Down Darker and Darker Stairs (1 of 5)
With traffic on Embarcadero behind him, Dean calls the registrar's office and says he works for a law firm he picked out of the San Francisco phone book not five minutes before, says that a "Samuel Winchester's applied for a job and lists Stanford as his current enrollment. It's just procedure, background checks, you know how it goes," and the woman on the other end of the phone sighs in agreement. He can hear her clicking away at a computer, hears her make a noise that only ever accompanies frowns.
"I'm sorry. Mr. Winchester was a student here, but he resigned his scholarship and transferred out four semesters ago. If you give me just one second," she says, and now Dean's not breathing. "Yes, we sent a transcript to the City College of San Francisco at that time."
Dean exhales, flirts a bit more with the woman, and hangs up, muttering, "I am so going to kill you when I track you down."
In the end, it's not that hard.
--
He gets a motel as far away from the water as he can without leaving Palo Alto; there are trees in the distance, some type of preserve a few miles away, and as Dean’s taking his duffel and weapons out of the Impala’s trunk, he hears howling travel through the air.
“Oh, you have got to be fucking with me,” he mutters, ignoring the slightly scandalised look of a woman passing, maybe a co-ed’s mother or grandmother here for whatever type of game the check-in clerk was talking about.
Dean knows the sound of those howls, knows what it means without having to look up at the sky to check the moon. Deeper and lower than regular wolves, longer and throatier than wild dogs, which means werewolves, just when he thought maybe he’d get the chance to stay in one night, clean the guns and sharpen the knives, take a long hot shower, actually get some sleep for once.
He sighs, drops his things in the motel room, and then packs up some guns loaded with silver-shot, tucks silver knives into his boots and pockets, and jumps back in his car, headed for the wolves.
--
There’s a sign in the dirt parking lot, wooden posts with a wooden board nailed across them, ‘Arastradero Preserve’ carved in to the board and highlighted in yellow paint. Dean stops the car, shuts the Impala off, and gets out, looking at the tree-covered hills blocking the sky from view. His spine tingles, instinct after all these years, and he drops his keys in his back pocket, pulls his collar up against his neck, and sets off into the trees.
It’s dark and quiet, except when a howl starts the pack off or there’s the scream of a frightened animal. He’s getting closer, has to take it slow, climbs up a few trees when his neck itches like something’s watching him, but the next time one of the wolves howls, he’s close enough to grimace at the ear-grating noise. Another howl, then, but this one’s cut off mid-sound, and Dean freezes, because that’s just not normal.
Dean crouches, then moves forward cautiously, one foot in front of the other, careful where he’s stepping. He’s looking around, guns in his hands, and when he looks in front of him again, there’s a pair of gleaming golden eyes staring back at him from across a worn path in the dirt. He doesn’t even have enough time to think before the wolf’s leaping and Dean’s gun is recoiling in his hand. The wolf collapses in the middle of the path, dropped like a stone and not moving, but the shot’s startled the other wolves and the entire pack starts howling.
He moves, not bothering to be quiet this time, because the pack will find the fallen wolf and go blood-crazed. From the sound of the howls canting up into the night sky, there’s a good dozen of them, maybe more. All Dean can think is that this is definitely not good, and at this rate, he’ll be lucky to get out of the preserve without running across another one of the pack.
He gets about a mile before the wolves’ cries change. They’d hit crazed a minute after Dean had started running, but now they’re yipping and calling, communicating with each other to try and track down their packmate’s killer, and from the sounds of things, they’re circling around Dean, blocking off his escape, travelling over the terrain on four feet easier than Dean is on two.
Dean looks up, finds a tree and climbs it, pulls out his guns and knives and gets ready to shoot the first thing that moves.
Nothing, but then he hears a howl close to him, maybe a few yards away, and tenses, points his gun in the direction of the noise. One wolf comes out of the brush and Dean aims, pulls the trigger, gets a headshot that leaves the wolf dead. The noise, though, attracts the rest of the pack, and as much as Dean would love to just kill the rest of them off, something about this is different.
The pack’s circling the tree he’s in, but they keep looking around, as if they’re expecting someone or something else. On top of that, there’s only seven, and he could’ve sworn he heard more before.
He shoots again, and then there’s a blur of movement as two of the remaining six wolves break off from the tree and start howling as they crash into the brush. Dean waits, watches the four wolves around his tree put their tails down, start whimpering. One of the wolves out-of-sight squeals and the other, Dean thinks, is cut off mid-howl.
Dean’s worried now, because someone else is hunting the wolves, or something, and it’s never good to encroach on another hunter’s territory, really never good to be unprepared for another supernatural monster. He’s just about ready to shoot the remaining four wolves dead when there’s a rustle in the brush and the wolves start to whine in what sounds like terror.
A person comes walking up, and Dean’s about ready to shout, tell him to leave, get out, but the person drops to his knees, looks at the wolves, and snarls, as clear a challenge as a person could ever make. Dean can only watch in disbelief as the four wolves tackle, leaping as one, and the person rolls, sliding out of the way, leaving a knife in his wake that slits one of the wolves’ throat.
The other three go crazy, and they attack the man until all Dean can see is fur flying every which way, hints of skin and glances of teeth, but one wolf ends up skidding away from the melee, dead, another gets thrown into a tree and slides down without a noise, missing part of its mouth, and the man fights the last wolf, ends up on it’s back, straddling the beast, yanking up it’s head and drawing a knife across it’s throat.
It doesn’t look like he’s even out of breath, when the man stands, wipes the blood off of his knife and on to the wolf’s fur.
“It’s safe to come down now, Dean,” the man calls out, looking straight up at Dean, and Dean’s caught in the manic, feral green cat’s-eyes staring at him.
“Sam,” he murmurs, then calls out, “Sam?” as he jumps down, hits the ground with a muttered “Oof” and tucks the guns into his jeans, stepping warily around the wolves. He gets a good look at Sam, the blood staining Sam’s skin and clothes, the glazed look in Sam’s eyes, the way Sam’s foot is tapping against the ground like he has to be moving now, and can’t stop the words from tumbling out. “Jesus, Sam, you’re. Damn it, you should know better than that! Did any of them bite you?”
The look Sam gives him in return could almost be classified as lazy, if it didn’t seem so hyped up, so tense and strung out.
“I’m fine, fine, fine,” Sam says, then starts laughing. “You owe me, though. Had two dozen wolves out here, none of them new, and they almost had you. You got two, I got twenty-two, how’s that for numbers?”
Dean frowns, steps closer to Sam, studies the glitter in Sam’s eyes and the way those pupils are darting around, every which way, as if Sam’s got to keep moving, got to keep watching out for potential threats.
“I got three,” Dean says, “one on the path, two here.”
Sam shakes his head, grins with his lips pressed together, steps closer. “Didn’t finish the kill, Dean, tsk, tsk. The one on the path was still alive, still breathing, ready to shift and heal and start all over,” Sam says, tone half speech, half song, tracing out rhythms and a strange, discordant melody.
“Sam,” Dean begins, but then Sam cocks his head and holds up one finger for silence.
Dean listens, frowns, opens his mouth, but then he hears it, hears something ruffling further away. He takes out his gun and looks at Sam, feels the blood drain from his face. Sam’s smiling, teeth bright in the darkness, and he’s nodding, bloodstained curls bouncing around his head.
“Something else, something else to find and hunt, you stay here,” Sam murmurs, and then he’s gone.
Gone, just like that.
Dean’s heart is hammering in his chest as shivers run down his spine. The way Sam was moving, the way he left, so quickly, so silently, disappearing into the darkness. It’s not natural, not at all right, and it’s worrying. He wants to go after Sam, try to keep his little brother safe, but if Sam was telling the truth and he did hunt the pack down, twenty-two wolves just with a knife, then maybe Dean should listen, stay here. He thinks about it for a minute, long seconds of silence, just that faint hint of movement wafting like smoke through the trees, and then he takes off, trying to track his brother by the blood still falling off of Sam’s clothes.
It’s an impossible task. Dean hadn’t grabbed a flashlight before running out here, depending on the light from the full moon, but the thin strands of silver filtering through the trees aren’t enough to see blood drops on leaves or against dirt. Still, Dean tracks his brother using everything John’s taught him over the years and ends up nearly tripping over Sam, his brother crouched behind a row of wild bushes, looking into a small, natural clearing.
Before Dean can look at what Sam’s watching, Sam’s hand is over his mouth, Sam’s lips close to his ear.
“Stay here, Dean,” Sam murmurs under his breath, and pushes Dean down to a kneeling position, letting Dean shift to get rocks out from under his knees but not letting Dean stand up. Sam presses one finger to Dean’s lips, says, “Shhh,” and darts into the clearing.
Dean’s eyes follow, see a man in the break between the trees who looks old, ancient, standing over the body of a fallen wolf. The wolf’s throat was slit, Dean can see the blood still gleaming on the fur, and the man, a Native American, looks up from the carcass to Sam, who’s tapping one foot and humming.
The man steps toward Sam, who skitters out of the way, shaking his head.
“No, no, no,” Sam says, then sings with a smile on his face. “No, no, no. Can’t take me, I’m not dead, not me, not dead, no, no, Kandjidji.”
The man pauses, lets his eyes follow Sam’s laughing movements, and asks, “Then why are you here, young hunter?”
“Heard you, yes, I heard you,” Sam says, tossing his knife in the air once, catching it when it comes down blade-first. “Heard you over the kelpies, noisy things,” he adds, as if in confidence. “Thought you were the bear-spirit, I did, but no, just the chief.”
Dean has no idea what’s going on, but hearing Sam talk in that sing-song tone sends shivers up and down his spine. It almost sounds like Sam’s possessed, and the look in his eyes, the way he’s holding himself, only add to that, especially when Sam grinds his teeth for a split-second, stops, does it again.
“They are your kill,” the man finally says, and steps away from the dead wolf. “Your claim was first.”
Sam laughs, tilts his head back and laughs, the noise spiralling straight up into the air. It goes on for a few seconds, but then Sam stops, like flicking a switch, and he looks straight at the man, says, “I rescind my claim,” as if he’s finally lucid, finally making sense.
Dean stares, takes in the moment of absolute stillness that creeps over Sam’s body, swallows hard at the intensity he sees in Sam’s eyes, but then the moment passes and Sam’s laughing, eyes fragmented, muscles tensing, relaxing.
“Take them, take them, take them,” Sam says between laughs, and the man, the chief, nods once, disappears into the moonlight along with the carcass.
Dean doesn’t know whether it’s safe to move now or not, but then Sam’s turning, looking at him and saying, “Come out, come out, Dean. It’s safe, he’s gone.” The only problem is, Dean’s not sure if it really is safe, because Sam’s stroking his knife, caressing the blade without care. Still, this is Sam, and Dean has never had to worry about his safety from Sam, of all people, before.
He stands up, joins Sam in the clearing, and looks down to see blood covering the ground where the wolf had been lying. “Who was that?” Dean asks.
Sam leans close, Dean can’t help tensing, but all Sam does is whisper, “No telling secrets,” before spinning away and letting out a blood-curdling yell that Dean half-thinks is a shout of victory.
That, on top of everything about this situation, pisses Dean off. He moves to grab one of Sam’s arms, but Sam twirls out of the way, far too quickly and much too gracefully for his large body. “The hell is going on here, Sam?” Dean finally asks, voice loud and heated, pissed off and confused and worried, more than anything. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Sam says, grinning, showing Dean his teeth, making the patterns of dried blood on his face shift in the moonlight into lines and patterns that almost look painted on, not by-products of splatter. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. Think I’ll go home now.”
He starts to leave, and Dean reaches out after him, says without thinking, “Not without me,” and isn’t prepared for Sam to turn around, step closer to him.
Sam reaches out his empty hand, smears a path of blood down Dean’s forehead and nose, between his eyes. Sam studies him for a moment, head tilted to one side, and then smiles. “Okay, Dean. You drive.”
--
Dean follows Sam back to the Impala; he’s turned around and Sam seems to know where he’s going. They don’t see any more dead wolves along the way, and when Dean asks, all Sam will tell him is that they went to the island along with something called Kandjidji.
“Ka-what?” Dean asks, and misses what Sam said because they’ve come out into the parking lot much, much faster than Dean thought was possible.
“Dean, focus, focus,” Sam chides, shaking a finger at Dean, and Dean’s not sure whether he wants to slice that finger off or pay attention to the scolding, so he rolls his eyes and unlocks the Impala’s trunk, takes out a couple towels.
He throws them Sam, who catches them both without any trouble, and says, “You need to clean up before I’m letting you sit in my car, dude.”
Sam laughs, takes off his shirt and rubs one towel over his hair after he shakes his head, sending blood drops flying off like water.
Dean takes the opportunity to study his brother’s torso, narrowing his eyes at what he sees. Sam’s far too skinny, and there are scars scattered over the skin that Dean doesn’t remember, hasn’t ever seen before. One long, white line cuts across from one shoulder to the opposite hip, skin puckered, looking slightly raised, and Dean can’t help asking, “What’s that one from, Sam? Thought you were coming out here to go to school, not get in knife fights.”
“Wasn’t a knife fight,” Sam says with a grin, winding the towel up and using it to swat excess blood and fur off of his jeans and boots. “Things with fangs like to bite, Dean, and things with claws like to scratch, scratch, scratch. Had an itch, found a way to get rid of it.”
Dean takes one step towards Sam, who spins from where he’s standing to the passenger’s seat of the Impala, opening the door and laying the clean towel across the seat.
“Can I sit? Time to go home, Dean, time to go home and,” he stops, cracks his neck, sends one sharp bark of laughter up into the sky, “and clean, sleep, clean, clean, eat. Find a new hunt, go out tomorrow, all done tonight.”
“Yeah,” Dean murmurs, walking around to the other side of the car, stomach sinking, confused as fuck but unable to put any sort of question into words. “Get in, Sammy.”
Sam slides inside, movements fluid, graceful, almost as if Sam’s boneless. Dean bites his lip, seeing it, seeing Sam move with a precise dance that he’s never seen another human possess, and then gets behind the wheel.
“Downtown, where all the lights are bright,” Sam says, leaning his head back, closing his eyes as one foot starts tapping out a manic rhythm on the floor, matched by one of Sam’s hands on his thigh. “Traffic in the city, don’t hang around. Chinatown, smells like fish and cracked plaster.”
Dean starts the car, sits there for a minute, then turns out of the preserve’s parking lot and heads for San Francisco.
--
It takes an hour and a half, reminding Dean just how much he hates driving in or around big cities. Give him the open road, no one around for miles, and he’s happy, but this many people around, packed so tightly together, it makes him itchy, makes him long for some backwater town in Nebraska with suspicious locals and one kind of beer on tap at the only roadhouse for sixty miles.
San Francisco’s bright, loud, almost dizzying to look at, but, then again, the car’s silent save for the non-stop tapping of Sam’s fingers and feet, his brother’s teeth grinding, and some weird, haunting melody Sam hums half-heartedly for a few miles, stops, and then goes back to minutes later.
Dean opens his mouth to ask where he’s going once the signs on the 101 start coming closer and closer together, but Sam beats him to it, tells him to turn right, left, left, right, go straight, turn around, cut through an alley, until Dean’s ready to ask if Sam’s just leading him around in circles. Still, he makes one more turn and finds himself in the hustle and bustle of Chinatown.
“Stockton Street,” Sam says, sitting up straight, stopping all of his movement save for the teeth grinding between words. “Less tourists, more fish. Park up there.”
Bewildered by the sudden change in Sam’s tone and posture, Dean does as directed. As soon as the Impala shuts off, Sam’s up and out of the car, darting off down a narrow side street. Dean yells, and Sam comes back, head poking out from around the corner of a building.
“Hurry, hurry,” Sam calls out, and Dean grabs a gun, a knife, and follows Sam.
It’s another maze of twists and turns that leave Dean breathless, trying to keep up with his brother’s longer, almost frenzied strides, and when Sam finally stops in front of a small door, Dean nearly barrels into his back.
“Fuck, warn a guy, would ya?” Dean mutters. He doesn’t think he spoke loud enough for Sam to hear, but Sam starts laughing, doesn’t even stop when the door opens and a man stares at them both, hands on hips.
Dean’s first thought is that this guy must be the actor who played Pai Mei in Kill Bill, Volume Two, because he’s got the white hair, the long moustache, the beady eyes, but his face is dipped and shadowed with pock marks, and he’s looking at Sam with some emotion between worry and disappointment.
“Bù zuò shēng,” the man says. Dean raises an eyebrow, has no clue what that means and doesn’t think he would have caught it if the man wasn’t speaking slowly, like Sam’s a child. Sam quiets down, though, calms down and holds his body stiffly, muscles rigid, as he bows.
The two start to talk in what Dean guesses is some Chinese dialect, the man asking questions and seeming to rein Sam in when Sam’s answers start going on for too long. The man reaches inside at one point during the conversation, pushes a different, clean t-shirt at Sam, helps Sam get his arms inside the sleeves. Eventually Sam says Dean’s name, and Dean tilts his head, elbows his way closer, looks the man over.
The pockmarks on the man’s face don’t extend down his neck, but there’s a small tattoo on one side of the man’s neck. The man’s arms are covered by his long shirt, but his hands look brown and callused, might suggest the man’s used to working.
“Dean,” the man says, and raises one eyebrow.
“Yes,” Dean replies. “Sam’s brother. Who are you?”
The man smiles, shows his teeth, and says something to Sam, too quick for Dean to pick out the separate syllables, much less pick apart individual words. Whatever he says, it makes Sam laugh, makes Sam step back and start twirling in the middle of the street, hands outstretched.
“You will call me Jianjun,” the man says, and then shuts the door.
“Okay,” Dean mutters, then turns to Sam, rolls his eyes when he sees Sam leaning against the wall across the alleyway and watching him. “Where to now?” Dean asks.
Sam grins, licks his teeth, and says, “Hungry?”
--
Dean follows Sam back to Stockton Street, stays on the sidewalk as Sam darts into some kind of herbal store and leans over the counter, kisses the girl behind it on the forehead. Dean’s not close enough to hear what they’re saying, doesn’t know if they’re speaking in English or whatever other language it seems Sam knows, but he sees the girl laugh and hand Sam a couple small brown paper bags.
Sam leans over the counter again, kisses her once on each cheek, and the girl reaches up, ruffles her hand through Sam’s hair. Dean tenses, but when she sees her hand smeared with blood, she starts to laugh, kisses Sam on one eyelid, then the other, shaking her head with what Dean thinks might be affection.
Sam skips out of the store, turning and blowing the girl a kiss before he slides one hand down Dean’s upper arm and moving out of reach almost before Dean registers the touch.
“I thought you said something about food,” Dean calls out, and follows Sam down the street, in and out of people who don’t give Sam a second look, as weird as he’s acting, but who frown when they see Dean, shopkeepers leaning out of their stores to watch as he walks by, men behind stalls keeping pierced eyes on Dean, as if he might go crazy and start shooting them all.
Sam stops at one of the stalls, bows again, exchanges some words with the man working, and the two carry on an easy conversation, the man taking Sam’s random muscle twitches and sharp, cutting laughter, in complete stride.
It only takes three minutes, then Sam’s hands, and Dean’s as well, are loaded with steaming cartons, and the man takes out two pairs of chopsticks, in paper sleeves, and offers them to Sam with a bow. Sam says something, it sets the man to chuckling, and leans down, takes them between his teeth with a solemn look.
“Dude, I,” Dean says, stopping, taken-aback, when the man behind the stall glares at him.
“C’mon, Dean,” Sam says, speaking around the chopsticks. “Home, home, time to eat.”
Sam starts moving, and Dean doesn’t spare a glance behind him as he follows Sam into an alleyway, trying hard not to think about how nuts all of this is, how exhausted it’s making him.
--
Sam leads Dean to a door set in the alley, in the back of a building that overlooks one of the quieter streets in this district. He kicks the door open and walks in, up a flight of rickety, narrow stairs. Dean raises an eyebrow, closes the door with his foot, sees that there’s no doorknob on the inside, no lock at all. Instead of asking, knowing he won’t get a straight answer right away, he follows Sam up the steps and through another doorway into a plain, sparse, one-room apartment.
There’s a small mattress in one corner, set right on the floor, covered in a pile of stained and worn blankets. Next to the mattress is a large cardboard box, closed, and a small oil lamp. The rest of the room is pretty plain, except for a small wooden table in the middle of the room, covered and surrounded by books and loose paper, and the stack of more books running the length of an entire wall. The walls, though, they’re what grab Dean’s attention immediately, enough so that he doesn’t notice right away when Sam plucks the take-away boxes from his arms.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, food forgotten as he walks toward one wall and just stares. There’s a map of San Francisco, pretty detailed, and then a larger one of the Bay Area, right next to an even larger one of the state of California. Pushpins litter all three maps, in different colours that Dean knows have to mean something. Around the maps, drifting across all four walls and even edging onto the two small windows overlooking the street, are notes of the kind that only crazy hunters, their father included, make. Notes in English and those Chinese characters that everyone and their brother has been getting tattoos of lately, sketches and words, copies from books, a few old pages that look as if they’re made out of rice paper or something equally fragile.
“Too much for one book,” Sam says, and Dean jumps, because he hadn’t heard Sam get close enough to whisper that in Dean’s ear, whisper and leave his breath moist on Dean’s skin. “Had to spread it out, can’t sit still long enough for one book. Food.”
By the time Dean’s turned around, drawn his eyes away from the walls, Sam’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, all the books that had been on top of the table stacked on the floor. Dean hadn’t heard those being moved, there really shouldn’t have been enough time to move all of them and set the cartons on the table, open them, set out two pairs of chopsticks. As Dean’s moving across the room, floorboards creaking underneath him, he’s wondering if he’d been staring at the walls for longer than he’d thought or if he’s going crazy.
“Food time,” Sam says, grinning up at Dean. “Sit and eat, eat and sit, sit, sit.”
Dean sinks to his knees, and picks up the pair of chopsticks, grabs a carton of what smells like beef, and digs in.
--
The food’s good, almost all gone. Dean doesn’t remember eating it, but Sam’s been holding one carton the entire time, taking small bites here and there, mostly just staring at Dean and chewing on his own lips as much as he’d been chewing on whatever vegetables were in the carton.
Dean sets the chopsticks down, shifts and stretches out, and says, “So this is where you live, huh, Sam? Can’t say I’ve seen much worse. What about school? Stanford?”
Sam laughs, sets his carton down and then flops backwards, legs still crossed, puts his hands under his head and lays there, staring up at the ceiling. “Too expensive,” he says. “Didn’t like it. Transferred and didn’t like it. Dropped out, started hunting.”
The blood running in Dean’s veins turns cold and he leans around the table, looks at Sam. “You’ve been hunting?”
“Never come to California, do you? Never hear anything about California, no sea of red and sky of grey, never here, never hear anything.”
Hearing Sam quote Zeppelin lyrics makes Dean’s head spin, because Sam never liked Zeppelin, bitched about having to listen the band over and over when it was Dean’s turn to pick the music and John wouldn’t put up with any more Metallica.
Zeppelin lyrics, the run-down apartment, the walls covered in research, the strange gleam in Sam’s eyes and the way his brother wrestled werewolves with nothing more than a knife, the way Sam speaks another language and knows people who laugh when they see Sam covered in blood.
Put all together, it makes Dean’s head spin, makes his stomach ache under the food he’s just eaten, makes his heart pound. Sam was supposed to be safe and sound down at Stanford, and instead, he’s been hunting, is covered with scars, looks and sounds as if he’s going completely ‘round the bend.
Before Dean can ask any questions, start a conversation, Sam’s kneeling next to him, moving, again, without sound, too fast for any kind of warning. Dean’s startled, holds one hand to his heart, racing out of control, and stays absolutely still as Sam licks a path down Dean’s face.
Sam’s tongue catches on something other than Dean’s skin, and Dean remembers the blood Sam trailed there, can’t believe Sam let him go out with blood on his face like some kind of lunatic. It distracts him from the wet heat on his face, the glitter behind Sam’s eyes, and the way one of Sam’s hands is pressing finger-shaped bruises into his shoulder.
Dean stays stock-still when Sam pulls back, licks his lips, and grins wide and bright, looking for a moment like he did when he was five, fascinated by his first real winter in New Hampshire.
“Time to sleep,” Sam says. “More time for hunting later. You sleep,” and manhandles Dean to the mattress.
Dean tries to protest, but Sam piles blankets on top of him and pushes him into the mattress. For all that it looked old and stained, it curves to fit Dean’s body, cradles him and pulls him in, and Dean’s suddenly tired, confusion and a full belly dragging him towards sleep.
“Sleep, sleep, rest,” Sam says, and Dean falls asleep to the shrill sound of Sam’s laughter and the smell of Sam, sunk deep into pillows and blankets.
Part Two