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Chapter Text

"Take cover!"

Dad was screaming at them, and for half a thought it was just like a war movie. Dad made Seagal and Stallone sound like prancing pansies when he was laying out plans, recounting a kill, or ordering his sons around in the field, but this, that scream, Sam had never heard outside the theater. It was the sound of a brave man panicking.

Sam stumbled as he sprinted after his brother to the rusty horse trailer hitched to Dad's pickup, cursing his gangly limbs as Dean raced nimbly over the rutted field, shotgun clutched picture-perfect across his chest. The Big Birds above them paused in their shrieking, and at the silence, Sam flinched to the ground. Two had broken from the flock and were streaking down at them, too close, too fast. Sam raised his own shotgun and fired at the nearest shape. His shot went wide. The bird circled around, and Dad's tough hand flung Sam to the dirt just as the other bird dove five feet above him, claws extended and a sneer on its apelike face. Sam felt his shoulder shuddering, and Dad's hand shuddering right back.

There were too many birds. Dad yanked Sam to his feet like he was half his height and shoved him ahead to the trailer where Dean was crouching already, knuckles white around the shotgun's forestock. Dean fired, sending iron shrapnel hissing overhead. Sam dove for the trailer as Dad shoved him ahead. He hit the steel floor hard and Dean slammed the door. Dad raced for the cab.

The hunt had fallen apart.

Big Birds had first been sighted in Texas in1976, then disappeared, likely taken down by some hunter. He'd apparently missed a few, because reports of similar creatures started popping up twenty years later in Kansas and Wyoming. They appeared at night, singly, variously described with a five- to twenty-foot wingspan and the face of a chimp, a red-eyed woman, or a vampire bat. Twenty-two solid citizens had confessed to seeing the creatures, and five middle-aged men had dropped dead of heart attacks outdoors at night. Dad and Dean had pegged it as a low-risk hunt—low risk enough to take Sam on. Cryptids rarely died any harder than natural animals. A head-shot with cold iron never hurt, but chupacabras and skunk apes went down with ordinary buckshot and bloodloss.

The Big Birds were roosting in an abandoned hay barn just outside of town. Dad had had Sam and Dean ring the decaying timber frame with twenty gallons of diesel and set it alight. He'd boosted an old horse trailer and brought his truck so they'd have some shooting cover in case any survived. An aerial enemy demanded a steel roof, and they could shoot out through the trailer windows.

The building had gone up beautifully, and just as the flames began to reach the roof, a hole had appeared in the corrugated steel and perhaps fifty Big Birds, heavy-headed, with piercing voices and long talons, had streamed into the sky, terrified and enraged. As the birds struck up their doom chorus, it had occurred to Sam that perhaps the men dead of heart attacks had had more than heart disease to blame.

They were too frightening for what they were.

The bloody tears in the back of Dean's jacket showed that at least some of their fear was justified. But not—Sam could barely think it—Dad, panicking.

"Load me up, Twig Boy!" Dean showed Sam a manic grin and a box of ammo. Sam swapped his own 12-gauge for Dean's empty and shoved seven down the magazine, his fingers fumbling and spilling shells. Dean fired three times out the window, and swore. There was no wounded keen from the birds outside. "Switch," Dean barked, thrusting the gun in Sam's face. Sam held up the loaded shotgun and Dean yanked it from his grip to fire again, and miss again.

Dean was a crack shot, but his hands were shaking.

Claws rattled on the roof and a talon and an angry face lunged through the shallow window. Dean recoiled, leaping back to stagger against the opposite wall of the trailer, and Sam popped up to fire, shells spilling from the open magazine, just as the bird withdrew.

The truck made a hoarse rasp. Dean was shaking, Sam was terrified, Dad was panicking, and the truck was out of commission. Sam frantically gathered up shells and stuffed them back down the magazine, pouring a couple back out as he realized he had loaded them backwards in his haste.

"The birds took the truck out?" Sam demanded. "They're that smart, they took the truck out?"

"I gotta cover Dad," Dean panted, eyes wild. "Stay in the trailer, cover me from inside—"

"No!" Sam grabbed Dean's jacket collar and twisted it. "They'll—you don't have enough ammo, they'll dive right through you. There's too many!"

"Dad needs me!" Dean insisted, ripping Sam's grip loose.

Another bird showed its face at the window, perching on the lower rim. Dean shot it, and a few balls of shot struck a girder and boomed and rattled inside the trailer.

"Sam, don't be stupid!" Dean grabbed the trailer latch. "If Dad can't fix the truck, we can't retreat. And the hunt turns into Jeepers Creepers II." Sam scrambled to his feet and jammed himself between Dean and the door. "Back off," Dean snapped.

Sam braced his legs against the trailer wall. "I'm covering you."

Dean crouched, wrapped his free arm around Sam's narrow waist, and slammed him to the steel floor, a pile of knees and elbows. "You stay here!" Dean snarled, "where it's safe! You stay here and hide 'till we come back and get you!"

The birds were screaming louder and louder, circling the trailer. The truck rasped again. Dean shuddered, swept a handful of shells off the floor, and stuffed them into Sam's jacket pocket. Dean was going to leave, Sam knew. Dean was going to die.

Sam clawed at Dean's coat, latching his fingers in his collar and making his heavier brother stagger. "No!" he cried, as Dean struggled to pry him loose. "No! No, no, no, no, Dean, no!"

A bird clattered on the trailer and perched at the window, ape-face hunched low and eager as it began to squeeze its way in. Sam's heart clogged his throat. He wrapped his arm around Dean's neck and dropped, sending them both booming to the floor, Dean's shotgun trapped between them. The bird gaped its jaws and screamed down at them, the noise echoing between the steel walls. Sam's chest felt heavy, and his skin burned cold. He heard Dean make a faint gasp of pain, and as Sam stared helplessly up at the animal's knowing leering face, something vicious stirred in him: he wanted to hurt it, choke it, wrap his hands around its bulldog neck and squeeze it into silence, then longer, until its face purpled and all the fear he felt left him to shine back at him from the bird's red, bulging eyes.

A shot boomed outside, and the bird vanished in a puff of ragged feathers. The flock's chorus faltered, and in the brief silence, Sam heard faint strains of Reggae. Don't worry, Bobby McFerrin's overdubbed chorus gently reprimanded them, be happy.

"I hate this song," Dean muttered, dazed.

'Cause when you worry, your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down, so don't worry. Another shotgun blast gave weight to the message. It was deep and concussive.

"That a 10-gauge?" Dean wondered, rolling off Sam. As one, they collected their shotguns, chambered shells, and stood to scan the outside. There was a dirty white Subaru parked beside the trailer. It'd likely approached while the birds' racket had drowned out all other sound. The windows on one side were open, and the speakers poured out music full blast. A man in a football helmet and a Carhartt jacket was swinging a shotgun around at the sky. As they watched, he fired again, over the truck, absorbing the recoil without a flinch, and as the echoes died, they heard Dad's voice.

"I got two more in the trailer," Dad barked at the man. "Drop us off at South Bend."

The man nodded, never taking his eyes from the sky.

---

Dad had gotten in first, taking shotgun and covering the other Hunter with his service pistol. The Subaru had reversed in a cloud of dust to pull up at the trailer door. Dad and the stranger had covered Sam and Dean's dive for the back seat, and they left the horse trailer, Dad's truck, and the frustrated flock of Big Birds shrinking in the distance.

The stranger killed the tape deck after the third loop of nauseating Cold War optimism, and popped off his football helmet, banging it on the ceiling in the cramped space he filled. Sam saw a lot of sweaty brown hair, and Dad watching their rescuer intently. "Nice timing," Dad growled.

"Saw the smoke," the stranger explained. "I've been in town the last . . . week, for the same hunt you're on. I figured . . . why miss out on the action when I've already done all the work?" Sam didn't like how much he hesitated. Dad didn't look impressed, either; Dad never did.

"Are we going back for the truck, Sir?" Dean asked. Dean had been driving the old family sedan for the past two years since Dad had acquired the truck. Sam had grown somewhat attached to the shotgun seat and didn't relish the thought of being kicked to the back bench.

"Not now, Dean." Dean sighed quietly, then sat up in his seat, his mouth twisting in disgust as he ran his hand over the cream velour upholstery. He engaged the safety on his shotgun and laid it carefully in the footwell as Sam did likewise. Dean hated new cars, white cars, hatchbacks, and Reggae, but his disgust seemed to be losing out to his curiosity as he sized the stranger up. Sam could count the hunters Dean had met on one hand, and Sam himself had never seen anyone but Dad on a hunt; he wasn't sure if it was because Dad didn't trust anyone but Dean for backup, or because there just weren't that many Hunters out there. It wasn't a fun way to live.

"You came in prepared," Dad remarked to the stranger. "What do you know about these things?"

The stranger stiffened a bit at the question. "You mean generally, or historically, or—they, uh, they're gregarious. Smart, maybe telepathic—they get us. I think they feed on fear. From the witness reports it sounds like they're, uh, supernaturally terrifying."

"Mm," said Dad. Sam shivered at the memory of just minutes ago: Dad panicking; Sam and Dean nearly killing each-other out of fear for each-other on the floor of the trailer, wrestling with loaded weapons.

"So," said the stranger awkwardly, "are you taking a taxi to your, to wherever you're staying? Because if we meet up later, I can get you your weapons back."

Dad had not relaxed during any of the stranger's explanations. "We'll chance it," he said.

"It's not hunting season," the stranger protested. He turned his head to look at Dad, and Sam caught a hint of a sharp nose and anxious mud-colored eyes.

"Drop us at the nearest gas station and forget about us," Dad ordered him, deadly cold.

The stranger looked at him sharply, as though to retort, but clicked his mouth shut instead. "I think we should keep in contact," he told Dad with forced mildness. "I heard you've been chasing something for a long time," he continued, watching Dad with cautious darts of his head. "I've been chasing it, too."

Dad was stone. Dean hissed through his teeth and clenched his fists in his lap, and even Sam felt vicarious adrenaline flood his veins with eagerness. There was one thing, one white whale that had ever eluded Dad for more than a month: the Thing that Killed Mom.

Chapter Text

The stranger's name was Grisham. Surprisingly enough, after they'd walked back to the motel in South Bend and driven back to the apartment in Buffalo Fork, Wyoming, Dad had called Grisham and met with him while Sam was at school. Sam heard about it from Dean. They were working together to finish the hunt.

Supernaturally smart though they were, the birds were still flesh and blood, and they still needed a roost during the day. Dad and Dean spent nights out of the apartment more often than not, leaving Sam to bus home and fix himself a mess of chicken breast and boiled vegetables in silence. Sam found out about the end of the hunt after the fact: Dean and Dad had trooped in the door just before Sam sat down to his dinner, Dean grinning, Dad cracking a smug smile over Dean's shoulder, and recounted how they'd slowly infused butane into an abandoned grain silo and set off a massive fuel-air explosion, taking out the entire flock in a column of flame visible for miles in every direction. Grisham's idea. Dean had a new god.

Sam was just washing up after a dinner of frozen peas and ground beef when Dad and Dean swept into the apartment. "Get in the car, we're eating out," Dad announced, swiping his journal off the top of the refrigerator. Sam jumped and grabbed his school notebook. Even on a full stomach, no Winchester turned down free food.

They piled into the car and Dad drove a little ways across town to a bar and grill. A pretty decent bar and grill. Everything looked clean. The neon and beer signs in the windows were tacky, but cheerful, and the lights were dim for mood, not because half the bulbs were burnt out. The parking lot was full of late-model Japanese sedans. The walls had shelves and display frames for bits and bobs of memorabilia, like an Applebees but with a twist of Hard Rock Cafe.

Dad never splurged like this. Sam wondered what the occasion was.

They filed into the restaurant part, Sam sandwiched between Dad and Dean like usual, and Dad announced them to the host—there was a host!—as Grisham, party of four.

"It says here, party of three," said the host, checking the reservation list—they had a reservation!

"Now it's four," Dad told him.

The host smiled nervously and stepped back, scribbled a note in the margin, and led them to a corner boot where Grisham sat. Sam hadn't actually seen him since the ill-fated first assault on the Big Birds. In a civilized setting, without the stink of gun smoke and fear and without the football helmet, Sam saw he was fairly well-groomed for a hunter—clean-shaven, recently bathed and laundered, shirt cuffs free of blood-stains—hard to manage on the road. Grisham seemed to have taken a note from Pulp Fiction and married John Travolta's hair to Samuel L. Jackson's sideburns. It was kind of awesome. Sam figured as Hunters went, Grisham might be one of the saner ones.

Dean threw back his shoulders like Dad's training exercises had turned him into an actual Marine, and gave Grisham a restrained nod. The restraint was for the hero worship. Sam had a sudden flash of Wayne and Garth kow-towing to Alyce Cooper in Wayne's World 2.

Dad shook Grisham's hand and sat next to him on the booth. Sam and Dean piled in opposite. "Grisham, meet my son Sammy," Dad announced. "Sammy, Sam Grisham."

Sam's mouth spasmed as though he'd been force-fed a lemon. Grisham made a similar flicker of distaste, or maybe surprise. Sam was pretty sure he hadn't been included in the "party of three," and he imagined few professionals appreciated the unexpected addition of a kid just cutting his teeth on the job.

Sam folded himself into his corner of the booth and flipped open his notebook. Sixteen years of extended car rides and unannounced extracurricular field trips had trained him to write an English Lit essay any time, any place. His topic was Alfred Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," a poem commemorating a cavalry charge that had accomplished nothing but killing most of the cavalrymen, executed under bad orders. The poem moved him nearly to physical violence. Sam would settle, instead, for verbal violence—double-tap, decapitate, disembowel, dismember, burn, until all the careful craftsmanship, rosy nationalist ideology, and pretty visions of honor and duty had been weighed, dissected, and reduced to so much ash.

If Sam ever got drafted, he'd probably kill himself.

Dad and Grisham had spread some clippings and Xeroxes across the table and Dean sat at attention, alert for orders as he scanned the research across from him upside-down.

"You find any deaths between sunrise and sunset?" Dad asked.

Grisham shook his head. "That's no guarantee for a daylight approach, though."

"Till we tap out the news and records, nobody sets foot on the place," Dad replied. "This thing covers a lot of territory, and nobody's seen it, far as we know."

Sam shut them out and paged to the text of the poem, copied into the notebook by hand that afternoon.

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Killing something, whether it was a hyper-intelligent fanged forest beast or classic poetry, could be as dangerous for the careless as it was straight-forward for the prepared. Everything had a weakness; some weaknesses were just less obvious than others.

Literature had to be confronted first with a show of respect and understanding. Tennyson was a master of verse-craft. Sam sketched out a paragraph commending the way the dactyls of the stanzas mimicked the rhythm of hoof-beats and added tension and impetus to the piece, enhancing the drama when read aloud. Creative works that—Sam reached for a delicate term for propaganda—aspire to hold a place of authority in the cultural consciousness—need universal appeal. They must be easy to love. They need charisma, and "Light Brigade" had it.

Dean elbowed Sam. The waitress had arrived with an extra menu. Sam scanned the entrees, looking at Dad for guidance. Dad gave a small nod with a tilt toward Grisham, which Sam took to mean, "Go nuts, it's his dollar."

There were the usual All-American bar and grill classics—ribs and steak and hamburgers—but also vegetables. Salads. Sam couldn't even imagine what a sixteen-dollar salad might have in it, but he was going to find out.

When the waitress came back, Dad and Dean each got a burger, and Sam and Grisham ordered the same salad. There was an awkward moment when they almost had a staring contest over who should change their order, but Dad distracted Grisham by shoving everyone's water glasses out of the way so he could unfold a map of Wyoming. They traced roads with colored pencils until the food came.

You couldn't hunt until you knew the territory—how to get to the target—and the target's pattern of activity—where it came and went. It was a rare hunt that didn't force Dad and Dean to work out the whole history of an area long before they had any clue how to kill the monster when they found it. That search for context started with a map and a timeline.

Tennyson had written "Charge of the Light Brigade" during the Crimean War, trying to make sense of a news report of a disaster of leadership that had cost hundreds of British lives. It was human nature to make sense of the senseless and find purpose in tragedy; Tennyson, and the British public that had embraced the poem, simply could not accept that the cavalrymen's deaths had been for nothing. They'd found solace in a story of devotion and submission that reinforced Britain's support of its overseas military and the chain of command that was its backbone.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

In the face of disasters like this, the public needed some kind of compensatory dogma to keep dangerous thoughts at bay. Commanders made mistakes—that was fact—but the chain of command was all that separated a modern military from the Visigoths. If an officer gave a command and a soldier said no, well. Cats falling from the sky, panicked retreats, logistical breakdowns, pillaging, and dishonor. Only a master like Tennyson could make unquestioning obedience in the face of uninformed orders palatable to the civilian audience, let alone honorable, and Tennyson had come through for Britain. He had sold a message that was critical to the prosecution of an overseas war.

But whose business was the war?

Where was the nobility in a soldier putting not just his life, but also his soul—because many traditions called murder a mortal sin, and killing was a sure way to wound anyone's soul—in the hands of whichever commander chance had given him to obey? What was honorable in giving up his responsibility for his own actions, in surrendering his own agency as a human being? What precisely was honor made of, if human societies could just decide that killing people from other societies en masse was honorable?

What were duty and devotion in a world at war? Machines were dutiful. Dogs were devoted. Human beings were supposed to be more than that, and to sell out whatever higher purpose humanity might have for some social construct called "honor". . . it made Sam sick.

The food arrived. Dean tucked in, while Dad, Sam, and Grisham shoved their work a little aside and ate absently. Sam flipped a few pages ahead in his notebook and summarized his objections to honoring the Light Brigade's Noble Six-Hundred in bullet form, to be rephrased more diplomatically later.

The salad dressing tasted like strawberries and pepper. The lettuce was dark and fine, with interesting ruffly edges. There were tiny strips of rare steak in it. Sam was pretty sure Dean would be ragging on him about it for the whole meal if Grisham hadn't had one, too.

Grisham had passed Dean a manila folder of smudged Xeroxes. Dean, uncharacteristically focused, was nearly as absorbed in the information as he was in his cheeseburger. Ever since Dean had dropped out of high school he'd been his usual Dad-idolizing, gung-ho hunter, big-damn-hero self, cubed. Around another hunter—Pastor Jim, Uncle Bobby, and now Sam Grisham, apparently—he was even worse, like it wasn't just his own credibility on the line, but Dad's, too. He'd always watched Dad's back before his own.

Sam could admit to himself that his and Dad's world would probably collapse without Dean, but the corollary was that any time Dean wanted, he could bring their life on the hunt to a crashing halt. But Dean didn't. Dean didn't . . . want.

"Nice work," Grisham told Dean when he passed the folder back skimmed, underlined, and summarized. Dean's eyes lit up and he sort of preened without moving a muscle.

Grisham narrowed his eyes and jerked his chin at the wall décor, the framed concert posters, vintage band shirts, amplifiers, bent cymbals, and dented guitar cases. Some of the logos were from bands Sam had never heard of, and others from Lynrd Skynrd, George Thoroughgood, and Aerosmith. "I hear this place got the theme from one of the employees who used to be a roadie," Grisham remarked, watching Dean's eyes as they went bright and wide. "The bartender, I think?" There was a question in his tone, but Sam didn't get the sense Grisham was at all uncertain. "I hear he's good for a few stories."

"The bartender roadied for Skynrd?" Dean shot back, just to be clear. He glanced rapidly between Dad and Grisham. "Permission to visit the bar, sir?"

Dean sometimes treated the "sir" thing as a respectful joke, but Sam had never found it funny.

"Your card good?" Dad asked. Dean nodded. "Two drinks. I'll come get you."

Dean stood and hovered at the end of the booth. "Sammy, you got your card? Let's go."

Sam took a tight grip on his notebook, braced himself against his corner, and dug in. "I'm doing homework," he protested. He didn't want to perch on a barstool getting spilled beer on his essay draft while listening to stories about rock stars puking on themselves and watching women Grisham's age fawn all over his brother.

Sam had goals. To meet his goals, Sam had to do the homework. It was a statistical fact.

Dean swaggered off to the bar, tossing Sam a "Later, loser," and Dad and Grisham stacked their empty plates on Dean's abandoned place to make room for the map.

"Leach mining," Dad muttered, poring over a yellowed newspaper. "What's involved in that?"

Grisham shrugged with his lips. "Pouring a solvent in a hole in the ground and pumping it back out from another one," he explained.

"So a smaller footprint than the excavations," Dad mused.

"Smaller holes, more groundwater contamination."

"Wyoming has groundwater?"

Sam tuned them out and plotted the overthrow of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The essay was going to turn into a deconstruction of nationalism and military service as a whole if he wasn't careful, and that wouldn't do the job. For all he knew, Mr. Schwartz's son had been in the Gulf War. Come in too fast too hard, and Sam would get smacked down, but a softer, circuitous approach could wear down most reasonable people's defenses.

Comprehension and commendation, then critique. Sam remembered what hero worship felt like. He could give the devil its due: fulfill the assignment by demonstrating that he understood and appreciated the poem for its merits, then turn and pick it apart at the seams in a second thesis.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Sam allowed that Tennyson respected the evil and savagery of war, for all that he'd never fought in one, though the poetic language didn't really capture the tunnel-vision of real danger. Fear made the world go sharp like strobe-light, and shoved the mind down one of two tracks: instinct or training. There was no room for comparisons to Hell or personifying box canyons in the heat of the moment, only rote behavior and panic. Poetic imagery tended to grow the other way around: years later, the surviving cavalrymen might have pictured Hell as a temperate valley rimmed by hidden cannons and thick with the smell of powder-smoke and blood, echoing with thunder and the screams of men and horses.

Sam chewed on his pen as he wondered how much personal experience was safe to include in this thing. Make it too believable, and there could be trouble.

"If you're done with that, you can do a witness sheet," Dad interrupted, pushing a stack of clippings across the table to him.

"I'm working," Sam protested. He set his pen back to his paper and willed something useful to come out.

"You've been staring into space for the past five minutes," Dad said. "Do the witness sheet."

"I was thinking!" Sam's voice cracked. Grisham smirked, and Sam reddened.

"Do it and don't argue," Dad growled, leaning toward him. Dad twitched his head toward the peaceful family seated around a table nearby, a mom and a dad and a well-behaved brother and sister about Sam's age. Unless the cops were involved, Dad had far less objection to making an embarrassing public scene than Sam did. Sam subsided and stiffly picked up the clippings.

The news clippings were about university and EPA-sponsored research expeditions to the grounds of a defunct uranium mine, in which one or more of the visitors had died. Law enforcement didn't like it when papers included enough details for vigilantes like Dad to launch their own investigations, but all the papers did by leaving out names was make things take longer. Give Sam the name and department of the supervising professor and the number of grad students on the research team, and Sam would note it down on the witness sheet so Dad could find out the rest by knocking on doors and asking questions.

Sam had been doing witness sheets since he was ten; it was the kind of chore a ten-year-old could reliably do. No staring off into space involved here. The best way to ease the pain was to grit his teeth and plow through the tedium as fast as possible. He took his notes: names, departments, organizations, dates. It was automatic. He couldn't write too fast, though, or Dad wouldn't be able to read his handwriting and he'd have to do the whole thing over.

"Permission to visit the bar, sir?" Sam demanded as soon as he'd finished. Dad shot him a flat look. Sam glared right back, clutching his notebook. The booth was hemming him in.

"He could check into the oral history," Grisham cut in, digging around in the bag that sat next to him.

"No, he's done some good work," Dad said.

It was a witness sheet. Sam couldn't imagine a way to screw it up.

"Permission granted."

Sam scrambled out of the booth. Dad caught him by the elbow before he could disappear. "You got that new ID from Marcus?"

"Yessir," Sam replied. He'd known this wasn't a school field trip.

"One drink," Dad ordered, squeezing his arm.

Sam stiffened. "All due respect, sir," he hissed, "if I'm using poker money and a fake ID, what the heck difference does it make how much I drink?"

"You will respect yourself," Dad growled, "and you will respect my orders, or you will stay here where I can watch you. I'll expect four miles out of you tomorrow morning before school."

Sam clenched his notebook in his fist. His blood was pounding in his ears. He was trapped.

Grisham smiled at him, oozing schadenfreude. "How hard do you think it'd be to find out how much you drink, anyway?"

Dad relaxed and patted Sam's arm, rising from the booth to take over Sam's seat. He and Grisham shoved the rest of their research over the whole table. "Tell you what, son, you can drink all you want as long as you get those four miles done in the morning."

Sam swallowed. "Understood."

He was across the restaurant and into the bar area by the time he realized he'd left his pen behind.

There was no way he was going back for it. He'd just have to amuse himself until Dad and Dean finally got bored and drove him home.

Dean, perched at the bar, was listening rapt to a weathered, tattooed barkeep spinning out some long-practiced, well-loved anecdote for the little crowd on the bar-stools, never pausing as he worked. As though he had eyes in the back of his head, Dean twisted in his seat and grinned at Sam, waving him over. Sam shrugged back at him and headed for the pool table.

The table was clean and polished, but not very even. A few grade-school kids were shooting balls back and forth at random. Sam occupied one end and did some strike drills to work on his control, but with balls rushing around and two thirds of the table in use, he couldn't concentrate or practice his back-spin.

He put his cue back and dragged himself and his useless notebook over to the bar-stool Dean had saved for him. His ID passed inspection with barely a raised eyebrow; Sam was damn tall for fifteen, and Marcus was a guru of identity fraud.

Dean bumped his shoulder and Sam sighed deeply. "What he's having," Sam requested, pointing to Dean's beer. The barkeep spun and filled him a glass of lager from the tap, and Sam and Dean nursed their beers as they listened to the story of that time the crew had to hunt through every hole-in-the-wall in Denver to capture Skynrd's drummer and drag him back to the venue in time for the show.

Dean was in hog heaven. Sam shuffled through his notebook and consoled himself that his evening could have gone a lot worse.

 

Five days later, Dad, Dean, and Grisham were still working up the Wyoming hunt, and Sam had his usual A on his Tennyson essay. Mr. Schwartz had appreciated the "metacritical dialectic," which Sam thought was kind of a smartass thing to write on a tenth grade paper, no matter how brilliant the student. Mr. Schwartz was not, and would never be, reviewing avante garde literature for the New Yorker.

Grisham's car was in the lot below when Sam clumped up the stairs, and there were pieces of the new Wyoming hunt tacked up all over the living room wall. Dean was clipping an obituary from a stack of newspapers with a knife, Dad was gazing at the crude timeline, and Grisham was taking notes from a big beige book that looked like it never ought to have left the library: marriage records, Sam saw, glancing over his shoulder as he scurried toward the bedroom for some well-earned privacy.

As he detoured for the kitchen to snag a bagel for dinner, Grisham coughed from the table, and Dad's hand landed on his shoulder and spun him toward the stove and the pot of cooling spaghetti with meat sauce. Sam slumped. "Dish yourself up and take a seat," Dad commanded, "Then take a look at this Hippie manifesto and tell me what you find."

Grisham flicked a page of marriage records, swop-snap. "I've already been over that; he won't find anything new," he predicted.

Dad frowned. "My boy needs the experience, Sam. I'm not turning down a fresh pair of eyes."

Sammy—dammit, Sam—could list a dozen or two times Dad had refused his offer of a fresh pair of eyes, but he wasn't about to mouth off in front of another adult, not when Dad was—wonder of wonders—defending him. He took the little paperback book, noting a vanity publisher's label on the back cover, and slopped some drying noodles and the remainder of the sauce into Dean's oversized coffee mug. The three mismatched bowls they had were already dirty in the sink.

Grisham stared unabashed at him as he took a seat at the table, marking his clothes, his hair, his attitude, the way he pinned the book open without cracking the binding, the way he gulped down spaghetti after twirling it into neat little spools. "What?" Sam mouthed at him, and Grisham startled and looked back down at his notes.

The Hippie Manifesto—Dad was politically incorrect at the best of times, and some of it always rubbed off no matter how Sam watched himself—was "Biological, Environmental, and Social Impacts of Uranium Mining in Natrona County, Wyoming" and contained enough scientific jargon, left-handed spin, and barely restrained vitriol to make Sam's head whirl giddily. He dug one of his spiral notebooks out of his backpack and used the back page for notes, jotting down the characters of the sordid drama as he came to them. The villain of the story was Richard Shear and Shear Mineral Industries, who had raped—the author had used "arsenide ore tailings" and "raped from the living rock" in the same paragraph—a few acres of Rocky Mountain foothills, carrying on in spite of constant protests, ever-tightening Federal regulations, and Shear's own death of metastatic meningiosarcoma in 1974. Twenty-six property owners had been bought out or evicted, either by Shear Industries for access to their land or by the EPA when their land was deemed too hazardous for human habitation.

A piece of newspaper hit Sam in the head, a little roll like a cigarette, and Sam glared at Dean. Dean, on the floor with the antique newspapers, mimed toking a joint with one hand and made a Peace sign with the other. Sam rolled his eyes and reached for the dummy joint to pitch it back. It was gone.

Grisham had snagged the joint. Sam stared as he turned it over in his fingers, smiling faintly, and tucked it away in his coat pocket.

Other than Richard Shear going violently insane and dropping dead from the most bizarre cancer ever and the family refusing to put him in a textbook afterward, the history of the mine was riddled with shady activity and irrational rage. There was an old bachelor who lived downstream of the mine whom the author spoke of with fearful awe, like some magnificent lion defending his domain instead of a Kazinski wannabe threatening mine administrators, environmentalists, and EPA inspectors alike with an ass-full of buckshot. Employee turnover at the mine was high, and there'd been several industrial accidents—like the father of four crushed to death by a bucket of ore. Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself in the head in Shear's on-site office, just before the evening shift change and in full view of two thirds of the employees through the brightly lit picture window. Before succumbing to brain cancer, Shear had tried to slit his wrists with a box cutter in that same office.

It was too much to hope that all these people had diaries. Sam was leaning toward Shear or the stubborn homesteader, himself. "What's the victim profile?" he asked.

Dad, bent over a crude, bloodstained map of the mine, looked up. "Dean?"

"Meddling, trespassing kids," Dean supplied. He was folding some more paper as he studied a back-page article. "Hikers, spelunkers, climbers, surveyors, grad students. It's like a Bermuda Triangle—people tromp around in there all the time monitoring the radiation and looking for privacy; some of 'em die a hideous Rube Goldberg accidental death." Dean cut a new clipping. "Mean sonofabitch, too."

"What are you thinking, Sammy?" Dad asked.

Sam's guts twisted, like they never did before a pop quiz in a class. Dad could take the fun out of learning like no-one else on the planet. He wouldn't listen quietly to a few key points and pat Sam on the head for something clever or reasonable, no, he'd have half the case worked out already and as soon as Sam revealed his nascent theories, he'd list off all the facts he hadn't shared and explain why Sam was wrong. There was no way to win. Sam would always wind up looking like a rookie.

Sam held back a glare and glanced quickly between Dad, Dean, and Grisham—Dad demanding, Dean hopeful, Grisham . . . snide and contemptuous. Great. Sam looked down at his notes again for strength. "Possible spirits might be . . . Marcia Rourke, jealous suicide; Donald Barker, accident; Jim McKennagh; found dead with his head bashed in; Richard Shear, he was obsessed with the mine and got his blood all over the office, then died crazy; Bill Ford, he wasn't dead when the book was published, but I'd bet he died in his cabin and rotted there."

Sam swallowed and licked dry lips. Dad had been silent, and the silence was worse than the lectures, because at least when he yelled Sam had some idea what he was thinking.

Dad nodded, his poker face on. "Good start. Any other theories?"

Shit, Sam mouthed, bending back over the book. Other theories. That meant Dad was thinking something completely different; he hadn't pushed for details on any possible spirits, because he wanted something bigger. Sam pleaded at Dean with his eyes, but Dean was deliberately focused on his newsprint. Dad was still waiting; Grisham was still staring with slitted eyes like Sam was a vaccum cleaner salesman or a malingerer with a painfully fake cough. Sam combed his fingers through his hair, willing something, anything, to come to mind. "The mine, the mineral company had a lot of bad luck, pretty much from the beginning. So maybe it's, um . . . maybe something was already there, like, um, like a nature spirit, maybe something linked to . . . aspens?" Sam watched Dad from under his bangs. "There was a lot of deforestation. Or it could be a water spirit; the water was heavily contaminated by the leach operation after they abandoned the pit."

"What do you think about the more recent deaths?" Dad asked.

Sam let out a slow breath through his nose. "It's, um . . . if it's a nature spirit, it saw what happened with the mine, and now it's . . . scared. It's taking a proactive approach."

Dad smiled. Just a sliver, before he turned back to his map.

"Well?" Sam asked. "Did I get it right?"

Grisham tugged a page of note paper out of the middle of a pile on the table and spun it to face Sam without making eye contact. 3 sq mi (wide for spirit), it read. Ford, Bill. Shear, Richard. Rourke, Marcia. McKennagh, Jim: poss vengeful. Suicide, murder: poss poltergeist. Preexisting bad luck, possible curse (Plains, Euro-American witchcraft). Burial ground? Poss naiad, nymph. Poss god: Iktomi, other rock deity, forest deity. Sam deflated.

"No such thing as right, Sammy," Dad corrected him, already absorbed again in his maps. "Just whatever keeps you alive and gets the job done."

Sam sighed and looked up from Grisham's notes. Grisham was no longer studying him, but his face was tight as though he'd eaten something moldy.

Grisham was reading Sam's Tennyson essay. Sam saw the top of it peeping out behind the table, not even concealed. Heat flared in Sam's chest and tingled in his palms. He checked his backpack—it was unzipped, moved a foot from his chair, the papers neatly parted around the place where the essay had been. A muscle ticked in Grisham's cheek as he turned a page in his massive hands, and Sam, feeling violated, restrained himself from snatching it back. "Mr. Grisham," he hissed instead.

Grisham ignored him. He ignored him! Sam steeled himself—it didn't matter that the guy could snap him in half over his knee, he was still an adult, and adults were supposed to respect simple rules like "look at people when they're talking to you," and "don't snoop through someone else's belongings while they're in the room." "Mr. Grisham," Sam tried again, louder.

Grisham reached the end of a paragraph before he looked up, slowly. His lip was curling back a bit from his teeth, and his eyes were dark and sharp.

Sam felt sweat prickle all across his back. He checked the couch, where Dad was cross-checking maps, and the floor, where Dean was profiling victims. "Can I have that back, please," Sam forced out. "Sir."

His politeness made no dent in Grisham's contempt; the big man all-out sneered at him before glancing at Dad and Dean himself, flipping to the last page, and slowly passing the essay across the table to Sam, reading as he went.

Its pages rattled as Sam returned it to his backpack. When a second wad of paper struck his face, he jumped. "Dammit, Dean!"

"Language!" Dad barked.

Dean was grinning. Sam grabbed the bit of paper and examined it: a sort of cone with a twisted, pleated base and a trumpet's flare—a flower. Devil's Herb. What the heck.

Flower power, Dean mouthed at him from the floor.

Grisham snorted in laughter, watching Dean fondly with the side of his eyes. It was creepy.

Sam rested his head on his hands and bent again over the book.

 

When Sam returned to the apartment from school the next day—he'd had to finish his math homework under his desk during first period American History, since he'd spent the whole last night reading up on the sordid politics of 1960's uranium mining—he stopped short.

The front room stunk of sage.

If Sam enjoyed anything about Hunting, it was botany: he knew the ritual and medicinal uses of over three hundred and fifty trees and herbs and how to recognize them. Burning sage was the ritual equivalent of closing all your Windows while installing new software. It helped keep complicated, dangerous processes from spinning out of control.

Sam also knew how to recognize a hex bag—he'd been warned about them from so early an age that the first time he'd seen a baggie of pot, he'd run to find Dean, panicked that there was a witch at his middle school, and had since learned the difference. Hex bags were wrapped in something opaque, like human leather. They contained things like precious metals, teeth, poisonous plants, and carved fetishes. Before they were wrapped up, someone had to chant over them, just like Dean was doing right now, leaning over four piles of gewgaws and herbs on circles of buckskin, as Grisham looked on.

"Are you teaching Dean witchcraft?" Sam demanded, his voice cracking. Dean whipped a hand up, showing Sam the back of it—stuff it, Sammy, big boys are working here—and closed out the chant with something about an eclipse and a shroud. His pronunciation was appalling. Sam doubted he even knew all he was talking about.

Grisham lit something in an ash-tray that sparked and sent up fumes of gunsmoke and frankincense, and Dean tied up each bundle with three widdershins winds of a rough cord.

When the room was safe, Sam continued, "Does Dad know about this?"

"Relax, Sammy," said Dean, tossing a hex bag from hand to hand like a hacky-sack.

Sam scowled. He wanted Grisham gone and he wanted his name back.

"He knows," Grisham dismissed him. As Dean stood and made a move to pack away some of the piles of dried leaves and seeds that dotted the kitchen floor, Grisham waved him away and grabbed a nearby broom and dust pan. "Why don't you take a load off, teach your brother something cool? You did great today."

Dean beamed. "Thanks, man. Sammy, siddown. Storytime."

Sam grudgingly perched on the corner of the couch, and Dean launched in at a speed usually reserved for lectures on music history and picking up girls. "So Dad and Grisham figure the whole mine's cursed, unholy ground—not like, Klaatu Barata Nicto, skeletons fisting you in the throat cursed, just like, Country Music cursed. Everything that comes on the place turns to crap cursed."

"Or, 'the soil is radioactive, the economy's tanked, and I'm a womanizing ass' cursed," Sam interrupted.

"You saw the statistics, kid," Grisham rebuked from the kitchen.

"King Midas in Reverse cursed," Dean continued, grinning. "So we're gonna cast this, uh, anti-curse. All-purpose cleansing ritual, 'cause we got no clue what's actually out there. The hex bags represent the four directions and the four elements, so that's gonna get the Four Winds to crash the curse party whatever witch invited the forces of darkness around for, and send 'em packing with their Care Bear Stare."

Sam raised an eyebrow at Grisham, who nodded. "That's it in a nutshell," he confirmed, his eyes flicking to Dean before he looked down and grinned behind his hair at the dustpan of occult herbs.

"The four elements," Sam repeated, rolling a hex bag between his hands—he supposed it wasn't technically a hex bag, but didn't know what else to call it. Fetish? That just sounded gross outside an anthropology book. "So, those are what, air, water, earth, and fire?"

"Fire, air, earth, and rock," Dean corrected, handing Sam another hex bag that felt like it was full of gravel. "Sioux elements. Air is hard enough to put in a hex bag, turns out, but fire was supposed to be impossible."

Sam leaned forward, intrigued.

"Can't exactly seal it up in a bag," Dean explained. "Unless you got asbestos and an oxygen supply or something."

"This is fire?" Sam clarified, probing the little bundle of soft leather and grit. "Fire pow—Fire's power?"

Dean smirked wickedly. "You just gotta find something close enough to fire, happening really slowly. In this case . . . radioactivity!"

Sam dropped the hex bag with a crunch.

"Don't be a pussy," said Dean, retrieving the bag with his bare hands.

"What—no—don't touch that!" Sam snapped, hearing himself whine. He grabbed for the bag. Dean jumped away, hand in the air, and Sam lunged after him with his new reach. Dean crouched and closed in, hooking his sturdy leg under Sam's spindly one and toppling him to the hard floor. "Dean! Drop it!" Sam rolled and popped up, hair in his eyes. Dean was bent over laughing at him, and Sam decided to help the suffocation process along by punching him in the stomach.

"Hey!" Grisham barked.

Dean folded, and Sam swiped the hex bag and bank-shot it past Grisham's scowling face into the kitchen sink. Maybe the eighth-inch of stainless steel would be some protection—or maybe that was just lead.

"Jeez, you little bitch," Dean wheezed.

Grisham had set down the dustpan and was curling and uncurling his long fingers around the broom handle, the tendons of his hand rippling menacingly. Sam sidestepped until he was standing behind Dean.

"Don't freaking try to kill yourself!" Sam growled at Dean, jamming himself back into his corner of the ancient couch.

"It's barely radioactive, anyway," Dean panted as he settled himself on the opposite end. "It's just ore from the mine, not enriched uranium slugs or anything."

"You're a jerk," Sam grunted, and hooked his backpack with the toe of this shoe. "Don't talk to me, I'm doing school."

"How 'bout I just talk at you?"

Sam's lips tightened and he yanked his algebra book up onto the couch, unwilling to closet himself in the bedroom, not when Grisham was in the kitchen staring him down, waiting for him to flinch.

Chapter Text

Saturday, they headed north at dawn to plant the hex bags around the perimeter of the mine in Wyoming. Dad was driving, Dean had shotgun, and Sam was in the back, which he didn't mind today because if Dean hadn't ridden in the Impala with him and Dad, he'd be in Grisham's Subaru grinning like a puppy while Grisham taught him about automatic weapons and curse-breaking and Sandanista interrogation techniques, or whatever it was big badass action villains like Grisham got their degrees in.

Of course, it'd be a cold day in Phoenix before Dad trusted another hunter alone with one of his sons, no matter how well they clicked. (Dad was clicking. Sam felt ill.) And Dean wouldn't be caught dead touching Grisham's yuppie car.

Road reflectors on eight-foot steel poles metered the miles as they whipped along the highway, flashing in and out of tree-shadow, climbing. The morning sun sliced in.

Four two-way radios sat beside Sam on the bench seat, along with flares, canisters of salt, and circular iron chains just long enough for a lost hunter to curl up in to wait for rescue or daylight. Dad's idea. Sam appreciated the paranoia, but it didn't change the fact that they'd always be safer far away from the cursed uranium mine.

Sam got that Dad had a hero complex. He got that Dean had his own. But statistically, if they didn't seek out the horrors of the shadow world to show them who's boss, Dean and Dad would have 18 fewer broken bones between them, and five or so fewer concussions. It wasn't like Dad would let Dean take up motocross or bullriding. Hunting shouldn't be an exception.

Mile 23 slipped past. They side-wound up hills and forged through woods, past Keep Out, No Trespassing, and Danger Radiation Area. They stopped at a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate, just long enough for Dean to hop out of shotgun and grab the bolt cutters, then rumbled on, the sun slanting through the restless aspens to dapple the road in gold, Grisham's white hatchback creeping behind.

The mine's processing building was a broad cinderblock structure with a corrugated steel roof and three loading ramps off one end. Sam thought he could see the office where Richard Shear's mistress had shot herself, a broad window on the second story, but the glass was broken and boarded up. Smaller buildings, likely part of the leaching operation, dotted the weedy gravel lot it squatted in, like monopoly houses clustered beside a hotel. Everything was padlocked and boarded, and no pipes or machinery remained. Woods and hills pressed in on all sides.

"Dean, with me," Dad ordered when they parked in the shadow of one of the outbuildings, out of view from the driveway. "Sam—"

Sam's pulse jumped as he watched Grisham unfold from the Subaru. Dad wouldn't put Sam on a hunt with a stranger, never anywhere he couldn't watch for his inevitable screwups. Sam knew this. He tightened his fist around the door handle.

"Any law enforcement wants to tow the cars," Dad ordered, "stop them."

Sam nodded and relaxed. Dad reached across the seat, and Sam passed him the gear.

"Everyone check your radios," Dad called out, tossing one to Grisham over the back of the Impala. Grisham caught his neatly and grinned down at it, like it was familiar. Maybe he was some kind of ex-military action-villain, Sam mused. Sam dutifully clicked his own radio in his turn, in a long-practiced chorale of "testing" and "received" that Grisham inserted himself seamlessly into. The hunters divvied up the rest of the gear, then tromped off into the woods, Dad and Dean to the north, and Grisham to the south, leaving Sam alone in the cooling car and the silence.

Sam crawled over the front seat, hefted his backpack and his radio after himself, jammed his feet against the dashboard, and thumbed open The Fountainhead. He liked Ayn Rand; he figured he and she would have similar things to say to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The shadow of the roof was perched at the very crest of the steering wheel. Sam watched until the strip of sunlight contracted into a hot white ribbon and disappeared.

The radio crackled. "Sammy, report!" Dad commanded.

Sam hit talk, cutting out the static. "Car's still here, Sir," he drawled into his mike. The radio buzzed back for a bit, and Sam could imagine Dad's finger absently smashing the talk button as he tried to decide if Sam's tone was really that snotty, or if it was an artifact of the static. A nervous thrill ran down his spine and he gnawed on the side of his finger.

"Copy," Dad replied at last, slow with warning. "Grisham, report!"

There was another pause, before Grisham's voice filled the Impala, brisk and light, too brisk and too light. "Placed the South bag on the fence at thirteen-hundred. There's some topography in the way, so I'll be delayed getting back."

The radio stilled, and Sam realized he was waiting anxiously for Dad's voice in the car again. "Copy," Dad replied, mildly, and no—Sam was waiting for Dad's anger, Dad's furious roar that said no one lied to him and got away with it, no one looked at his sons without his permission, and he'd spent six months in Hell-on-Earth in '72 and wasn't above bringing that place back to US soil. Grisham's voice was a liar's voice. It had none of the tells Sam knew to look for, knew to hide, but hearing his report felt like hearing a lie—felt like telling a lie himself.

"We placed the North bag at twelve-fifteen," Dad reported, and Sam hugged his chest as Grisham replied, "Copy," and the airwaves went dead.

Sam picked up The Fountainhead again and got sweat from his fingers on the pages.

Grisham emerged from the woods just half an hour later.

Sam snatched up his radio, then froze. Dad and Dean were still a ways out, and Grisham was right there, stalking through the weeds and gravel, his huge chest heaving with each breath, like he was an engine or a mad bull. Sam could see Grisham's radio swinging from his belt.

The Impala's keys were with Dad, had stayed with him or Dean ever since Sam's disappearing stunt in Flagstaff, and Grisham was looming tall outside, his eyes dark under his heavy brow and his wind-blown hair screening his face.

Sam locked his door. He locked the right rear door, and as Grisham broke into a sprint to round the Impala, Sam dove across to the driver's side and locked both left-hand doors. Panting in the driver's seat, Sam watched Grisham's prowling bulk and pawed in the footwell for the Glock taped underneath.

He gripped ridged plastic, ripped it free, and tucked the gun between his knees, flipping off the safety by touch. Beyond the glass, Grisham stroked the chrome seal of the Impala's window, his face all in shadow as the sun beat down.

Sam aimed the gun slightly up into the door, where he figured Grisham's thigh might be, and rolled the window down a quarter inch. "What do you want?" he demanded. His voice was shrill.

Grisham slid his hand gently over the window frame again, and rubbed away a bit of dried mud with his thumb, his thumb that was half the width of Sam's own wrist. His breathing was deep and loud and fast. "You can relax, kid," Grisham promised, low and soft, sincere but for the cloying phantom taste in Sam's mouth, kind but for the electric claws latched in the back of Sam's neck. "I just want to talk," Grisham continued. Sam twisted sideways in the driver's seat, and felt behind him for the radio. Grisham shifted and bent to peer through the window. "You don't want your Dad and Dean to hear what I'm gonna say." Sam stilled. "You like keeping secrets," Grisham mused. "Might as well start your collection."

Sam worked spit into his mouth and kept his voice steady. "What did you want to talk about?"

Grisham fidgeted outside, the hand that caressed the car rising to card his hair away from his face. The silence dragged. Thoughts slotted together behind his eyes, heavy and jagged.

"Tennyson," Grisham said at last.

"The—my essay? The poem?" Sam tightened his right hand around the gun and found the radio with his left. If he clicked it, Grisham would hear on his own set; he'd be angry and smash through the windows.

"'Course, you think of the essay first; everything revolves around you," Grisham sneered. "That essay, that 'metacritical dialectic' crap. Where you said—you wrote about duty." Grisham leaned close again, resting one big palm against the glass of the back seat and the other on the windshield.

Sam met his shadowed eyes. The glass looked very, very thin.

"You said devotion to duty is betraying your own humanity. It's—it's prostituting one's own agency, that's what you said." Grisham's voice rose and shivered as the veins of his wrists rose and the car leaned away from his weight and the strength of his arms. "You thought of Dean when you wrote that. And you think Dad's some dumbass British general who can't give a crap to get his facts straight before he sends his soldiers off to die. But it's not true!" Grisham snarled, baring his white teeth like an animal. "You think like it's some great noble enterprise to break away, you think you can write your own game plan." It was a statement, Sam observed, not a question. Grisham bent his head and gave the car a shove that swayed the frame on the shocks. "Well, it can't work!" he roared. His shoulders heaved with each breath, and they spanned the side window. The glass before his face was growing fogged. "You can't write your own story, kid. A soldier might have to suffer some dumbass general's mistakes, but he knows who he's following. You go off on your own, you're just a puppet. You're an animal. Duty's what separates people from monsters, and you just want to throw it away like trash. Like you know better."

Sam backed across the seat, clutching his gun and his radio. Grisham pushed off the car with a sneer of disgust, sending it rocking again, and prowled around the hood to the opposite window.

"You're a real smart kid," Grisham breathed, his voice muffled through the glass. "You know that. Anyone'd think you got some bright future. Mr. Wannabe New Yorker Correspondent Schwartz sure does. Deep down, you know there's something wrong with that picture, but you wanna believe 'em, 'cause you can just believe whatever you want. You're normal. Dean's the freak. Dad's dragging the two of you on some quixotic revenge quest on a whim. A new American fairy tale."

Sam held the radio and, again, contemplated pushing the talk button. If he provoked Grisham, and then shot him, he'd need a headshot. If Grisham were even human. He imagined Grisham charging him, his chin smeared red with bloody froth and his reaching hand slick with it, ferocious and undeterred.

Grisham slapped his hand against the windshield, and Sam's thumb tightened reflexively on the button, silencing the faint fuzz of static that it received from the air, and clicking sharply on every other radio. Grisham didn't seem to notice. "Repeat what I just told you!" he demanded, bent over and pinning Sam with his sharp eyes.

"Fairy tale," Sam echoed, his lips fumbling. "You're saying . . . I . . ." He clutched the radio and rolled his shoulders, drawing a deep breath. "I'm a smartass bitch and I should be grateful Dean and Dad let me bask in their presence, that's what you're saying."

Grisham shuddered in rage, one fist rocking back as if of its own accord, before relaxing shakily to rest against the windshield. Frustration boiled off him, his lip curling and his hands clenching and stretching as he gazed through the glass at his prey. Grisham was gentle with the car, Sam realized. Sam took another deep breath and rechecked the locks.

"Yeah, that's actually pretty close," Grisham gritted out when he had himself under control. "You gotta start pulling your weight. Stop whining. Stop buying all those pity pep talks from Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Wyatt. You're never gonna get out."

Mr. Wyatt—Sam hadn't thought of him in over a year, though he remembered the essay he'd written him: honest to God my family killed a werewolf on my summer vacation, what do you make of that, and he recalled the man who'd mistaken jaded honesty for genius. But college—escape—had bounced around in Sam's skull ever since, faster and faster like a flubber ball.

The clip in the Glock just had lead bullets. If Grisham were some thing that could read minds, read pasts—some psychic vampire if there was such a thing—lead wasn't going to cut it. Sam studied Grisham's face—his eyes so thin with rage the whites and irises were shadowed, his skin unshaven but clear, his neck corded with muscle. Like human, but better: like a top-bloodline, performance show human, like a thing in a custom human chassis.

"The Hunt's for you," Grisham hissed. "Your dad's hunt, it's all 'cause of you. Little Sammy, gotta watch out for little Sammy before the dark things get him. Your dad could get out if it weren't for you. Dean—Dean could get out, Dean could be happy, but he's flushing his life down the toilet for you! Into the goddamn mouth of Hell—and you—" He broke off and took a heaving breath that sent his shoulders rolling. "You're not even human! You're only human in the ways that count, and the joke is? That's the worst part of you!"

Sam watched him, his blood pounding in his ears. Grisham knew indisputable things, facts, and dim shameful things, feelings. But he'd never thought that he—he knew he had to get out, that the underworld of blood and secrets delighted and nurtured all the parts of himself that he feared the most, but to think that he belonged to it, that he might be drawing it to him— "No," Sam protested. "No."

"Trust me," Grisham snarled.

Sam crept toward the window, his hands shaking. "You don't know that." He panted, his lungs burning. "Dad's a good hunter. He's hard-core. He'd know if I was a—something else. I touch salt and iron and silver, every freaking week I'm sharpening the silver knives, so I can't be. You don't know anything. You don't know anything about me, or how I—so you can just—"

"Humans can't tell holy water from tap water," Grisham interrupted, his cheek almost touching the glass.

Sam's mouth shut.

"You don't know how your mom died yet, do you?" Grisham's gaze steadied and his head tipped, a big cat cocking its ears, or something colder. His nostrils flared and his lips curled. "No, you're still thinking it was an ifrit or a salamander or freaking arson, broad daylight maybe."

Sam shook his head, slow and helpless.

"She died in your nursery." Grisham splayed his hand against the window, his head low, eyes burning. "On your six-month birthday, she died because of you. Like a lamb on a goddamn altar."

Dad's voice roared outside the car—muffled, but so clear and so welcome— "Back away from my son, now!"

Grisham flinched. Sam spun on the front seat and saw Dad advancing from the treeline, his service pistol cocked and trained, his stride steady and swift. "I was just talking," Grisham lied, the lie thick in his voice, thick like bile in Sam's throat. This time, Dad heard the lie. Dad rounded the car and herded Grisham toward the white hatchback.

"I trusted you, you sonofabitch," Dad snarled, as Grisham planted himself feet from his car. "I told you not to mess with my son—"

Grisham flung his arms wide and lowered his head like a bull. "We were just—"

"Hey, asshole!" Dean shouted from another quarter of the woods, his own Colt drawn. He shot.

Sam and Grisham jumped. It was a warning shot. Grisham deflated, wary. "Next one goes in your forehead," Dad warned him, deadly soft.

Grisham opened his mouth and lifted a foot, as if to advance or argue again, but at whatever he saw on Dad's face, he retreated stiffly, slipping into his car. As he looked out the windshield, away from Dad, his face lost its fury and twisted in distress.

Grisham's hatchback reversed, and Dad watched until it disappeared down the access road.

Sam unlocked the passenger door of the Impala. Dad opened it and leaned in, bracing his arm against the roof. "You hurt?" Dad demanded. "Did he ask you anything?"

Sam took a deep breath and shook his head.

"Asshole stole our radio," Dean groused in the silence.

Dad was pacing in the shade, fifty yards off. Dean was in the driver's seat, his arm flung over the seat back, and Sam still huddled in the passenger seat, his elbows on his knees and the Glock beside him.

"Good thinking with the talk button," Dean continued. "At first we thought you'd just clicked it by accident, but then we figured you were either sitting on it or doing it on purpose."

"I know how to use a freaking short-wave, Dean," Sam snapped.

"Geez, you're touchy." Dean took his arm off the seat back, and chewed on his lip. "Sammy, he didn't, uh—"

"It's Sam. There's no one around to confuse me with."

Dean groaned. "Sam. You were safe in the car the whole time, right? Like, he didn't—"

"No, he didn't try to touch me in a bad place. He just talked. He was mad and talking crazy, but he couldn't do anything."

"Yeah, that's good," Dean muttered. "Good." He picked at a scab on the back of his hand. "I'm sorry, man."

Sam waited, his fingers wrapped around his own face. He could imagine Grisham grabbing him like that, and squeezing until his bones broke and his eyeballs popped out.

"I can't believe I liked the guy," Dean said. "He just—he was cool, and he asked me stuff, like, he'd find things for me to do whenever him and Dad were working. But really—"

"So you didn't pick up on the raging psycho vibes," Sam grumbled.

Dean shook his head, staring out the window, dazed.

"He fooled Dad, too," Sam consoled him.

"Yeah." Dean turned aside to watch Dad where he strode back and forth in the woods, thinking loud enough to shake the hillside. "Holy shit. He did fool Dad, didn't he?"

"He hates me," Sam murmured. "He likes you and Dad, but he hates me."

"Must be from Bizarro-World, huh, Sammy?" Dean ruffled Sam's hair, until Sam shoved him off and slid to the edge of the seat, one leg raised in warning. "Freaking teacher's pet—ow! You bitch, you can't kick me in the face!"

Chapter Text

Dad stalked back to the car and opened the driver's side door. Dean sat at attention, like a retriever or—like he was prostituting his human agency for social approval. No. "We finish the hunt," Dad announced, and Sam held his tongue.

"Yessir."

"Sam, you're coming with us. Dean, move the car into reserved parking; that might buy us some time if any security comes around. We got two more bags to place, and we got to check Grisham's work."

"What if he comes back?" Sam asked softly. "Sabotages the car, follows us out?"

"He has a gun with him," Dad said. "If he was going to—Dean, you see him again, you shoot to kill, understand? He knows better than to come around, but if he does, don't let him get close."

He'd had a gun, Sam thought. He'd been so angry he'd rocked the car with an unconscious shove, and he'd had a gun the whole time.

"Radios?" Dean asked.

"Leave 'em."

Sam got to see a real life hex bag planted for the first time. Dean scuffed a hole in the dirt at the fenceline with the toe of his boot, dropped the bag in, and kicked leaves and twigs on top. Later, on the way to the South end of the mine property, they startled a rattlesnake, which Dad didn't let Dean shoot. Sam startled at every rustle and snap of leaves. Sometimes he would turn toward a noise, and when he turned back, would find Dad facing the same direction.

The sun dropped low.

Walking the South fence, they discovered Grisham's hex bag tied to the base of the chain link. Dean checked the binding, but the seal looked intact, same as when he'd knotted it. Without breaking it open and in the process breaking its power, that was as sure as they'd get that Grisham hadn't sabotaged the entire hunt.

The West end, the site of the last bag, was exposed to the brightest of the twilight, though Dad and Dean still waved their flashlights over the low-hanging branches and Sam peered peevishly into the gloom, wishing for his own. The old pit mine was in the way, from before the industry had switched to leach extraction, so they had to skirt it—and maybe Sam was some kind of hybrid freak, because he felt more than cold in the breeze that stirred with nightfall. Before the chill could sink past his skin and into his mind, they broke through the edge of the woods and Sam caught his first real view of the old excavations.

He'd thought the environmental impact reports he'd read had exaggerated the scale of the dig; he'd seen a few gravel quarries as he'd cris-crossed the US, and while their fifty-foot cliffs would hurt to take a dive from, they had nothing on nature for grandeur. They were just gouges, like road cuts in the Rockies, a few weeks' work with dynamite and backhoes. But this mine was the work of years. The pit gaped as deep and wide as the hills around were high, its walls solid gray rock. Truck-wide terraces spiraled into its shadowed depths, ten yards down at a time, marking its growth like the rings of a tree. The destruction was incredible—the mass of a hill, the volume of a lake, all crumbled into granite boulders and trucked away, year by year, the walls warping and twisting to chase veins of ore, leaving nothing of the old landscape but cracked bare rock and harsh right angles—but it was beautiful, too, in a way, like a moonscape or a temple. The long ramp that made up the shelf below led down and down. The madly-warped walls had begun to crumble in spots, sprouting weeds and saplings and strewing the old spiral path with mounds of jagged stone. The weak slanting gold of dusk petered out far above the bottom of the pit, leaving a deep black mystery that could have touched the center of the Earth.

Dean, already familiar with the mines, ranged ahead, scrambling around the edge where tree roots and thin soil gave way to blasted rock face, scouting for obstacles. Sam and Dad followed slower, taking the shortcuts Dean found for them. Sam wondered if it was Dad's knees or his worry for his youngest that made him let Dean take point.

"Look sharp," Dad had murmured in Dean's ear before letting him run ahead. "Just because the job's three-fourths done doesn't mean the curse is three-fourths broken."

Some dumbass British general who couldn't be bothered to get his facts straight—no. Sam never thought that, but why was he surprised when Dad's grip had lingered too long on Dean's shoulder, and now when half the time Dad's flashlight was on Dean instead of his and Sam's own path?

"Dad?" Sam asked softly. "Are there . . . monsters that can read your mind just by looking at you?"

"A few," Dad said, surprised. "Crocattas, changelings, Korrigans . . . Things that need to keep a human alive to feed have ways to keep us from running, and sometimes that means knowing what we think."

"Are there monsters that know the future?" Sam continued, glad to have caught Dad in a revelatory mood.

Dad's jaw twitched. "Not that I know."

"What about psychics?" Sam asked. A low continuous rustle of leaves sounded to their left, and the wind crawled down his collar. "Are there any that aren't just cold-readers? Seers, mind-readers?"

"What's got into you?" Dad asked, grabbing his arm.

Sam listened to the leaves. He didn't want Dad fighting his battles for him, didn't want Dad interrogating him, but Dad had already scared off Grisham and maybe the interrogation could go two ways. "Grisham knew things," Sam said vaguely. "About me."

Dad hissed through his teeth. "What?" Dad rumbled, his hand tightening.

"He said . . ." Sam took an instant to calculate his angle. Dad was quick—any waffling and he'd wise to the game. "He told me I'd never get out," Sam confided, listening to Dad's breath and feeling the twitch of his tense fingers. "He said . . . Mom died 'cause of me."

It was as if Dad died for the instant the words hung on the air; his grip slipped and his breath halted. He swayed on his feet, and Sam's heart raced at Dad's weakness and the confirmation of Grisham's words.

Then Dad shook him. Dad shook him once, twice, and dropped his hands as though Sam's jacket burned him. "What else did he say?" Dad growled. "Tell me! What else—"

"So you knew," Sam challenged, stepping back. His throat was hot and tight. "All this time, there's something—about me, you knew?"

"It wasn't your problem."

"It's me!" Sam snapped. "I'm my problem."

"Tell me what that bastard said to you!"

"Why, so you can keep your story straight?"

"Sam!" Dad barked, looming over him. "You don't want to go there. Everything I do, I do to keep you boys safe—"

"Well, I've finally got a reason to believe that," Sam snarled.

Dad broke away. "Son, you can't believe everything you hear."

"That's been pretty clear so far, sir," Sam hissed.

"No!" Dad snapped. "Listen! For once! There are things out there, that will lie to you. They might mix in some truth, but there's always a lie; you can't listen to them!"

"So what was Grisham, Dad?" Sam demanded. "If he's one of those things?"

"I don't know!" Dad scowled into the dark. "I don't know. But if you'd told me soon enough, I would've killed him when I had the shot."

Sam dropped his head. "'Cause he's a monster?" he asked softly.

"Because he's a threat to you."

Dad's flashlight had dropped to his side, splashing against loam and gravel, lighting the sides of their faces as they stared away into the dim woods. The continuous crackling hiss of leaves grew louder and nearer, and Dad flicked the light at it, expecting, perhaps, a maple bent sideways in a draft of wind funneled by the topography.

It wasn't a tree. The light struck a tall ribbon of motion swaying between two pine trees, built of flickering horizontal bands and perhaps three feet wide at its narrowest. A plume of leaves and dirt rose from its base. It shimmied, advancing a yard, then Dad's full weight slammed Sam to the ground. The rattling noise ceased and Sam heard a spatter of impacts—rock striking trees, dirt, boulders, leather and denim and bone. Dad grunted. A rock struck Sam's shoulder and he yelped.

A dust-devil of gravel. By the time Sam had begun to wrap his mind around the thing, Dad had his arm clamped in his grip and was hauling him up. "Dean, get away from the pit!"

"Dean?" Sam yelled.

"Yessir!" Dean shouted back, his voice wary and puzzled. Dad burst into a limping jog, taking the light with him, and Sam followed, wishing he knew whether the splash of dark on the back of Dad's thigh were shadow or blood.

They heard a rumble, and Dean shouting, "Holy shit!"

"Dean!" Dad roared.

"I'm okay!" Dean yelled back. "Just—rocks're a little—goddammit—unstable—"

"Get away from the rocks, now!" Dad bellowed, lurching into a sprint on his dark-splotched leg. They saw the winking of Dean's light among the boulders as they drew near the edge, and heard a crack like muffled gunfire to their left from the base of a spreading pine. Dad jagged toward the noise. "Sam, run!"

Sam, already running, twisted after him until he looked up at the black canopy that clawed the air beneath the fading dusk, saw the devouring sway, and bolted away from the tree. Dad twisted midstride, stagger-sprinting to Sam, and yanked him back. "This way!" he insisted, still running, but hampered by the hand he had wrapped in Sam's sleeve, and they charged toward the trunk, the canopy looming larger and larger overhead, until the tree began to tilt in earnest, crashed against the ground, and Sam and Dad were long out of its path, looking back on the sky-reaching roots, still shaking and dripping fresh dirt, and the massive trunk behind them.

"Dean!" Dad bellowed, taking off toward the pit again. "Something's here!"

Dean replied, as they closed on the pit and finally spotted him, perched on a peninsula flanked by two gouges of fresh scree and clinging to a spindly dogwood, "I know. It's coming toward you."

"What?" Dad panted, so soft that only Sam heard him.

Dean's little tree shivered, and the craggy stone peninsula wrinkled and crumbled, the whole bulk of it slumping intact before great cracks splintered it, gouging out terraces of raw stone that Dean vaulted over, his light jumping, legs springing, losing ground as the rockslide accelerated, staggering over plate-sized shards of granite, and finally stumbling, falling, and drifting down into the dark of the pit as the stones swallowed him up.

The rocks stopped. There was a jagged pile of boulders leaning against the wall of the pit, obliterating the rocky shelves. Dad's light rested on the place they'd seen Dean last.

"Dean!" Sam shrieked, and from behind him, like an echo but much deeper, he heard, "Dean!"

A human shape bounded out of the woods and down the fresh rubble, slip-sliding down the loose-packed rocks to the flashlight beam. It latched hold of a stone and flung it away, digging desperately.

Dad tugged Sam's arm, and they scrambled down the torn slope, slipping and wobbling, listening to the harsh pants and the clatter of rock from the man in the dark digging for Dean. Sam Grisham.

Grisham's hands were bleeding by the time they reached him. Dad aimed his light in his face. "Look at me!" he bellowed, and as Grisham looked away from his work, his eyes wide and wounded, Dad shouted, "Christo!"

Sam dropped to his knees and began to tug at the heavy rocks that hid Dean. "Give me your weapon," he heard Dad bark.

"There's a poltergeist," Grisham panted as he passed Dad a massive semiautomatic. "Went after me when I tried to leave. The curse, or the suicide or the murder, attracted a poltergeist, and now its reacting to the bags. It'll just get worse until we get 'em all planted."

Dad grabbed Sam again, pulling him away from the rocks, and handed him Grisham's pistol. "Check it." Sam opened the slide, ejected the clip, and found eleven rounds. "Keep it." Sam secured the gun in his inner jacket pocket, and Dad passed him his flashlight and the last hex bag. "Plant this. Keep yourself safe." He man-handled Sam around to face up the slope, and shoved him. "Go, Sam!"

A poltergeist, Sam thought dully. An intelligence, reacting in self-defense to the incomplete cleansing spell. He ran up the slope, the flashlight slick in his palm. He would reach the fence. He'd plant the bag. Dad and Grisham would stay back and dig, and he'd pray Dad and Dean were alive by the time he killed the thing.

The trees were moving.

The trees bowed their branches toward him like supplicants at a faith healing, and Dean could be dead, and as the dusk faded, Sam turned to the stars to find his way West. He ran, flashlight bobbing crazily. The width of the pit had forced him off-course, and he drove himself over the loam and roots, punishing his shredding lungs and rubber-weak legs. It felt like the last leg of a five-mile when Dad was pacing him with the car. It felt like training. Dean could be dead, and Sam's stupid legs thought they were just running for training.

Something screamed off to his left, and Sam just ducked in time for a flailing raccoon to fly through the air over his head, white teeth and green eyes flashing in the edge of his light. It struck something deeper in the woods and was silent. Sam kept running, and saplings bowed to meet him.

Vines unspooled from tree trunks, reaching like tentacles.

Dean could be dead. Sam coaxed more speed from his legs, and the mesh of the fence glimmered ahead of him, in a clearing just beyond the shadow of the tree-trunks.

A soft gasp of triumph escaped him, and he found sprint in him he hadn't known was there. He checked his jacket pocket and felt the last bag, Air, soft under his fingers, light in his hand. A vine shot out like a harpoon, the slender green growth at the tip crumpling against his jeans, and as Sam leapt away forward, it recurved like a snake and snapped out again, stabbing old wood and bark through Sam's shin.

It yanked Sam down with a savage shredding tear. The flashlight fell from his hand, and the hex bag flew into the dark.

With a snarl, Sam squirmed forward, fear and fury steaming through him. More vines latched onto him by his legs, his arm, his chest, binding and crushing his waist. Sam yanked at a vine fingering along his shoulder with his free arm, just as another looped over his head.

Bark tightened coarse and cable-strong about his forearm and the nape of his neck, sawing at his skin as it advanced probing leaves around his throat, tickling under his clothes. Sam's thin muscles burned against his outsized bones, and his body began to lift off the ground with the vines' tension.

The poltergeist was going to draw-and-quarter him.

"Stop!" Sam gasped. "Stop! Please! I'll destroy the bag!"

The vines stopped lifting. Sam heaved a breath. His left arm was numb from the elbow and his impaled shin was burning, lightening flaring from it with each throb of his pulse. "You kill me, and my family's gonna finish the job," Sam panted. "My dad and my brother. They're tough, and they're real good on revenge. Let me go—" let go, let go— "and I'll break the spell. I'll tell 'em the job's done, and if you keep quiet 'till they leave, they'll never know. I'll say I did it. Please."

The vines tightened again, the one around Sam's throat cutting off his air, and he bucked like a dying animal, rage and panic stealing his body and smothering his mind. They relaxed after a minute that felt like an hour, and Sam gasped, dragging air in through his half-closed throat. His face felt hot and fat with trapped blood. "I know you can hear me, you sonofabitch!" he rasped. "I swear—I promise you, I'll do it! Just let me get the bag before my dad finds me gone—cause he's smart, he's a great hunter. He'll find a way to kill you! You won't stop him!"

Another tornado of rocks bloomed under Sam's nose, a scale model of the first one, dim and half-seen in the glow of the flashlight that the woods threw back. It drilled a little hole in the dirt, and its rocks were just pebbles and grit. It was a witness, Sam thought, not a weapon. The vines were the weapon.

"I swear," Sam repeated. The vines lowered him six inches, until his knees and hips just brushed the ground, but no further. The little rock dust-devil wriggled. "I said I swear," Sam insisted, hope revving up his heart and sending more blood to his strangled head. "I swear on my life. I swear before God—before the Great Spirit. I swear by the All-Maker. I swear by my dad. I swear by my brother. I swear on my brother's life. Let me go and I'll break open the bag, on my brother's life, and you'll never hear from us again!"

The little tornado contracted, then exploded, bruising Sam's face with a splatter of rock like a ricochet of buckshot. The vines unwound, scraping Sam's skin and grating against the bone. A dribble of blood joined the pins and needles flaring in his limbs.

Sam gasped a few breaths, lying on the dirt and feeling his limbs come back online. He'd need them . . . the thought of things that could read minds flashed past, and he cleared his. Had to get the bag. Everything was going to be okay. He'd sworn on Dean's life.

Sam struggled to his feet, and his shin screamed at him. He gritted his teeth and bounced on the leg, punishing it into submission until his entire body was electrified with ceaseless, featureless pain, then stepped firmly to the flashlight. He found the hex bag at the base of a vine-wrapped aspen, and retrieved it with a wary eye on the foliage.

He began to fiddle with the ties as he backed away from the trees, away from the vines, toward the western fence. "Damn, Dean got these on tight," he muttered, staggering backward and letting his limp explain the four or five steps it took him to catch his balance. Dean could be dead. "I can't," he whimpered. "I don't have my pocket knife—I'll get it open, I just gotta—"

He bolted toward the fence, and heard the the woods hiss behind him.

The trees thinned. The poltergeist had less to throw at him here in the clearing, but Sam heard a rumble as he closed on the fence, pain stabbing up from his shin at each step to jolt his heart and stop his breath. The rumble behind him built as he neared his goal, ten yards, five yards, three—Sam took a last leap from his good leg and dove at it, flinging himself blindly through the air and crashing to the ground, just as a clammy weight of earth and grass pounced on him from behind, flattening him. Coughing dirt, Sam gouged out a hole with the handle of his flashlight and stuffed the bag in.

The night went still.

Sam sat up from under a foot-deep blanket of dirt and wobbled to his good leg, steadying himself against the nearby chainlink. A broad strip of sod had been disturbed, doubled up at Sam's end and dragged forward six feet from the unbroken turf at the other, exactly following his path from the treeline. The bag was in place, but Dean could be dead.

Chapter Text

It was a long miserable stagger-trot back to the pit. Sam's shin stiffened by the minute, until he'd had to use a shoelace to suspend the toe of his boot by a hole in his jeans to keep from dragging it on the ground. When he saw the bluish light of Grisham's flash rising over the rim, he ripped out the whole assembly as he lurched to the edge.

Grisham was kneeling in the light, his hands clasped and resting on top of his head, making a piteous face. Dad was a black silhouette. To the side, in the dim fringe of the lamp beam, Dean lay on the rocks, his head propped up on Grisham's jacket, his left leg splinted to the knee with a pine branch and his right arm bound to his chest. Sam's breath left him in a long wheeze and his vision blurred. "Dean," he choked as he picked his way down the debris slope. "Dad—Dean?"

Dean turned his head and twitched his unbound leg. "Hey, Sammy," he croaked.

Dad twitched, and his shoulders swayed in a great sigh. "Job done?"

"'Course," Sam replied, rattling down the slope.

"Can you help carry your brother?" Dad continued, counting up his assets.

Sam stepped wrong on his bloody shin and nearly lost his balance. "No, sir," he grunted through his teeth. Not that he could carry Dean anyway—maybe with a travois—but even misplaced confidence was nice for a change.

"Lucky you," Dad said to Grisham. "You get to walk us out of here."

Sam finally limped over the rocks to Dean, and examined his bruised, mottled, bloody face.

"You look like you lost a fight with the Lawn and Garden department," Dean remarked with a nearly hidden wince. He squinted off to the side of Sam's head, and Sam wondered if his vision was rattled. "That poison ivy?"

Sam checked his hair and ripped out a fine three-bladed leaf, then cursed, phantom itches flaring all along his throat and wrists.

"Language!" Dad barked.

Sam hissed something that maybe sort of resembled "sorry, sir," as he tied up his toe to his jeans again.

"Sam, you know not to walk into terrain you can't run out of," Dad scolded.

"I can't run, period," Sam grumbled.

"How bad?"

"I got stabbed, a little," Sam admitted. "But it's not really bleeding anymore. Can still feel my foot."

"Mm," Dad replied. "Sam, come put this chain around Grisham's neck."

It was a surreal moment as Sam took one of the ghost-proof iron chains Dad handed him from their gear, and looped it tight under Grisham's chin, his fingers brushing his stubble and the tips of his hair as he braced himself against his massive shuddering shoulder. Dad's gun gleamed reassuringly in the edge of the flashlight beam, and Grisham's gun, heavy in Sam's inner pocket, bumped his elbow as he secured the chain with several heavy knots in a piece of Dean's shoelace left over from his splint.

Dad loaded a protesting Dean into Grisham's arms, his splinted leg sticking skyward and his good arm locked around his neck. Sam trained Grisham's gun and propped up Dad's injured side where the rock from the gravel-devil had torn his thigh, and Dad held Grisham's chain.

"This is so wrong on so many levels," Grisham muttered.

"Shut up and climb," Dad growled.

---

They reached the parking lot at 2030, Sam and Dad buckling against each-other, their wounds swollen into immobility, Grisham trembling under Dean's 190 solid pounds, Dean nauseous from the pain and the blow to his head. The evening security lamps had kicked on, buzzing blue soup cans on telephone poles throwing the gravel parking lot into harsh relief. Dad switched off his flashlight.

"Take him to my Chevy," Dad ordered Grisham. The chain jingled, he and Sam hobbled after him, and Sam raised Grisham's gun. "Set him down by the back wheel."

Grisham obeyed, choking a bit before Dad caught up to him with the chain. He crouched on the pavement, shuddering with exhaustion, and gently propped Dean up against the car, avoiding his bound arm and lowering his splinted leg slowly to the ground. His eyes never left Dean's tense white face.

"Good," Dad said coldly. "Now back away."

Grisham crept back from Dean until Sam's line of fire was clear. Dad drew his own gun and unlatched his arm from Sam's shoulders, staggering a step as he moved away. "Sam, help your brother into the car. Grisham, with me."

Sam stared disbelieving down at Dean, who sprawled against the Impala, white with pain. Dean scowled up at him and hissed, "Oh, this is such bullshit."

"Dad," Sam protested, hobbling to the car to sag against the trunk, "I can't just lift him in with the splint—I can't lift Dean, period—"

"I want Dean safe in the car when I get back," Dad barked. He dug in his jacket pocket and tossed something small and jingling through the air—keys. Sam caught them and held the Impala's keys in his hand for the first time since Dean had taught him to pull donuts in a Sears parking lot the shortly before Sam had run away to live alone in a vacant shack for a week and used up all his driving privileges for the rest of time.

"Dad?" Sam asked, his gut lurching, but Dad just limped out into the dark, toward the corner of the mine office, guiding Grisham with his service pistol and the chain. Sam had the keys and the car and a gun, everything he needed to keep Dean safe, according to Dad.

Dean smacked him in the stomach with his good arm. "You wanna gimme a leg up, bitch?"

Sam nodded, still watching as Dad marched the larger man across the lot toward the corner of the office. Another ten yards and they'd be out of view. "Watch your head," he warned, and swung open the creaky back door. Dad's pace picked up a bit and his shoulders straightened.

"Sammy, don't," Dean murmured. Sam froze and looked him over, but Dean didn't seem to be in any more pain than when Grisham had first set him down. "Whatever you're thinking of doing, brainiac," Dean clarified. "Dad'll go postal if we're not waiting in the car; can't you see he's spooked?"

Sam snorted.

"I'm serious."

"You're the one who said this was bullshit," Sam retorted.

Dean gaped. "I meant you lifting me, twig boy. I'm not that crippled."

"Whatever. Arm." Dean slung his good arm around Sam's bony shoulders, and Sam planted his feet and shoved upward.

He got about a foot before his legs gave out. "Shit," Dean gasped as his splinted leg jostled against the ground, and Sam hissed, "Sorry! Sorry! Shit!" and repositioned his feet to try again. He set his legs at ninety degrees and braced his and Dean's backs against the car, then pushed again.

"You're scratchin' the paint!" Dean whined.

"More worried about your leg," Sam grunted. He chanced a glance backward and just caught the last of Dad's shadow disappearing around the corner of the building. Dean slipped, and Sam clutched his arm tighter and cursed.

Dean did something with his good leg—hopped on it, scuffling against the gravel, trying to pull it in close enough to stand on—and Sam's own legs wobbled and slipped, sending them skidding to the ground again. Dean yelped, then sat very, very still, his eyes unblinking and very wide.

"This isn't working," Sam muttered, pushing himself shakily to his feet. Dean's good hand pawed at his jacket, but Sam shoved it away, sticking Grisham's gun into it as an afterthought. "Just sit tight. Dad can kill me later."

"You suck so very much," Dean hissed.

"Like that's news." Sam staggered away and limped across the parking lot as fast as he could go without flexing his bad foot, hugging the wall of the mine office. He slowed as he reached the corner. Worst case scenario, Dad would spot him on the way back. Best case, and Sam could—what, run screaming out of the dark to stop Dad from shooting Grisham?

Holy shit, he was expecting Dad to shoot Grisham. Murder him, and leave him nameless and un-mourned in the middle of the woods for the vultures to clean up. Dad always said the job was about saving people, but Grisham was another hunter—and apparently hunters didn't count. Not even when they'd helped save Dean.

Sam reached the corner of the office and leaned against the cinderblock wall, creeping toward the edge until he could just make out low voices beyond: Grisham whispering, "Yessir."

"Write it down," Dad ordered. Sam's ears perked; Dad had obviously just said something critical. He cursed himself for not arriving five seconds sooner.

There was a nerve-wracking pause, a rustle, and the click of a retractable pen.

"I'll contact you," Dad ground out. I'll contact you. "Cross your arms and get down on your stomach."

Sam heard the crunch of gravel and the jingle of chains. He used the sound to cover his movements, and before he peered around the corner, he knelt awkwardly on the sharp rocks to keep his face below Dad's line of sight. Dad stood beside Grisham's squirming dark bulk, sharp-shadowed in the harsh beam of a security lamp, the chain swaying from his left hand and his gun steady in his right. When Grisham was flat on the ground, Dad planted his bad foot between his shoulderblades and leaned down.

"I want your intel," Dad murmured, as Sam held his breath to catch the words. "Hell, there may be times I'll want your advice. But you don't come near my sons—you don't meet them, you don't contact them, you don't track them, you don't tell a goddamn soul about—" Dad cut himself off and took a breath. "About anything that don't concern the here-and-now. And I'll know. I'll find someone—I'll let someone live so they can track you down and make you pay if anything happens to my boys. Make you pay in ways you can't run from, understand?"

Grisham lifted his face from the gravel, the shadows masking his features, and Sam dodged back behind the wall.

Dad snarled. "Do you understand?"

"Yessir," Grisham replied, softly.

Dad dug his boot into Grisham's back and pulled on the chain, forcing a choked noise from the larger man. "If stopping this costs me my boys, I don't give a good goddamn about your doomsday story."

There was a long pause, and both dark figures were still. "Oh," said Grisham.

"Yeah. Oh." Dad scrubbed his jaw against his shoulder, the pistol fixed above Grisham's head. "I knew a guy in seventy-two, reminded me of you," Dad remarked. "In-country, some guys got delicate. Other guys, this guy, took to it; he took to it real well. Word was, he carried a three-foot wampum belt made of Viet Cong ears. Every engagement, he'd sniff out a corpse and cut a new one. He'd kill anything you pointed him at. The VC had women and children armed—if they didn't kill us outright, the guilt was enough to kill you anyway—but none of 'em got past Private Clark. Cutter Clark. Every day in-country we thought he was our savior. Every day on base, or when the VC stopped breathing down our necks, we'd change our tune and call him a monster, but that never changed the fact that he'd saved good kids by killing kids or that back home we'd've shot him down in the street." When Dad leaned down, the shadows took his face and the light gleamed on his gun. "We let Cutter live because he was under control."

Dad tossed the chain aside, and drew his boot knife with his left hand, keeping the pistol trained. He reached down toward Grisham's face, the big blade flashing until it disappeared behind Grisham's hair, and jerked his hand back. Dad's fingers were choked up high on the blade. Grisham flinched and gasped, grinding his face on the gravel.

With his right hand, Dad uncocked his pistol and struck Grisham across the skull with the barrel. He prodded his slack face experimentally with his boot, then holstered the gun. From between the blade and his left thumb, he took something small, held it up to the light, and tucked it into an inner coat pocket. He wiped off the knife and his fingers on Grisham's jacket, then stood, pain creeping into his stance.

Sam shook himself out of his daze and scurried back toward the car, Dad's words about making Grisham pay sliding into a macabre sort of sense. Witchcraft could work in several ways, he'd been taught: they could plant a hex bag near the victim, taking the spell to them, but on the other hand, with access to part of the victim's body—even dead parts like hair or nails—they could target the victim without ever knowing where he or she was. Some curses, like in voodoo, found their target through a handmade model of the victim. Cursing Grisham through a piece of his ear would be no challenge to a competent witch.

Sam felt ill. What happened to "magic is an enemy in itself"? What happened to "we don't trust monsters, we don't need their information, we don't use their methods"?

What did Grisham know that was so critical that Dad was breaking all those rules to keep him alive and under control?

"Do as I say, not as I do" still held, at least.

Sam prayed he was limping faster than Dad was. He lurched toward the glimmer of the Impala's chrome, crashing onto his good leg and yanking his bad leg toward his butt, crunch...crunch-ow, crunch...crunch-ow, and between his steps he heard Dad crunching along behind the building, faintly, swinging his own bad leg rigidly from the hip.

When he rounded the car, Dean wasn't there. His breath stopped.

A bruised fist knocked against one of the back windows from inside, and Sam let himself into the driver's seat, his heart racing dizzily. Dean was sprawled, shivering, across the back bench, leaning against the passenger-side door. He passed Grisham's gun to Sam, arm shaking. Sam stuck the keys into the ignition and slid into the passenger seat. He opened his mouth.

"Can it," Dean cut him off.

"Are you—"

"Sam." Dean's voice was low and harsh through his clenched teeth.

Sam huddled against the passenger door, looking at the floorboards. He felt sick, and he knew better than to blame the pain of his swelling shin. "I di—"

Dad swung open the driver's door and Sam fell silent. Dad just leaned in, supporting himself with a hand on the roof, grabbed the keys, and lurched back toward the trunk. Sam stared over the back seat at Dean, and Dean stared out the side window, clenching his jaw.

"Pills," Dad announced when he returned from rummaging around in the trunk. Sam and Dean each held out their hands: Tylenol all around, and a Vicodin for Dean. Dad eased himself into the seat, a little cockeyed so he could work the gas pedal with his good foot, and peeled them out of the lot in a scrape of gravel.

Sam didn't manage to catch Dean's eye until they were out of the mountains and almost to the hospital. Dean was starting to look dopey and pale instead of pissed and pale. I'm sorry, Sam mouthed over the back of the seat.

Dean lifted one hand and mimed cracking a whip, then pointed to his leg. You're my slave until I'm back on my feet.

Sam nodded, relief flooding in.

Dean chomped on an invisible sandwich and knocked back an invisible beer, picked at a fold of his shirt, and pretended to ball it up and throw it away. Meals and laundry. Sam nodded again. Anything.

Dean zipped his lips, made an O with his hand, and held up four fingers. No whining for four months.

Sam's mouth turned down at the corners. Don't push it. Dean smirked, and Sam turned back to look out the windshield.

---

The next morning, while Sam was in the hospital for monitoring after getting the hole in his shin flushed out and Dean was unconscious with a plate in his leg, Dad crammed all their belongings into their duffels and a few trash bags, loaded up the Impala, bought a vacuum cleaner suck any stray hairs and fingernails out of their apartment's carpet, and bailed on their lease to move them to a motel in another town, all while limping around on a thigh that was mostly bruise and forgoing prescription painkillers.

Sam, hobbling despite a full dose of his own opioids, was grudgingly impressed.

It was two months before they heard from Grisham again.

Pastor Jim had a dinner of left-over church-lady casseroles and cookies waiting from them when they stopped over on the way to a new school and new hunting grounds in Indiana, and after dinner, a brown paper package for Dad. Dad's face went cold at the handwriting on the wrapper.

Inside was a recent hardback novel, John Grisham's The Firm, bookmarked somewhere toward the end, and a thick three-hole binder of typed gibberish spaced to look like words—cipher, with a line from the novel as the concordance. Dad read the bookmark, ran his finger over the line it indicated, and burned the scrap of gas station receipt in Pastor Jim's fireplace.

Sam watched and their eyes met as he finished.

For years later, that binder traveled with him; the novel, Dad passed off to Sam and Dean for road reading. Sam never caught Dad studying the binder, but it got grubbier and rattier by the month. He wondered what Grisham had passed on: something about Sam, calling him a what instead of a who? Something about Mom, about why she'd been killed? Dad had his secrets, and now Sam had his own.

Sam got The Firm after Dean was done with it, the paper cover already sloughed off and discarded. After reading it, Sam decided it was an odd choice of concordance for a guy who got so incensed about disrespecting authority. Buried close against the spine on the edge of the introduction page—Sam liked reading the front matter, while Dean never cared—were three brief notes in faint pencil.

"Holy water doesn't work on every demon," the first read. Then, after a little space, "Never ever use performance-enhancing drugs of any kind." Crammed near the top of the page sat, "Always trust family first."

Two years later, locked in the bathroom and clutching an admission letter from Stanford University in shaking hands, Sam prayed for an instant that Grisham hadn't written those notes to him. He didn't need to use holy water; he didn't need to decide who to trust. He wasn't going to be a Hunter much longer, or a soldier in the trenches clinging to his comrades and his orders. Sam was getting out.

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