Chapter 1:
Nancy Wiseman lay sleeping in her bed, and groaned when her alarm clock sounded. She pressed the OFF button and got out of bed, glancing back at her husband before running her hands through her hair. Suddenly, she narrowed her eyes. The baby hadn't cried at all the previous night. Not once.
Worry gnawed at her stomach and she bolted into the baby's room and over to the crib. Shock caused her to freeze for a full second.
Blue face.
Not moving.
Oh God, Jessie.
"Richie!" she screamed, taking the baby out of the crib. She positioned Jessie the way she'd been taught to do resuscitation for a baby in her class. "Richie! Oh God, oh please God no!"
"Nancy?" her husband asked, running into the room. "What's—." He stopped, staring at the baby, their child, as Nancy tried desperately to get her to breathe again.
"Richie, call 911!"
Richie ran out of the nursery and into their bedroom, grabbing the phone and dialing 911 as he raced back to his wife.
"Yes, my baby's not breathing, we just came into the nursery and she wasn't breathing…my wife's administering CPR—."
"Richie, it's not working!" Nancy sobbed. "Get an ambulance! Tell them we need an ambulance!"
As the two frantic parents continued to panic, their Calico cat sat in the corner of the room, its tail flicking back and forth as it stared.
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Sam pulled over to the rest stop on the highway, parking the car.
"Thank God," Dean groaned. "I have to piss so bad." At that, he got out of the car and walked quickly toward the small store.
"Really? I never would have guessed with you talking about it for the past twenty minutes," Sam murmured under his breath. He shut the door to the car and locked the car before following Dean inside.
Once the two had used the bathroom and gotten some food for the road, they took off again.
"So what else could it be?" Dean asked. "Shtriga, an abiku, what else is a likely suspect?"
"Honestly I think we need to do some looking around before we can make any kind of guess," Sam replied.
"Yea, that's what I'm thinking, but it never hurts to try to be prepared," Dean said.
"True. An abiku is a likely candidate, but a Shtriga I'm not sure. The last one put the children into comas before they killed them and it didn't go after babies. This one could be different, but we won't be sure until—."
"Until we do some looking around. Yea, I know." Dean took off the plastic wrap covering his sandwich and took a big bite.
Three hours later, the boys arrived in Torrington, Connecticut. After finding a motel, they checked in and locked the door, taking a picture off the wall on the left, and began to put up what would become a collage of information. Newspaper articles, information about creatures or spirits or demons they thought might be responsible for whatever was happening, it all got taped up on the wall. By the end of the case, the wall would likely be covered.
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"So we really aren't sure what could be going on. Have the police been investigating?" the coroner asked.
"The local police were investigating until it became an issue for the FBI," Sam replied. "Now, some diagnosis that might be mistaken for SIDS is shaken baby syndrome, infant botulism…. Was there anything that would indicate something like that?"
"Nothing. I've been doing this for a long time, and I would know if there was something in a textbook out there that would explain this," he replied. "SIDS is just a condition we don't know much about yet. Hopefully the police or the FBI will find something that will stop whatever this is."
Sam nodded. "That's what we're trying to do. Thanks for your time."
"No problem."
Sam turned around to look for Dean and saw him talking with a girl that Sam thought was way too pretty to be working in a morgue. Sam rolled his eyes. Of course she was just the right amount of pretty for Dean to be talking to her. He walked over. "I think I got everything we need," he said to Dean.
"I'm just finishing up here," Dean replied.
Sam walked toward the door as he heard Dean say, "So the bar's named Izzies? Cause, I have the night off."
Sam waited in the Impala for Dean, going over the notes he'd gotten from the coroner. It wasn't much. He hadn't found any odd markings on the babies or anything in the toxicology report. The next stop was the houses the babies had lived in. Sam winced. He hated having to speak with people when a loved one had died, especially when it was their child. It was something that really stayed with him.
Dean opened up the driver's side of the door and got in, shutting the door. "You find out anything from the coroner?" he asked.
"Just a background on SIDS. Which I could have, and actually did, find online. He didn't find anything odd about the baby. He just…stopped breathing. You get anything?"
"Just the name of a bar that Kelly's going to be at tonight," Dean replied with a smile. "She did hear about the deaths. Just didn't hear anything interesting."
"So our first house is the first death — the Nicolsons."