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It was the summer after Sam ran away, and Deanna was still trying to stifle the feeling that she'd failed her brother, that she'd failed John, by not stopping him. She was always working. She took jobs whenever she could find them, often with less than two hours' rest between them, until John began to worry about her.
"You need to give it some time," he told her over the phone at midnight on the Fourth of July, after Deanna had taken a job that was supposed to be one werewolf but turned out to be two, and killed them both. "You need to take a break. You'll run yourself into the ground."
Deanna, sitting in the driver's seat of the parked Impala with her heavy boots up on the dash, shrugged. "Nah," she replied. "I live on this stuff. More monsters, happy Deanna."
It was a hot night, and she had rolled the windows down all the way; even so, a thin sheen of sweat covered her skin as she lounged in the car, one arm thrown over the back of the seat as she held the phone to her ear and tried to avoid looking at the empty passenger seat beside her.
Her father grunted on the other end of the line. "Well. Don't let it get to you, Deanna. He chose this."
"What, Sam running away?" Deanna asked. "Yeah, I know. He went off to do his thing and I'm doing my thing and we're both happy. There's nothing to 'get to' me."
"Good. I'm in Wisconsin now; we can meet up in Illinois."
Deanna sat up. "Well, I'm investigating a job in Ohio, so I don't think we can do that."
She could hear John's disapproval, even though he kept silent for a couple of heartbeats. She hadn't worked a job with him in months. "Look, De, you have to take a day off sometime. Do you even sleep?"
"Like a baby." Deanna turned the key in the ignition and put the car into gear. "I'm fine. Look, I'll call you when I've figured this new thing out, okay?"
John was certainly not okay with his daughter's decision, but he knew there was nothing he could say to make her change her mind. She had always been a headstrong kid, and Sam's disappearing had changed her, even if she wouldn't admit it.
Sometimes Deanna did jobs with other hunters, people that John or Bobby hooked her up with who happened to be in the area. She killed a wendigo in Nebraska with a hunter named Cruise Anton, an easy, chatty man in his mid-thirties who liked to smile often. They went out for beers after the job was finished and talked about comic books (Cruise was a collector, and had a pile of them in his apartment in Iowa).
The two of them did plenty more jobs together after that. Deanna learned that Cruise was a good backup in a fight, reliable when it came to research, and always easy to relax with when the hunt was over.
They hunted a family of ghouls in Colorado, in an ancient mausoleum where high school students had been disappearing for weeks. The two of them crept in late one night armed with hatchets and shotguns, ready for the ambush that hit them almost as soon as the set foot in the doorway – but not ready for the five ghouls that sprang from the shadows, when they had only been expecting two or three.
Deanna took the head off of one with a single swing of her hatchet. A second later the next one slammed into her like a brick wall, sending her hatchet skittering across the floor and out of her reach. She struggled to bring her shotgun up to its face.
Deanna felt the air rush out of her when her back made sudden contact with the stone floor. Too close range – now her shotgun was useless. She let go of it and jabbed her elbow into the ghoul's throat. Its weight was crushing her. It snarled, its jaws snapping at her face like a dog's.
"No...you...don't...ugly!" she grunted. She grabbed its shoulders with both hands and heaved, forcing it to roll over with her. "Sam! Hatchet!"
The next instant a hatchet came sliding over the floor to her. She snatched it up. The ghoul was underneath her, struggling against the weight of her knees pinning it to the floor. Its nails scratched at her legs, trying to break free. Deanna swung the hatchet down.
The ghoul's head rolled away, trailing bright red blood. Deanna stood up, breathing heavy, and kicked away its corpse.
"Not bad, eh?" she heard Cruise say from behind her. She turned around. The tall blonde hunter was spattered in blood, holding only a shotgun since he had thrown his hatchet to Deanna.
She nodded, feeling a grin break across her face. There were five bodies on the ground, some of them with heads chopped off and some of them with heads obliterated by a shotgun shell. "Yeah. Not bad."
At a tiny room in a seedy motel two hours later, Deanna and Cruise stitched up each other's wounds. Deanna's weren't that bad, though her face and her legs needed some attention, but Cruise had suffered a dislocated shoulder and a gash in his left arm from where one of the ghouls had bitten him. They disinfected the wound and Deanna sewed it up with an expertness born of frequent experience, while Cruise grunted in pain and took gulps from a bottle of unidentified amber-colored alcohol.
"Finished." Deanna cut the thread and leaned back to survey her handiwork. "There. Stop moaning."
"Thanks." Cruise set down the bottle and lifted his arm for an inspection. "Hey, at the mausoleum, did I hear you call me 'Sam'? Who's that? Your boyfriend?"
Deanna blinked. Fuck. She was sure it was likely, in the heat of the battle, forgetting that it was this man and not her little brother backing her up in the fight.... She shrugged. "I don't have a boyfriend," she said with deliberate casualness as she stood up and walked to the sink. The water came out cold when she switched on the faucet. Don't ask any more questions, Anton.
Behind her, Cruise grunted. "Then who's Sam?"
"My brother," Deanna replied. The dried blood was stubborn coming out of her fingernails under the blast of icy water.
"You hunt with him?" Cruise asked.
"Sometimes." Stop asking questions.
"'Sometimes'?"
Deanna turned off the water and scrounged around for a towel to dry her hands on. "Damn, I could go for some pizza. I wonder if any pizza places are willing to deliver at four in the morning?"
Cruise laughed. "Maybe. I need to wash up first; I smell like a ghoul."
They parted ways the next morning. Deanna told him she was going to meet up with her dad and work some more jobs on the East Coast, when the truth was she couldn't bear to be around him anymore. She was getting too close.
"Are you sure?" Cruise had asked her outside of the motel, with Deanna leaning against the side of the Impala, legs crossed, thumbs hooked in the pockets of her well-worn jeans.
She'd nodded. "Yeah. See you around, Cruise."
He would have been happy to keep going with her, keep seeking out jobs together, posing as US Marshals or pest control or a fire inspection team. He liked working with her, and she liked working with him. That was why their partnership had run its course. The minute she started getting that comfortable with someone, she remembered Sam. She remembered her little brother, whose backup in a hunt was like fighting with her other half, whose stupid jokes and wicked pranks reminded her that even though she didn't have a home, she still had a family. Cruise, for all his reliability and easygoing manner, wasn't Sam. But he reminded her too much of what it was like to hunt with Sam that she couldn't hunt with him anymore -- because the hunting ceased to be joy in itself and instead turned into a too-sharp memory of her brother.
"Dad," she said to John's voicemail as she flew down the Colorado highway early that afternoon, fifteen miles over the speed limit. "Where are you? I just took care of some ghouls in Colorado, me and another hunter." She paused. "How about we meet up and work a job together?"
It was the middle of the day near the end of August. The sun was shining high and the windows were rolled down, blasting highway air onto Deanna's face as she blared Lynyrd Skynyrd from the cassette player, singing along at the top of her lungs. It was too late to be thinking of Sam, so she wouldn't let herself do it. She doubted he ever though about his family as he studied whatever it was he was studying at Stanford. He was the one who'd run away and left them.
He probably didn't even miss her.
___
Every night Sam woke up in the middle of the night for no reason at all. He would always sit in bed, bewildered, until he either got up to get some water or fell back asleep. At first he was confused, wondering what – short of a haunting or a medical disorder – was causing it. But after a few months he figured it out. It wasn't medical; it wasn't even supernatural. The reason, he realized, was surprisingly simple. Every night he heard a sound in his dreams that made him sit bolt upright, both excited and anxious, until the dream faded to nothing and left him feeling lost. It was familiar, the sound in his dreams that woke him every night.
It was the sound of the Impala's engine as it pulled up outside his window, Deanna's face grinning above the wheel.