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Part One
--
Like those of the other homes on the street, the front windows of the Bradys' home look out onto the ocean; wind-lashed, the water is a vicious thing, rougher than the sky, though only a few shades darker. From behind the safety of those windows, the rage of storms would look beautiful. Even the pane of the shotgun window is enough of a buffer to allow the idea that the rain is something distant, something that can be admired while never affecting. "Sometimes kids just wander away," Dean says, his tone bland enough that it only emphasizes what it's meant to be covering, and Sam glances back, hearing everything Dean didn't say.
"Sometimes," he says, and opens his door. The wind immediately tears at his tie, blowing it over his shoulder.
The roof over the front porch offers little protection from the wind, but it keeps the worst of the rain off of them as they wait for someone to answer the door. "Maybe nobody's home," Dean says after a minute.
"Would you leave, if you thought there was a chance she'd come back?"
Dean doesn't look at him, says, "Not everybody comes back."
I did, Sam wants to say, and so did you, but that's not a conversation to have here, now, or maybe ever, and before he can say anything, the door opens before them.
A ragged-looking man with red-rimmed eyes looks out, keeping the door mostly closed against the threat of the weather, or the threat of them. If not for the sleepless lines on his face, he might have looked young. "Can I help you?" he asks.
"Mr. Brady?" Sam says, and hears Dean make a sound that could almost pass for a muffled snicker instead of the memory of one. "We're Agents Gilmour and Wright with the F.B.I." He holds up his badge, and beside him, Dean does the same. "May we come in?"
"Are you here about Lacey?" Brady asks, and Sam tries not to hear the ache of hope in his voice. "Did you find something?"
"I'm afraid we haven't found anything yet, sir," Sam says. "But if you have a minute, we need to ask you a few questions that will help us find her." He manages not to wince at the lie, will instead of might, instead of might help us save the next one; after a year and a half of practice, it's dangerously easy.
Brady steps back, opening the door so they can enter. "My wife's resting," he says. "She hasn't been sleeping well since -- lately."
"We'll try not to disturb her," Dean says. The house is large, and few lights are on; though the windows are plentiful, the natural light that filters in is grey and autumnal, making the high-ceilinged rooms seem colder and more desolate than they might have otherwise. Brady shows them into the living room, sits down on one of the overstuffed couches; Sam and Dean sit opposite him. A large brick fireplace occupies the nearest wall; the mantel is lined with framed family photos. Lacey, an only child, appears happy in all of them, at least as far as Sam can tell from this distance.
"We're sorry to have to bother you like this," Sam begins, and Brady shakes his head.
"If it'll help bring her home," he says. "Anything I can do." His voice sounds ravaged, insomniac, broken.
Sam nods. "Your daughter disappeared from your front yard last Thursday. Where were you and your wife prior to discovering her disappearance?"
Brady swallows. "We were in here," he says. "Uh, in the house, I mean. Linda was keeping an eye on her out the window and I was making supper. Linda went out to call her in to eat, and she, she wasn't there anymore."
"Has she ever run away in the past?" Sam asks. "Maybe just for a few hours, or even a few minutes? Does she like to play hide and seek or anything like that?"
"No," Brady says. "Never. We taught her -- we taught her to always make sure somebody knows where she is. She wouldn't have just run away." His voice cracks on the last word and Sam glances at Dean.
"Mr. Brady, in the days before your daughter's disappearance, did you notice anything strange?" Dean asks.
"What do you mean? Strange how?" Brady asks.
"Anything out of the ordinary. Did you see anything unusual around your house?" Dean says.
"You mean did I see anybody watching us?" Brady says. "Anybody waiting for a chance to snatch my little girl? No. No."
"What about inside your house? Did you notice any electrical malfunctions, any strange noises, anything like that?"
Brady's forehead furrows in confusion. "No, I don't think so. I don't understand, what does that have to do with where my daughter is?"
Dean looks back at Sam, who licks his lips and says, trying to steel himself for the inevitable and knowing that no amount of distance will be enough, "Sir, are you familiar with the rumors about a ghost on the island?"
Brady stares at him, mouth open as if to speak. He closes it, then, and swallows, and blinks. "Agent Gilmour, are you suggesting that a ghost may have something to do with the disappearance of my daughter?"
"No!" Sam says at the same time Dean says, "Not necessarily." Sam grits his teeth and looks at Brady instead of glaring at Dean. "Sir, no, we're not. We're suggesting that someone may have taken advantage of those rumors."
"You think somebody, what, pretended to be a ghost to take Lacey?" Brady asks. "You think Lacey would have fallen for that, and that my wife wouldn't have noticed?"
"No," Sam says. "Sir, no, we just--"
"I'm going to ask you to leave now," Brady says, and beneath the anger in his voice, Sam hears something very tired, and very old. He wants to apologize, but he knows Brady won't hear anything else they say.
"Thank you for your time, sir," he says instead, getting to his feet. Dean does the same a second later. Brady doesn't respond, but he follows them to the front door, and as soon as it's closed behind them, Sam hears the lock engage.
"Well, at least we got that out of the way," Dean mutters, and Sam elbows him sharply. When they step out from the shelter of the porch, it's raining hard enough to render any sort of non-shouted conversation impossible until they get inside the car.
Dean starts the engine and turns the windshield wipers on. They slap back and forth as Sam pushes rain-damp hair out of his face. Heat sighs weakly out of the vents, sad as the last breaths of a beautiful machine kept alive long after her time. "That went well," Dean says, tugging at his tie to loosen it. "Any other bright ideas?"
"The police have to have found something," Sam says. "If we can take a look at their file, see what they've found--"
""Remember the whole 'wanted for bank robbery' thing you were so hyped up about?" Dean yanks off his tie, drops it onto the seat between them. "We're not going to the police. End of discussion."
"Even if you don't go in, I can at least--"
"Sam," Dean says, and Sam falls silent. He tells himself it's not at all because for a moment Dean had sounded exactly like their father; he tells himself that he stopped listening to their father's orders, stopped caring what their father thought, a long time ago. Sometimes he tells himself that the grief he feels in the wake of their father's death is not tinged with regret; sometimes he tells himself that if he had known what would happen, he would have done nothing differently.
"What, Dean? I get that you think it's a risk, but we take risks every day."
"Not for nothing," Dean says, and Sam doesn't want to think about whether it's annoyance or pity or grief darkening his eyes. "You found this hunt on the internet, okay, fine. You found it on a blog, that's kinda sketchy, but we've had worse. You find it on somebody's anonymous blog, we go to check it out and find nothing, that's called a dead end."
"We find things on anonymous blogs all the time. People are scared, they don't want to be connected to this kind of thing, or else they're scared of what might find them if they were--"
"Yeah, that's where the checking it out part comes in. I don't like it any better than you do, but we got nothing to go on here."
Sam sighs. "Can we at least pull out of the damn driveway before the guy calls the cops, if he hasn't already?"
Dean glares at him, but shifts the car into drive. When they're halfway down the street, he says, "I get that there's a missing kid, okay. I get that you wanna make this right. But that doesn't mean you can, Sam. Not everything's connected to, to the demon. Not everything's something you gotta fix."
"What about the ghost Denise saw?" Sam says. "You saw how freaked out she was even just telling us about it. You said yourself that she wasn't making it up."
"I also said I didn't know if it was gonna help us," Dean says. "People see stuff all the time. Not all of it's connected. This morning you said you didn't even know if the ghost was real, man."
"That was before we talked to Denise! Don't you think it's a pretty big coincidence, her seeing a ghost and the anonymous poster saying the same thing about Lacey's disappearance?"
"Did you ever stop to think that she's the one who made the connection?" Dean's not quite yelling, not yet, and Sam realizes that his own voice had been raised to begin with.
He swallows. "Why would she, if she didn't even wanna talk to us in the first place?"
"People do weird shit, Sam," Dean says, and whether his voice is quieter out of weariness or an attempt to be kind, Sam can't tell. "They find ways to make things make sense."
"Look," Sam says. "Can we just, can we just go by where she said she saw the ghost, Tillman Road or whatever? If we go there after sunset and the ghost doesn't show, you win."
"It's not a goddamn contest," Dean says, and then he stops, the hand that's not on the steering wheel raised as though to ward off whatever Sam might have said. "Whatever, fine. Tillman Road. 'Cause we haven't spent enough time driving across the damn island today already."
If he's trying to goad Sam into another argument, it's not going to work. Sam sets his jaw resolutely and turns to look out the window. The rain batters against the glass and reduces the world to a collage of bruised grey, lit by an occasional bright vivid smear of streetlights, smudged electric greens and reds. He feels the beginning of a headache grating at the back of his skull and wishes that Dean wouldn't always go out of his way to be as infuriating as possible.
Lacey Brady is missing. At least one person has seen the ghost that might be responsible for her disappearance. They've done more with much less before, and just because Dean's in a hurry to move on to something easy, something they can hunt and track and shoot, doesn't mean that there isn't something here.
Sam knows that this is real. He can feel it in the marrow of his bones, can sense it in the rainwracked crest of the sea, can --
He wipes his suddenly-damp palms on his jeans. This isn't the first time, he reminds himself. Long before their father said anything to Dean, he could sense things. People sense things all the time; it's called intuition, or having a hunch, or a gut feeling. It's perfectly normal.
All the same, his hands have gone cold with incipient dread, and the sickening paradoxical weight of at once fear and stubborn denial, a plea for disbelief, settles against the back of his neck like the spark of metal-tinged air in the moments before the rain begins, before the lightning strikes, like the black bore of his brother's favorite gun in the instant before he pulls the trigger.
--
There's a faint red glow at the horizon, all that remains of a day that seems never to have truly been light, and the tires crunch onto gravel as Dean parks the car alongside the blacktop of Tillman Road. In the distance, the lights of civilization, streetlights and lit windows, flicker like candles, like lanterns on a ship swept by the sea. The fog rolling off of the ocean does nothing to dispel the image, though as the road behind them is slowly masked with mist, it looks more like they're the ones who've been set adrift, Sam thinks, and looks pointedly back at the road ahead.
The rain, at least, has stopped. For now.
Dean shifts his weight and reaches for the thermos at his feet. He unscrews the cup that serves as a lid and fills it with coffee, hands it to Sam without saying anything.
It's not a peace offering, since they're not technically fighting, but Sam accepts it as gratefully as though it were. The road is rural enough that it's lined only sporadically with streetlamps; the effect is chilling, serving more to emphasize the depth of the darkness than to provide any sort of comfort. He wonders how cold it was the night Denise saw the ghost, and whether she'd believed, prior to seeing it, that the streetlights would keep her safe.
Nightmares move more quickly in the dark, but they do not require the dark in order to move.
From where they're parked, Sam can see all the way down to the water. The shoulder of Tillman Road slumps down at a fairly slow, if muddy, degree of gradation; at the base of the hill is a short expanse of rough flatland, a tangle of rocks and mud and sea-battered scrub, at the edge of which Denise had seen the ghost staring out to sea. Or at least pretending to.
He passes the cup back to Dean. "How long are we gonna wait?"
"You tell me," Dean says. "You're the one who's so damn sure it's gonna show. What do I get if you're wrong?"
Sam doesn't mean to laugh, but it happens anyway. "What happened to this not being a contest?"
"It's a bet," Dean says. "There's a difference. If it was a contest, all that'd happen is you'd lose. This way you're gonna lose and owe me."
Sam raises his eyebrows. "Right."
"Hey, fair warning," Dean says. "I just don't wanna hear you bitching in a coupl'a hours about how I cheated."
Sam rolls his eyes and looks back out the window. A few straggling guillemots wheel above the water like shadows slipping against the sky, barely visible. "We shouldn't be the only ones here," he says quietly, and he feels Dean watching him.
"Hate to break it to you, Sammy, but I think we're the only ones crazy enough." Dean's tone is carefully measured, light without being cavalier, and Sam wonders what that costs him.
He turns to look at his brother. "Not just the only hunters, I mean. There should be other people. A little girl's missing, somebody else should notice."
"Whole damn community noticed," Dean says. "That doesn't mean they can do anything about it. Kids go missing every day. They probably think she drowned." Which she might have, he doesn't add, but Sam hears it all the same.
"There should have been a body."
Dean shrugs. "Hell of a lot of ocean out there," he says, looking out the windshield. Sam can't tell what he's looking at, or what he's seeing, if they're different. He doesn't look back at Sam, and Sam swallows, feeling oddly voyeuristic, and looks out his own window.
The car smells like coffee and Dean's hair gel, and the heater is working now, pushing warm air out at them. The rumble of the engine is soporific, and lately he's slept better in the car than anywhere else; he could tilt his head back against the seat and close his eyes and go to sleep, and he knows that Dean would not wake him. Maybe Dean would even keep vigil for him, just in case the ghost happens to show.
God, he's tired. And he knows that Dean is, too, which is why he has to stay awake.
Not that he was looking forward to the nightmares, anyway.
He opens the car door and steps out onto the gravel and gritty mud. The headlight beams disappear out into the dark, filtering out all too quickly into shadow. A breeze rustles across the back of his neck and he shivers, slipping his hands into his pockets. The wind scrapes across his face and his knuckles are abraded with cold. He feels half-asleep, liminal all the same, and blinks against it.
"Heads up," Dean says, and Sam looks up in time to catch the flashlight Dean tosses across the hood to him. Dean closes his door and the noise is jarring, but short-lived; the sound is swallowed quickly by the depth of the night and the susurration of the waves. "What the hell was wrong with waiting in the car?"
"Where's your sense of adventure," Sam says, clicking his flashlight on and casting the beam across the ground towards the fallow, weather-trampled weeds at the edge of the road.
"This isn't an adventure, this is a freakin' snipe hunt," Dean says, but he follows Sam down the hill anyway, their boots skidding and slipping down the incline. "You got a plan or what?"
"Reconnaissance," Sam says, pushing his hair out of his face with his free hand.
"So in other words, no." Dean comes to stand beside him at the base of the hill; lit faintly by his proximity to the periphery of the flashlight beams, his eyes gleam.
Sam ignores him. "You got the EMF meter?"
"There's not gonna be anything," Dean says, but he fishes it out of his jacket anyway. "See? Zip. Nothing. Radio silence."
Sam shrugs. "So the ghost isn't here yet."
"'Cause waiting for a ghost that might not even exist's exactly how I wanted to spend the night," Dean says, but it's mostly to himself, his head down as he kicks halfheartedly at the rocks. Sam rolls his eyes, just in case Dean happens to look up, and doesn't reply. To the left, the rotating beam of a lighthouse slumps slowly through the fog and across the water.
The ocean laps at the shoreline, shifting and depthless black, quietly predatory, and Sam narrows his eyes at it. Despite the dark, it's easy to be defiant with Dean standing this close.
And then he realizes the absurdity of what he's doing and plays his flashlight beam back onto shore.
When the rain begins a moment later, he's not surprised.
"Fuck," Dean says, sounding more resigned than annoyed. "I hope you're happy."
"Thrilled," Sam says, and shivers despite himself. Flashlit, the rain is an eerie, alive thing, glistening as it falls wind-tossed.
"Seriously, how long you planning to wait out here? 'Cause it's not like we can see any better here than we'd be able to from my car. I said we'd see if it showed up, man, I didn't say anything about drowning in the process."
"You wanna go wait in the car, fine. If you're too delicate, I get it, I can handle this," Sam says as serenely as he can, and judging from the look Dean gives him, it works.
"Funny," Dean says sourly. "Asshole."
"Look who's talking."
"Hey, this wasn't my idea. And you never said what I get when you lose."
"What do you want?" Sam asks, not entirely uncurious; it never hurts to ask. Most of the time.
"You to actually try to get some sleep," Dean says, quickly enough that he had to have planned it, and Sam blinks at him. Dean shrugs, his expression deliberately inscrutable, Sam thinks, and looks away, towards the water. Sam swallows, feeling inexplicably caught out. When he speaks, his voice is composedly bland.
"That's all? You gotta be desperate."
"Tell me about it," Dean says, still looking towards the sea. "Second choice's I get first shower for the next month and you gotta be the one to get takeout the whole time, too. And no getting me salads."
"What if you lose?" Sam says. Water drips cold down the back of his shirt and he hunches further into his jacket.
"Never gonna happen. Goddamnit, Sam, I feel like the wicked witch of the freakin' west out here." He turns back to Sam and smirks, scapegrace twist of his mouth. "Which makes you Dorothy."
"Dude, did you just reference an actual book?"
"I meant the movie," Dean says. "C'mon, do the red shoe thing already, I'm ready to get the hell outta here."
"I'm surprised you didn't make a Kansas joke," Sam says. "It's good to know there're still some things that are beneath you." Dean's smirk gets wider. "Whatever you're thinking, keep it to yourself."
"You sure know how to ruin a guy's fun," Dean says. "Guess spending your whole life practicing paid off."
"It's not my fault all it takes to ruin your fun is refusing to hear your joke," Sam says. "You know I wouldn't have laughed anyway."
"You never do," Dean says. "Once of these days, all that bottled-up hilarity's gonna kill you. I'll race you back to the car."
Sam thinks wistfully of the car's heaters and better yet, the warmth of the motel room, where the rain would be nothing more than white noise, and swallows. He tells himself it's not only the thought of being somewhere warm and dry that's making him think Dean might be right about the ghost not making an appearance, about there being no reason to be out in the storm like this. But it's far too easy to make justifications, and if the ghost took another kid-- "What if we miss the ghost?"
"You look like a drowned cat. Seriously, you're the scariest thing we're gonna see out here." Dean squints at him through the rain. "Maybe ghosts got better sense than you do and know to stay outta the rain. People sure as hell do, anyway, and how's it gonna take somebody if nobody's outside?"
"You're out here with me," Sam points out.
"Yeah, keeping an eye on you," Dean says. "Somebody has to." He pauses as though struck by the repetition, as though that hasn't become one of the key themes of their lives these days, a mantra ever-echoing in all of the silences they leave. Watch out for your brother. Watch out for me.
Sam narrows his eyes at him, calculating, and then takes off for the hill; he hears Dean behind him a half-second later. Their footsteps should be loud against the night, and would be if not for the storm; instead Sam can't hear anything more than the rush of blood in his ears and the clatter of rain against battered rock and earth and sea. He's almost to the top of the incline when the sky splits lightning-torn, blinding white crackle close enough to leave his ears ringing. Lightning, not a vision, he tells himself, because he didn't see anything and it wasn't accompanied by the jagged lobotomizing pain that he associates with them, snarling blooms of ache against the cage of his skull like flowers of blood, and then he realizes that he's slipping, the earth tilting, giving way beneath him.
If he'd been paying attention, he probably could have landed better.
The thought occurs to him a moment too late; he has time to wince preemptively before the hand he's flung out to break his fall connects hard with the ground, bringing all of his weight to bear upon those fragile newly-healed bones. The result is a flare of pain that threads up his arm with the same white-hot intensity of the lightning and he twists onto his side, curling his arm against his chest reflexively and biting his tongue until his eyes have cleared of everything but the retinal afterimages like tiny grains of light and the rain that drips from his hair. He blinks, becoming aware that Dean is standing right in front of him, is crouching down in front of him, careful not to lose his own balance on the incline. "Sammy," Dean says. "What the fuck?"
"I slipped," Sam says. It's hard to push himself to his knees without jostling his arm, but not impossible. He wonders vaguely if his jacket is salvageable, and if any of the dampness on his face is blood. He can't recall whether he scraped it, going down onto the rock.
"Uh, yeah, I noticed." Dean frowns at him. "Are you, uh."
"I'm fine," Sam says tightly. "I just lost my balance. After the lightning."
Dean raises his eyebrows. "The lightning?"
Sam's mouth goes abruptly dry. He swallows, which doesn't help. "You didn't see it?"
It takes Dean a half-second too long to respond, and when he does, he only says, "What do you say we go back to the motel, huh?" in that tone Sam hates, all bravado and selective hearing.
"I'm not crazy," Sam says out of habit, but he doesn't shrug away when Dean gets a hand beneath the elbow of the arm he's not clutching to his chest and helps him up.
"I didn't say you were." Dean lets go of him. "Think you can make it up the hill without falling over this time?"
"Funny," Sam says. He doesn't fail to notice that Dean walks a careful half-step behind him the rest of the way, but he doesn't comment on it, either. There's nothing he can say that he hasn't said already, and nothing he can say that won't result in Dean spending the rest of the night sulking on the opposite side of the motel room.
"Get mud on the seats and you'll be the one scrubbing it off," Dean says when they get back to the car, which is such a mild threat that it hardly counts at all.
"Whatever," Sam says anyway, opening his door.
The rain is falling heavily enough that the ocean is almost entirely obscured. He turns his face away from the window all the same; he doesn't want to know what he might glimpse, or might think he glimpses, half-visible for an instant through the storm.
"Told you the ghost wouldn't show," Dean says as he glances in the rearview before edging the car back onto the road.
Sam ignores him, reaching over to turn on the dome light. Dean glares, but doesn't turn it back off.
In the thin yellow glow, Sam's skin looks sallow, his veins like faded scars. He prods gingerly at his wrist; bruised, he decides. Bruised, and no worse. He switches off the light, rain-dappled darkness sweeping back over them like a sigh.
It's entirely possible that Dean had his eyes closed, or just wasn't looking up, or something. And even if it wasn't lightning, there are other perfectly reasonable explanations.
Like a seizure. Like the ghost. Like whatever the hell's wrong with him . . . activating.
Or he could just be tired, he tells himself. That's a perfectly likely explanation, too. He crosses his arms over his chest, small and laughable armor, and tilts his head back against the seat. If he's going to sleep tonight, it's only going to be from now until the time they get back to the motel, he knows, but he doesn't care. Right now, his wrist hurts and he's cold and soaked, and he really doesn't want to think about what exactly just happened. Right now, he's safe, and Dean's here, and they're moving. It's not running, but it's good enough for now.
That it's harder to hit a moving target might not be enough to save them someday, but right now, that doesn't matter.
He closes his eyes.
--
And he wakes with a start to Dean's hand on his shoulder; the car is stopped, the shotgun door is open, and past Dean, the dull architecture of the motel blocks out the sky. It's raining too hard for him to make out the number on the closest room, but he assumes it's theirs. Dean moves his hand and Sam knuckles at his eyes, the clean iron scent of water filling his lungs like a dream of drowning. "We're here?" he says, too sleep-dazed to wince at the obviousness of the answer, and Dean steps out of the way, turning towards the motel room door.
The rain stings the back of Sam's neck and he crowds into the room after Dean, pushing the door closed against the wind and the rain that's already dampened the carpet in ragged lines radiating inward across the threshold.
Dean moves towards the heating unit in the corner, rattling dials and glaring at it until the machinery begins to clank and wheeze. Sam sinks down onto the bed and shrugs out of his sodden jacket; a moment later Dean snatches it away and tosses it onto the heater.
"That's a fire hazard," Sam says. Dean makes a rude noise that's probably meant to be a scoff and continues pacing, wandering from door to bed to wall and back with energy enough for them both. "Will you sit down already?"
"Do you know how much time I've spent waiting in a motel room this last month?" Dean says, but he obliges, lowering himself onto the other bed. Sam assumes the question is rhetorical, since there's no way he could not know, considering that he's the one who pointed out to Dean that it probably wasn't a good idea to go around introducing himself for a little while; even if people didn't hear the implied "wanted criminal" in whatever awful alias he was using, there was always the chance that somebody might have paid attention to the "meant-to-be-dead guy shows up and robs a bank" thing, considering that it was on national television and everything. And he's been the one putting up with Dean bitching about that for the last month, too.
"You've spent like half your entire life waiting in a motel room," Sam points out instead.
Dean narrows his eyes. "That's different," he says. "That's voluntary, not because you got your panties in a bunch and decided you're the boss of me." He points a finger at Sam threateningly. "Which you're not. I just figured it'd be easier to go along with it than watch you have a heart attack every time somebody checked me out. You're just jealous it wasn't you on the news."
"Yes, Dean, I'm really jealous you got to be the one everybody now thinks is the worst bank robber ever, in addition to being a serial killer and grave desecrator and whatever the hell else."
"Oh, man," Dean says, his voice hushed and weirdly mournful. "I didn't even think about that. The worst bank robber ever?"
Sam stares at him. "Probably not ever," he says. "I mean, it was just poorly-planned, it wasn't . . . okay, it was stupid, but it wasn't comedy-level stupid." Especially since comedies don't usually involve people dying, but he's not going to say that part. He blinks, recalling Dean's longstanding claim of first right to the newspaper whenever they find one that carries News of the Weird, and then he wonders how much of the conversation has been solely to distract him from their situation.
Not that it hasn't worked, which when he realizes it now makes him feel worse than he would have if he'd known all along. He rubs his eyes, wishing desperately that he were more awake.
"Thanks, that makes it so much better," Dean says. "How's your wrist?"
He shrugs. "Fine."
Dean's huff of laughter sounds tired. "Liar."
"It's not as bad as it was," Sam says.
"Yeah, I figured, since you remembered how to talk."
Sam shakes his head. "Fuck you."
"You gotta learn to put some heat into it, Sammy, otherwise people're just gonna laugh at you when you say that."
"You're the only one I say it to," Sam says.
"Only 'cause you got me looking out for you. You hungry?"
"What happened to 'first shower and no salads'?"
"This is me taking pity on you. Enjoy it while it lasts, 'cause it ain't gonna be for much longer." Dean pauses. "And make it no tofu, too. You and your freakin' wheat smoothies, it's like you were raised in a damn hippie cult or something."
"Tofu's a perfectly acceptable meat substitute," Sam says, mostly to make Dean sneer. "Yeah, I could eat." Though he's not especially hungry, the thought of something warm is enticing, and all it will take is a drive back out into the rain. He thinks of the things that could be veiled by the cold cruel hammer of the storm; he thinks of Dean driving the Impala alone through the black rain-riddled night, the glow from the headlights dim and smoky, and he thinks of skidding tires, shrieking brakes, crunched metal.
These days, he's terrified of what might happen to him if something were to happen to Dean, if he didn't have Dean to keep him from--
If he didn't have Dean in case something happens. That's a nice, safe euphemism.
"Seriously, one of these days your face is gonna get stuck like that, and then I'm gonna sell you to one of those freakshow museums we always pass," Dean says. "They can bill you as the world's most depressed sasquatch and make a fortune. Hey, maybe I'll keep you and sell tickets myself."
"Outta what, the trunk?"
"Sure," Dean says. The car keys flash and jangle brightly in his hand. "Don't break anything while I'm gone. That includes yourself. Maybe you should just not move until I get back."
Sam flips him off and adds, "You want me to come with you?"
Dean gives him a strange look. "I'm not the one passing out all over the place, and if I want somebody to hold my hand, you're not gonna be my first choice, dude."
"I slipped," Sam says. That sounds better than vertigo coupled with visual hallucinations, and he's not going to mention the other potential explanations. Dean's probably already thinking them, anyway.
"Tripped over your own damn feet, more like," Dean says. "I meant it, don't burn the place down while I'm gone. I come back to a bonfire, I'm gonna be pissed."
"You're the one who threw my jacket onto the heater," Sam says.
"So stop bitching and pick it up already." Dean opens the door and steps out into the storm, and Sam's breath seems very loud then, contrasted only with the heater rattling softly in the corner and the melancholy noise of the rain. He swallows and gets to his feet; he can wash his hands, at least.
In the bathroom mirror, he looks a wreck; his eyes are shadowed, his hair is drying matted and there is indeed a smear of blood high on one cheek, the skin below it proving upon contact to be tender as expected. He's glad Dean's not here to make comments about how he grits his teeth when the water slides over his wrist, or worse, to stand in the doorway with his shoulders slumped and that look on his face like he thinks this is one more thing for which he is responsible.
He washes the grime from his hands, washes his face, and dry-swallows a few aspirin on autopilot; he wanders back out and looks longingly at his bed, wondering if Dean would mind if he maybe just stayed there for the rest of the hunt. Even if he didn't sleep, at least he'd be warm and dry and safe from all of the ways in which the world reminds him that it's bloody and jagged, full of angry, twisted things both dead and alive. Except for how he's currently embodying at least a few of those reminders, tripwire catch of his breath at the thought of what that might mean, so there goes that idea.
Plus, Dean would bitch the entire time, even though he's perfectly capable of handling this on his own, and Sam would never live it down.
Not that he's not going to be called a melodramatic drama queen for the rest of his life anyway, what with it being one of Dean's favorite terms of endearment, but he'll feel better if he knows he hasn't yet done anything to deserve it.
And then he realizes that having had that entire thought process at all is itself justification for the title, and he blinks and reaches for his laptop. At the very least, he can go over everything they have so far, little as it is; maybe they've missed something, and if not, he can at least rule out the possibility.
That's what he's doing when Dean returns, laden with bulging plastic bags and accompanied by a heavy waft of salt and fried food. Sam closes the laptop, having found nothing new, nothing more than the dead girl--
Missing, he tells himself. Missing, not dead, but the dull, hollow feeling in his chest means acceptance, means that he can't even pretend to believe it anymore. He pushes the laptop away and goes to help Dean with the bags.
"You do know we're the only ones who're gonna be eating," he says, hating the deadened pitch of his voice and hoping that Dean won't notice it.
"I was hungry," Dean says. "I am hungry. And this way I don't gotta worry about you stealing my food."
"Because that happens all the time." Sam opens one of the Styrofoam containers and wonders if this is payback for what he said about tofu. "Did you get anything that doesn't contain part of a dead animal?"
"Meat's good for you, nature boy," Dean says. "It's not like you were gonna commune with the cows, anyway. They'll be dead whether or not you eat 'em, so you might as well do 'em justice."
Sam decides it's probably a sign of fatigue that that argument actually makes sense. He carries his dinner over to his bed, nudges his laptop aside.
"Hey, you find anything?" Dean asks, nodding at the laptop.
"No," Sam says. He busies himself with his burger, pulling out the sliced onions and setting them to the side. It's as good an excuse as any not to look at Dean. "You're right, there's no way she's still alive."
"I didn't say that," Dean says. "I just meant don't . . . don't get your hopes up, is all."
"Thought you didn't believe in miracles." It comes out more acerbic than he'd intended and he swallows. "Sorry, I'm just--"
"Tired," Dean finishes. Sam shrugs. "Yeah, I got it. You wanna see what's on?"
"On?" Sam asks.
"T.V. Television. Box with the moving pictures? Unless that'd get in the way of the mope-a-thon you got going on."
"Does being an asshole come with age?" Sam says. "Because the thought of you at thirty is terrifying."
"Nah, it's a skill," Dean says, depositing two bottles of beer on the nightstand before settling onto his own bed. "Watch and learn."
There's no HBO on the island, or at least at the motel at which they're staying, the only one open now, during the long slump of non-tourist season; as such, what passes for television turns out to consist of one mostly-static free channel playing a sitcom that bears absolutely no resemblance to any reality Sam's ever seen, but it's excuse enough to not have to talk, to focus on the banalities of someone else's existence while chewing mechanically and trying to savor what he can of the sandwich that tastes like it could have come from an anonymous diner anywhere in America, and he's thankful for that, at least. With the curtains drawn and the canned laughter blotting out the noise of the storm, he can pretend they're surrounded by thousands of miles of road, flatlands and prairie in every direction instead the cold black sea and the shadows that glide and skitter across its floor.
The television cuts out five minutes later, along with the lights and the heater and the clock on the nightstand between their beds. Dean says, "motherfucking son of a bastard bitch," like the power outage is some kind of personal affront and like he'd actually been paying attention to the show instead of eating his cheeseburger as loudly as humanly possible. Sam lets his head fall back against the headboard with a satisfying thunk and considers never moving again. The rain pounds at the windows like the imprecations of the dead; the water is freezing, turning to sleet. Springs squeak as Dean pushes off of his bed; he goes to the window and shoves the curtains aside. "It's the whole damn block," he says, shadows of the rain sliding across his face. "Streetlights and everything."
"Great," Sam says. Dean drops the curtain and the room slips back into steady darkness. "Where're you going?"
It's too dark for Sam to make out the expression on Dean's face, but he can imagine it well, based on his brother's tone. "Where the hell do you think I'm going? I'm going to the goddamn manager's office to see what the fuck's going on." Dean doesn't quite manage to not slam the door on his way out, and the sudden sharp noise makes Sam's ears ring. He closes the lid of the Styrofoam box over the remnants of his dinner, suddenly not hungry at all.
The room seems much colder than it did a few moments ago, which makes sense, he tells himself; the power's out. Obviously. He shivers and tells himself it would be paranoid to line the doorway with salt. Dean will be back in a few minutes, and it's only his imagination, combined with lack of sleep, that's making the darkness seem ominous, as though anything could be hiding within it, waiting for him to let his guard down. He knuckles at his eyes, wincing at the bursts of light across his vision. There's nothing there, he tells himself, no brazen-eyed demons, no beings of smoke with claws that could cut bone, not the dead whispering his name, asking with voices of sorrow why he'd let them die. It's only the rain, only the wind, scraping lonely and ancient against the walls, brushing like breath or the press of fingertips against the glass. His wrist aches, a chilled, dull pain where once had been the sear of fire.
"Backup generator's fucking shot. We can either wait to see if it comes back or sleep in the car," Dean says, letting himself back into the room, and Sam blinks, realizing that he'd fallen asleep and hoping it wasn't for more than a few seconds. "Unless you still got an urge to freeze your ass off, I'm voting for the car."
"Yeah," Sam says vaguely, and then, "Uh, the car's good." He gets to his feet stiffly and grabs his jacket from the rapidly-cooling heater, doubles back to the bed to grab one of the pillows.
Though he'd known it was going to be cold, he's not prepared for the way the wind tosses sleet at him as soon as he steps outside. He flinches, lurching towards the Impala, and has the sudden image of them wandering out into the storm like errant cows, to be found frozen the next morning. With the streetlights out, the parking lot seems as dark as the ocean had been, and his breath hangs like fog in the air. He thinks of Denise's ghost, of all of the things that could be hunting, taking advantage of the cover the storm provides, and when Dean unlocks the car, he ducks into it gratefully, taking the backseat out of habit and pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. Dean starts the engine and begins rattling around in the glove compartment. Sam winces preemptively and a second later Dean says, "Two goddamn weeks I been wondering where I lost this tape, Sammy. I sure as hell hope you thought this was funny, 'cause it's gonna cost you."
"I put it there for safekeeping," Sam says, shivering. The cold tears at his throat. "It's not my fault you never thought to look there." He waits for Dean to shove the tape into the deck and make them listen to the shrieking of Robert Plant for the next eight hours; at least it would probably keep the ghost away, but Dean only sighs. "What were you looking for?"
"A lighter," Dean says. "I was gonna set you on fire for heat."
Sam rolls his eyes even though Dean won't be able to see the gesture, and pushes the pillow against the door.
"Keep your feet off the seat," Dean says without looking back.
"Bite me," Sam says, drawing his legs up onto the leather, which is gradually beginning to thaw. Sleet batters at the car, runnels down the windows. "If we die of carbon monoxide poisoning, I'm blaming you."
"You wanna sleep in the room, knock yourself out," Dean says. His voice creaks unexpectedly as though with exhaustion and Sam blinks. "Otherwise, shut up before I make you sleep in the trunk."
"You'd sprain something trying," Sam says, but he pulls the pistol from the waistband of his jeans and sets it within easy reach on the floor; he folds his arms over his chest for warmth and focuses on the rumble of the engine, louder and much closer than the noise of the storm.
--
He is standing on the beach, if the low, rough stretch of land off of Tillman Road may be said to be a beach. It is dawn, or maybe dusk; the sky is an uncertain color, an opalescent blue-grey that promises nothing but cold and shearing wind. The sky cannot be held to a promise, he thinks, and then, as though called into existence by his thoughts, he feels the wind, ruffling through his hair, prickling across his skin. The ground before him, all the way to the sea, is covered with frost. The sea moves soundlessly, and he is alone; Dean is nowhere to be seen.
He might stand here forever, or only for a few moments; time is inconsequential. Before him, a woman appears, though in truth she might have been there always; perhaps he has only just now noticed her. Her eyes are slate and sea-glass, her hair tangled and braided by the waves. She regards him without warmth, but without malice; he does not fear her, but neither does he know her. As he watches, the wind begins to abrade her, eroding at her body as though she is made of sand; before his eyes, she begins to crumble.
Fading, she raises a hand, as though to beckon, or to offer him something from her cupped palm; before he can decide, she is lost to the wind, particles that might merely be sand tossed out onto the water like ashes, like an offering.
He feels something damp on his face; it tastes of salt, and when he touches his cheek, pulls his fingers away to examine them, he sees that it is saltwater, that it is the sea. Her blood, he thinks; he has been marked, though he knows not by whom, nor for what purpose; with this thought, he awakens, no transition between the bleak white shoreline and the black of the Impala's front seat as he lays curled on his side, feeling for blood like tears that never existed in this reality, or perhaps even at all.
His legs ache from being held cramped and still for so many hours. The Impala's engine still rumbles; though he aches, he isn't cold. He sits up slowly, massaging the back of his neck with one hand. The sky is light, a pale blue he associates with Nebraska in midwinter, and a glance at his watch informs him that it's after ten in the morning. Though he doesn't recall what time it was when they abandoned the room for the heat of the car, the time seems miraculous, and faintly suspicious; he hasn't slept for this long maybe in months.
"Time is it?" Dean says blearily from the front seat, sitting up slowly. Sam hadn't thought he'd made any noise, but he feels vaguely guilty all the same.
"Just after ten. Think the power's back?"
Dean blinks. "Motel sign's on," he says after a second. "That's a good sign." He rolls his shoulders and then cuts the engine, pockets the keys and opens the door. "God, I could use a hot shower. My back's killing me."
"Maybe you're getting old," Sam says, tucking the pistol back into his waistband and then grimacing as he steps out into the cold air. "You should think about getting a new car to match your lifestyle. A minivan, maybe. Something with that fake wood paneling you like so much."
"Didn't anybody ever tell you to respect your elders?" Dean says. "Fairly certain I beat that lesson into you like a thousand times by now. You want me to do it again?"
"Wouldn't want you to put your back out," Sam says, but he steps back quickly, out of Dean's reach, when Dean turns around. Dean smirks and turns back to unlock the door. Stepping into the room, Sam wrinkles his nose; the room smells like what's left of what was meant to be their dinner, salt and grease overlaid with ketchup. Dean flicks on the lights.
"Home sweet home," he says blandly. He takes a bite of a cold French fry and grimaces. "Get rid of the food, would you?"
"Dude, I'm not your maid," Sam says.
"And thank God for that. You in one a' those little black dresses is something I wanna never think about again." Sam rolls his eyes and Dean grins, grabs a shirt from his bag. "Gimme ten minutes and we'll get breakfast, huh?" Sam shrugs in agreement and Dean disappears into the bathroom. Left alone in the room, Sam swallows; he lowers himself onto his bed and reaches for the laptop he'd set aside the night before. Ten minutes should be enough time to narrow down at least a few of the leads his dream provided.
It could have just been a dream, but he's not going to risk that. He'd dreamed of Jess for days, after all, and just because in the past his visions have come when he's awake, that doesn't mean that they always will.
He's not going to risk anyone else.
By the time Dean's done in the shower, he's found absolutely nothing about any sort of water spirit that matches what he saw, in description or in action; despite the dream, he's no closer to narrowing down the cause of Lacey Brady's disappearance to anything more than a ghost.
Dean pauses in the doorway of the bathroom, catching sight of Sam with the laptop, and Sam feels the urge to blush, as though he's done something wrong. Which he hasn't, he tells himself. Just because he's accepted that Lacey Brady is most likely dead doesn't mean they're giving up on this hunt; whatever took her, whatever killed her, is still out there, and it will be until someone puts a stop to it.
Which, as usual, is going to have to be them.
"Am I interrupting something?" Dean asks, one eyebrow raised like he's ready to turn this into something that can be brushed off, if only Sam will give him the opportunity.
"Just checking my email," Sam says.
"'Cause if you want me to give you some time to yourself, you know, to handle things, you just gotta say the word, man."
Sam gives him the most withering stare he can and shuts the laptop down. Dean shrugs. "Just looking out for you," he says. "Keeping your best interests in mind."
"Dude, if that's what you mean by best interests, please, please don't think about mine."
Dean's forehead wrinkles. "You got a real knack for making things dirty," he says, half-disgusted and half-approving.
"And whose fault is that?" Sam says. "C'mon, I'm starving."
"And now you're stealing my lines," Dean says. "Next, you're gonna wanna drive. Does this mean you're gonna start listening to real music now? 'Cause I'd let you drive more if you did."
"No, you wouldn't," Sam says.
"You don't know that," Dean says defensively.
"Yes, I do," Sam says. "You're not that hard to figure out, man."
"I just make it easy for you," Dean says. "I don't want you to have to strain anything, you bitch enough as it is."
Sam considers retorting and decides the better of it; he turns for the door, trusting that Dean will catch up.
--
The waitress who serves them at the diner is the same one who served them the day before, but she shows only the faintest sign of recognizing them, smiling wanly as she pours their coffee. Once she's gone, Sam swallows, and leans in; despite the mug clutched between his hands, and the warmth of the diner itself, he is chilled. It's probably dread, he tells himself, and forges on. "I had a dream last night," he says, his voice low.
"Uh, okay, MLK," Dean says. "That's usually when people have dreams, since that's usually when they're asleep. And dude, when I said all you had to do was say the word, I meant it. You so don't need to give me the blow-by-blow." He pauses, though Sam's fairly certain the word choice was intentional. "Uh, so to speak."
"Are you done?" Sam asks.
Dean shrugs noncommittally. "For now."
"There was a woman. She was, I don't know, made of sand or something. It was like she wanted something from me, or was trying to give me something, and then I woke up." He winces at the way it sounds when spoken aloud, but he meets Dean's eyes all the same.
Dean raises his eyebrows. "And you think this is, what, connected to whatever Denise saw?"
"What else could it be?"
"Uh, a dream, for one thing," Dean said. "I get that it was intense or whatever, but that's not exactly a psychic vision."
"Look, I know it doesn't sound like much, but I don't think we can write it off as coincidence, not with everything we've seen. And what else do we have to go on?"
"Nothing, Sam, and that's the point," Dean says. "We're not even clutching at straws here, we're clutching at the ghosts of straws. Things that might not even be straws at all. Things that maybe you want to look like straws, but that don't mean they do. Look, straws aside, we're clutching at nothing."
"So, what, you want us to give up?" Sam crosses his arms. "Just shrug and pretend it doesn't matter that Lacey Brady's dead?"
"What the fuck, Sam. You know damn well that's not what I'm saying."
"Then what, Dean?" His voice is rising, despite his intentions, going sharp and harsh.
"Look, we been running on adrenaline for -- for our whole goddamn lives, okay, but the last couple weeks it's been even worse. We're off our game, maybe we're trying to see things that aren't there." His shrug looks more like a twitch, nervous and defensive. "Maybe you're trying to make this something it isn't, something you can fix."
"So now I'm crazy," Sam says dully. "Now I'm seeing things. What's next, do you think, do I start killing people or do you shoot me before I get that far?"
"Jesus Christ, Sam," Dean says, a whisper not far from a hiss, a gasp of shock and horror and hurt. That's funny; Sam had expected him to shout, or maybe to throw a punch. "That's not what I said, and that's sure as hell not what I fucking meant." He swallows; it looks like he's swallowing glass. "You want to make this something we can handle, because then we can deal with it and there's justice or whatever. That's all. I want the same goddamn thing, okay? I'm just saying that wanting it doesn't mean it's true."
"You said 'you're,'" Sam says. "Not 'we're.' You said that I'm trying to make this something it isn't." He thinks he might sound petulant; he's not sure that he cares.
"I meant 'we're,'" Dean snaps. Sam can't tell whether he's lying, and isn't sure that it matters. "Do you want to sit here and argue about fucking grammar or do you want to figure out what happened to Lacey Brady?"
"Lacey Brady?" Sam looks over to see the waitress staring at them, their plates in hand. He swallows, wondering how much she overheard; he hadn't heard her approach. Across from him, Dean is pale and white-knuckled; he looks like he's going to bolt or start taking hostages. "Didn't you hear? They found her body this morning, buried in the neighbor's backyard."
It's not until the waitress says, "Sir, sir," and Dean says, "Sammy," reaching across the table with a handful of paper napkins, that Sam realizes the mug he'd been clutching is in shards across the table and across his lap, and that his hands are damp not with sweat but with the dregs of his lukewarm coffee, and with blood that spreads like the bloom of roses across the napkins Dean presses against them.
Part Three
--
Like those of the other homes on the street, the front windows of the Bradys' home look out onto the ocean; wind-lashed, the water is a vicious thing, rougher than the sky, though only a few shades darker. From behind the safety of those windows, the rage of storms would look beautiful. Even the pane of the shotgun window is enough of a buffer to allow the idea that the rain is something distant, something that can be admired while never affecting. "Sometimes kids just wander away," Dean says, his tone bland enough that it only emphasizes what it's meant to be covering, and Sam glances back, hearing everything Dean didn't say.
"Sometimes," he says, and opens his door. The wind immediately tears at his tie, blowing it over his shoulder.
The roof over the front porch offers little protection from the wind, but it keeps the worst of the rain off of them as they wait for someone to answer the door. "Maybe nobody's home," Dean says after a minute.
"Would you leave, if you thought there was a chance she'd come back?"
Dean doesn't look at him, says, "Not everybody comes back."
I did, Sam wants to say, and so did you, but that's not a conversation to have here, now, or maybe ever, and before he can say anything, the door opens before them.
A ragged-looking man with red-rimmed eyes looks out, keeping the door mostly closed against the threat of the weather, or the threat of them. If not for the sleepless lines on his face, he might have looked young. "Can I help you?" he asks.
"Mr. Brady?" Sam says, and hears Dean make a sound that could almost pass for a muffled snicker instead of the memory of one. "We're Agents Gilmour and Wright with the F.B.I." He holds up his badge, and beside him, Dean does the same. "May we come in?"
"Are you here about Lacey?" Brady asks, and Sam tries not to hear the ache of hope in his voice. "Did you find something?"
"I'm afraid we haven't found anything yet, sir," Sam says. "But if you have a minute, we need to ask you a few questions that will help us find her." He manages not to wince at the lie, will instead of might, instead of might help us save the next one; after a year and a half of practice, it's dangerously easy.
Brady steps back, opening the door so they can enter. "My wife's resting," he says. "She hasn't been sleeping well since -- lately."
"We'll try not to disturb her," Dean says. The house is large, and few lights are on; though the windows are plentiful, the natural light that filters in is grey and autumnal, making the high-ceilinged rooms seem colder and more desolate than they might have otherwise. Brady shows them into the living room, sits down on one of the overstuffed couches; Sam and Dean sit opposite him. A large brick fireplace occupies the nearest wall; the mantel is lined with framed family photos. Lacey, an only child, appears happy in all of them, at least as far as Sam can tell from this distance.
"We're sorry to have to bother you like this," Sam begins, and Brady shakes his head.
"If it'll help bring her home," he says. "Anything I can do." His voice sounds ravaged, insomniac, broken.
Sam nods. "Your daughter disappeared from your front yard last Thursday. Where were you and your wife prior to discovering her disappearance?"
Brady swallows. "We were in here," he says. "Uh, in the house, I mean. Linda was keeping an eye on her out the window and I was making supper. Linda went out to call her in to eat, and she, she wasn't there anymore."
"Has she ever run away in the past?" Sam asks. "Maybe just for a few hours, or even a few minutes? Does she like to play hide and seek or anything like that?"
"No," Brady says. "Never. We taught her -- we taught her to always make sure somebody knows where she is. She wouldn't have just run away." His voice cracks on the last word and Sam glances at Dean.
"Mr. Brady, in the days before your daughter's disappearance, did you notice anything strange?" Dean asks.
"What do you mean? Strange how?" Brady asks.
"Anything out of the ordinary. Did you see anything unusual around your house?" Dean says.
"You mean did I see anybody watching us?" Brady says. "Anybody waiting for a chance to snatch my little girl? No. No."
"What about inside your house? Did you notice any electrical malfunctions, any strange noises, anything like that?"
Brady's forehead furrows in confusion. "No, I don't think so. I don't understand, what does that have to do with where my daughter is?"
Dean looks back at Sam, who licks his lips and says, trying to steel himself for the inevitable and knowing that no amount of distance will be enough, "Sir, are you familiar with the rumors about a ghost on the island?"
Brady stares at him, mouth open as if to speak. He closes it, then, and swallows, and blinks. "Agent Gilmour, are you suggesting that a ghost may have something to do with the disappearance of my daughter?"
"No!" Sam says at the same time Dean says, "Not necessarily." Sam grits his teeth and looks at Brady instead of glaring at Dean. "Sir, no, we're not. We're suggesting that someone may have taken advantage of those rumors."
"You think somebody, what, pretended to be a ghost to take Lacey?" Brady asks. "You think Lacey would have fallen for that, and that my wife wouldn't have noticed?"
"No," Sam says. "Sir, no, we just--"
"I'm going to ask you to leave now," Brady says, and beneath the anger in his voice, Sam hears something very tired, and very old. He wants to apologize, but he knows Brady won't hear anything else they say.
"Thank you for your time, sir," he says instead, getting to his feet. Dean does the same a second later. Brady doesn't respond, but he follows them to the front door, and as soon as it's closed behind them, Sam hears the lock engage.
"Well, at least we got that out of the way," Dean mutters, and Sam elbows him sharply. When they step out from the shelter of the porch, it's raining hard enough to render any sort of non-shouted conversation impossible until they get inside the car.
Dean starts the engine and turns the windshield wipers on. They slap back and forth as Sam pushes rain-damp hair out of his face. Heat sighs weakly out of the vents, sad as the last breaths of a beautiful machine kept alive long after her time. "That went well," Dean says, tugging at his tie to loosen it. "Any other bright ideas?"
"The police have to have found something," Sam says. "If we can take a look at their file, see what they've found--"
""Remember the whole 'wanted for bank robbery' thing you were so hyped up about?" Dean yanks off his tie, drops it onto the seat between them. "We're not going to the police. End of discussion."
"Even if you don't go in, I can at least--"
"Sam," Dean says, and Sam falls silent. He tells himself it's not at all because for a moment Dean had sounded exactly like their father; he tells himself that he stopped listening to their father's orders, stopped caring what their father thought, a long time ago. Sometimes he tells himself that the grief he feels in the wake of their father's death is not tinged with regret; sometimes he tells himself that if he had known what would happen, he would have done nothing differently.
"What, Dean? I get that you think it's a risk, but we take risks every day."
"Not for nothing," Dean says, and Sam doesn't want to think about whether it's annoyance or pity or grief darkening his eyes. "You found this hunt on the internet, okay, fine. You found it on a blog, that's kinda sketchy, but we've had worse. You find it on somebody's anonymous blog, we go to check it out and find nothing, that's called a dead end."
"We find things on anonymous blogs all the time. People are scared, they don't want to be connected to this kind of thing, or else they're scared of what might find them if they were--"
"Yeah, that's where the checking it out part comes in. I don't like it any better than you do, but we got nothing to go on here."
Sam sighs. "Can we at least pull out of the damn driveway before the guy calls the cops, if he hasn't already?"
Dean glares at him, but shifts the car into drive. When they're halfway down the street, he says, "I get that there's a missing kid, okay. I get that you wanna make this right. But that doesn't mean you can, Sam. Not everything's connected to, to the demon. Not everything's something you gotta fix."
"What about the ghost Denise saw?" Sam says. "You saw how freaked out she was even just telling us about it. You said yourself that she wasn't making it up."
"I also said I didn't know if it was gonna help us," Dean says. "People see stuff all the time. Not all of it's connected. This morning you said you didn't even know if the ghost was real, man."
"That was before we talked to Denise! Don't you think it's a pretty big coincidence, her seeing a ghost and the anonymous poster saying the same thing about Lacey's disappearance?"
"Did you ever stop to think that she's the one who made the connection?" Dean's not quite yelling, not yet, and Sam realizes that his own voice had been raised to begin with.
He swallows. "Why would she, if she didn't even wanna talk to us in the first place?"
"People do weird shit, Sam," Dean says, and whether his voice is quieter out of weariness or an attempt to be kind, Sam can't tell. "They find ways to make things make sense."
"Look," Sam says. "Can we just, can we just go by where she said she saw the ghost, Tillman Road or whatever? If we go there after sunset and the ghost doesn't show, you win."
"It's not a goddamn contest," Dean says, and then he stops, the hand that's not on the steering wheel raised as though to ward off whatever Sam might have said. "Whatever, fine. Tillman Road. 'Cause we haven't spent enough time driving across the damn island today already."
If he's trying to goad Sam into another argument, it's not going to work. Sam sets his jaw resolutely and turns to look out the window. The rain batters against the glass and reduces the world to a collage of bruised grey, lit by an occasional bright vivid smear of streetlights, smudged electric greens and reds. He feels the beginning of a headache grating at the back of his skull and wishes that Dean wouldn't always go out of his way to be as infuriating as possible.
Lacey Brady is missing. At least one person has seen the ghost that might be responsible for her disappearance. They've done more with much less before, and just because Dean's in a hurry to move on to something easy, something they can hunt and track and shoot, doesn't mean that there isn't something here.
Sam knows that this is real. He can feel it in the marrow of his bones, can sense it in the rainwracked crest of the sea, can --
He wipes his suddenly-damp palms on his jeans. This isn't the first time, he reminds himself. Long before their father said anything to Dean, he could sense things. People sense things all the time; it's called intuition, or having a hunch, or a gut feeling. It's perfectly normal.
All the same, his hands have gone cold with incipient dread, and the sickening paradoxical weight of at once fear and stubborn denial, a plea for disbelief, settles against the back of his neck like the spark of metal-tinged air in the moments before the rain begins, before the lightning strikes, like the black bore of his brother's favorite gun in the instant before he pulls the trigger.
--
There's a faint red glow at the horizon, all that remains of a day that seems never to have truly been light, and the tires crunch onto gravel as Dean parks the car alongside the blacktop of Tillman Road. In the distance, the lights of civilization, streetlights and lit windows, flicker like candles, like lanterns on a ship swept by the sea. The fog rolling off of the ocean does nothing to dispel the image, though as the road behind them is slowly masked with mist, it looks more like they're the ones who've been set adrift, Sam thinks, and looks pointedly back at the road ahead.
The rain, at least, has stopped. For now.
Dean shifts his weight and reaches for the thermos at his feet. He unscrews the cup that serves as a lid and fills it with coffee, hands it to Sam without saying anything.
It's not a peace offering, since they're not technically fighting, but Sam accepts it as gratefully as though it were. The road is rural enough that it's lined only sporadically with streetlamps; the effect is chilling, serving more to emphasize the depth of the darkness than to provide any sort of comfort. He wonders how cold it was the night Denise saw the ghost, and whether she'd believed, prior to seeing it, that the streetlights would keep her safe.
Nightmares move more quickly in the dark, but they do not require the dark in order to move.
From where they're parked, Sam can see all the way down to the water. The shoulder of Tillman Road slumps down at a fairly slow, if muddy, degree of gradation; at the base of the hill is a short expanse of rough flatland, a tangle of rocks and mud and sea-battered scrub, at the edge of which Denise had seen the ghost staring out to sea. Or at least pretending to.
He passes the cup back to Dean. "How long are we gonna wait?"
"You tell me," Dean says. "You're the one who's so damn sure it's gonna show. What do I get if you're wrong?"
Sam doesn't mean to laugh, but it happens anyway. "What happened to this not being a contest?"
"It's a bet," Dean says. "There's a difference. If it was a contest, all that'd happen is you'd lose. This way you're gonna lose and owe me."
Sam raises his eyebrows. "Right."
"Hey, fair warning," Dean says. "I just don't wanna hear you bitching in a coupl'a hours about how I cheated."
Sam rolls his eyes and looks back out the window. A few straggling guillemots wheel above the water like shadows slipping against the sky, barely visible. "We shouldn't be the only ones here," he says quietly, and he feels Dean watching him.
"Hate to break it to you, Sammy, but I think we're the only ones crazy enough." Dean's tone is carefully measured, light without being cavalier, and Sam wonders what that costs him.
He turns to look at his brother. "Not just the only hunters, I mean. There should be other people. A little girl's missing, somebody else should notice."
"Whole damn community noticed," Dean says. "That doesn't mean they can do anything about it. Kids go missing every day. They probably think she drowned." Which she might have, he doesn't add, but Sam hears it all the same.
"There should have been a body."
Dean shrugs. "Hell of a lot of ocean out there," he says, looking out the windshield. Sam can't tell what he's looking at, or what he's seeing, if they're different. He doesn't look back at Sam, and Sam swallows, feeling oddly voyeuristic, and looks out his own window.
The car smells like coffee and Dean's hair gel, and the heater is working now, pushing warm air out at them. The rumble of the engine is soporific, and lately he's slept better in the car than anywhere else; he could tilt his head back against the seat and close his eyes and go to sleep, and he knows that Dean would not wake him. Maybe Dean would even keep vigil for him, just in case the ghost happens to show.
God, he's tired. And he knows that Dean is, too, which is why he has to stay awake.
Not that he was looking forward to the nightmares, anyway.
He opens the car door and steps out onto the gravel and gritty mud. The headlight beams disappear out into the dark, filtering out all too quickly into shadow. A breeze rustles across the back of his neck and he shivers, slipping his hands into his pockets. The wind scrapes across his face and his knuckles are abraded with cold. He feels half-asleep, liminal all the same, and blinks against it.
"Heads up," Dean says, and Sam looks up in time to catch the flashlight Dean tosses across the hood to him. Dean closes his door and the noise is jarring, but short-lived; the sound is swallowed quickly by the depth of the night and the susurration of the waves. "What the hell was wrong with waiting in the car?"
"Where's your sense of adventure," Sam says, clicking his flashlight on and casting the beam across the ground towards the fallow, weather-trampled weeds at the edge of the road.
"This isn't an adventure, this is a freakin' snipe hunt," Dean says, but he follows Sam down the hill anyway, their boots skidding and slipping down the incline. "You got a plan or what?"
"Reconnaissance," Sam says, pushing his hair out of his face with his free hand.
"So in other words, no." Dean comes to stand beside him at the base of the hill; lit faintly by his proximity to the periphery of the flashlight beams, his eyes gleam.
Sam ignores him. "You got the EMF meter?"
"There's not gonna be anything," Dean says, but he fishes it out of his jacket anyway. "See? Zip. Nothing. Radio silence."
Sam shrugs. "So the ghost isn't here yet."
"'Cause waiting for a ghost that might not even exist's exactly how I wanted to spend the night," Dean says, but it's mostly to himself, his head down as he kicks halfheartedly at the rocks. Sam rolls his eyes, just in case Dean happens to look up, and doesn't reply. To the left, the rotating beam of a lighthouse slumps slowly through the fog and across the water.
The ocean laps at the shoreline, shifting and depthless black, quietly predatory, and Sam narrows his eyes at it. Despite the dark, it's easy to be defiant with Dean standing this close.
And then he realizes the absurdity of what he's doing and plays his flashlight beam back onto shore.
When the rain begins a moment later, he's not surprised.
"Fuck," Dean says, sounding more resigned than annoyed. "I hope you're happy."
"Thrilled," Sam says, and shivers despite himself. Flashlit, the rain is an eerie, alive thing, glistening as it falls wind-tossed.
"Seriously, how long you planning to wait out here? 'Cause it's not like we can see any better here than we'd be able to from my car. I said we'd see if it showed up, man, I didn't say anything about drowning in the process."
"You wanna go wait in the car, fine. If you're too delicate, I get it, I can handle this," Sam says as serenely as he can, and judging from the look Dean gives him, it works.
"Funny," Dean says sourly. "Asshole."
"Look who's talking."
"Hey, this wasn't my idea. And you never said what I get when you lose."
"What do you want?" Sam asks, not entirely uncurious; it never hurts to ask. Most of the time.
"You to actually try to get some sleep," Dean says, quickly enough that he had to have planned it, and Sam blinks at him. Dean shrugs, his expression deliberately inscrutable, Sam thinks, and looks away, towards the water. Sam swallows, feeling inexplicably caught out. When he speaks, his voice is composedly bland.
"That's all? You gotta be desperate."
"Tell me about it," Dean says, still looking towards the sea. "Second choice's I get first shower for the next month and you gotta be the one to get takeout the whole time, too. And no getting me salads."
"What if you lose?" Sam says. Water drips cold down the back of his shirt and he hunches further into his jacket.
"Never gonna happen. Goddamnit, Sam, I feel like the wicked witch of the freakin' west out here." He turns back to Sam and smirks, scapegrace twist of his mouth. "Which makes you Dorothy."
"Dude, did you just reference an actual book?"
"I meant the movie," Dean says. "C'mon, do the red shoe thing already, I'm ready to get the hell outta here."
"I'm surprised you didn't make a Kansas joke," Sam says. "It's good to know there're still some things that are beneath you." Dean's smirk gets wider. "Whatever you're thinking, keep it to yourself."
"You sure know how to ruin a guy's fun," Dean says. "Guess spending your whole life practicing paid off."
"It's not my fault all it takes to ruin your fun is refusing to hear your joke," Sam says. "You know I wouldn't have laughed anyway."
"You never do," Dean says. "Once of these days, all that bottled-up hilarity's gonna kill you. I'll race you back to the car."
Sam thinks wistfully of the car's heaters and better yet, the warmth of the motel room, where the rain would be nothing more than white noise, and swallows. He tells himself it's not only the thought of being somewhere warm and dry that's making him think Dean might be right about the ghost not making an appearance, about there being no reason to be out in the storm like this. But it's far too easy to make justifications, and if the ghost took another kid-- "What if we miss the ghost?"
"You look like a drowned cat. Seriously, you're the scariest thing we're gonna see out here." Dean squints at him through the rain. "Maybe ghosts got better sense than you do and know to stay outta the rain. People sure as hell do, anyway, and how's it gonna take somebody if nobody's outside?"
"You're out here with me," Sam points out.
"Yeah, keeping an eye on you," Dean says. "Somebody has to." He pauses as though struck by the repetition, as though that hasn't become one of the key themes of their lives these days, a mantra ever-echoing in all of the silences they leave. Watch out for your brother. Watch out for me.
Sam narrows his eyes at him, calculating, and then takes off for the hill; he hears Dean behind him a half-second later. Their footsteps should be loud against the night, and would be if not for the storm; instead Sam can't hear anything more than the rush of blood in his ears and the clatter of rain against battered rock and earth and sea. He's almost to the top of the incline when the sky splits lightning-torn, blinding white crackle close enough to leave his ears ringing. Lightning, not a vision, he tells himself, because he didn't see anything and it wasn't accompanied by the jagged lobotomizing pain that he associates with them, snarling blooms of ache against the cage of his skull like flowers of blood, and then he realizes that he's slipping, the earth tilting, giving way beneath him.
If he'd been paying attention, he probably could have landed better.
The thought occurs to him a moment too late; he has time to wince preemptively before the hand he's flung out to break his fall connects hard with the ground, bringing all of his weight to bear upon those fragile newly-healed bones. The result is a flare of pain that threads up his arm with the same white-hot intensity of the lightning and he twists onto his side, curling his arm against his chest reflexively and biting his tongue until his eyes have cleared of everything but the retinal afterimages like tiny grains of light and the rain that drips from his hair. He blinks, becoming aware that Dean is standing right in front of him, is crouching down in front of him, careful not to lose his own balance on the incline. "Sammy," Dean says. "What the fuck?"
"I slipped," Sam says. It's hard to push himself to his knees without jostling his arm, but not impossible. He wonders vaguely if his jacket is salvageable, and if any of the dampness on his face is blood. He can't recall whether he scraped it, going down onto the rock.
"Uh, yeah, I noticed." Dean frowns at him. "Are you, uh."
"I'm fine," Sam says tightly. "I just lost my balance. After the lightning."
Dean raises his eyebrows. "The lightning?"
Sam's mouth goes abruptly dry. He swallows, which doesn't help. "You didn't see it?"
It takes Dean a half-second too long to respond, and when he does, he only says, "What do you say we go back to the motel, huh?" in that tone Sam hates, all bravado and selective hearing.
"I'm not crazy," Sam says out of habit, but he doesn't shrug away when Dean gets a hand beneath the elbow of the arm he's not clutching to his chest and helps him up.
"I didn't say you were." Dean lets go of him. "Think you can make it up the hill without falling over this time?"
"Funny," Sam says. He doesn't fail to notice that Dean walks a careful half-step behind him the rest of the way, but he doesn't comment on it, either. There's nothing he can say that he hasn't said already, and nothing he can say that won't result in Dean spending the rest of the night sulking on the opposite side of the motel room.
"Get mud on the seats and you'll be the one scrubbing it off," Dean says when they get back to the car, which is such a mild threat that it hardly counts at all.
"Whatever," Sam says anyway, opening his door.
The rain is falling heavily enough that the ocean is almost entirely obscured. He turns his face away from the window all the same; he doesn't want to know what he might glimpse, or might think he glimpses, half-visible for an instant through the storm.
"Told you the ghost wouldn't show," Dean says as he glances in the rearview before edging the car back onto the road.
Sam ignores him, reaching over to turn on the dome light. Dean glares, but doesn't turn it back off.
In the thin yellow glow, Sam's skin looks sallow, his veins like faded scars. He prods gingerly at his wrist; bruised, he decides. Bruised, and no worse. He switches off the light, rain-dappled darkness sweeping back over them like a sigh.
It's entirely possible that Dean had his eyes closed, or just wasn't looking up, or something. And even if it wasn't lightning, there are other perfectly reasonable explanations.
Like a seizure. Like the ghost. Like whatever the hell's wrong with him . . . activating.
Or he could just be tired, he tells himself. That's a perfectly likely explanation, too. He crosses his arms over his chest, small and laughable armor, and tilts his head back against the seat. If he's going to sleep tonight, it's only going to be from now until the time they get back to the motel, he knows, but he doesn't care. Right now, his wrist hurts and he's cold and soaked, and he really doesn't want to think about what exactly just happened. Right now, he's safe, and Dean's here, and they're moving. It's not running, but it's good enough for now.
That it's harder to hit a moving target might not be enough to save them someday, but right now, that doesn't matter.
He closes his eyes.
--
And he wakes with a start to Dean's hand on his shoulder; the car is stopped, the shotgun door is open, and past Dean, the dull architecture of the motel blocks out the sky. It's raining too hard for him to make out the number on the closest room, but he assumes it's theirs. Dean moves his hand and Sam knuckles at his eyes, the clean iron scent of water filling his lungs like a dream of drowning. "We're here?" he says, too sleep-dazed to wince at the obviousness of the answer, and Dean steps out of the way, turning towards the motel room door.
The rain stings the back of Sam's neck and he crowds into the room after Dean, pushing the door closed against the wind and the rain that's already dampened the carpet in ragged lines radiating inward across the threshold.
Dean moves towards the heating unit in the corner, rattling dials and glaring at it until the machinery begins to clank and wheeze. Sam sinks down onto the bed and shrugs out of his sodden jacket; a moment later Dean snatches it away and tosses it onto the heater.
"That's a fire hazard," Sam says. Dean makes a rude noise that's probably meant to be a scoff and continues pacing, wandering from door to bed to wall and back with energy enough for them both. "Will you sit down already?"
"Do you know how much time I've spent waiting in a motel room this last month?" Dean says, but he obliges, lowering himself onto the other bed. Sam assumes the question is rhetorical, since there's no way he could not know, considering that he's the one who pointed out to Dean that it probably wasn't a good idea to go around introducing himself for a little while; even if people didn't hear the implied "wanted criminal" in whatever awful alias he was using, there was always the chance that somebody might have paid attention to the "meant-to-be-dead guy shows up and robs a bank" thing, considering that it was on national television and everything. And he's been the one putting up with Dean bitching about that for the last month, too.
"You've spent like half your entire life waiting in a motel room," Sam points out instead.
Dean narrows his eyes. "That's different," he says. "That's voluntary, not because you got your panties in a bunch and decided you're the boss of me." He points a finger at Sam threateningly. "Which you're not. I just figured it'd be easier to go along with it than watch you have a heart attack every time somebody checked me out. You're just jealous it wasn't you on the news."
"Yes, Dean, I'm really jealous you got to be the one everybody now thinks is the worst bank robber ever, in addition to being a serial killer and grave desecrator and whatever the hell else."
"Oh, man," Dean says, his voice hushed and weirdly mournful. "I didn't even think about that. The worst bank robber ever?"
Sam stares at him. "Probably not ever," he says. "I mean, it was just poorly-planned, it wasn't . . . okay, it was stupid, but it wasn't comedy-level stupid." Especially since comedies don't usually involve people dying, but he's not going to say that part. He blinks, recalling Dean's longstanding claim of first right to the newspaper whenever they find one that carries News of the Weird, and then he wonders how much of the conversation has been solely to distract him from their situation.
Not that it hasn't worked, which when he realizes it now makes him feel worse than he would have if he'd known all along. He rubs his eyes, wishing desperately that he were more awake.
"Thanks, that makes it so much better," Dean says. "How's your wrist?"
He shrugs. "Fine."
Dean's huff of laughter sounds tired. "Liar."
"It's not as bad as it was," Sam says.
"Yeah, I figured, since you remembered how to talk."
Sam shakes his head. "Fuck you."
"You gotta learn to put some heat into it, Sammy, otherwise people're just gonna laugh at you when you say that."
"You're the only one I say it to," Sam says.
"Only 'cause you got me looking out for you. You hungry?"
"What happened to 'first shower and no salads'?"
"This is me taking pity on you. Enjoy it while it lasts, 'cause it ain't gonna be for much longer." Dean pauses. "And make it no tofu, too. You and your freakin' wheat smoothies, it's like you were raised in a damn hippie cult or something."
"Tofu's a perfectly acceptable meat substitute," Sam says, mostly to make Dean sneer. "Yeah, I could eat." Though he's not especially hungry, the thought of something warm is enticing, and all it will take is a drive back out into the rain. He thinks of the things that could be veiled by the cold cruel hammer of the storm; he thinks of Dean driving the Impala alone through the black rain-riddled night, the glow from the headlights dim and smoky, and he thinks of skidding tires, shrieking brakes, crunched metal.
These days, he's terrified of what might happen to him if something were to happen to Dean, if he didn't have Dean to keep him from--
If he didn't have Dean in case something happens. That's a nice, safe euphemism.
"Seriously, one of these days your face is gonna get stuck like that, and then I'm gonna sell you to one of those freakshow museums we always pass," Dean says. "They can bill you as the world's most depressed sasquatch and make a fortune. Hey, maybe I'll keep you and sell tickets myself."
"Outta what, the trunk?"
"Sure," Dean says. The car keys flash and jangle brightly in his hand. "Don't break anything while I'm gone. That includes yourself. Maybe you should just not move until I get back."
Sam flips him off and adds, "You want me to come with you?"
Dean gives him a strange look. "I'm not the one passing out all over the place, and if I want somebody to hold my hand, you're not gonna be my first choice, dude."
"I slipped," Sam says. That sounds better than vertigo coupled with visual hallucinations, and he's not going to mention the other potential explanations. Dean's probably already thinking them, anyway.
"Tripped over your own damn feet, more like," Dean says. "I meant it, don't burn the place down while I'm gone. I come back to a bonfire, I'm gonna be pissed."
"You're the one who threw my jacket onto the heater," Sam says.
"So stop bitching and pick it up already." Dean opens the door and steps out into the storm, and Sam's breath seems very loud then, contrasted only with the heater rattling softly in the corner and the melancholy noise of the rain. He swallows and gets to his feet; he can wash his hands, at least.
In the bathroom mirror, he looks a wreck; his eyes are shadowed, his hair is drying matted and there is indeed a smear of blood high on one cheek, the skin below it proving upon contact to be tender as expected. He's glad Dean's not here to make comments about how he grits his teeth when the water slides over his wrist, or worse, to stand in the doorway with his shoulders slumped and that look on his face like he thinks this is one more thing for which he is responsible.
He washes the grime from his hands, washes his face, and dry-swallows a few aspirin on autopilot; he wanders back out and looks longingly at his bed, wondering if Dean would mind if he maybe just stayed there for the rest of the hunt. Even if he didn't sleep, at least he'd be warm and dry and safe from all of the ways in which the world reminds him that it's bloody and jagged, full of angry, twisted things both dead and alive. Except for how he's currently embodying at least a few of those reminders, tripwire catch of his breath at the thought of what that might mean, so there goes that idea.
Plus, Dean would bitch the entire time, even though he's perfectly capable of handling this on his own, and Sam would never live it down.
Not that he's not going to be called a melodramatic drama queen for the rest of his life anyway, what with it being one of Dean's favorite terms of endearment, but he'll feel better if he knows he hasn't yet done anything to deserve it.
And then he realizes that having had that entire thought process at all is itself justification for the title, and he blinks and reaches for his laptop. At the very least, he can go over everything they have so far, little as it is; maybe they've missed something, and if not, he can at least rule out the possibility.
That's what he's doing when Dean returns, laden with bulging plastic bags and accompanied by a heavy waft of salt and fried food. Sam closes the laptop, having found nothing new, nothing more than the dead girl--
Missing, he tells himself. Missing, not dead, but the dull, hollow feeling in his chest means acceptance, means that he can't even pretend to believe it anymore. He pushes the laptop away and goes to help Dean with the bags.
"You do know we're the only ones who're gonna be eating," he says, hating the deadened pitch of his voice and hoping that Dean won't notice it.
"I was hungry," Dean says. "I am hungry. And this way I don't gotta worry about you stealing my food."
"Because that happens all the time." Sam opens one of the Styrofoam containers and wonders if this is payback for what he said about tofu. "Did you get anything that doesn't contain part of a dead animal?"
"Meat's good for you, nature boy," Dean says. "It's not like you were gonna commune with the cows, anyway. They'll be dead whether or not you eat 'em, so you might as well do 'em justice."
Sam decides it's probably a sign of fatigue that that argument actually makes sense. He carries his dinner over to his bed, nudges his laptop aside.
"Hey, you find anything?" Dean asks, nodding at the laptop.
"No," Sam says. He busies himself with his burger, pulling out the sliced onions and setting them to the side. It's as good an excuse as any not to look at Dean. "You're right, there's no way she's still alive."
"I didn't say that," Dean says. "I just meant don't . . . don't get your hopes up, is all."
"Thought you didn't believe in miracles." It comes out more acerbic than he'd intended and he swallows. "Sorry, I'm just--"
"Tired," Dean finishes. Sam shrugs. "Yeah, I got it. You wanna see what's on?"
"On?" Sam asks.
"T.V. Television. Box with the moving pictures? Unless that'd get in the way of the mope-a-thon you got going on."
"Does being an asshole come with age?" Sam says. "Because the thought of you at thirty is terrifying."
"Nah, it's a skill," Dean says, depositing two bottles of beer on the nightstand before settling onto his own bed. "Watch and learn."
There's no HBO on the island, or at least at the motel at which they're staying, the only one open now, during the long slump of non-tourist season; as such, what passes for television turns out to consist of one mostly-static free channel playing a sitcom that bears absolutely no resemblance to any reality Sam's ever seen, but it's excuse enough to not have to talk, to focus on the banalities of someone else's existence while chewing mechanically and trying to savor what he can of the sandwich that tastes like it could have come from an anonymous diner anywhere in America, and he's thankful for that, at least. With the curtains drawn and the canned laughter blotting out the noise of the storm, he can pretend they're surrounded by thousands of miles of road, flatlands and prairie in every direction instead the cold black sea and the shadows that glide and skitter across its floor.
The television cuts out five minutes later, along with the lights and the heater and the clock on the nightstand between their beds. Dean says, "motherfucking son of a bastard bitch," like the power outage is some kind of personal affront and like he'd actually been paying attention to the show instead of eating his cheeseburger as loudly as humanly possible. Sam lets his head fall back against the headboard with a satisfying thunk and considers never moving again. The rain pounds at the windows like the imprecations of the dead; the water is freezing, turning to sleet. Springs squeak as Dean pushes off of his bed; he goes to the window and shoves the curtains aside. "It's the whole damn block," he says, shadows of the rain sliding across his face. "Streetlights and everything."
"Great," Sam says. Dean drops the curtain and the room slips back into steady darkness. "Where're you going?"
It's too dark for Sam to make out the expression on Dean's face, but he can imagine it well, based on his brother's tone. "Where the hell do you think I'm going? I'm going to the goddamn manager's office to see what the fuck's going on." Dean doesn't quite manage to not slam the door on his way out, and the sudden sharp noise makes Sam's ears ring. He closes the lid of the Styrofoam box over the remnants of his dinner, suddenly not hungry at all.
The room seems much colder than it did a few moments ago, which makes sense, he tells himself; the power's out. Obviously. He shivers and tells himself it would be paranoid to line the doorway with salt. Dean will be back in a few minutes, and it's only his imagination, combined with lack of sleep, that's making the darkness seem ominous, as though anything could be hiding within it, waiting for him to let his guard down. He knuckles at his eyes, wincing at the bursts of light across his vision. There's nothing there, he tells himself, no brazen-eyed demons, no beings of smoke with claws that could cut bone, not the dead whispering his name, asking with voices of sorrow why he'd let them die. It's only the rain, only the wind, scraping lonely and ancient against the walls, brushing like breath or the press of fingertips against the glass. His wrist aches, a chilled, dull pain where once had been the sear of fire.
"Backup generator's fucking shot. We can either wait to see if it comes back or sleep in the car," Dean says, letting himself back into the room, and Sam blinks, realizing that he'd fallen asleep and hoping it wasn't for more than a few seconds. "Unless you still got an urge to freeze your ass off, I'm voting for the car."
"Yeah," Sam says vaguely, and then, "Uh, the car's good." He gets to his feet stiffly and grabs his jacket from the rapidly-cooling heater, doubles back to the bed to grab one of the pillows.
Though he'd known it was going to be cold, he's not prepared for the way the wind tosses sleet at him as soon as he steps outside. He flinches, lurching towards the Impala, and has the sudden image of them wandering out into the storm like errant cows, to be found frozen the next morning. With the streetlights out, the parking lot seems as dark as the ocean had been, and his breath hangs like fog in the air. He thinks of Denise's ghost, of all of the things that could be hunting, taking advantage of the cover the storm provides, and when Dean unlocks the car, he ducks into it gratefully, taking the backseat out of habit and pushing his damp hair out of his eyes. Dean starts the engine and begins rattling around in the glove compartment. Sam winces preemptively and a second later Dean says, "Two goddamn weeks I been wondering where I lost this tape, Sammy. I sure as hell hope you thought this was funny, 'cause it's gonna cost you."
"I put it there for safekeeping," Sam says, shivering. The cold tears at his throat. "It's not my fault you never thought to look there." He waits for Dean to shove the tape into the deck and make them listen to the shrieking of Robert Plant for the next eight hours; at least it would probably keep the ghost away, but Dean only sighs. "What were you looking for?"
"A lighter," Dean says. "I was gonna set you on fire for heat."
Sam rolls his eyes even though Dean won't be able to see the gesture, and pushes the pillow against the door.
"Keep your feet off the seat," Dean says without looking back.
"Bite me," Sam says, drawing his legs up onto the leather, which is gradually beginning to thaw. Sleet batters at the car, runnels down the windows. "If we die of carbon monoxide poisoning, I'm blaming you."
"You wanna sleep in the room, knock yourself out," Dean says. His voice creaks unexpectedly as though with exhaustion and Sam blinks. "Otherwise, shut up before I make you sleep in the trunk."
"You'd sprain something trying," Sam says, but he pulls the pistol from the waistband of his jeans and sets it within easy reach on the floor; he folds his arms over his chest for warmth and focuses on the rumble of the engine, louder and much closer than the noise of the storm.
--
He is standing on the beach, if the low, rough stretch of land off of Tillman Road may be said to be a beach. It is dawn, or maybe dusk; the sky is an uncertain color, an opalescent blue-grey that promises nothing but cold and shearing wind. The sky cannot be held to a promise, he thinks, and then, as though called into existence by his thoughts, he feels the wind, ruffling through his hair, prickling across his skin. The ground before him, all the way to the sea, is covered with frost. The sea moves soundlessly, and he is alone; Dean is nowhere to be seen.
He might stand here forever, or only for a few moments; time is inconsequential. Before him, a woman appears, though in truth she might have been there always; perhaps he has only just now noticed her. Her eyes are slate and sea-glass, her hair tangled and braided by the waves. She regards him without warmth, but without malice; he does not fear her, but neither does he know her. As he watches, the wind begins to abrade her, eroding at her body as though she is made of sand; before his eyes, she begins to crumble.
Fading, she raises a hand, as though to beckon, or to offer him something from her cupped palm; before he can decide, she is lost to the wind, particles that might merely be sand tossed out onto the water like ashes, like an offering.
He feels something damp on his face; it tastes of salt, and when he touches his cheek, pulls his fingers away to examine them, he sees that it is saltwater, that it is the sea. Her blood, he thinks; he has been marked, though he knows not by whom, nor for what purpose; with this thought, he awakens, no transition between the bleak white shoreline and the black of the Impala's front seat as he lays curled on his side, feeling for blood like tears that never existed in this reality, or perhaps even at all.
His legs ache from being held cramped and still for so many hours. The Impala's engine still rumbles; though he aches, he isn't cold. He sits up slowly, massaging the back of his neck with one hand. The sky is light, a pale blue he associates with Nebraska in midwinter, and a glance at his watch informs him that it's after ten in the morning. Though he doesn't recall what time it was when they abandoned the room for the heat of the car, the time seems miraculous, and faintly suspicious; he hasn't slept for this long maybe in months.
"Time is it?" Dean says blearily from the front seat, sitting up slowly. Sam hadn't thought he'd made any noise, but he feels vaguely guilty all the same.
"Just after ten. Think the power's back?"
Dean blinks. "Motel sign's on," he says after a second. "That's a good sign." He rolls his shoulders and then cuts the engine, pockets the keys and opens the door. "God, I could use a hot shower. My back's killing me."
"Maybe you're getting old," Sam says, tucking the pistol back into his waistband and then grimacing as he steps out into the cold air. "You should think about getting a new car to match your lifestyle. A minivan, maybe. Something with that fake wood paneling you like so much."
"Didn't anybody ever tell you to respect your elders?" Dean says. "Fairly certain I beat that lesson into you like a thousand times by now. You want me to do it again?"
"Wouldn't want you to put your back out," Sam says, but he steps back quickly, out of Dean's reach, when Dean turns around. Dean smirks and turns back to unlock the door. Stepping into the room, Sam wrinkles his nose; the room smells like what's left of what was meant to be their dinner, salt and grease overlaid with ketchup. Dean flicks on the lights.
"Home sweet home," he says blandly. He takes a bite of a cold French fry and grimaces. "Get rid of the food, would you?"
"Dude, I'm not your maid," Sam says.
"And thank God for that. You in one a' those little black dresses is something I wanna never think about again." Sam rolls his eyes and Dean grins, grabs a shirt from his bag. "Gimme ten minutes and we'll get breakfast, huh?" Sam shrugs in agreement and Dean disappears into the bathroom. Left alone in the room, Sam swallows; he lowers himself onto his bed and reaches for the laptop he'd set aside the night before. Ten minutes should be enough time to narrow down at least a few of the leads his dream provided.
It could have just been a dream, but he's not going to risk that. He'd dreamed of Jess for days, after all, and just because in the past his visions have come when he's awake, that doesn't mean that they always will.
He's not going to risk anyone else.
By the time Dean's done in the shower, he's found absolutely nothing about any sort of water spirit that matches what he saw, in description or in action; despite the dream, he's no closer to narrowing down the cause of Lacey Brady's disappearance to anything more than a ghost.
Dean pauses in the doorway of the bathroom, catching sight of Sam with the laptop, and Sam feels the urge to blush, as though he's done something wrong. Which he hasn't, he tells himself. Just because he's accepted that Lacey Brady is most likely dead doesn't mean they're giving up on this hunt; whatever took her, whatever killed her, is still out there, and it will be until someone puts a stop to it.
Which, as usual, is going to have to be them.
"Am I interrupting something?" Dean asks, one eyebrow raised like he's ready to turn this into something that can be brushed off, if only Sam will give him the opportunity.
"Just checking my email," Sam says.
"'Cause if you want me to give you some time to yourself, you know, to handle things, you just gotta say the word, man."
Sam gives him the most withering stare he can and shuts the laptop down. Dean shrugs. "Just looking out for you," he says. "Keeping your best interests in mind."
"Dude, if that's what you mean by best interests, please, please don't think about mine."
Dean's forehead wrinkles. "You got a real knack for making things dirty," he says, half-disgusted and half-approving.
"And whose fault is that?" Sam says. "C'mon, I'm starving."
"And now you're stealing my lines," Dean says. "Next, you're gonna wanna drive. Does this mean you're gonna start listening to real music now? 'Cause I'd let you drive more if you did."
"No, you wouldn't," Sam says.
"You don't know that," Dean says defensively.
"Yes, I do," Sam says. "You're not that hard to figure out, man."
"I just make it easy for you," Dean says. "I don't want you to have to strain anything, you bitch enough as it is."
Sam considers retorting and decides the better of it; he turns for the door, trusting that Dean will catch up.
--
The waitress who serves them at the diner is the same one who served them the day before, but she shows only the faintest sign of recognizing them, smiling wanly as she pours their coffee. Once she's gone, Sam swallows, and leans in; despite the mug clutched between his hands, and the warmth of the diner itself, he is chilled. It's probably dread, he tells himself, and forges on. "I had a dream last night," he says, his voice low.
"Uh, okay, MLK," Dean says. "That's usually when people have dreams, since that's usually when they're asleep. And dude, when I said all you had to do was say the word, I meant it. You so don't need to give me the blow-by-blow." He pauses, though Sam's fairly certain the word choice was intentional. "Uh, so to speak."
"Are you done?" Sam asks.
Dean shrugs noncommittally. "For now."
"There was a woman. She was, I don't know, made of sand or something. It was like she wanted something from me, or was trying to give me something, and then I woke up." He winces at the way it sounds when spoken aloud, but he meets Dean's eyes all the same.
Dean raises his eyebrows. "And you think this is, what, connected to whatever Denise saw?"
"What else could it be?"
"Uh, a dream, for one thing," Dean said. "I get that it was intense or whatever, but that's not exactly a psychic vision."
"Look, I know it doesn't sound like much, but I don't think we can write it off as coincidence, not with everything we've seen. And what else do we have to go on?"
"Nothing, Sam, and that's the point," Dean says. "We're not even clutching at straws here, we're clutching at the ghosts of straws. Things that might not even be straws at all. Things that maybe you want to look like straws, but that don't mean they do. Look, straws aside, we're clutching at nothing."
"So, what, you want us to give up?" Sam crosses his arms. "Just shrug and pretend it doesn't matter that Lacey Brady's dead?"
"What the fuck, Sam. You know damn well that's not what I'm saying."
"Then what, Dean?" His voice is rising, despite his intentions, going sharp and harsh.
"Look, we been running on adrenaline for -- for our whole goddamn lives, okay, but the last couple weeks it's been even worse. We're off our game, maybe we're trying to see things that aren't there." His shrug looks more like a twitch, nervous and defensive. "Maybe you're trying to make this something it isn't, something you can fix."
"So now I'm crazy," Sam says dully. "Now I'm seeing things. What's next, do you think, do I start killing people or do you shoot me before I get that far?"
"Jesus Christ, Sam," Dean says, a whisper not far from a hiss, a gasp of shock and horror and hurt. That's funny; Sam had expected him to shout, or maybe to throw a punch. "That's not what I said, and that's sure as hell not what I fucking meant." He swallows; it looks like he's swallowing glass. "You want to make this something we can handle, because then we can deal with it and there's justice or whatever. That's all. I want the same goddamn thing, okay? I'm just saying that wanting it doesn't mean it's true."
"You said 'you're,'" Sam says. "Not 'we're.' You said that I'm trying to make this something it isn't." He thinks he might sound petulant; he's not sure that he cares.
"I meant 'we're,'" Dean snaps. Sam can't tell whether he's lying, and isn't sure that it matters. "Do you want to sit here and argue about fucking grammar or do you want to figure out what happened to Lacey Brady?"
"Lacey Brady?" Sam looks over to see the waitress staring at them, their plates in hand. He swallows, wondering how much she overheard; he hadn't heard her approach. Across from him, Dean is pale and white-knuckled; he looks like he's going to bolt or start taking hostages. "Didn't you hear? They found her body this morning, buried in the neighbor's backyard."
It's not until the waitress says, "Sir, sir," and Dean says, "Sammy," reaching across the table with a handful of paper napkins, that Sam realizes the mug he'd been clutching is in shards across the table and across his lap, and that his hands are damp not with sweat but with the dregs of his lukewarm coffee, and with blood that spreads like the bloom of roses across the napkins Dean presses against them.
Part Three