John Winchester and the Four Universal Truths of Fatherhood 2/2

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John Winchester and the Four Universal Truths of Fatherhood 2/2

Continued from Part I

Turned out he wasn't the only one tired of talking. Sammy had refused to talk to him for a week, and not even the threat of a spanking could goad him from his policy of radio silence. He'd talked to Bobby and Dean all you pleased, but when he tried to join the conversation, Sammy had simply tuned him out. It was Dean who finally got him talking again, though John had long since forgotten how. Sammy had simply emerged from the bathroom one morning, naked as the day he was born, to inform him that there was a spider the size of a hamster squatting in the shower drain. He'd been so surprised by the sudden rapprochment that he hadn't bothered to question it. He'd simply armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and a can of Raid so old that it bore rust stains on its canister like leprous lesions and gone marching as to war. One squashed and thoroughly gassed spider later, and Sammy was talking as though there had never been an undeclared war of silence between them.

Maybe he'd just needed to be sure that his old man really did kill monsters for a living.

He might've killed the monster, but he'd never dispelled the darkness. Sammy had never been the same after that awful come to Jesus meeting at Bobby Singer's kitchen table. Like Dean before him, he'd put away childish things and become a little man in secondhand Keds, but unlike Dean, he hadn't accepted the yoke of premature adulthood gracefully, with a stiff upper lip and the zeal of a greater cause burning in his belly. He'd chafed and bridled and questioned, the last most of all, and with each question, he'd stripped another chunk of iron from John's feet to reveal the soft wet clay beneath, the red clay that was so much like blood.

Sam hadn't wanted the life of a hunter, the nomadic, gypsy caravan bustle of moving from town to town in the middle of the night and sleeping fitfully under the blinking neon moon of a motel VACANCY sign. He'd hated the moves and the secrecy and the rootlessness of life in the middle of everywhere, and he never failed to say so. He'd begged to put down roots and make a life for himself, to be allowed the luxury of friends and the stability of having the same teacher for the entire school year. He'd wanted nothing more than what the yellow-eyed demon had denied him. And nothing less.

And though John could hardly blame him, neither could he give it to him. It would've meant conceding defeat and admitting that the demon that had stolen his American dream was the better man and deserved to win. It would've meant letting go of Mary, failing her a second time. He couldn't. He wouldn't. She deserved better, his Mary, Mary, quite contrary, who'd never lived to see her garden grow. She deserved a better tribute than an unremarkable slab of grey slate in a Kansas cemetery he seldom visited, lest he come face to face with her haggard, unforgiving father, Jonathan Edwards in a button-down shirt and an honest church deacon's earth-stained brogans. He couldn't recover her from the ashes, reform her from the soot and dust of Sammy's ruined nursery with his grease-grimed hands and breathe life into her again, but he could damn sure send her killer to the same devouring fire. So, he'd squared his shoulders and hardened his heart and become the drill sergeant he'd had to be instead of the father he'd wanted to be. And Sammy, wrapped in the narcissism of childhood, had hated him for it.

John had spent years trying to atone for the acts of parental sabotage his quest for vengeance had required of him. He'd made sure that Sam's school records were never out of date no matter how many times he had to change schools, and he'd dutifully coughed up money better spent on weapons in the name of school field trips to zoos, libraries, and museums. He'd done his best to limit his hunting forays to the summer, and when he couldn't, he'd enlisted Dean as de facto babysitter, ordered him to forego his scant adolescent freedoms and pursuits so that Sam could wow his teachers with papier mache globes of the world and styrofoam recreations of solar systems and DNA strands. He'll, John had spent more than one Friday night up to his elbows in artist's glue, getting high on Elmer's in the name of science so his boy could rewrite history with a cardboard diorama of the Jurassic period.

When Sam had gotten old enough for Dean to instruct him in the art of pool hustling and they'd roared off to the local honky tonk in the Impala, tires spinning and radio blaring The Blue Oyster Cult, John had let them go with a warning to use a rubber, dammit, and yes, Dean, that went for quickies, too, and a prayer that Dean wouldn't wrap them around a telephone pole while "Don't Fear the Reaper" bled from the mangled speakers and rescue workers wondered what a twelve-year-old was doing with his pockets stuffed with cash and pool hall rubbers. Dean had always brought them home in one piece, full of swagger and smelling of smoke and cheap perfume(but never of perfume that smelled of sun-warmed silk and chantilly lace, never that, thank God for tender mercies), and though Sam had scowled in righteous, lofty disapproval at the means by which Dean's pocket money was acquired, that never stopped him from using it to buy school supplies or books with which to pass the time on long road trips. In fact, he'd considered it his due more often than not, reasonable if paltry compensation for the unjust indignity of having a tight-assed maniac for a father, and Dean, ever faithful in his execution of a duty beyond his years and rightful job description, had shrugged and done without so that Sam could have just that much more.

Sam had never seen it that way, of course; "that much more" had never been enough, but rather more proof of just how badly he had it. Never mind that Dean had put paid to his high school career at sixteen so that Sam could dazzle the junior high maidens and blue-haired spinsters with his near-perfect attendance(though to be fair, he doubted Dean had ever shed a tear over that particular brotherly sacrifice; he'd probably done a farewell jig from the registrar's office like a dancer from West Side Story). Never mind that he, John, had often paid more rent than he could afford and overstayed his welcome in suspicious, tight-knit towns so that Sam could finish the school year, or at least make it to the Christmas break before they had to move on. Sam fixated only on the opportunities of which he'd been cruelly deprived and turned a disdainful, blind eye to the ones he'd been given. John had lost count of the times the boy had pissed and moaned and lapsed into a flat-out sulk over all the world had denied him and sworn up and down that when he was old enough, he was going, going, gone and never coming back. Dean always dismissed Sam's avowals as a temporary and amusing case of teenaged chapped ass, but John knew better. He remembered that same stubbornness set on another face long ago and far away, reduced to cherished memory, and he knew Sam was serious. If he got the chance, Sam would turn in his holy water and his Latin exorcism rites and his rock salt and never look back.

He also knew this: he'd never tell Dean that truth. Love, even love incommensurate with what was right and fair, ran deep, and Dean, his good and faithful son, Abel with a brush cut and a James Dean swagger, deserved that smallest of mercies.

Then again, maybe he would, because Sammy, with his willful blindness and adolescent rage, was currently offering a crash course in the fourth universal law of fatherhood: a father's best intentions often upended in the blink of an eye and sent his most jealously guarded secrets slithering into the light. Dean was about to come to a hard, painful truth on the unforgiving birch lash of absolute necessity, and there wasn't a goddamned thing John could do about it.

He'd never intended to tell Dean the secret, you see, never intended to divulge to a boy barely into manhood the third universal law of fatherhood and admit that he was the firstborn but not the first loved. It wasn't his fault that he hadn't been the last of his Mary, Mary, quite contrary's treasures. It had been the simple luck of the genetic draw and the fickle whim of fate. Five years earlier, and there would've been no Sam to save, only Dean, dressed in a yellow onesie and squalling himself blue in the face while his mother roasted in Hell above his crib. Five years earlier, and Dean would have been his only son, more precious than the Hope Diamond. Five years earlier, and there would have been no terrible secret to keep. Just Dean, and maybe God help him, they wouldn't be in this clusterfuck now.

He'd meant to keep his dirty secret, infect no heart but his own. There hadn't been a need to spread the dreadful sin like syphilis and ravage the boy's heart and soul. Dean had been everything a father could ask for and then some, brave and decent and obedient to his detriment. He'd swallowed his own grief for his precious mother Mary so that John could concentrate on keeping them afloat and one step ahead of the next bump in the night. He'd gone from five years old to twenty overnight, standing on a rickety stepstool to warm formula and change diapers. He'd learned to manipulate the straps on Sammy's carseat with fingers that should've been grappling with the pudgy, colorful shafts of Crayolas. And he'd carried Sam's dreams for him when he'd cast them aside in a fit of impotent rage, tucked them carefully against his heart in case Sam rediscovered hope.

The Easter after Sam had taken his most unwelcome trip down the road to Damascus, Dean, who'd been far too old for such childhood magic, had spent a bleary-eyed, pre-dawn morning hiding jellybeans and Cadbury crème eggs in the various nooks and niches of a hotel room in Des Moines. He'd shuffled around in his boxers, hiding beans and eggs behind the television set and beside the cracked face of the clock radio while Sam had snored and shifted in his nest of covers, ass pointed heavenward, a compass needle pointed true north.

"I don't think Sammy sets much store by the Easter Bunny these days, Dean," he cautioned as he'd watched the careful ritual over the flimsy rim of his styrofoam cup.

Dean had shrugged as he'd placed an egg behind the cardboard placard advertising the fare on the hotel's pay-for-porno channels. "Probably not," he'd said. "But just in case, you know?" Nonchalant, as though he didn't care whether Sam believed in Peter Cottontail or not, but he'd looked at Sam as he finished placing the treat, and John had known that it damn well did matter. Dean had been just as determined to give Sam a childhood as John had been desperate to grow him up.

Sammy hadn't much cared about what the Easter Bunny had left him when he woke up. He'd just yawned and rolled his eyes and told Dean that the Easter Bunny wasn't real, a scientist upending the world of a backward, Bible-clutching zealot who thought the sun revolved around the earth. John had winced at the flicker of defeat on Dean's face, the momentary sense of loss, as though an invisible fist had fetched a blow to his solar plexus. But Dean was nothing if not quick on his feet, and after an instant of flummoxed, wounded silence, Dean had laughed and grabbed Sam in a headlock and said of course there was no such thing as the Easter Bunny, he was just making sure that Sam didn't need to ride the short bus with the slow kids, that was all. The laughter had soured the coffee in John's mouth, and he'd gone outside under the pretense of making sure no one had picked the Impala's locks in the middle of the night.

He'd tried to offer small, fumbling consolation to Dean when he'd come out with duffels in hand, but Dean had been all swagger and glassy bravado. "It's okay, Dad. Like you said, Sammy's too old for that baby stuff." Dean had gone back into the hotel room before he could say anything else, and really, what could he have said? So, he'd let it go and concentrated on getting the boys up and out.

He'd thought that was the end of it until an hour down the road, when he'd heard furtive clicking noises coming from the pocket of Dean's army jacket, which lay across his knees.

"Dean, did you leave shells in your pocket? I thought I told you to keep ammunition out of the passenger cabin and off of your person in case we got pulled over by some hayseed cop with a power hard-on. Besides, one of those damn things falls out, it could roll under the brake pedal and keep me from stopping this car in a hurry."

Dean had blinked at him in surprise, and then a guilty flush had crept into his cheeks. He'd shifted in his seat, and the Impala's upholstery had purred agreeably beneath his sliding flanks. "Yes, sir, you did. But it's not ammo in my pocket, I swear."

"Well, what is it, then?"

Dean's flush had deepened. "Nothin'," he'd muttered softly to his crotch.

Visions of pilfered M-80s and Black Cats had danced in his head. "Dean, you either show me what you've got in there, or I'm going to pull the car over and find out for myself, and if I have to do that, I guarantee you won't like it."

"Yes, sir." Dean had lifted the flap of the pocket and reached inside, and his hand had emerged in a loose fist. Wordlessly, he'd turned his hand and uncurled his fingers, a magician revealing the heart of his magic, and in the cup of his palm had been jellybeans.

"Oh."

"Just in case Sammy changed his mind."

"Oh." Oh, son. "Well, that's all right, then."

He'd expected Dean to return the candy to the shelter of the pocket, but instead, he'd let it rest in the cup of his palm while he looked out the window and watched the cornfields pass. Eventually, Dean had fallen asleep, head lolling against the headrest, and John had been tempted to scoop the candies from his lax hand and toss them out the window, Jack's harridan mother wresting the innocuous gift of prosperity and innocent hope from the hand of her gullible boy, but he couldn't. It had smacked of heartless cruelty, and so he'd left them where they lay and watched them bleed their colors into his son's hand in a Willy Wonka stigmata. Either Sam would eat them, or Dean would let them go when he was ready, simply turn the cradling cup of his palm earthward and let them fall to the soil to wither or flourish as they might.

In that moment, looking at his thirteen-year-old son hold ninety-nine cent jellybeans in his palm just in case his sleeping and oblivious eight-year-old brother wanted them later, John had known that he would never tell Dean the truth. In that moment, his love for Dean had been as it should have been, a white-hot flame that consumed everything in its path, a merciless napalm that had threatened to consume him from the inside. His trembling fingers had spasmed around the steering wheel, and his vision had blurred dangerously. The wave of emotion had been so intense that his chest had hurt, and he'd pulled to the shoulder to regain his composure.

The subtle jolt of the car coasting to a stop had roused Dean, and he'd sat up and blinked the sleep from his eyes, fingers closing instinctively around their precious burden.

"What's the matter, Dad?" he'd asked anxiously. "Did Sammy get carsick?" He'd twisted in his seat to peer fretfully at Sam, searching the crevices of the upholstery for telltale rivulets of vomit.

"Nope. Sam's fine, son." It's me that needs a minute or thirty. Dean was the spitting image of Mary in profile, right down to dusting of freckles on his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. If he squinted, he could pretend it was Mary beside him, and that they were rambling the Kansas back roads to calm a colicky Dean, who was howling to be heard over the optimistic din of Steeler's Wheel. If he kept squinting, he could even believe that Mary would reach into the backseat and pull out not a sleeping Sam, but an indignantly howling Dean. She'd cuddle him on her lap and sing along, bounce the gas out of him while she sang about how glad she was to be stuck in the middle with him. She'd sing, and Dean would burp and laugh, and John would watch them and hum a different, secret song inside his head, one made famous by The Big Bopper. If he squinted, he could make the car a time machine.

"Oh," Dean had said, and his cracking, adolescent voice had jolted John rudely back to the present. "Is there something wrong with the car?" He'd leaned in to inspect the dashboard gauges, and when he'd found nothing amiss, he'd craned his neck out the passenger window in a search for flat tires or an ominous puddle of fluid on the blacktop or the dirt beneath the car.

"No, son. Car's fine." It's me that's having a goddamn breakdown.

"Oh." The handy family buzzword. "What're we doing here then?"

"I just need a minute, Dean."

"Oh. Okay." Dean had lapsed into obedient silence, but his fingers had drummed a nervous tattoo on the outside of the Impala's door panel, fingers dancing on the warm metal.

He'd sat staring at the cornfield until Sam had begun to stir in the backseat, roused by the lack of noise and the persistent heat of the sun on his cheeks, and then he'd thrown the car into gear and driven on. He'd had to resist the compulsion to watch the cornfield recede in his rearview mirror, convinced that if he looked back, he'd see Mary emerging from the cornrows with stalks woven in her pretty golden hair like a garland. She'd beckon him with an enticing smile, and he wouldn't be able to resist. He'd never been able to resist her, to deny her anything, not even sons, and nothing, not even death and the patently impossible would change that. If she'd emerged from the gently whispering stalks and bid him follow, he would not have hesitated. He would've left the car in the middle of that Iowa highway and chased her into the field. If he'd had the courage, he would've left Sam and Dean in the car and to the hopeful charity of passing tourists, but like as not, he would've taken them with him, would've ordered them to fall in and follow him into the field of dreams.

But he'd resisted the seduction of the mirror, and after a quarter-mile, the cornfield had been so much shimmering fool's gold in his wake. Sammy had declared himself hungry and eventually eaten the jellybeans Dean had so carefully hoarded, though by the time he had, they'd looked less like magical beans and more like awful medicine disguised as a sweet by an enterprising yet inept parent, mottled and bled of their colors by Dean's sweaty hand. Sam had eaten them with no discernible relish, and John had doubted that they had returned to him his lost innocence, but Dean had been satisfied, even furtively pleased. They might not have resurrected Sam's childhood, but they preserved Dean's for just a little longer, and he had supposed that was magic enough from a bag of jellybeans plucked carelessly from a dollar-store shelf.

Well, they sure as shit couldn't save it now. No one could, and it was his fault.

He should've left Sam at home. At fourteen, he was old enough to be left alone, and he could be trusted to use the money John left for him in the pickle jar for food. He should've loaded up the refrigerator with frozen dinners and ground beef and left a paper with Bobby's and Pastor Jim's phone numbers by the telephone and left him with the promise to return in a week. Sammy would sooner die than miss a minute of school, so the truant officer wouldn't have been a problem. Widow Weller, the nosy biddy who lived across the street, and who presided over her dusty, fishbowl world through the warped lens of her old brass telescope might've kicked up didoes about the Winchester boy being left alone, but she kicked up so many didoes that the local cops usually ignored her. If the ocular predations of an old woman who took her fashion and etiquette tips from The Civil War Almanac and Ladies' Home Companion truly bothered him so much, he should've shipped Sam off to Singer or bitten the bullet and left Dean behind with a sullen Sam.

What he should not have done was let Sam come on this hunt. He'd known it was a bad idea the minute Sam had broached the subject over dinner last week, eager and preemptively sullen beneath his too-long bangs. He'd known it and said no, and for a week, he'd weathered the storm of righteous indignation and shrill accusations of brutal rule by fiat. He'd even withstood the hours of brooding silence and the interminable drives with Sam slouched in the backseat of the Impala in a ball of hard-done-by pique and Dean turning the radio to intolerable, ear-splitting volume to drown out the uncomfortable silence of adult might versus adolescent right. He'd pressed on, secure in the knowledge that his gut had seldom steered him wrong. He'd had no intention of bringing Sam along, and as late as yesterday afternoon, he'd planned to leave him behind, where he was safe.

But damned if Sam didn't have a politician's tongue and a badger's dogged persistence. Once he figured out that silence and sulking wasn't going to win the shooting match, he changed tack. He'd switched his focus from the grievous wrongs of exclusion to the potential benefits of playing tagalong. He'd pointed out that with him along to do the grunt work of bag-hauling, Dean would be free to help with the more dangerous aspects of hunting and tracking. Besides, he'd added with the hectic, bright-eyed fervor of a Jehovah's Witness with a boner and a dream, he was fourteen now, plenty old enough to hold his own. Hadn't John been teaching him to shoot since he was ten? The monsters wouldn't care how old he was, wouldn't spare him for the mercy of youth, and didn't he have to learn sometime? What was he supposed to do if, God forbid, he and Dean became so much demon bait? Cower in the hotel room until starvation or an angry hotel manager forced him out?

Very fine points all, and still John had balked. The perpetually harried and terrified father-voice inside his head hadn't given a damn about logic or Sam's budding skills in Oratory and Debate 101. Too young, too young, it had hissed with rabbity insistence, and he couldn't disagree. Dean had been sixteen on his first hunt, grown into his body and armored with the confidence of absolute conviction. Further, Dean wasn't hampered by the weakness of curiosity or moral ambiguity. Dean's only interest in the things he hunted was how best to kill them, and he certainly never stopped to ponder whether their demise was deserved.

Sam, on the other hand, was possessed of an insatiable need to know and understand beyond any doubt. Sam liked to quantify and qualify and catalogue, to dissect and inspect until there was neither knowledge nor doubt to be had. He was a budding scientist with a philosopher's heart, and John was afraid that Sam would hesitate when push came to shove, paralyzed by ill-advised wonder or the stirrings of a useless moral quandary. He would hesitate, and the monster wouldn't, and Sam would leave the world a bloody, tattered ragdoll, distant, dead eyes fixed on questions he'd never have the chance to ask. With him would go the ill-defended treasure of his mother and most of his father's mind. The possibility was more than he could stand, and so he'd done his best to cut it off at the pass and told Sam that his choices were to stay home alone or be shipped to Bobby's to play gopher and rag-holding apprentice. Sam had done his best imitation of a disenfranchised grunt with a terminal case of hemorrhoids, and John had slept like a rock, sure he'd made the right decision.

And then this morning, standing over a sink full of dirty dishes and sipping black coffee from a steaming mug while he watched Widow Weller watch him like the world's oldest Nancy Drew, he'd changed his mind, quashed his better judgment with the same ruthless fist that had strangled so many of his sons' dreams and barked at a bewildered Sam to be ready to leave in five minutes. His father-voice had howled at him in abject panic, demanded to know what madness had seized him. It had called him a fool and a lunatic and a squanderer of children, and he could refute none of these accusations, but neither could they change the fact that Sam had clambered into the backseat of the Impala and begun to chew his nails in nervous anticipation.

It was Dean who'd changed his mind. Not through word or deed; in those, Dean had steadfastly backed his decision to bar Sam from the family business, and when John had abruptly reversed himself this morning, it was Dean who'd launched a desperate campaign to keep Sam home. Much like the father-voice inside his head, Dean had thought him out of his mind, an idiot seized in the grip of madness. He hadn't put it that way, of course. Dean was careful to be polite even in the most mulish throes of high piss-off, but his anger had been perfectly clear behind the façade of "sirs" and carefully couched expressions of doubt and in the stiff set of his shoulders as he'd gone to load the Impala's trunk. The clack of his boots had snapped, "You're an asshole," all the way out the door, and by the time John had slid into the driver's seat, he'd had two sullen sons slouched moodily in the car.

But Sam had been right for the wrong reasons. Odds were good that sooner or later, the hunter would become the hunted. He wasn't Achilles, Greek god and deathless warrior, invulnerable save for the heel covered by his mother's well-intended hand. He was a middle-aged mechanic and former grunt armed with nothing but a burning need for vengeance, a little knowledge, and an endless wellspring of grief. Age and the monsters would eventually catch up with him, most likely in some godforsaken backwater or in the attic of some rundown voodoo attic in a Louisiana bayou where the end would come with the snap a hungry gator's jaws and what was left of him would float through the swamps forever as reconstituted gator turd. If and when that happened, Dean would be left alone, the last soldier in a foxhole turned tomb. He deserved better for his years of loyalty, for being the good son with no thought to his place in the family pecking order or to the possibility that his rightful inheritance would be denied him. So, John had invited Sam on the hunt in the hope, however feeble, that Sam would succumb to the family mania, catch the killing fever in his blood and decide that the hunt was his calling after all. If Sam caught the family madness, then Dean wouldn't be alone, wouldn't die alone, and John would have one less wound to scar and fester on his conscience.

So, snared with the best of intentions, John now faced an impossible choice. He stared at the scene before him, heart pounding and mind racing in an endless loop of possibilities, each more terrible and hopeless than the one before. His eyes darted between Sam, who cowered beneath the shadow of the wendigo in mute terror, gun drooping uselessly between his legs, and Dean, who dangled helplessly from the priapic stub of a rotten tree, hands curled around the soft, splintering wood in a desperate embrace. His feet scrabbled uselessly, seeking purchase from the open air below the jagged cliff face, but he was five hundred feet above solid ground, and there were no angels to bear him up. Both his boys walked in the valley of the shadow of death, and the longer he looked at them, the more apparent the ugly truth became.

He could save Sam, or he could save Dean, but he couldn't save them both. If he raised the Winchester in his hand, he could blow the wendigo's brains out with its load of silver. Sam would be spared the shadow and wind up with nothing but a few scratches and a splatter of wendigo guts in his hair, but Dean would lose his battle with gravity and plummet to the arroyo below. If, on the other hand, he dropped the rifle and dove for Dean with hands outstretched, Dean would crawl to safety on his strength, victim of nothing more than the splinters embedded in his raw hands. Sam would be torn to ribbons by the monster's diseased maw, and Dean would wind up putting what was left of him in a garbage bag. It was the impossible choice of King Solomon, and there was no tender-hearted mother to lift the burden from him.

You bastard! You can't make me choose between my sons. You've already stolen my wife. Haven't I lost enough? Not fair! Not fair! his mind yammered.

Winter or spring. Only one may you carry from this place, intoned an implacable voice. Make your choice and do it quickly, else I do it for you and take them both in my impatience.

Dean, who dangled on the lip of the world and never once cried out for help, but who struggled in silence. Dean, who came to the world on winter's fury and plowed his way through its challenges with bull-necked indifference, never asking for more than his share and never complaining when it shorted him. Dean, for whom Mary had tried to knit booties and had ended up knitting a lopsided, ectoplasmic blanket instead. Dean, who would die for Sam without hesitation, and who, if he knew John was having this internal struggle, would kick him in the ass and tell him to save Sam before it was too late.

Sam, who was born into the world on the beneficent tide of spring's warmth. Sam, who demanded of the world nothing less than everything it had to offer, and who had the intelligence and the drive to take it. Sam, who would never forgive either of them if Dean didn't come home. Sam, for whom his Mary, Mary, quite contrary had died. Sam, who beneath the humid, exotic musk of teenage boy, still smelled of chantilly lace and sun-warmed silk when the weather was right.

Such was his choice. And yet, terrible as it was, there was no choice, not really. God help him, there never could be. He raised his rifle and took aim at the wendigo, which loomed over Sam with a guttural howl of triumph, saliva hanging from its blue-black lips in thick runners.

"Mine," it crooned. "All mine."

Not on your life, you son of a bitch. He's mine. He took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger, and the rifle bucked in his hand.

The wendigo howled in agony, and black blood gouted from the hole in its neck. John cursed and cocked the rifle for another shot. He'd meant to take the fucker's head off its shoulders, but it'd moved at the last instant. The wound might still be fatal-the creature's head lolled on its neck at a grotesque angle, and blood pumped from the wound in steady, urgent spurts-but not before the damn thing took a Winchester with it if it could.

"Sam, you move now!" John roared. "Go on. Get where it's safe!"

Sam, who'd been watching the advance of the wendigo and its subsequent wounding, jerked as though touch by a live wire, and then he was scrabbling backward, crab-crawling away from the wendigo as fast as he could.

The wendigo rounded on John, fangs bared. It shrieked in agony and frustration, and blood sluiced from its wound and pattered to the ground in thick, gelid droplets. Its moon-white eyes were wide and greedy even as their moonbone light flickered and wavered with promised extinction. It wobbled and weaved on its feet, but it did not retreat. In fact, it smiled at him.

"Aw, papa bear comes to save his cubs," it croaked. "How heroic."

"You're going to hell, you son of a bitch."

The creature laughed, a gargling, glottal wheeze, and its loose neck wobbled. "Maybe," it conceded. "Maybe. But then, you'll be right there with me, won't you?"

It feinted right with astonishing speed, and John whirled to keep it in his sights. For an instant, it was an emaciated, white blur on the mesa, and then it faltered. It staggered and lurched on weakening legs, and its head drooped.

"Looks like you're going to die," John observed as his finger grazed the trigger. "One way or another."

"Mmm," the creature grunted. "But looks like I'm not the only one." It laughed, clogged drains in high summer, and from behind John came the sound of splintering wood followed by the sad clitter of falling pebbles.

Dean.

The father-voice inside his head began to wail, a mindless, animal sound of loss, and then he was screaming, too, a howl of rage and loss and love discovered too late. The wendigo laughed, and John rewarded its impertinence by reducing its head to so much rotten pulp courtesy of a silver bullet. The shot sheared off the top of its skull, and the wendigo collapsed, became as inconsequential as a bundle of discarded clothing. John stared at it in numb incomprehension, wracked by dry sobs, and then he turned and staggered blindly towards the cliff, fingers clawed stupidly around the barrel of the gun.

Deandeandean, his heart thundered, and soon his mouth followed suit. "Dean! Dean! Dean!"

"Dad!" Not Dean, but Sam, small and breathless.

He stopped and looked around. "Sammy! Where are you?"

"Over here."

John turned toward the voice and scanned the area. At first there was nothing, and then he caught a glimpse of booted feet sticking out from behind the treacherous rotten log that had sent Dean to his death. He hurried over, expecting to see Sam peering mournfully at his brother's broken body on the jagged rocks of the arroyo, but what he found was Sam clinging ferociously to a very grimy, bloody hand and a hank of jacket.

"I can't lift him," Sam said plaintively. "He's too heavy."

No, but John could. John could have moved mountains without breaking so much as wind. He cast his rifle aside and dropped to the ground with an inarticulate cry, hands scrabbling and outstretched. My boy. Give me my boy.

"I got you, Dean. I got you." He dimly remembered that he'd said the same thing nineteen years ago, when a beaming doctor had placed a screaming, wriggling Dean in his arms.

He and Sam wrestled Dean onto the solid ground of the mesa, where the three of them lay in a panting, bloody, sweaty heap. Sam had begun to cry in awkward, hitching gulps, whether from shame, exhaustion, or delayed terror, John didn't know, and for the moment, he didn't care. He was focused on Dean, who lay on his stomach, face turned from the dirt. They stared at one another in silence, and for an instant, John saw Mary in those hazel eyes and that blond hair. And why not? He'd inherited them both from her.

He wanted to say something, to offer apologies for unnamed sins or express his endless love for the son he'd nearly lost, but his throat was coated with dust and raw from screaming, and so he simply reached out and cupped the back of his son's head.

"You're not going all chick flick on me, are you, Dad?" Dean asked weakly, and John laughed.

"No, son. I'm just glad you're all right, and that Sam got there when he did."

And, he added silently, that the third universal law of fatherhood is still my dirty little secret.

He withdrew his hand and rolled onto his back to stare at the sun and let memories of chantilly lace and sun-warmed silk wash over him.