She pulled into the motel lot at fifteen till the hour when the mark's preferred watering hole had its last call.

It was one of those noir nights, calling out for a Robert Montgomery voice-over, the razor-edged shadow and ice-slick moonshine like the chiaroscuro landscapes she remembered from her first time at the movies, hugging her knees in the bed of a loading truck at the drive-in, the night onscreen blacker than the night outside, and realer too, swarming with hints, possibilities, threats. Each new frame meant something changed: character propelling plot, action-to-reaction-to-reaction, like the pistons of the freight train that ran on the tracks bordering her family's farm. A window cracked ajar in her dusty little world for the first time.

Now she's in the driver's seat of a 67 white Mustang but parked, car overshadowed by a copse of pines and the un-moonlit wing of the motel. Rearview mirror tilted to watch the motel parking lot over her right shoulder. This Appalachian backwater, only a roadhouse across the street and spruce and pine woods all around. Little voice in her head whispering that this wasn't what she'd had in mind when she'd imagined herself in the role of Gene Tierney or Mary Astor, one of those ravenous-eyed, ice-bitch-fatales. Stupid thing to bother over, when it was her own idea she be here in the shadows, running surveillance, but she'd never been good at waiting. Spent the first twenty-six years waiting for life to happen to her until she got sick to death of it. Literally.

She touched up her Chanel rouge lipstick before lighting a Marlboro because even if she wasn't to be seen tonight it never hurt to dress your part. Rolled the window down and exhaled a thin white plume out through the crack.

Maybe fifteen minutes passed, and the grind of snow tires on black ice startled her so that she whipped her head around, saw that it was the 80-something blue Ford she'd been waiting on. She returned her gaze to the rearview. Dragged nicotine hard into her lungs, got only a shade of the hit she wanted.

Here came the noir hero, silhouette backlit by stuttering red neon motel sign. Broad suede shoulders and brimmed hat. If this was a noir it'd have to be that subgenre where the man runs to the crack of nowhere hicktown, escaping from big city crooked police department or the mafia or family troubles, only to find that Faulkner was right about the past. Here came the dame-in-trouble, crossing the mostly deserted highway at a reckless run while the hero was looking for something in the glove compartment. The girl's long legs in black nylons stumbling coltishly around the ice slicks in the parking lot, slipping behind a big rig and then coming into his range of sight just as he straightened up. Catching movement out the corner of his eye, his hand went to the concealed carry in the small of his back. Stayed there, even as he saw that this was just something in the shape of a girl with a white stricken face and raccoon-ish mascara, bleached hair teased and tucked into a band like retro '92 was in fashion, shiny black overcoat flapping a peak at a tube mini dress, perfect slasher flick titillation wear, slutty foil to Jamie Lee's final girl.

She'd done that costumery herself. It had been the only fun part of adopting the role of baby sitter. The girl had been pathetically grateful at first, leaned into the brush even as the bristles snagged, smiled as she smacked her cherry lip gloss. For a disconcerting half hour it had almost been like having a sister again. That was the first night. This was the fifth. Tonight the little bitch had squirmed, scratched at where the tube dress squeezed, rubbed the mascara out of its artfully drawn tear-tracks, whined, "I hate the way they look at me when I'm like this, and they're always thinking they can put their hands on me, and why can't I dress up like the girl I was before?"

"Sweetie," she said, "there is no girl you were before. Just the clothes and eye-liner and push up cups and what they want you to be."

She'd given the girl the shiner on her cheekbone. Not in anger; it was as artful as anything else she'd done. It was the ripening purple-eggplant on her face that made the hero of the night give her more than a cautious once-over. The bruise and the tear-tracks and the unsteady click-clack of her heels. Girl in trouble, on the run.

He caught up to her before she made it into the motel lobby, and she, watching their silhouettes, played out the script in her head. "Ma'am, you in trouble?" he'd ask, Midwestern courtesy, carefully keeping his eyes to her face while he pulled his badge out with his gun hand, like that was what he'd meant to do all along. She'd quiver her lips, say,"I need to use the phone, I dropped mine." And when he gently but surely pressed her, his badge lit up by the neon motel sign- "I don't know, it happened so fast. I was at this party and I got out of the house and I was waiting on my ride when, I think, I think, uh, someone jumped me, or shoved me. I hit the wall and blacked out for a second and woke up and there was this blood-" Hand clutched to the side of her neck, tucked under her coat collar. He'd ask, "May I have a look at that ma'am?"- and when she curled her fingers back just enough that he could see the blood trickle down to her collarbone, from a set of puncture wounds that'd just missed her carotid- "I think he might have, uh, have bitten me"-he went for his first aid kit.

Patched her neck with gauze and tape and while he did so, surreptitiously did other things to ascertain that she was just a girl. He asked for the address where the party was. Escorted her into the hotel lobby and called her parents, slipped the manager a fifty to let her stay indoors until someone came to pick her up. Professional. He didn't lay an inordinate finger on her. Marched back out to the cab of his truck like a good little soldier. The girl could play victim to the hilt, she'd give her that.

She stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray, pulled out her phone and tapped speed-dial. "Twenty down Route 9 and you'll be having company," she said. Gave it five after the truck cleared the first highway hairpin before she put her weight on the pedal, flicked her cigarette out the window, long arc of cinder sparking against ink blot shadow. She drove.

o

The snow stopped one mile out from the Tennessee border. After that, Dean drove under a sky the grey of wet newsprint so near the shade he remembered from Purgatory, blue mountain skyline, stark white hoarfrost on the pines. Prairie on the highway sides, grasses brown and sere, nothing for miles but the occasional rest stop and taillights in the rearview. Sam slept in the passenger seat, had drifted off to Seeger some four hours ago, slept like he hadn't for days, which maybe he hadn't, not like Dean would know, this past week he'd spent four days out of five shut up in his room, passed out, drinking.

Once Voodoo Chile' played out in the tape deck he flicked the dial to radio, the local weathercast, saying it'd be more of the same: gritty snow-slush or ice-prickling rain, either way, the risk of mudslides.

It wasn't till he'd passed the coalmine - mountainside reduced to pock-scarred slopes like lunar terrain, greenery sheered from stone, black veins laid bare, low billows of muddy grey dust, new hills made out of deposits of stripped rock and soil, machinery crawling on it like maggots on a corpse, mining trucks hauling a hundred tons of fresh unwashed coal along a myriad of switchbacks - that he heard Sam's breath catch, sounding like some half-strangled word. Dean looked sidelong at him as Sam opened his mouth and frowned, reached down for the binder that had slid off his lap, flapped open facedown in the footwell. Sam retrieved it with care, smoothed the pages without letting it fall open enough that Dean could look inside. Rubbed the back of his neck and said, "I miss anything?"

"Mountains, mostly. Your cue to go off on, like, the desecration of our global habitat and environmental hazards, or whatever."

"So we're in county lines and nothing, then." Sam reached for his thermos and took a sip, grimaced at half-a-day-old coffee.

"Yeah, seems like."

Another fifteen before NOW ENTERING old pinewood sign coming on the road's right shoulder, in peeling red lettering: Burnside, population 3,093. It was the kind of podunk mining town that made him wish he could wear the hat he'd got for his trip to the old west, y'know, like Tim Olyphant in Justified, without having to shut Sam's trap about it every five minutes. On the first corner an auto-body shop and a cast-iron monument to what looked like coal miners circa the depression. A combination diner and grocers and gas station on the other corner, and that was where Dean pulled off. Trudging through gritty slush in the lot, tracking it onto the cafe's grimy linoleum. High brittle jingle as he pushed through the door, chimes crusted in frost. They took their seats at a counter lined with other men in flannel. Ordered coffee, sandwiches.

He was halfway through his smoked ham on rye before he made himself sidle his eyes to Sam, say, "Any luck?"

Sam's eyebrows hunched "Seeing as we got here, just, fifteen minutes ago-"

"Hey, y'know that's not what I meant." Right elbow resting on the counter, he curled his fingers in, clenched the flexors of his forearm. The Mark burned. Sam swallowed.

"Thought you said I should let it alone while we're on the job."

"Yeah, but you obviously haven't been. So. Whadya got?"

"Bunch of ancient sources on curses from West Africa and the Sumerian basin, either of which likely could've been Cain's point of origin, and I've been compiling a database of lore from our library, because even if one source doesn't have the answer, I can cross reference them against each other, make connections..."

Meaning he had no leads and was trying to dress straw-clutching up as strategy.

"Just so long as you're not letting it take your mind off what we're really here for."

"Fine, you got anything new? Since you're back to running into the ground again."

"While I was driving your comatose ass for the past eight hours you mean?" He tried to remember the salient facts of the case from when he had skimmed the headlines on the county paper's website: town lowlifes disappearing and then returning in pieces, faces flayed off, guts torn out, shit they could almost pin on the local wildlife, and then his vision ran red and he felt like he was going to claw out of his skin, or claw open someone else's if he let his mind go to that place a second longer. "I'm thinkin' werewolf or wendigo, open and shut."

"Since when is a werewolf open and shut? And anyway, no missing heart which is the kind of thrilling color that somebody usually leaks to the press." Sam tapped his fingers on the Formica. He downed the rest of his coffee, half a cup in two gulps. "Wendigo, maybe."

"Or a hillbilly ax murderer. You'd like that, wouldn't you."

"What?"

"Y'know, for your serial-killer fetish. Whadya call it, 'true crime, this could be another hall of fame-er, you could get his autograph."

"C'mon man, you know it's not like that."

"So what's it about? No, I'm being serious here, what got you into that stuff?"

Sam's eyes were skittish. "Thought it might help on the job, y'know, psychological profiling. If I could get in the head of a human killer, I could get in the heads of the things we hunt. And I never told you because I knew what you'd say, monsters do what they do because it's in their nature, black and white, we don't have to explain it, that's what's great about this job..."

"Monsters I get, people are crazy." He felt an achy twinge that might've been nostalgia. But it was still god's truth (or whatever) wasn't it? He understood the blood-hunger roaring in his stomach-heart-nerves better than what went on in his own head most days. "So. Did it ever come in useful?"

"Sure, sometimes. With vengeful spirits, or shifters, or...And even if it didn't come into the job, so what, can't I have a hobby?"

"Sure, but why not collecting dolls or those midget mummy heads or something less-"

Cut off, by their waitress saying something like "Top you off?" leaning in, and he slanted a look at her full breasts pressed against her starched yellow uniform, her name tag reading Mary, and the thick rivulet of blood dark syrupy running down her shirtfront, oozing from the gash across her jugular, drip drip drip on the Formica, and his hand went to the small of his back, gun tucked in his waistband. Waitress Mary's eyes rounded, blinked, her mouth parted, and she bled and bled but didn't die and he didn't draw, and it must've been the look on his face, his sudden movement, readying for imminent violence, that was leeching the blood from her apple cheeks, because this wasn't really happening, and he forced a smile, said, "Thanks darlin'," laying it on thick. Felt Sam's eyes on him, hot, wary. On him, not on the woman bleeding out, soaking his crumpled napkin, because that wasn't actually happening. There were so many fucking bodies in this place, suddenly. But if he let himself flip out every time he got that feeling-

"I'm gonna hit the head," he said, making like he'd been reaching for his wallet and slapping down what he hoped was a twenty on a spot of Formica where the blood hadn't pooled. "Then top off the tank. You wanna get us some groceries, do it in the next fifteen. We got us an appointment at the coroners."

He didn't look back as he went.

o

They checked into a rental cabin, donned their fed suits, brushed their teeth. Drove another twenty five minutes to St. Barbara hospital (St. Barbara, the patron saint of miners, Sam said, because that was the kind of thing Sam had to share with the class), the morgue in the basement, autopsy room not much bigger than the cabin, lighting no better than the sickly pallor of rest stop bathrooms. Body of the latest vic on the slab: ribs pried open, skin split apart in long ragged slices, organs and muscles shredded, guts unspooled, and all of his blood in a white commode by the steel table, next to a pair of pruning shears. "We're strapped for funds," the coroner said, off Sam looking askance at the pruning sheers. "And it's not like they mind."

Vic was thirty-two but the beard straggling below his collarbone was streaked with cobweb grey. Teeth almost a methhead's yellow. Had a Desert Eagle on his right bicep. He'd been staying with his sister since he got back from Afghanistan. She reported him missing two weeks ago. Three days since, was when the coroner had ruled time of death. Two days since he'd been found in the foothills by the hunters who'd been prowling the mountainside since the disappearances started, thinking they were going to bag the agro black bear or pack of coyotes or hillbilly serial killer what done this.

Not enough flesh torn off for a wendigo. They'd strip to the bone and suck the marrow. One eye plucked from the socket, but a buzzard could've done that.

Sam was asking those official sort of queries about the diameter of the incisions and the force required to snap both femurs and shatter the hypoid and what could do this.

"The crack through his sternum, that's concentrated blunt force, like from a hammer," the coroner said.

Dean looked at Sam, his skin washed out in that morgue light, drawn too tight over his bones. His bones, that Dean connected to the thought of a hammer, what could be done with a hammer, why he'd picked it out, blunt little instrument: could nail Sam's hands and feet to that goddamnfucking chair and see how he liked it, could shatter every remaining unbroken bone in his arms, his fingers, his kneecaps, shins, toes. He could draw it out for hours, days. Finish with the flame thrower, inch the open flame closer and closer to his brother's body and watch his skin redden, blister, crack, peel. It would've been symmetry or irony - my mother would still be alive if it wasn't for you - or some other literary conceit. He appreciated good literature, despite what Sam might think.

The man on the slab, he forced himself to consider, his wounds were not random, he'd had bones broken that would be extraneous to break in a fight, whatever had done this had had fun, maybe had disemboweled him while he was alive; whatever had done this had tooth and claw and a mind capable of understanding and savoring human suffering, and he looked at the corpse of Robert Hudson and could viscerally imagine himself doing these things to him. He looked away.

The trash bin was stuffed with bloodied latex gloves. He tasted copper in his mouth.

He made some transparent excuse, had to recharge his cell in the car so he could call his supervisor in DC, and walked out.

The hospital parking lot was empty for visiting hours, closest person a panhandler at the bus stop. Nothing louder than the sirens coming in off the highway. Frozen grey cloud cover had thawed a basketball sized patch of pale pale blue, black wings flickering across it. The Impala was in guest parking, other side of the lot. Standing in the shadow of the brick arch over the doorway, he pulled his lighter out. Held his palm over the flame, watched his skin redden, blister.

He crossed the lot, got in the Impala. Felt a little better, turning the keys in the ignition, hearing the engine turn over. He drove around to the morgue's backdoor, sat idling with the engine on. Flicked his lighter open, shut, open, shut. He was fine, he was fine, he was fine.

A doctor came out a different door, made his way round to the morgue's trash bins, head down, paced back and forth, pulled a pack of smokes out of the flannel jacket he wore over his scrubs. He had a matchbook, but his first match struck out. So'd the second. Dean cracked the car door, leaned out, meaning to offer the man a light. Didn't get the words out before the doctor turned eyes rimmed in bluish shadow and a forbidding scowl up to him, said-

"Doesn't look like you got a permit for that space, Agent."

"I'm a fed, pal. I had this deal with an autopsy-"

"So? Guest parking's that side. And if you're finished with the coroner's, what're you doing loitering?"

"Not that you're privileged to that info, but I'm waiting on my partn -"

"So? He can walk, can't he? Somebody might have a real need to park there."

"So your somebody can use one of these other spots-'' He was out of the car, which, he didn't need to be, wasn't like he was looking to get physical, but the doctor had moved in on the Impala, and there was the slim possibility he might try something, so Dean had to put himself between the doctor and the car. Right.

"I swear, you people. Think you're entitled to walk over everyone, every inch of this town, you and those ATF sonsofbitches, swan in like you're god's gift, now we've got trouble salacious enough to splash on the ten p.m news-tear the place apart, rooting through people's lives like yesterday's garbage, and in a few months you'll be out of here, leave us to mop up the mess- what gives you the goddamn right-"

"The badge and the gun," he said, gave him a peak at the holster of the latter. "Mostly the gun. 70/40."

"That's the most asinine punchline I've ever heard. Congratulations. Almost as asinine as that goddamn penis substitute"- (jabbing a finger at the Impala) - "what, do our tax dollars pay for that-"

Dean wanted to kill the guy. Not in the figurative sense, but in the sense that he wanted to pull his Glock out and put a 9mm through his skull.

Then Sam came out the door.

"Like I said, I'm just picking up my partner." Dean cut his eyes past the doctor, gave Sam a tight everything-under- control-here nod.

The doctor closed his mouth, almost gulped, like this second witness had thrown an ice bucket on him. His face got that the-fuck-did-I-just-do look. Probably he was just a tightass who'd had a really stressful day, lost a patient on the table, whatever.

For whatever reason, he didn't give them anymore shit about parking. He went back to fumbling with his matches. Dean saw him strike a light in the rearview.

He colored in the confrontation for Sam, on the highway back to the cabin, acid anger sizzling in his stomach, clouds tinted rust red where the sunset bled through. His epithets for the doctor escalated from tightass to douchebag to cocksucker, at which last Sam looked askance at him, like he was offended or something, but he hadn't been talking literal cocksucking, Jesus Christ.

o

He hits the ground running, familiar terrain unfurling under his boots. This is how the good dreams start. He's setting an energy conserving pace, measured and deliberate, his eyes nose ears mind responsive and focused, his body a blade, cutting through the wood like cutting through the tenderest flesh. He's hunting.

The sky is wrong. Should be that watery ink grey, the light that bleeds down but never dies, the goddamn endless interim light, never night never day never changing.

This forest is black. Bible black, waking in your coffin black. Can't tell up from down, right from left black. But he never stumbles. His feet find the right level of ground, dry, stone-less, like he's using senses he's not supposed to have. The senses that feel his prey all the way down to the roots of him. Like lungs starved for nicotine, a stomach starved for food. That black hole inside he can cover over in a thousand ways but will never be rid of.

He runs for a timeless time through the wood until he senses something that can fill him up. Hears him, the breath wheezing in his tired lungs and the rich meat of his heart pumping and the long stumble of his legs snapping and crackling branches and brush. Smells his fear-sweat and his sweet necessary blood. He only has to slow to a silent stalk, knowing mound and gully and web of roots and moss slick as if he were the one who'd laid the terrain. He circles round and gets ahead of his prey's blind flight, and in the alley mouth between two oaks he crouches in wait.

His vision sharpens, peels away the blackness until his prey is the only visible thing in the wood. The skin of his face and throat and hands white, gleaming like bone. His prey's eyes watching out the corners, fox-like slanting eyes. But he walks straight between the oaks, a cow down the lane of the slaughterhouse, and it's that easy, to get an arm around his neck and pull him close, cut off his breath, and his prey's weak hands scrabble against him for purchase, so it almost feels like a mutual embrace.

It's blameless instinct, sinking teeth into his prey's throat. Arterial blood hits the roof of his mouth, hot, hot, swimming in his mouth, swallowing so the blood takes root inside him, prey-brother's blood, alien and familiar, the blood that's always been between them one way or another, takes root in the black pit, and the feel of his prey (brother) dying in his arm is sense-memory too, but a distant echo that can't hurt anymore not even when he-

Woke on a foldout sofa bed in the cabin, cramped shoulder and numb arm on the side he'd been laying on because his body had accommodated too much to the memory foam back at the bunker, one unlaced boot still dangling off his heel and the taste of copper still in his mouth. He rolled off the bed, hit his knees on the pinewood. He coughed, retched. Blood dribbled from his lips, splashed on the floor. He flipped on the lamp, dim glow of which couldn't chase the muddy dark from the corners, saw that Sam was out, and oh yeah, recalled he'd gone to interview the family of one of the missing. He got a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Lysol from under the sink, scrubbed up the blood he'd spilled. Checked his watch and it was 6:22; he pulled back a threadbare red curtain and saw slate clouds spitting sleet against the glass. He thought about Sam on the road for god knows how long, the mudslide warning on the radio. He paced back and forth, got a beer out of the mini-fridge, tuned the TV to WWE, watched a glossy spandex counterfeit of violence.

Maybe twenty five minutes until Sam got back, long fed coat and hair shedding sleet, and still wearing that expression of disinterested sympathy he used on witnesses.

"Where've you been?" Dean said, thinking he had to head Sam off before he could bring up before at the morgue.

"One of the guys who's still missing, Jeremiah Holts, he has a girl on a farmhouse twenty miles outside town limits. I got out of her that her man's in the meth business-"

"What just like that? One hour with you and your puppy dog eyes and she's snitching that her man's gone Heisenberg?"

Sam shrugged in all false modesty.

"She didn't seem ashamed of it really, just scared that we'd be back to search the house, maybe confiscate her property. Said a lot of guys in this county are involved in meth, because there are only so many jobs outside the mines. Said she'd rather have that than him going overseas and coming back a wreck, like a lot of boys around here did. She thinks he was taken out by someone else in the business, a new rival or his old boss, and y'know, she could be right. Not every disappearance has to have the same explanation."

A pause - Sam was taking a breath that threatened a new tack in the conversation.

"You got our dinner stuffed away under there?" Dean gestured at the flaps of Sam's wool coat. "I'm starving, why didn't you pick up-Never mind, night on the town, my treat." Stomping his feet into his boots and pulling the laces circulation cutting tight, had to move fast or Sam's dangerous dewy eyes might pin him down. He grabbed his flannel-lined winter jacket on the way to the door, then had to stand around on the front step while Sam changed back into civilian wear.

He and Sam went to the bar on Front Street, biggest bar in town, meaning it housed maybe forty bodies on this a Friday night, but they had luck sufficient to grab a table near the stage where a blues band was covering Zeppelin: In the days of my youth I was told what it means to be a man. Sam set up his laptop, said he couldn't get decent WiFi at the cabin, nibbled on a baked potato with collared greens while Dean stuffed down nachos dripping baked beans and bacon bits and sour cream. They talked shop.

"Has to be the wampus beast," Dean said. "Sounds right. Wampus beast."

"But get this, the taillypo-"

"Is pissed off that some old lady found his toe lying around, cooked it and ate it, which, maybe if it was deep fried- but that's still the lamest motivation ever. Also doesn't exactly fit the victim profile here."

"The lore differs," Sam said. "Some accounts have it as a hunter that mutilated the taillypo, and maybe it doesn't know who to blame and the victim's are chosen as, essentially, crimes of opportunity."

"Okay, but how many taillypos are out there? If it's all the same taillypo why didn't the disappearances start decades ago? If there's more than one taillypo why the fuck do they keep taking their toes off in the woods, you'd think they'd have learned by now. Then there's the name. Tai-lly-po. You think a name like that could drop seventeen bodies? Wampus beast, on the other hand, now those are some badass..."

"Maybe," Sam said, still rolling baked potato around on his tongue, like he was too distracted to swallow. Eyes angled to his laptop screen, but they were thousand-yard eyes.

Dean swallowed the last dregs of his beer and shoved back from the table, said, "I'm getting somethin' stronger."

Only three bartenders on duty; while Dean was waiting he got a look at two-seats-over's askew black straps over lithely muscled brown shoulders, got something going between her smoky slanted eyes and his, and then some dude wedged in wearing exactly the kind of old west hat Dean had at the bottom of his duffle. Way the girl reacted he was probably her boyfriend, but still. You don't cut in on somebody's eye game. Asshole.

When he ordered a bourbon the bartender, fifty-ish woman whose over the shoulder braid was still mostly nut brown, with a face densely freckled for the far side of winter, said, "15% off as thanks for your service." Gave him a smile that got an answering smile out of him.

"I'm uh, actually not," he said. "Don't suppose you'd want to offer your compliments to a g-man?"

She said, "Oh, I coulda sworn-we get so many military boys in here, I thought I could pick the look out at thirty feet in a crowd."

"My dad was in the marines," he said. "Somethin' must've rubbed off."

"One in the family," she said. "Well, that also puts a load on."

She pointed over her shoulder at a graduation photo of a girl with her freckles pinned to the cork-board. "My daughter's a medic in Afghanistan. Was supposed to be doing her residency in a clinic round here, but so many of the friends she grew up with had gone overseas...But I can't say she'd be any safer in her hometown anymore, now can I?"

She'd put his bourbon down. Other people along the bar were signalling to get served, but off some gut-feeling Dean said-

"About that, gotta ask, if you've picked up any chatter..."

She sucked in one cheek, said, "Probably won't be news to you, but-"

"Shoot," he said.

"Bout the first week of January there was a marshal that came round here, name of Ray Cohen, said he was workin' the missing persons same as you, and then there was his buddy, think his name was Walter Kubrick. Didn't see much of the buddy, but he'd be in here most nights, until the night he didn't show up but his buddy did. He was asking those questions, y'know, who had talked to Marshal Cohen last and did anyone see him go out, and did he have somebody tailing him. And after that night, I don't see either of them again and neither does anyone else who comes in here, which, as you can see, is a hefty slice of the town. And for some days I figure now two marshals are gone, that'll bring a regiment of feds crawling all over us, but then no-one comes round asking about them again, not even a deputy marshal. Not until those ATF agents and now you." She left him, got cowboy hat and smoky eyes shots, came back with a rag in hand. Wiping the bar in front of him clean of stickiness and peanut shells so she wouldn't look like an idle chatterer. "And I was thinkin', Cohen and Kubrick, names like that could happen coincidentally, but maybe they coulda been not who they said they were?"

He bolted the bourbon, said, "Maybe. Wish I could give you more, ma'am but y'know how it is." He gave a sidelong flap of his hand meant to indicate the federal statute of classified shit, or whatever.

"Names Susanna," she said. "Susanna Clark. And we are grateful that you're on the job. Local cops are doing what best they can but they're underfunded and stretched thin even at the best of times. It's been hard, watchin' faces vanish from the crowd and asking who's next...Look, I know those gone ain't the cream of society, but. Most of 'em, even the ones with broke bad on their records, they deserve a second chance, they've been through bad times with the recession and so many having gone overseas and come back, and all that state community development money really just goes into the mines. I hope that it won't make a difference.."

"Trust me," he said. "I know I'm in no position to pass judgment on people."

He cased the pool table: two men in ripped denim and grey flannel, one had on a Virginia Tech cap, and they weren't laying down cash, just playing for who'd buy the next round. Winded his way back to his and Sam's table, the bar doing an original, fire in the hole the brassy refrain, and Sam still at the laptop. He slipped behind a knot of people, only a couple feet away when he stepped into Sam's peripheral vision, and Sam clicked over to a different webpage. Dean dropped back in his chair, said, "Whadya got there?"

"Forum for my 'serial killer fetish'." Sam didn't look up, hair boxing his face in half-shadow. "I'm looking at the more notorious cases in this region."

"Yeah, and?"

"Aside from, you know, the Greenbrier ghost, Omie Wise, and John Hardy-there's Randall Lee Smith, killer who stalked the Appalachian trail. Murdered two social workers in '81. Could be because he'd retreated into a world of fantasy to escape a hard childhood and lashed out at anyone who tried to draw him out of it, could be resentment for the intimacy women hadn't given him-"

"People'd be slaughtered in the streets every day if all it took was broken homes and blue balls."

"People are slaughtered every day," Sam said. "Though I'm not saying those're reasons. No-one's ever come up with a satisfying profile for this guy."

Dean hunched forward, elbows on knees. "Murder groupies ever talk about us?"

Sam smiled thin, twisted. "Oh yeah, we've got websites, youtube channels, scholars write their dissertations on us right along with Bundy and Dahmer and the James Younger gang."

Dean sat back some. "So you're saying it's too bad Brad Pitt's too old to play me in the movie."

"Think we're gonna be the next season of Serial."

"Three dozen murders over ten years, all that Satanist ritual shit, two times falsely presumed dead, and all we get is some freakin' NPR podcast, man."

"You know about Serial?" Sam's eyebrows twitched up.

"Dude, I get culture - I - what you're saying is in addition to the high-school-musical-the-even-shittier-sequel crowd we've got this whole other club..."

"Oh, it overlaps with the book fandom-the increased notoriety of the Winchester murders really drew attention to the books. There's a lot of theories that we were forcing Chuck to write this stuff, that he was either our accomplice or that he was the man behind the curtain getting us to carry out his own psychotic fantasies. Either we killed him or he went into wit-sec, and he's been sending out encrypted messages on the web tipping people off about our future crimes. People are almost as fascinated by him as they are us."

"And let me guess-" He picked with his fingernail at the corn chip crumbs stuck between the strip of metal that ran around the table and the Formica-"it's all Daddy beat us with coat-hangers and touched us in the bad place and that's why we're the sick fuckers we are today."

"The incest does get a lot of attention. But there's a lot of stuff about Dad's PTSD from 'Nam and how the military-industrial complex bears responsibility, and the post cold-war nostalgia for a time when it was true blue American masculinity against the Red Menace, and how that fed into Dad's paranoid psychosis- the fugitive mentality, the intoxicating sense of 'us against them.' As for you and me, a war against Authority displaced from our tyrannical father onto society, and maybe a variant of Bonnie and Clyde syndrome."

Dean forced a teeth-baring grin. "But you're Bonnie, right?"

"Means we get off on killing for each other."

"Literally get off? The fuck is wrong with people?" Sam lightly lifted his shoulders, oh so nonchalant about this except for the brittle quality to his smile. As if it was small change, them having lived most of their lives by the first rule of fight club, all they'd sacrificed to keep the things they did on the down-low, just for criminal pathologists to pick over their lives and high-schoolers to post smut about them on the internet.

Dean shoved back from the table, cut his eyes around for a distraction. "C'mon, play one round at least. Remember what clean wholesome fun's like."

"Have to take the laptop to the car," Sam said.

He ordered another bourbon when Sam went. Joined the pool game where the man in the Virginia Tech cap was telling the other, a passing trucker, which hometown girls were game for anything, and then they got onto speculating about the disappearances, and the bodies, seventeen disappeared and nine bodies come back with no particular chronological congruence. (Dean knew that was important, the chronology in which the bodies came back, and he'd figure out how but not tonight). Trucker said it was a meth kingpin who took small time crooks and made them an offer, work for him or be game for his bloodhounds, and it all went down at a hunting lodge in the mountains.

Dean said, "Nyah, I'm a fed, man-(they didn't exactly buy that; he was broadcasting the wrong image tonight)-and I've seen bodies and it wasn't no brute animal that done this." Looked at the burnt red back of the trucker's neck as he bent and lined up his next shot. Imagined gnawing that neck open, his teeth tearing through skin and chewing muscle and sucking from the jugular.

He cleared out after that round with fifty in his pocket and Sam still not come back.

In the parking lot he had to look around the lot for a little while because the thick splashing sleet and the grey mist smeared the black night across the streetlights, the Impala's black indistinguishable from shadow and asphalt until he was only a few feet away. There he saw the flashlight glow through the Impala's passenger window, Sam with a book propped against the dashboard. He rapped on the glass and Sam startled. Slipped the book away in his duffle in the footwell by the time Dean got in driver's side. All so familiar - Sam with his half-furtive research binges just after Dean gave it to him clear that that wasn't what he wanted. He gave Dean a pinched sidelong glance while Dean said-

"My company wearin' on you Sammy?"

"Just tired," Sam said. "Id've only cramped your game. You good to drive?"

"Don't give me that passive - You mean gimme the keys, say gimme the keys. Or don't, cause I feel totally cool."

"Really? Cause you're kinda starting to sound like Dad on a bad night."

"The hell's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. I just -"

"Sure, whatever, not like you usually mean the things you say." He turned the key in ignition. He wasn't mad at Sam really. Sam just had the misfortune to be in the car with him and this razor-edged thing threatening to tear out from under his skin.

Sam's eyes hooded. He swallowed with that particular clench of jaw that said he was biting words back, too tired to fight. His fingernails scratched at the denim over his thighs. He said nothing more. Dean drove.