Title: Sweet Little Lullaby
Author: "Solus Nemo"
Summary: A sweet little lullaby to sing when the wolf is at the door, a sweet little lullaby to coo while fear dances with enclosing shadows, a sweet little lullaby to hum whilst evil devours your soul.
Author's Note: Came to me while I was listening to the new Queens of the Stone Age album, the one I finally bought a few days ago before this cold came up and bit me in the ass.

Rating for violence, adult language and themes.
Disclaimer: I don't own "Supernatural" or anything affiliated with it (the WB does), but if I did I would have had Jensen Ackles locked in my closet a long time ago, with a light forever shrouding half his face in blackness – because he looks best that way. Mm'hm, he does. Now, I'm getting warm, but maybe that's this infernal sickness.

Chapter One

And as the story begins a bright summer's day blooms before thee in the quiet mind of child

Storms were nothing to be afraid of, but apparently Trude McFarland missed that memo because she could think of nothing better to do at the moment than to bury herself under the covers at the foot of her bed and hum as loud as she could. Unfortunately, with the storm being right above her head it seemed, her show tune humming wasn't loud enough to quell the thunder clapping.

It was absolutely ridiculous, her being afraid of a little storm such as this – she wasn't a kid anymore, but a girl now, one tall for her age – but reminding herself of the gift her Jolly Green Giants of parents gave her didn't make the storm any less of a reality. Lightning still burned her shut eyelids with white flare, thunder still rattled the framed pictures on her walls, and that damned Johnny wouldn't leave her alone.

Setting aside the fact that her parents would take away her dessert privileges if they ever found out their little Trude said 'damned', Johnny had been pestering her since before the thunderstorm had even begun – a long time now – and didn't show any signs of quitting.

"Oh, Trude Trude Trude," he sang to the tune of the Dreidel Song, "come see what I have done. And if you hurry to get there, you'll have lots of fun." He laughed harshly and, like he did for the past hour and a half, started his song back up again. It didn't matter that Trude had stopped talking to him, denied the very fact that Johnny existed at all, because he just wouldn't stop until he had his way.

Oh, Trude Trude Trude (she was getting it stuck in her head now), didn't like Johnny anymore. She regretted ever playing with him, ever befriending him and defending him when her stupid snot-nosed sister (girls could still say stupid and snot-nosed because her sister wasn't very smart and her nose was filled with snot) called him imaginary. Johnny wasn't imaginary, no, not at all, but Trude wanted to believe he was. Maybe if she believe she was imagining him, like a loony in the crazy farm, maybe he'd go away and never bother her again.

Johnny, still singing his annoying little verse, gave a good tug to Trude's quilt, but she held fast onto it so he wouldn't tear it from her head. She didn't want to have to see him smile. God, that smile. If smiles could be pure, unfiltered evil, that's what his was. But of course no one would agree to that because Johnny was imaginary.

"Trude! Troo-dah!" Johnny yelled, in his best whiny tone of voice. "Come see what I have done, Trude!"

She suddenly wished not for the storm to be over or for Johnny to let her alone, but for it to be a Sunday afternoon so she could hop in the backseat of Uncle Monty's car and drive around the countryside with the wind blowing through her hair.

"TRUDE!"

"Go away," she whimpered. "I don't wanna see."

"That hurts, Trude," Johnny stated curtly. "I thought you were my friend."

Trude had to turn her head, she couldn't breathe with her nose so firmly crunched against the mattress. "I wanted to be, but not anymore. So just leave me alone."

"No. Not until you've seen what I've done. You're going to love it, Trude, trust me." He laughed again, sent more shivers down her spine than the lightning crashes.

"Go. Away," Trude demanded firmly. It sounded so strange coming from such a small girl, though tall for her age. "Leave me alone."

Johnny didn't answer, didn't say anything at all this time. In fact, even the storm seemed to have listened to Trude because the entire world suddenly... went out.

The silence was such a shock Trude thought she'd gone deaf, but did your ears tingle when you go deaf? Slightly filled with the urge to move, but with most of her body still locked stiff with anxious fear, Trude slipped a hand to her only free ear. She felt and, most importantly, heard her fingers slide against her skin and a few stray strands of hair.

Just in case she needed more proof of her hearing, in those seconds where her hands were otherwise not interested with locking down the quilt around her head, something grabbed a hold of said quilt and ripped it from her body just as the storm came back to the world with a vengeance.

Sight was absolutely terrifying.

&&&

The sun was bouncing off chrome, a blinding lantern of heat, but that didn't stop salivation.

"Oh, baby," Dean breathed, voice thick with sensuous wonder, as he tapped the palm of his hand against the steering wheel of his Impala. "Hon, I think we just found yourself a mate."

After throwing a quick glance at the passenger seat to see if his brother Sam was indeed still asleep, Dean opened the creaky driver's door and clamored out of his Black Beauty in an awkward cross between tripping and running. He didn't bother to close the door behind him (let every mosquito in the Midwest pile in for a cruise!), just kind of groped blindly at the air in front of him, in a way testing the reality of the moment.

Drawn to this new car like moth to flame, hazel eyes shinning brighter than the aforementioned lantern of heat, the eldest of the Winchester brothers smiled – more like leered – at the automobile parked only a few inches from the front bumper of his pride and joy. Really, this pin-up of a car was the only reason Dean stopped driving; he couldn't gawk and keep in the right lane at the same time. Actually, he was confident he very well could, but he wasn't about to try for risk of driving into a federal mail box and ruining a stand up paint job – on his car, not the mail box.

"Yeah, girl, if there ever was one this is it. Damn, if this was a woman..."

He had arrived at this awesome spectacle by now, ran his hands along the warm painted sheet metal of the hood, up the curve of the front window. Usually Dean wasn't so insensitive to the feelings of his car, but for now it was simply going to have to deal with him caressing this other classic.

It was his car's twin (if it had been anything other than an Impala Dean wouldn't have stopped to spit on it; flashy was the only thing that caught his eye), but like any set of twins there were some differences. For instance: this 1967 Chevrolet Impala wasn't a hardtop, it's black cloth convertible top was folded down and pocketed away. But other than that and the fact that this owner had collector plates, the two cars were hard to tell apart by anyone who didn't have half a brain – it helped, too, that Soft Top was immaculate, down to the original tires.

He could have been making Caveman-ish noises as he ran his hands over every inch of that car, much like a blind man downloading all the features of his wife through his fingertips, which would explain why the woman in the shot gun position of the car looked at him like he had finally flown right over the cuckoo's nest.

"Can I help you?" she asked, over-plucked eyebrows disappearing into nicely shaded blonde locks.

"Just admiring your car," Dean replied, voice only slightly less husky than before.

The girl, somewhere in her early twenties, shifted against the leather upholstery and folded her arms on top of the door, rested her chin at the cross her wrists made. Hopefully no looking-for-some-fun poltergeist would come along and bring up the window, scare the girl and in effect smack Dean in the side of the head or, worse yet, the goods when she threw the door open to run away.

She said, through a small smile, "I can tell, but it's not my car. It's my sister's." Blondie sighed at that statement, blew some of her bangs toward the Heavens. "She's in there–" she tilted her head in the direction of the building behind her "–dropping something off for work. I didn't want to come along, but now I'm glad I did."

On a normal day Dean would've been all over this one, but – come on! – this was so totally not a normal day. What was a normal day anymore, anyway? It's not like he'd have the time to do anything with this chick even if there wasn't a second Black Beauty sitting before him.

"Not a speck of rust, and you're in Ohio. Ohio, this by all rights should be a road salt magnet."

"Climate control garage, something like that," the girl said softly, apparently disappointed Dean wasn't paying attention to her. "I don't know, it's not like I'm allowed to go in there. It's padlocked."

"Not a dent, not a scratch."

"Doesn't even let me breathe on the thing too hard, like I'm sure she'd think you're doing. Christ, it's just a car. Our uncle let me touch it. It's not like I'm going to make the thing explode if I put the key in the ignition and not her."

Dean stood up, looked down into the roomy cabin, at the pristine condition of it all. "I don't know, I'm like that with my little brother, too. First time I let him take over mine, he drives it into the living room of a house. Great parking, though, got it right in the center of an area rug, but he took out one of her poor headlights."

"I'm sorry to hear that," someone behind Dean offered. "That just kills value."

Turning around, Dean met a woman better suited for Sweden than Ohio (tall, blonde, blue eyed, just like her sister but with more realistic eyebrows). "I know," Dean stressed. "You try to tell that to the kid, but he just doesn't get it. He doesn't seem to care that my baby's molested now, that its days of being 100 percent original are gone, over, kaput. It makes me feel icky."

The woman laughed kindly, handed a manilla folder with a big, scribbled T name on it to her sister and walked around to the driver's side of the car. She didn't get in, but placed her fingers on the door handle and looked at the other Impala. "At least they did a good job, huh?"

Dean smiled. "Thank you." In truth, he couldn't get a bagel out of a toaster without nearly killing himself, but any moment to gain a few more swoon worthy manly points...

And it worked. While Blondie the Eldest smiled back at Dean, close to melting, the over-plucked younger Blondie was past the stage of turning to pudding in her seat.

Just as he was about to make his move, Sam decided to disagree with his brother's search of a soul mate for his car and picking up some ladies in the sincerest way possible: he screamed. It was his most blood curdling to date and totally cramped Dean's style.