SPN FIC - Journey (Chapter 6, part 1 of 3)
JOURNEY began here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/9849.html#cutid1
Here's Chapter 6:
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Six
Something Wicked
Sam’s clarity of mind evaporated the moment he saw Sarah’s face.
He half expected her to get out of the car wearing an expression that said How do you like them apples, buddy boy? Or to be annoyed with him. Even angry.
None of that was anything like what happened.
She had been crying; that was obvious. Her face was puffy and her eyes were bloodshot, and when she spoke it was in a nasal way that said her sinuses were plugged. The difference between all of that and the way she had looked when she’d left the Marriott a few hours ago astonished him to the point that he could think nothing more coherent than What…?
It didn’t help when she said “Sam? What are you doing here?” in a way that said not only didn’t she want to see him right now, but that she was about half a breath from freaking out.
He backed off. One step, then another.
A friend back at Stanford had told him one night over beer and nachos, “Lemme give you a piece of advice. When she’s crying and you don’t know why, assume it’s over something you did. Ninety percent of the time you’ll be right, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and drama. Just walk right in there and say ‘Jesus, baby, I’m sorry,’ then bring her tea. Unless you did something off-the-scale heinous, like run over her cat with the car, it’ll work. ‘Baby, I’m sorry’ and tea.”
That didn’t seem to be a good option here.
“I…wanted to…” he began.
Wanted to what? Hell, nothing seemed to be a good option. Her dress was wrinkled, and it hadn’t been when she’d left the hotel. She should have been here hours ago, for that meeting she’d said she needed to attend with her father, so maybe something had happened with the car? A flat, an accident? He could only see one side of her car from where he was standing but it didn’t seem damaged.
And this was certainly way too soon for her to be pregnant.
Baffled, he moved a little closer so he could reach for her without touching her. “You left pretty suddenly this morning,” he ventured softly. “I wasn’t sure if - well, I wasn’t sure how we were leaving things. Or if we were leaving them.”
Her mouth moved a little. It took her a moment to say, “This morning?”
“At the hotel.”
“I…I don’t know what you mean.”
That was no game - no round of “we’re going to pretend it never happened.” Couldn’t be. Dean had been right about the mind fuck thing; Sarah had never been anything other than upfront with him. In fact, she’d told him half a dozen times over the phone that she hated mind games. That was one of the reasons she’d broken up with the guy she’d dated all through college. So this was on the level: she didn’t know what he meant.
But how the hell that was possible…
Of course Dean was listening. He was only ten feet away, and this wasn’t like television, where ten feet meant you were completely out of earshot. For once in his life Dean was keeping his mouth shut, and for a moment Sam wished his brother would say something, just to fill the silence. Or to make all of this seem real. Again, Sam reached out, and his fingers brushed Sarah’s arm. To his relief she didn’t pull away. He found himself speaking, to see how she’d respond, he supposed, because his mind was still demanding How the hell could she not remember? “We spent the night together,” he told her, barely above a whisper. “At the Marriott in Tarrytown.”
Her mouth formed the word “What?”
“Sarah,” Sam said. “We -“
Then she started to cry again.
“Sarah? What…” was all he could get out. He tried taking her hand, but she pulled it out of his reach and stumbled back against her car.
He had missed the door of the auction house opening and Daniel Blake’s footsteps as he crossed the gravel. Before Sam could say anything else, or even begin to put together something to try to say, Blake had moved in between Sam and Sarah and had gathered her up close to him. Whether Blake had been watching from inside via the security camera or whether he’d sized up the situation as he walked across the parking lot made no difference. Either way, he wanted the Winchesters gone.
Way gone.
Yesterday.
And the blackness of his gaze as he looked at Sam said that if Sam was in any way responsible for hurting Sarah, having his balls fed to a Rottweiler would seem like a picnic in the park.
Something brushed against Sam’s sleeve. Dean’s voice said quietly, “Sammy.”
There was nothing he could do but leave. Feeling like he was sleepwalking, he walked back to the Impala and got in on the passenger side. By the time Dean had taken the driver’s seat, the Blakes had disappeared inside the auction house.
Half a mile down the street, Dean pulled the Impala over to the curb and killed the engine.
Sam was slumped in the passenger seat with his chin on his chest.
Cars went past them, and Dean sat with his head canted toward his window, watching them. After a while he started looking for out-of-state plates and counted a couple from Jersey, a New Hampshire, a Connecticut. Even a Florida, and two from North Carolina.
A school bus went by, and a FedEx truck.
He tried to think of something to say to Sam, either concerning Sarah or not, and all he could come up with was This is one big goddamn clusterfuck.
His instincts told him to get out of New Paltz, to just drive in no particular direction. There was enough gas in the tank to take them three or four hundred miles. The trouble was, nothing appealing lay in any direction he might pick. In the years since the demon had taken their mother, he and Sam had seen every state in the Union, and none of them was any better than any other. None of them was home, and as far as he could see, none of them would ever be.
An SUV towing a sailboat went by, and Dean watched it until it disappeared around the bend up ahead.
“You gotta be all kinds of crazy to do that,” he said.
Sam shifted his head a little. “What?” he asked without much interest.
“Those people who sail around the world on those little boats. What the hell is that like, being out in the middle of the ocean in a sailboat?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, man, I saw ‘The Perfect Storm.’”
“That wasn’t a sailboat,” Sam said.
“Same difference.”
“How could she not know what I was talking about?”
Dean ran his hands along the smooth circle of the steering wheel, still watching the traffic as it went by. “I don’t know, Sammy. Maybe she is pulling some kind of ‘Fatal Attraction’ thing on you. I wouldn’t have figured she did, but the girl’s got issues of some kind. If she doesn’t want to acknowledge that you two were together, then -“
“You’re saying I should just leave.”
“You never know about people, Sam. You think you know ‘em, and then they turn out to be some whole other thing.”
It took a while, but finally Sam nodded. “I guess.”
“Tell me where you want to go.”
Sam turned to look at his brother, and what he was thinking was as clear on his face as if somebody had drawn it there with colored markers. The pain in it made Dean cringe and turn away, pushing Sam even beyond his peripheral vision.
Sam had been forced to leave a lot of things behind during his life: toys, classmates, bicycles, Christmas trees. The house in Lawrence where their mother had died. The chance to win a math contest during middle school, out in Indiana. A stray dog he befriended in Arizona.
And Jenny, bestower of The Lord of the Rings.
Every time, he’d gotten the same instructions from their father: “You have to be brave about this, Sammy.”
He was trying to do that now, Dean figured - jaw clenched, hands balled into fists.
Dean thought about trying to offer him a smile, then heard a voice whisper out of his memory. “It’s a good thing I’m a soft touch for lost puppies and long faces.”
BITCH! he screamed back.
“Brooklyn,” Sam murmured. “We should keep an eye on those kids.”
* * * * *
Sarah let her father walk her into the auction house, through the rows of furniture and paintings and antique glassware, and into his office at the back of the building. He wanted her to sit on the sofa, collapse there if she felt like it, but for the moment she couldn’t bear to let go of him.
“I’ll get you a drink of water,” he offered, and it wasn’t a suggestion.
So she had no choice but to sit down. When he came back from the kitchen with the glass of water she took it and drank half of it, feeling that this was no different from sitting in Mrs. Jennings’ living room staring into a cup of tea. Her heart was thumping against her rib cage as if it wanted to break free of her chest.
“You left the seminar early?” her father ventured.
She gave him a smile that felt as if someone was pulling at the corners of her mouth with strings.
“You didn’t go to the seminar,” he filled in, then let out a long breath. “Were you with them? Those two men?”
“I…I don’t think so.”
That got out before she could stop it. Daniel Blake’s eyes narrowed, and he turned to look out through the open doorway of the office toward the front entrance of the auction house. When he turned back to her he took in the condition of her clothes and her face and the way her hands were shaking. The conclusion he’d jumped to was obvious. He thinks I’ve been roofied, Sarah thought. She held back the laugh that wanted to come out, but it made her stomach quiver a little.
“You don’t think so?” he echoed.
She thought about Sam’s expression out in the parking lot, the disappointment and hurt that had been so plain in his eyes. It’s more like I roofied myself. That made the quiver come again.
“Something’s funny?” her father said.
“No, Dad.”
His eyebrows were crawling closer together, in that way that said I don’t know what they did, but they did something. It was no worse than it’d been when he was dealing with her high school boyfriends - none of them had drugged her, either, but there’d been drinking involved a lot of the time, and she’d always supposed the Fathers’ Rule Book said somewhere If it’s male, it’s not to be trusted. But she wondered what he’d think if he knew what had really happened last fall to the Telescas and Evelyn - that a serial killer had been involved, but not the type he (and the police, and most of the community) imagined. Or if he knew she’d stood in a cemetery holding a flashlight while Sam and Dean “Connors” dug up the grave of Isaiah Merchant.
“Why are they here, Sarah?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
“They were looking for you. To have dinner with you, so they said.”
It was high school all over again. He was doing the father thing, the alpha male thing: trying to figure out what they’d done, so he could deliver the appropriate degree of ass-kicking. If he found out she’d done anything that wasn’t in the rule book, he’d deal with her later.
She’d come here to give him the car keys, she remembered, but they were still in the car.
“Were you drinking?”
There was nothing about her that said she hadn’t, other than that she didn’t smell of alcohol. Maybe… drifted though her mind.
“Sarah Jane.”
All she had to do was open her mouth and say what she’d come here to say: that she couldn’t remember yesterday, or last night, or a collection of stray minutes before that. That when she woke up from those lost minutes her head hurt and her vision was blurred and her stomach was upset.
That he was going to have to be the strong one this time, or try to be, since this time there’d be no one to accept casseroles from the neighbors while he sat alone in his office.
She looked at him and saw the man who had given her the Lexus, who could be gruff with clients but had wept in front of her mother’s casket, who had held a small girl during thunderstorms and murmured, “No, no, it’s all right.”
There was no way she could tell him.
Something in her said it was going to be worse if she didn’t, if he found her the way he had found her mother, but for now…
“I guess,” she said.
“With them.”
She produced another smile and knew how phony it looked. A minute went by, then he sighed heavily and stepped away from the sofa. “You’re not hurt?”
“Just wrinkled.”
“I’ll take you home. I don’t want you driving.”
Neither do I, she thought.
* * * * *
“You know what I like?” Babykay asked.
She and Dean were sharing a pew, with enough space between the two of them for someone else to sit down. For a while she’d been quietly paging through a hymnal, frowning now and then. A couple of times she had hummed a few bars of a hymn, smiling to herself as if the music brought back a good memory.
“No clue,” Dean said.
“Yellow cupcakes. My gram used to make me yellow cupcakes. She’s dead now.”
The Winchesters had picked up several bags of food to supplement the soup Will Hanson had said he had on hand. Choosing things they thought Babykay, Chaz and Lemon would actually eat had been a challenge.
Simply walking through the supermarket had been a challenge. The bright fluorescent lights had made Dean’s head throb; after a few minutes the place seemed like something out of an acid trip. When they finally had the groceries in hand he had fled to the car as if he was being chased.
“Shoulda told me sooner,” he sighed.
“I don’t care. The chocolate ones are all right. As long as there’s no peanuts. I’m allergic to peanuts.”
Up in the front of the sanctuary, Sam was sitting on the floor, using the seat of the front pew as a desk. He’d found an unused phone jack up there and had plugged the laptop into it, using a 90-day free trial offer that he’d juggled into its tenth month to log onto the Internet. He had Dad’s journal open beside the computer and every few minutes would turn pages, though with a lot less patience and reverence than Babykay was using to go through the hymnal.
Chaz and Lemon were asleep, each stretched out in a pew, their bellies full of junk food. When Dean glanced over at them, Lemon had a hand balled up against her mouth and was gnawing at it in her sleep as if she thought it was a cupcake.
Pastor Hanson had retreated to his office some time ago.
“You’re nice,” Babykay said. “You and Sam. I wish you were my brothers.”
Dean considered the girl’s angular little face. The smile on it was genuine, and he half expected her to reach out and pat his arm. “No you don’t,” he told her.
“I hate my brother.”
“Kinda harsh. What, did you guys fight a lot?”
“He stuck his fingers in me.”
“He…what?”
“I cut him with a razor blade. They were gonna send me to Juvie, but I ran away before they could catch me. My mom said he didn’t mean anything by it ‘cause he was drunk, but that’s crap. Don’t you think that’s crap?”
It was any number of things, Dean thought. “Crap” wasn’t one of them. Idly he wondered how Babykay’s brother would feel if Sam stepped on his head. And kicked it a few times for good measure.
“Son of a bitch,” he murmured.
Unable to sit beside her any longer, he slid out of the pew and went up to stand next to Sam. His brother’s head was bent, his shoulders hunched, and his expression managed to be both ferocious and exhausted at the same time. He looked at Dean’s boots for a moment, then returned to making faces at the laptop screen. “I don’t know what to do with this,” he complained. “Dad might. Or Ash. I don’t see any connections in any of this.”
Dozens of people had died within a hundred-mile radius of Brooklyn within the past few days. Most of them, of course, had expired of natural causes, but there were leftovers. Sam had taken to scribbling down the details on a notepad supplied by Will Hanson. The last few entries on his list were almost illegible.
“This woman,” Sam said through gritted teeth, “tied her son up in the bathtub because he wet the bed.”
“He died?”
“No. Do you know how many babies die because their parents slam them against something to make them stop crying?”
“Sam, man, what the hell are you looking at?”
“I can’t do this, Dean.”
“I’ll do it, then. Go chill out for a while.”
Sam pushed himself up off the floor and confronted his brother, gesturing at the computer with a hand that closed into a fist. “Maybe it’s one demon. Maybe it’s fifty. Maybe it’s not a demon at all. These people are worse than demons. What are we looking for, Dean? How do we make things any better?”
“Take a break, man,” Dean said quietly. “Go for a walk or something.”
“Let’s go. Let’s just go.”
“You want to get a drink? We’ll go get a drink.”
“I don’t want a drink. I want to leave.” A moment after he had said that, Sam seemed to recover some of his equilibrium. “We’re bailing out the Titanic with a paper cup, Dean.”
“Do you want me to do it?”
“No,” Sam said. “You suck at research.”
“Want me to call Ash?”
“No,” Sam barked. “I’ll do it. Just…go away. I’ll do it.”
As a dismissal, it served well enough. Telling himself he needed to check the kitchen downstairs to see what was left of the groceries, Dean stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered down the narrow flight of stairs to the basement.
Hanson was already in the kitchen, building stacks of Oreos on the battered, enamel-topped table. When he saw Dean in the doorway he smiled without humor and admitted, “Not exactly what they pay me to spend my time doing.”
“I don’t figure it says anything about demons in your job description either.”
The minister’s left eyebrow slid up toward his hairline. “Say again?”
“That’s what we’re looking for. Me and Sam. The guy in the Porsche that those kids told us about - we don’t think he’s human.”
“I see.”
He was surprisingly unsurprised, or was wildly good at poker faces. Dean considered that for a minute, then pulled the only unoccupied chair away from the table and sat down. After he’d popped a cookie into his mouth he pushed his cell phone across the table toward Hanson. “In case you feel a need to call the guys with the net. Or are we gonna play ‘I believe that you believe it’?”
Hanson’s gaze dropped to the scar on his wrist. “No.”
“Wasn’t a dog, you said. What was it?”
It took Hanson a long while to answer. “My friend and I were in our junior year of high school. We decided to camp out one night, down by the lake. Sleeping bags, flashlights, a couple of bottles. Neither one of us was anywhere near sober when we went to sleep.” He paused, looking at his towers of Oreos. “I woke up - I don’t know how much later it was. I heard this odd sound. When I looked over toward Tom’s sleeping bag, there was something dark near his head. There was moonlight, but I couldn’t make out what it was.”
“Coyote?” Dean suggested.
Chapter 6 continues here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/15644.html#cutid1
Here's Chapter 6:
Journey
By Carol Davis
Chapter Six
Something Wicked
Sam’s clarity of mind evaporated the moment he saw Sarah’s face.
He half expected her to get out of the car wearing an expression that said How do you like them apples, buddy boy? Or to be annoyed with him. Even angry.
None of that was anything like what happened.
She had been crying; that was obvious. Her face was puffy and her eyes were bloodshot, and when she spoke it was in a nasal way that said her sinuses were plugged. The difference between all of that and the way she had looked when she’d left the Marriott a few hours ago astonished him to the point that he could think nothing more coherent than What…?
It didn’t help when she said “Sam? What are you doing here?” in a way that said not only didn’t she want to see him right now, but that she was about half a breath from freaking out.
He backed off. One step, then another.
A friend back at Stanford had told him one night over beer and nachos, “Lemme give you a piece of advice. When she’s crying and you don’t know why, assume it’s over something you did. Ninety percent of the time you’ll be right, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and drama. Just walk right in there and say ‘Jesus, baby, I’m sorry,’ then bring her tea. Unless you did something off-the-scale heinous, like run over her cat with the car, it’ll work. ‘Baby, I’m sorry’ and tea.”
That didn’t seem to be a good option here.
“I…wanted to…” he began.
Wanted to what? Hell, nothing seemed to be a good option. Her dress was wrinkled, and it hadn’t been when she’d left the hotel. She should have been here hours ago, for that meeting she’d said she needed to attend with her father, so maybe something had happened with the car? A flat, an accident? He could only see one side of her car from where he was standing but it didn’t seem damaged.
And this was certainly way too soon for her to be pregnant.
Baffled, he moved a little closer so he could reach for her without touching her. “You left pretty suddenly this morning,” he ventured softly. “I wasn’t sure if - well, I wasn’t sure how we were leaving things. Or if we were leaving them.”
Her mouth moved a little. It took her a moment to say, “This morning?”
“At the hotel.”
“I…I don’t know what you mean.”
That was no game - no round of “we’re going to pretend it never happened.” Couldn’t be. Dean had been right about the mind fuck thing; Sarah had never been anything other than upfront with him. In fact, she’d told him half a dozen times over the phone that she hated mind games. That was one of the reasons she’d broken up with the guy she’d dated all through college. So this was on the level: she didn’t know what he meant.
But how the hell that was possible…
Of course Dean was listening. He was only ten feet away, and this wasn’t like television, where ten feet meant you were completely out of earshot. For once in his life Dean was keeping his mouth shut, and for a moment Sam wished his brother would say something, just to fill the silence. Or to make all of this seem real. Again, Sam reached out, and his fingers brushed Sarah’s arm. To his relief she didn’t pull away. He found himself speaking, to see how she’d respond, he supposed, because his mind was still demanding How the hell could she not remember? “We spent the night together,” he told her, barely above a whisper. “At the Marriott in Tarrytown.”
Her mouth formed the word “What?”
“Sarah,” Sam said. “We -“
Then she started to cry again.
“Sarah? What…” was all he could get out. He tried taking her hand, but she pulled it out of his reach and stumbled back against her car.
He had missed the door of the auction house opening and Daniel Blake’s footsteps as he crossed the gravel. Before Sam could say anything else, or even begin to put together something to try to say, Blake had moved in between Sam and Sarah and had gathered her up close to him. Whether Blake had been watching from inside via the security camera or whether he’d sized up the situation as he walked across the parking lot made no difference. Either way, he wanted the Winchesters gone.
Way gone.
Yesterday.
And the blackness of his gaze as he looked at Sam said that if Sam was in any way responsible for hurting Sarah, having his balls fed to a Rottweiler would seem like a picnic in the park.
Something brushed against Sam’s sleeve. Dean’s voice said quietly, “Sammy.”
There was nothing he could do but leave. Feeling like he was sleepwalking, he walked back to the Impala and got in on the passenger side. By the time Dean had taken the driver’s seat, the Blakes had disappeared inside the auction house.
Half a mile down the street, Dean pulled the Impala over to the curb and killed the engine.
Sam was slumped in the passenger seat with his chin on his chest.
Cars went past them, and Dean sat with his head canted toward his window, watching them. After a while he started looking for out-of-state plates and counted a couple from Jersey, a New Hampshire, a Connecticut. Even a Florida, and two from North Carolina.
A school bus went by, and a FedEx truck.
He tried to think of something to say to Sam, either concerning Sarah or not, and all he could come up with was This is one big goddamn clusterfuck.
His instincts told him to get out of New Paltz, to just drive in no particular direction. There was enough gas in the tank to take them three or four hundred miles. The trouble was, nothing appealing lay in any direction he might pick. In the years since the demon had taken their mother, he and Sam had seen every state in the Union, and none of them was any better than any other. None of them was home, and as far as he could see, none of them would ever be.
An SUV towing a sailboat went by, and Dean watched it until it disappeared around the bend up ahead.
“You gotta be all kinds of crazy to do that,” he said.
Sam shifted his head a little. “What?” he asked without much interest.
“Those people who sail around the world on those little boats. What the hell is that like, being out in the middle of the ocean in a sailboat?”
“I don’t know.”
“I mean, man, I saw ‘The Perfect Storm.’”
“That wasn’t a sailboat,” Sam said.
“Same difference.”
“How could she not know what I was talking about?”
Dean ran his hands along the smooth circle of the steering wheel, still watching the traffic as it went by. “I don’t know, Sammy. Maybe she is pulling some kind of ‘Fatal Attraction’ thing on you. I wouldn’t have figured she did, but the girl’s got issues of some kind. If she doesn’t want to acknowledge that you two were together, then -“
“You’re saying I should just leave.”
“You never know about people, Sam. You think you know ‘em, and then they turn out to be some whole other thing.”
It took a while, but finally Sam nodded. “I guess.”
“Tell me where you want to go.”
Sam turned to look at his brother, and what he was thinking was as clear on his face as if somebody had drawn it there with colored markers. The pain in it made Dean cringe and turn away, pushing Sam even beyond his peripheral vision.
Sam had been forced to leave a lot of things behind during his life: toys, classmates, bicycles, Christmas trees. The house in Lawrence where their mother had died. The chance to win a math contest during middle school, out in Indiana. A stray dog he befriended in Arizona.
And Jenny, bestower of The Lord of the Rings.
Every time, he’d gotten the same instructions from their father: “You have to be brave about this, Sammy.”
He was trying to do that now, Dean figured - jaw clenched, hands balled into fists.
Dean thought about trying to offer him a smile, then heard a voice whisper out of his memory. “It’s a good thing I’m a soft touch for lost puppies and long faces.”
BITCH! he screamed back.
“Brooklyn,” Sam murmured. “We should keep an eye on those kids.”
* * * * *
Sarah let her father walk her into the auction house, through the rows of furniture and paintings and antique glassware, and into his office at the back of the building. He wanted her to sit on the sofa, collapse there if she felt like it, but for the moment she couldn’t bear to let go of him.
“I’ll get you a drink of water,” he offered, and it wasn’t a suggestion.
So she had no choice but to sit down. When he came back from the kitchen with the glass of water she took it and drank half of it, feeling that this was no different from sitting in Mrs. Jennings’ living room staring into a cup of tea. Her heart was thumping against her rib cage as if it wanted to break free of her chest.
“You left the seminar early?” her father ventured.
She gave him a smile that felt as if someone was pulling at the corners of her mouth with strings.
“You didn’t go to the seminar,” he filled in, then let out a long breath. “Were you with them? Those two men?”
“I…I don’t think so.”
That got out before she could stop it. Daniel Blake’s eyes narrowed, and he turned to look out through the open doorway of the office toward the front entrance of the auction house. When he turned back to her he took in the condition of her clothes and her face and the way her hands were shaking. The conclusion he’d jumped to was obvious. He thinks I’ve been roofied, Sarah thought. She held back the laugh that wanted to come out, but it made her stomach quiver a little.
“You don’t think so?” he echoed.
She thought about Sam’s expression out in the parking lot, the disappointment and hurt that had been so plain in his eyes. It’s more like I roofied myself. That made the quiver come again.
“Something’s funny?” her father said.
“No, Dad.”
His eyebrows were crawling closer together, in that way that said I don’t know what they did, but they did something. It was no worse than it’d been when he was dealing with her high school boyfriends - none of them had drugged her, either, but there’d been drinking involved a lot of the time, and she’d always supposed the Fathers’ Rule Book said somewhere If it’s male, it’s not to be trusted. But she wondered what he’d think if he knew what had really happened last fall to the Telescas and Evelyn - that a serial killer had been involved, but not the type he (and the police, and most of the community) imagined. Or if he knew she’d stood in a cemetery holding a flashlight while Sam and Dean “Connors” dug up the grave of Isaiah Merchant.
“Why are they here, Sarah?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
“They were looking for you. To have dinner with you, so they said.”
It was high school all over again. He was doing the father thing, the alpha male thing: trying to figure out what they’d done, so he could deliver the appropriate degree of ass-kicking. If he found out she’d done anything that wasn’t in the rule book, he’d deal with her later.
She’d come here to give him the car keys, she remembered, but they were still in the car.
“Were you drinking?”
There was nothing about her that said she hadn’t, other than that she didn’t smell of alcohol. Maybe… drifted though her mind.
“Sarah Jane.”
All she had to do was open her mouth and say what she’d come here to say: that she couldn’t remember yesterday, or last night, or a collection of stray minutes before that. That when she woke up from those lost minutes her head hurt and her vision was blurred and her stomach was upset.
That he was going to have to be the strong one this time, or try to be, since this time there’d be no one to accept casseroles from the neighbors while he sat alone in his office.
She looked at him and saw the man who had given her the Lexus, who could be gruff with clients but had wept in front of her mother’s casket, who had held a small girl during thunderstorms and murmured, “No, no, it’s all right.”
There was no way she could tell him.
Something in her said it was going to be worse if she didn’t, if he found her the way he had found her mother, but for now…
“I guess,” she said.
“With them.”
She produced another smile and knew how phony it looked. A minute went by, then he sighed heavily and stepped away from the sofa. “You’re not hurt?”
“Just wrinkled.”
“I’ll take you home. I don’t want you driving.”
Neither do I, she thought.
* * * * *
“You know what I like?” Babykay asked.
She and Dean were sharing a pew, with enough space between the two of them for someone else to sit down. For a while she’d been quietly paging through a hymnal, frowning now and then. A couple of times she had hummed a few bars of a hymn, smiling to herself as if the music brought back a good memory.
“No clue,” Dean said.
“Yellow cupcakes. My gram used to make me yellow cupcakes. She’s dead now.”
The Winchesters had picked up several bags of food to supplement the soup Will Hanson had said he had on hand. Choosing things they thought Babykay, Chaz and Lemon would actually eat had been a challenge.
Simply walking through the supermarket had been a challenge. The bright fluorescent lights had made Dean’s head throb; after a few minutes the place seemed like something out of an acid trip. When they finally had the groceries in hand he had fled to the car as if he was being chased.
“Shoulda told me sooner,” he sighed.
“I don’t care. The chocolate ones are all right. As long as there’s no peanuts. I’m allergic to peanuts.”
Up in the front of the sanctuary, Sam was sitting on the floor, using the seat of the front pew as a desk. He’d found an unused phone jack up there and had plugged the laptop into it, using a 90-day free trial offer that he’d juggled into its tenth month to log onto the Internet. He had Dad’s journal open beside the computer and every few minutes would turn pages, though with a lot less patience and reverence than Babykay was using to go through the hymnal.
Chaz and Lemon were asleep, each stretched out in a pew, their bellies full of junk food. When Dean glanced over at them, Lemon had a hand balled up against her mouth and was gnawing at it in her sleep as if she thought it was a cupcake.
Pastor Hanson had retreated to his office some time ago.
“You’re nice,” Babykay said. “You and Sam. I wish you were my brothers.”
Dean considered the girl’s angular little face. The smile on it was genuine, and he half expected her to reach out and pat his arm. “No you don’t,” he told her.
“I hate my brother.”
“Kinda harsh. What, did you guys fight a lot?”
“He stuck his fingers in me.”
“He…what?”
“I cut him with a razor blade. They were gonna send me to Juvie, but I ran away before they could catch me. My mom said he didn’t mean anything by it ‘cause he was drunk, but that’s crap. Don’t you think that’s crap?”
It was any number of things, Dean thought. “Crap” wasn’t one of them. Idly he wondered how Babykay’s brother would feel if Sam stepped on his head. And kicked it a few times for good measure.
“Son of a bitch,” he murmured.
Unable to sit beside her any longer, he slid out of the pew and went up to stand next to Sam. His brother’s head was bent, his shoulders hunched, and his expression managed to be both ferocious and exhausted at the same time. He looked at Dean’s boots for a moment, then returned to making faces at the laptop screen. “I don’t know what to do with this,” he complained. “Dad might. Or Ash. I don’t see any connections in any of this.”
Dozens of people had died within a hundred-mile radius of Brooklyn within the past few days. Most of them, of course, had expired of natural causes, but there were leftovers. Sam had taken to scribbling down the details on a notepad supplied by Will Hanson. The last few entries on his list were almost illegible.
“This woman,” Sam said through gritted teeth, “tied her son up in the bathtub because he wet the bed.”
“He died?”
“No. Do you know how many babies die because their parents slam them against something to make them stop crying?”
“Sam, man, what the hell are you looking at?”
“I can’t do this, Dean.”
“I’ll do it, then. Go chill out for a while.”
Sam pushed himself up off the floor and confronted his brother, gesturing at the computer with a hand that closed into a fist. “Maybe it’s one demon. Maybe it’s fifty. Maybe it’s not a demon at all. These people are worse than demons. What are we looking for, Dean? How do we make things any better?”
“Take a break, man,” Dean said quietly. “Go for a walk or something.”
“Let’s go. Let’s just go.”
“You want to get a drink? We’ll go get a drink.”
“I don’t want a drink. I want to leave.” A moment after he had said that, Sam seemed to recover some of his equilibrium. “We’re bailing out the Titanic with a paper cup, Dean.”
“Do you want me to do it?”
“No,” Sam said. “You suck at research.”
“Want me to call Ash?”
“No,” Sam barked. “I’ll do it. Just…go away. I’ll do it.”
As a dismissal, it served well enough. Telling himself he needed to check the kitchen downstairs to see what was left of the groceries, Dean stuck his hands in his pockets and wandered down the narrow flight of stairs to the basement.
Hanson was already in the kitchen, building stacks of Oreos on the battered, enamel-topped table. When he saw Dean in the doorway he smiled without humor and admitted, “Not exactly what they pay me to spend my time doing.”
“I don’t figure it says anything about demons in your job description either.”
The minister’s left eyebrow slid up toward his hairline. “Say again?”
“That’s what we’re looking for. Me and Sam. The guy in the Porsche that those kids told us about - we don’t think he’s human.”
“I see.”
He was surprisingly unsurprised, or was wildly good at poker faces. Dean considered that for a minute, then pulled the only unoccupied chair away from the table and sat down. After he’d popped a cookie into his mouth he pushed his cell phone across the table toward Hanson. “In case you feel a need to call the guys with the net. Or are we gonna play ‘I believe that you believe it’?”
Hanson’s gaze dropped to the scar on his wrist. “No.”
“Wasn’t a dog, you said. What was it?”
It took Hanson a long while to answer. “My friend and I were in our junior year of high school. We decided to camp out one night, down by the lake. Sleeping bags, flashlights, a couple of bottles. Neither one of us was anywhere near sober when we went to sleep.” He paused, looking at his towers of Oreos. “I woke up - I don’t know how much later it was. I heard this odd sound. When I looked over toward Tom’s sleeping bag, there was something dark near his head. There was moonlight, but I couldn’t make out what it was.”
“Coyote?” Dean suggested.
Chapter 6 continues here: http://ficwriter1966.livejournal.com/15644.html#cutid1