed his pattern and everything.”
Sam picked that thought right up. “And if it’s ours, there might be an old pattern of disappearance in the area.” He got up. “I’ll look.”
“Dude, it’s one in morning.” But Sam was powering up his laptop already. “Fine. You do that, and I’m gonna take a shower.”
Hot water felt good after a long day and a long week. Dean was determined not to think of pedophiles, or child-eaters, or their disgusting hunting habits. He thought about Dr. Sexy instead, focusing on the non-existent Seattle Grace he may or may not have looked for on a map once, and the cowboy boots, and the sexy but difficult-
Do it, Sarah.
Hot water was still pounding on Dean’s shoulders, but his entire body had gone cold, except for the weird, bad sort of warmth that went crawling through his head, spreading inward. He took a few deep breaths, almost having to force them in while his heart beat too fast. Goddammit. Stop it right now. But the tiny panic attack went on as the warmth spread through his head and made him shiver.
The woods, and the snow, and the orange brew bubbling away below the window, smelling like curry. He could hear the song in his head: oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. There was an old pattern in the area alright. He thought of the roller coaster then, and of something he had seen but didn’t fully register until much later - Sam putting a knife over his toe, both hands over the blade, pausing for a second to collect his courage.
“Hey,” Sam called from the room. “You alright in there?”
How did he even know? Dean jumped a little, but Sam’s voice was grounding, pulled him back into the real world. “I’m fine, dude.”
He fell asleep fast that night and dreamed of something awful that he only remembered for a moment when he woke up in the depth of the night.
~~~~
Sam dreamed about dying, and then it was over and he was lying in the darkness with his eyes closed, face pressed into the pillow. He had no memories left of the dream, only that there was a death. Now the real world was back. Out in the parking lot, someone was filling an ice bucket a couple of doors down. A TV was on in the next room. Dean was deep asleep, judging by his breathing.
Something was in the room.
Sam felt a sudden rush of cold down his spine, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up straight. The fear was paralyzing for a moment as he imagined, involuntarily, masked men with rifles, a vampire, a demon, one of the hundreds of things that liked to hunt at night. He concentrated on keeping his breathing even but felt sweat breaking. Then came the sound: quiet dry rustling. Slowly, Sam opened his eyes.
He didn’t see anything at first, just Dean sleeping on his stomach with one leg sticking out from under the covers, arms folded under the pillow. Sam was trying to see the bathroom door out of the corner of his eye when the rustling sound came again and the covers moved on Dean’s thigh. What Sam had taken for a fold rose up and became a long flexible neck - no, a long body with triangular head. A huge black snake was standing up between Dean’s knees, and its scales sliding against one another made that sound as its body uncoiled. The snake seemed to stretch, readjusted itself, and lowered its head to the back of Dean’s leg.
“Dean!”
Sam fell out of bed and punched the snake for lack of better ideas, a second before Dean rolled off his own bed, knocking Sam off his feet. They landed in a pile. Sam’s elbow struck the nightstand and went numb. Dean was swearing, tangled up in the covers, and Sam couldn’t see the snake, couldn’t figure out if it was still on the bed or on the floor with them.
“What, Sam, what, where?”
“Shut up!”
There was a hiss so low it almost sounded like a growl, and Sam saw a dark shape make a dash for the bathroom. It must’ve been six feet long. It disappeared inside the bathroom, and soon after came a splash of it diving into the toilet.
They sat still for a moment, both breathing heavily, and waited. Waves of crawling sensation kept rolling down Sam’s arms, over and over again. Finally, Dean got up, grabbed a gun from under the bed and headed for the bathroom. He stopped in the doorway to turn the light on. Sam couldn’t see inside, now that Dean was blocking the way, but the snake must’ve been gone because Dean kept his gun pointed at the floor. He dropped the toilet lid down and quickly stepped away.
“Now I want to sit on it all night, but I also don’t, you know?” He gave Sam a crooked smile. “Dilemma.”
Sam checked under both beds for more snakes, but there were only dust bunnies. He pulled himself up to the bed and sat waiting, letting his heart settle down. Dean had dragged a chair into the bathroom and was trying to set it on the toilet lid.
“It’s too light,” Sam said.
“I guess.” Dean made a face and gave the chair a little push. It fell off. “Damn. I hate snakes, you know.”
“I know.”
Just then Dean turned around, and Sam saw, at the back of his knee, something that made his breath catch. A small trickle of blood was running down his calf, from two puncture wounds. “Dean.”
“You’ve always had a hard on for them. I remember. Always-”
“Dean! You’re bleeding.” Sam was off the bed and dropped to his knees where Dean was standing, to grab his leg and hold it still. Dean immediately tried to twist around. “Stand still, dammit!”
“Shit. Is that a bite?”
Sam looked up and saw his face, unevenly lit by the bathroom light. Dean’s eyes looked huge. His hair was standing up straight on one side where he had his head against the pillow. Sam had a sudden feeling of déjà vu wash over him, and thought that he’d give anything - all of his toes, his hands, his heart, his head - for Dean not to be taken away again.
“Come on.” He grabbed the car keys and pulled Dean to the door. “Come on, we’re going to a hospital.”
Dean didn’t object to him driving the car but sat quietly in the passenger seat all the way, squeezing his thigh over the bite site and frowning at the road ahead. He mumbled something when Sam took a turn too fast, and once said, “Man, they won’t have fucking cobra antivenom at the Good Samaritan, or whatever it’s-.”
Sam said, “Shut up.”
The county hospital was a small two-story building, looking lonely in a parking lot that was mostly empty at this time. Sam spotted the bright red sign of the emergency room and headed that way, but Dean slapped his shoulder. “Stop here. We’re not going in there before shit hits the fan. Sam!”
“Fine.” Sam stopped the car twenty feet away from the emergency room and shut off the engine. Dean had gotten his leg up on the dashboard and was trying to study the bite marks. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.”
“You should’ve felt something by now, right?”
Dean shrugged, still poking at the back of his knee. “Fucked if I know. We wait.”
They waited. Ten minutes went by, measured by the ticking of Sam’s wristwatch that he was acutely aware of. A nurse came outside the emergency room and stood there for a few minutes, smoking and looking at them. Sam waved. The nurse waved back, finished her cigarette and went back inside. A feeling of great relief had started to creep over Sam. He squashed it out of superstitious fear, but it came back again, making his hands shake.
“I think it drank my blood,” Dean said. “I’m a little lightheaded. Shit, man, I don’t even have any pants on.”
That was funny, unexpectedly. Sam laughed briefly and surprised himself by it. It was probably just the relief.
“Lend me yours?” Dean said. “Come on, Sam, you got to wear pants on the drive here. It’s my turn.”
“Get out of the car and let me look at the wound.”
“The nurses are gonna look at us funny.” But he got out and stood by the passenger door with his arms folded on the roof. Sam took some time to make sure his hands had stopped shaking while he got out their first aid kit and a flashlight.
The two puncture wounds on the back of Dean’s knee didn’t look very deep. It was as if the snake knew to go just deep enough to get the vein. Surgical work for a big animal like that. Sam poured a little water on a piece of gauze to clean off dried blood, and felt a muscle in Dean’s leg jump at the contact. He washed carefully around the wound, which didn’t look inflamed, he was glad to see.
“I saw some strange chick at the store last night,” Dean said. “Gave me the hibbie-jibbies.”
“Yeah?” Sam took the gauze away and waited to see if the wound was going to bleed more, but it didn’t. He wetted another piece of gauze with peroxide and started swiping the site.
“She was pale, but I guess normal otherwise. She had these huge sunglasses on in the middle of the night. She just stared at me and ran away. I thought she was….”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Admiring you. You thought she was admiring you.”
“Hey, that’s happened before!”
“Sure.” Sam covered the bite mark and stared at the white square at the back of Dean’s leg, too exhausted to think. He couldn’t figure out if it was okay to leave now, or if they should wait some more for some delayed reaction. Dean kept going on about women - a clear sign that he was alright. Sam closed his eyes and pressed his face against the back of Dean’s thigh, and kissed it above the bite. Dean’s skin was warm and a little sweaty from the leather seat. Sam squeezed Dean’s thigh, felt his fingers digging into the muscle, and suddenly he was hard, in the hospital parking lot at three in the morning.
Dean had fallen silent. When Sam opened his eyes and looked up, Dean was staring down at him over his shoulder. It’s been long, he thought, way too long since they’d done this - the nastiest, dirtiest, best thing they had between them, and Sam had missed it.
He said, “You drive.”
Dean didn’t take the car back to the motel but went the opposite way, until there were no lights of human habitat and only yellow road signs flashed out of the dark whenever the headlights hit them. Sam picked at a cuticle and wondered if Dean was headed for Canada. There was tension and longing in his entire body that made him restless. Finally, Dean picked some unmarked dark lane he liked, and Sam started pulling his shirt off before the car stopped. He couldn’t see Dean anymore, but he could hear him breathing and felt his body heat.
Dean’s hands were on the waistband of Sam’s training pants, pushing them down, fingers burning against his skin, and then Sam had a wild suspicion hit him. “Dean, I swear, if you’re just trying to steal my pants, I will kick you in the fucking ear.” Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Not giving Dean a chance to argue, Sam found the back of his neck and pulled him into a hard kiss and shoved his hand down Dean’s shorts but missed in the dark and scraped at his thigh.
“Almost put my eye out just now with all that face-grabbing, you freak,” Dean said when his mouth was free again.
Sam thought, You’ll live, licking a trail up Dean’s neck and feeling the intake of breath against his tongue.
Part Four .. Master Post