Karna - Chapter Two
Chapter two of Karna. Summary, warnings and other details can be found in the A/N in Chapter One.
Two
"There's been another murder."
Dean looked to his side, brow furrowing. "What?"
Sam was slumped in the front seat of the Impala, eyes half-closed, the sweat beading on his forehead shining in the light-dark-light of the streetlights as they shot past the windows. Dean was possessed of a sudden urge to place his hand against Sam's forehead, check his temperature. The kid looked sick. "Sam?"
"Another murder, Dean," Sam said irritably. He tilted his head back, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes like he could stuff what had to be a bad headache into a neat little box in the back of his brain, being the OCD gigantor that he was. "We need to go faster."
Faster, Dean. Not much time left before you're going to have to kill me, too. Dean pursed his lips. Damn if he was going to let Sam run this situation with that manic energy that scared Dean sometimes. Not after that little stunt he'd pulled not a few weeks back, sneaking away in the middle of the night and nearly getting both their sorry asses killed. "Was that a vision, or what?" he asked. "I mean, you weren't sleeping or doing that spacing-out thing you do usually..."
Sam squinted at him. "It just... came to me, I don't know." Dean was about to open his mouth again (don't you give me that bullshit, Sammy) but Sam beat him to it. "These visions... it's like they're coming in installments. Not more than three or four seconds at a time. And there's no warning, Dean. Sometimes, I - uh. Um. I don't know."
One of these days, Dean decided, he was going to sit Sam down and make him finish a sentence properly - preferably when he wasn't in the clutches of a skull-splitting migraine induced by death visions. "So is that what this is - some kind of interrupted transmission? You only to chose to speak up once you got the full picture?"
At this Sam dropped his hands from his face and turned to unleash the full power of his bitchface on Dean. "I didn't know, alright? 'Sides, I think it's already happened." He slumped back into the seat. "Just like the fire."
The fire. As it turned out, Sam figured out that it had taken place in Windom, Minnesota - good, if we leave right now and floor it we can save them, he'd said, all quiet and intense and strong, and Dean had felt that horrible choking fear again that something, something, wasn't right with his brother - but it had only taken a glance at the online edition of Windom Gazette to know that they were too late. There had been a fire in an old abandoned house on the outskirts of the town the previous night, and the remains of two bodies had been found in the wreckage. While nothing was confirmed yet, it was rumoured to be two high-schoolers that nobody'd seen since the evening of the fire - Carl Thompson and Jessie Fraser.
Sam had looked so shattered.
Dean sighed. "So what did you see?"
His brother turned his face, lips pressing together into a thin line. "Late evening, early night - a man, middle-aged, I think. Throat cut open, and, uh." His eyes scrunched closed. "He was driving, veered off the road and crashed. And then. Then... there was fire. Fire, Dean." Sam's voice was gradually fading, the lines around his eyes easing.
"Sam!" Dean hated to disturb him just as he was giving into exhaustion and finally getting some goddamned rest, but he needed to know more. Had to finish this shit so it would stop haunting Sam (haunting them). "You see anything else? Licence plates, street signs?"
"No, nothing. He was driving a blue sedan, but... that's about it."
Well, shit. "It's gotta be related to the Windom fire, then," Dean said.
"Maybe," Sam said quietly. There was a long pause before he spoke again, voice soaked in pain and exhaustion. "Or maybe it's something else - somewhere else, to distract us from the fire."
Or maybe it's another thing to lure us to Windom. Dean hadn't forgotten the whole Croatoan incident, with Sam's visions leading them to that demon-virus-infected town, and the fiasco that ensued. "Well, we'll know once we get there, won't we?" He glanced at Sam. "Get some sleep before then, yeah? You don't want to scare the locals with your giant zombie get-up."
Sam didn't roll his eyes or snap back like Dean had hoped, but just settled deeper into his seat and closed his eyes. "Gonna die this time," he said in a voice so low Dean could just barely hear it, "and then another, and... real. D'know, Dean. Don't know." And his lips stopped moving, his breathing gradually settling into the gentler rhythm of sleep.
Dean clenched his teeth. Sammy and his goddamn cryptic angst.
He didn't bother to hide the waves of fear that trembled through his arms as he continued to drive.
Adam Milligan's new life started with a dream.
At first, there was nothing more remarkable about the dream than the very fact that he could remember it - splashes of colour and confused movement with the faces of the people he knew and loved floating in and out of resolution, like he was suspended in some kind of giant kaleidoscope. It ended with the face of a man he'd never seen before: old and tired and ordinary but with eyes that glowed a sick, jaundiced yellow. No words, no noise: just the old man, looking at him with something akin to amusement and pity.
So, yeah, nothing remarkable, because Adam tended to dream a lot of weird shit anyway, but it lingered with him the whole day afterwards, gnawing away at the back of his brain like a particularly persistent insect. And when he dreamt that night again, the yellow-eyed man came back and spoke. Except, it wasn't in any language that Adam understood; it was a noise so high-pitched that it seemed to him like it was trying to scoop his brains out through his ears. Just when the pain touched unbearable levels, the yellow-eyed man disappeared in a sudden bloom of fire and Adam woke, panting and drenched in sweat, blood dripping from his nostrils.
The next day, he met Dan Michaels.
He had just finished his evening shift over at Cousin Oliver's and was on his way home, already looking at the homework assignments he had to complete that night, the studying for the extra classes he was taking, kickstarting the preparation for the exhibition he was representing the school a few weeks later (we can't afford med school Adam we're just making ends meet as it is) when a shudder ran down his spine and the temperature around him seemed to drop a few degrees.
Nonplussed, Adam looked side to side - a few people moving about in the crisp autumn breeze, some kids running, laughing, the rumble of an occasional car - and felt ridiculous (you know what you are Milligan you're an arrogant bastard who has no time for anybody mark my words you're going to go insane). And that was when he spotted it: a shimmer in the air down the road, a flash of colour, and - was that a face? (was that the man with the yellow eyes?)
Without even fully knowing why, he walked toward it, only for the face to blink out of existence and reappear a few metres away. And when he followed it, it did it again, leading him further and further away from the road, into the scraggly thicket of trees the town's residents liked to term their forest. He was running now as the face winked on and off, always so tantalisingly close -
And when he turned a final corner, he saw her.
She was young, maybe ten, eleven years old, all blonde hair and dark eyes glowing with a soft, appealing innocence. She smiled at him - a melancholy smile, an enchanting smile, a smile that held all the secrets of the world crystallised into a single grain of truth that rested at the upturned corner of her lips - and spoke. "Hello, Adam," she said, soft, lilting, "thank you so much for coming with me."
She walked toward him, seeming to flicker in and out in the sunlight filtering through the trees. He stood dumbly, mesmerised.
"Adam." She raised her arms at him, looking for all the world like a little girl asking for a hug. He didn't notice the temperature drop further as he stepped toward her; didn't notice her fingernails peel back and blood dribble down the undersides of her arms and onto her white gown. Didn't notice the spread of blue-black decay creeping from under her frilly collar or the white-yellow of bone as a ray of sunlight hit her face at the right angle.
Not until another voice cried out his name, something warm and large barelled into his side and knocked him to the ground.
No sooner had he hit the leaf-strewn dirt than a gunshot rang through the air, followed by a grunt and a scream. Adam flinched, and when he opened his eyes, there was a man where he'd been standing just a few moments before, hefting a long-barelled gun. The girl was gone.
"What...?"
Another scream, and she was back - next to the man, arms reaching out for him, blood dripping from her eyes and ears and lips and long jagged scars that tore themselves into her skin in front of their very eyes -
The man pulled the trigger, and the girl vanished again.
Adam gaped.
"Hello, Adam," the man said, meeting his gaze with old green eyes that glinted with amusement, "I see you've found your first ghost. Congrats, son."
Dan Michaels was the end of the beginning.
"And what were they asking again?"
Adam watched as Dan moved the oilcloth in and over the gun's barrel methodically. "I don't know. FBI kind of questions?"
Dan's hands stilled for the briefest of moments, and Adam felt it like a strongly-worded admonishment. Right. Supposed to be taking this seriously. He picked nervously at a loose thread on the rattly old couch he was sitting on. "They're investigating the fire, and Carl and Jessie's deaths. And, uh," he dropped his eyes, "about Frank, too."
At this Dan laid his gun and cleaning supplies aside and laced his fingers across his lap. "I thought even your mother was informed only this morning about the accident."
Adam felt a familiar frustration bubbling in him, and he stood up to pace, to vent some of the energy that had been building up since the news had arrived. That morning, barely hours after his mother returned from her shift, the call informing her of Frank's death had arrived. Throat slashed open, body mangled and half-destroyed in the wreckage of his crashed car. Unmarried and with no particularly close friend or partner, his mother had been the first to be contacted, and asked to come identify the body, a few counties over. And she had - she had -
Looked relieved? Scared? Maybe Adam was imagining all that, dramatising. Maybe she just looked resigned.
It was a familiar look on her these days.
"Adam?"
He glanced at Dan, who'd gotten up from the bed and was looking at him with concern. "You okay, son?"
hunt without sacrifices isn't a hunt at all but what is a sacrifice that isn't done for love and what is a hunt that doesn't sacrifice love itself
"Adam!" He jerked to attention at the tone (spaced-out arrogant Milligan hates us, boys). "I'm - I'm fine," he said quickly. "I don't know how these two agents knew - but they've been asking around town a bit, and they definitely mentioned Frank." He swallowed, his eyes tracing the contours of Dan's sparse apartment without really taking in anything. "You don't think - I mean, this whole thing started because that old place was haunted, and you said I had to burn it down, you said -" He abruptly shook his head; he was going about this the wrong way. He shouldn't be afraid - he should, should. He should man-up, right? "I burnt it down. And maybe whatever was in there is back? I mean, I don't know, but Frank was murdered within a locked car, the keys still in the ignition -"
"We don't know, yet, Adam." Dan smiled. "The last thing you want to be doing as a hunter is jump to premature conclusions." He picked up the whetting stone from the bed and the large Bowie knife he'd promised Adam that he could one day even come near. He let the edge scrape across the stone, the rhythmic scrrich scrrich resounding through the silence strangely calming. "Tell me more about these agents."
"I haven't seen them." Adam sighed. "I heard they were at Carl and Jessie's houses this morning, asking questions and stuff. And they were mentioning Frank, so, yeah, I think they might be coming over to my home later today, and -" He squinted at Dan, who was now sharpening the knife with a small smile quirking his lips. "What are you laughing about?"
Dan looked up at him, half-exasperated. "Think, okay? Why would they be asking about Frank, too? And so soon?"
Adam blinked. "They're hunters?"
"Can't be sure - you can never be sure what these government fellows get in their heads to look into - but, yeah. Seems likely." Dan laughed, the sound startling Adam like shattering glass in the non-silence. "In fact, it seems like something John Winchester would do."
Adam's heart suddenly felt three sizes too large for his chest. "You mean, Jo-Dad - you really think he might be -"
"Don't get your hopes up, Adam." There was a trace of quiet sadness in Dan's voice as he returned to sharpening the knife.
"But if there's a chance that it's him, then, then, this is the perfect opportunity!" Adam's eyes gleamed; if at all he felt uncomfortable about terming murder - that of his uncle, no less - as a perfect opportunity, he pushed it deep down. "I'm ready to see him, you know I am."
The rhythm stopped again. "Maybe you are," he said slowly. "Or maybe you won't meet him at all, and it's only his sons snooping around."
"I don't -" Adam stopped, his eyes widening and fingers convulsively clutching at the back of the couch as he realised the implications of that last sentence. "Sons?"
Dan nodded. "Two of them - both of them raised in the hunting life. Just as good as me, or John - maybe even better, not that he'd ever admit that openly."
The frustration was back, boiling and bubbling at the pit of his stomach to the point of physical pain. "He already has - oh, man." He threw his arms in the air. "And you didn't bother to tell me this before, why?"
"They're dangerous, Adam." Dan shrugged. "Haven't seen either of them in years, but I've heard things. The two of them alienate themselves from the rest of the community worse than their father ever did, and that? That kind of means they don't trust us. And, boy, in this profession, trust is everything." He grinned at Adam. "Besides, I knew you were not going to take this very well."
Adam's head was reeling, and it took him a second to realise it was because he was breathing too heavily, beads of sweat soaking into his eyebrows and leaking into his eyes. "You should've told me," he said, trying to get back control of his breathing, feeling a familiar heat build in his palms, in tandem with the rising pain in his stomach. "They're - they're still," god, the word sounded so weird coming out of his mouth, "my brothers."
"They are," Dan said solemnly. "And that's what you should be afraid of."
It wasn't until Dan mentioned John Winchester that Adam really started getting interested.
Until then, everything he told him was something of a ride through a particularly macabre house of horrors - something Adam would've dismissed two words into the whole thing, if he hadn't seen (ghosts and silver and blood and decay and). Dan spoke of ghosts and revenants and things that creeped in the murky corners of Adam's dreams, dripping blood and acid and inky blackness. He spoke of vengeful spirits and putting them to rest; of salt, and fire, and rituals that better fit among the pages of some dark medieval text.
He took Adam to salt and burn the corpse of the little girl who had come to them in the forest that day, and he spoke about John Winchester.
Winchester's an old buddy of mine, he had said. And I know who you are, Adam.
He had forced his father's name out of his mother years ago; however, she had refused to tell him anything else. Every major holiday, every one of his birthdays after that passed with the unfulfilled promise of his father's visit - Adam had begun to suspect that John did not know of his existence at all. But now, if -
So my father, he'd said, rolling the word on his tongue, savouring it, he does... this. What you do.
Dan had nodded. He's a hunter, Adam, and one of the best I know.
Adam had thought. There was so much to consider; and yet, nothing at all, because if this was real, and this was his connection to his father, there was nothing to consider at all. Then tell me more, he'd said, teach me everything you know.
Of course. Dan had smiled. I was only waiting for you to ask.
Two
"There's been another murder."
Dean looked to his side, brow furrowing. "What?"
Sam was slumped in the front seat of the Impala, eyes half-closed, the sweat beading on his forehead shining in the light-dark-light of the streetlights as they shot past the windows. Dean was possessed of a sudden urge to place his hand against Sam's forehead, check his temperature. The kid looked sick. "Sam?"
"Another murder, Dean," Sam said irritably. He tilted his head back, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes like he could stuff what had to be a bad headache into a neat little box in the back of his brain, being the OCD gigantor that he was. "We need to go faster."
Faster, Dean. Not much time left before you're going to have to kill me, too. Dean pursed his lips. Damn if he was going to let Sam run this situation with that manic energy that scared Dean sometimes. Not after that little stunt he'd pulled not a few weeks back, sneaking away in the middle of the night and nearly getting both their sorry asses killed. "Was that a vision, or what?" he asked. "I mean, you weren't sleeping or doing that spacing-out thing you do usually..."
Sam squinted at him. "It just... came to me, I don't know." Dean was about to open his mouth again (don't you give me that bullshit, Sammy) but Sam beat him to it. "These visions... it's like they're coming in installments. Not more than three or four seconds at a time. And there's no warning, Dean. Sometimes, I - uh. Um. I don't know."
One of these days, Dean decided, he was going to sit Sam down and make him finish a sentence properly - preferably when he wasn't in the clutches of a skull-splitting migraine induced by death visions. "So is that what this is - some kind of interrupted transmission? You only to chose to speak up once you got the full picture?"
At this Sam dropped his hands from his face and turned to unleash the full power of his bitchface on Dean. "I didn't know, alright? 'Sides, I think it's already happened." He slumped back into the seat. "Just like the fire."
The fire. As it turned out, Sam figured out that it had taken place in Windom, Minnesota - good, if we leave right now and floor it we can save them, he'd said, all quiet and intense and strong, and Dean had felt that horrible choking fear again that something, something, wasn't right with his brother - but it had only taken a glance at the online edition of Windom Gazette to know that they were too late. There had been a fire in an old abandoned house on the outskirts of the town the previous night, and the remains of two bodies had been found in the wreckage. While nothing was confirmed yet, it was rumoured to be two high-schoolers that nobody'd seen since the evening of the fire - Carl Thompson and Jessie Fraser.
Sam had looked so shattered.
Dean sighed. "So what did you see?"
His brother turned his face, lips pressing together into a thin line. "Late evening, early night - a man, middle-aged, I think. Throat cut open, and, uh." His eyes scrunched closed. "He was driving, veered off the road and crashed. And then. Then... there was fire. Fire, Dean." Sam's voice was gradually fading, the lines around his eyes easing.
"Sam!" Dean hated to disturb him just as he was giving into exhaustion and finally getting some goddamned rest, but he needed to know more. Had to finish this shit so it would stop haunting Sam (haunting them). "You see anything else? Licence plates, street signs?"
"No, nothing. He was driving a blue sedan, but... that's about it."
Well, shit. "It's gotta be related to the Windom fire, then," Dean said.
"Maybe," Sam said quietly. There was a long pause before he spoke again, voice soaked in pain and exhaustion. "Or maybe it's something else - somewhere else, to distract us from the fire."
Or maybe it's another thing to lure us to Windom. Dean hadn't forgotten the whole Croatoan incident, with Sam's visions leading them to that demon-virus-infected town, and the fiasco that ensued. "Well, we'll know once we get there, won't we?" He glanced at Sam. "Get some sleep before then, yeah? You don't want to scare the locals with your giant zombie get-up."
Sam didn't roll his eyes or snap back like Dean had hoped, but just settled deeper into his seat and closed his eyes. "Gonna die this time," he said in a voice so low Dean could just barely hear it, "and then another, and... real. D'know, Dean. Don't know." And his lips stopped moving, his breathing gradually settling into the gentler rhythm of sleep.
Dean clenched his teeth. Sammy and his goddamn cryptic angst.
He didn't bother to hide the waves of fear that trembled through his arms as he continued to drive.
Adam Milligan's new life started with a dream.
At first, there was nothing more remarkable about the dream than the very fact that he could remember it - splashes of colour and confused movement with the faces of the people he knew and loved floating in and out of resolution, like he was suspended in some kind of giant kaleidoscope. It ended with the face of a man he'd never seen before: old and tired and ordinary but with eyes that glowed a sick, jaundiced yellow. No words, no noise: just the old man, looking at him with something akin to amusement and pity.
So, yeah, nothing remarkable, because Adam tended to dream a lot of weird shit anyway, but it lingered with him the whole day afterwards, gnawing away at the back of his brain like a particularly persistent insect. And when he dreamt that night again, the yellow-eyed man came back and spoke. Except, it wasn't in any language that Adam understood; it was a noise so high-pitched that it seemed to him like it was trying to scoop his brains out through his ears. Just when the pain touched unbearable levels, the yellow-eyed man disappeared in a sudden bloom of fire and Adam woke, panting and drenched in sweat, blood dripping from his nostrils.
The next day, he met Dan Michaels.
He had just finished his evening shift over at Cousin Oliver's and was on his way home, already looking at the homework assignments he had to complete that night, the studying for the extra classes he was taking, kickstarting the preparation for the exhibition he was representing the school a few weeks later (we can't afford med school Adam we're just making ends meet as it is) when a shudder ran down his spine and the temperature around him seemed to drop a few degrees.
Nonplussed, Adam looked side to side - a few people moving about in the crisp autumn breeze, some kids running, laughing, the rumble of an occasional car - and felt ridiculous (you know what you are Milligan you're an arrogant bastard who has no time for anybody mark my words you're going to go insane). And that was when he spotted it: a shimmer in the air down the road, a flash of colour, and - was that a face? (was that the man with the yellow eyes?)
Without even fully knowing why, he walked toward it, only for the face to blink out of existence and reappear a few metres away. And when he followed it, it did it again, leading him further and further away from the road, into the scraggly thicket of trees the town's residents liked to term their forest. He was running now as the face winked on and off, always so tantalisingly close -
And when he turned a final corner, he saw her.
She was young, maybe ten, eleven years old, all blonde hair and dark eyes glowing with a soft, appealing innocence. She smiled at him - a melancholy smile, an enchanting smile, a smile that held all the secrets of the world crystallised into a single grain of truth that rested at the upturned corner of her lips - and spoke. "Hello, Adam," she said, soft, lilting, "thank you so much for coming with me."
She walked toward him, seeming to flicker in and out in the sunlight filtering through the trees. He stood dumbly, mesmerised.
"Adam." She raised her arms at him, looking for all the world like a little girl asking for a hug. He didn't notice the temperature drop further as he stepped toward her; didn't notice her fingernails peel back and blood dribble down the undersides of her arms and onto her white gown. Didn't notice the spread of blue-black decay creeping from under her frilly collar or the white-yellow of bone as a ray of sunlight hit her face at the right angle.
Not until another voice cried out his name, something warm and large barelled into his side and knocked him to the ground.
No sooner had he hit the leaf-strewn dirt than a gunshot rang through the air, followed by a grunt and a scream. Adam flinched, and when he opened his eyes, there was a man where he'd been standing just a few moments before, hefting a long-barelled gun. The girl was gone.
"What...?"
Another scream, and she was back - next to the man, arms reaching out for him, blood dripping from her eyes and ears and lips and long jagged scars that tore themselves into her skin in front of their very eyes -
The man pulled the trigger, and the girl vanished again.
Adam gaped.
"Hello, Adam," the man said, meeting his gaze with old green eyes that glinted with amusement, "I see you've found your first ghost. Congrats, son."
Dan Michaels was the end of the beginning.
"And what were they asking again?"
Adam watched as Dan moved the oilcloth in and over the gun's barrel methodically. "I don't know. FBI kind of questions?"
Dan's hands stilled for the briefest of moments, and Adam felt it like a strongly-worded admonishment. Right. Supposed to be taking this seriously. He picked nervously at a loose thread on the rattly old couch he was sitting on. "They're investigating the fire, and Carl and Jessie's deaths. And, uh," he dropped his eyes, "about Frank, too."
At this Dan laid his gun and cleaning supplies aside and laced his fingers across his lap. "I thought even your mother was informed only this morning about the accident."
Adam felt a familiar frustration bubbling in him, and he stood up to pace, to vent some of the energy that had been building up since the news had arrived. That morning, barely hours after his mother returned from her shift, the call informing her of Frank's death had arrived. Throat slashed open, body mangled and half-destroyed in the wreckage of his crashed car. Unmarried and with no particularly close friend or partner, his mother had been the first to be contacted, and asked to come identify the body, a few counties over. And she had - she had -
Looked relieved? Scared? Maybe Adam was imagining all that, dramatising. Maybe she just looked resigned.
It was a familiar look on her these days.
"Adam?"
He glanced at Dan, who'd gotten up from the bed and was looking at him with concern. "You okay, son?"
hunt without sacrifices isn't a hunt at all but what is a sacrifice that isn't done for love and what is a hunt that doesn't sacrifice love itself
"Adam!" He jerked to attention at the tone (spaced-out arrogant Milligan hates us, boys). "I'm - I'm fine," he said quickly. "I don't know how these two agents knew - but they've been asking around town a bit, and they definitely mentioned Frank." He swallowed, his eyes tracing the contours of Dan's sparse apartment without really taking in anything. "You don't think - I mean, this whole thing started because that old place was haunted, and you said I had to burn it down, you said -" He abruptly shook his head; he was going about this the wrong way. He shouldn't be afraid - he should, should. He should man-up, right? "I burnt it down. And maybe whatever was in there is back? I mean, I don't know, but Frank was murdered within a locked car, the keys still in the ignition -"
"We don't know, yet, Adam." Dan smiled. "The last thing you want to be doing as a hunter is jump to premature conclusions." He picked up the whetting stone from the bed and the large Bowie knife he'd promised Adam that he could one day even come near. He let the edge scrape across the stone, the rhythmic scrrich scrrich resounding through the silence strangely calming. "Tell me more about these agents."
"I haven't seen them." Adam sighed. "I heard they were at Carl and Jessie's houses this morning, asking questions and stuff. And they were mentioning Frank, so, yeah, I think they might be coming over to my home later today, and -" He squinted at Dan, who was now sharpening the knife with a small smile quirking his lips. "What are you laughing about?"
Dan looked up at him, half-exasperated. "Think, okay? Why would they be asking about Frank, too? And so soon?"
Adam blinked. "They're hunters?"
"Can't be sure - you can never be sure what these government fellows get in their heads to look into - but, yeah. Seems likely." Dan laughed, the sound startling Adam like shattering glass in the non-silence. "In fact, it seems like something John Winchester would do."
Adam's heart suddenly felt three sizes too large for his chest. "You mean, Jo-Dad - you really think he might be -"
"Don't get your hopes up, Adam." There was a trace of quiet sadness in Dan's voice as he returned to sharpening the knife.
"But if there's a chance that it's him, then, then, this is the perfect opportunity!" Adam's eyes gleamed; if at all he felt uncomfortable about terming murder - that of his uncle, no less - as a perfect opportunity, he pushed it deep down. "I'm ready to see him, you know I am."
The rhythm stopped again. "Maybe you are," he said slowly. "Or maybe you won't meet him at all, and it's only his sons snooping around."
"I don't -" Adam stopped, his eyes widening and fingers convulsively clutching at the back of the couch as he realised the implications of that last sentence. "Sons?"
Dan nodded. "Two of them - both of them raised in the hunting life. Just as good as me, or John - maybe even better, not that he'd ever admit that openly."
The frustration was back, boiling and bubbling at the pit of his stomach to the point of physical pain. "He already has - oh, man." He threw his arms in the air. "And you didn't bother to tell me this before, why?"
"They're dangerous, Adam." Dan shrugged. "Haven't seen either of them in years, but I've heard things. The two of them alienate themselves from the rest of the community worse than their father ever did, and that? That kind of means they don't trust us. And, boy, in this profession, trust is everything." He grinned at Adam. "Besides, I knew you were not going to take this very well."
Adam's head was reeling, and it took him a second to realise it was because he was breathing too heavily, beads of sweat soaking into his eyebrows and leaking into his eyes. "You should've told me," he said, trying to get back control of his breathing, feeling a familiar heat build in his palms, in tandem with the rising pain in his stomach. "They're - they're still," god, the word sounded so weird coming out of his mouth, "my brothers."
"They are," Dan said solemnly. "And that's what you should be afraid of."
It wasn't until Dan mentioned John Winchester that Adam really started getting interested.
Until then, everything he told him was something of a ride through a particularly macabre house of horrors - something Adam would've dismissed two words into the whole thing, if he hadn't seen (ghosts and silver and blood and decay and). Dan spoke of ghosts and revenants and things that creeped in the murky corners of Adam's dreams, dripping blood and acid and inky blackness. He spoke of vengeful spirits and putting them to rest; of salt, and fire, and rituals that better fit among the pages of some dark medieval text.
He took Adam to salt and burn the corpse of the little girl who had come to them in the forest that day, and he spoke about John Winchester.
Winchester's an old buddy of mine, he had said. And I know who you are, Adam.
He had forced his father's name out of his mother years ago; however, she had refused to tell him anything else. Every major holiday, every one of his birthdays after that passed with the unfulfilled promise of his father's visit - Adam had begun to suspect that John did not know of his existence at all. But now, if -
So my father, he'd said, rolling the word on his tongue, savouring it, he does... this. What you do.
Dan had nodded. He's a hunter, Adam, and one of the best I know.
Adam had thought. There was so much to consider; and yet, nothing at all, because if this was real, and this was his connection to his father, there was nothing to consider at all. Then tell me more, he'd said, teach me everything you know.
Of course. Dan had smiled. I was only waiting for you to ask.