Witch's Canyon (11 page)

Sam flung his left arm out, blocking Dean before he could tear off into the woods after it. “What?” Dean said.

“That thing was huge,” Sam said. “We’re going to need some fi repower.”

“Right.” They both reversed course, headed for the Impala. Or as Sam sometimes thought of it, the mobile armory. He’d have been happiest with a bazooka, but he settled for a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip. He cracked Witch’s

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it open, fed in two shells of buckshot, and pocketed a dozen more. Dean chose a .45 automatic handgun, a Smith & Wesson that was just like—possibly even the same one, given its scarred grip—the one Dad had trained them with. Sam noted that he put a couple of extra magazines in his pockets.

“Loaded for bear,” Dean said.

The silence in the forest was almost eerie. The snow on the ground muffled their footfalls. The stuff coming down seemed to Sam like it should have made some kind of sound—rain did, after all, and so did falling leaves. Shouldn’t there be little puffi ng sounds or something? But no, not a peep. If there were birds around, they were still and quiet, no doubt trying to stay out of the weather.

Fortunately, the snow wasn’t falling fast enough to fill in the bear’s tracks. They were deep, fi ve-toed, with the rear feet showing more pad than the front.

Sam was surprised they couldn’t hear it crashing through trees and brush up ahead, but apparently the bear knew its way around the forest.

“How long are we going to track this thing?” he asked after about twenty minutes. The sun was invisible behind pewter clouds, but it would be setting before too much longer.

“Till we find it. You want to quit, you know where the car is.”

“I’m not saying I want to quit, Dean. I’m only saying we didn’t really come prepared for a long hunt.

If that thing’s moving fast, it could take us all night to catch up to it. We’re not equipped for spending 94 SUPERNATURAL

the night out here. Won’t do anyone any good if we freeze to death.”

“Then I guess we should go faster.” Dean picked up the pace even as he spoke, stepping over a low shrub and around another.

Sam knew his brother well enough to recognize what was going on. Nothing pissed Dean off like failure. They had been taught from childhood that when they failed, people could die. Dean took it a step further, believing that if he was even a little slow in succeeding, people would defi nitely die.

Dad had wanted to make soldiers of his boys. In Dean’s case, he had clearly succeeded. Almost everything about Dean said soldier, from the short hair to the solid build, the straight shoulders, the easy familiarity with weapons and combat of all kinds.

It was internal, too, even more than external. Dean had no sense of romance, of wonder. They dealt on a daily basis with things most people only imagined in nightmares, they saw things that would qualify as miraculous. But the creatures they battled weren’t mysteries or marvels to Dean, they were simply enemies. To him, everything was the mission, the hunt.

Here in Cedar Wells, Sam had to admit, Dean’s concern had definitely materialized. Which meant that he didn’t blame Dean for taking this personally.

He did, too. He just kept enough emotional separa-tion so he could tell when they were in danger of making things worse by killing themselves. Sometimes he thought Dean wouldn’t mind dying if he could go out in a blaze of glory, as the saying went.

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In moments of fairness, Sam knew that wasn’t true.

Dean didn’t care about the glory; he cared about making a difference.

Sam had to step lively to keep up.

“When we catch up to it,” he said a few minutes later, slightly out of breath from the pace, “what are we going to do? Interrogate it?”

“We’re gonna kill it, Sammy.”

“But . . .”

“But what? You want to make friends with it?

That’s not Gentle Ben. Or . . . or Yogi.”

“I know that. It’s just that, well, this changes things.”

“Changes them how?”

“We’re not looking for the spirit of some old soldier anymore. Not if this bear is involved, too. We’re back to square one.”

Dean paused, mid-stride, and caught his eye.

“Good point,” he said, and continued after the bear.

“I mean it, Dean,” Sam continued. “We thought we were dealing with one dead guy. But now we’ve got, what, animal spirits?” In his haste he had only brought buckshot shells, not rock salt ones. If it was a spirit bear, he’d be sorry for that oversight.

“Animal spirits working in collusion with human ones,” Dean muttered. “That could happen. Or maybe it’s a werebear.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Yeah, another good point.”

“I’m full of ’em.”

“Full of something, anyway.”

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“Dean, I’m all for killing as many unnatural creatures as we can. But right now we have to decide what’s a higher priority, fi nding this bear or fi guring out what’s behind the murder cycle here. I vote for the murder cycle.”

“I’ve always been bad at prioritizing,” Dean said.

“I’m better at the whole killing thing.” He came to a sudden halt. Sam could tell by his body language that something was wrong. Dean stood awkwardly at the edge of a small clearing in the trees, his hands splayed out, staring at the ground.

“What is it?” Sam asked, fearing the worst.

“You tell me.”

Sam shouldered in beside Dean, his right arm brushing snow from low-hanging pine branches. The bear tracks led into the clearing, plain in the fresh snow.

But then they stopped, halfway across it.

From the last tracks, it would have taken an Olym-pic long jumper to reach any spot outside the clearing. There were no trees close enough for the bear to have climbed up. The tracks just ended, and the bear was gone.

“Where’d he—”

“I wish I knew.”

From a branch about twenty feet up one of the nearest trees, a raven
cawed
. It sounded disturbingly like it was laughing at them.

“That thing must have weighed fi ve hundred pounds,” Sam said. “It can’t just up and vanish.”

“Don’t tell me,” Dean said. “Tell it.” Witch’s

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The raven gave another double
caw
. Sam could have sworn it was looking right at them, its head cocked, a sinister grin on its bill. Then it spread its wings, pure black, like midnight shadows stretch-ing out, and took flight. Voicing its amusement, it circled over them twice, inscribing the perimeter of the clearing. Dean raised his .45 like he might shoot it down on the wing. “Thing bothers me,” he said.

“Me, too.” The raven swept its wings against the air and fl ew out of sight.

“You don’t think . . .” Sam began.

“What? That raven was the bear? Some kind of animal shapeshifter?”

“That’s what I was thinking. The bear transformed into a bird, and that’s why the footprints stopped.” Dean shot him a frustrated glance. “Why didn’t you say something? Maybe I should have shot it.”

“Maybe so,” Sam agreed. “I didn’t think of it until it was too late.”

“Next time, think faster.”

“I’ll try, Dean.”

“Good.”

“And Dean?”

“What?”

“What the hell are we dealing with here?” Dean considered this for a moment. “You fi gure that out, college boy, you let me know.”

TWELVE

Since the mall’s food court wasn’t open yet, Sam and Dean had skipped lunch. On the way back into town, having called the sheriff’s offi ce about the bear’s victim from the victim’s own house, Dean slowed outside the Wagon Wheel Café. Sam realized that hunger pangs had started eating his stomach from the inside out. “Sure,” he said. “I could eat. And maybe we can find something out from the locals.”

“The ones who are still alive, you mean.” Dean pulled over at the curb. “I can always eat, but I’m pretty hungry now, too.”

Inside, the Wagon Wheel carried out its theme visually, with wagon wheels printed on the menu and antique ones hung on the walls like works of art. A waitress with a knot of thick straw-blond hair on her head, an apron around her waist, and a frenzied air ticked her head toward the tables, most of which Witch’s

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were empty. “Sit anywhere you like,” she said. “I’ll be there in a jif.”

“A jif,” Dean said as they sat down. “Don’t hear that often enough these days.”

“Place is quiet,” Sam observed.

“It’s early for dinner,” Dean said. “And it looks like it’s busy enough for her.” Of the four occupied tables, three had what looked like families gathered around them, one of which spanned the generations from very elderly grandpar-ents to an infant in a high chair. When Sam saw families like that, he sometimes felt a pang of regret—that was a storybook life, as far as he was concerned, something that real people did sometimes but that he could never be part of. He had hoped for a time that he might have it with Jess, even though he hadn’t grown up in that kind of setting. But it was hard to overcome one’s early life, he guessed. Kids who are homeless are more likely to become homeless as adults than kids who have always had a roof over their heads. Children in dysfunctional families often re-created them when they grew up. His chances at a

“normal” family life had ended on November 2, 1983, when his mother was slaughtered against the ceiling of his nursery, and he hadn’t accepted that until Dean took him away from Stanford the weekend before his law school interview.

Since then, events had convinced him that his hopes of normalcy with Jessica would have been doomed anyway. He was simply not a normal guy. He had been chosen for something—it was no accident that 100 SUPERNATURAL

Mom had died above his crib and not Dean’s bed, or her own. Sam had been targeted.

But knowing that didn’t mean it hurt any less to look at what might have been.

He noticed Dean gazing around the big room, studying the people at the tables. After a moment he realized why. “Looking for that widow? Juliet?”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”

“I bet you wouldn’t.”

Dean was about to say something else when the waitress stopped beside their table, having delivered an armload of dishes to the big family. “What can I get you? Coffee to start?”

“Sure,” Dean said. “That’d be good.” Sam thought it over for a second. The snow was still falling outside, and there was no telling when they’d be in for the night—if at all. “Sure, coffee works.”

“Ready to order?”

Dean ordered a hamburger, Sam a hot open-faced turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes. The menu was heavy on all-American dishes and comfort foods, light on anything trendy or even remotely healthy.

Sam hoped the gravy didn’t come with extra artery blockers already mixed in.

The brothers were quiet while they waited for the food, unwinding from the tension of the bear chase and the two dead bodies they’d already seen that day—three if you counted the fact that they hadn’t made it to Ralph McCaig’s place until after midnight. When the waitress came back with their or-Witch’s

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ders, Dean flashed a smile at her. “You from around here?”

“Sure thing. Bred and born.”

She looked to be in her mid to late thirties, so wouldn’t remember the last murder cycle fi rsthand.

“We’re just visiting,” Dean said. “But it sounds like we picked a bad time.”

She brushed a stray hair off her cheek. “Bad how?

The snow?”

“No, I don’t mind that. But people seem to be dying around here this week.”

She moved her shoulders up and down, turning her head, like she was trying to work out a sore muscle.

“I guess that’s true.”

“Have you heard about it?”

“You know how it is, place like this. People talk.

I hear things. I don’t always credit what they have to say.”

“Way we hear it is, three since last night,” Dean said.

“Ralph was a good man,” the waitress said. Color flooded into her cheeks. “I didn’t really know Johnny that well. But poor Brittany Gardner—she worked here for a time, when she first moved to town.”

“Was she in her fifties or so, gray hair?” Sam asked.

“Oh, no. Brittany is—was—younger than me.”

“Then it’s four,” Sam said.

“It’s four.” The new speaker was a man sitting alone at a nearby table with a folded newspaper and a cup of coffee in front of him. He had brown hair 102 SUPERNATURAL

turning gray at the temples, a big head with enormous ears that looked like they would flap in a high wind, and a somber expression. “Four, and it’s just begun.”

“Now, Cal,” the waitress said. “Don’t go fi lling these boys’ heads.”

Cal ignored her. His lower lip jutted out far enough for fighter jets to land on. “You can still get out of town,” he said. “If you’re just passing through, you must have someplace better you can go.” He nodded toward the waitress. “Eileen and I, we don’t know anything other than Cedar Wells. We’ll stick it out, like my family did last time, and most probably be fine. But there’s no reason for you to put yourselves at risk.”