The Cause Sanguine - Section One

[glasslogic]

 We humans fear the beast within the wolf
because we do not understand the beast within ourselves
                                ~Gerald Hausman

Prologue

~1989~

Later, when he was asked, Dean would say it was the creak of the front door opening that dragged him from the depths of his fevered sleep and sent him padding through the cold towards the kitchen.

But it was really the crying.

The sound should have been muffled by the closed bedroom door and the thick wooden walls of the cabin John had borrowed from his old mentor, Sam Trellis. And by the quilts and blankets Dean had pulled up around his ears as he nested on the sagging mattress and sweated out a bad turn with the flu; all the other thumps and scuffles as John moved through the house were. But the crying sliced through everything. The moon was full and bright in the night sky, its light streaming in through high, narrow, horizontal windows as he crept out of his bedroom to investigate.

On the counter in the kitchen sat a boy, somewhat younger than his own ten years. His hair was a tangled mess and tears streaked through the dirt smudged on his face. He was dressed only in a t-shirt Dean recognized as his dad’s; it hung on his skinny frame like a tent and pooled around his hips on the chipped Formica of the countertop. A blanket Dean recognized from the backseat of the Impala was draped over his shoulders. One of the boy’s legs was oddly angled and loosely wrapped in an old towel. Blood stained the fabric and dripped to the floor in slow, heavy drops.

“Hi,” Dean said awkwardly.

The sharp little chin jerked up and Dean found himself staring into the most striking pair of eyes he had ever seen. Hazel, with yellowish flecks... but it was the personality he could see looking out of those eyes that made him take an involuntary step forward.

A low growl rumbled out of the shadows and he jumped, spinning to face the huge grey wolf that was slinking towards him from the doorway. Dean looked around frantically but there was nothing in reach he could use as a weapon, and the wolf could certainly take him down before he could run for anything. He was still frozen in indecision, trying to figure out how to get himself and the kid to safety, when the boy on the counter hiccupped and then gave a low warbling whine. The wolf stopped advancing. It sat back on its haunches and seemed to be thinking about the situation. Dean wanted to yell for his dad, but he was afraid to startle the animal into action. He backed up until he could see both the boy and the wolf at the same time.

Tears were still dripping down the smudged face, but the child reached out for Dean with one blood-smeared hand. Dean met his eyes again and felt that same pulling sensation. The wolf was all but forgotten as Dean extended his own hand and tangled their fingers together. It felt... right. A second later, the strange moment was broken as a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Dean pulled free and looked up into his dad’s lined face. John ruffled his hair gently.

“Back to bed with you, kiddo.”

Behind his dad, another man was standing. Dressed, as the boy was, in some of his father’s spare clothes. He had an odd stillness to him, and there wasn’t anything Dean could understand in his gaze.

“Dad?”

“Nothing to worry about. But it’s past time for you to be asleep.” Dean recognized the command in his father’s voice and he let his dad usher him back down the hallway to his bedroom.

“I don’t want to see you up again tonight, Dean.”

Dean nodded obediently. But he could hear the crying in the kitchen again.

“Dad?” he called, before John could close the door again. His father paused. “Will he be okay?”

John smiled. “He’s going to be just fine. Got his leg caught in a mess of a trap. You don’t need to worry about him; just get some rest.”

Dean pulled the blankets back up over his head, and the pillows too, and stayed that way until the exhaustion of his illness carried him back to sleep.



Chapter One

I left my anger in a river running highway 5

New Hampshire, Vermont, bordered by
College farms, hubcaps, and falling rocks
Voices in the woods and the mountaintops
                               ~Jonas and Ezekiel, Indigo Girls

~2004~

Dean ducked another bar stool and flipped the thug who threw it a rude gesture. He opened his mouth to mock the guy for being a loser, when a fist caught him across the jaw and he reeled into the wall. Sliding down onto his ass, he took stock of the situation and decided that there wasn’t anything else to be gained in the chaotic free-for-all the bar had become. Mostly because all the liquor he had spent the past few hours swallowing was threatening to make a dramatic reappearance.

He tried to stand up, but gravity was stronger than Dean remembered. He fell twice before he decided he wasn’t too good for crawling, and bushes were better for vomiting than wooden floors. The cold air outside was like being slapped in the face, and after a few more tries he managed to stand enough to stagger down the street to his motel room. The carpet was more comfortable than he thought it would be; the dust and hair and debris of a thousand unnamed previous tenants only gave it more padding as he closed his eyes for a moment. He promised himself he would get up as soon as the room stopped spinning...

Sunlight was torture seeping in through Dean’s eyelids when he roused again. His mouth tasted like an open grave and he felt like he’d been beaten. The sudden vivid recall of a pool stick catching him in the kidneys made him groan and curl into a ball, and the noise he made caused him to whimper and curl even tighter. He passed back out after that, but somehow in his hung-over misery managed to crawl onto the cool tile of the bathroom, because there’s where he woke up hours later.

The sink was convenient to lean on as he hunched over it and splashed cold water on his face before peeling out of his disgustingly filthy shirt. Dean looked up to meet his own bloodshot eyes and dull pallor. One of his eyebrows was split and his lip too. Dried blood crusted the wounds, and both his face and torso were colored with layers of bruises. A messy line of stitches closed a shallow stab wound over his left hip gained in a brawl he had started a few days earlier, and one blow to his shoulder had been so hard he could still see an imprint of the guys ring. A collection of pointless wounds and injuries gained defending nothing more important than his pain and his pride.

Dean spit into the sink and from the way his mouth felt, was distantly surprised not to see a tooth come out in it. He took a deep breath and hung his head. Pickling his liver and putting the fear of Dean Winchester into the hearts of barflies throughout the Midwest wasn’t going to accomplish anything except to land him in his grave before the year was out.

He ripped the crinkly plastic off of one the cups on the sink and filled it with tap water. Through the doorway he could see his duffle bag lying where he had kicked it. The zipper was undone and its contents were spilling out on the carpet. Among the collection of filthy clothes and weapons he could see a battered manila envelope. Dean’s fist tightened on the plastic cup he had been drinking from until it crushed in his grip. His name was written neatly across the front of the envelope in heavy black ink, like an accusation. It wasn’t meant that way, but he couldn’t see those perfect block letters and not feel a desperate need to find some whiskey. Couldn’t see them as anything but a reminder that when his dad had really needed him, he’d been a thousand miles away chatting up coeds in a college dive. When his dad had gone into that house without back-up, he’d been trying to charm some random girl into his motel room. And when his dad lay dying on the filthy floor of a house twenty years abandoned, he’d been twisted in cheap cotton sheets enjoying the results of a different kind of hunt.

He hated himself for that. And he hated his dad for not calling him in before taking that job on alone. His dad had already suffered for the mistake, and Dean had thrown himself into his own form of punishment.

But three months of burying himself in a bottle trying to drown his self-loathing was two months, three weeks, and six days longer than John would have tolerated. It seemed a poor sort of memorial to the man to be indulging in behavior he would have abhorred out of grief over his death.

On the edge of sober for the first time in weeks, Dean mostly just felt tired, and empty. He dropped the mangled plastic into the trash bin and went to pick up the packet Bobby had forwarded to him within days of hearing of John’s death. Time to see what was inside.

He had to move on.

“Yeah, Bobby. I’m there now.”

Dean peeked out the window into the yard, still white and silent with a blanket of snow.

“No, it’s in pretty good shape for having stood empty all these years. Looks like a branch came through a window awhile back. The overhang seems to have kept most of the moisture out.” He listened a moment and rolled his eyes. “I said most of the moisture, not all of it! Of course it needs a lot of work.” Dean scuffed at a moldering pile of leaves blown against a baseboard, sighing when moving them aside took part of the wall and the floor out as well.

“I’ll maybe have to replace some planks. Well, yeah. There’s a few other things; the window, some shingles, maybe the overhang, some fence railing, the porch is weak in a few places, some of the walls need work. There might be a hole in the roof where the tree hit it. Possibly one on the other side too. Looks pretty sound otherwise though.” A pause. “Why are you laughing at me?”

He leaned against the kitchen counter, listening patiently and eyeing a bird’s nest of top of the hand carved cabinets. “I don’t have to pay anything; the funds are already in place. Apparently it’s set up in some kind of trust. Local management. No, it was something Samuel set up when he left the cabin to Dad. No, I don’t know what Dad did for him, must have been something big though, this is kind of a sweet deal. I don’t care about the state of the place! The back bedroom looks intact and I needed something to do anyways.” Dean listened and frowned. “What do you mean ‘do I know what I’m doing?’ I can fix a car, I can fix a roof. You think there is anything more complicated in carpentry than in an engine rebuild?” He pulled the phone away and gave it a disgruntled look while Bobby laughed at him again, three states away. He pressed it to his ear again after a moment. “You about done? Yeah, I think changing the subject would be good.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “The town’s fine, Bobby.” He picked up a couch cushion and dropped it when a mouse fell out of the bottom and scrambled away. “Well because no one shot at the car or crossed themselves when I ran in to get some groceries, so yeah -- on the basis of that I think it’s a nice place. No, I haven’t been up here since I was a kid. We used to come up here every year or so, hang out for a few weeks. Do some hunting and fishing.” He opened the refrigerator and wrinkled his nose at the musty smell, but at least it was empty. “I don’t know, Bobby, ten maybe? Eleven? Something like that. Dad just didn’t want to come any more.” He paused, one hand still on the fridge door as the memory of teary hazel eyes and a child’s plaintive crying echoed in his memory. “I really don’t remember why.”

Dean closed the fridge and walked back to the window. He tugged at one of the curtains and frowned when it fell apart in his hand. “A few months, probably. I just need some space to get my head together. Nothing with hunting. Yes, peace, quiet, and home repair. Neighbors?” He peered out the glass into the dense forest on the other side of his strip of yard. The footprints of curious wildlife were visible in the otherwise crisp, unbroken snow. “There’s another house about a mile down the road. Then eight or nine miles into Sunvalley town. Otherwise, it’s just me and the woods.”



Chapter Two

There are, of course, several things in
Ontario that are more dangerous than wolves.
For instance, the step-ladder.
                                                               ~J .W. Curran, The Canadian Wildlife Almanac, 1981

Crackling ice coated everything in the late April sunshine. The snow was only inches deep, and it crunched under Dean’s feet as he hurried down the stairs to meet a truck that had pulled up behind the Impala in the driveway.

It hadn’t taken Dean long to realize that if he wanted to stop the water dripping on his head and the icy winter drafts any time before the spring thaw, he was going to need more supplies and some help that actually knew what they were doing. A discussion with the trust manager and a trip to the hardware store had handled the former, and a few games of pool at the local watering hole the latter. The guys there seemed to appreciate the novelty of a man who played for favors instead of cash, especially once he raked them all over the table.

“Morning stranger,” Alan called, climbing out and heading around to the bed of the truck.

Dean flashed him a grin and reached over the side of the bed to haul out a bundle of shingles. “Stranger? You usually deliver construction supplies to people you don’t know?”

Alan’s smile was a little sourer than Dean’s own, but it was friendly enough. “Only the ones that can run a pool table like my dog runs the sheep. You do a good job at looking wet behind the ears.”

“It’s a gift. Did you bring everything?”

“I told June I was going to haul everything you’d purchased out here for you and this is what they put in the truck. If you bought things that aren’t here, you need to take it up with the hardware store. I’m just glad you were playing for favors and not cash, even if it is going to cost me my Saturday.”

“I have to live here; I wouldn’t do that to you guys.” Dean gave the materials filling the truck bed a calculating look. “This looks like it. And I really do appreciate it. It would have taken me three trips and been hell on my upholstery to get all of this stuff.”

Alan gave the Impala a dismissive grunt, then glanced up at the roofline where the edges of the blue tarps spread over the damaged places were flipping casually in the breeze. “Are we really going to be about fixing your roof with the ice like this?”

Dean shrugged and carried a bundle of shingles over to the porch. “I don’t see where I have a lot of choice here. The water coming in is destroying more of the walls and floor every day. Plus, it’s freaking cold inside.”

Alan sighed and shrugged his coat off, tossing it in the truck. He squinted at the roof again. “Tell you what, you do everything I say --and don’t fall off the roof and break anything-- and I’ll do what I can to help you get this project done before Monday. You can have me all weekend and all you have to do is buy me lunch. Deal?”

Dean gave him a more genuine smile than he had given anyone in months. “Deal.”

By the next afternoon, the roof was well on its way to being patched and the only injuries, contrary to Alan’s pessimistic muttering, were blisters and chapped skin. There would be more work to do when the temperature improved later in the year, but at least by the time they were finished the early spring weather would stay on the outside of the house where it belonged.

A few hours in and Alan set his hammer down and looked off toward the woods. Dean straightened up and followed his gaze to see a wolf sitting out by the far fence post. He had been seeing the animal on and off since first showing up at the cabin, but this was the boldest the creature had been yet.

“You see a lot of him?”

Dean shrugged and banged a nail in. “Some. I see a lot of tracks around the yard in the morning, hear them at night. He’s usually out here in the afternoons when I’m working, though. I think he likes me. But I’ve only been here about a week; took me that long to realize no half-assed patch job was going to keep my head dry and the heat in.” Dean chuckled and reached for another nail, but paused when he caught sight of the look on Alan’s face. “Something wrong?”

Alan was still watching the wolf. The animal was just sitting, watching them back. “Not wrong, really. Just curious. You hear a lot about the wolves around here; don’t see them too often, though. They keep to themselves, and we keep to ourselves. Works out best for everyone.”

Dean’s instincts pricked. “What about people hunting game, they keep to themselves too?”

“We’ve got hunters aplenty sure enough, but they don’t go deep into the forest. Not more than maybe a mile or two. Not the smart ones.”

Dean set the hammer down and gave the wolf a harder look. “What happens to the less smart ones?”

“Nothing like what you’re thinking. They come back in one piece. They just don’t catch anything, and it’s... strange.”

“How strange?"

Alan raised an eyebrow. “You thinking of doing some hunting yourself?”

Dean snorted. “Hardly.” He waved one hand, indicating the wolf sniffing at the fence line. “But if the neighbors are going to come calling, I figure I should at least know what manners to mind.”

Alan picked up his hammer again. “It’s all just urban legends. Some people get lost, get dehydrated, get spooked, and suddenly the laws of nature are being twisted left and right. We don’t have any problem with the wolves, and there’s a few packs in the valley. They mind their own business. I was just surprised to see one out here.”

“I’m not any kind of park ranger, but isn’t the valley a little small to support several wolf packs?”

“Sometimes people from the University come out to see us and try and figure out that very thing.” Alan sounded almost smug. “They like to come and walk around and talk to people and use fancy words to try and explain it, but they never have come up with anything reasonable, and the wolves are still here.” He shrugged. “This valley is actually a lot bigger than you would think. Not that big, of course. But we’re two valleys, you know; this one and the one that curves around us. These mountains, then that valley beyond them, then the other set.”

“What’s in that valley?” Dean was surprised; he hadn’t really noticed there being anything else out there from the road. He had just assumed it was valley, mountains, and then the rest of the world.

“Just the wolves. It’s pretty steep and there’s a big river at the bottom, not a good place for human habitation, and besides -- it’s already occupied. Don’t need it anyway, though, and soon the wolves can have this one too.”

“What do you mean?”

Alan shrugged. “It’s a small town. People don’t seem to want to move here, and our kids can’t wait to get out. Hard to blame them, but it means there’s less population every year.”

Dean glanced over towards the forest again, just in time to see the wolf stretch out and trot back into the dense woods. “I’m surprised. It seems like a nice town, beautiful country; would think you could get people to retire here if nothing else.”

“You would think, but people don’t like to visit here much either. Say they get weird vibes. Can you believe that? Weird vibes.”

Dean shook his head and reached for more nails. He had certainly detected his own share of weird vibes in his life, but it wasn’t something he wanted to discuss with Alan.

Not everything had to be a hunt, and for now at least, he wasn’t any kind of hunter.

Honest labor, Alan’s nonjudgmental company, and the satisfaction of a job well done made Dean’s collapse into bed that night something he welcomed for the first time in months. Wolf song echoed in the mountains around him as he closed his eyes. Ignoring, as he had every night since moving into the cabin, that distant tugging in his mind that insisted that there was something in that cacophony speaking only to him: welcome.



Chapter Three

"The wolf is neither man's competitor nor his enemy.
He is a fellow creature with whom the earth must be shared."
                                                    -L. David Mech

Snow melted and spring started to slowly edge its way into the scenery. Home repair expanded into a whirlwind of hammering, sanding and cool mountain air. Dean was good with his hands and not afraid of hard work. Alan was always willing to offer pointers, and a few times he and some of the other guys stopped by to help out or provide some welcomed advice.

Dean had mentioned Alan’s comments regarding the local wildlife to Bobby during one of his periodic calls. Bobby had snorted and made Dean feel generally stupid for even bothering to repeat them. After all, the area’s local hunter, Sam Trellis, had mentored both Bobby and Dean’s father. John had visited the cabin often when Dean was a kid, and Bobby himself had spent a lot of time with Trellis out in Sunvalley following his wife’s death. If there was something supernatural that needed to be taken care of, then one of them would have found out about it.

“You’re there to rest,” Bobby advised him. “Don’t waste your time stalking around chasing rumors. If you want to do that, I’ve got a laundry list of real problems that need looking in to.”

Pushing his body to accomplish something that had nothing to do with death was slowly sweating out the apathy and depression Dean could still feel. Real sleep and the daily distraction served to improve his disposition, and it was no time before he found himself anticipating the next day of work, instead of dreading the return of consciousness and the overwhelming burden of guilt.

For its part, the wolf continued to act interested in the activities of its newest human neighbor, slowly getting bolder until it was actually entering the yard. Dean, intrigued by the animal, took to eating his lunch outside. One day on impulse he tossed half his turkey sandwich out to it. The wolf crept forward, keeping its eyes warily on the human. When Dean didn’t make any movements, it bolted the food then loped into the forest. The next morning when Dean walked out to start the day’s work, he was startled to see the wolf standing in the gravel driveway not even ten feet away from the steps, giving the Impala a good sniff. It backed off when it saw him, but not out of the yard. Dean shared his lunch again and the wolf kept him company through the afternoon until the sun sank away into the mountains.

Their odd relationship seemed to expand from that point. While still not an everyday occurrence, the wolf was there more often than not, usually spending the entire day shadowing Dean around the property. It seemed interested in everything he did, even if not willing to quite come within touching distance. After awhile, Dean missed its company when the wolf didn’t show, and he started buying double the amount of meat from the deli to share with his guest.

About the same time the first wildflowers were unfurling in the grass, the pattern changed. The wolf was waiting for him when he strode out the door in the morning, but instead of sitting by the stairs, it was out in the grass by the forest edge, lying on its belly. Dean kept an eye on it while he went about ripping out the porch rail, but when it ignored the ham he tossed towards it at lunchtime, he decided to try and get a closer look.

Dean didn’t think the animal was lacking in intelligence, so he didn’t bother trying to hide his intention. He just walked slowly and deliberately towards until he was only yards away. The wolf didn’t seem injured, just... uncomfortable. It whined a little when he got close, and the tail swished through the grass. Dean took another careful step, just wanting to get close enough to see if the animal was in need of some kind of medical attention --not that he could really provide it if it did-- but the wolf shied and loped off.

The wolf was missing for three days. Dean hit his hand more than once because his gaze kept drifting to the woods, hoping to see flash of grey. He thought he did a few times, but nothing ever emerged. When he stepped outside the morning of the fourth day and almost tripped over it, he actually laughed, relieved.

“What are you doing on the porch?”

The wolf just flicked its tail in seeming disdain, but Dean couldn’t get over the feeling that it was just as pleased to see him as he was to see it.

A week later, Dean was laying half under the Impala with the sun high in the sky, cussing under his breath, covered in grease and scraping his knuckles on the undercarriage trying to tighten just one last bolt so he could call the project done. Then he could get out of the cold and go take a shower. He felt a faint brush of something against his hip and pushed one hand down to see what had touched him, but found nothing but some leaves. The wind was blowing so he dismissed it and focused back on the car. A few minutes later, he heard a rattle of loose gravel and the touch was back, firmer and this time right over his crotch. Dean slid out from under the car so fast it wasn’t even conscious movement until he was sitting splayed on the gravel, and then froze.

Standing warily not even four feet away was the wolf. Dean had never seen it so close. It was an impressive animal with a coat in rippling shades of gray and a dusting of black. But it was the eyes that really grabbed him him, full of wildness and thoughts he could in no way understand, yet struck a longing through him for something unnamed. The sense of connection, familiarity, he felt was shocking in its intensity.

When he didn’t move, the wolf crept cautiously closer until Dean could have reached out and touched it. It watched him nervously, then bent down to give his crotch another good sniff. Dean stayed locked into position, stunned by the turn of events, and also pretty sure he didn’t want to give the animal a reason to flip out on him with its teeth so close to his face and other parts he was fond of. Its nose brushed against the denim, leaving a damp spot.

“Hey!”

The shaggy head shot up and met him almost eye to eye. Then with no warning, the wolf swiped its tongue across Dean’s face from chin to hairline and danced out of reach.

Dean made a strangled, incoherent sound of outrage that got him a curiously cocked head as he wiped at his face and glared at the animal that he could swear was laughing at him. “See what kind of treats I toss you next!”

The wolf stretched, showing obvious disdain for whatever the human was shouting at it. As Dean watched it trot back into the shadows of the tree line, he was surprised to find he was smiling.

A few days later, when he headed out to eat his lunch in the yard, he almost stepped on a rabbit lying on the steps. It had been neatly killed and obviously placed. He bent to pick it up and the wolf stepped from the side of the wraparound porch Dean hadn’t been able to see.

“This yours?” Dean asked, setting the rabbit back down carefully in case the wolf took offence.

But the animal didn’t make any move to reclaim the kill, just laid down on the edge of the porch where the most sun would sweep across its fur.

Dean snorted. “Yeah, you’re fearsome all right.” He picked the rabbit up thoughtfully. “I don’t think you’re going to be impressed with what I do with this.”

The wolf didn’t seem particularly concerned, cracking one eye open to track Dean’s movements before apparently sinking back into slumber.

The wolf hadn’t seemed impressed with rabbit stew Dean set down hours later, but it gamely finished the bowl Dean set out for it, then laid back down so close to where Dean was sitting on the bare wooden planks that he could feel the warmth of its body through his jeans. The nights were still uncomfortably cool, even with his long sleeves.

He stayed on the porch until close to dawn, the wolf pressed against him, the stars overhead, a strange sort of peace stealing through his bones like he hadn’t known since the phone call five months ago.



Chapter Four

There are nights when the wolves are silent
and only the moon howls.
                                      ~George Carlin

By the end of May, Dean was deep in the internal repairs to the cabin, ripping out planking, and sanding, and finishing the replacements. The local guys were still making their periodic drop-bys. Alan especially, who seemed to have adopted Dean almost as some kind of project, was concerned that Dean spent so much time alone, but Dean kept assuring him the peace and quiet was exactly what he was after.

When Dean was alone, the wolf was there. He had thought moving his labor inside would limit his time with the animal, but one day when the screen was propped open to air out as much of the house as possible while he stained the new floor sections, he glanced up to see the wolf sitting in the doorway. It didn’t look especially happy to be there --Dean imagined the fumes were especially bad to its sensitive nose-- but it continued to loiter so Dean shrugged and turned his attention back to the floor.

He yelped and dropped the can of stain when something cold and wet prodded tentatively at the back of his neck with a loud snuffling sound. Turning around fast, he glared at the quickly retreating wolf and rose to close the screen firmly behind it. Bold was one thing, but enough was enough. Dean’s resolve lasted until the next afternoon when a plaintive whine drew his attention to where the wolf was pacing in front of the door.

“You can’t possibly want to come in again.” He opened the door anyway out of curiosity and the wolf stepped past him into the cabin. It threw one wary look Dean’s way before it proceeded to give the living room a thorough investigation, avoiding the freshly stained places. Then it hopped up and settled on the couch, as at home as a family dog.

“You do know you’re a wolf, right?” Dean asked skeptically. The animal yawned and flopped its head down on its paws. Dean gave up and went to open another window.

It disappeared again for a few days a week or so later, after a particularly trying afternoon in which it whined, paced and generally refused to settle. The wolf capped the fun off by stealing Dean’s entire sandwich off the picnic table in the yard when Dean went inside to get a drink, then left it mangled and inedible on the ground. Dean would have been more irritated, but the wolf had obviously been out-of-sorts.

Dean slept poorly for the next few nights, the light of the full moon burning through the thin curtains of the bedroom and his concern keeping him awake. When the wolf showed back up a few days later, Dean just acknowledge it with a nod and life resumed as normal. Or as normal as it had ever been for him. But the wolf seemed even more determined to invade his space. Dean opened the door one evening to let it out before he went to bed, and it flatly refused to leave. He took a moment to consider the likely outcome of trying to make a hundred pounds of wild animal do what it clearly didn’t want to do, then let the front door close again.

“Fine, but if you pee on my floor, you’re not going to be invited back in to shed all over my furniture.”

Dean left the wolf standing in the living room and headed for bed. He was just drifting off when something heavy landed on the mattress, startling him fully awake. He threw one hand out and it met thick, coarse fur and got a friendly lick. A long, warm weight pressed up against his back over the blankets. Dean blinked in the darkness, unsure what to do, but the wolf didn’t move again, and eventually Dean fell asleep still trying to decide what to do.

The wolf disappeared into the forest when Dean stumbled out of bed shortly after dawn and opened the door for it, but was back on the porch before noon, and by the end of the week, Dean had grown used to only having half the bed to sprawl over.

But as preoccupying as the construction and repair work had been, it couldn’t last forever. By the time June was rolling to a close, the cabin was in as good or better shape than it had been since it was constructed. Dean enjoyed the feeling of completion and accomplishment for about a week, and then restlessness started to set in. The idea of hunting was still too painful; he just wasn’t ready to go back on the road. But sitting in the cabin day after day with nothing to do was making him crazy, leaving him with hours of emptiness with only thoughts about his dad and all the ways the Winchesters had always been damned to dwell on. The wolf trailed along with him when it wasn’t off in the forest doing whatever wolves did, but even his fascination with the animal couldn’t draw him out of his mood. He missed it when it wasn’t there, but it wasn’t distracting enough to keep him engaged.

Eventually, Dean turned to the town to absorb his time, and that led him finally led him back to the local bar. It wasn’t actually that far from his cabin, and backed up to the same endless stretch of forest that he saw out his windows every day. The bar led to drinking, drinking led to more brooding, and the brooding led back to the bar. He got some concerned looks as he hunched over his glasses night after night, from Alan and some of the other people he had met during his reconditioning of the cabin, but his attempts to socialize with them for more than a few minutes did little but serve to remind Dean of how deep the divide between his own life and theirs really was; it made him snappish and they ultimately left him alone to drink his poison in solitude.

He might have continued on this path indefinitely until it landed him right back where he had been in the months following John’s death, but about a week after he found his new favorite establishment, his professional curiosity was pricked by a loud conversation at a nearby table. Dean eavesdropped by habit, but it was the subject that really caught his attention.

“I’m telling you, Jeannie saw one!” The man dug an elbow clumsily into the side of the woman beside him. “Didn’t she?”

“She certainly saw something.”

“A werewolf,” the redhead sitting across from the guy said dubiously. “Your sister saw a werewolf in the woods last month?”

“Sure she did; the moon was full and everything!”

“Ralph,” scoffed the redhead’s apparent date. “How the hell does Jeannie know it’s a werewolf if she saw it on the full moon? These woods are lousy with wolves. Dogs and maybe even coyotes too. She couldn’t tell how it started the evening off if all she saw was a wolf.”

“Unless she saw it change,” the redhead grinned.

Ralph snorted. “You guys don’t know anything. Mistake you for tourists. Around here, it’s not the people turning into wolves on the full moon you have to watch out for; it’s the wolves that turn into people.”

Redhead snorted Coke out of her nose. “You’re for shit, Ralph.”

“I swear to God, Jeannie saw a naked man running with the wolves down by Spring Creek hollow last month. She was up in Paul’s deer blind, star gazing--”

“You mean Paul gazing,” the woman beside him interrupted.

“Whichever. The point is the guy ran past her, not even twenty feet away. Naked as a jay bird, him and half a dozen of the shaggy things.”

“Bet that gave her a thrill,” the guy across the table laughed.

“I think Paul was the one giving the thrills,” the redhead giggled.

“She’s a liar.”

The conversation came to an abrupt halt as all four heads turned to face Dean.

“You don’t know jack-all about werewolves. They don’t turn into wolves, just monsters. And wolves sure as hell don’t turn into people.”

Ralph looked Dean over warily. “You seem to be taking a bit of table gossip personally, stranger. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Gossip.” Dean threw back the rest of his beer, then slammed the bottle down on the table. “That’s all it ever is to you people, until your ‘gossip’ comes back to bite someone in the ass and they die choking on their own blood in a fucking haunted house.” He grabbed onto a chair to steady his balance.

“You must come from the same place Rick and Wanda do,” the brunette next to Ralph suggested. “Because we only have the one type of werewolves around these parts, and they run on four feet every day of the month but three. Jeannie isn’t the only one who’s seen them.” She looked over to where the bartender had taken an interest in the shouting.

“That’s for sure,” the man offered, setting down the glass he had been drying and leaning in to keep the conversation a little more private. “I saw one myself nearly three years ago when my cousin and I were fishing right before dawn at Linden Falls. Two men and a woman, naked as God made people, just strolling as calmly as you please along the lakeside with a couple of wolves. You’d think my cousin had never seen a naked female before, dropped an entire tackle box over the side, his eyes were so big, and the whole pack of them split into the forest clean as you’ve seen anything move.”

“You’re full of shit,” Dean growled, and reached for his jacket.

The bartender’s brows drew together. “Now, son, there’s no need to be taking that tone just because we have things a little different around these parts.”

“You don’t have things different; you’re just stupid and have no fucking idea of how the world really works.”

The redhead frowned at him. “I don’t think you’ve got call to be saying we’re stupid, when we’re just telling some stories and you’re in here cussing at us and calling us liars about werewolves.”

Dean ripped some bills out of his wallet and tossed them in the direction of the counter without another word. He staggered towards the door with more intent that he had felt in weeks. Hunters knew werewolves, he knew werewolves, and the fucking crazy locals didn’t know shit about anything.

And he would damn well prove it.

It occurred to Dean, after a few miserable and fruitless hours of stumbling around the woods more than half drunk, that heading behind the bar and striking off into the forest without so much as a flashlight or a clue as to where he was going was not one of his better plans. If it wasn’t for the moon burning overhead, he wouldn’t have been able to see even his hand in front of his face, and he was starting to feel pretty sorry for himself as the haze of the alcohol began to recede before the more concrete onslaughts of cold and lost.

Once he sobered up enough to realize just how lost he was, he tried to come up with a plan that might get him back out of the forest and somewhere sane. His head really hurt, though, and more-sober was still a long way from clear-headed, so the best he had been able to come up with was to follow the distant roaring he could hear. There were a few waterfalls in the area, and most of them were pretty well known to fishermen and other locals. If he could find one, he could probably find a path out of the woods. Or at least hole up and wait for a rescue. He had a lighter and could build himself a fire beside the river to warm up a little. Though as many times and he tripped over his own feet and the undergrowth as he headed towards the roaring noise, he was pretty much reduced to just hoping he didn’t fall in.

He came around the side of the outcropping the water poured off of, so close he could feel the damp spray when the wind blew his way, arms wrapped around himself for warmth and teeth chattering. His only thoughts were for building a fire and never drinking again. Alcohol was bad; he was giving serious thought to having it tattooed on his hands. Dean was so lost in feeling miserable and sorry for himself that he nearly tripped over the wolves when he did find them, having forgotten all about the original point of the expedition.

For the wolves’ part, it must have been the roar of the falls that deafened them to his approach, because he was being anything but stealthy. Dean stepped around a tree and froze; before him was the partially consumed carcass of a deer, and spread around it in a circle were half a dozen wolves, busily tearing at chunks of meat while one wolf hunched over the carcass itself. His first thought was that it was a strangely beautiful sight. The carcass not so much, but the stark naturalness of the scene struck him. His next thought was more related to his survival: soscrewed. But the breeze was blowing against his face and the wolves didn’t seem to notice his presence.

Dean felt suddenly completely sober; he held his breath and carefully crept backwards from the feasting predators. When he thought he had enough distance, he turned on one foot to run... and almost slammed into a man standing not even two feet away. The guy was huge, taller than Dean by a few inches and muscled in a way that made the hunter instantly wary. Which he could immediately see because the man was also stark naked. Dean raised his gaze to the guy’s face and felt his breath leave him in a rush.

“You,” Dean gasped in shocked recognition. He couldn’t tell the color of the man’s eyes in the moonlit forest, but he would be dead ten years before he forgot the soul that looked out of them.

The man made an odd questioning sort of sound and cocked his head, and then Dean took in the rest of the picture. The nakedness, the smears of dirt, the shaggy hair, and most telling of all, the mask of blood that coated his face from nose to chin. Even as Dean watched, the naked stranger used his tongue to clean a broad stripe of it from the side of his mouth, eyes still boring into Dean’s face. He made that weird sound again, this time with a little note at the end that seemed almost hopeful. Then he slowly lifted an arm, reaching out. Dean was still caught up in the strangeness of the moment, and his alcoholic haze, and stood still while the man wrapped fingers around his bicep. He squeezed gently, then threw back his head and gave a deafening howl, nothing human in it.

Reality slammed into Dean like a train, he ripped free of the strange whatever and stumbled backwards with vague intentions of throwing himself in the lake and seeing if maybe he could out swim the wolves and wolf-thing, since losing them on land seemed unlikely. But his boot caught on a limb and he fell backwards, slamming his head into something that seemed harder than dirt.

Next


Masterpost

Comments

[glasslogic.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I hope you enjoy the rest of the fic as much!