Birthright

By Marz1

Chapter 4

They arrived in Big Fork, Minnesota just after dawn. John Winchester left the car like a blizzard blowing over. As he marched away, everyone in the Impala began to thaw. Dean cracked his neck and shifted his shoulders. Sam tried to unfold his right foot from under his left knee, and then winced and hissed as the numb limb went pins-and-needles on him. Maya was the last to stretch, still a little afraid someone would see her move and hit her. She was stiff from the long drive, but after a couple of full meals and a night of mostly uninterrupted sleep, she felt better than she had in… a week.

It can't have been a week. It must have been years. I feel a hundred, she thought.

The Whispering Pines Motel was just like the old motel as far as she could tell: a long row of rooms-single story-with a weedy, cracked parking lot, only paved near the manager's office. Sam had seen a thousand like it. His memories ghosted through her mind even though they were no longer touching.

Another motel, another town, another Hunt, another notch in Dad's monster-killing belt, another chance for us all to die.

Maya still wasn't sure if they were crazy. The last time she had gone to visit her grandmother, another resident of the old folks' home had grabbed her arm. The man saw faceless corpses lining the halls and snakes and eels falling from the ceiling.

Sam had a few vague images of ghostly creatures in his mind, glimpses of things in graveyards and run-down houses. Most of his idea of monsters was composed of illustrations from books, long dull paragraphs in old English and stories from his father and brother. She could tell he believed in them, though.

It didn't matter, really, since Mr. Winchester did not want her involved, and if he was telling the truth, would leave her with some relative of theirs named Bobby in the near future. Given that Sam seemed fond of his uncle Bobby, and his father was not, and that their last names were different, Maya assumed Bobby must be Sam's maternal uncle. She knew Sam's mother was dead. She had picked up on it when he was dabbing rubbing alcohol on her wounds. She also knew Sam had never known his mother. Maybe Bobby had fought Mr. Winchester for custody when she died.

With another touch, she could have found the answers in Sam's head, but she dared not risk it. She knew Sam did not mind. He was desperately lonely, and even her very intrusive manner of communication made him feel less isolated. She could tell Dean was watching her, in the rear view mirrors and from the corner of his eye. Sam knew Dean was overly and obsessively protective of him, and she didn't want to do anything to make him more suspicious. Mr. Winchester was already suspicious enough for a whole mob of people.

They all jumped as Mr. Winchester returned, yanking open the door like he intended to pull it off the car entirely. He started the engine and slammed the car into gear, the tires spitting gravel as he swung the car around into a parking space 30 feet from where he started.

"Get the girl inside," he growled, throwing a set of keys at Sam.

Sam hurried to obey, grabbing Maya's elbow and dragging her across the seat and out of the car. She looked around as they crossed the sidewalk and then the world vanished again, replaced by four yellowing walls and two queen beds. Mold and bleach warred inside her nostrils. Dean followed them in with a couple of duffle bags, and they all jumped again as the Impala's engine roared.

"I…uh…I guess he'll be back with dinner," Dean said. "We should get set up."

Dean upended one of the duffle bags and dumped books all over a bed. Sam started pinning maps and notes up on the wall. She recognized the map she had marked with locations of suspicious drownings around Cass Lake and Pike Bay in the Chippewa national forest. Dean lobbed a book at Sam, who caught it without looking.

"Maybe we'll have this handled by the time he gets back," Dean said. "We'll go out for steaks."

Maya could almost hear Sam's eyes roll in response. As Sam started paging through the book, Dean took a bag of salt out of the second duffle, and poured a thin line across the window sills and doorway, and then along the carpet beneath the heating vents.

"We're in the middle of Windigo territory," Dean said.

"But they take big bloody bites of people," Sam said. "They don't drown them. Here!"

Sam turned the book so they could see.

"Mishipeshu?" Dean asked squinting. "Isn't that a car?"

"That's Mitsubishi," Sam said.

"How can it be a lynx or a serpent?" Maya found herself asking.

"A lot of things are shapeshifters, or they don't really look like anything a person can describe, so they just kind of stick a label on it," Sam said.

"Does it say how to kill it?" Dean asked.

"A girl hit it on the tail with a cedar paddle, and the tail fell off and turned into copper," Sam said.

"And that killed it?" Dean asked.

"Uh…no." Sam said. "They're the enemy of Thunderbirds, apparently."

"Also a car," Dean said.

"The first one wasn't a car!" Sam said.

She watched the brothers bicker and tease each other as they searched for ways to kill a creature that probably wasn't real. They kept at it for another hour before Maya lost interest and shuffled over to the corner of the second bed, farthest from the door, and crawled under the blankets. If Sam and Dean noticed, it didn't interrupt their sniping disguised as research.

She did not know why all of this made her so tired. I was rescued, she thought. I should be happy or something. She wasn't happy, though, just in less pain. Everything in front of her was now a big dark empty space with the question "now what?" echoing around inside it.

At home, hiding, she at least had her mother and her routine. She did her homeschool work and tried to help out with the dozen or so "work from home" projects her mother had going at any one time; answering customer questions for a VCR that was almost completely obsolete, mail order alterations of suits, and stuffing envelopes.

She realized the Winchesters had quieted down; she supposed they were trying to let her sleep. She couldn't though, not really. She stared at the stitches on the inside of the comforter, her mind drifting thoughtlessly. The shadows moved across the walls of the room and papers rustled. It was almost peaceful.

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"Pizza time!"

Maya bolted upright, her eyes tracking toward a looming figure to her right.

"Oops," Dean said, backing up with an open cardboard box resting on his forearms in offering.

"Jerk," Sam growled.

"No one's a jerk when they're giving out free pizza," Maya said, wanting to avoid conflict.

Dean smirked at her. "I got half veggie for the lady, half meat-lovers for you and me."

"Jerk," Sam reiterated.

She took a slice from the veggie side and ate quietly. They seemed to spend an awful lot of money on takeout food. She supposed that made sense since they were on the road. She wondered how they paid for it. Her question was answered at least in part when John Winchester returned well after midnight.

The smell of tobacco smoke, beer, and stale sweat poured into the room as he stomped inside. He tossed an armful of files on the room's small table, and threw a roll of twenty-dollar bills on top of it. The knuckles on his right hand were split and oozing blood, and he had blue chalk dust on his sleeve.

Dean hopped out of the rickety chair he'd been dozing in, and Sam scrambled out of the other queen bed. They stood as if waiting for inspection. Maya shifted under the blankets of her bed, trying and failing to avoid Mr. Winchester's gaze. He turned back toward Sam.

"See what you can do with that," he growled, pointing at the files.

Sam shuffled over to the table and his father kicked off his boots and took over Sam's bed. Maya shuffled over to the table too, feeling like she shouldn't look lazy with Mr. Winchester in the room, even if he appeared to be sleeping. Dean flashed a smile at her, hopping onto her vacated bed, as if this were some sort of official shift change.

Sam handed her a file that was stamped property of the county sheriff's office. She paged through it, trying to look productive. She wondered if she should try not to put fingerprints on them, but Sam did not seem concerned. Sam eventually assigned her to compile statistics on the victims, but they did not have much in common, in regards to age or race or birthdays, which Sam said could be important. Their one commonality was a criminal record.

"A lot of the people who died had criminal records for theft and vandalism. All but one were caught at least once, stealing copper pipes or wiring out of houses to sell for scrap," Sam said.

"So it hates people who steal from houses?" Maya asked.

"I think it's more about the copper," Sam said.

"That doesn't help us kill it," Mr. Winchester said, making them both jump.

"It could help us draw it out," Sam said.

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She thought they would wait until the next night, but Mr. Winchester got up and got Dean up as well. Five minutes later they were trooping out the door. Maya worried she'd be left on the shore of a lake with a stolen pipe in her hands. Instead, she was left in a hotel room with a pile of stolen police files.

"You stay here," Mr. Winchester said. "Don't open the curtains. Don't make noise."

"Yes, sir," she said.

She heard tires squeal and gravel fly. She checked the clock: 4am. She fought the urge to look out the curtains. She sat on the end of the bed for a few minutes, and then got up and paced. On her tenth circuit of the room, she realized the Winchesters had taken their bags with them. There was enough clutter; the pizza box, the files, the rumpled and discarded bedding, that she did not notice right away, but all their personal property was gone.

Her clothes from the second-hand store were still there in the plastic bag. She knelt down and picked through them. There wasn't a note or any money or anything tucked inside. If they were ditching her, she was sure Sam would have left her something. Of course, Sam would have to know they weren't coming back, to know to leave something.

She paced through the room again, looking under the beds and in the bathroom. No explanation presented itself.

She found a copy of the yellow pages in the nightstand. She thought about Mr. Winchester's comment about putting her on a bus somewhere. There was a little map in the front of the book, but they were nowhere near the station. She was alone, in Minnesota. That was worlds better than alone in the FOH camper, or the cornfield in Nebraska. It gave her more of a head start, but no clearer idea of where to go.

Maya didn't know how many days Mr. Winchester had paid for; maybe he'd rushed off with his sons because he'd only paid for one night. The hotels she'd stayed at with her mother all had check-out-by-ten polices, so she had about six hours to…do something. She had no plan. She lay back on the bed. She didn't think she would sleep, but she did.

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The door crashed open just after noon. Dean and Sam struggled to squeeze through at the same time. They were wet and their pants were spattered with mud.

"The shower is mine, Bitch!" Dean declared.

Instead of replying, Sam attempted to kick the back of Dean's knee. They both fell to the floor. Dean, being much larger, rolled them over and came out on top. Dean leapt up and stumbled away from a rather squashed Sam. The bathroom door slammed and the shower rattled on a moment later. Maya looked through the doorway into the parking lot, but she saw no sign of Mr. Winchester. She crept forward and offered Sam a hand. He took it, though he did not put any weight on her as he stood.

The construction site had a flood light, but no cameras. It took Dean all of five seconds to hop the fence, grab a bundle of wire, and hop back into the Impala. Dad hadn't even bothered with the parking brake. Moths and mosquitoes flashed in the headlights. Moonlight reflected off the lake, bright through the dark wall of trees. The trunk creaked as it opened, and Dean's grin flashed as held he up a cattle prod to check the charge.

They walked along the shore, Dean close to the water, Dad a yard further up the bank, Sam ten feet further still. Dean hummed, almost inaudibly. Dad's breath hung around his face as steam. The undergrowth shivered and rattled as they moved.

Sam held a taser pointed out and to the side; he wasn't supposed to fire it unless both Dad and Dean were incapacitated, or specifically ordered him to. He hated that he was drilled over and over until he was proficient with weapons, and then was treated like he'd shoot himself in the foot if no one held his hand.

It walked up out of the water without a ripple or a splash. Its feet made no sound upon the cluttered, weedy shore. The body was mammalian-rolling, catlike shoulders and muscular haunches, but the skin was slick and hairless, and the head round and reptilian with yellow lidless eyes. It never looked away from Dean.

It never screamed or screeched or hissed, even as its mouth moved in paroxysms of dying. The only sounds were the sizzle of the cattle prod and Dad's cursing. It fell apart when it died, not flesh, but glowing metal flakes, all over the rocks and mud. They couldn't salt and burn that. Sam was sent back to the car for trash bags. He spent hours squatting and kneeling in the mud. Dean helped a little. Dad napped in the car.

Sam let go of her and slumped in a chair. He rested his arms on the table, careful to avoid the police files. After closing the door, and checking the salt line, she shuffled over and sat across from him.

"Dad's going to dump the bags away from the water," Sam said.

Maya nodded, Sam's thoughts and memories spooling out inside her head. She wondered what he got from her, but he spoke without her asking.

"We weren't going to leave you in the middle of nowhere," Sam said. "I know you're scared, and Dad doesn't explain anything if he can help it, but we are going to find you somewhere safe."

Maya nodded again. They sat in silence, Sam exhausted and Maya uncertain what to say.

The day wore on. Dean eventually emerged from the bathroom, and collapsed in one of the beds. Sam took over the shower, then spent a few hours on the phone, calling dozens of numbers, and leaving messages, and then went back to napping. When the sun got low again, Dean went out for food, though how he was going to get anywhere without a car was a mystery to Maya. She nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone rang. Sam fumbled the receiver and then hit the speaker button.

"Hey! You been calling me?" a twangy voice called.

"Caleb! Hey, this is Sam!"

"Hey Sammy! What's shakin'? Your daddy shoot himself in the foot again?"

"No, no. We're good. Uh…how are you?"

"I'm kickin' ass and takin' names, but I think maybe you're in a hurry to get to the point."

"Uh…yeah." Sam said. "We were trying to get in touch with Bobby, or Pastor Jim."

"Well Jim's down in Haiti helping some Santeria church chase a group of witches out of Port-de-Paix, and then build a school, since he's that kind of goody-two-shoes. Bobby's up in Washington State trying to clear up a curse, thinks it was some old Japanese lady who got killed when she wouldn't give up her house and go to Manzanar back in WWII. Anyway, he'll probably be at that a while, too. You know curses, can't just salt and burn the bones, 'specially if was a righteous one."

"Oh," Sam said.

"You need back up on something? I'm in Ensenada, but I can be back in the States in a couple hours," Caleb said.

"No, thanks," Sam said. "We don't really need help with a case. We're trying to find a new home for somebody who was caught up in some weird stuff."

"I got ya," Caleb said. "I'll try to get through to Bobby, too, but I wouldn't bet on him being back at the junkyard until the end of September. If it gets down to it, you can hide your guy at one of my cabins."

"Thanks, Caleb," Sam said.

"No worries Sammy, stay safe!"

"You too."

The line clicked and the high dial tone came on.

"Looks like you'll be hanging with us a while," Sam said.

Maya shifted around in her seat. The call confirmed that more than just Sam's family believed in all this crazy stuff. She looked back at the pile of police reports. She had a file like that in some office, just as far from the truth as accidental drowning was. In the last week, the world had become a hundred times more frightening, and now it just doubled that.

"Don't worry," Sam said. "I'll tell dad."