"When the Badger Grows Horns" 4/5
Dec. 7th, 2010 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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saroseficsKin Dóone’é Áshį́
On finding a job in Gatewood, Missouri, which was equidistant from three or four potential hunts and would make a good home base for the time being, John stipulated that he needed to start on a Tuesday so he’d be home in case of breakdowns caused by Dean’s first day of kindergarten. The grandfatherly garage owner agreed and told John that he appreciated his honesty; “most of the Injuns I’ve hired just show up when they feel like it.”
“I’m a Marine,” John said flatly, and his boss shrugged.
So John waited in the hall with Sammy, just to make sure Dean was settling in okay, while the teacher, who looked to be in her late twenties, introduced herself to the kids and had each child introduce himself or herself to the others. Most just said something like, “Hi, I’m Susie”; a couple of them mumbled so badly that the teacher had to prompt them to speak up.
When it was his turn, Dean stood and said clearly, “Dean Winchester yinishyé. Dóone’é Campbell ei’ nishli, Ashiihi bá shíshchíín.”
Miss Thistlewaite blinked. “I’m sorry, Dean... could you say that in English, please? We didn’t understand you.”
Dean looked her in the eye and sat down.
“De!” cried Sammy, which caught the teacher’s attention. She excused herself from the class and stepped out into the hall as the brothers waved to each other, closing the door behind her.
“Are you Dean’s father?”
“Yes,” John nodded. “I’m sorry about that—we’ve been spending a lot of time with my family in Arizona since my wife died, and he’s gotten out of the habit of speaking English.”
“I see,” said Miss Thistlewaite, though she clearly didn’t, because her next sentence was, “Well, I’m afraid I don’t speak Japanese, so....”
John frowned. “We’re Navajo.”
She blushed. “I’m sorry. Obviously I don’t speak Navajo either.”
“I’ll talk to him after school,” John promised.
She didn’t look pleased at the prospect of having to deal with a non-English-speaking child for even one day, but she thanked him and turned to go back inside. When she got to the door, however, she turned back. “Forgive me for asking, but... how long has your family been in the States?”
“Longer than yours,” John deadpanned and left, ignoring Sammy’s fussing over being separated from Dean.
“School is stupid,” Dean groused in Diné bizaad when he climbed into the Impala that afternoon. “All we do is color and talk about letters and numbers, and then we play. I can do that at home. Woman-with-Thistle-for-Brain still thinks we’re Japanese. And everyone looks at me like I’m the one who’s stupid.”
John sighed. “Dean, we’re not on the ranch anymore. You’re going to have to speak English, at least at school.”
Dean remained sullenly silent for the rest of the day, but the next morning he did agree to speak English at school and reserve Diné bizaad for sarcastic commentary that he didn’t want others to understand. And Miss Thistlewaite was baffled by the fact that not only was his English fluent, he was already reading at a third-grade level. He then made a point of reading library books about American Indians, especially Navajos, until they moved away in mid-November. She never got the hint, and Dean never stopped calling her Miss Thistle-brain in either language behind her back.
Tony Hillerman might or might not be a good writer. John didn’t know because he hadn’t read Hillerman’s books; he didn’t read novels all that often, and mysteries were considerably lower on his scale of interest than books of hunting lore. But on one point he owed the man a debt of gratitude: for a certain subset of the public imagination, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn made a Navajo with a badge not only plausible, but respectable. Some of the other hunters were astounded at the ease with which “Do you read Tony Hillerman?” defrosted individuals who were skeptical of FBI Agent Yazzie or NCIS Special Agent Whitehorse or whatever John’s federal cover identity of the day happened to be.
Unfortunately, it only worked when people recognized him as an Indian. John knew some people would probably mistake him for a Latino if he used a Spanish surname, so he never did unless he wanted to pass for Latino, but he wasn’t prepared for some of the other confusions he encountered. Some were just funny, like the “Where in India are you from?” question he got once in Atlanta. But “Special Agent Tso,” despite wearing a bolo tie with a turquoise slide, was asked how to make “that chicken stuff”; “Agent Kiyaani” got “Get outta here, ya damn Jap” in Fayetteville, Arkansas; and “Father Chee,” ironically, once ran into a victim anxious for someone to help him practice his Cantonese.
“Do I really look Asian?!” he asked Ellen Harvelle after that one.
“Not to anyone with half a brain,” Ellen shrugged. “Unfortunately, there are too many people in this world who don’t have half a brain.”
Given the number of towns in which it was easier for John to play drunk and hustle pool than to get a job as a mechanic, even when he gave his name as Diego Vega, he had to agree.
If there was one thing that annoyed John about being a father, it was other people’s notions of good parenting. Emily Winchester and Amá Sání Chee started Dean on a traditional training regimen the day after his sixth birthday, and John attempted to continue it in the next town where they moved for a hunt, only to have a nosy neighbor call Child Protective Services on him. John hadn’t laid a hand on Dean in punishment, and “That’s the way we do it on the rez” actually worked in this case; but Bobby recommended that John have Dean do most of his exercising indoors unless the weather was pleasant so the neighbors would be less likely to call CPS again. It didn’t always help, though, so John had to have a ready supply of excuses in case someone decided that Dean’s morning mile was a sign of abuse.
Oddly enough, no one seemed to mind John teaching Dean to shoot except when they were in New England or southern California.
School was a problem, too. Fights were one thing, but there were activities many schools expected John to be involved in that he just didn’t have time for, between hunting and training Dean and doing non-school stuff with both boys, and somehow that got him labeled as neglectful. He tried explaining that he didn’t need to help Dean with his homework, that Dean was bright enough to figure it out on his own, that maybe the problem was that Dean was bored with material that didn’t challenge him and that he’d never need in real life, but his arguments almost always fell on deaf ears. One rare school actually had a Gifted and Talented program where Dean thrived, and John hated to pull him away from it; it just figured that that case would be one that went sideways enough to catch the FBI’s attention, necessitating a quick exit from the state.
The “We think your son’s dyslexic” call he got when Dean was in the third grade was a new one, though, especially since it came when Dean was in the middle of reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for pleasure. The school administrators seemed to view minorities as People Who Need Our Enlightened Help And Ought To Be Grateful We Care, an attitude that had annoyed John from the first time he’d encountered it in the reservation schools; they weren’t pleased when John explained that he couldn’t afford and didn’t want the expensive battery of tests needed to diagnose dyslexia, and they weren’t amused when Dean couldn’t explain himself in English, John couldn’t translate what Dean did say, and Sammy refused to translate on the grounds that the whole thing was stupid and that Dean had been reading to him for forever. The fact that John had opted to delay Sammy’s enrollment in kindergarten for a year seemed to invalidate the boy’s opinion, even though he was the most articulate Winchester in the room.
“Dean could be mildly dyslexic,” Pastor Jim allowed when John called him that night for advice. “I’ve known him to get letters and numbers switched. But if I had to guess, I’d say the school’s more anxious for the special education funding than they are for Dean’s academic future—or Sam’s, for that matter.”
A few discreet questions around town confirmed Pastor Jim’s fear, and that school disappeared in the Impala’s rearview mirror not long after.
Technically, English was John’s second language; Diné bizaad was his first. But after so many years off the reservation, the distinction didn’t matter for him any more than it did for his boys. He’d picked up some Spanish, too, and he’d learned a few useful phrases in Thai and Vietnamese in the Corps. But he’d never given serious thought to learning another language until he started hunting and kept having to call Bobby or Pastor Jim to translate reference books for him. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Ugaritic... the sheer number of old languages made his head hurt, never mind the number of alphabets. And that didn’t include the modern languages like French, German, and Japanese.
Mary had insisted on raising the boys bilingual, and John had done so, though Sammy seldom spoke Navajo except when they were in Arizona for the holidays. But Dean never had any interest in learning a third language beyond memorizing Latin exorcisms. Sammy, on the other hand, pestered Bobby and Pastor Jim to teach him every language they possibly could, and John repaid them by translating any Diné bizaad texts they ran across.
Then Sammy discovered Scots Gaelic, and somehow it caught Dean’s interest as well. John went away on a hunt for two weeks, and when he got back, they were speaking Gaelic to each other almost as fluently as they did Diné bizaad. He was happy they’d recovered a bit of Mary’s heritage that way, but listening to them chatter in a language he didn’t understand... it made him wonder when he’d become the outsider in his own family.
They confused him, his boys. Some of the differences between them could be put down to the notion of multiple intelligences, according to Pastor Jim, even if the problems didn’t quite make sense to John. Sammy always complained about training, for example, while Dean seemed to understand its purpose even when he was miserable, whereas Dean hated research almost as passionately as Sammy loved it, despite Sammy sharing Mary’s distaste for hunting. But those weren’t the only conflicts and contradictions that came up with startling regularity. John was somewhat aware that living on the road as they did made it difficult for them to find the harmony they needed between the two cultures from which they came, but Dean flat-out refused to go back to Lawrence, and Sammy could never settle when they went back to the ranch for Thanksgiving and Christmas (which they did every year). Both boys enjoyed playing with the Chee cousins, but Sam hated being away from children who took more pleasure in books than in outdoor games. Dean enjoyed reading, too, but so adamantly did the younger boy define himself by his reading habits that the cousins finally started calling him Naaltsoos-miil, Thousand Books. Yet as proud as Dean was of his Diné heritage, he preferred to dress like Bobby and Bill, insisted on keeping his hair almost Jarhead-short, and was forever getting into fights at school with any boy who dared to view him as anything other than “the new kid.” (Several of the Chees warned Dean that cutting his hair would bring bad luck, but Amá Sání and John both saw it as a token of his mourning for Mary.) Sammy, on the other hand, for all his fascination with his mother’s literature and his leanings toward Christianity, never wanted to get his hair cut and swore that sneakers made his feet hurt in a way that moccasins didn’t. School dress codes became the bane of his existence—after hunting, that is.
Ellen figured out that part of Sammy’s problem with sneakers was that he kept getting Dean’s hand-me-downs and the soles were worn just enough to fit his foot wrong. There wasn’t much John could do about that, as poor as they were. But Pastor Jim put it down to wanting to distinguish himself from the rest of the family, which was odd, because in most other ways Sammy wanted to be just like everyone else at school.
Bobby and Amá Sání Chee both said at several points during the boys’ childhood that John should try staying put for a while. But Bobby didn’t get enough business at the salvage yard to be able to hire anyone; Bill and Ellen weren’t sure hiring John to tend bar at the Roadhouse would pass muster with the local ATF agents, who weren’t known to be kind to minorities; and John couldn’t find work in Blue Earth or anyplace else near friends he could count on to watch the boys when he was hunting. And even if both boys would have been happy staying with the family in Arizona, the incident with the Shtriga was enough to convince him that they wouldn’t be safe even in Dinétah unless he was with them. The old ways weren’t enough to keep the dark wind away from Sammy.
And that was another puzzle that became harder to solve the older Sammy got. He was sensitive to the supernatural, so much so that the elders thought he would make a good singer or a hand-trembler, and he was a good kid, tenderhearted, driven to help others and save lives. There were things he hated about hunting, just as Mary had, but he never hesitated to run to another person’s aid. His faith was a thing of beauty, even if John couldn’t share it. And as much as life in close quarters meant that they got on each other’s nerves, he and Dean adored each other—it made a certain kind of sense for them to have a private language, almost like twins. Yet the boy attracted evil like a magnet attracts iron, and he had a hair trigger at times and always seemed to know exactly the wrong thing to say to John. It made no sense. Worse still, if a demon mouthed off to John, it might or might not refer to Dean as Monster Slayer, but it never called Sam Child-Born-for-Water; he was always the Boy King. And nobody, not even Bobby, could tell John what that meant.
“Bináá’ łitso wanted something,” John recalled as he paced in Bobby’s dining room after one such incident on the eve of Sam’s thirteenth birthday. “Wanted it badly enough to make Mary an offer she couldn’t refuse. It was in Sam’s nursery, and the only reason for it to come back that night was that Sam was exactly six months old. The hand-trembler must have sensed Bináá’ łitso’s interest in Sammy; that’s why he wanted Mary to keep Sammy with her during the Nidáá, for all the good that did. So either Bináá’ łitso took something from Sam, or it did something to him.”
“John, we’ve been over this,” Bobby replied.
“But what if it took his soul?!”
“I think we’d notice something by now, ya idjit. Kid with no soul wouldn’ta run into that burning house three months back just to save someone he’d never met.”
“A marker, then, like a crossroads deal.”
“Standard lease from a crossroads demon is ten years, and a six-month-old ain’t capable of consent.”
John sighed. “So it did something to him. How do we undo it?”
“Until we know what it was, we can’t. Even if we did know, it might not be reversible. Look, John, I know you and Sam have your problems, but you’re gonna have to treat him like any other teenager. Whatever that demon did to your boy, it didn’t change the fact that he’s good deep down. Don’t let this ‘Boy King’ business make you forget he’s still your son.”
John stole a glance at the boys playing Monopoly in the living room, chattering happily in Gaelic, and the echo of a misplaced memory stole through his mind, some strange man pleading with Mary—You’ve got to leave John... you are gonna die, and your children will be cursed....
None of them had asked for this, least of all Sam. And it was wrong to destroy the sacred unit of the family.
“I’ll try,” he whispered.
Living on the road was tough financially, especially since their hunts routinely took them to places where garage owners were hesitant to hire Indians or Hispanics. John had to sell almost everything he had to invest in weapons and ammunition, and though he occasionally got welfare checks from the BIA, pool hustling and credit card fraud were quicker and easier than relying on the government. He tried not to ask the family for money unless things were really tight; he knew they didn’t approve and didn’t want them to feel obligated to help him.
But the college fund belonged to the boys. It wasn’t John’s place to do anything else with that money, and it wasn’t his place to tell them what to do with it. They had so little they could call truly their own, apart from their horses and a few sheep each back in Dinétah, that he couldn’t take that from them even if respect for children’s possessions weren’t part of Diné culture; and besides, it was all the inheritance they would ever get from Mary, apart from her journals. He couldn’t add to it now, but he didn’t touch it, simply letting it gather interest until the boys were ready for it.
Somewhere along the way, Dean had given up on school. John couldn’t blame him; hunting was far more important, and school was both boring and full of conflicts with kids who couldn’t see past skin color. Most of his teachers saw him only as a smart aleck and a troublemaker. But Sam loved learning, and even the prospect of life as a hunter didn’t completely discourage him from thinking about college.
The day before Thanksgiving in 1997, while Sam was at Aunt Sarah’s house catching up with his cousins and John was going through his weapons while visiting with Amá Sání Chee, Dean came to John and said, “Dad, I’ve been thinking.”
John didn’t look up from cleaning his gun. “Ąą’?”
“I want Sam to have my half of the college fund.”
John did look up at that. “Where did this come from?”
Dean sighed. “Look, while we were in Indiana, Sam’s English teacher asked him if he had ever thought about becoming a writer. That’s the first time a teacher’s seen him as more than a long-haired weirdo in years, and it got him thinking about going to college. No college is gonna look twice at me, I know that, and you need me more than I need school, but Sam wants to give it a try, and... I wanna help him.”
“Dean, I need you both. And what if something comes after him at school?”
“Honestly, Dad, when’s the last time you had a hunt on a college campus?” When John didn’t answer right away, Dean stood. “The money’s mine, right? So I’m giving it to Sammy. End of story.” And he walked outside.
“Thousand Books always was more like his mother,” Amá Sání mused in Diné bizaad.
John frowned and answered in kind. “You think I should let Sammy go to college?”
“You needed to go away from us to find your path, my grandson. Mary needed to leave her clan. It may be that the same is true of Sam. And if the end of all things is near, you may not be able to protect him from the dark wind much longer even if you are with him every hour of every day.”
John sighed. From what little they knew, Bináá’ łitso was incredibly powerful, stronger than any chindí he’d encountered since, and all the signs still pointed to his wanting Sammy for some special dark purpose. Amá Sání was right, as usual—they had no way of keeping Sam safe forever, even in Dinétah.
And Mary had wanted the boys to go to college.
Early the next morning, after a nightmare in which he’d actually disowned Sam for leaving, John rode out to his thinking spot, the place where he had first read Mary’s journals fourteen years earlier, and settled down to think about Amá Sání’s advice. But no sooner had he done so than a voice said, “I thought I’d find you out here.”
John turned to see his horse edging away from a Bilagáana with light brown hair and a weak face but strong brown eyes and an impish smirk. He hadn’t been standing there a second ago.
“Who are you?” John demanded.
“I’m a friend of Coyote’s,” the man said. “You can call me Loki.”
“Did you follow me?”
“Nah, just passing through. Actually happened to overhear your conversation with your grandmother last night and thought you could use my two-cents’ worth.”
John swallowed hard. He knew better than to trust things that looked human but weren’t, and Loki definitely seemed dangerous. But by the same token, it could be worthwhile to hear what Loki had to say; if nothing else, it would tell him what the other side wanted.
“Gummi bears?” Loki offered, holding up a gold bag of the expensive German kind—Dean’s favorite, and a treat they could rarely afford.
“No, thank you.”
“Haribo macht Kinder froh, und Erwachsene eben so.” He waggled the bag enticingly.
“Really. I’m fine.”
Loki shrugged and shook a few into his hand, then set the bag on John’s saddle. “Listen, John. Sam’s going to go to college whether you want him to or not. That’s not a threat; it’s a fact, and it’s not one anyone other than Sam can change. The more you oppose him on it, the more you’ll harden his resolve. And all you’ll end up doing is fracturing your family. You drive him away, he’ll let down his guard all the more just to spite you and end up listening to influences he ought to ignore. And people will die.”
“Why are you telling me this?” John frowned. “Why do you care?”
“Because Badger’s been trying on horns.” And Loki popped the handful of gummi bears into his mouth.
John’s blood ran cold. “What does that have to do with my sons?”
Loki held up a finger until he swallowed. “I can’t tell you everything I know. Even if I could, you wouldn’t believe me. Just trust me: those two have a starring role in Apocalypse Now, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.”
John nodded slowly. “Okay. Say I let Sam go to college. What happens then?”
Loki shrugged again. “Apocalypse is still going to happen, but I can think of a couple of lives you might be able to save.”
John sighed as he thought it over. His nightmare had been horrible—Dean quietly resenting John’s decision for three years, both of them sneaking off to keep a distant eye on Sam, neither of them spotting the signs of Bináá’ łitso’s return until it was too late and the family was fractured almost beyond repair. He couldn’t do that to either of his sons... but how was he supposed to keep Sam safe by letting him go out alone into a world determined to turn him into a monster?
Loki scoffed as if he could hear John’s thoughts. “Seriously? You’ve raised two of the best damn hunters in the West, and you’re afraid that little Sammy can’t tie his own shoes?”
John’s eyes narrowed. “I’m his father. I’m supposed to protect him.”
“Doing a bang-up job of that, leaving the boys on their own as often as you do.”
John opened his mouth to retort but suddenly realized he was caught. The only differences between leaving Dean to look after Sam now, or taking Dean with him on a hunt over a weekend while Sam was alone, and letting Sam go to college were the length of the stay, Dean’s presence, and the duration of John’s absence. He did want Sam beside him, both for Sam’s help on the hunt and for John’s peace of mind about Sam’s safety, but how often was he acting on that desire now?
To John, school was a necessary evil. To Mary, it had been an unattainable goal, one that she wanted to make sure the boys could reach. And it wasn’t his place to deny that dream to either son.
Loki just gave him a knowing look and vanished... leaving the gummi bears as a reminder.
There wasn’t much in Sam’s college fund, they discovered when they called the bank in Lawrence that Monday morning. John had put in only $600 before the fire, and even with the magic of compound interest, it hadn’t grown much at all. But Dean’s... it wouldn’t cover tuition for more than a year, even at a state school, but it would sure help with housing and books and the like, provided Sam could get a good scholarship.
So it was settled. Dean took the GED in Tuba City that Christmas and transferred the money from his college fund to Sam’s, and Sam knuckled down to keep ahead of his studies and crammed for all the entrance tests and such he’d need to take. John didn’t understand most of the acronyms and numbers the boys chattered at each other over the years, especially when they did it in Gaelic, so he had to take their word for it that Sam was doing well.
He did understand “National Merit Scholar,” though, and when word finally came that Sam had made it, John took both boys out for pizza and a movie to celebrate. He also understood “full scholarship,” and the offers began rolling in within a few weeks of the National Merit announcement. The one that most stunned all three of them was the full scholarship offered by Stanford.
After some careful consideration, Sam narrowed his choices to Stanford, Arizona State, and Texas A&M, and while John had several urgent hunts to take care of, Dean drove Sam to all three campuses to help him decide. Arizona State, despite its proximity to family, was discarded both because Sam wasn’t crazy about its approach to pre-professional programs and because the other schools had prettier scenery. At Stanford, Sam got an interview with one of the deans; at A&M, he got the chance to sit in on a couple of classes and to meet informally with several department heads.
John met the boys at Bobby’s after the A&M visit, and he could tell from the expression on their faces when they got out of the car that they’d been thinking and talking seriously all the way from College Station. “Ąą’?” he asked as soon as they walked up to him.
“He’s gonna be a lot happier at A&M,” Dean answered, and Sam nodded his agreement.
“You’re sure about this?” John pressed. “Stanford... that’s a very prestigious school. And they don’t give full rides to just anybody.”
“Stanford wants me ’cause I’m Diné,” Sam replied. “A&M wants me ’cause I’m smart.”
Well, when he put it that way....
“What are you gonna major in, Sam?” Bobby asked.
“Linguistics. Maybe pre-law, maybe pre-med. I figure it’s a good idea to be able to speak to victims in their own language.”
Bobby nodded. “Very sensible.”
They stayed in Sioux Falls all that spring, both to allow Sam to finish school in one place and to allow the family to take on some hunts on the various reservations around the state that Bobby had been saving for them. Something was stirring up ghosts and monsters of various kinds on all of the reservations, but the white hunters Bobby knew hadn’t been able to get very far. So John and Dean, and Sam when he had time, set about blending in, making inquiries, and taking out the bad things.
The people they helped were always grateful, but the holy men always looked oddly at Dean and frowned at Sam. John finally managed to corner one of them, a Lakota, and demand an answer.
The holy man just shook his head. “A storm is coming for us all, Rifleman. Your sons, both of them... they are wakan, sacred, but darkness and light make war around them. They have the power to save the world or to destroy it.” He shrugged. “It makes no sense, I know, but that’s what I see.”
John refrained from remarking that it didn’t make sense only because the Sioux never contemplated the end of the world; that wasn’t entirely fair, and it wouldn’t be polite to say. He simply thanked the man and let Dean snark about peyote users all the way back to the motel. And when at last they caught the demon that was behind the disturbances and it was stupid enough to mouth off to him in Sioux, John took immense satisfaction in sending it back to Hell. Apparently it hadn’t gotten the memo as to which nation the Winchesters belonged to.
John still hadn’t figured out what his boys had to do with the Apocalypse, though he assumed Bináá’ łitso had some role in the whole mess. But when Sam pressed him about what the Lakota had said, he told the boy not to worry about it. Graduation and college were stress enough for one teen.
In the end, only a handful of John and Bobby’s hunting friends were able to come to Sioux Falls for the graduation itself. But Bobby paid for a videotape, so John was able to take the tape and the boys back to Dinétah for a family celebration. And celebrate the family did, in a way John hadn’t seen since before Mary died, and with two major surprises for Sam.
While Sam and Dean had been investigating colleges, the Chees and Joe and Emily Winchester had been debating graduation gifts. And although it had taken a considerable contribution from every member of the extended family, they had managed to scrape together enough money to buy Sam a laptop computer and an inkjet printer. John had consulted with Ash, the MIT dropout whom Ellen had half adopted, as to what to buy, and Ash had gotten them a good deal on a machine he said would last Sam all four years and possibly beyond; but Amá Sání Chee insisted on having it blessed and making the presentation herself. Sam was so overwhelmed that he barely choked out a quiet “Ahéhee’,” but the tears spilling down his cheeks were thanks enough for Amá Sání.
Sam’s other graduation gift from the Chees was a chestnut filly with a star and white stockings. Sam promptly named her Aggie.
“Aggie?!” Dean echoed incredulously.
“It’s short for Agatha,” Sam replied haughtily, and Aggie snorted as if to say, “So there.”
Dean laughed. “Dude, I am so glad you’re not going to Stanford. Your poor horse would never recover if you named her Cardinal.”
“I guess Aggie’s better than Reveille,” mused Aunt Sarah, and everyone laughed at that.
Midsummer’s Day of 2005 found Sam, newly recovered from a horrific bout of mono, in College Station making up his incompletes and filling out applications to law schools, while his girl Jessica was in Europe doing some study-abroad course and John and Dean were in Indiana, chasing down a rawhead. And they caught the monster none too soon; seconds after they got back to the motel after a post-hunt beer, a supercell thunderstorm crashed down on them and took the power with it. Dean grumbled and turned in early, but John took the time to update his journal by candlelight before sitting back to think as he watched Dean sleep.
Loki’s advice had proven to be wise after all. Though John and Dean had missed Sam’s presence on the hunts they undertook during the school year, they had kept in contact, and giving Sam space to do his own thing seemed to have truly lessened the tensions among them. They both approved of Sam’s girlfriend, even though she’d been more awkward around the Chees that first Christmas than Mary had been. And Sam, without prompting, had caught on to no fewer than three demons possessing his friends and sent them back to Hell. The family was still intact... but John was beginning to wonder if his sons’ safety might not require him to put that unity on the line.
He hadn’t told the boys yet, but thanks to the research he’d done at A&M and Baylor while they were taking care of Sam that spring, he’d finally gotten most of the pieces put together with regard to Bináá’ łitso. Azazel, its name was, one of their original suspects. He thought he knew how to track it, now that it had finally become active again after twenty-some years. He even thought he’d gotten a solid lead on the Colt, if Daniel Elkins would quit holding out on him. The question was, after all these years, whether it might not be safer to leave the boys to their own devices while he took down Azazel on his own. Leave Sammy in Texas, send Dean back to the ranch, keep them both off the demon’s radar a while longer, before... before the enemy could penetrate the stronghold of Dinétah. Before the badger grew horns.
He was still considering his options when his cell phone rang.
“Dad?” Sam’s voice sounded small and very, very shaken.
“What is it, Sam? Haidzaa?”
“When... when Mom died... Bináá’ łitso pinned her to the ceiling, right?”
John’s hand tightened around the phone. “Why do you ask?”
“I had this nightmare....”
And lightning flashed across the sky from east to west.
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