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Summary and warnings in part 1.
Lake Manitoc, at least, had nothing that threatened to eat them.
Winchester fumbled Andrea Barr, the sheriff’s daughter, like she was made of razors and molten glass, instead of an ordinary grieving widow. Because he didn’t look like the kind of man who had trouble with women, his too-wide smile came off sleazy and she bristled right away.
Then Lucas Barr showed up and Winchester’s focus swung to him like a lighthouse beam. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up in the clink as a potential pedophile.
Sam went into damage-control mode, rolling his eyes at Winchester, bringing Andrea onto his side. “Sorry about that,” he told her. “He really is housetrained, even if he doesn’t look like it.”
She told them where to find the nearest motel. A few hours later, when they had more background on the series of deaths that had caught Winchester’s eye, they knew they needed to see her again. Sam would have preferred to talk to her alone, but Winchester’s attention had been captured by the fact that Lucas had watched his father die. “You don’t get over that,” he said, his face as blank and grey as the lakefront.
So they went to the park, because Sam had heard Andrea promise to take Lucas there later. She was sitting on a bench, alone, watching Lucas, also alone. The swings and slides made Sam feel too large. Father had kept playground equipment at their compound, but only a few pieces of everything, so there was always competition. If you wanted something, you had to shove your way to the front, or ally with enough of the others that you could take turns within your smaller group.
Lucas had his choice of anything, but he was just sitting at a little table scattered with toy soldiers and crayons.
“Can we join you?” Sam asked Andrea as they stopped beside her.
“I’m here with my son,” she said pointedly.
“Oh,” Winchester said, barely looking at her. “Mind if I say hi?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
Sam adopted a bemused expression, pulling in his shoulders and offering Andrea a sympathetic look.
She was having none of it. “Tell your friend that whole Jerry Maguire thing’s not gonna work on me.”
He told her the absolute truth: “I don’t think that’s what this is about.”
Over at the table, Winchester squatted down, balancing easily as the hem of his long leather jacket brushed the dirt. He touched the toy soldiers, grabbing one and dancing it around for a bit. Lucas didn’t react. Then he flipped through the papers on the table, marked with blobs of color that Sam couldn’t interpret from a distance. He said something else to Lucas, then picked up a crayon. As he drew, he kept talking. Lucas didn’t raise his head, but he didn’t move away as he had earlier.
Winchester offered Lucas the picture he’d drawn, then left it on the table. As he headed back to the adults, Sam saw Lucas pick it up and inspect it.
Winchester wasn’t smiling when he returned, which probably had something to do with Andrea’s decision to talk to him.
“Lucas hasn’t said a word, not even to me. Not since his dad’s accident.”
“Yeah, we heard,” Winchester said, sitting down at the edge of the bench and leaving several feet between himself and Andrea, still oriented like a setter towards Lucas. “Sorry.”
“The doctors say it’s post-traumatic stress.”
Sam made his voice low and respectful, widening his eyes and bringing his brows down a fraction, hunching forward. “That can’t be easy for either of you.”
“My dad helps out a lot,” she said, and a shadow ran under Winchester’s face, almost too fast to see. “It’s just, when I think about what Lucas went through, what he saw—”
“Kids are strong,” Winchester said, putting his hands together between his spread knees. “They can get through just about anything.”
Andrea sighed, her face tight with regret. “You know, he used to have such life. He was hard to keep up with, to tell you the truth. Now he just sits there. Drawing those pictures, playing with those army men. I just wish—”
She stopped as Lucas came up to them. His face was as grave as it had been the entire time.
“Hey, sweetie,” she crooned, her voice full of yearning.
Lucas raised his hand and offered Winchester a picture.
“Thanks,” Winchester breathed. Lucas didn’t acknowledge either of them, just walked back to his table.
****
Bill Carlton, sitting on the dock and looking out at the lake that had taken both of his children, told them that losing them was worse than dying himself. Winchester seemed to crumple a little at that; he stopped trying to question Carlton, but Sam had to tug him away.
He stumbled on his way back to the car. Sam put his hand out, held on so that Winchester couldn’t just keep moving. “What is it?” he asked, turning Winchester so that they were face to face. The leather of Winchester’s jacket was tough and cracked, nothing inviting about it. Sam leaned in, close enough that he could feel Winchester’s panting breaths against his cheeks. He purged the annoyance from his voice, leaving only concern. “C’mon, what is going on with you?”
Winchester pulled sharply away from Sam’s clutching fingers; Sam had to let go or they’d be having a fight. “’s nothing,” he lied, facing towards the Carlton house so that Sam couldn’t see his face. “I just—hey.”
He pulled out the picture Lucas had given him. Sam looked at it and cursed the bad timing. Lucas had drawn the Carlton house.
“Sometimes, when bad shit happens, latent psychic talents surface,” Winchester said, his tone indicating he’d already concluded that the drawing was no coincidence.
Sam hadn’t gotten any sort of vibes off of Lucas, but he also hadn’t been checking.
If the kid had some psychic link to the killings, that did a little more to explain his trauma. Of course if watching visions of random people die had been enough to knock Sam out, he wouldn’t have survived puberty. But that was the point of Father’s lessons, after all: Sam and his siblings were better and stronger than the rest. Lucas, whatever he knew, was as weak as any ordinary kid.
****
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Andrea said when they returned to her father’s house.
Winchester’s earlier unease had been lost to his laserlike focus on Lucas. “I just need to talk to him, just for a few minutes.”
“He won’t say anything,” Andrea pointed out, her face tight with anger that she’d been forced to remind them of her son’s deficiency.
Sam took a deep breath and pushed the larger agenda aside. “Andrea, we think more people might get hurt. We think something’s happening out there.”
She shook her head in automatic denial. “My husband, the others, they drowned. That’s all. People drown.”
Winchester held his hands out like he was begging for alms. His eyes were wide, bottle-green with worry, but his voice was steady. “Ma’am, please. If you think there’s even a possibility that something more is happening, please let me talk to your son.”
****
Sam and Andrea hovered at the door of Lucas’s room while Winchester went in.
Winchester began slow, soft, thanking him for the picture. Sam could see that Lucas had drawn a slew of new pictures. The two visible at the moment showed a red bicycle. “The thing is, I need your help again.” Lucas paused in his coloring—the present drawing looked like it might be a person in water.
Carefully, like he was unwrapping an ancient text that might crumble, Winchester withdrew Lucas’s earlier drawing from his jacket and unfolded it. When he asked how Lucas knew to draw it, Lucas didn’t even twitch. It was the same for the next questions, and the same when Winchester suggested that he could nod yes or no. Sam heard Andrea’s tiny sigh of disappointment.
Winchester’s next words riveted his attention back where it belonged. “You’re scared. It’s okay, I understand. See, when I was your age, I saw something real bad happen to my mom, and I was scared, too. I—I was all alone then. I didn’t feel like talking, just like you.” He stopped, drew in a shuddering breath. “But my mom—I know she wanted me to be brave. I think about that every day. And I do my best to be brave. And maybe your—maybe your dad wants you to be brave, too.”
Lucas raised his eyes at last. His crayon thudded to the carpet. They stayed locked like that for nearly a minute, and then Lucas reached out without looking into his pile of pictures, extracting one with a church, a house, and a boy with a red bicycle outlined against a fence. Andrea’s hand went to her mouth.
“Thanks, Lucas,” Winchester said, but Lucas was done communicating. Andrea swept him into a hug, and she looked up at Sam and Winchester like they were half the danger to her son.
Sam found her hovering a little disturbing. The drawings were not reassuring. But did she really think that she could protect the kid from his own mind? It was almost enough to make Sam want to pull Lucas aside and lecture him about the frailty of others. Except that Winchester seemed to be the only person allowed inside his little circle of indifference.
****
The next four hours were devoted to finding every church within a five-mile radius of the lake, hoping for a match to the church in the drawing. Sam would have tried to get Winchester talking about his mother, but Winchester’s angry concentration made it clear that any distraction would be counterproductive.
Winchester really wanted to save Lucas. Not just whoever was going to be targeted next, but Lucas specifically, a little kid caught up in a bigger game. For a second, Sam wondered what it would have been like to have someone looking out for him, him specifically, at the same age. The thought made him twitchy, and he had to keep himself from snapping at Winchester when the first three churches they visited were obviously wrong.
The fourth was perfect, though, and the yellow house from the drawing was right next to it. A woman answered the door when Winchester knocked. Her hair was short and white, and her throat showed her age, the skin sagging down from her chin, but her eyes were still alive.
“We’re sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Winchester began, “but does a little boy live here, by chance? He might wear a blue ball cap, has a red bicycle.”
The woman took a quick gulping breath. “Not for a very long time,” she said. Winchester’s quizzical expression invited her to continue, and she did, explaining that her son Peter had disappeared in 1970. “Losing him—you know, it’s…It’s worse than dying.”
Without thinking about it, Sam patted Winchester’s back and felt the muscles jump. Past the woman’s body, he saw a brace of toy soldiers set out on the table, just like the ones that Lucas Barr had started to play with after his father’s death. He tapped Winchester’s shoulder and indicated them with a flick of his eyes while the woman turned to an old, faded picture just by the door.
Winchester picked up the picture, examining the two boys and the red bicycle. Sam fleetingly wondered why the woman didn’t object, but maybe anyone willing to remember her son counted as a friend. “Peter Sweeney and Billy Carlton, 1970,” Winchester read from the back.
****
So now they knew: Bill Carlton was being punished by Peter’s unquiet spirit. Unfortunately, they didn’t arrive in time to keep Carlton from going out on the lake, and even more unfortunately, they were then subjected to angry interrogation from the Sheriff Devins.
When Andrea showed up to bring her father dinner and was summarily ordered home, Lucas actually made a noise and grabbed Winchester’s arm, which seemed to shock everybody in the room but Winchester. Lucas’s affinity for Winchester made Lucas’s grandfather even more suspicious, and Sam answered his questions several more times, keeping the story basically true. Winchester just kept looking at the door as if he were trying to see all the way to Lucas’s house, assenting to Sam’s story every time he was asked.
Finally, the sheriff revealed that he’d checked—and easily blown—their cover IDs. Sam refrained from reminding Winchester that he’d predicted this was going to happen. Devins kicked them out of town, which was a fine resolution as far as Sam was concerned.
Except that Winchester got to the edge of town and then turned away from the highway. “The case is over,” Sam argued. “Peter got his revenge.”
“What if it’s not?” Winchester asked. “What if we missed something, and more people get hurt?”
This was about Lucas, somehow. A child alone with a parent who mourned but didn’t understand.
Winchester might be right. The kid was psychic and still scared.
Sam didn’t say anything when Winchester headed back to Andrea Barr’s house. If they got arrested, he was prepared to tweak the sheriff’s brain until they got free and explain it away somehow, but fighting Winchester on this was not the way to win his trust.
****
As soon as Winchester touched the door, Lucas flung it open, panting like he’d just run a marathon, and ran back upstairs to where water was pouring out through a closed door. Winchester managed to thrust Lucas into Sam’s arms just long enough to kick the door down, and then Lucas was back on him like a leech.
That was damned lucky for Andrea, because Sam doubted even Winchester’s considerable physical strength would have been enough to free her from the entity holding her under the water. Sam was able to push the spirit back enough to win the tug-of-war before she drowned, though it was close.
Afterwards, while Andrea cried and wondered if she were crazy and Lucas watched in silence, Winchester rifled through every family memento he could find in the house. When he found an old album labeled “Jake” that contained a picture of Peter Sweeney and Bill Carlson with their Boy Scout troupe, Andrea confirmed that her father was another Scout.
“Hey!” Winchester said, noticing that Lucas had moved to the window. “Lucas, what is it?”
They all followed him out, Andrea wincing and barefoot in her robe, to an unremarkable spot on the lawn. Winchester put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “Shovels in the trunk,” he told Sam.
At some point, Andrea forced Lucas back into the house and into bed, and then she declared herself worn out and went in herself. They kept digging. About two feet down, they hit dull metal, inconsistently shaped enough that they had to abandon the shovels and go to their knees. Sam wanted to stop as soon as they confirmed that it was a red bicycle; it was dark and cold and his legs were nearly as numb as his hands. But Winchester insisted that they might need the bicycle, so they kept at it until dawn crept over the horizon and they didn’t need the flashlights to work any more.
At last, they pulled it free of the wet earth, propping it on the pile of excavated dirt.
That was when Sam heard the footsteps behind them. “Who are you?” The sheriff sounded almost as confused as he was angry.
They swiveled, Sam raising his empty hands when he saw Winchester do it. The sheriff had his gun up, moving it back and forth to target first Winchester, then Sam.
“Put the gun down,” Sam suggested.
“How did you know it was there?” the sheriff demanded.
“What happened?” Winchester asked. “You and Bill killed Peter, threw him in the lake, buried the bicycle? Nothing stays buried forever.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” The sheriff even sounded like he wanted to believe himself.
“I think you do,” Winchester said, just as Andrea came out yelling for her father. “You’ve got one seriously pissed off spirit,” he continued.
Sheriff Devins cared about his family, he’d made that clear. Sam had an idea of how to reach him. “It’s gonna take Andrea, Lucas, everyone you love. It’s gonna drown them. And it’s gonna drag their bodies God knows where, so you can feel the same pain Peter’s mom felt. And then, only after all that, it’s gonna take you. That’s when it stops.”
The sheriff’s hands shook on the gun. “How could you know that?”
Sam spoke with pure conviction: “Because that’s what it did to Bill.”
“You’re both insane!”
Winchester had the long-suffering expression of a man who heard that too often for his taste. “If we’re going to stop this,” he said carefully, “we’re going to need to find the remains, salt ‘em, and burn the bones. So you better tell me you didn’t just dump him in the water.”
“Dad, is any of this true?” Andrea asked, but Sam could tell that she was already a believer, like it was just confirming something she’d always known.
“No!” he barked. “Don’t listen, they’re liars, they’re dangerous—”
“Something tried to drown me,” she said, her voice thin with shock. “Chris died on that lake, there’s something talking to me, I think it’s talking to Lucas—Dad, tell me—oh, my God.” She crumpled in on herself, nearly falling to the ground.
Andrea’s breakdown triggered the sheriff’s confession; he had, Sam supposed, little left to lose. He gave the usual excuses: they were kids, it was an accident, things just got out of control. Sam remembered all that quite well. He also remembered how very dead the victims stayed afterwards, regardless of intent.
“Listen to me,” Winchester interrupted. “We need to get all of you as far away from the lake as possible.”
Andrea gave a choked cry.
“Lucas!” the sheriff yelled.
They turned to see Lucas nearly at the edge of the lake.
By the time Winchester hit the edge of the dock, Lucas was already dipping his hand in the water. Sam saw a hand, solid as any living human’s, reach up and grab Lucas’s wrist, pulling him down without even a splash.
Winchester dove into the water like an arrow launched from a bow.
Andrea sped up, preparing to follow him, but Sam caught her before he’d thought it through. “Stay on the dock,” he warned.
Winchester came up, gasping for air, without Lucas. He went down again, into the black water. Sam could feel him under there, searching frantically and futilely. He’d keep going until he drowned.
Even if Winchester got his hands on Lucas, Peter’s spirit would resent the interference and keep them both down. Sam couldn’t beat the spirit in water, its home turf, especially not without being able to see it.
He knew what he had to do. “Jake! You’ve got to end it now.”
For a long moment, the sheriff looked straight at Sam. Sam let him see it all: the contempt, the knowledge that Winchester and Sam could do nothing to fight Peter’s ghost in time to save Lucas, Sam’s doubt that the man would find the courage to accept the trade.
In a moment, he’d give Devins a tiny mental push, but he wanted to see what free will would do on its own.
The sheriff was crying, the tears almost invisible in the weak morning light. Slowly, he waded into the lake, useless apologies spilling from him. Andrea called out denials, not yet realizing that she was going to lose at least one of them.
Winchester emerged, looking around frantically, and saw Devins on his way in. “No!” he yelled, joining his voice to Andrea’s.
“Just let it be over!” The sheriff’s voice broke on the last word, right before he was dragged down.
Winchester dove again. This time, he came up with Lucas.
****
Andrea swept Lucas back into the house before the ambulance arrived. Winchester pointed out that sticking around as witnesses to a second mysterious watery death was a good way to get arrested, so he pulled a couple of blankets out of the trunk of his car to protect the seat from his sopping clothes and they headed back to their motel. Winchester didn’t seem to mind that Sam followed him into his room. Sam was operating on the theory that success would make him more talkative.
“You really got to the sheriff,” Winchester said after he got out of the shower, like he wasn’t quite sure whether getting to the sheriff was a good thing. “I—I hate tryin’ to convince anyone about this stuff.” It took Sam a moment to remember that he was talking about convincing Devins that Peter’s spirit was killing people, not convincing Devins to trade himself for his grandson. Winchester had been underwater for that, and Sam had no plans to fill him in.
Sam didn’t say anything. Instead, he leaned back on the bed, putting his hands behind him to brace himself, and enjoyed the view, since the towel around Winchester’s waist dipped low enough to show his pelvic cut and was still too short to cover more than the upper half of his quads.
“In the end, he sacrificed himself for his family,” Winchester said, half to himself. “You think that makes up for what he did?” He bent over a little, his back to Sam, pulling at the towel that had been hanging around his neck and using it to rub his hair dry.
If Sam had been in the same situation as Devins, he would have hied himself far away from open water, but he guessed that the resolution had a certain symmetry. “No. Just means the ghost threatened the right thing.”
It took a few seconds to realize that Winchester had paused his towel-rubbing in order to turn his head and stare at Sam.
“Not that it did the right thing,” he clarified quickly. “I mean it had the right tactics for its objectives. What do you think?”
Winchester frowned, throwing the towel back over one shoulder. “I think … you’ve gotta be willing to make that sacrifice. Sometimes it’s not enough. But if you don’t—” He shook his head. “Family’s all we have.”
This whole business had been nothing but an engraved invitation to inquire into Winchester’s trauma.
“What you said to Lucas,” he began, low and careful. “You wanna talk about it?”
Winchester’s mouth pursed up and he dug in his bag until he found an acceptable pair of gray boxers. He dropped the towel around his waist and stepped quickly into them, then began rummaging for a shirt. Sam had to force himself not to be distracted. “Thought your visions told you everything you needed to know about me.”
He sat up on the bed, lowering his voice further. “It doesn’t work like that. I’ve only seen flashes of your future. But, you know, the fact that I see your future at all means that we have a weird connection, so maybe there’s something …?”
“Like I said,” Winchester told the T-shirt in his hands, his back all clenched muscle, “my mom’s dead. My dad and I watched her burn up with my brother when I was four.” His hands were strangulation-tight on the fabric, bones and tendons standing out sharply.
“Wow,” Sam said, giving himself time to think. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
Winchester didn’t change expression, but he pulled the shirt on and started wandering around the room, touching random objects. “Yeah, well, light a candle on All Souls’ Day. What about you? Any family secrets you wanna share?”
Sam took a deep breath, preparing to give some answer that would strengthen the bond between them. Then he stopped, caught by an instinct. “All Souls’ Day? You’re not Catholic.”
“That’s the anniversary. November 2, 1984, the night they died.”
He couldn’t speak for a moment. Winchester noticed and cocked his head. Without conscious intent, Sam’s voice came out in a whisper. “That’s my birthday.”
Winchester went even paler, his freckles standing out on his skin, his eyes shadowed. “My brother Sam was six months old that day. Exactly six months.”
Sam didn’t have to feign his shock. This was one of the jokers up Father’s sleeve.
A death in the family, a boy with nearly the same name, on the very night Sam was born: that was more than coincidence. Naming him to commemorate a recent victim was just the kind of secret cruelty Father would love. Which meant that the fire was a clue.
“That’s what happened to me,” he forced out. Lying to Winchester now was shockingly difficult, like swimming up from five fathoms deep, but if he got it done right Winchester would be sutured to him for good. “My mother died in a fire when I was six months old.”
“You feel it too, right?” Winchester asked, staring at the wall like he expected it to fall on him. He sounded like he was speaking from under a pile of rocks. “This, whatever. Connection, like you said.”
Sam nodded, then made himself say it out loud. “Yeah.” If he didn’t pay attention, he found himself turning towards Winchester automatically, like a fucking sunflower swiveling towards the sun. He knew where Winchester was in a room, often even in a building, without thinking about it. The only consolation was hearing that it was mutual.
“I feel like I’ve been in deep water for years and I’m coming up for air for the first time,” Winchester admitted.
Sam felt a stab of something sharp and hot in his chest.
If he forgot that this was all a part of Father’s plan, he and Winchester were going to end up identical bloody smears on the ground. It was in both their interests for Sam to fight the impulse to spend all his time slobbering over Winchester like a kid with a new game system.
Even if he really wanted to play with Winchester.
Focus. Ava wouldn’t let herself be diverted by squishy feelings. He needed to know more facts—unless the whole point of this was only to distract Sam somehow. But why Winchester? It didn’t make sense.
What does Father want with you?
“What does it mean?” Winchester asked, an echo of that four-year-old boy who’d just lost his mother in his voice.
“I don’t know,” Sam said, keeping his hands to himself only with effort. “But we’re going to find out.”
****
He’d asked about his mother when he’d been fifteen, brave with hormones. Father had glanced at him, then back to his grimoire. “A witch, pledged to me—German or Polish or something like that.”
“Is that why she gave me my name, because she was pledged to you?” It was such a stupid name: people always got it wrong, and he’d given up explaining, even though he always wanted to tell them the difference between ‘God has heard’ and ‘poison of God.’ Maybe, if she did it to show her faithful service—
“Sammy,” Father had chuckled, “she didn’t give you anything.”
It was a scissors-stab, but he’d persisted. “Where is she now?”
Father had closed the book with a sigh. “Everywhere.” Sam had stood rooted, uncomprehending. “The birth was difficult, the way God intended. It left her … vulnerable.”
That night, Sam had crumpled up the picture and hidden it in the back of his closet. Sometime during the next few years, it had disappeared. But he still remembered her eyes: the first woman he’d killed.
****
Winchester invited Sam to his room the next night, which was promising, but when Sam showed up, the bed had been tilted up against the wall, propped up on its headboard, and the mattress was sitting on the carpet. At least the disarrangement drew some focus off of the hot-air balloon decor, though there was nothing to be done about the big yellow lamps with their switches embedded in the gondolas.
Sam raised his eyebrows, silently asking for an explanation.
“Thought it’d be a good idea for you to know how to fall.”
He was totally serious, too: Sam spent several hours falling over, falling down, falling back, and even falling forward. When he protested, about forty minutes in, and got up to leave, Winchester nodded to himself, then swept his leg out so fast Sam barely saw it, and Sam got to experience what falling was like on the bare carpet.
By the end, Sam was sore and his ass hurt, and he hadn’t even gotten Winchester to press their bodies fully together, which might have been some consolation.
But the next day, Winchester started showing him how to break holds.
****
When Sam had been ten years old, Father had instituted a ritual: the end-of-day deficiency list. Everybody gathered together, and Father would identify one or two screwups by each of them. Unless there’d been none he cared to name, which naturally made that person a target for the next few days. Sam stayed clear of Father’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger chidings about one day out of four, which was better than anyone else’s record.
Father didn’t have a fixed order for listing the names, so there was no way to tell if you’d escaped until the very end. Sam would always think, before the start, that the waiting was the worst part, but Father had a way of making your errors sound so amazingly stupid that waiting was generally preferable.
Winchester never made him feel like an idiot or a weakling, even at the beginning when Sam got winded after ten minutes while Winchester was still running backwards in front of him, grinning like the class clown. He even warned Sam about how to keep his muscles from seizing up. His rebukes were softer than Father’s caresses: Winchester would whack Sam, open-palmed, on the ass or the shoulder when he got through Sam’s guard, or smirk at Sam over dinner when they discussed how he’d killed the hell out of the tree next to the target.
Without penalties, Sam hadn’t even noticed he was being taught at first. He’d just assumed it was Winchester’s way of passing the time.
****
Sam started to spend his evenings researching suspicious, unsolved fire deaths. There were a lot of them, too many, so that any patterns were lost in white noise.
Then, on a hunch, he restricted it to deaths involving mothers and their children. There were still hundreds in the early eighties alone. He generated a spreadsheet with dozens of biographical details for each victim. One night, frustrated, he tried a graphical representation of the data, and one of the scatter plots wasn’t all that scattered.
From 1981 through 1987, there had been an enormous spike in the number of babies who died at exactly six months old, burned up with their mothers. Or at least that was what the police records said.
Sam’s random lie hadn’t been so random as all that.
Father had said the birth had left his mother vulnerable. He hadn’t said to what.
Most of the babies couldn’t have made it, one way or another. Even if he went back to his earliest memories, there had only been about forty of them growing up together. The only attrition he remembered from his childhood had been Father’s dispatch of Charles. At eight, Charles had proved unable to control his impulses with respect to the household pets. Father had opted for a swift and public punishment.
Large quantities of blood still forced Sam to fight the impulse to gag, not in themselves but because of the sense memory of being required to kneel in his own vomit for over an hour before he’d been allowed to clean it up.
The point was, Father had collected his children from around the country (and probably the world; Sam was still working on foreign data, especially Germany and Poland, but most other countries’ records were even harder to get than American ones), but the initial fire seemed to have been some sort of six-month screening. Sam wondered what sort of powers a six-month-old could demonstrate. Or was it just that Father had liked the looks of the ones he saved?
Winchester’s brother had likely been a failed recruit. Maybe Winchester himself—but no, there’d been no sign of powers, and Winchester was well past the age of manifestation.
****
“Thank you, ma’am,” Winchester said, smoothing his hand over his tie.
Missy Fawkes didn’t look any happier to be called ‘ma’am’ at the end of the interview than she had at the beginning, but at least she’d bought Winchester’s humorless cop act, and she nodded and ushered them out of her condo.
Officiousness was really Winchester’s best mode, not the hail-fellow-well-met thing he’d tried with witnesses when he’d first met Sam. He got too nervous to be believable when he tried to smile at everyone. But with Sam around to do the smiling, Winchester was free to be the bad cop, or often enough the bored and indifferent insurance investigator.
The only time Sam had seen him relax around a stranger immediately had been a case involving a garage, and what they had initially thought might have been a possessed car. Sam had known it was going to be annoying from the get-go: Winchester had glowed when he mentioned the possibility of an actual Christine, and spent half the journey on an extended analysis of the merits and demerits of various Stephen King movies. Then, when they arrived to investigate, the garage owner had creamed himself at the sight of the Impala. It had taken Winchester two and a half hours to get around to the point of their visit, by which time Sam had already found out by talking to the owner’s girlfriend that the likely source of the problem was not a car but an extremely dissatisfied customer who had decided to start a beyond-the-grave chapter of the Better Business Bureau.
It had taken extensive efforts on Sam’s part to keep his patience and cajole Winchester into leaving the garage for the cemetary. Once they’d burned the bones, though, Winchester had been effusive in his praise, and for some reason that had just pissed Sam off more. He wanted to tell Winchester that he didn’t give a good goddamn whether some moron’s garage burned down. He wanted to tell Winchester to stop pretending that Sam was some kind of good guy. Which was stupid, he knew. Winchester was wrong, but he wasn’t pretending. It was just difficult for Sam to keep all the anger in the right places.
In the end, they’d left with a freshly detailed car and five phone numbers for garages across the country that the owner swore would treat the Impala as she deserved to be treated. Sam thought that anyone who called a car a ‘she’ deserved to be treated rather badly himself, but no one had asked him.
Once he’d had a chance to contemplate his pique, Sam understood a little better. Winchester rarely got the opportunity to share his enthusiasms: the problem with ghost-hunting was obvious; people who loved weapons as much as Winchester did generally either didn’t trust strangers enough to talk to them or wanted to recruit them into neo-Nazi cults; B-movie fans all congregated on the internet now, and Winchester hated to type. Of course he’d feel comfortable with someone who recognized the glory of his vehicle.
Sam didn’t actually care, but he resolved to do a better job of listening. It was very important that Winchester turn to him first, after all.
Part 3.
Lake Manitoc, at least, had nothing that threatened to eat them.
Winchester fumbled Andrea Barr, the sheriff’s daughter, like she was made of razors and molten glass, instead of an ordinary grieving widow. Because he didn’t look like the kind of man who had trouble with women, his too-wide smile came off sleazy and she bristled right away.
Then Lucas Barr showed up and Winchester’s focus swung to him like a lighthouse beam. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up in the clink as a potential pedophile.
Sam went into damage-control mode, rolling his eyes at Winchester, bringing Andrea onto his side. “Sorry about that,” he told her. “He really is housetrained, even if he doesn’t look like it.”
She told them where to find the nearest motel. A few hours later, when they had more background on the series of deaths that had caught Winchester’s eye, they knew they needed to see her again. Sam would have preferred to talk to her alone, but Winchester’s attention had been captured by the fact that Lucas had watched his father die. “You don’t get over that,” he said, his face as blank and grey as the lakefront.
So they went to the park, because Sam had heard Andrea promise to take Lucas there later. She was sitting on a bench, alone, watching Lucas, also alone. The swings and slides made Sam feel too large. Father had kept playground equipment at their compound, but only a few pieces of everything, so there was always competition. If you wanted something, you had to shove your way to the front, or ally with enough of the others that you could take turns within your smaller group.
Lucas had his choice of anything, but he was just sitting at a little table scattered with toy soldiers and crayons.
“Can we join you?” Sam asked Andrea as they stopped beside her.
“I’m here with my son,” she said pointedly.
“Oh,” Winchester said, barely looking at her. “Mind if I say hi?” He didn’t wait for an answer.
Sam adopted a bemused expression, pulling in his shoulders and offering Andrea a sympathetic look.
She was having none of it. “Tell your friend that whole Jerry Maguire thing’s not gonna work on me.”
He told her the absolute truth: “I don’t think that’s what this is about.”
Over at the table, Winchester squatted down, balancing easily as the hem of his long leather jacket brushed the dirt. He touched the toy soldiers, grabbing one and dancing it around for a bit. Lucas didn’t react. Then he flipped through the papers on the table, marked with blobs of color that Sam couldn’t interpret from a distance. He said something else to Lucas, then picked up a crayon. As he drew, he kept talking. Lucas didn’t raise his head, but he didn’t move away as he had earlier.
Winchester offered Lucas the picture he’d drawn, then left it on the table. As he headed back to the adults, Sam saw Lucas pick it up and inspect it.
Winchester wasn’t smiling when he returned, which probably had something to do with Andrea’s decision to talk to him.
“Lucas hasn’t said a word, not even to me. Not since his dad’s accident.”
“Yeah, we heard,” Winchester said, sitting down at the edge of the bench and leaving several feet between himself and Andrea, still oriented like a setter towards Lucas. “Sorry.”
“The doctors say it’s post-traumatic stress.”
Sam made his voice low and respectful, widening his eyes and bringing his brows down a fraction, hunching forward. “That can’t be easy for either of you.”
“My dad helps out a lot,” she said, and a shadow ran under Winchester’s face, almost too fast to see. “It’s just, when I think about what Lucas went through, what he saw—”
“Kids are strong,” Winchester said, putting his hands together between his spread knees. “They can get through just about anything.”
Andrea sighed, her face tight with regret. “You know, he used to have such life. He was hard to keep up with, to tell you the truth. Now he just sits there. Drawing those pictures, playing with those army men. I just wish—”
She stopped as Lucas came up to them. His face was as grave as it had been the entire time.
“Hey, sweetie,” she crooned, her voice full of yearning.
Lucas raised his hand and offered Winchester a picture.
“Thanks,” Winchester breathed. Lucas didn’t acknowledge either of them, just walked back to his table.
****
Bill Carlton, sitting on the dock and looking out at the lake that had taken both of his children, told them that losing them was worse than dying himself. Winchester seemed to crumple a little at that; he stopped trying to question Carlton, but Sam had to tug him away.
He stumbled on his way back to the car. Sam put his hand out, held on so that Winchester couldn’t just keep moving. “What is it?” he asked, turning Winchester so that they were face to face. The leather of Winchester’s jacket was tough and cracked, nothing inviting about it. Sam leaned in, close enough that he could feel Winchester’s panting breaths against his cheeks. He purged the annoyance from his voice, leaving only concern. “C’mon, what is going on with you?”
Winchester pulled sharply away from Sam’s clutching fingers; Sam had to let go or they’d be having a fight. “’s nothing,” he lied, facing towards the Carlton house so that Sam couldn’t see his face. “I just—hey.”
He pulled out the picture Lucas had given him. Sam looked at it and cursed the bad timing. Lucas had drawn the Carlton house.
“Sometimes, when bad shit happens, latent psychic talents surface,” Winchester said, his tone indicating he’d already concluded that the drawing was no coincidence.
Sam hadn’t gotten any sort of vibes off of Lucas, but he also hadn’t been checking.
If the kid had some psychic link to the killings, that did a little more to explain his trauma. Of course if watching visions of random people die had been enough to knock Sam out, he wouldn’t have survived puberty. But that was the point of Father’s lessons, after all: Sam and his siblings were better and stronger than the rest. Lucas, whatever he knew, was as weak as any ordinary kid.
****
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Andrea said when they returned to her father’s house.
Winchester’s earlier unease had been lost to his laserlike focus on Lucas. “I just need to talk to him, just for a few minutes.”
“He won’t say anything,” Andrea pointed out, her face tight with anger that she’d been forced to remind them of her son’s deficiency.
Sam took a deep breath and pushed the larger agenda aside. “Andrea, we think more people might get hurt. We think something’s happening out there.”
She shook her head in automatic denial. “My husband, the others, they drowned. That’s all. People drown.”
Winchester held his hands out like he was begging for alms. His eyes were wide, bottle-green with worry, but his voice was steady. “Ma’am, please. If you think there’s even a possibility that something more is happening, please let me talk to your son.”
****
Sam and Andrea hovered at the door of Lucas’s room while Winchester went in.
Winchester began slow, soft, thanking him for the picture. Sam could see that Lucas had drawn a slew of new pictures. The two visible at the moment showed a red bicycle. “The thing is, I need your help again.” Lucas paused in his coloring—the present drawing looked like it might be a person in water.
Carefully, like he was unwrapping an ancient text that might crumble, Winchester withdrew Lucas’s earlier drawing from his jacket and unfolded it. When he asked how Lucas knew to draw it, Lucas didn’t even twitch. It was the same for the next questions, and the same when Winchester suggested that he could nod yes or no. Sam heard Andrea’s tiny sigh of disappointment.
Winchester’s next words riveted his attention back where it belonged. “You’re scared. It’s okay, I understand. See, when I was your age, I saw something real bad happen to my mom, and I was scared, too. I—I was all alone then. I didn’t feel like talking, just like you.” He stopped, drew in a shuddering breath. “But my mom—I know she wanted me to be brave. I think about that every day. And I do my best to be brave. And maybe your—maybe your dad wants you to be brave, too.”
Lucas raised his eyes at last. His crayon thudded to the carpet. They stayed locked like that for nearly a minute, and then Lucas reached out without looking into his pile of pictures, extracting one with a church, a house, and a boy with a red bicycle outlined against a fence. Andrea’s hand went to her mouth.
“Thanks, Lucas,” Winchester said, but Lucas was done communicating. Andrea swept him into a hug, and she looked up at Sam and Winchester like they were half the danger to her son.
Sam found her hovering a little disturbing. The drawings were not reassuring. But did she really think that she could protect the kid from his own mind? It was almost enough to make Sam want to pull Lucas aside and lecture him about the frailty of others. Except that Winchester seemed to be the only person allowed inside his little circle of indifference.
****
The next four hours were devoted to finding every church within a five-mile radius of the lake, hoping for a match to the church in the drawing. Sam would have tried to get Winchester talking about his mother, but Winchester’s angry concentration made it clear that any distraction would be counterproductive.
Winchester really wanted to save Lucas. Not just whoever was going to be targeted next, but Lucas specifically, a little kid caught up in a bigger game. For a second, Sam wondered what it would have been like to have someone looking out for him, him specifically, at the same age. The thought made him twitchy, and he had to keep himself from snapping at Winchester when the first three churches they visited were obviously wrong.
The fourth was perfect, though, and the yellow house from the drawing was right next to it. A woman answered the door when Winchester knocked. Her hair was short and white, and her throat showed her age, the skin sagging down from her chin, but her eyes were still alive.
“We’re sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Winchester began, “but does a little boy live here, by chance? He might wear a blue ball cap, has a red bicycle.”
The woman took a quick gulping breath. “Not for a very long time,” she said. Winchester’s quizzical expression invited her to continue, and she did, explaining that her son Peter had disappeared in 1970. “Losing him—you know, it’s…It’s worse than dying.”
Without thinking about it, Sam patted Winchester’s back and felt the muscles jump. Past the woman’s body, he saw a brace of toy soldiers set out on the table, just like the ones that Lucas Barr had started to play with after his father’s death. He tapped Winchester’s shoulder and indicated them with a flick of his eyes while the woman turned to an old, faded picture just by the door.
Winchester picked up the picture, examining the two boys and the red bicycle. Sam fleetingly wondered why the woman didn’t object, but maybe anyone willing to remember her son counted as a friend. “Peter Sweeney and Billy Carlton, 1970,” Winchester read from the back.
****
So now they knew: Bill Carlton was being punished by Peter’s unquiet spirit. Unfortunately, they didn’t arrive in time to keep Carlton from going out on the lake, and even more unfortunately, they were then subjected to angry interrogation from the Sheriff Devins.
When Andrea showed up to bring her father dinner and was summarily ordered home, Lucas actually made a noise and grabbed Winchester’s arm, which seemed to shock everybody in the room but Winchester. Lucas’s affinity for Winchester made Lucas’s grandfather even more suspicious, and Sam answered his questions several more times, keeping the story basically true. Winchester just kept looking at the door as if he were trying to see all the way to Lucas’s house, assenting to Sam’s story every time he was asked.
Finally, the sheriff revealed that he’d checked—and easily blown—their cover IDs. Sam refrained from reminding Winchester that he’d predicted this was going to happen. Devins kicked them out of town, which was a fine resolution as far as Sam was concerned.
Except that Winchester got to the edge of town and then turned away from the highway. “The case is over,” Sam argued. “Peter got his revenge.”
“What if it’s not?” Winchester asked. “What if we missed something, and more people get hurt?”
This was about Lucas, somehow. A child alone with a parent who mourned but didn’t understand.
Winchester might be right. The kid was psychic and still scared.
Sam didn’t say anything when Winchester headed back to Andrea Barr’s house. If they got arrested, he was prepared to tweak the sheriff’s brain until they got free and explain it away somehow, but fighting Winchester on this was not the way to win his trust.
****
As soon as Winchester touched the door, Lucas flung it open, panting like he’d just run a marathon, and ran back upstairs to where water was pouring out through a closed door. Winchester managed to thrust Lucas into Sam’s arms just long enough to kick the door down, and then Lucas was back on him like a leech.
That was damned lucky for Andrea, because Sam doubted even Winchester’s considerable physical strength would have been enough to free her from the entity holding her under the water. Sam was able to push the spirit back enough to win the tug-of-war before she drowned, though it was close.
Afterwards, while Andrea cried and wondered if she were crazy and Lucas watched in silence, Winchester rifled through every family memento he could find in the house. When he found an old album labeled “Jake” that contained a picture of Peter Sweeney and Bill Carlson with their Boy Scout troupe, Andrea confirmed that her father was another Scout.
“Hey!” Winchester said, noticing that Lucas had moved to the window. “Lucas, what is it?”
They all followed him out, Andrea wincing and barefoot in her robe, to an unremarkable spot on the lawn. Winchester put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “Shovels in the trunk,” he told Sam.
At some point, Andrea forced Lucas back into the house and into bed, and then she declared herself worn out and went in herself. They kept digging. About two feet down, they hit dull metal, inconsistently shaped enough that they had to abandon the shovels and go to their knees. Sam wanted to stop as soon as they confirmed that it was a red bicycle; it was dark and cold and his legs were nearly as numb as his hands. But Winchester insisted that they might need the bicycle, so they kept at it until dawn crept over the horizon and they didn’t need the flashlights to work any more.
At last, they pulled it free of the wet earth, propping it on the pile of excavated dirt.
That was when Sam heard the footsteps behind them. “Who are you?” The sheriff sounded almost as confused as he was angry.
They swiveled, Sam raising his empty hands when he saw Winchester do it. The sheriff had his gun up, moving it back and forth to target first Winchester, then Sam.
“Put the gun down,” Sam suggested.
“How did you know it was there?” the sheriff demanded.
“What happened?” Winchester asked. “You and Bill killed Peter, threw him in the lake, buried the bicycle? Nothing stays buried forever.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” The sheriff even sounded like he wanted to believe himself.
“I think you do,” Winchester said, just as Andrea came out yelling for her father. “You’ve got one seriously pissed off spirit,” he continued.
Sheriff Devins cared about his family, he’d made that clear. Sam had an idea of how to reach him. “It’s gonna take Andrea, Lucas, everyone you love. It’s gonna drown them. And it’s gonna drag their bodies God knows where, so you can feel the same pain Peter’s mom felt. And then, only after all that, it’s gonna take you. That’s when it stops.”
The sheriff’s hands shook on the gun. “How could you know that?”
Sam spoke with pure conviction: “Because that’s what it did to Bill.”
“You’re both insane!”
Winchester had the long-suffering expression of a man who heard that too often for his taste. “If we’re going to stop this,” he said carefully, “we’re going to need to find the remains, salt ‘em, and burn the bones. So you better tell me you didn’t just dump him in the water.”
“Dad, is any of this true?” Andrea asked, but Sam could tell that she was already a believer, like it was just confirming something she’d always known.
“No!” he barked. “Don’t listen, they’re liars, they’re dangerous—”
“Something tried to drown me,” she said, her voice thin with shock. “Chris died on that lake, there’s something talking to me, I think it’s talking to Lucas—Dad, tell me—oh, my God.” She crumpled in on herself, nearly falling to the ground.
Andrea’s breakdown triggered the sheriff’s confession; he had, Sam supposed, little left to lose. He gave the usual excuses: they were kids, it was an accident, things just got out of control. Sam remembered all that quite well. He also remembered how very dead the victims stayed afterwards, regardless of intent.
“Listen to me,” Winchester interrupted. “We need to get all of you as far away from the lake as possible.”
Andrea gave a choked cry.
“Lucas!” the sheriff yelled.
They turned to see Lucas nearly at the edge of the lake.
By the time Winchester hit the edge of the dock, Lucas was already dipping his hand in the water. Sam saw a hand, solid as any living human’s, reach up and grab Lucas’s wrist, pulling him down without even a splash.
Winchester dove into the water like an arrow launched from a bow.
Andrea sped up, preparing to follow him, but Sam caught her before he’d thought it through. “Stay on the dock,” he warned.
Winchester came up, gasping for air, without Lucas. He went down again, into the black water. Sam could feel him under there, searching frantically and futilely. He’d keep going until he drowned.
Even if Winchester got his hands on Lucas, Peter’s spirit would resent the interference and keep them both down. Sam couldn’t beat the spirit in water, its home turf, especially not without being able to see it.
He knew what he had to do. “Jake! You’ve got to end it now.”
For a long moment, the sheriff looked straight at Sam. Sam let him see it all: the contempt, the knowledge that Winchester and Sam could do nothing to fight Peter’s ghost in time to save Lucas, Sam’s doubt that the man would find the courage to accept the trade.
In a moment, he’d give Devins a tiny mental push, but he wanted to see what free will would do on its own.
The sheriff was crying, the tears almost invisible in the weak morning light. Slowly, he waded into the lake, useless apologies spilling from him. Andrea called out denials, not yet realizing that she was going to lose at least one of them.
Winchester emerged, looking around frantically, and saw Devins on his way in. “No!” he yelled, joining his voice to Andrea’s.
“Just let it be over!” The sheriff’s voice broke on the last word, right before he was dragged down.
Winchester dove again. This time, he came up with Lucas.
****
Andrea swept Lucas back into the house before the ambulance arrived. Winchester pointed out that sticking around as witnesses to a second mysterious watery death was a good way to get arrested, so he pulled a couple of blankets out of the trunk of his car to protect the seat from his sopping clothes and they headed back to their motel. Winchester didn’t seem to mind that Sam followed him into his room. Sam was operating on the theory that success would make him more talkative.
“You really got to the sheriff,” Winchester said after he got out of the shower, like he wasn’t quite sure whether getting to the sheriff was a good thing. “I—I hate tryin’ to convince anyone about this stuff.” It took Sam a moment to remember that he was talking about convincing Devins that Peter’s spirit was killing people, not convincing Devins to trade himself for his grandson. Winchester had been underwater for that, and Sam had no plans to fill him in.
Sam didn’t say anything. Instead, he leaned back on the bed, putting his hands behind him to brace himself, and enjoyed the view, since the towel around Winchester’s waist dipped low enough to show his pelvic cut and was still too short to cover more than the upper half of his quads.
“In the end, he sacrificed himself for his family,” Winchester said, half to himself. “You think that makes up for what he did?” He bent over a little, his back to Sam, pulling at the towel that had been hanging around his neck and using it to rub his hair dry.
If Sam had been in the same situation as Devins, he would have hied himself far away from open water, but he guessed that the resolution had a certain symmetry. “No. Just means the ghost threatened the right thing.”
It took a few seconds to realize that Winchester had paused his towel-rubbing in order to turn his head and stare at Sam.
“Not that it did the right thing,” he clarified quickly. “I mean it had the right tactics for its objectives. What do you think?”
Winchester frowned, throwing the towel back over one shoulder. “I think … you’ve gotta be willing to make that sacrifice. Sometimes it’s not enough. But if you don’t—” He shook his head. “Family’s all we have.”
This whole business had been nothing but an engraved invitation to inquire into Winchester’s trauma.
“What you said to Lucas,” he began, low and careful. “You wanna talk about it?”
Winchester’s mouth pursed up and he dug in his bag until he found an acceptable pair of gray boxers. He dropped the towel around his waist and stepped quickly into them, then began rummaging for a shirt. Sam had to force himself not to be distracted. “Thought your visions told you everything you needed to know about me.”
He sat up on the bed, lowering his voice further. “It doesn’t work like that. I’ve only seen flashes of your future. But, you know, the fact that I see your future at all means that we have a weird connection, so maybe there’s something …?”
“Like I said,” Winchester told the T-shirt in his hands, his back all clenched muscle, “my mom’s dead. My dad and I watched her burn up with my brother when I was four.” His hands were strangulation-tight on the fabric, bones and tendons standing out sharply.
“Wow,” Sam said, giving himself time to think. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
Winchester didn’t change expression, but he pulled the shirt on and started wandering around the room, touching random objects. “Yeah, well, light a candle on All Souls’ Day. What about you? Any family secrets you wanna share?”
Sam took a deep breath, preparing to give some answer that would strengthen the bond between them. Then he stopped, caught by an instinct. “All Souls’ Day? You’re not Catholic.”
“That’s the anniversary. November 2, 1984, the night they died.”
He couldn’t speak for a moment. Winchester noticed and cocked his head. Without conscious intent, Sam’s voice came out in a whisper. “That’s my birthday.”
Winchester went even paler, his freckles standing out on his skin, his eyes shadowed. “My brother Sam was six months old that day. Exactly six months.”
Sam didn’t have to feign his shock. This was one of the jokers up Father’s sleeve.
A death in the family, a boy with nearly the same name, on the very night Sam was born: that was more than coincidence. Naming him to commemorate a recent victim was just the kind of secret cruelty Father would love. Which meant that the fire was a clue.
“That’s what happened to me,” he forced out. Lying to Winchester now was shockingly difficult, like swimming up from five fathoms deep, but if he got it done right Winchester would be sutured to him for good. “My mother died in a fire when I was six months old.”
“You feel it too, right?” Winchester asked, staring at the wall like he expected it to fall on him. He sounded like he was speaking from under a pile of rocks. “This, whatever. Connection, like you said.”
Sam nodded, then made himself say it out loud. “Yeah.” If he didn’t pay attention, he found himself turning towards Winchester automatically, like a fucking sunflower swiveling towards the sun. He knew where Winchester was in a room, often even in a building, without thinking about it. The only consolation was hearing that it was mutual.
“I feel like I’ve been in deep water for years and I’m coming up for air for the first time,” Winchester admitted.
Sam felt a stab of something sharp and hot in his chest.
If he forgot that this was all a part of Father’s plan, he and Winchester were going to end up identical bloody smears on the ground. It was in both their interests for Sam to fight the impulse to spend all his time slobbering over Winchester like a kid with a new game system.
Even if he really wanted to play with Winchester.
Focus. Ava wouldn’t let herself be diverted by squishy feelings. He needed to know more facts—unless the whole point of this was only to distract Sam somehow. But why Winchester? It didn’t make sense.
What does Father want with you?
“What does it mean?” Winchester asked, an echo of that four-year-old boy who’d just lost his mother in his voice.
“I don’t know,” Sam said, keeping his hands to himself only with effort. “But we’re going to find out.”
****
He’d asked about his mother when he’d been fifteen, brave with hormones. Father had glanced at him, then back to his grimoire. “A witch, pledged to me—German or Polish or something like that.”
“Is that why she gave me my name, because she was pledged to you?” It was such a stupid name: people always got it wrong, and he’d given up explaining, even though he always wanted to tell them the difference between ‘God has heard’ and ‘poison of God.’ Maybe, if she did it to show her faithful service—
“Sammy,” Father had chuckled, “she didn’t give you anything.”
It was a scissors-stab, but he’d persisted. “Where is she now?”
Father had closed the book with a sigh. “Everywhere.” Sam had stood rooted, uncomprehending. “The birth was difficult, the way God intended. It left her … vulnerable.”
That night, Sam had crumpled up the picture and hidden it in the back of his closet. Sometime during the next few years, it had disappeared. But he still remembered her eyes: the first woman he’d killed.
****
Winchester invited Sam to his room the next night, which was promising, but when Sam showed up, the bed had been tilted up against the wall, propped up on its headboard, and the mattress was sitting on the carpet. At least the disarrangement drew some focus off of the hot-air balloon decor, though there was nothing to be done about the big yellow lamps with their switches embedded in the gondolas.
Sam raised his eyebrows, silently asking for an explanation.
“Thought it’d be a good idea for you to know how to fall.”
He was totally serious, too: Sam spent several hours falling over, falling down, falling back, and even falling forward. When he protested, about forty minutes in, and got up to leave, Winchester nodded to himself, then swept his leg out so fast Sam barely saw it, and Sam got to experience what falling was like on the bare carpet.
By the end, Sam was sore and his ass hurt, and he hadn’t even gotten Winchester to press their bodies fully together, which might have been some consolation.
But the next day, Winchester started showing him how to break holds.
****
When Sam had been ten years old, Father had instituted a ritual: the end-of-day deficiency list. Everybody gathered together, and Father would identify one or two screwups by each of them. Unless there’d been none he cared to name, which naturally made that person a target for the next few days. Sam stayed clear of Father’s more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger chidings about one day out of four, which was better than anyone else’s record.
Father didn’t have a fixed order for listing the names, so there was no way to tell if you’d escaped until the very end. Sam would always think, before the start, that the waiting was the worst part, but Father had a way of making your errors sound so amazingly stupid that waiting was generally preferable.
Winchester never made him feel like an idiot or a weakling, even at the beginning when Sam got winded after ten minutes while Winchester was still running backwards in front of him, grinning like the class clown. He even warned Sam about how to keep his muscles from seizing up. His rebukes were softer than Father’s caresses: Winchester would whack Sam, open-palmed, on the ass or the shoulder when he got through Sam’s guard, or smirk at Sam over dinner when they discussed how he’d killed the hell out of the tree next to the target.
Without penalties, Sam hadn’t even noticed he was being taught at first. He’d just assumed it was Winchester’s way of passing the time.
****
Sam started to spend his evenings researching suspicious, unsolved fire deaths. There were a lot of them, too many, so that any patterns were lost in white noise.
Then, on a hunch, he restricted it to deaths involving mothers and their children. There were still hundreds in the early eighties alone. He generated a spreadsheet with dozens of biographical details for each victim. One night, frustrated, he tried a graphical representation of the data, and one of the scatter plots wasn’t all that scattered.
From 1981 through 1987, there had been an enormous spike in the number of babies who died at exactly six months old, burned up with their mothers. Or at least that was what the police records said.
Sam’s random lie hadn’t been so random as all that.
Father had said the birth had left his mother vulnerable. He hadn’t said to what.
Most of the babies couldn’t have made it, one way or another. Even if he went back to his earliest memories, there had only been about forty of them growing up together. The only attrition he remembered from his childhood had been Father’s dispatch of Charles. At eight, Charles had proved unable to control his impulses with respect to the household pets. Father had opted for a swift and public punishment.
Large quantities of blood still forced Sam to fight the impulse to gag, not in themselves but because of the sense memory of being required to kneel in his own vomit for over an hour before he’d been allowed to clean it up.
The point was, Father had collected his children from around the country (and probably the world; Sam was still working on foreign data, especially Germany and Poland, but most other countries’ records were even harder to get than American ones), but the initial fire seemed to have been some sort of six-month screening. Sam wondered what sort of powers a six-month-old could demonstrate. Or was it just that Father had liked the looks of the ones he saved?
Winchester’s brother had likely been a failed recruit. Maybe Winchester himself—but no, there’d been no sign of powers, and Winchester was well past the age of manifestation.
****
“Thank you, ma’am,” Winchester said, smoothing his hand over his tie.
Missy Fawkes didn’t look any happier to be called ‘ma’am’ at the end of the interview than she had at the beginning, but at least she’d bought Winchester’s humorless cop act, and she nodded and ushered them out of her condo.
Officiousness was really Winchester’s best mode, not the hail-fellow-well-met thing he’d tried with witnesses when he’d first met Sam. He got too nervous to be believable when he tried to smile at everyone. But with Sam around to do the smiling, Winchester was free to be the bad cop, or often enough the bored and indifferent insurance investigator.
The only time Sam had seen him relax around a stranger immediately had been a case involving a garage, and what they had initially thought might have been a possessed car. Sam had known it was going to be annoying from the get-go: Winchester had glowed when he mentioned the possibility of an actual Christine, and spent half the journey on an extended analysis of the merits and demerits of various Stephen King movies. Then, when they arrived to investigate, the garage owner had creamed himself at the sight of the Impala. It had taken Winchester two and a half hours to get around to the point of their visit, by which time Sam had already found out by talking to the owner’s girlfriend that the likely source of the problem was not a car but an extremely dissatisfied customer who had decided to start a beyond-the-grave chapter of the Better Business Bureau.
It had taken extensive efforts on Sam’s part to keep his patience and cajole Winchester into leaving the garage for the cemetary. Once they’d burned the bones, though, Winchester had been effusive in his praise, and for some reason that had just pissed Sam off more. He wanted to tell Winchester that he didn’t give a good goddamn whether some moron’s garage burned down. He wanted to tell Winchester to stop pretending that Sam was some kind of good guy. Which was stupid, he knew. Winchester was wrong, but he wasn’t pretending. It was just difficult for Sam to keep all the anger in the right places.
In the end, they’d left with a freshly detailed car and five phone numbers for garages across the country that the owner swore would treat the Impala as she deserved to be treated. Sam thought that anyone who called a car a ‘she’ deserved to be treated rather badly himself, but no one had asked him.
Once he’d had a chance to contemplate his pique, Sam understood a little better. Winchester rarely got the opportunity to share his enthusiasms: the problem with ghost-hunting was obvious; people who loved weapons as much as Winchester did generally either didn’t trust strangers enough to talk to them or wanted to recruit them into neo-Nazi cults; B-movie fans all congregated on the internet now, and Winchester hated to type. Of course he’d feel comfortable with someone who recognized the glory of his vehicle.
Sam didn’t actually care, but he resolved to do a better job of listening. It was very important that Winchester turn to him first, after all.
Part 3.
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So yes, I'm loving the story and can't wait for more!
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this is an astonishing retelling
and dean...being dean, finding someone to take care of...to train...
i just hope...well...its your story, i'll wait and see where you take it...
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Re: this is an astonishing retelling
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It was a scissors-stab, but he’d persisted. “Where is she now?”
Father had closed the book with a sigh. “Everywhere.”
That certainly let us know what was coming. "Everywhere." That was actually kind of beautiful, even though it described a terrible event.
I loved the way you reworked the ep to fit here.
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I think the social awkwardness is more because John kept him way too close--it's an indirect consequence of the absence of Sam, rather than a direct consequence.
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Oh, okay. Now I get it. I think. I'm just surprised that Sam doesn't. Or is it willful blindness?
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*sniffle*
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And sharp though he is, it never occurs to Sam that he might be lusting after his big brother. Having his lie to get Dean to continue confiding in him actually turn out to be true was a neat, creepy twist.
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To be fair to Sam, the long-lost brothers thing would be a bit shocking to anyone! And he's been told plenty of lies to disguise the truth.
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