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At sixteen Sam could track his way through a swamp at midnight with something toothy on his trail, but at nineteen he can’t navigate San Francisco with the girl he’s desperately hoping to impress without disaster.
He glances anxiously at Jess. She’s still brightly dissecting the creepiness of their art history professor – who has a morbid, too-personal passion for those paintings of a gory dead pheasant and a glassy-eyed fish and half an exotic melon – but their reservation was for forty-five minutes ago, and surely she’s getting hungry and wishing she had gone on a date with Brady or some other person from a normal family. A family where “Let’s wander around in circles until we die of starvation and exposure,” doesn’t actually sound kind of romantic.
“She’s out of your league anyway, Sammy,” says Sam’s Inner Dean.
Sam’s Inner Dean is sometimes an embarrassment on dates, but right now Sam could use his help. When he sees the House of the Golden Dragon on the corner of street-that’s-not-where-the-restaurant-is and other-street-that’s-not where-the-restaurant-is, it’s like the universe is hearing his prayers. Because obviously the answer to What Would Dean Do is: get the girl food, now.
“Uh, Jess, do you want to give up on Fleur de Lys and have moo shoo pork on a park bench instead?” he offers, and Jess smiles at him like he’s brilliant and says “I thought you’d never ask,” and his heart swells in a stupid cliché out of a stupid high school romance novel.
“Attaboy, Sammy,” says Inner Dean, “no aphrodisiac like MSG,” and it sounds like he approves, which isn’t surprising, what with the food.
Sam wishes that Inner Dean would stop calling him Sammy.
They get dumplings and garlic pork and Chinese greens, and they take it to the bench. Sam watches Jess’s deft handling of her chopsticks as she spears dumplings, and the way she scowls when the wind blows her hair in her face while she’s trying to eat, and despite it all he’s having a good time. He squeezes the little packet of soy sauce onto his rice, except it squirts sideways and scatters a perfect spray of dark droplets across Jess’s dress. Sam is babbling apologies and dabbing at the stains with his napkin when he realizes that he’s basically pawing at her breast. With a cheap napkin that’s leaving soggy white pills of paper on the dark blue cloth.
“Oh, smooth, Sammy, you know, I could have suggested about five ways of getting to second base that would work better than that,” says Inner Dean, at the same time as Jess is laughing and batting at his hands and saying, “Sam, it’s OK.”
“Shut up,” snarls Sam, under his breath, but Jess must have heard him, because she looks startled and hurt and now he’s not just the date who couldn’t find the fancy restaurant and squirts soy sauce on her dress, he’s the psycho date who mutters things to himself, and they aren’t even polite things, and oh, God. “Not you, not you,” he says, which probably makes it worse, and he wishes he were being played by Hugh Grant so he could pull off the whole behaving like a halfwit thing better.
But Jess suddenly puts down the cardboard container and the chopsticks, and she reaches up and curves her hand around the back of his neck, and it’s warm and it’s cool and it’s smooth and she’s so fucking beautiful. “You can stop talking to the voices in your head now and kiss me,” she says. But he doesn’t actually have to, because she kisses him.
She tastes of garlic and soy sauce, and it’s wonderful. His hand tangles in the back of her hair, and her arms slide down and lock around his waist and pull him closer, and he’s pretty sure she’s laughing at him but he’s fucking Hugh Grant and he got the girl and that’s fine.
“Out of your league, Sammy,” says Inner Dean faintly, and Sam smiles against Jess’s mouth, because apparently not.
II.
The thing Sam hates most about being back on the road and back with Dean and back into hunting is the shit luck. His family is cursed, and it’s not just the one big death and destruction curse, it’s a hundred little pinpricks of Murphy’s Law.
How else do you explain the fact that the cop had had time to take their guns and salt rounds and accelerant and even Dean’s lighter before she got snatched by the ghost, but she couldn’t get them outside and into a cop car before some supernatural whammy sealed down the old Bates house like the Pentagon during a terrorist attack? Now the door to the basement where the bones are might as well be a fucking bank vault, and none of the outer windows and doors will budge, and for a family in hunting country the late inhabitants seem to have had distressingly little taste for guns.
All he and Dean have managed to scrape together by way of defense is half a carton of Morton’s salt, some matches, and an iron lampstand. And then Sam opens a cabinet in the pantry and what do you know, the Bates family might not have been into hunting, but they did have a passion for illegal fireworks.
Dean comes over at his shout and sees the collection, and his face looks like it’s Christmas morning, if they’d really done Christmas.
“I bet we could use those to light the bones,” he says, and Sam says, “If we could get to the bones,” and then the Christmas look ratchets up a notch or two, and Dean picks one up and looks at the cardboard tube and says, “Wonder if we could replace just a bit of the powder with salt.”
So that’s how Sam finds himself boring little holes in the cardboard tubing of fireworks, carefully pouring out small piles of explosive powder, and coaxing in thin streams of salt in their place. Dean patches the punctures with duct tape they found in a drawer, and yeah, that’ll work. It’s not that Sam doesn’t trust Dean’s judgment – he’s not about to admit it, but the cool professional his brother has become is pretty fucking impressive – but everyone has their blind spots, and no expertise is going to get Dean to make a distinction between Good Plan and Plan That Involves Fireworks.
Then again, it’s also Only Plan.
They’ve tinctured eight fireworks with salt, and set the rest ready to use on the bones, when the temperature drops and Mildred Bates coalesces by the fireplace. Sam swipes at her with the lampstand while Dean fumbles with the matches, and then Dean is yelling “Back, Sam!” and they’re both stumbling into the hallway while the living room behind them goes off in purple and white and gold. There are wisps of smoke in the hall and a smell of gunpowder and Sam’s heart is racing, but it isn’t fear. “Fucking sweet,” says Dean, and it must have actually worked and dispersed the ghost, because when Sam puts his shoulder to the basement door it opens.
They scatter the rest of the fireworks over the skeleton in its shallow grave, and Dean is getting ready to light the first match when Sam says, “Hey, can I do one?” Dean gives him a look and tosses him the matchbook, and in the end they each light two and throw them in on the count of three. There are pops and starbursts behind them as they scramble out of the basement, and Sam is still seeing colored streaks when they crash through the back door and onto the grass.
They’re both breathing hard and coughing and their clothes smell of smoke and the sharp, enticing scent of the fireworks, and Dean’s grinning, lit like a fucking supernova. “You can’t deny you were having a good time in there, Sammy,” he says, and whacks him lightly in the ribs, making him cough more. Jerk.
Sam will deny it till his dying day.
III.
Some time after his fourth or fifth dying day, though (what, he’s lost count, OK? the one with Lucifer and the big hole in the ground) and his third or fourth beer (the Belgian brew that Dean says is girly, because, dude, Belgian, and Sam took a Gender Studies course once at Stanford and he aced it with no textbook but Dean) Sam turns to his brother, lounging beside him at the bar and humming along idly with the jukebox, and says, “Hey, remember that ghost we wasted with fireworks in Nanticoke?” and he sees Dean light up again, like the 4th of July.
IV.
It starts with Dean refusing to leave his leather jacket in the locker. Sam could tell the librarian at the lobby desk that she’s lucky Dean isn’t insisting on parking his damn car in the rare book room, just to keep an eye on it, but that probably won’t help. The librarian is giving them the glare of death as it is, and they don’t have time to be distracted from their current case by a basilisk librarian. So Sam tugs Dean – by his precious fucking jacket – into the exhibit room to have it out.
“I just don’t see why they won’t let me wear my jacket in there,” says Dean, and he’s pouting like a four-year-old. Sam wants to tell him that those are the rules, suck it up, but reasoning with preschool Dean is already as much role reversal as he can take. “It’s a theft risk, Dean,” he says patiently, and now Dean looks genuinely puzzled. “Why would they care if someone steals my jacket?” he asks, and Sam has to grind his teeth and remind himself that Dean is one of the smartest people he knows. It was Dean, after all, who first connected up the deaths of five professors at five universities in five states, though Sam was the one who traced it to their research on one sixteenth-century would-be necromancer whose library ended up here.
Dean’s one of the smartest people Sam knows, but sometimes he’s dense. “Not someone stealing your jacket, dumbass,” he says, “you, stealing their stuff. Hiding a few manuscript leaves under your coat and waltzing out with them.” “We’re going to have to burn the book when we find it, Sam, I don’t think my sneaking out old laundry lists under my jacket should be their biggest concern,” says Dean reasonably, and, fuck, the exhibit space is kind of echoey and the librarian is right there in the lobby and Dean may be one of the smartest people Sam knows, but then, it’s not like Sam’s got an extensive social circle.
So Sam gives up, which is probably what Dean was angling for all along, and agrees to go through Ravennius’s books, all sixty-three of them, by himself, while Dean goes to do some interviews and probably have a milkshake and a hot date and a nice nap at the motel before it’s time to meet Sam at the burger place across the street for dinner.
It’s not until tome forty-something that the universe hands Sam his revenge.
This one has woodcuts. Suggestive woodcuts. In fact, “suggestive” is the wrong word, all tentative and polite. These woodcuts aren’t suggesting anything, and Christ! – he turns the page – did they even know about that in 1583? It’s then that it hits him what he’s found, maybe the greatest discovery of his geekboy research career. Because Sam is as fond of suggestive woodcuts as the next man, but the highlight of this? Is not going to be what that girl in the picture is doing with the other girl and the– is that a cassowary? Jeez. Oh, no. The highlight is going to be when he meets up with Dean at the burger place and lets him know that his childish jacket tantrum cost him the chance to do research on porn.
Sam opens a new file on the laptop and begins to take notes.
V.
They’ve been driving through Arkansas all morning, two-lane highway, hills, hardly another car. It’s hot but breezy and the air smells of summer and pine. Towards eleven they pull in at a tiny rest stop, just bathrooms and a picnic table and crepe myrtle. No shop, only vending machines, but the Cokes are ice cold. Sam leans back against the car to drink, not ready to fold himself into the passenger seat again, and closes his eyes against the dazzle of sun. He can hear some kind of bird in the background, unmusical, maybe a jay, and the engine ticks and the car settles softly as Dean props himself next to Sam. After a while Sam shifts without opening his eyes and drinks the last of his Coke and says, “Guess we should get going,” but Dean says, “No hurry.”