Chapter 2 of Cursed
bloodwritesChapter 2
Dean follows his brother into the motel room. After dumping their bags, Sam reaches out.
"Let me help you," he says, tugging at Dean's jacket.
"Don't touch me," Dean growls. He pulls away violently, and with a kind of revulsion he's never felt before, not even when hunting the most disgusting of monsters, the kind that eat corpses and stink of it. "Don't you ever fucking touch me again."
Dean grabs his bag by one handle, and he drags the entire thing behind him into the bathroom. He slams the door hard enough that the whole room shakes around him.
He locks the door.
He turns the shower on. All the way up, as hot as it will go. He strips off his clothing, soaked through and filthy, and he stuffs it all, every single garment, into the tiny trash can in the corner, until it's overflowing.
He gasps when he climbs under the spray of water. It's scalding, but he doesn't care, wants to boil off his skin, because as hard as he scrubs, he's never going to get clean.
Dean's head spins, and, finally, he turns the temperature down, because if he passes out, Sam will break the door to come in, and the last thing Dean wants now is to be exposed, naked, in front of his brother.
There's something about him, about Dean, that made Sam think what he did was okay, and all Dean wants to do now is hide it, cover himself, make whatever it is go away.
Sam watches Dean when he emerges in a cloud of steam with mournful, concerned eyes, but Dean ignores it.
He climbs into the bed nearest the door, bundled in threadbare sweats and a hoodie, and he shivers and lies awake while Sam showers and goes to bed.
Dean lies awake until he finally hears Sam's breathing ease into deep sleep, then he slips out of bed, takes his keys and his bag, and leaves the room on silent feet.
It's pouring with rain. Dean's sweats got wet when he dashed to the car, but he turns the heat all the way up, and he drives.
He drives on through the night, without sleep, coming down off the pain pills Sam gave him, head throbbing from when it connected with the roof of the car, and then he sees it.
On the side of the highway, the same dirt road Sam took, the same road that leads to the river, to the bridge, where Sam fucked him—raped him—
It's impossible. Dean drove in the opposite direction, he made sure he was headed as far away from that place as he could possibly get.
He never wants to go back there, and he never wants to see that town again, the town where he was cursed, where they killed the monster who did this to him.
Sam did this to him.
The witch, the witch he killed, all they did was sentence Dean to death, a death that was coming anyway.
Sam's the real monster.
Dean shut off the engine when he first spotted the road and coasted to a stop. Through the darkness, he takes a closer look. Past the brush on the side of the road, he can see the contours of the land in the moonlight. There's no river. There's no bridge.
It's not the same place. He is heading in the right direction.
Away.
He starts the engine again. And he drives. He drives until he can't keep his eyes open any longer, until he damn near drives off the road.
He pulls over, and he falls asleep, stretched out on the front seat with his arm for a pillow.
Dean wakes to the car shaking around him and the roar of an 18-wheeler thundering past on the highway.
Dawn lightens the sky. A kind of reflex has him pulling himself up to glance into the back, but all that's there is his bag and the cooler. He left Sam behind him in the motel.
Dean drives. He keeps going, away from Sam, away from what happened to him—but he can't get away. He can feel it, still, the ache inside him, and it's not pain, not really—Sam made sure of that, with the pills, by knocking him unconscious—but it's there, like Dean can still feel his brother inside him.
No amount of distance will make it go away, will wipe his body's own betrayal from Dean's mind, or his brother's betrayal away.
Dean drives, stopping only for gas and food and sleep, and when his phone starts to ring he ignores it, and when it keeps ringing he turns the damn thing off and throws it into the back seat.
The days and nights blend into each other, until Dean has no idea how long he's been running, until the physical ache inside him has faded.
The ache in his heart, however. That won't go away.
Dean does the only thing he knows how to do to ease that kind of pain, and he stops at the first bar he sees.
It's just the right kind of dive. Indeterminate rock music filters out into the night. Motorcycles are lined up outside.
Dean has no idea where he is, but it doesn't matter. "Whiskey," he says to the bartender when he slides onto a stool. "Keep 'em coming."
Dean ignores the sounds around him. All he hears is the music, all he sees is the level of whiskey in the bottle slowly inching downward.
"Hey."
Dean starts, and looks up at the girl who spoke. She's pretty. Blonde. Wearing a top that's too tight and a skirt that's too short and a smile that invites him to take her back to his motel room and lose himself in an entirely different way.
"Hey," he replies.
"You were looking kinda lonely over here," she says.
"I'm not," Dean lies. He grabs the bottle he paid for with his scammed credit card and had the bartender leave. "I got my best buddy right here."
The girl smirks. "There's gotta be something Jack can't do for you?"
She's forward. Fast. Dean usually likes that, but right now it scares him. "Too soon," he mutters and he slips off the stool and grabs the bottle by the neck and he heads for the door, leaving the girl pouting at the bar.
Dean drives.
He drives all the way to the ocean.
He follows the coast until he can barely keep his eyes open, then stops in a small beach side village and checks into a motel.
As the manager reaches for a key, Dean's eyes stray to a newspaper on the counter.
SHARK ATTACK
"It wasn't a shark," the manager says as he slides the key across the counter. "It was weird."
"Weird is our—my—thing," Dean says, taking up the key and the newspaper. "Can I take this?"
"Knock yourself out," the manager says. "Check out is at ten."
Dean could do with a hunt. A distraction. He needs something to hit, something to kill.
He needs something that could kill him.
Dean heads down to the beach early the next morning. There's a man standing at the water's edge where the waves rush up to engulf his ankles and then flow back out again. He's tall, broad-shouldered, with masses of sun-bleached hair falling in untidy waves onto his shoulders. He's looking out past the breakers.
Dean comes up behind him, stopping short of the high water line. "You know the guy?" he asks.
The guy turns. He's young, pretty, but with skin tanned and weathered from the sun. Freckles spread over the bridge of his nose and his full lips are chapped. "He was my buddy," he says. "And it wasn't a fucking shark, so if you're a reporter—"
"I'm not a reporter," Dean says. "And I believe you. Why don't you tell me what you know."
The guy jerks his chin in the direction of the dunes behind them, and starts walking away. Dean follows.
"We were out there, you know?" the guy says, once they're seated in the dunes. "Chilling. The wind wasn't great, but we were just hanging out, shooting the shit. If we got a wave we got a wave, if we didn't..." He shrugs. "Jerry was my best mate." His voice cracks. "We've been surfing together since we were kids."
Dean's pockets are going to be full of sand. His boots are going to be full of sand. He's going to come out of this with sand everywhere. "What happened?"
"The wind started to get up. We were like, awesome, we might actually get a wave today, but then it got real bad, like in two minutes it went from calm as fuck to like six foot crossing swells and we both got dumped off our boards. And I saw this thing come out of the water behind Jerry." The guy puts his fingers in his mouth, chews at fingernails already bitten down to the quick. "It wasn't a fucking shark."
"What was it?"
The surfer shakes his head. "I've been in the ocean around here my whole fucking life. I've heard some weird shit. Seen some weird shit, but I've never seen anything like this. It was like, shaped like a dude, right? But skin like a shark. Big fucking eyes, huge. Black. And a weird nose, like, I dunno, a fucking snout thing. At first I thought it was an elephant seal, you know? I climbed back on my board and shouted to Jerry because we don't fuck with those things, they can be dangerous, but then it grabbed him. With arms. And then he was just gone. It pulled him down, took his board, too. A few seconds later the board popped back up again. Without him. The leash was cut through."
He chokes, sobs. "Jerry was just gone. He never came back up again."
"Okay," Dean says. He can already feel his skin burning under the California sun. "You got a computer?"
"Yeah." The surfer stands up, brushes the sand off his board shorts, and then sticks out his hand to pull Dean up. "I'm Bodhi," he says, because of course that's his name. "Come up to the house."
Probably had hippie surfer parents intent on raising hippie surfer kids. He's probably got a sister called Nirvana or Karma or something.
"Dean," Dean says, and rubs the sand off his jeans. Yep. Pockets full of sand.
Bodhi's house sits just above the sand dunes. It's small, but tidy, if you ignore the sand sprinkled over the hardwood floors. There's an ancient surfboard hanging on one wall, and the place is decorated with bits of driftwood and seashells and hibiscus illustrations.
He slides a laptop out from beneath a couch and opens it up, sets it on the coffee table. "Knock yourself out," he says, and then heads for the kitchen. "Coffee?"
"Thanks," Dean says. "Make a lot. This might take a while."
"It's called a 'Kabagon'," Dean says, as he closes the laptop. He's got about a liter of strong coffee flowing through his veins, and his brain is mush. Sam's better at this research shit. "Sea monster that hangs out in the Pacific. Fucks with the weather, capsizes boats, takes sailors. Pretty rare. I've never come across one before."
Bodhi's eyes go wide. "There are other sea monsters? Like, real life sea monsters? Krakens and shit?"
Dean shrugs. "This is my first sea monster. I usually deal with the land-based variety. I'll admit, I wasn't looking forward to figuring out how to kill this Kabagon thing out in the water, but apparently they come into land for a few nights after they feed. I'll go out tonight. With any luck—"
"You kill monsters," Bodhi says, shock in his voice. "You're a monster killer."
"Hunter," Dean says. "What, are you vegan or something? This thing ate your friend. Should I just leave it to get someone else?"
Bodhi shakes his head. "No, it's— It's good. I want to help."
Dean bites back a retort about amateurs getting themselves killed. "I can handle it," he says. "You've been surfing since you were a kid? I've been hunting monsters since I was a kid. I know what I'm doing."