The bear had loped around the house, headed for the forest behind it. Sam and Dean made a breakneck tour of the house to verify that there were no other victims, then dashed outside. Tracks in the snow confirmed the animal’s direction, and that it hadn’t changed course. Beyond the backyard, as far as they could see, were trees. Nothing but trees.
And somewhere among them, a killer bear.
Sam flung his left arm out, blocking Dean before he could tear off into the woods after it. “What?” Dean said.
“That thing was huge,” Sam said. “We’re going to need some firepower.”
“Right.” They both reversed course, headed for the Impala. Or as Sam sometimes thought of it, the mobile armory. He’d have been happiest with a bazooka, but he settled for a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun with a pistol grip. He cracked it open, fed in two shells of buckshot, and pocketed a dozen more. Dean chose a .45 automatic handgun, a Smith & Wesson that was just like—possibly even the same one, given its scarred grip—the one Dad had trained them with. Sam noted that he put a couple of extra magazines in his pockets.
“Loaded for bear,” Dean said.
The silence in the forest was almost eerie. The snow on the ground muffled their footfalls. The stuff coming down seemed to Sam like it should have made some kind of sound—rain did, after all, and so did falling leaves. Shouldn’t there be little puffing sounds or something? But no, not a peep. If there were birds around, they were still and quiet, no doubt trying to stay out of the weather.
Fortunately, the snow wasn’t falling fast enough to fill in the bear’s tracks. They were deep, five-toed, with the rear feet showing more pad than the front. Sam was surprised they couldn’t hear it crashing through trees and brush up ahead, but apparently the bear knew its way around the forest.
“How long are we going to track this thing?” he asked after about twenty minutes. The sun was invisible behind pewter clouds, but it would be setting before too much longer.
“Till we find it. You want to quit, you know where the car is.”
“I’m not saying I want to quit, Dean. I’m only saying we didn’t really come prepared for a long hunt. If that thing’s moving fast, it could take us all night to catch up to it. We’re not equipped for spending the night out here. Won’t do anyone any good if we freeze to death.”
“Then I guess we should go faster.” Dean picked up the pace even as he spoke, stepping over a low shrub and around another.
Sam knew his brother well enough to recognize what was going on. Nothing pissed Dean off like failure. They had been taught from childhood that when they failed, people could die. Dean took it a step further, believing that if he was even a little slow in succeeding, people would definitely die.
Dad had wanted to make soldiers of his boys. In Dean’s case, he had clearly succeeded. Almost everything about Dean said soldier, from the short hair to the solid build, the straight shoulders, the easy familiarity with weapons and combat of all kinds.
It was internal, too, even more than external. Dean had no sense of romance, of wonder. They dealt on a daily basis with things most people only imagined in nightmares, they saw things that would qualify as miraculous. But the creatures they battled weren’t mysteries or marvels to Dean, they were simply enemies. To him, everything was the mission, the hunt.
Here in Cedar Wells, Sam had to admit, Dean’s concern had definitely materialized. Which meant that he didn’t blame Dean for taking this personally. He did, too. He just kept enough emotional separation so he could tell when they were in danger of making things worse by killing themselves. Sometimes he thought Dean wouldn’t mind dying if he could go out in a blaze of glory, as the saying went. In moments of fairness, Sam knew that wasn’t true. Dean didn’t care about the glory; he cared about making a difference.
Sam had to step lively to keep up.
“When we catch up to it,” he said a few minutes later, slightly out of breath from the pace, “what are we going to do? Interrogate it?”
“We’re gonna kill it, Sammy.”
“But…”
“But what? You want to make friends with it? That’s not Gentle Ben. Or…or Yogi.”
“I know that. It’s just that, well, this changes things.”
“Changes them how?”
“We’re not looking for the spirit of some old soldier anymore. Not if this bear is involved, too. We’re back to square one.”
Dean paused, mid-stride, and caught his eye. “Good point,” he said, and continued after the bear.
“I mean it, Dean,” Sam continued. “We thought we were dealing with one dead guy. But now we’ve got, what, animal spirits?” In his haste he had only brought buckshot shells, not rock salt ones. If it was a spirit bear, he’d be sorry for that oversight.
“Animal spirits working in collusion with human ones,” Dean muttered. “That could happen. Or maybe it’s a werebear.”
“In broad daylight?”
“Yeah, another good point.”
“I’m full of ’em.”
“Full of something, anyway.”
“Dean, I’m all for killing as many unnatural creatures as we can. But right now we have to decide what’s a higher priority, finding this bear or figuring out what’s behind the murder cycle here. I vote for the murder cycle.”
“I’ve always been bad at prioritizing,” Dean said. “I’m better at the whole killing thing.” He came to a sudden halt. Sam could tell by his body language that something was wrong. Dean stood awkwardly at the edge of a small clearing in the trees, his hands splayed out, staring at the ground.
“What is it?” Sam asked, fearing the worst.
“You tell me.”
Sam shouldered in beside Dean, his right arm brushing snow from low-hanging pine branches. The bear tracks led into the clearing, plain in the fresh snow.
But then they stopped, halfway across it.
From the last tracks, it would have taken an Olympic long jumper to reach any spot outside the clearing. There were no trees close enough for the bear to have climbed up. The tracks just ended, and the bear was gone.
“Where’d he—”
“I wish I knew.”
From a branch about twenty feet up one of the nearest trees, a raven cawed. It sounded disturbingly like it was laughing at them.
“That thing must have weighed five hundred pounds,” Sam said. “It can’t just up and vanish.”
“Don’t tell me,” Dean said. “Tell it.”
The raven gave another double caw. Sam could have sworn it was looking right at them, its head cocked, a sinister grin on its bill. Then it spread its wings, pure black, like midnight shadows stretching out, and took flight. Voicing its amusement, it circled over them twice, inscribing the perimeter of the clearing. Dean raised his .45 like he might shoot it down on the wing. “Thing bothers me,” he said.
“Me, too.” The raven swept its wings against the air and flew out of sight.
“You don’t think…” Sam began.
“What? That raven was the bear? Some kind of animal shapeshifter?”
“That’s what I was thinking. The bear transformed into a bird, and that’s why the footprints stopped.”
Dean shot him a frustrated glance. “Why didn’t you say something? Maybe I should have shot it.”
“Maybe so,” Sam agreed. “I didn’t think of it until it was too late.”
“Next time, think faster.”
“I’ll try, Dean.”
“Good.”
“And Dean?”
“What?”
“What the hell are we dealing with here?”
Dean considered this for a moment. “You figure that out, college boy, you let me know.”