Fic: Seventy-Seven Square Miles (2/2)
Masterpost | Part One
Alex
Alex wasn’t exactly best friends with Sam Winchester, but she liked the guy well enough. He seemed nice. A little dorky, maybe. But after an entire afternoon of hanging out with him doing research, she was thrilled to be picking up Patience. They’d retrieved her car from where she’d parked it near the bar overnight and dropped it off at the hotel, so she was once again riding shotgun in Sam’s car. She thought it might be a rental. She hoped it was a rental, that it wasn’t stolen. She really didn’t need anything else on her record.
Sunset was still several hours away, but they’d found the likely murder location, so they had good news for Patience. Well, if you could count that as ‘good news’. Sam suggested dinner, but when Patience heard that they might know where her vision went down she insisted they head straight out there, even if they had to wait.
There was a mixed-use trail leading from the parking lot into the woods. The forest eventually narrowed down to a thin strip of land that jutted out nearly a mile into the lake. It was heavily wooded. At the end there were a set of brick and stone benches forming a wide circle around a fire pit. The peninsula was maybe 200 feet across, narrow enough that you could see the lake through the sparse trees on each side.
Sam stood with Patience on the southern shore, looking out towards the downtown, the low skyline of which could be seen across the lake. “Does this match your vision?”
Patience squinted across the sunlight reflected off the lake towards the city. Alex watched as she closed her eyes, probably bringing to mind the image from her vision. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Alex studied her face. Patience seemed sure, but also weirdly hesitant. Then again, they were here to hopefully stop a murder, which was definitely enough to put anyone off their game.
They had a lot of time, but Patience was clearly anxious, so they decided to just stick around. They grabbed seats around the fire pit. The weather was reasonable, warm and sunny with the shade from the trees and some clouds and the breeze off the lake kept them cool. Sam had a backpack with him-purple camo print-and Alex had seen him load it up with a few guns and other supplies, but she and Patience were unarmed. Their plan was to spot the girl and warn her away, hopefully before her assailant even had a chance to strike. Sam had briefly suggested that maybe Alex and Patience should wait in the car or back at the hotel, but he didn’t seem surprised when Alex told him how dumb that sounded. They weren’t going to sit this out.
Now that she thought about it, he had probably been trying to give Patience an out if she wanted it.
In any case, all three of them stuck around as the shadows grew longer. The path looping around the outside of the fire pit was busy with joggers and people walking with strollers. There were a couple teenagers sitting on the stone benches across the circle from them, laughing amongst themselves. From where they sat the three hunters could see anyone who’d approach.
As the sun started to dip below the treetops the mosquitoes came out in force. Sam was wearing jeans and long sleeves-how was he not dying in this heat?-but Alex and Patience slapped at their arms and legs to fend them off.
“Here.”
Alex looked up from murdering one of the blood suckers to find Sam holding out a small bottle of bug spray.
“Aren’t you a boy scout,” she said, but happily took it and spritzed it liberally over her exposed skin. “I really hope this girl shows up soon,” she said as she handed the bottle over to Patience.
The sky was starting to light up in oranges and reds as the sun dipped lower. Already they were in shade from the long shadows of the trees surrounding them.
Patience glanced over towards where she must have ‘seen’ the murder take place. “Yeah, maybe it’s not tonight?”
“No murders last night,” Sam said. “So far this year there have only been three murders in the city, all of them male, none of them nearby.”
The stream of people passing through slowed to a trickle. Alex poked around on her phone, just killing time. Patience was trying to do the same, but she was clearly too antsy to focus even on something as inane as Instagram.
“What classes did you sign up for?” Sam asked.
Patience dug into her purse and unfolded a sheet of paper. “Anthropology. An English class. Freshman chem. Calculus.”
Sam nodded. “Good mix.”
She shoved the paper back into her purse. “Yeah, well, I don’t exactly know what I want to major in, so I figured I’d just try a bunch of stuff.”
“It’s a good strategy.”
“What about you?” Patience asked. “What was your major?”
“I was pre-law,” Sam said. “Philosophy major. I took a lot of anthropology, though. And religious studies classes. Perks of being raised a hunter-you know a lot about religions and myths.”
“So what happened?” Alex asked before she thought better of it.
“My girlfriend died. A demon killed her.” Sam replied, very matter-of-factly.
Crap. Alex felt a pit form in her stomach. She knew that asking a hunter about their past was a huge faux pas, but the atmosphere had been so relaxed that the question had just slipped out innocently.
“I’m sorry,” Patience said.
“It was a long time ago,” Sam said. “And the demon is dead. Both of them, actually.”
“But you never got out,” Patience pointed out.
“That doesn’t have to be you, though,” Sam replied. Patience shot him a look and he sighed. “Okay, if you’d asked me ten years ago, yeah, I’d say nobody escaped this life. All the hunters I knew were angry, obsessive old men. But Jody and Donna both hold down real jobs and hunt. And I’ve met hunters who were in it for decades and got out and they’re still out. It’s your life, you can do what you want with it. If you want to hunt, we’ll all help you. But if you don’t, well, I wouldn’t blame you.”
They lapsed into silence after his speech, for which Alex was personally glad. Living with Jody meant that Alex couldn’t entirely escape the hunting life, but she’d done a pretty good job distancing herself from it.
At least, she thought she had, until those ugly monsters started showing up in Sioux Falls a few months back. Back when Henry had turned out to be a vampire, she’d convinced herself that it was a one-off occurrence, but now she was seeing the beginning of a pattern. She hadn’t hunted anything since they’d closed the rift, hadn’t so much as held a gun, but even though she went to work every day like normal, deep down she thought it was only a matter of time before that life swallowed her whole.
But then here was Sam Winchester, practically a hunting icon, telling her that it didn’t have to be that way.
Still, that didn’t mean he was right. He could be just as delusional as the rest of them. But it was nice to hear from a hunter other than Jody and Donna anyway that not all of them were as obsessive as Claire.
The three tensed as the sun got lower and the light faded. The teens had left and there were no more joggers. Occasionally there would be a couple slowly walking down the path. There was something romantic about the location. Alex gave her group a once-over and wondered if anyone was getting some really weird ideas about them.
The light faded until they couldn’t deny that night had fallen.
“Looks like that’s a bust,” Alex finally said to break the ice. “What’s up with your visions? They’ve never been wrong before.”
“Could have been the wrong day,” Sam said as he pulled a flashlight out of his bag. “You’re sure this is the location you saw?”
“Yeah,” Patience said, but there was definitely something hesitant in her voice.
Sam clearly also heard the hesitation. “Are you sure?”
Patience crossed her arms, rubbing her upper arms for warmth, even though the night air was comfortably warm. “It’s the same spot, it’s got to be. The skyline looks right. But it looked… different.”
“Different how?” Alex asked.
Patience gestured to the stone circle they sat in. “This was all different. It wasn’t stone like this.”
Sam shone the flashlight beam around their surroundings in the graying light. “Huh. Well, let’s pack it in for today.”
By the time they got back to the car it was pushing ten at night. The piled into the sedan somewhat disheartened. It wasn’t as if Alex had been looking forward to grappling with a murderer or anything, but it was still frustrating to have waited hours for nothing.
Sam maneuvered them onto one of the main roads back into the city. The car was quiet, the only sound the soft murmur of the local radio station.
“You guys hungry?” Sam suddenly asked.
The clock on the dash read 10:07. “Uh, it’s a little late?” Alex said.
“I thought I was the old one,” Sam teased.
“I could eat,” Patience added from the back seat.
“Sounds good.” Sam said as he turned the car towards the capitol.
They parked on the street downtown and Sam directed them to an out-of-the-way entrance wedged in between two buildings. If Alex was forced to describe the décor inside, she supposed she’d call it ‘cabin chic’: wood-paneled walls, fancy glass chandeliers, and votive candles on each table.
They weren’t the only people eating, even this late on a weeknight, but they got a table pretty quickly. “Dean loves this place for the late night menu. Cheap steaks after ten PM.”
“Where is he, anyway?” Alex asked. The words were already out of her mouth by the time she thought better of them. She wasn’t an expert on Winchesters, but even she had some sense of how close the brothers were. It didn’t seem normal or good that Sam was suddenly alone and driving a rental.
“Dean’s, uh…” Sam was saved from his fumbling by the arrival of their waitress. Sam’s body language opened up and he gave her a smile as he ordered a salad.
Alex waited as Patience ordered soup before it was her turn to put in an order for the sirloin steak. Wherever Dean was, she couldn’t fault his choice in food.
Sam took a long drink of his water. He sat back and scratched absently through his short beard. “Back when the rift opened up, Jack and… Kaia… were trying to get to an alternate world. They were doing it to try and save my mom. Dean and I eventually got back there and we saved her, and Jack, but we got followed back to our world.”
“Like the monsters,” Alex said. “The ones that followed Kaia to Sioux Falls.”
“Yeah, kinda,” Sam said. “Except these were archangels.”
“Archangels?” Patience said. “Really?”
“Really,” Sam said, no trace of humor in his voice. “And now one of them has Dean.”
“‘Has’ him? What does that mean? Like, kidnapped?”
“More like… possessed.” His voice was quiet.
Claire had once told Alex about being possessed by an angel. Claire always talked about hunting like it was the best thing in the world, but she didn’t sound that way about Castiel taking over her body. She’d sounded haunted.
“Angels possess people?” Patience asked. “Like demons?”
“Not exactly the same, but yeah.”
“Wait,” Alex said. “I thought angels couldn’t possess someone without their permission.” Claire had blamed herself for letting Castiel in. Alex had told her in no uncertain terms that that was bullshit.
Sam paled a little, but he nods. “Yeah.”
“Why would Dean do that?” Patience asked.
“To save me,” Sam said softly. “Me and Jack.” He closed his eyes for a moment before opening them and schooling his expression into something hard. “I’m going to get him back. But you guys should be aware. It’s unlikely he’d try to find you or anything, but I’ll show you some banishing sigils just in case.”
“Is that what you were doing? In Chicago?” Patience asked.
Sam nodded. “I was looking for some supplies.”
“Does Jody know?” Alex asked. “And Donna?” They hadn’t said anything to her.
“I wanted to keep them out of it. Jody’s got her hands full in Sioux Falls,” Sam said.
“That’s bullshit,” Alex replied heatedly. “They should know. You can’t keep this from them.”
“You’re right,” Sam said, so unexpectedly that it stole all Alex’s angry momentum. She’d been working up to a truly awesome rant. The last thing she’d expected was agreement. “I’ve been so focused on the job, on trying to save him. It’s… it’s not the first time I’ve been in a situation like this. But Jody and Donna deserve to know.”
Alex wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but thankfully their food arrived and saved her from having to try. The steak was delicious. Dean had good taste.
As she ate Alex fit this information into what she’d seen over the past day. Suddenly a lot about Sam’s actions made sense. They’d figured out the likely murder location relatively quickly this afternoon and Sam had taken the time to do some other research. When she’d asked he’d just said it was another hunt and she was more than happy to be left out of that. But now she figured it must have been something to do with Dean. She’d eventually grown bored and wandered around the massive city library, but he’d sat on the library’s computer for hours, not talking, barely even moving. When Patience had texted her to be picked up she’d gone over to let him know and he’d seemed shocked that so much time had passed. She’d even left to get lunch and he hadn’t moved.
She watched him pick through his salad now. He hadn’t finished his omelet this morning either.
Alex didn’t know the Winchesters very well, certainly not as well as Jody or Claire did. She’d always tried to keep a bit of distance from them and all they represented-the hunting life.
But they had saved her life, multiple times. And she knew that they’d saved Jody’s and Claire’s plenty. They didn’t deserve the horrible shit she’d heard stories about from hunters who passed through Jody’s house. They didn’t deserve this.
She hoped that Sam got Dean back soon. Because she didn’t know how long he could keep this up.
Patience
Alex dropped her off the next day for the second day of advising and information sessions. Patience already had her schedule, so she didn’t need much in the way of advising, but there was a campus tour that would show you what buildings your classes were in. The campus was sprawling and unfamiliar, so Patience thought it might be nice. Until then she was killing time walking through the Sports and Activities fair. It was just a bunch of tables set up in lines in a huge room, all with club presidents or team captains trying to recruit for the College Democrats or ultimate Frisbee team or Sci-Fi Club.
Patience had played plenty of sports back in Atlanta, and she’d gotten on the volleyball team in Sioux Falls for her last semester, liked sports, liked having a team. It was a good way to make friends. And if she was going to do occasional hunts it was also a good way to stay in shape. Of course, it might also take up time on weekends that she’d need to go hunting.
In which case, it’d be a nice excuse.
She talked for a while with a girl from the rowing team. It wasn’t a sport her school back in Atlanta had, same with Sioux Falls, but the girl assured her that that wasn’t unusual. She got a pamphlet with some information about an open house to learn more in late August after she’d moved into her dorm. Practice for first-year rowers was in the evening.
The campus tour started just after lunch. The day had ended up hot and humid and Patience was glad she’d brought along a water bottle. The sun beat down mercilessly on the twenty-odd future students.
“You’ll be wishing for this come January,” their tour guide joked and Patience shuddered. She’d only barely survived her first real winter in South Dakota. Snow was horrible.
Their tour guide stopped to tell them the story of some of the buildings as the group huddled in the relative comfort of the shade of an old tree across the street. Patience found her attention wandering and she glanced around.
And that’s when she saw her.
The girl.
Her red hair stood out like a beacon. She stood on the sidewalk across the street and she was staring straight at Patience.
Patience wasted a few moments gaping before she surged forward, towards the crosswalk. But before she could reach it the light changed and cars swept through the intersection. Patience could see the girl as she turned away, but then a bus rumbled down the bus lane and broke her line of sight. It squealed to a stop to let people on and off. When it moved again the girl wasn’t there anymore. From the curb Patience scanned the sidewalk but couldn’t see her. Had she gotten on the bus? Or maybe gone into one of the buildings on the street?
Patience was torn between chasing after her, which probably wouldn’t help, and staying with the tour group.
She was interrupted by the buzzing of her cell phone. It was a text from Alex.
We think we found her. You done yet?
Patience glanced back up and took a second look for the girl. Nothing. She tapped out a quick text back.
Tour is almost done. I saw her on the street, but I lost her. Where are you guys?
The tour walked on and she trailed behind it as she waited for a response. It took a few minutes, but eventually her phone buzzed.
Finish your tour, no rush. We’re at the public library on Mifflin St downtown. You need a ride?
‘No rush’? Yeah, sure, easy for Alex to say, she wasn’t the one with the murder visions.
I can walk. See you later.
She couldn’t focus on what the guide was saying as she looked over her future fellow students. They were the same age as her, but they were just kids. They didn’t know anything.
How was she supposed to be like one of them? Did she really think she could just go home on weekends, behead a vampire, and be back in time for her 9 am Monday class? If she had a vision, could she really just call home, give them the details, and go back to studying for an exam?
But at the same time, what was the other choice? Quit school and hunt full time? Get a job to pay the bills in between driving across the continental U.S.? Or be like Claire and live on the road, driving from vision to vision and hunt to hunt? Use fake credit cards? That wasn’t a life, not to her. Just thinking about it made her stomach turn. She couldn’t live like that.
But all the same, how could she live with herself if people died while she was here playing at normalcy?
The tour had hit half her classes and she figured she could Google the rest of them when she started school in fall.
She pulled up the public library’s location on her phone. When the tour group turned right she kept on going straight, headed downtown. It wasn’t a very long walk, but the sun and humidity were brutal. Not for the first time this summer she lamented losing her Atlanta conditioning. If she’d never moved to Sioux Falls this would seem like nothing. Back home summer was sometimes four solid months of brutally hot and muggy days. She used to put a jacket on the first day it dipped below 80. But she’d never had to deal with temperatures below zero in winter, either, and something about adjusting to the vicious Sioux Falls winter had stripped her of her warm weather acclimation. She used to go on runs in weather hotter than this and she laughed at the tourists who would complain about the summer Georgia heat; now she was just like them.
At least the nice thing about Madison was that there was usually a breeze off the lakes. Sometimes in Atlanta the air would just sit, heavy and stifling and miserable.
The library, when she reached it, looked new, all steel and glass and modern art. She wandered a bit through the first floor before she found Alex and Sam on the second. They had a room to themselves that looked like a glass-walled cage.
“Hey guys,” Patience said as she pushed open the door. “They finally lock you up?”
“Patience, hey,” Sam said from over the top of his laptop. “Figured the room would help to keep from being overheard talking about ghosts and demons. How was your tour?”
“Alex said you found something,” Patience said as she threw her purse on the table. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk.
Sam exchanged a glance with Alex before turning his laptop around.
The picture was black and white and grainy, maybe an old scanned-in yearbook photo? But the face was entirely familiar. Patience nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”
Sam flipped his laptop back around. “Teresa Schneider. From McFarland, Wisconsin, a couple miles south of here.”
“You have her name, that’s great,” Patience said. “We can look up her family. Or check enrollment. I was thinking she looked like she’s about my age, so maybe she’s a student here.”
“She was a freshman,” Sam agreed.
Something in the way he said it made Patience pause. “Was?”
They exchanged another glance and Alex spoke up. “You mentioned that the spot didn’t look the same as in your vision. I found an article that said it was remodeled a few years ago. So we started looking at newspapers.”
Sam flipped his laptop back around. Teresa’s picture was still there, but smaller. The graininess finally made sense, as it was embedded in a news article. Above it was a headline:
‘Still no leads to disappearance of UW student’
The digitized page looked old, low resolution.
“When is the article from?” Patience asked.
“This one is from December 1978,” Sam replied. “She went missing that September.”
“So she’s dead,” Patience said, mostly to herself. Her head was spinning.
“Probably.” Sam said. “My best guess is that she died like you saw in your vision. It’s a cold case. They never found any leads.”
Patience couldn’t help the tears. “She’s dead. She died… years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said softly.
Anger and frustration surged in her, overtaking the sorrow. “Why would I get visions of something that happened forty years ago? How does that make any sense?”
“I have a theory.”
Sam was obviously trying to be considerate, but just then it grated on her. “Great,” she drawled. “A theory.”
Sam didn’t seem to take any offense. “Being a psychic means you’re more in tune with the supernatural. We think you saw Teresa’s ghost, that she was drawn to you, and that she sent you the vision.”
“But why?” Patience asked. “I can’t help her.”
“That’s how vengeful spirits are born,” Sam explained. “Some are just mean. But others, like Teresa, have unfinished business.”
“And how am I supposed to help that? I can’t even see who killed her!”
“Teresa’s body was never found,” Sam said. “Her family never got to know what happened to her. Not all ghosts want justice or revenge.”
She suddenly imagined this girl’s parents. Their daughter had gone to college and then just vanished. Maybe she had siblings. Friends. None of them ever found out what happened to her. Maybe they were still waiting for her to come home someday.
“This sucks,” Patience said. “So what do we do now?”
“We can summon her ghost,” Sam said. “And hopefully we can talk to her.”
Her life sucked.
Nightfall found them, once again, out at Picnic Point. The plan was to wait until after the park closed at 10 to do the ritual. To avoid suspicion they parked in a distant parking lot and hiked over with their supplies in Sam’s backpack. It was still warm and muggy that night, though somewhat more manageable without the sun’s harsh radiation.
Sam gave Alex a sawed-off shotgun, explaining about the rock salt shells. He apologized that he didn’t have one for Patience, though she was more than happy to take the crowbar he offered instead. Apparently ghosts hated iron. She’d fired a gun during the whole monsters-from-another-dimension thing, but she wasn’t great with them.
They lucked out and the fire circle at the end of the peninsula was empty. Patience had half expected to stumble across some drunk teens or something, but the land was still and quiet. The only sound was the waves lapping gently at the shore.
Sam directed them to watch out for any people coming down the path as he zipped open his backpack and began unpacking. Patience had a hard time keeping her attention away from the spell set up. Even with months of being a psychic and living with a hunter, she was still a little baffled at the existence of actual magic.
It didn’t look particularly impressive. Sam chalked a pattern onto the stone and set a brass bowl in its center. The ingredients looked mostly like the dried plants she used to find hanging in her grandmother’s house. Which, come to think of it, probably made sense.
“Ready,” Sam said, drawing their attention fully back to him.
“This is safe?” Patience asked.
He glanced up at her. “Teresa’s ghost hasn’t been aggressive so far.” He glanced down at the spell ingredients. “Of course, that was with you…”
There was something contemplative in his voice that made Patience immediately wary.
“I think you should do the spell,” Sam said.
“I don’t know how to do magic,” she replied, entirely reasonably. Heck, she wasn’t even sure if she believed in magic yet.
Sam just smiled. “Fortunately, spells like this don’t take much natural affinity. How’s your Latin?”
“I took French.”
“Close enough,” Sam said. “It’s more about intention anyway. Dean’s Latin is horrible, but he manages.” He handed over a sheet of lined notebook paper with a few incomprehensible lines written on them. Patience scanned her flashlight over the contents. He had some notes about spell ingredients at the top in a rushed, messy scrawl, but the actual incantation was meticulously neat.
“Say those words, then light the match and drop it into the bowl.”
Patience traded a glance with Alex, who shrugged and hefted her shotgun up to her shoulder.
Patience took a deep breath and slowly, haltingly started the incantation.
“Contra obsecro hoc spiritum justa ad facientem voluntatum mayhem.”
She fumbled a bit trying to hold onto the paper and her flashlight as she switched her grip to the matches and lit them. They flared up bright in the darkness before she dropped them carefully into the bowl-
-and immediately had to back away as the contents of the bowl flared up with bright blue flames.
“Jesus!” Patience yelped, backing away. She glanced back at Alex, who gave her the same incredulous look, before her gaze shifted to just over Patience’s shoulder and her face morphed into one of shock.
Patience whipped around and there she was.
Teresa was noticeably translucent this time. Patience could see the moon’s light reflecting off the waves behind her. In the dim light of their flashlights she looked inhumanly pale, but her red hair was still bright where it lay straight across her shoulders.
“Teresa Schneider?” Patience whispered.
Teresa nodded.
Patience glanced over towards Sam. He had his shotgun up and ready, but didn’t seem particularly worried. He gave her an encouraging nod.
Patience turned back to the ghost. “You sent me those visions. Of your…” she trailed off. Was it inconsiderate to mention a ghost’s death to their face?
Teresa nodded again, but this time she smiled, as if she understood the awkward nature of their conversation.
It was that oh-so human expression that got to Patience and suddenly she felt tears bubbling up in her throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that it happened to you.”
Teresa’s smile faded a bit, but she still didn’t speak. Maybe she couldn’t.
Patience plowed forward. “Your vision, I can’t see who did it. I can’t see who killed you.”
She could hear and feel Alex and Sam tense up at her words, bringing their weapons up to bear. But Teresa didn’t fly into some supernatural rage. She only nodded, slowly.
Instead the anger boiled up in Patience. Frustration at her powers being useless to do this one, stupid thing. “I’m so sorry that I can’t get you justice. You… you deserve that. I wish I could find whoever did it.” Teresa only stared on, silently. Patience drew in a deep breath, let it out. “But I’m going to tell your family. I’ll tell them what happened to you. They won’t have to wonder anymore.” Her cheeks were wet with tears.
Teresa continued to stare for a long moment before her mouth curled up in a small smile. Her figure grew brighter, and at first Patience thought it was just her eyes adjusting to the dark, but then the light seemed to encompass her until she dissolved into it. Patience looked around, blinking against the afterimage, but Teresa was gone.
There were footsteps and a hand came down on her shoulder. “She moved on,” Sam said.
Patience wiped at her face with the heels of her hands. Alex came up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Patience leaned into it. “You did great.”
Alex
They crashed one more night in the hotel, since they had it booked anyway. The next morning Sam took them out to breakfast again. The joint was something Alex wouldn’t have expected from the Winchesters, all organic and with plenty of vegan options.
“Dean hates this place,” he explained as they looked over the menus while waiting in line to order. His voice was steady, but his hands shook a bit.
They kept the conversation on lighter topics. Sam asked Patience about what dorm she wanted to live in and she asked his opinion on whether proximity to classes was more important than room size and amenities.
They were nearing the end of their meal. Alex was enjoying her French toast much more than Sam could possibly be enjoying his tofu scrambler. Seriously, something was wrong with that guy.
The conversation hit a lull. Sam broke the silence. “Have you talked with your dad?” His tone was cautious and understanding, but Alex shot him a glare anyway. After the shit night they just had, why would Sam bring that up?
Patience stirred at her food a bit with a fork. “He’s been texting me, a bit. I haven’t told him that I’m going here.”
“Why not?”
Patience heaved a sigh. “Before I left home I was a straight-A student. We were looking at Ivy League schools.”
“You think he’d be ashamed?”
“He told me not to leave,” Patience said. “Told me that I wouldn’t come back from choosing the hunting life. I just… I don’t want him to be right. Because I don’t regret going to help, you know? But he kind of was. Right, I mean.”
“He wasn’t right to say that,” Sam said. “And this is a really good school. I’m sure he’d be proud of you.”
“You don’t know my dad. He had high expectations for me, always has. And how do you even know it’s a good school?”
It was Sam’s turn to look uncomfortable. “I knew someone who went here.”
“Who?” Alex asked. She didn’t know many hunters who went to college.
“His name was Adam,” Sam said. “He was my half-brother, me and Dean’s.”
Now that was news. “A half-brother?”
“It’s a long story. But he was going here when we learned about him. So I checked it out a bit. Research, you know.” He sounded a little rueful. Alex wondered what had happened to him, but she knew better than to ask. Judging by the little she knew of the Winchesters it was probably something horrible. “When I went away to college, my dad said something similar to me, you know.”
“But you went to Stanford,” Patience argued.
Sam laughed like she’d told a joke. “Yeah, I don’t think that mattered to my dad. He didn’t want me to leave the hunting life. Same with Dean. But I realized a long time ago that half the reason my dad was so against it was because he was scared for me. He just didn’t know how to say that.”
Alex decided to tactfully avoid mentioning that he clearly came back to the hunting life.
She didn’t really want to go into that. Jody interacted with hunters all the time, they often stopped through the house. Very few of them had “real” lives outside hunting. Jody and Donna were great role models, but Alex was by now well aware that they were outliers in the hunting community. Alex loved Claire like a sister, but she didn’t particularly want to end up like her.
“Do you ever still want to get out?” Patience asked.
Sam looked a little surprised by the question. “Uh, no. Not really, I guess. Not for a long time.”
“Why not?”
He looked down at his food, which was mostly uneaten, before setting his fork down. “For a long time, I thought I might. But there was always something to deal with. But now… I guess I’ve accepted that this is my life. I can help people this way.” He attempted a smile. “Dean never really got that. He loves hunting.”
Alex glanced over at Patience, who seemed to take Sam’s words to heart. Alex had noticed her texting a lot lately, but she didn’t think it had been to Jody. She supposed Patience had been talking with her dad.
Jealousy struck like a knife below her ribs and she focused on her nearly empty plate of food.
Sam shared with them the address he’d found for Teresa Schneider’s family. They lived in Mount Horeb, which was about a half hour out from the city. They piled in their respective cars. Alex cringed as she offered up her credit card to pay for parking, again. She hoped Jody agreed to pay her back, or she’d be picking up extra shifts at the hospital.
The highway out of town cut through gently rolling hills. Fields of corn dotted with red-sided barns and interspersed with patches of squat Midwestern trees.
As Alex’s phone counted down the minutes until they arrived Patience squirmed in the passenger seat. “What am I even going to say to them?”
Alex didn’t have an answer for that.
“Hi, I’m psychic and I saw your daughter’s ghost and just wanted you to know that she’s dead,” Patience snarked. “They’re going to call the cops on me.”
“Pretty sure Sam could take them,” Alex pointed out. Winchesters were scary.
“And that’s another thing,” Patience said. “He’s really not like I thought he’d be. I mean, I knew Dean from the whole wraith thing back home. But Sam’s kind of different, right?”
Alex shrugged. She’d always seen the Winchesters as a bit of a single entity. That’s kind of how Jody and Claire talked about them. And in previous encounters Alex had noticed Dean more. He was louder, for sure.
She hadn’t given much thought to Sam. But the Sam from these past few days wasn’t like she expected. She hadn’t known that he’d tried to get out of the hunting life. She always just assumed that the brothers would be like Claire and crave hunting. To find out that one of the infamous duo had had his own reservations was quite the revelation.
And then there was his obvious grief at what had happened to his brother. Alex understood grief. She even understood messy relationships with family.
Mount Horeb wasn’t much a town, and even less of a ‘mount’. Alex has no idea how it garnered that name, given that it was just as flat as the rest of the surroundings.
The house they pulled up to was a tiny ranch just outside the main drag. It was pale yellow and well-kept, but old in a way that wasn’t fashionable enough to be antique.
They parked bumper to bumper at the curb. Sam unfolded himself from his car and waited for them.
“We can come up, if you want,” Sam offered.
Patience shook her head, squared her shoulders. “I should do this.”
So Alex and Sam hung back as she walked up to the door. It made Alex jumpy. She kept looking around, feeling like she was being watched.
From where they stood they could see Patience approach the door and ring the doorbell. The woman who answered was elderly. She only came up to Patience’s shoulder, but her rounded face was friendly. If Sam’s research was correct, that was Teresa Schneider’s mother, Joyce. Alex couldn’t see Patience’s face from where she stood, but she watched as Joyce’s face grew more shocked. It was hard to make out at this distance, but when she reached up to wipe her eyes it was clear that she’d started crying.
Alex shivered and looked away.
On the house’s front stoop Joyce had broken down into tears and pulled Patience into a hug that the psychic clearly didn’t know what to do with. Eventually her arms came up to loosely circle Joyce’s shoulders.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
“She waited forty years to hear anything about her daughter and now gets to find out that she’s dead,” Alex bit out.
“Not knowing can be worse,” Sam said.
It was something that people said in movies. They talked about closure. Alex hadn’t really ever understood that. What’s worse than someone being dead? Reality could be so much worse than peoples’ imaginations.
But it was hard to deny the relief clearly breaking over Joyce Schneider’s face as she looked up at the girl delivering bad news. She stepped back and opened up the screen door, gesturing inside. Patience glanced back and gave them a watery grin before stepping into the house.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Sam said. “I didn’t think…”
“Why are you sorry? Because my grandma never knew?” Alex asked, trying for lofty. She almost made it. “I’m glad she didn’t. I’m glad she never found out what happened.”
Alex’s grandmother had seemed just the right height to her at eight years old, but she thought now that she must have been petite. She had been thin, but strong enough to pick Alex up. She used to braid Alex’s hair in a French braid, pulling the sides in snug but not too tight.
“I think she would have liked to know,” Sam said carefully.
“What, that her granddaughter helped kill people? Yeah, she would have loved that.”
Her grandmother had been Catholic, that Alex remembered. Remembered sitting in church with her on Sunday mornings. She’d given her a rosary, tried to teach her all of the prayers. Alex could do the Our Father and Hail Mary, but the long one at the beginning was a little too much for her. She’d been going to Sunday School when Celia had taken her. She’d never gotten to do First Communion.
It was funny. She knew now that angels were real, but she never wanted to go back to church again.
Would they even accept her if she did? How’d they like to hear that she once drank actual blood?
“She would have wanted to know, Alex.” Sam continued with determination. She wanted him to stop, but couldn’t make the words come out. “It wouldn’t be like that. You’re alive and you’re a good person. She would have been happy.”
“A good person?” she whispered, skeptical.
Sam wasn’t swayed. “Even good people can do bad things. You are better than what those vampires did to you.”
She slammed her eyes shut against the tears. Fuck Sam for this, for bringing this up. She’d been doing fine, damn it.
“It’s not just Joyce Schneider that needed closure,” Sam pointed out. “Teresa did, too.”
“I know she’s dead,” Alex snapped.
“Have you ever visited her grave?”
His words hit like a punch. Her grandmother’s grave. Because she was dead.
“I looked it up,” he said. “It’s in Kenosha, only a couple of hours away.”
“Shut up,” she was finally able to grind out. “Just shut up.”
To Sam’s credit, he did. Alex glared at him and walked away back to her car. The inside was already overheated from the sun, so she started it up and ran the A/C.
Her grandmother couldn’t cook worth a damn. She once tried to make a hot dog for Alex using the microwave and ended up nuking it for over three minutes. It turned into a hunk of rubber.
She sold art on weekends, in her spare time. She used to make these little customized cartoon drawings that she’d sell at art fairs of people and their professions. Little cartoon teacher with a little cartoon desk and books and apple. She’d bring Alex-Annie-along with her to the fairs and let her sit on the floor of the booth and color with crayons.
She taught her letters by copying down a big capital letter and then transforming it into a picture. The A became an arrow. The B was a book. The C was a cat.
She hadn’t thought of her grandmother at all after Celia took her. She’d just walled it off. The time period before she’d been taken had just been a black hole. It was the only way to survive.
But after Jody had saved her, it started coming back. She’d resisted. There was nothing back there for her, why dwell on it?
The door opened and Alex started in surprise. It was Patience. Her eyes were red, but she looked happy.
“You ready to go?”
Alex turned to glance out the window. Sam was hovering next to his car. It made her regret that Jody had ever taught her manners.
She climbed back out of the car.
“You two have a safe drive back,” Sam said. “And if I don’t see you, have a good time at school, Patience. I know it wasn’t the most fun hunt. But call me if you need any help with your visions. I never got very good at mine, but I can try.”
“Thank you,” Patience said with so much sincerity that it made Alex’s teeth hurt. “Really. Yeah, it sucked, but at least we figured it out.”
“I hope you find Dean soon,” Alex added.
Sam nodded, a quick little jerk of his head as his lips pressed together into a thin line.
They each gave Sam a hug goodbye. He was surprisingly skinny. They each turned back to their respective cars, but Patience stopped suddenly.
“Hey, Sam?”
Sam turned back.
“Way back, you know, with the wraith?”
Sam nodded, though he clearly had no idea where she was going with this.
“Dean told me back then that hunting sucked. He said I should stay out, if I could be normal.”
Sam seemed a bit surprised at that. Alex was more than a little surprised herself.
Patience shrugged. “I’m just saying… maybe, when you get him back, maybe you guys could take a vacation or something. Find some normal for yourselves. Maybe he didn’t understand back when you went to college, but I think he might get it now.”
Sam looked absolutely floored. He swallowed. “Uh. Thanks.”
After they’d all finally climbed into their cars Alex watched as Sam pulled out and drove away.
“Do you mind if we take a little detour?”
Patience
Their trip east across the state took a few hours, still winding through farmlands. For a state so famous for cheese, she didn’t see all that many cows. She could recognize fields of corn and thought the shorter crops might be some kind of bean. Her only exposure to plants had been helping her grandmother with her herb garden. The biggest thing in her backyard had been a lone tomato plant.
The cemetery was small and neat. Patience had texted Sam for the grave plot and they’d wandered around a bit trying to figure out how to find it. It was a deep red stone, set into the ground.
Antonette Jones
1926 - 2012
Patience hung back for a few minutes as Alex knelt to place the bouquet they’d picked up from a gas station in front of the plaque.
She hated cemeteries, which unfailingly reminded her of her mother’s death and the horrible divide that opened up in her family immediately after. She hadn’t understood as a little kid why she suddenly couldn’t see her grandmother.
When Alex stood again Patience moved in next to her. “What was she like?”
“Italian,” Alex said with a grin. “Catholic as hell. Nice, to me, but I remember her calling the ladies at church ‘fat whores’ behind their backs.”
It surprised a laugh out of Patience. “My grandma was kind of like that, too. She’d tell me about her clients. Probably more than my mom and dad wanted me to know.”
“She lost so much,” Alex said. “I never met my grandfather, he died when my mom was just a kid. Then she lost my mom. She must have thought I died, too.”
What could Patience say to that?
So instead she went with deflection. “Hey, are we near the lake?”
“You mean Lake Michigan?”
“Yeah.”
Alex nodded. “Yeah, a couple blocks, I think.”
Patience nudged her shoulder. “C’mon. I’ve never seen a Great Lake. Let’s go.”
Back in the car Patience checked her phone and there ended up being a park nearby, so they headed there.
Her family had gone down to Savannah a few times when she was a kid and she’d seen the Atlantic Ocean then. Her dad had taken her along on a business trip to LA once and so a couple years ago she’d seen the Pacific.
Lake Michigan looked a lot like that, completely unlike any lake she’d ever seen before. She’d known that it was big, of course.
“You can’t even see the other side!” she exclaimed.
Alex laughed at her. “Duh.”
There was a beach. Neither of them had brought swimming suits along, but they took off their sandals and waded in. The water was shockingly cold.
Afterwards they sat at the top of the beach and watched the families. Some older kids were building elaborate sand castles.
“What’s that?” Alex asked.
Patience followed her gaze to the business card in her hand. She’d pulled it out of her pocket when she sat down because it dug into her hip weird, but hadn’t really noticed that she was playing with it. “Sam gave it to me.” She handed the card over.
“Mia Vallens,” Alex read. “Sam gave you a card for a therapist?”
“Apparently she lives in Madison. Sam thought maybe I could use someone local to talk to about all this stuff.”
“She knows about hunting?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” Patience confirmed. “And get this: she’s a shapeshifter.”
“Well,” Alex said. “That’s… certainly something.”
Patience laughed.
“How does Sam even know a shapeshifter shrink?”
“Say that five times fast,” Patience joked. “And I have no idea. Not really sure I want to, you know?”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a bit. Patience played around with the card.
She could see the appeal. She didn’t have anything against therapy. Her dad had sent her to talk to someone after her mom died and it had helped a lot.
She had enough to talk about, considering the past year. Her grandmother’s death, her psychic abilities. The fight with her dad and moving halfway across the country to Sioux Falls. Fighting off monsters.
Kaia’s death.
And maybe she would. But she realized that despite everything, she was handling it pretty well. She knew she had Jody to thank for a lot of that. The sheriff had taken her in, supported her, provided a sounding board for her choices without pressuring her at all. She’d needed to figure it out for herself and she couldn’t with her dad treating her like a kid.
But now she was also thinking that it was more than just Jody. Donna visited a few times and Patience loved the brash, funny woman. Claire had taken up hunting again, but while she’d been staying in Sioux Falls she’d gotten over whatever low-burning animosity she’d felt for Patience and they were almost friends.
And then, of course, there was Alex. She kept weird hours because of her nursing and classes, but she’d welcomed Patience in pretty quickly, even though it had been with her particular brand of sarcasm.
It suddenly seemed important that Alex understood what that had meant to her. “Hey, thanks for coming with me,” Patience said, before she could chicken out.
“I only did it because Jody was paying me,” Alex drawled.
Patience laughed, which made Alex crack up herself.
Going to college was going to be a new adventure. And after what she’d been through these past few days she thought she might finally be ready to tell her dad about it, see if they could fix things between them. But it helped to know.
Masterpost | Part One
Alex
Alex wasn’t exactly best friends with Sam Winchester, but she liked the guy well enough. He seemed nice. A little dorky, maybe. But after an entire afternoon of hanging out with him doing research, she was thrilled to be picking up Patience. They’d retrieved her car from where she’d parked it near the bar overnight and dropped it off at the hotel, so she was once again riding shotgun in Sam’s car. She thought it might be a rental. She hoped it was a rental, that it wasn’t stolen. She really didn’t need anything else on her record.
Sunset was still several hours away, but they’d found the likely murder location, so they had good news for Patience. Well, if you could count that as ‘good news’. Sam suggested dinner, but when Patience heard that they might know where her vision went down she insisted they head straight out there, even if they had to wait.
There was a mixed-use trail leading from the parking lot into the woods. The forest eventually narrowed down to a thin strip of land that jutted out nearly a mile into the lake. It was heavily wooded. At the end there were a set of brick and stone benches forming a wide circle around a fire pit. The peninsula was maybe 200 feet across, narrow enough that you could see the lake through the sparse trees on each side.
Sam stood with Patience on the southern shore, looking out towards the downtown, the low skyline of which could be seen across the lake. “Does this match your vision?”
Patience squinted across the sunlight reflected off the lake towards the city. Alex watched as she closed her eyes, probably bringing to mind the image from her vision. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Alex studied her face. Patience seemed sure, but also weirdly hesitant. Then again, they were here to hopefully stop a murder, which was definitely enough to put anyone off their game.
They had a lot of time, but Patience was clearly anxious, so they decided to just stick around. They grabbed seats around the fire pit. The weather was reasonable, warm and sunny with the shade from the trees and some clouds and the breeze off the lake kept them cool. Sam had a backpack with him-purple camo print-and Alex had seen him load it up with a few guns and other supplies, but she and Patience were unarmed. Their plan was to spot the girl and warn her away, hopefully before her assailant even had a chance to strike. Sam had briefly suggested that maybe Alex and Patience should wait in the car or back at the hotel, but he didn’t seem surprised when Alex told him how dumb that sounded. They weren’t going to sit this out.
Now that she thought about it, he had probably been trying to give Patience an out if she wanted it.
In any case, all three of them stuck around as the shadows grew longer. The path looping around the outside of the fire pit was busy with joggers and people walking with strollers. There were a couple teenagers sitting on the stone benches across the circle from them, laughing amongst themselves. From where they sat the three hunters could see anyone who’d approach.
As the sun started to dip below the treetops the mosquitoes came out in force. Sam was wearing jeans and long sleeves-how was he not dying in this heat?-but Alex and Patience slapped at their arms and legs to fend them off.
“Here.”
Alex looked up from murdering one of the blood suckers to find Sam holding out a small bottle of bug spray.
“Aren’t you a boy scout,” she said, but happily took it and spritzed it liberally over her exposed skin. “I really hope this girl shows up soon,” she said as she handed the bottle over to Patience.
The sky was starting to light up in oranges and reds as the sun dipped lower. Already they were in shade from the long shadows of the trees surrounding them.
Patience glanced over towards where she must have ‘seen’ the murder take place. “Yeah, maybe it’s not tonight?”
“No murders last night,” Sam said. “So far this year there have only been three murders in the city, all of them male, none of them nearby.”
The stream of people passing through slowed to a trickle. Alex poked around on her phone, just killing time. Patience was trying to do the same, but she was clearly too antsy to focus even on something as inane as Instagram.
“What classes did you sign up for?” Sam asked.
Patience dug into her purse and unfolded a sheet of paper. “Anthropology. An English class. Freshman chem. Calculus.”
Sam nodded. “Good mix.”
She shoved the paper back into her purse. “Yeah, well, I don’t exactly know what I want to major in, so I figured I’d just try a bunch of stuff.”
“It’s a good strategy.”
“What about you?” Patience asked. “What was your major?”
“I was pre-law,” Sam said. “Philosophy major. I took a lot of anthropology, though. And religious studies classes. Perks of being raised a hunter-you know a lot about religions and myths.”
“So what happened?” Alex asked before she thought better of it.
“My girlfriend died. A demon killed her.” Sam replied, very matter-of-factly.
Crap. Alex felt a pit form in her stomach. She knew that asking a hunter about their past was a huge faux pas, but the atmosphere had been so relaxed that the question had just slipped out innocently.
“I’m sorry,” Patience said.
“It was a long time ago,” Sam said. “And the demon is dead. Both of them, actually.”
“But you never got out,” Patience pointed out.
“That doesn’t have to be you, though,” Sam replied. Patience shot him a look and he sighed. “Okay, if you’d asked me ten years ago, yeah, I’d say nobody escaped this life. All the hunters I knew were angry, obsessive old men. But Jody and Donna both hold down real jobs and hunt. And I’ve met hunters who were in it for decades and got out and they’re still out. It’s your life, you can do what you want with it. If you want to hunt, we’ll all help you. But if you don’t, well, I wouldn’t blame you.”
They lapsed into silence after his speech, for which Alex was personally glad. Living with Jody meant that Alex couldn’t entirely escape the hunting life, but she’d done a pretty good job distancing herself from it.
At least, she thought she had, until those ugly monsters started showing up in Sioux Falls a few months back. Back when Henry had turned out to be a vampire, she’d convinced herself that it was a one-off occurrence, but now she was seeing the beginning of a pattern. She hadn’t hunted anything since they’d closed the rift, hadn’t so much as held a gun, but even though she went to work every day like normal, deep down she thought it was only a matter of time before that life swallowed her whole.
But then here was Sam Winchester, practically a hunting icon, telling her that it didn’t have to be that way.
Still, that didn’t mean he was right. He could be just as delusional as the rest of them. But it was nice to hear from a hunter other than Jody and Donna anyway that not all of them were as obsessive as Claire.
The three tensed as the sun got lower and the light faded. The teens had left and there were no more joggers. Occasionally there would be a couple slowly walking down the path. There was something romantic about the location. Alex gave her group a once-over and wondered if anyone was getting some really weird ideas about them.
The light faded until they couldn’t deny that night had fallen.
“Looks like that’s a bust,” Alex finally said to break the ice. “What’s up with your visions? They’ve never been wrong before.”
“Could have been the wrong day,” Sam said as he pulled a flashlight out of his bag. “You’re sure this is the location you saw?”
“Yeah,” Patience said, but there was definitely something hesitant in her voice.
Sam clearly also heard the hesitation. “Are you sure?”
Patience crossed her arms, rubbing her upper arms for warmth, even though the night air was comfortably warm. “It’s the same spot, it’s got to be. The skyline looks right. But it looked… different.”
“Different how?” Alex asked.
Patience gestured to the stone circle they sat in. “This was all different. It wasn’t stone like this.”
Sam shone the flashlight beam around their surroundings in the graying light. “Huh. Well, let’s pack it in for today.”
By the time they got back to the car it was pushing ten at night. The piled into the sedan somewhat disheartened. It wasn’t as if Alex had been looking forward to grappling with a murderer or anything, but it was still frustrating to have waited hours for nothing.
Sam maneuvered them onto one of the main roads back into the city. The car was quiet, the only sound the soft murmur of the local radio station.
“You guys hungry?” Sam suddenly asked.
The clock on the dash read 10:07. “Uh, it’s a little late?” Alex said.
“I thought I was the old one,” Sam teased.
“I could eat,” Patience added from the back seat.
“Sounds good.” Sam said as he turned the car towards the capitol.
They parked on the street downtown and Sam directed them to an out-of-the-way entrance wedged in between two buildings. If Alex was forced to describe the décor inside, she supposed she’d call it ‘cabin chic’: wood-paneled walls, fancy glass chandeliers, and votive candles on each table.
They weren’t the only people eating, even this late on a weeknight, but they got a table pretty quickly. “Dean loves this place for the late night menu. Cheap steaks after ten PM.”
“Where is he, anyway?” Alex asked. The words were already out of her mouth by the time she thought better of them. She wasn’t an expert on Winchesters, but even she had some sense of how close the brothers were. It didn’t seem normal or good that Sam was suddenly alone and driving a rental.
“Dean’s, uh…” Sam was saved from his fumbling by the arrival of their waitress. Sam’s body language opened up and he gave her a smile as he ordered a salad.
Alex waited as Patience ordered soup before it was her turn to put in an order for the sirloin steak. Wherever Dean was, she couldn’t fault his choice in food.
Sam took a long drink of his water. He sat back and scratched absently through his short beard. “Back when the rift opened up, Jack and… Kaia… were trying to get to an alternate world. They were doing it to try and save my mom. Dean and I eventually got back there and we saved her, and Jack, but we got followed back to our world.”
“Like the monsters,” Alex said. “The ones that followed Kaia to Sioux Falls.”
“Yeah, kinda,” Sam said. “Except these were archangels.”
“Archangels?” Patience said. “Really?”
“Really,” Sam said, no trace of humor in his voice. “And now one of them has Dean.”
“‘Has’ him? What does that mean? Like, kidnapped?”
“More like… possessed.” His voice was quiet.
Claire had once told Alex about being possessed by an angel. Claire always talked about hunting like it was the best thing in the world, but she didn’t sound that way about Castiel taking over her body. She’d sounded haunted.
“Angels possess people?” Patience asked. “Like demons?”
“Not exactly the same, but yeah.”
“Wait,” Alex said. “I thought angels couldn’t possess someone without their permission.” Claire had blamed herself for letting Castiel in. Alex had told her in no uncertain terms that that was bullshit.
Sam paled a little, but he nods. “Yeah.”
“Why would Dean do that?” Patience asked.
“To save me,” Sam said softly. “Me and Jack.” He closed his eyes for a moment before opening them and schooling his expression into something hard. “I’m going to get him back. But you guys should be aware. It’s unlikely he’d try to find you or anything, but I’ll show you some banishing sigils just in case.”
“Is that what you were doing? In Chicago?” Patience asked.
Sam nodded. “I was looking for some supplies.”
“Does Jody know?” Alex asked. “And Donna?” They hadn’t said anything to her.
“I wanted to keep them out of it. Jody’s got her hands full in Sioux Falls,” Sam said.
“That’s bullshit,” Alex replied heatedly. “They should know. You can’t keep this from them.”
“You’re right,” Sam said, so unexpectedly that it stole all Alex’s angry momentum. She’d been working up to a truly awesome rant. The last thing she’d expected was agreement. “I’ve been so focused on the job, on trying to save him. It’s… it’s not the first time I’ve been in a situation like this. But Jody and Donna deserve to know.”
Alex wasn’t sure how to respond to that, but thankfully their food arrived and saved her from having to try. The steak was delicious. Dean had good taste.
As she ate Alex fit this information into what she’d seen over the past day. Suddenly a lot about Sam’s actions made sense. They’d figured out the likely murder location relatively quickly this afternoon and Sam had taken the time to do some other research. When she’d asked he’d just said it was another hunt and she was more than happy to be left out of that. But now she figured it must have been something to do with Dean. She’d eventually grown bored and wandered around the massive city library, but he’d sat on the library’s computer for hours, not talking, barely even moving. When Patience had texted her to be picked up she’d gone over to let him know and he’d seemed shocked that so much time had passed. She’d even left to get lunch and he hadn’t moved.
She watched him pick through his salad now. He hadn’t finished his omelet this morning either.
Alex didn’t know the Winchesters very well, certainly not as well as Jody or Claire did. She’d always tried to keep a bit of distance from them and all they represented-the hunting life.
But they had saved her life, multiple times. And she knew that they’d saved Jody’s and Claire’s plenty. They didn’t deserve the horrible shit she’d heard stories about from hunters who passed through Jody’s house. They didn’t deserve this.
She hoped that Sam got Dean back soon. Because she didn’t know how long he could keep this up.
Patience
Alex dropped her off the next day for the second day of advising and information sessions. Patience already had her schedule, so she didn’t need much in the way of advising, but there was a campus tour that would show you what buildings your classes were in. The campus was sprawling and unfamiliar, so Patience thought it might be nice. Until then she was killing time walking through the Sports and Activities fair. It was just a bunch of tables set up in lines in a huge room, all with club presidents or team captains trying to recruit for the College Democrats or ultimate Frisbee team or Sci-Fi Club.
Patience had played plenty of sports back in Atlanta, and she’d gotten on the volleyball team in Sioux Falls for her last semester, liked sports, liked having a team. It was a good way to make friends. And if she was going to do occasional hunts it was also a good way to stay in shape. Of course, it might also take up time on weekends that she’d need to go hunting.
In which case, it’d be a nice excuse.
She talked for a while with a girl from the rowing team. It wasn’t a sport her school back in Atlanta had, same with Sioux Falls, but the girl assured her that that wasn’t unusual. She got a pamphlet with some information about an open house to learn more in late August after she’d moved into her dorm. Practice for first-year rowers was in the evening.
The campus tour started just after lunch. The day had ended up hot and humid and Patience was glad she’d brought along a water bottle. The sun beat down mercilessly on the twenty-odd future students.
“You’ll be wishing for this come January,” their tour guide joked and Patience shuddered. She’d only barely survived her first real winter in South Dakota. Snow was horrible.
Their tour guide stopped to tell them the story of some of the buildings as the group huddled in the relative comfort of the shade of an old tree across the street. Patience found her attention wandering and she glanced around.
And that’s when she saw her.
The girl.
Her red hair stood out like a beacon. She stood on the sidewalk across the street and she was staring straight at Patience.
Patience wasted a few moments gaping before she surged forward, towards the crosswalk. But before she could reach it the light changed and cars swept through the intersection. Patience could see the girl as she turned away, but then a bus rumbled down the bus lane and broke her line of sight. It squealed to a stop to let people on and off. When it moved again the girl wasn’t there anymore. From the curb Patience scanned the sidewalk but couldn’t see her. Had she gotten on the bus? Or maybe gone into one of the buildings on the street?
Patience was torn between chasing after her, which probably wouldn’t help, and staying with the tour group.
She was interrupted by the buzzing of her cell phone. It was a text from Alex.
We think we found her. You done yet?
Patience glanced back up and took a second look for the girl. Nothing. She tapped out a quick text back.
Tour is almost done. I saw her on the street, but I lost her. Where are you guys?
The tour walked on and she trailed behind it as she waited for a response. It took a few minutes, but eventually her phone buzzed.
Finish your tour, no rush. We’re at the public library on Mifflin St downtown. You need a ride?
‘No rush’? Yeah, sure, easy for Alex to say, she wasn’t the one with the murder visions.
I can walk. See you later.
She couldn’t focus on what the guide was saying as she looked over her future fellow students. They were the same age as her, but they were just kids. They didn’t know anything.
How was she supposed to be like one of them? Did she really think she could just go home on weekends, behead a vampire, and be back in time for her 9 am Monday class? If she had a vision, could she really just call home, give them the details, and go back to studying for an exam?
But at the same time, what was the other choice? Quit school and hunt full time? Get a job to pay the bills in between driving across the continental U.S.? Or be like Claire and live on the road, driving from vision to vision and hunt to hunt? Use fake credit cards? That wasn’t a life, not to her. Just thinking about it made her stomach turn. She couldn’t live like that.
But all the same, how could she live with herself if people died while she was here playing at normalcy?
The tour had hit half her classes and she figured she could Google the rest of them when she started school in fall.
She pulled up the public library’s location on her phone. When the tour group turned right she kept on going straight, headed downtown. It wasn’t a very long walk, but the sun and humidity were brutal. Not for the first time this summer she lamented losing her Atlanta conditioning. If she’d never moved to Sioux Falls this would seem like nothing. Back home summer was sometimes four solid months of brutally hot and muggy days. She used to put a jacket on the first day it dipped below 80. But she’d never had to deal with temperatures below zero in winter, either, and something about adjusting to the vicious Sioux Falls winter had stripped her of her warm weather acclimation. She used to go on runs in weather hotter than this and she laughed at the tourists who would complain about the summer Georgia heat; now she was just like them.
At least the nice thing about Madison was that there was usually a breeze off the lakes. Sometimes in Atlanta the air would just sit, heavy and stifling and miserable.
The library, when she reached it, looked new, all steel and glass and modern art. She wandered a bit through the first floor before she found Alex and Sam on the second. They had a room to themselves that looked like a glass-walled cage.
“Hey guys,” Patience said as she pushed open the door. “They finally lock you up?”
“Patience, hey,” Sam said from over the top of his laptop. “Figured the room would help to keep from being overheard talking about ghosts and demons. How was your tour?”
“Alex said you found something,” Patience said as she threw her purse on the table. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk.
Sam exchanged a glance with Alex before turning his laptop around.
The picture was black and white and grainy, maybe an old scanned-in yearbook photo? But the face was entirely familiar. Patience nodded. “Yeah, that’s her.”
Sam flipped his laptop back around. “Teresa Schneider. From McFarland, Wisconsin, a couple miles south of here.”
“You have her name, that’s great,” Patience said. “We can look up her family. Or check enrollment. I was thinking she looked like she’s about my age, so maybe she’s a student here.”
“She was a freshman,” Sam agreed.
Something in the way he said it made Patience pause. “Was?”
They exchanged another glance and Alex spoke up. “You mentioned that the spot didn’t look the same as in your vision. I found an article that said it was remodeled a few years ago. So we started looking at newspapers.”
Sam flipped his laptop back around. Teresa’s picture was still there, but smaller. The graininess finally made sense, as it was embedded in a news article. Above it was a headline:
‘Still no leads to disappearance of UW student’
The digitized page looked old, low resolution.
“When is the article from?” Patience asked.
“This one is from December 1978,” Sam replied. “She went missing that September.”
“So she’s dead,” Patience said, mostly to herself. Her head was spinning.
“Probably.” Sam said. “My best guess is that she died like you saw in your vision. It’s a cold case. They never found any leads.”
Patience couldn’t help the tears. “She’s dead. She died… years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam said softly.
Anger and frustration surged in her, overtaking the sorrow. “Why would I get visions of something that happened forty years ago? How does that make any sense?”
“I have a theory.”
Sam was obviously trying to be considerate, but just then it grated on her. “Great,” she drawled. “A theory.”
Sam didn’t seem to take any offense. “Being a psychic means you’re more in tune with the supernatural. We think you saw Teresa’s ghost, that she was drawn to you, and that she sent you the vision.”
“But why?” Patience asked. “I can’t help her.”
“That’s how vengeful spirits are born,” Sam explained. “Some are just mean. But others, like Teresa, have unfinished business.”
“And how am I supposed to help that? I can’t even see who killed her!”
“Teresa’s body was never found,” Sam said. “Her family never got to know what happened to her. Not all ghosts want justice or revenge.”
She suddenly imagined this girl’s parents. Their daughter had gone to college and then just vanished. Maybe she had siblings. Friends. None of them ever found out what happened to her. Maybe they were still waiting for her to come home someday.
“This sucks,” Patience said. “So what do we do now?”
“We can summon her ghost,” Sam said. “And hopefully we can talk to her.”
Her life sucked.
Nightfall found them, once again, out at Picnic Point. The plan was to wait until after the park closed at 10 to do the ritual. To avoid suspicion they parked in a distant parking lot and hiked over with their supplies in Sam’s backpack. It was still warm and muggy that night, though somewhat more manageable without the sun’s harsh radiation.
Sam gave Alex a sawed-off shotgun, explaining about the rock salt shells. He apologized that he didn’t have one for Patience, though she was more than happy to take the crowbar he offered instead. Apparently ghosts hated iron. She’d fired a gun during the whole monsters-from-another-dimension thing, but she wasn’t great with them.
They lucked out and the fire circle at the end of the peninsula was empty. Patience had half expected to stumble across some drunk teens or something, but the land was still and quiet. The only sound was the waves lapping gently at the shore.
Sam directed them to watch out for any people coming down the path as he zipped open his backpack and began unpacking. Patience had a hard time keeping her attention away from the spell set up. Even with months of being a psychic and living with a hunter, she was still a little baffled at the existence of actual magic.
It didn’t look particularly impressive. Sam chalked a pattern onto the stone and set a brass bowl in its center. The ingredients looked mostly like the dried plants she used to find hanging in her grandmother’s house. Which, come to think of it, probably made sense.
“Ready,” Sam said, drawing their attention fully back to him.
“This is safe?” Patience asked.
He glanced up at her. “Teresa’s ghost hasn’t been aggressive so far.” He glanced down at the spell ingredients. “Of course, that was with you…”
There was something contemplative in his voice that made Patience immediately wary.
“I think you should do the spell,” Sam said.
“I don’t know how to do magic,” she replied, entirely reasonably. Heck, she wasn’t even sure if she believed in magic yet.
Sam just smiled. “Fortunately, spells like this don’t take much natural affinity. How’s your Latin?”
“I took French.”
“Close enough,” Sam said. “It’s more about intention anyway. Dean’s Latin is horrible, but he manages.” He handed over a sheet of lined notebook paper with a few incomprehensible lines written on them. Patience scanned her flashlight over the contents. He had some notes about spell ingredients at the top in a rushed, messy scrawl, but the actual incantation was meticulously neat.
“Say those words, then light the match and drop it into the bowl.”
Patience traded a glance with Alex, who shrugged and hefted her shotgun up to her shoulder.
Patience took a deep breath and slowly, haltingly started the incantation.
“Contra obsecro hoc spiritum justa ad facientem voluntatum mayhem.”
She fumbled a bit trying to hold onto the paper and her flashlight as she switched her grip to the matches and lit them. They flared up bright in the darkness before she dropped them carefully into the bowl-
-and immediately had to back away as the contents of the bowl flared up with bright blue flames.
“Jesus!” Patience yelped, backing away. She glanced back at Alex, who gave her the same incredulous look, before her gaze shifted to just over Patience’s shoulder and her face morphed into one of shock.
Patience whipped around and there she was.
Teresa was noticeably translucent this time. Patience could see the moon’s light reflecting off the waves behind her. In the dim light of their flashlights she looked inhumanly pale, but her red hair was still bright where it lay straight across her shoulders.
“Teresa Schneider?” Patience whispered.
Teresa nodded.
Patience glanced over towards Sam. He had his shotgun up and ready, but didn’t seem particularly worried. He gave her an encouraging nod.
Patience turned back to the ghost. “You sent me those visions. Of your…” she trailed off. Was it inconsiderate to mention a ghost’s death to their face?
Teresa nodded again, but this time she smiled, as if she understood the awkward nature of their conversation.
It was that oh-so human expression that got to Patience and suddenly she felt tears bubbling up in her throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that it happened to you.”
Teresa’s smile faded a bit, but she still didn’t speak. Maybe she couldn’t.
Patience plowed forward. “Your vision, I can’t see who did it. I can’t see who killed you.”
She could hear and feel Alex and Sam tense up at her words, bringing their weapons up to bear. But Teresa didn’t fly into some supernatural rage. She only nodded, slowly.
Instead the anger boiled up in Patience. Frustration at her powers being useless to do this one, stupid thing. “I’m so sorry that I can’t get you justice. You… you deserve that. I wish I could find whoever did it.” Teresa only stared on, silently. Patience drew in a deep breath, let it out. “But I’m going to tell your family. I’ll tell them what happened to you. They won’t have to wonder anymore.” Her cheeks were wet with tears.
Teresa continued to stare for a long moment before her mouth curled up in a small smile. Her figure grew brighter, and at first Patience thought it was just her eyes adjusting to the dark, but then the light seemed to encompass her until she dissolved into it. Patience looked around, blinking against the afterimage, but Teresa was gone.
There were footsteps and a hand came down on her shoulder. “She moved on,” Sam said.
Patience wiped at her face with the heels of her hands. Alex came up and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Patience leaned into it. “You did great.”
Alex
They crashed one more night in the hotel, since they had it booked anyway. The next morning Sam took them out to breakfast again. The joint was something Alex wouldn’t have expected from the Winchesters, all organic and with plenty of vegan options.
“Dean hates this place,” he explained as they looked over the menus while waiting in line to order. His voice was steady, but his hands shook a bit.
They kept the conversation on lighter topics. Sam asked Patience about what dorm she wanted to live in and she asked his opinion on whether proximity to classes was more important than room size and amenities.
They were nearing the end of their meal. Alex was enjoying her French toast much more than Sam could possibly be enjoying his tofu scrambler. Seriously, something was wrong with that guy.
The conversation hit a lull. Sam broke the silence. “Have you talked with your dad?” His tone was cautious and understanding, but Alex shot him a glare anyway. After the shit night they just had, why would Sam bring that up?
Patience stirred at her food a bit with a fork. “He’s been texting me, a bit. I haven’t told him that I’m going here.”
“Why not?”
Patience heaved a sigh. “Before I left home I was a straight-A student. We were looking at Ivy League schools.”
“You think he’d be ashamed?”
“He told me not to leave,” Patience said. “Told me that I wouldn’t come back from choosing the hunting life. I just… I don’t want him to be right. Because I don’t regret going to help, you know? But he kind of was. Right, I mean.”
“He wasn’t right to say that,” Sam said. “And this is a really good school. I’m sure he’d be proud of you.”
“You don’t know my dad. He had high expectations for me, always has. And how do you even know it’s a good school?”
It was Sam’s turn to look uncomfortable. “I knew someone who went here.”
“Who?” Alex asked. She didn’t know many hunters who went to college.
“His name was Adam,” Sam said. “He was my half-brother, me and Dean’s.”
Now that was news. “A half-brother?”
“It’s a long story. But he was going here when we learned about him. So I checked it out a bit. Research, you know.” He sounded a little rueful. Alex wondered what had happened to him, but she knew better than to ask. Judging by the little she knew of the Winchesters it was probably something horrible. “When I went away to college, my dad said something similar to me, you know.”
“But you went to Stanford,” Patience argued.
Sam laughed like she’d told a joke. “Yeah, I don’t think that mattered to my dad. He didn’t want me to leave the hunting life. Same with Dean. But I realized a long time ago that half the reason my dad was so against it was because he was scared for me. He just didn’t know how to say that.”
Alex decided to tactfully avoid mentioning that he clearly came back to the hunting life.
She didn’t really want to go into that. Jody interacted with hunters all the time, they often stopped through the house. Very few of them had “real” lives outside hunting. Jody and Donna were great role models, but Alex was by now well aware that they were outliers in the hunting community. Alex loved Claire like a sister, but she didn’t particularly want to end up like her.
“Do you ever still want to get out?” Patience asked.
Sam looked a little surprised by the question. “Uh, no. Not really, I guess. Not for a long time.”
“Why not?”
He looked down at his food, which was mostly uneaten, before setting his fork down. “For a long time, I thought I might. But there was always something to deal with. But now… I guess I’ve accepted that this is my life. I can help people this way.” He attempted a smile. “Dean never really got that. He loves hunting.”
Alex glanced over at Patience, who seemed to take Sam’s words to heart. Alex had noticed her texting a lot lately, but she didn’t think it had been to Jody. She supposed Patience had been talking with her dad.
Jealousy struck like a knife below her ribs and she focused on her nearly empty plate of food.
Sam shared with them the address he’d found for Teresa Schneider’s family. They lived in Mount Horeb, which was about a half hour out from the city. They piled in their respective cars. Alex cringed as she offered up her credit card to pay for parking, again. She hoped Jody agreed to pay her back, or she’d be picking up extra shifts at the hospital.
The highway out of town cut through gently rolling hills. Fields of corn dotted with red-sided barns and interspersed with patches of squat Midwestern trees.
As Alex’s phone counted down the minutes until they arrived Patience squirmed in the passenger seat. “What am I even going to say to them?”
Alex didn’t have an answer for that.
“Hi, I’m psychic and I saw your daughter’s ghost and just wanted you to know that she’s dead,” Patience snarked. “They’re going to call the cops on me.”
“Pretty sure Sam could take them,” Alex pointed out. Winchesters were scary.
“And that’s another thing,” Patience said. “He’s really not like I thought he’d be. I mean, I knew Dean from the whole wraith thing back home. But Sam’s kind of different, right?”
Alex shrugged. She’d always seen the Winchesters as a bit of a single entity. That’s kind of how Jody and Claire talked about them. And in previous encounters Alex had noticed Dean more. He was louder, for sure.
She hadn’t given much thought to Sam. But the Sam from these past few days wasn’t like she expected. She hadn’t known that he’d tried to get out of the hunting life. She always just assumed that the brothers would be like Claire and crave hunting. To find out that one of the infamous duo had had his own reservations was quite the revelation.
And then there was his obvious grief at what had happened to his brother. Alex understood grief. She even understood messy relationships with family.
Mount Horeb wasn’t much a town, and even less of a ‘mount’. Alex has no idea how it garnered that name, given that it was just as flat as the rest of the surroundings.
The house they pulled up to was a tiny ranch just outside the main drag. It was pale yellow and well-kept, but old in a way that wasn’t fashionable enough to be antique.
They parked bumper to bumper at the curb. Sam unfolded himself from his car and waited for them.
“We can come up, if you want,” Sam offered.
Patience shook her head, squared her shoulders. “I should do this.”
So Alex and Sam hung back as she walked up to the door. It made Alex jumpy. She kept looking around, feeling like she was being watched.
From where they stood they could see Patience approach the door and ring the doorbell. The woman who answered was elderly. She only came up to Patience’s shoulder, but her rounded face was friendly. If Sam’s research was correct, that was Teresa Schneider’s mother, Joyce. Alex couldn’t see Patience’s face from where she stood, but she watched as Joyce’s face grew more shocked. It was hard to make out at this distance, but when she reached up to wipe her eyes it was clear that she’d started crying.
Alex shivered and looked away.
On the house’s front stoop Joyce had broken down into tears and pulled Patience into a hug that the psychic clearly didn’t know what to do with. Eventually her arms came up to loosely circle Joyce’s shoulders.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
“She waited forty years to hear anything about her daughter and now gets to find out that she’s dead,” Alex bit out.
“Not knowing can be worse,” Sam said.
It was something that people said in movies. They talked about closure. Alex hadn’t really ever understood that. What’s worse than someone being dead? Reality could be so much worse than peoples’ imaginations.
But it was hard to deny the relief clearly breaking over Joyce Schneider’s face as she looked up at the girl delivering bad news. She stepped back and opened up the screen door, gesturing inside. Patience glanced back and gave them a watery grin before stepping into the house.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Sam said. “I didn’t think…”
“Why are you sorry? Because my grandma never knew?” Alex asked, trying for lofty. She almost made it. “I’m glad she didn’t. I’m glad she never found out what happened.”
Alex’s grandmother had seemed just the right height to her at eight years old, but she thought now that she must have been petite. She had been thin, but strong enough to pick Alex up. She used to braid Alex’s hair in a French braid, pulling the sides in snug but not too tight.
“I think she would have liked to know,” Sam said carefully.
“What, that her granddaughter helped kill people? Yeah, she would have loved that.”
Her grandmother had been Catholic, that Alex remembered. Remembered sitting in church with her on Sunday mornings. She’d given her a rosary, tried to teach her all of the prayers. Alex could do the Our Father and Hail Mary, but the long one at the beginning was a little too much for her. She’d been going to Sunday School when Celia had taken her. She’d never gotten to do First Communion.
It was funny. She knew now that angels were real, but she never wanted to go back to church again.
Would they even accept her if she did? How’d they like to hear that she once drank actual blood?
“She would have wanted to know, Alex.” Sam continued with determination. She wanted him to stop, but couldn’t make the words come out. “It wouldn’t be like that. You’re alive and you’re a good person. She would have been happy.”
“A good person?” she whispered, skeptical.
Sam wasn’t swayed. “Even good people can do bad things. You are better than what those vampires did to you.”
She slammed her eyes shut against the tears. Fuck Sam for this, for bringing this up. She’d been doing fine, damn it.
“It’s not just Joyce Schneider that needed closure,” Sam pointed out. “Teresa did, too.”
“I know she’s dead,” Alex snapped.
“Have you ever visited her grave?”
His words hit like a punch. Her grandmother’s grave. Because she was dead.
“I looked it up,” he said. “It’s in Kenosha, only a couple of hours away.”
“Shut up,” she was finally able to grind out. “Just shut up.”
To Sam’s credit, he did. Alex glared at him and walked away back to her car. The inside was already overheated from the sun, so she started it up and ran the A/C.
Her grandmother couldn’t cook worth a damn. She once tried to make a hot dog for Alex using the microwave and ended up nuking it for over three minutes. It turned into a hunk of rubber.
She sold art on weekends, in her spare time. She used to make these little customized cartoon drawings that she’d sell at art fairs of people and their professions. Little cartoon teacher with a little cartoon desk and books and apple. She’d bring Alex-Annie-along with her to the fairs and let her sit on the floor of the booth and color with crayons.
She taught her letters by copying down a big capital letter and then transforming it into a picture. The A became an arrow. The B was a book. The C was a cat.
She hadn’t thought of her grandmother at all after Celia took her. She’d just walled it off. The time period before she’d been taken had just been a black hole. It was the only way to survive.
But after Jody had saved her, it started coming back. She’d resisted. There was nothing back there for her, why dwell on it?
The door opened and Alex started in surprise. It was Patience. Her eyes were red, but she looked happy.
“You ready to go?”
Alex turned to glance out the window. Sam was hovering next to his car. It made her regret that Jody had ever taught her manners.
She climbed back out of the car.
“You two have a safe drive back,” Sam said. “And if I don’t see you, have a good time at school, Patience. I know it wasn’t the most fun hunt. But call me if you need any help with your visions. I never got very good at mine, but I can try.”
“Thank you,” Patience said with so much sincerity that it made Alex’s teeth hurt. “Really. Yeah, it sucked, but at least we figured it out.”
“I hope you find Dean soon,” Alex added.
Sam nodded, a quick little jerk of his head as his lips pressed together into a thin line.
They each gave Sam a hug goodbye. He was surprisingly skinny. They each turned back to their respective cars, but Patience stopped suddenly.
“Hey, Sam?”
Sam turned back.
“Way back, you know, with the wraith?”
Sam nodded, though he clearly had no idea where she was going with this.
“Dean told me back then that hunting sucked. He said I should stay out, if I could be normal.”
Sam seemed a bit surprised at that. Alex was more than a little surprised herself.
Patience shrugged. “I’m just saying… maybe, when you get him back, maybe you guys could take a vacation or something. Find some normal for yourselves. Maybe he didn’t understand back when you went to college, but I think he might get it now.”
Sam looked absolutely floored. He swallowed. “Uh. Thanks.”
After they’d all finally climbed into their cars Alex watched as Sam pulled out and drove away.
“Do you mind if we take a little detour?”
Patience
Their trip east across the state took a few hours, still winding through farmlands. For a state so famous for cheese, she didn’t see all that many cows. She could recognize fields of corn and thought the shorter crops might be some kind of bean. Her only exposure to plants had been helping her grandmother with her herb garden. The biggest thing in her backyard had been a lone tomato plant.
The cemetery was small and neat. Patience had texted Sam for the grave plot and they’d wandered around a bit trying to figure out how to find it. It was a deep red stone, set into the ground.
Antonette Jones
1926 - 2012
Patience hung back for a few minutes as Alex knelt to place the bouquet they’d picked up from a gas station in front of the plaque.
She hated cemeteries, which unfailingly reminded her of her mother’s death and the horrible divide that opened up in her family immediately after. She hadn’t understood as a little kid why she suddenly couldn’t see her grandmother.
When Alex stood again Patience moved in next to her. “What was she like?”
“Italian,” Alex said with a grin. “Catholic as hell. Nice, to me, but I remember her calling the ladies at church ‘fat whores’ behind their backs.”
It surprised a laugh out of Patience. “My grandma was kind of like that, too. She’d tell me about her clients. Probably more than my mom and dad wanted me to know.”
“She lost so much,” Alex said. “I never met my grandfather, he died when my mom was just a kid. Then she lost my mom. She must have thought I died, too.”
What could Patience say to that?
So instead she went with deflection. “Hey, are we near the lake?”
“You mean Lake Michigan?”
“Yeah.”
Alex nodded. “Yeah, a couple blocks, I think.”
Patience nudged her shoulder. “C’mon. I’ve never seen a Great Lake. Let’s go.”
Back in the car Patience checked her phone and there ended up being a park nearby, so they headed there.
Her family had gone down to Savannah a few times when she was a kid and she’d seen the Atlantic Ocean then. Her dad had taken her along on a business trip to LA once and so a couple years ago she’d seen the Pacific.
Lake Michigan looked a lot like that, completely unlike any lake she’d ever seen before. She’d known that it was big, of course.
“You can’t even see the other side!” she exclaimed.
Alex laughed at her. “Duh.”
There was a beach. Neither of them had brought swimming suits along, but they took off their sandals and waded in. The water was shockingly cold.
Afterwards they sat at the top of the beach and watched the families. Some older kids were building elaborate sand castles.
“What’s that?” Alex asked.
Patience followed her gaze to the business card in her hand. She’d pulled it out of her pocket when she sat down because it dug into her hip weird, but hadn’t really noticed that she was playing with it. “Sam gave it to me.” She handed the card over.
“Mia Vallens,” Alex read. “Sam gave you a card for a therapist?”
“Apparently she lives in Madison. Sam thought maybe I could use someone local to talk to about all this stuff.”
“She knows about hunting?” Alex asked.
“Yeah,” Patience confirmed. “And get this: she’s a shapeshifter.”
“Well,” Alex said. “That’s… certainly something.”
Patience laughed.
“How does Sam even know a shapeshifter shrink?”
“Say that five times fast,” Patience joked. “And I have no idea. Not really sure I want to, you know?”
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a bit. Patience played around with the card.
She could see the appeal. She didn’t have anything against therapy. Her dad had sent her to talk to someone after her mom died and it had helped a lot.
She had enough to talk about, considering the past year. Her grandmother’s death, her psychic abilities. The fight with her dad and moving halfway across the country to Sioux Falls. Fighting off monsters.
Kaia’s death.
And maybe she would. But she realized that despite everything, she was handling it pretty well. She knew she had Jody to thank for a lot of that. The sheriff had taken her in, supported her, provided a sounding board for her choices without pressuring her at all. She’d needed to figure it out for herself and she couldn’t with her dad treating her like a kid.
But now she was also thinking that it was more than just Jody. Donna visited a few times and Patience loved the brash, funny woman. Claire had taken up hunting again, but while she’d been staying in Sioux Falls she’d gotten over whatever low-burning animosity she’d felt for Patience and they were almost friends.
And then, of course, there was Alex. She kept weird hours because of her nursing and classes, but she’d welcomed Patience in pretty quickly, even though it had been with her particular brand of sarcasm.
It suddenly seemed important that Alex understood what that had meant to her. “Hey, thanks for coming with me,” Patience said, before she could chicken out.
“I only did it because Jody was paying me,” Alex drawled.
Patience laughed, which made Alex crack up herself.
Going to college was going to be a new adventure. And after what she’d been through these past few days she thought she might finally be ready to tell her dad about it, see if they could fix things between them. But it helped to know.
Masterpost | Part One