Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I think I found something.” Sam didn’t look up from his laptop at he spoke.

Dean, who had just returned to their motel room after a food run, tossed the paper bag of takeout burgers on the table. “What have you got?”

 “A seventeen-year-old girl was found murdered this morning in a small town in Washington State.”

“So?” Dean unwrapped his burger, took a bite, and rolled his eyes at the “really?” look Sam gave him. “I mean,” Dean said through a mouthful of burger, “what makes it our kind of thing?”

“Well, for starters, it’s twenty-five years to the day after another seventeen-year-girl was murdered in the same town.” Sam was scrolling through local news websites. “Both girls’ bodies were found in a local lake, naked, wrapped in plastic.”

“I repeat, so? Sounds like a serial killer with a weirdly specific fetish and a really long fuse. Still not seeing how it’s our kind of thing.”

“It can’t be a serial killer, because the original killer was caught in 1989, a few weeks after the murder. Turns out the girl’s father had killed her, and shortly afterwards also murdered his niece, who looked just like her cousin. The guy confessed to the crimes, and to sexually abusing his daughter for years. Then he died while in custody at the sheriff’s station, in what seem to be really sketchy circumstances.”

“Huh. You thinking ghost? Sounds like maybe the sick bastard gets his jollies from reliving what he did to his daughter.”

“Could be.” Sam’s brow was furrowed, a clear indication that he was puzzling over something.

“What, is there something else?”

“I’m not sure. After the original murder in 1989, a bunch of crazy stuff happened in the town. The sawmill burned down, there was an explosion at a bank, and there were several other murders or unexplained deaths. All that in a town of 50,000 people, and a lot of it was after the arrest and death of the murderer. Things seem to have quieted down since then, but I get the feeling from the local newspaper that it’s just, well, a really weird town.”

“Sounds like our kind of place.” Dean popped a French fry into his mouth. “Where is this town, anyway?”

“It’s called Twin Peaks. It’s in the far northeastern corner of Washington, about a ten-hour drive from here.” They were in Billings, Montana, where they had spent the previous night busting a nest of vamps outside town and then spent the day sleeping it off and looking for another case. “I know it’s not a lot to go on, but until Castiel gets a lead on Metatron …" Sam trailed off. Since everything that had happened with Gadreel, both of them had avoided bringing up the larger situation or talking about anything beyond the bare essentials. Dean was just glad Sam was hunting with him again, even if he wasn’t acting like his normal nerdy self. Even the just-the-facts-ma’am way Sam had pitched this case was a sign that he still had his panties in a twist over how Dean had lied to him to save his life. Well, tough shit, Sammy, Dean would do it again.

“Keeping busy, right. We’ll hit the road in the morning.” If Sam and his Google Maps said it was a ten-hour drive, Dean and his Baby would get them there in eight. Maybe it was a real case and maybe it wasn’t, but they had gone a lot further on a lot less before.

I-90 through northern Idaho was one of the most scenic stretches of interstate highway in the entire country. Sam knew this because he had traveled every mile of the Interstate Highway System, all 48,191 of them. He knew that because he had started keeping track with Sharpie lines on a Rand McNally atlas when he was a kid, probably seven or eight years old. When he was thirteen, he had triumphantly inked in the final stretch (I-59 between Birmingham, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee), while Dean had teased him for being a nerd for keeping track. Dean had also pointed out that they hadn’t really been on every mile, because there were interstates in Hawaii, ridiculous though that was, and they hadn’t been there. (Missing those fifty miles on the island of Oahu actually did bug Sam, but he would never admit it to Dean.)

As far as the interstate highways in the contiguous US went (the only ones that really counted, Sam stubbornly insisted to himself), most of them looked exactly the same. They were “inter” not only in the sense that they went from one state to another, but in the sense that they weren’t really in any state at all. That was the point, of course, to maximize the efficiency of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible and also to make sure that all the travelers streaming along the identical interstates in their identical cars have access to identical fast food and motels and gas stations regardless of whether they’re in Portland or Pittsburgh. When they had the time, Sam and Dean preferred to take the blue highways, for the same reason they stayed in quirky independent hotels instead of chains and ate at the local diners and drank at the seediest dive bars they could find. Given how rootless their lives were, it was strangely reassuring to be somewhere instead of always in the great moving nowhere that was the interstate.

But there were times when they did just need to get from point A to point B, and for those times they had the Interstate Highway System. Even on the featureless thousands of miles that made their determined way across the great empty heart of America, Sam still occasionally got flashes of memory from the last time he and Dean had driven that particular stretch of road, two years ago or five or twenty. The sight of a billboard for some tourist trap would remind him of the song Dean was singing along to on the radio the last time they were there, or a sign for a town with a funny name would trigger a memory of him and Dean laughing at it when they were kids, and they would laugh at it again every time they saw it, because some jokes never get old. (Booger Hole, West Virginia? Ding Dong, Texas? Pee Pee, Ohio?) Sam wondered if that was how normal people felt driving around the towns where they’ve spent their lives, like maybe seeing their high school would remind them of their old crush or seeing the park where they used to play as kids would remind them of a childhood friend. Sam couldn’t imagine having your whole life confined such a small area, not when his and Dean’s lives had been spread out from sea to shining sea.

But this stretch of I-90 was one of the rare stretches of interstate that was memorable on its own merits. Despite the best efforts of the US Department of Transportation engineers to transcend geography, the Rocky Mountains stood resolutely in their path. The interstate here had had to concede to topographic realities and meander up and down the passes through a set of curves through the mountains, now covered in late-winter snow. It also traveled on an elevated viaduct above the historic silver-mining town of Wallace. Sam and Dean had had a memorable hunt there a few years ago, taking out the ghost of the town brothel’s madam. She had been murdered in the 1880s and had lately been luring attractive men to their death after the brothel building had been converted into a brewpub, in revenge against the charming outlaw who killed her. They had eventually found the object that was anchoring her spirit, a corset they had to steal from the local history museum. While they were in the process of burning the thing, the ghost had shown up and begun propositioning Dean in the most filthy, colorful language Sam had ever heard. Apparently, Wild West whores were a lot more eloquent and creative in their use of metaphor than you would think. He still remembered the look on Dean’s face, half-disgusted, half-intrigued, while Sam had frantically gotten the corset to ignite and take out the ghost. Man, he had given Dean shit about that for months afterward. Now, as they passed the exit to Wallace, Sam glanced over at the driver’s seat to see if Dean was also reminiscing. But Dean didn’t glance back, just kept his eyes on the road ahead and cranked the volume up higher on “Enter Sandman.”

Sam sighed. He hated it when things were tense between them, and he realized that this time it was mostly his fault for being pissed that Dean had lied to protect him. He could still hear Dean’s voice in his head, saying that Sam would have done the same thing for him, and then his own voice saying he wouldn’t. The thing was, he knew that he would have done the same thing for Dean, and that was the problem. That’s what he was angry about, not so much because Dean had lied, but because they both kept walking, eyes wide open, into every single trap that all these monsters and angels and demons kept setting for them. And they would both keep doing it, because they didn’t know how to do anything else.

Well, that’s why Sam had been glad to find this case. He couldn’t face going back to the bunker now, where he would be forced to either shut himself away from Dean or actually talk to him. As long as they stayed on the road, kept hunting, they had enough things to do and enough case-related stuff to talk about to maintain some normalcy. So they would go to Twin Peaks, bust the sicko ghost or whatever it was, and then Sam would find another yet easy case for them to work after that.

Shortly after crossing the Washington state line, they exited good old I-90 in Spokane and headed north on a US highway. Sam couldn’t recall ever being in this particular corner of Washington before. After leaving Spokane’s modest urban sprawl, tall evergreen trees began lining the highway, so densely that it was like driving through a green canyon. A rapid-filled river paralleled the highway, and the infrequent openings in the trees revealed sculpted snowy mountains towering overhead. They stopped at a highway rest stop, where a massive bull elk was licking deicing salt off the pavement on the other side of the road, to change into their FBI suits. There were now about as many British Columbia license plates as Washington and Idaho ones on the vehicles they passed. Just a few miles shy of the Canadian border, a sign appeared at the side of the road welcoming them to Twin Peaks. The sign had a picture of the namesake peaks, which they could also see directly ahead of them on the highway as they entered the town itself. Below the sign, a coyote stood, chewing on a bone. It gave them stink-eye and then slinked off into the woods as Dean slowed the Impala to the posted speed limit.

There wasn’t a whole lot to the town. A short commercial strip with the requisite big-box stores and fast-food places. A high school (“Home of the Steeplejacks!”) a gas station, a diner. A few McMansions that looked like recent construction. Sam had been to a thousand towns like this, although with the numerous trees and mountains, this one was prettier than most. It didn’t look there was evil lurking beneath the surface, but then, it never did.

They headed to the hospital first, to see the girl’s body in the morgue. That was always a good place to start, before the funeral home took it away and they would have a harder time seeing if there was any sign on the body of what kind of monster, if any, had done the deed. The hospital was small and looked as though everything in it dated back to the 70s.

They went up to the reception desk and pulled out their FBI IDs with practiced ease. “Special Agents Page and Plant, FBI,” Dean said to the young woman at the desk. “We’re here about the Helen Briggs case. Can you direct us to the morgue, please?”

The receptionist looked at them, eyes wide. “I can call Dr. Hayward for you.”

Dr. Hayward turned out to be a brunette woman in her early 40s. Pretty hot, too. Good, Dean thought, that usually made things easier. They flashed their FBI badges again, which she carefully examined, then Dean flashed his most charming smile at her as he explained again that they were here on the Helen Briggs case and needed to see the body.

Annoyingly, the doctor didn’t seem that charmed by him. “The sheriff was here this morning,” she said, puzzled. “He didn’t say that the FBI was coming.”

“Well, he probably didn’t know yet,” Dean said smoothly. “Our office was supposed to call earlier, but we just got a new secretary, she’s still learning the ropes. Now, which way to the morgue?”

Frowning, Dr. Hayward led them down to the basement. Inside the morgue, one lightbulb kept flickering. The doctor pulled out one of the drawers that lined the walls of the room. Lying on the metal slab was a body. Dr. Hayward pulled back the sheet covering it, and the light flickered on the dead girl’s face.

“I’m a physician in the hospital, but I double as the county medical examiner,” Dr. Hayward said, standing back. “I did the autopsy myself this morning.”

“What did you find?” Sam asked. He was peering at the girl’s face. She was pretty, blond, with cuts lining her face, neck, and shoulders.

“Time of death was yesterday morning between midnight and 4 am, shortly before her body was discovered. Cause of death was blood loss. As you can see, there was no single major wound, just lots of small lacerations, done with a thin blade like a razor. But cumulatively the blood loss was massive.”

“Someone took their time with her,” Dean mused. Clearly whoever did this to this girl was a monster, but it was still an open question whether it was the human kind or the kind he and Sam could take out. He hated ambiguous cases like this. Much better when they could take one look at the body and figure out what kind of monster they were dealing with. “Did you find anything else? Like, anything out of the ordinary?”

“Underneath the fingernail of the left ring finger, there was a small square of paper with the letter B printed on it. The sheriff took it as evidence.”

Well, that was weird. Dean tried to think of monsters that left cryptic messages under their victim’s fingernails, but he was drawing a blank on that one. He raised his eyebrows at Sam, who shrugged.

“Doctor,” Sam spoke up. “One angle we’re investigating is a possible connection to the Laura Palmer murder in 1989. Do you happen to have a copy of that autopsy report as well?”

“Um, yeah.” Dr. Hayward had seemed to flinch at the mention of Laura Palmer’s name, but she walked over a side room that held a bunch of filing cabinets. “Of course, that was before electronic records. We keep all the old paper files in here. Just give me a minute, I should be able to find it.”

While she rummaged around, Dean leaned across the body to speak to Sam in a low voice. “What do you think?”

“Maybe you were right.” Sam’s brow was furrowed again. “This case might be a bust. Maybe it’s a copycat of the original murder, or maybe they got the wrong guy back then, or maybe the original killer had an accomplice who just started killing again. It sure doesn’t seem like the work of a ghost, or any other monster I can think of.”

Dr. Hayward walked back into the morgue holding a manila folder. “I found it,” she said, extending it to Dean. Her hand was shaking, and as Dean reached out for the folder, she dropped it on the floor. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she exclaimed. Her eyes were filling with tears.

Dean knelt down to pick up the scattered papers and put them back in the folder. He jerked his head at the doctor. Dealing with crying people was much more in Sam’s wheelhouse.

“Are you okay, Dr. Hayward?” Sam asked solicitously.

“Yes, I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’m being so unprofessional. It’s just, I grew up in this town. Laura Palmer was my best friend in high school.” Her voice caught, and she visibly took a deep breath to try to get her emotions under control. “I thought I had finally put that time behind me, but this is bringing it all back. And Helen,” her eyes went back to the body on the table. “Her parents are the same age as me, we all grew up together. And I did their daughter’s autopsy this morning.” Resolutely, she wiped the tears from her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Sam murmured. “That’s a lot of tragedy for a small town like this.”

“What can you tell us about Helen?” Dean broke in.

“Not much. Everyone knows everyone in this town, but I didn’t know Helen well. I haven’t been close with Bobby and Shelly – Helen’s parents – for years. But I know Helen was popular, everyone liked her. She was a good student, volunteered for lots of community groups. She was prom queen. Just like –” She stopped and shook her head. “I don’t understand why this would happen to her.”

“And what about Laura Palmer? What can you tell us about her?”

Dr. Hayward’s mouth compressed into a thin line. She shook her head again. “I can’t talk about Laura. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

Dean wanted to push her more, but Sam cut him off. “We understand. We really appreciate your help.”

The doctor nodded. “That folder has a copy of Laura’s autopsy report. You can take it, we have the original. I also put a printout of my report of Helen’s autopsy in there for you.”

They thanked her again, handed her their FBI business cards that listed their cell numbers, and headed back upstairs. As they crossed the hospital lobby, Dean said, “She knew more about Laura Palmer’s murder than she was saying.”

“Yeah.” Sam sighed. “But if they were best friends in high school, I can’t really blame her for not wanting to talk about it, especially the same day as she did an autopsy on the daughter of her other friends. We can follow up with her later if we need to. For now, we just need to figure out if this is a job for us or not. I think we need to see the police reports for both murders.”

“So time to go make nice with the sheriff, I guess.”

It turned out that the sheriff had beat them to it. As they were walking through the hospital parking lot toward the Impala, Dean suddenly hit Sam in the arm. “Speak of the devil. Here comes the fuzz now.”

Sam looked across the parking lot. Strolling toward them through the parking lot were two men in tan sheriff’s department uniforms. One was an old guy, probably late sixties, but he looked pretty spry, with a full head of grey curly hair. The other guy looked at least fifteen years younger. He was handsome, wearing an amount of hair product that even Sam thought was a bit excessive, with just a streak of gray around his temples. He could have been the star of a Just-for-Men commercial.

“Good afternoon, boys,” Curly called. He and Just-for-Men stopped just in front of Sam and Dean. “Welcome to Twin Peaks. I’m Sheriff Harry Truman.”

“Seriously?” Sam couldn’t help saying under his breath. That sounded like a faker fake name than all the fake names he and Dean used. Dean made a “what?” gesture at him, and Sam rolled his eyes. Of course, Dean probably couldn’t name a single president before Reagan, other than the ones printed on currency.

Probably used to incredulous reactions to his name, Sheriff Truman ignored them and continued. “And this is Deputy Dale Cooper,” indicating Just-for-Men. “We heard the FBI was at the morgue looking into the Helen Briggs murder.”

How the hell had they heard that already? Sam and Dean had barely been in town for half an hour. That was the problem working jobs in small towns, people were just so nosy and had nothing better to do than gossip. They both pulled out their FBI IDs again, and Dean’s voice took on his assured federal-agent tone. “That’s right. Special Agents Page and Plant.”

“There was a time when the FBI came to town,” Sheriff Truman said, “first thing they’d do is go check in with the local sheriff.” He and Deputy Cooper grinned at each other, as if sharing some fond memory.

“Actually, we were just on our way to see you now.” Dean was doing his best to smooth things over. “Our supervisor wanted us to get the autopsy report to send over to our office right away. Let me assure you the FBI is taking this case seriously and will provide all needed assistance –”

“Relax.” Sheriff Truman sounded amused. “We know you’re not really FBI agents.”

Uh-oh. They didn’t often encounter pushback on their FBI covers, especially not from small-town sheriffs. Usually, the suits and the swagger were enough. Dean recovered quickly, saying in an affronted tone, “I assure you, Sheriff, we are. You’re welcome to contact our supervisor for verification.”

Sam tried to remember which hunter they currently had manning the burner phone they used for the infrequent occasions when someone asked to confirm their FBI IDs. It had been challenging finding someone responsible to do it since Bobby’s death. Last year, the hunter who was in charge of the phone had answered it drunk and thought it had been his ex-girlfriend calling rather than the Sacramento PD. They had had a hell of a hard time explaining their way out of that one.

“Gentlemen,” Deputy Cooper spoke up. “Please allow me to enumerate the reasons for our skepticism about your identities. First, the FBI has no jurisdiction in this case. Second, even if it did, standard protocol would be to contact our office by phone prior to sending any field agents. Third, your agency credentials are fraudulent. I don’t mean to be discouraging, because they’re very good fakes, but those badge numbers do not conform to the convention used by the FBI. And fourth, and again this is intended to be constructive criticism, you seem to be basing your mannerisms on stereotypes of federal agents as portrayed on television.”

“And fifth,” Sheriff Truman chimed in, “the names you gave us are the names of two of the members of Led Zeppelin.”

“Good catch, Harry.” They grinned at each other again.

Dean sputtered a bit, giving Sam an oh-shit look. Sam rolled his eyes. Years and years ago, he had told Dean that using Led Zeppelin names was a bad idea. It was kind of obvious, it wasn’t like they were some obscure band. Dean tried again, a bit weakly, “Well, if you just call our office –”

Sam, resigned, cut Dean off. “I don’t think they’re falling for it.” Sam’s mind raced as he tried to think of a backup cover story. They could say they were journalists trying to get a scoop on a story or something. No, journalists wouldn’t impersonate FBI agents. Maybe they could claim to be bloggers –

“We sure aren’t,” Sheriff Truman said. “Deputy Cooper here used to be an FBI agent. A damn good one, too.” He smiled proudly and clapped the deputy on the back. Sam idly wondered, if he was such a damn good FBI agent, why he was now a sheriff’s deputy in a small town in the middle of nowhere. But that train of thought was curtailed by the sheriff’s next statement. “So, I think it would be best if we go somewhere to talk, and you can tell us who you really are and what you’re up to.”

Although Sheriff Truman made it sound like a friendly suggestion, it sent Sam into a bit of a panic. Were he and Dean getting arrested? What if the sheriff called in the real FBI? Sam and Dean had been off the radar of federal law enforcement since faking their own deaths, and they very much wanted to keep it that way. Sam looked at Dean, trying to silently agree to a plan. Should they just make a run for it now?

But before they could make a move, Sheriff Truman and Deputy Cooper, who seemed to be having their own silent conversation via eye contact, apparently reached a consensus of some sort. Cooper turned to them and flashed a bright, disarming smile.

“Do you fellows like pie?”

Chapter Text

The pie was awesome. Upon entering the Double R Diner, a nice older lady sat them down in a booth by the window and brought them each a slice of cherry pie and a cup of coffee without even being asked. Clearly, the sheriff and deputy were regulars. Dean tucked into his pie with great enthusiasm, as did Deputy Cooper across the table, whom Sheriff Truman watched with fond indulgence. As Dean shoved in another huge mouthful, he could feel Sam watching him with far less indulgence from the seat beside him.

“I gotta say,” Dean said through his full mouth, “I’ve eaten a lot of pie, in a lot of diners, from coast to coast. This is maybe the best cherry pie I’ve ever had.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” Deputy Cooper said. “I must say, I agree with your assessment. The quality of Norma’s cherry pie really is unparalleled.” Despite how weird the guy was, and the fact that he was a former FBI agent who could potentially get him and Sam in a lot of trouble, Dean couldn’t help but like the deputy. You gotta respect a man who enjoys the finer things in life. Deputy Cooper continued, “Unfortunately, business has slowed down in her diner since Twin Peaks got a Starbucks and a Panera Bread in the past few years.” His tone was mournful. It did look like business was slow. Besides them, the only other customer was an old lady sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee and what appeared to be, of all things, a log. Sheriff Truman patted Deputy Cooper consolingly on the shoulder. Apparently, the encroachment of chain coffee shops and bakeries was a source of some distress for the deputy. Dean could sympathize. He’d take a fifties-throwback like this diner, which even had a jukebox by the door, over some bland chain place any day.

Beside him, Dean could feel Sam getting impatient with all the small talk. They had thought about just leaving town after getting called on their covers by the local lawmen. But since said lawmen’s invitation to join them for pie and coffee at the diner didn’t seem like an immediate precursor to getting arrested or turned in to the FBI, Sam and Dean had agreed to follow them over to the diner just so they could get a better read on the situation and figure out whether or not they had a case here. That, and well, Dean did like pie.

“Let’s get down to business, shall we,” Sheriff Truman said. “We’re guessing you really are here about the Helen Briggs murder. Hunters, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Sam said in surprise. He lowered his voice and leaned across the table, even though the old lady seemed to be absorbed in a conversation with her log and the waitress was busy wiping down the counter. “So you know about hunters, and monsters, and the whole thing?” That should make things a hell of a lot easier if these guys were already wise to the existence of the supernatural.

“Yeah. We’ve had a few hunters come through town over the years. Twin Peaks tends to attract your type. I’ll tell you the same thing we told the others. Thanks, but no thanks. We can handle the Helen Briggs murder on our own.”

Glancing over at Dean, Sam said, “Are you saying there was nothing supernatural about the murder? Because we have a lot of experience in this kind of thing –”

“Not saying that.” Sheriff Truman took a sip of coffee. “I’m saying it’s our town, and we can handle it.”

Dean shrugged. “Okay. We’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses, we don’t go where we’re not wanted. If you’re savvy to the whole monster thing and still don’t want our help, no skin off our asses. Thanks for the pie.” He threw in that last part in the hope that they would cover the bill. After all, the sheriff and deputy were the ones who had wasted their time. Still, it had pretty much been worth the drive just for the pie.

Sam, however, looked as though he still wanted to argue. He directed his appeal at Deputy Cooper, who hadn’t said anything, but was playing with his pie crust with his fork. “Look, we get it,” Sam said. “You don’t know us. But we’ve been doing this for a long time, and sometimes things turn out to be more complicated than they seem –”

He stopped speaking because the old lady with the log had approached their table. She had stringy white hair, dumpy clothes, and a serious case of crazy eyes. Dean came across a lot of crazy in his line of work, and he could feel it radiating off her in waves. The lady regarded them seriously for a moment, cradling her log to her chest as if it were a baby.

“Can we help you, ma’am?” Sam asked politely.

In response, the lady held out the log in front of Dean, who was closest to her. “Touch my log,” she commanded.

Huh? “What, it’s not going to even take me out for dinner first?” Dean tried joking.

“Touch it,” she almost shrieked. Automatically, he complied. With his hand on the wood, he looked across the table at Sheriff Truman and Deputy Cooper, both of whom nodded seriously. “You too,” the lady said to Sam, who obediently reached over and put his hand on the log as well. They stayed like that for a long moment, as the lady put her head to the side, appearing to listen. Then she yanked the log back. “My log says they can help,” she told the sheriff and deputy.

“Thank you, Margaret,” Deputy Cooper said. The log lady walked out of the diner, still cradling her log.

“Okay, random.” Dean was seriously weirded out. “What’s with the log?”

“That’s a fair question,” Sheriff Truman replied thoughtfully. “I’ve been wondering that for decades myself.”

“Well, gentlemen,” Deputy Cooper said as though nothing had happened, “if you’re still willing to offer your assistance, we would be grateful to accept it.” The sheriff nodded in agreement.

“Wait a minute.” Dean was incredulous. “You changed your minds because a log told you to?”

“The log’s usually not wrong,” Sheriff Truman said, as if he wished it were otherwise.

“No. I don’t think I even want to help people who only want our help on the advice of a piece of wood.” Pie or not, Dean was so done with this town.

Sam hit him in the arm. “Would you excuse us for a moment?” he asked the sheriff and deputy. They nodded, and Sam dragged Dean over to the jukebox by the door.

“Look,” Sam said. “Clearly there’s something weird going on in this town –”

“Ya think?”

“—and it’s not often that we get an invitation from the locals to help out. We need all the allies we can get.”

Dean thought of Jody and conceded that it was helpful to have connections to local sheriffs who could keep an eye out for monster activity and alert them when something was going down. “Okay, fine. More pie for me.”

Decision quickly reached, they returned to the table, where the waitress was refilling all their coffee mugs. “Can I get you all anything else?” she asked.

“No thanks, Norma,” Sheriff Truman said.

Recognizing from the name Deputy Cooper had mentioned that she was not only the waitress, but the proprietor of the diner and the pie-maker, Dean raised his coffee mug to her. “Awesome pie,” he said.

“Thanks.” She smiled briefly at him, then turned to the sheriff. “Any news yet about what happened to Helen?”

“Not yet,” he replied. “We’re on our way to go talk to Bobby and Shelly.”

Norma nodded sadly. “Give them my love and tell Shelly that of course she can take as much time as she needs.” She went back to the counter.

Sheriff Truman regarded Sam and Dean expectantly. “So?”

“We’ll stay and help out,” Dean said.

“Excellent,” Deputy Cooper said, giving the goofiest thumbs-up Dean had ever seen someone give unironically. “We very much appreciate it.”

“No problem,” Sam said. “Can we get a copy of your case file, Sheriff?”

The sheriff nodded. “Sure, I can give you the copy I have out in the truck. And you can call me Harry. Not sure what we should call you boys? Are we going to stick with Page and Plant?” His eyes twinkled.

“I’m Sam, this is my brother Dean.”

“So do you have ideas about what kind of monster we’re dealing with here?” Dean asked. Now that they were committed, he was eager to get into the familiar rhythm of a hunt.

“Oh, we’ve got ideas,” Harry said vaguely. He and Cooper looked at each other and seemed to have another silent conversation. They seemed to do that a lot, but Dean guessed that he and Sam did too.

Having reached agreement, Cooper turned back to them. “We believe that it would be most expedient for our investigations to proceed in parallel at this time, so as to allow you to reach an independent conclusion. That way, we can benefit fully from your expertise. We have our own methods, as you no doubt have yours, and we hope that our strategies can complement one another.”

“O-kay?” Dean had never encountered that attitude before. Usually, if the locals were aware of what was going on at all, they were eager to hand the whole thing over to the hunters so they wouldn’t have to think about the existence of things that went bump in the night.

He looked at Sam, who shrugged and said, “I guess we can start by taking a look at the autopsy report and case files. Can we get the file for the Laura Palmer murder in 1989 as well?”

“Sure thing,” Harry said. “We were about to go interview the Briggs family. Want to come along? We can tell everyone that you really are FBI agents.”

“Lead the way.” Sam and Dean followed their new allies into the parking lot.

Sam and Dean took the Impala across town, following Harry and Cooper who, like seemingly everyone else in town, drove a pickup truck. They pulled up in front of a modest home on the outskirts of town, where they got out and followed the local lawmen up to the door. Harry and Cooper looked sad.

“Bobby Briggs, Helen’s father, is one of my deputies,” Harry said, ringing the doorbell. “Her death hit all of us pretty hard.”

A middle-aged man opened the door. He had dark hair and a haunted expression. “Hey, thanks for coming,” he said, letting them in. Both Harry and Cooper clapped him sympathetically on the shoulder.

Harry introduced Sam and Dean to Bobby Briggs using their fake Led Zeppelin names, and Bobby didn’t seem to register anything unusual in the presence of FBI agents. “I’m glad you guys are helping,” was all he said. “We’re a small department, and it’s been a long time since anything like this happened here—” his voice broke off.

Sam always felt bad lying to grieving families, even if it was for their own good. “We’ll do everything we can to find out who did this to your daughter.” That much, at least, was true.

Bobby led them into the living room, where a pretty, middle-aged blond woman sat on the sofa, her face streaked with tears. On a rocking chair in the corner sat a bald old guy. He stared straight ahead into space.

The woman got up and hugged both Harry and Cooper, and Harry introduced Sam and Dean to Shelly Briggs, Helen’s mother. “Hello, Garland,” Cooper said to the old guy. But the guy made no sign that he had heard or seen any of them.

“It’s one of his bad days,” Shelly said apologetically. “Of course, it’s a bad day for all of us.” She wiped away another tear.

“My father has early-onset dementia,” Bobby explained to Sam and Dean. “He’s often unaware of what’s going on.”

They all sat, and Sam and Dean listened while Harry took the lead on the interview. Standard questions: did they know of anyone who would want to harm their daughter, did she have a boyfriend or any new acquaintances, had they noticed any unusual behavior in the weeks leading up to her death. All these questions were answered in the negative. Bobby and Shelly confirmed the timeline for the night of Helen’s death. She had come home from school as normal, did her homework and helped her mother cook dinner, watched TV with the family, and then gone up to her room around nine. They hadn’t even realized she had left the house until Harry had called them early the next morning to notify them that her body had been found in Pearl Lake. All those details had been in the police report Harry had given them, which Sam had skimmed on the drive over. Relating the story, Shelly began to silently cry again, while Bobby put his arm around her shoulder. They all sat, a bit awkwardly, as they waited for her to stop crying before asking any more questions.

After that, Cooper took over the lead on the interview, and the questions got noticeably weirder. Had Helen reported any strange dreams lately? Did she spend much time hanging out in the woods? Did she ever say anything about playing with fire or fire walking? At these questions, it was Bobby’s turn to get upset. “You’re thinking what happened to Helen has something to do with what happened to Laura all those years ago.” It was a statement, not a question.

“We’re investigating that possibility, yes.” Cooper turned to Sam and Dean. “Do you have any questions, Agents?”

“Yeah, a few.” Sam cleared his throat. Might as well keep the weird ones going, which was made a bit easier now that Cooper had done the warm-up act. He asked about cold spots, strange noises, any other recent deaths in the family. He got the usual confused reactions from the Briggs parents, but Harry and Cooper were impassive. The answers all indicated no signs of haunting within the house itself, but then, the girl hadn’t died there, so that might be a moot point.

As they seemed to be wrapping things up, Cooper asked, “Is Raven at home? We would like to speak to her as well if possible.”

“He’s in his room,” Bobby said. He got up and walked over to the staircase, where he yelled upstairs, “Will! The sheriff and Deputy Cooper are here with some FBI agents. They want to talk to you about your sister.” A voice yelled something indistinct in response, and Bobby walked back over to the sofa. “You can go up to his room,” he told the lawmen.

“Bobby.” Shelly’s voice held a strong tone of admonishment. “Her room.”

“Oh, for god’s sake, Shelly, I’m doing my best,” Bobby snapped. “Can you give me a break, just for today?”

“Raven is going through a traumatic experience with losing her sister,” Shelly snapped back. “The book says it’s more important than ever to be affirming.” She gestured at a book on the side table, with the title Loving Your Transgender Child.

Bobby took a deep breath, visibly getting his temper under control. “Okay. I’m sorry. You all can go up to her room.”

They did. As they walked up the stairs, Sam discreetly took out a portable EMF meter and did a quick scan. No sign of ghosts. But then, Helen hadn’t died inside the house, so that didn’t necessarily mean a ghost hadn’t killed her.

In the upstairs hallway, Cooper knocked on a bedroom door. A voice sullenly told them to come in. Raven was sitting on her bed, a laptop propped against her knees. She was maybe nineteen or twenty, with long frizzy purple hair, a nose ring, and a tattoo of her namesake bird across her upper chest and neck. She looked miserable.

Cooper sat next to her on the bed as Harry did another round of introductions of Sam and Dean as FBI agents. Raven kept her eyes on her laptop. “Raven, we’re so sorry about your sister,” Cooper said kindly. “We know you two were very close.”

At that, Raven snapped her laptop shut and tossed it onto the bed behind her. Her eyes filled with tears. “She was the only reason I kept coming back to this shithole of a town,” she said. “I could have just stayed on the road with the band.” The walls of the room were lined with musical instruments: a keyboard, a guitar, a saxophone. “Or I could have moved to Seattle. Maybe Portland, or San Francisco.”

“You still can, if that’s what you want,” Cooper said, putting a hand on her shoulder. She flung her arms around him and clung tightly, sobbing.

“I know she’s dead because of all that fucked-up stuff in the woods,” Raven gasped.

“What fucked-up stuff in the woods?” Dean interjected. Sam’s ears had also perked up, because finally someone was speaking their language, but he gave Dean a warning look. Better to let Cooper handle it, since he obviously already had a rapport with the girl.

Raven pulled away from Cooper and looked at Sam and Dean. “Look, you’re not from here,” she said, “so you don’t know what I’m talking about. But everyone who lives here does. There’s something in the woods around here, and it’s evil. I know how tacky that sounds, but it’s true. I don’t know what it is exactly, but everyone says it goes back to 1989. There was a hell of a lot more going on than Leland Palmer going crazy and killing his daughter, but we don’t know what because no one who was around back then ever talks about it. My parents knew Laura Palmer, my dad even dated her for a while, but they just brush me off when I ask about it. Just like you guys do.” She glared at Cooper and Harry.

Harry sat down next to her on the bed, on the other side from Cooper. “You’re right, Raven,” he said quietly. “There is something in the woods, and we’re going to do our damnedest to stop it before it hurts anyone else. But we need your help. What was going on with Helen in the past few weeks?”

“She wasn’t acting like herself,” Raven said bleakly. “My parents probably told you she was fine, but that’s just because they’re oblivious. She was fine when I was here for New Year’s. Then I went up to BC for some gigs. When I came back three weeks ago, she was like a totally different person. She started spending all her time partying when she always used to be such a goody two-shoes. And she was having sex with randoms, much older guys she would meet at the Roadhouse. As far as I know, she was a virgin up until this year. And she was doing drugs. I found meth in her room. I covered for her, of course. That’s part of why my parents were clueless. Maybe if I had snitched on her –” her eyes filled with tears again.

Coop put his hand on her shoulder consolingly again. “What happened to Helen is not your fault,” he said. “Were there any men in particular she was seeing? Or any that she talked about a lot?”

“No, like I said, they were randos. But –” a thought seemed to occur to Raven. “I just remembered, a few weeks ago she started posting crazy shit on her YouTube channel.”

“She had a YouTube channel?” Cooper asked.

“Yeah, since she was like fifteen. It was always so geeky, she would post reviews of Netflix shows or how-to videos for making cupcakes or whatever. But then a few weeks ago, she started putting up all this weird shit.”

“Weird how?” Sam asked.

“I don’t really know, I quit watching after the first one. In that one, she was just talking, but it made no sense. I guess she was high or whatever. Look, I can’t watch it, but if you want to check it out, her username is 1000ShipLauncher.” Sam and Cooper both chuckled. “Yeah, like I said, she was a geek.” Raven smiled for the first time, but her smile held mostly sadness.

“Thank you, Raven.” Cooper stood up, and Harry followed. “You’ve been a great help. Now, please, be very careful and don’t go out on your own, especially at night.”

“Like there’s anywhere to go in this town. After the funeral tomorrow, I might just hit the road, for good this time.”

“There are worse places than the road,” Dean agreed.

“Well, when you’ve achieved fame in your musical career, please be sure to come back and visit,” Cooper said, a bit wistfully.

“Yeah, for you guys I will.” Raven gave both Cooper and Harry a hug. “You are pretty much the only cool people in this town.”

Before they left the Briggs house, they looked through Helen’s room, with her parents’ permission. Harry and Cooper tore the room apart, but didn’t find any more drugs, or whatever the hell else they were looking for. Meanwhile, Sam did a more thorough sweep with the EMF reader and still failed to find anything ghostly.

They reconvened in front of Harry’s pickup truck, parked in front of the Briggs house. “Well?” Dean looked at Harry and Cooper expectantly.

“Raven was very informative,” Cooper said evasively.

“Yeah, but what is the actual information she gave us? Can we get some backstory on the weird shit in the woods and what went down with Leland Palmer and his daughter in 1989? Sam and I are kind of flying blind here.”

“As I said, we would prefer to pursue our investigations along independent lines for now. Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective can be illuminating, especially when they use a process that differs from expected norms.” Cooper and Harry grinned at each other again. That was another thing they sure did a lot of.

“Okay, whatever.” Dean was getting frustrated with these guys. Way to be cryptic for no reason. “I guess we’ll hole up and read through the reports and watch the girl’s meth-fueled ramblings on YouTube.” Yay, research. Not his favorite part of a hunt. He realized he hadn’t seen any motels on the commercial strip, their usual home away from home, when they entered town. “Hey, speaking of meth, where do you keep all your cheap motels around here? We need to find a place to stay.”

“I can get you a rate at the Great Northern,” Harry said.

After they had spent a few minutes entering each other’s numbers into their cell phones, and Harry had insisted on giving them detailed directions to the hotel while Sam insisted that they could just look it up on Google Maps, Sam and Dean took their leave in the Impala with a promise to check in at the sheriff’s station in the morning. Sam initially ignored the sheriff’s directions and tried to navigate them to the Great Northern using Google Maps, which sent them on an apparent suicide mission down a dirt logging road. Dean had to find a place to turn around on the narrow road, cursing Sam out for making him risk Baby’s suspension and getting mud on her rims, and then followed Harry’s directions straight to the Great Northern Hotel.

“Wow,” Sam said as they pulled into the parking lot. Wow was right, this place must have a rating at least five stars higher than their normal Bates Motel-style lodgings. It was a huge building with that rustic yet upscale look typical of ski resorts and country clubs, no neon signs to be found, and it was perched on the rim of a freaking waterfall.

The place was so nice, Dean was a bit offended at the sight of it. “Who the hell is that sheriff kidding? We’re gonna have to burn a whole credit card to pay for this.” Even though they paid for everything with fraudulent credit cards, Dean considered frugality a virtue. He figured they owed that much to the dead people whose stolen social-security numbers they used to apply for credit.

“He said they’d give us a discount if we tell them we’re here on sheriff’s department business. Let’s just go and see.” Sam seemed to be a pissy mood again, maybe because Google Maps had let him down or maybe because the case was getting on his nerves, as it was Dean’s.

Well, it turned out the sheriff had been as good as his word on the discount. They ended up paying about the same rate as they normally would at one of their typical fleabag motels. They immediately changed out of their suits and set up their laptops upon entering their temporary home, Room 315. The room itself wasn’t as nice as one would expect based on the grand exterior and lobby of the hotel, with two double beds shoved into what looked like a space designed for one queen. But at least it didn’t have a mini-fridge balanced on the toilet tank, which was more than Dean could say for one motel in Utah they had stayed in a few years back.

“So, divide and conquer?” Sam asked, throwing the case files he had gotten from Harry onto the table. “Do you want the reports, or the YouTube videos?”

“Is that even a serious question? YouTube, every time.”

So while Sam perused the files, Dean queued up 1000ShipLauncher’s channel. Her sister had been right, most of the videos posted were painfully lame teenage girl stuff. The channel showed video stills of Helen wearing an apron or sitting with a bowl of popcorn, with descriptions like “Best cupcakes ever!!!” and “Frozen singalong time! Let’s Let It Go!”. But there were half a dozen videos, all posted since the first week of February, that stood out. Their video stills showed Helen just sitting in a darkened room, looking pale and strung-out, very unlike her glam appearance in the earlier videos. All the descriptions of the more recent videos were also starkly different. They were all quotes from nihilist philosophers. (Not that Dean knew that that’s who the guys quoted were, he had to ask Sam.) From Nietzsche: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.” From Kierkegaard: “Leveling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one’s own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless.” From Baudrillard: “The apocalypse is finished … We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.” Okay, Dean didn’t pretend to understand the philosophy of nihilism, but it was obvious that this girl had taken a pretty major dark turn in the last weeks of her life.

It got more disturbing yet when he watched the actual videos. Each was about five minutes long. In some of them, Helen definitely channeled the meth-head vibe, talking a nonstop stream of complete nonsense. “There are fragments hidden in the between spaces…” “I dreamed of a red room with a dwarf who spoke backwards…” “Constructed of ghost wood, the meeting place of the insubstantial and the solid, the living and the dead…” Even more chilling were a couple of videos in which she just stared wordlessly at the camera, looking she was already dead, like she was a ghost herself. Her silence was punctuated by occasional cries like “He’s everywhere, now that I know where to look…” “I don’t even know which of the thoughts in my head are mine and which are his…” “Fire and wood…”

Having finished the videos, Dean slammed his laptop shut. “That is some sick shit. Why didn’t people report that to YouTube?”

“They were probably too busy calling each other Hitler in the comments section of some cat video,” Sam said absently, rifling through the reports.

“How about you? Did you find anything?”

“A few things. For starters, Sheriff Truman was the sheriff back in 1989. The FBI also worked the Laura Palmer case, and guess which agent they sent?”

“Deputy Dale? So that’s how he ended up in this town?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Huh. Why was the FBI involved anyway?” Dean was only a fake FBI agent, but he did watch enough TV to know something about jurisdiction and how the FBI didn’t have it when it came to local crimes like murder.

“There was another girl who was taken by the killer at the same time as Laura. Ronette Pulaski. She got away and ended up crossing the state line into Idaho.”

“Does she still live in town?” Sounded like a jackpot of a witness.

“Uh, no, she’s dead. Apparently jumped off a bridge a few weeks after Laura’s murder.”

“Awesome.” That wasn’t suspicious in any way. “Did she at least provide any useful information at the time?”

“Not really. I guess she was pretty traumatized, in kind of a catatonic state for a while.”

“So what did they find out in 1989 during Laura’ murder investigation?”

“Well, quite a bit, but it’s kind of convoluted. The sheriff and Agent Cooper, at the time, investigated a bunch of suspects, including Bobby Briggs, incidentally, who was Laura’s boyfriend at the time of her death. There were all these connections to drugs being smuggled across the border and what seems to be some sort of French-Canadian mafia and a pet bird and a brothel. I had trouble following it all, honestly, and most of it is kind of ridiculous. But the upshot is that eventually Leland Palmer, Laura’s father, was taken into custody and confessed to killing Laura, as well as her cousin Maddie. But literally while he was in the sheriff’s station confessing, he dropped dead. No cause of death listed.”

“Okay. And what about Helen Briggs?”

“The autopsy reports show that they both died in the same way. Cause of death was blood loss from multiple small cuts. Both of them were also using drugs. Cocaine in Laura’s case, and meth in Helen’s. And remember that letter B Dr. Hayward said was found under Helen’s nail? They found a letter R under Laura’s, same finger.”

“Well, I guess we can safely say the same thing killed them both. So what are we dealing with? It could still be our original theory. Maybe Leland killed Laura and now for whatever reason his ghost came back to kill Helen.”

“Yeah, maybe. Doesn’t necessarily explain the change in Helen’s behavior before she died, and there haven’t been any signs of ghosts so far. But Helen did say something about ghosts in one of those videos. Apparently, Leland is buried in the cemetery here in town, so we could salt and burn his bones tonight just in case.”

“Might as well.” Dean was in favor of a good salt and burn just as a general policy. Their lives would be a lot easier if everyone went with a hunter’s funeral. Someone should do a public awareness campaign about the importance of salting and burning. But there was another possibility he had been wondering about. “You think it could maybe be a demon?”

Sam looked thoughtful. “I was thinking the same thing. I mean, maybe Leland was possessed when he killed his daughter.” Dean sort of hoped that was true. It was better to think that a demon was responsible for the evil than that the guy really had raped and murdered his own daughter. But on the other hand, that meant they would have to deal with a demon, which was several levels above what Dean had expected to have to tangle with on this hunt.

Sam went on, “That could also explain why Leland died so suddenly, when the demon left its meatsuit and moved on. But I don’t know. Demons usually don’t get fixated on particular towns or particular people like this. We’re just interchangeable meatsuits to them. It would have to be a weird demon to make a point of returning to the same town just to kill a girl the same way he killed another girl 25 years ago.”

“Well, it’s a weird town. Maybe it attracts weird demons.” Dean leaned back in his chair.

“That’s kind of what I’m thinking. This monster could something local. Something to do with whatever’s going on in the woods.” Sam threw down the case files and opened his laptop.

“Well, we’ll have to wait a few hours before we can head to the cemetery.” Dean stood up decisively. “I’m going to go find the local dive bar. You coming?” He was jonesing for a drink, and visiting the town watering hole was always a good way to get a feel for a place anyway. That was the kind of research he could get behind.

“No, I’m going to look into the lore, see if I can find anything.” Sam was already engrossed in his screen.

“Suit yourself.” Dean headed for the door.

“Remember, we still have to go to the cemetery later,” Sam called after him. “Don’t get drunk off your ass, and don’t get in any fights.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be home by curfew,” Dean muttered.

He headed to the lobby and walked up to the registration desk, where the kid who’d checked them in was sitting and playing Angry Birds on his phone. “Hey, Clyde,” Dean said, reading off the guy’s nametag. “Where can I get a drink around here?”

Clyde looked up from his phone. He was probably in his mid-twenties but had the acne of a teenager. “The hotel has a full bar with happy-hour specials, a selection of premium wines from the Walla Walla Valley, and a tapas menu.” He sounded as though he were reciting a phrase he had memorized from the hotel’s marketing material, which he probably was.

“No offense, but I’d rather drink rubbing alcohol.” No way was Dean drinking in an overpriced hotel bar that served tapas and premium wines, no matter how awesome the name of the valley the wines came from. Besides, it would be all hotel guests in the bar, and the whole point was to rub elbows with the locals.

Clyde nodded sagely. “Yeah, me too.”

“So where would you go?”

“The Roadhouse.” Of course, there was always a Roadhouse. Dean remembered Raven had mentioned it as the place where Helen had gone to meet up with guys, so maybe he could get some intel on the case there too. Clyde continued, “Just head north on Highway 31, it’s on the left right after you leave the town limits. You can’t miss it. The sign says Bang Bang Bar, but everyone calls it the Roadhouse.”

“Thanks, man.”

The Roadhouse was right where Clyde said, and it was just like every other Roadhouse across America. With a pang, Dean thought of the Harvelles. Ellen and Jo had just been another two in the long line of good people he and Sam had lost. Pushing away the thought, Dean went into the bar.

Despite it being a Tuesday night, the place was hopping. The good people of Twin Peaks seemed to take their drinking seriously. There was a band playing live music. Dean bellied up to the bar and, in grudging recognition of Sam’s bitchy reminder that they had to go to the cemetery later, ordered a beer rather than anything stronger.

Right after he took his first sip, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see two familiar faces. Harry and Cooper sure seemed to be joined at the hip. After working together all day, they were now at the bar together in the evening. They had changed out of their uniforms and into flannels, which was also what 95% of the people in the bar were wearing. The Winchesters fit right in to this town as far as wardrobe was concerned. “Settling in all right?” Harry asked Dean.

“Yeah. Thanks for the discount on the hotel. It’s a nice place.”

“You’ll be pleased with the water pressure in the showers,” Cooper said. “The coffee in the dining room is also outstanding.”

“Awesome. Something to look forward to.”

“Where’s your brother?” Harry asked.

“Back in the room. Doing research. Which is also what I’m doing.” Dean lifted his glass. “Do you guys want some beers? First round’s on me.”

“Thank you, but no,” Cooper said politely.

“I’m in recovery,” Harry added. “Twenty-four years sober.”

“Hey, good for you, man.” Dean wondered why they were here if not to drink. Maybe they were also here to investigate. “Did you find out anything about the guys Helen would meet up with here?”

“Dead end, we think,” Harry said. “We asked around, and it seems she would only leave with guys who were from out of town. No locals.” That sort of implied that Harry and Cooper were thinking it was a local, which made it more likely that there was a connection to the Laura Palmer murder. Harry gestured to a table over in the corner. “Well, we’d better go. We’re meeting some friends. Sort of a club we’re part of.” Said friends had been staring at Dean, but quickly averted their eyes when Dean looked in their direction. There were three older men: a Native guy with gray hair, a big white guy, and a skinny balding guy. Looking very much the odd one out, a young blond woman with a don’t-fuck-with-me expression was also seated with them.

“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see you guys in the morning.” Dean took another sip of beer.

“Have a good night, Dean,” Cooper said, and started over to the corner table.

“Coop, I’ll be over in a minute,” Harry said. While Cooper went to join their friends, Harry crossed over to the other side of the room, where the band was playing. Watching, Dean saw him take a seat next to a woman seated at a table directly in front of the stage. It was Dr. Hayward. She appeared to ask Harry something, and he responded. At his response, a look of sadness crossed her face, and she put her hand on his. Dean couldn’t see Harry’s face, because his back was turned. Dean assumed they were talking about Helen’s murder, but the interaction seemed a bit weird in that Dr. Hayward appeared to be comforting Harry rather than the other way around. Harry and Dr. Hayward talked for a minute longer, then Harry got up and went to join Cooper and the others.

Dean got up from the bar. Dr. Hayward was sitting alone, so he might as well see if he could get any more information out of her. Sidling up to the table, he turned the charm of his smile up to eleven, determined to make it work on her this time. “Dr. Hayward, nice to see you here this evening.”

“Hello again, Agent Page,” she said.

“Please, call me Dean.”

“Okay, Dean. And you can call me Donna.” She was now smiling back. That was more like it.

“Can I buy you a drink, Donna?”

She stirred the remnants of her cocktail, which was mostly melted ice cubes at that point. ‘Sure. Gin and tonic.”

Dean went and got her drink, then sat next to her at the table. The band was playing some folk-rock crap. Sam would probably like it. “So, Donna,” Dean said. “How long have you lived in Twin Peaks?”

“I was born and raised here. I left for college and medical school and did my residency in Seattle. Came back about fifteen years ago when my father became ill. That’s when I started working at the hospital here. Even after he died a couple of years later, I decided to stay. Dad was also a physician here for many decades, and everyone in town was used to there being a Dr. Hayward in Twin Peaks.”

“The family business. I get that.” Dean sipped at his beer.

“Yeah. I went through a rough period with my family around the time I graduated high school, when I found out Dad wasn’t really my biological father. But he was in all the ways that mattered. So we eventually patched things up. After seeing a bit of the world, I realized Twin Peaks wasn’t such a bad place to come home to.”

“What was it like growing up here?” Dean seized the opportunity to get more information about the town.

“Mostly, it was great. Until …” she trailed off.

“Until Laura’s death?” Dean prompted.

“Well, yeah. That was when everything went to hell. And now I’m afraid it’s happening again.” She threw back a large gulp of her gin and tonic.

“Donna.” Dean kept his voice low and gentle. “I know this is hard for you, but anything you can tell us about Laura and what happened to her could help us with our investigation of Helen’s death.”

Donna took a deep breath. “When Laura died, I found out I hadn’t really known her at all, even though she was my best friend. I was just a kid back then, but I thought I was Nancy Drew or something. I thought I could figure out what happened to her, and then maybe she would turn back into the person I thought she was all along.”

“So what did you find out?”

“I found her diary.” Her voice was bleak. “Not the one she kept in her room, where she pretended to be the Laura everyone knew. I found her secret diary. I only had a chance to read some of the pages, but she was different in them. It didn’t make a lot of sense. She wrote about a dream she had, where she was in a red room with a small man, and all her words came out slow and odd. And she wrote about Bob.”

“Who’s that? Bobby Briggs?”

“No, not Bobby Briggs. Bob is someone else. He’s the one who killed her.” Donna’s voice came out in a whisper. “I know they said her father did it, but she wrote in her secret diary the night she died that she knew she was going to die, that it was the only way to keep Bob away from her.”

“Do you have any idea who this Bob person is?”

Donna shook her head, seeming distracted by the new song that had just begun to play. Most of the band members had retreated backstage, but the lead singer remained on stage, with nothing but an acoustic guitar. He was in his early forties, dark-haired, wearing a wife-beater that exposed the Mexican Day of the Dead skull tattoo on his bicep. He strummed a soft ballad that Dean was sure Sam would think was the best thing since Celine Dion. As the guitarist sang, he made direct eye contact with Donna. “Just you, and me …” the song went.

Donna started to weep silently. Not knowing what else to do, Dean put his hand on her shoulder in what he hoped was a gentlemanly and not a gropey way. Sam really was better at dealing with this kind of thing. As the song went on, Donna seemed to accept the comfort, grabbing at his other hand to grip it tightly.

Suddenly, there was a crash from the stage. The singer had stopped playing and stood up abruptly, knocking over the stool he had been sitting on. Dropping his guitar, he jumped off the stage and marched up to Dean and Donna’s table. “Okay, that’s it,” the guy said, getting all up in Dean’s face. “Get your hands off her, now.”

Dean coolly stood up. Donna also got to her feet and pulled against the douchebag’s arm. “James, what the hell are you doing?”

“What I am doing? What are you doing? You’re throwing yourself at some guy in public, today of all days?” The guy was close enough that Dean could smell the liquor on his breath. It was kind of impressive he had been able to play, given how shit-faced it was now apparent he was, but that was musicians for you.

“I’m not throwing myself at anyone.” Donna was still teary-eyed. “And even if I was, it wouldn’t be any of your business. It hasn’t been for a long time. So leave me alone.”

“You heard the lady,” Dean said succinctly. “Get lost.” He could see the punch coming from a mile away, so it was child’s play to duck it and pin the douchebag to the table with his arm twisted against his back.

“Okay, James, take her easy,” came Harry’s voice. He and Cooper had come over when the commotion started, along with the big guy who had been sitting at their table.

“I’ll take him home,” said the big guy. “You can let him go, he’s not going to cause any more trouble, are you, James?”

“Fuck off,” James slurred, but Dean released him, and he didn’t make any more threatening moves.

The big guy took James by the arm and escorted him outside. Harry said, “I’m just going to see if Big Ed needs any help,” and went after them.

Cooper produced a tissue from somewhere and handed it to Donna. “Are you all right?” he asked her solicitously. The chattering noises of the bar crowd had started up again now that the show was over.

“Yes, mostly just embarrassed.” She laughed a bit breathlessly and dabbed at her eyes.

“Well, this is a difficult time for everyone. Emotions are running high,” Cooper said diplomatically.

“I’m sorry about James,” Donna said to Dean. “He’s my ex-husband. We were together in high school, around the time of Laura’s death. We were both close to Laura, and her cousin Maddie too. He even dated Laura for a while. I don’t know how I would have gotten through Laura and Maddie’s deaths without him. We stupidly got married when we were way too young and divorced a few years later. We’ve mostly been on good terms since, but I think everything happening now is bringing him back to the time, so he thinks he can try to control me. But thank you for standing up for me. It’s been a long time since guys had a bar fight over me, it makes me feel young again.”

“No problem. It wasn’t much of a fight.” Dean spoke with some satisfaction.

“Would you like one of us to take you home?” Cooper offered her.

“No, thank you, I’m fine. I just need to go wash up.” She dabbed again with the tissue at her running mascara and went off to the women’s room.

“Is there always this much excitement here?” Dean asked Cooper.

“Not always, no. But it is always interesting.” Cooper smiled enigmatically.

“Is that why you stayed in town after the Laura Palmer case?” Dean wanted to fish for information on that backstory partly because it might be relevant to their current case, but also just out of curiosity. “Going from FBI agent to small-town sheriff’s deputy must have been a big step down.”

“Quite the contrary. Twin Peaks is a wonderful place, with wonderful people.” Cooper’s smile broadened as Harry came back through the door to the bar and their eyes found each other across the room. “It was a big step up. There is, to put it simply, nowhere I’d rather be.”

 Just as Sam was scraping the bottom of the online lore barrel, Dean returned to the room. “Did you behave yourself?” Sam asked. He was glad Dean had gotten back at a reasonable hour.

“Yeah, yeah. Even better, I ran into Donna – that’s Dr. Hayward to you – and got some information out of her.”

Sam listened with interest as Dean told him about what Laura Palmer had written in her secret diary. “Sounds a lot like what Helen was talking about in her videos,” Sam said. “They even had the same dream about a red room. And the ‘he’ Helen was talking about could be this Bob, whoever or whatever that is.”

“Yeah. I guess back in 1989, all kids could do was write their crazy thoughts in a diary, but now, thanks to YouTube, they can share them with the whole world. What about you, did you find anything in the lore?”

“Maybe. It seems like most of the local legends around here have to do with the mythology of the Nez Perce people. One that stands out is a place called the Black Lodge. It’s said to be a place of unspeakable evil.”

“Awesome. Where is this Black Lodge?”

“The lore isn’t clear on that. I’m not sure if it’s even a physical place. There’s also a White Lodge, apparently. You get to the Black Lodge through fear and the White Lodge through love.” Sam shrugged.

“Kinda cheesy, but okay. Where does all this leave us?”

Sam pondered a moment. “So we have some sort of person or monster named Bob, who was apparently tormenting Laura Palmer leading up her death, and who may have been responsible for her murder, either independently of Leland or working through him. We can assume that’s the same thing that killed Helen. And since there is supposedly a place of unspeakable evil somewhere in the neighborhood, that seems like the most likely place for the thing to have come from.”

“Yup, that’s about the size of it.”

“Do you still want to do the salt-and-burn just in case?” It was looking less and less like a standard ghost case, but Sam figured that burning Leland’s bones could still help just in terms of process of elimination.

“Always. Let’s do it.”

So they drove to the town cemetery. It was now after midnight, and the place was appropriately deserted. The cemetery wasn’t that big, so it was easy to find Leland Palmer’s grave. Actually, they found Laura Palmer’s first, which had a larger tombstone that someone had recently put fresh flowers on. Next to it was Leland’s, with a smaller, unadorned tombstone. Sam felt a squirmy feeling in his stomach at the thought of Laura’s body lying right next to that of the father who, as far as anyone knew, had raped and murdered her. That was messed up. Sam decided that, ghost or no, torching Leland’s bones was the thing to do, if just to give the poor girl some peace.

They made quick work of the digging, having optimized their technique through long experience, and soon Sam’s shovel hit Leland’s coffin. He and Dean crowbarred the coffin open, and Dean started getting the bag of salt and lighter fluid ready. “Wait a minute,” Sam said. In his flashlight glare, he thought he had caught a glimpse of something unusual about the bones. Both Sam and Dean trained their flashlights on the inside of Leland’s coffin.

“Well, that’s a new one,” Dean said, after a moment of stunned silence.

The bones were all there, laying in skeletal repose. But each bone was covered with delicately engraved markings, as if some deranged artist had carved into it like they would into marble. The etchings resembled flames. Flames burning up and down each limb, stretched across the ribcage, protruding from the hollow eye sockets and grinning jaw of the skull.

“Dean, that coffin was sealed when we opened it. That means it’s been undisturbed since the day it was buried. No one before us could have gotten to these bones.”

“So I guess they must have been like when he was buried. Or turned that way afterwards on their own.” Dean sounded equally puzzled and disgusted. “Whatever, let’s burn it now.”

Sam understood the impulse. The bones were weirdly unsettling to look at, an abomination that needed to be destroyed. But he told Dean to wait a minute again. Handing Dean his flashlight, he had him position both lights on the bones. Then Sam messed around with the camera settings on his phone while Dean groused impatiently. Finally, Sam succeeded in capturing a few decently lit photos of the bones. There, now they at least had the evidence. “Okay, light it up,” Sam said.

Dean sprinkled some salt and lighter fluid on the bones and tossed in a lit match. They stood in silence while the etched flames seemed to dance in the light and shadow cast by the real, living flames. Sam’s mind was racing. What had touched Leland Palmer that was so evil it had carved itself into his very bones? 

Chapter Text

Cooper had been right about the hotel’s water pressure, Dean admitted. His morning shower felt good after their late night. It had been after two in the morning by the time they had finished filling in Leland’s grave and returned to the room the night before. As he came out of the bathroom toweling himself off, Sam half-heartedly suggested that they wear their suits again today, since they were still FBI agents to everyone in town other than Harry and Cooper. Dean said screw that, he wasn’t going to wear a monkey suit when there was no need to fool the cops, and anyway people would probably like them better if they just wore their flannels and looked like everyone else in town. So they headed down to the hotel’s dining room dressed in their usual hunter chic.

Cooper had also been right about the quality of the hotel’s coffee. Not that Dean cared, coffee was coffee to him, but Sam wouldn’t shut up about how great it was. But the bacon and hashbrowns and biscuits with gravy, now that was something Dean could appreciate. Sam, of course, stuck to yogurt and granola and fresh fruit.

They ate their breakfast at a table that, like all the other tables in the dining room, had a view looking over the top of the waterfall, and talked about their plans for the day. They had promised to check in at the sheriff’s station, where they could share what they had found out the previous night with Harry and Cooper. Maybe those guys would be willing to tell them if they were on the right track or not, but if they insisted on keeping up the whole separate investigation thing, Sam and Dean could at least go check out the location where Helen’s body had been found. And Raven had mentioned that her sister’s funeral was today. That might be a good place to scope out, see if anyone showed up looking suspicious, maybe even do some low-key interrogations of the attendees. Bottom line, they had to find this Bob character and figure out what kind of nasty they were dealing with.

Sam kept yawning and seemed to hitting the coffee pretty hard. Dean was kind of tired too, but it’s not like they weren’t used to late nights, so Sam’s level of exhaustion seemed a bit much. “What’s with you, anyway?” Dean asked, taking another bite of crispy bacon.

“Nothing. Just didn’t sleep that well, that’s all. Weird dreams.”

Dean paused with bacon halfway to his mouth. “Weird bad or just weird weird?” Given Sam’s past psychic tendencies, his dreamland adventures were worth taking seriously.

“Just weird, weird. It was a room, with red curtains all around, and there was a dwarf –”

“Wait. You’re talking about the dream that Laura Palmer and Helen Briggs both had.”

“Well, yeah. I was thinking about it before I went to sleep, so that’s probably why I dreamed it. No big deal.”

“Or, maybe, big deal. What else happened?” Dean did not at all like that Sam was having the same dream two murder victims had had right before their deaths.

“Nothing happened. The dwarf just said something, and it sounded weird, like Laura wrote about in her diary, almost like he was talking backwards, or I was hearing it backwards, or something.”

“And? What did he say?”

“This is the waiting room. That’s all he said.” Sam shrugged and took another sip of coffee.

“I don’t like this.”

“Dean, like I said, it was just a dream. It was just that the case was on my mind when I was falling asleep.” Sam turned his head to look out the window and paused. “What is going on out there?”

“Don’t change the subject.” Dean followed Sam’s gaze out the window and saw that a bunch of people had gathered on the platform overlooking the waterfall outside. There seemed to be a lot of excited chatter among the crowd, with their voices faintly reaching them even inside the hotel. “Okay, what is going on out there?”

Suddenly, Clyde the front-desk kid came running into the dining room. “You have to see it!” he announced to the room at large.

Everyone stared at him, then most went back to eating their breakfast. “See what?” Dean demanded.

“Whitetail Falls, it’s …” Clyde made a hopeless gesture, as if the thing they had to see simply could not be conveyed in words. “You just have to see it!”

Sam and Dean exchanged a look and went outside through the glass doors that led directly to the platform at the top of the waterfall. As they weaved their way through the crowd, they heard snippets of excited conversation among the couple dozen people who had gathered. “How did they do it?” “Is this for a TV show or something?” “Coolest thing ever…”

Arriving at the edge of the platform, Sam and Dean leaned against the handrail and surveyed the sight before them. “Well, that’s another new one,” Sam said.

The waterfall was flowing backwards. Instead of falling down like you would expect gravity to make it do, the water was climbing up the steep cliff face and then retreating upriver as far as the eye could see. It was a waterfall in reverse. “It’s a water-rise,” Dean said, and chuckled at himself.

The people hanging around seemed pretty chill with the laws of physics suddenly deciding to take a day off, their first instinct being to film it on their smartphones. One idiot climbed onto the stone wall on the far side of the safety handrail and moonwalked along it while his friend filmed him. “This is so going viral!” the idiot yelled.

“It wasn’t like that yesterday,” Sam said. “It was just a normal waterfall. Right?”

“Yeah. Can waterfalls reverse themselves? Is that something that happens?” Dean was casting his mind back to all the shows he had watched on the Discovery Channel, trying to remember if there was some natural phenomenon that could explain this, something to do with the phases of the moon or the tides or some shit like that.

“Hasn’t happened before.” The voice came from behind him, and Dean whirled around. It was the dynamic duo again, now back in their sheriff’s department uniforms. Harry continued, “We got a few calls about it, so we came to see for ourselves.” He seemed pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, but Dean got the impression that he was used to dealing with things he didn’t understand. Next to Harry, Cooper was holding a travel mug of coffee and looking excited.

“Why is your waterfall flowing backwards?” Sam asked, almost accusingly, like the thing was doing it on purpose just to piss him off.

“No idea.” Harry peered over the edge, as if to confirm the water’s flow direction, then turned to Cooper. “Coop?”

“Clearly, such a reversal of the normal order of things must have some significance.”

An old man in a bathrobe came walking purposefully up to them. “Sheriff, I trust you’re investigating this …” Words appeared to fail him. “This incident?”

“Well, Ben,” Harry drawled. “It’s not really a crime, is it?”

“It’s a crime against the laws of nature,” the guy retorted. Dean had to admit it was a fair point.

Cooper intervened by saying, “Ben, we are of course as interested as you are in discovering the cause of this phenomenon. By the way, have you met FBI Special Agents Page and Plant? They’re guests in the hotel while they’re in town investigating the Helen Briggs case with us.”

“Ben Horne,” the old guy said, shaking hands with Sam and Dean. “I own the hotel. Of course, I’m retired now from the daily operations,” he added quickly, as if to point out that he was not responsible for whatever the waterfall did nowadays. “I keep busy now working on my book. It’s a new retelling of the Battle of Gettysburg. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying your stay, Agents?”

“Yeah. The water pressure is great,” Dean said.

“Well, I hope you can figure out what’s causing this and put Whitetail Falls back to normal,” Ben said loftily to the sheriff. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to run a hotel when our chief scenic attraction is behaving so unpredictably.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Sam was scrolling through social media on his phone. “If anything, this is going to help your business. The hashtag ImpossibleWaterfall is already trending on Instagram.”

“Really?” Ben looked intrigued. “Maybe we can start marketing that. Well, I’d best be off, a TV news crew from Spokane is on their way. Thank you, gentlemen.”

“You’re welcome, Ben.” Harry waited until Ben was gone, then said flatly, “Slimy rat bastard. Well, what do you think, Coop?”

“We should go investigate the phenomenon up close,” Cooper said, gesturing to the base of the falls.

Dean didn’t really see the point of that, because they could see it perfectly fine from up here, but he and Sam followed Harry and Cooper down the narrow staircase built into the cliffside down to the base of the waterfall. Standing on the slippery rock with the falls looming above them, they stood there for a moment and regarded the scene. Yup, it was flowing backwards all right. Suddenly, with almost perfect coming timing, the water rushing up the cliff face reversed itself and started falling back down instead, as if gravity had just returned from a smoke break. The water-rise was once again a waterfall, and the four of them were immediately soaked by its mist.

“Fascinating,” Cooper shouted over the roar of the falls. “It seems as though it was waiting for us to come down here before restoring itself. It must be a message.”

“Yeah? What’s the message?” Dean shouted back.

“I have no idea.” Cooper looked more excited than concerned about that.

They went back up the stairs to the overlook platform, where the disappointed-looking crowd was dispersing now that it was just an ordinary boring waterfall that obeyed the laws of physics. “Well, what now?” Sam asked. His hair was dripping water across his face.

“We were going to head out to Ghostwood,” Harry said. “You can come with us if you want.”

“Ghostwood?”

“It’s a country club and housing development just outside of town. Helen mentioned it in one of her videos, so we thought we should go check it out.”

Dean remembered Helen saying something about “ghost wood”, but he hadn’t realized it was an actual place. Sounded ominous enough. “Okay,” Dean said. “Lead the way.” He tried to remember what Helen had said about Ghostwood. Something about it being a meeting place, between the insubstantial and the solid, the living and the dead. Sounded like it could be the place where Helen had run into the evil that had haunted and killed her.

On the way to Ghostwood, they stopped at the lake where Helen’s body had been found. According to Harry, it was the exact same spot where Laura’s body was found in 1989. They stood on the lakeshore for a few minutes. It was a beautiful, lonely spot. The day was calm but overcast, and the surface of the lake was as smooth as a mirror, fringed by the reflections of the dark evergreens growing on its shore.

Sam couldn’t shake off the sense of unease he had felt all morning. His dream of the red room had been vivid and unsettling. He hoped that what he had told Dean was true, that the dream was just the product of him dwelling on the case, but he wasn’t sure he was even convinced of that himself.

Not seeing any sign of additional evidence at the scene, Sam and Dean got back in the Impala, continuing to follow Harry and Cooper’s pickup to a side road a few more miles down the highway, marked by an ornate sign reading “Ghostwood Estates.” They pulled into a parking lot that looked like the world’s fanciest log cabin, marked “Clubhouse,” and got out.

Harry again deferred to Cooper on their next move, and Cooper suggested proceeding on foot from there to see if they came across anything unusual. So they began walking the roads of the development, which were lined with identical luxury homes with perfectly manicured lawns. Over the roofs of the houses, the tops of the distant tall evergreens could be seen looming over the fastidious landscaping of the cul-de-sacs like a beast readying to pounce.

“Who would buy a house in a place called Ghostwood, anyway?” Dean wondered aloud.

“Retired Californians, for the most part,” Cooper answered, sounding a bit bitter.

Harry launched into the backstory of the development. “This place was built in the early nineties. That was a tough time economically for old timber towns like Twin Peaks. Logging and processing of lumber were both way down. Most people around here blamed the environmentalists, but a lot of it was just international trade, more automated processing in the mills, stuff like that. Plus, there just weren’t as many big trees as there used to be. Doug firs grow fast in this climate, but you can’t get as much profit per acre for a tree farm as you can clearcutting an old-growth forest. But now almost all the old-growth is gone.”

“When I first came here, there were more trees than I had ever seen in my life,” Cooper interjected sadly. “But there are so few of the really tall and majestic ones left now.”

Harry squeezed Cooper’s shoulder. “Anyway,” Harry continued, “the mill here in Twin Peaks burned down in ’89, and it was never rebuilt. The Martells, who owned the mill, decided to get investors to build this development instead. Actually, it was originally Ben Horne’s idea, but then he ran a campaign against it once Catherine Martell took it over, because they hated each other. The idea behind the development was that timber was the past, tourism and retirement communities were the future. But in order to build here, they had to cut down a large area of the remaining old-growth forest, where we’re standing now.”

“It was a tragedy,” Cooper said. “All those beautiful trees …”

“There were a couple years in ’91, ’92, when it was like a battleground here,” Harry said. “Audrey Horne, Ben’s daughter, was going to college at Evergreen, this hippie school in Olympia. She brought a bunch of her friends out here, and they sat in trees and chained themselves to bulldozers, things like that, to try to stop the construction. And my own deputy joined them.” He grinned fondly at Cooper.

“But, sadly, we were unsuccessful,” Cooper finished the story. “Construction of Ghostwood Estates was completed in 1994, and that began the influx of out-of-state retirees to Twin Peaks. Since then, there have been several other new housing developments, many new chain restaurants moving into town, and so on. There was a downturn during the recession in 2008, but real estate in the area is rebounding again. Construction is starting on an expansion of Ghostwood Estates into the remaining forest.”

“The development isn’t even owned locally anymore,” Harry added. “Catherine Martell died about ten years ago, and her husband Pete is retired. Gone fishing, as he says. He didn’t want anything to do with running the place. So it was bought out by a big real-estate company in San Francisco.”

Well, that sounded like a pretty typical story of homogenizing corporate forces taking over local communities and obliterating the things that made them special in the first place. Sam had seen that happen all across the country. Still, Twin Peaks seemed plenty forested and quirky to him. He couldn’t imagine what it must have been like before if this was the deforested, corporatized version of the place.

Maybe it was just because Sam was used to looking for sinister undertones in seemingly normal places, or maybe he was just primed by the name of the development, but he was definitely getting a creepy vibe from Ghostwood Estates. Despite the sprawling vastness of the development, Ghostwood felt strangely empty. It was clear from the cars parked out front and the decorations on the porches that most of the houses were occupied, but there was hardly anyone outside, and most of the homes had their curtains drawn.

As they passed one house, they did see someone out in the front yard. It was a woman, early sixties, who was, incredibly enough, dead-lifting what had to be a 350-pound barbell. “Hello, Sheriff, Deputy,” she called, casually dropping the barbell, which sank a couple of inches into the wet grass. The woman had an eyepatch and looked like she could kick all their asses single-handedly. “What brings you here?”

“Hello, Nadine,” Cooper said politely. “We’re just following up on a lead in the Helen Briggs case.”

“Oh, that poor girl,” she said. Walking across the lawn closer to them, she turned a predatory look on Sam and Dean. “And who are your handsome young friends?”

“FBI Special Agents Page and Plant,” Harry said. “They’re working the case with us.”

“So glad to have you in town, Agents,” she said alluringly, running her hand up and down Sam’s arm. “Are you in need of any drape runners?”

“What?” Sam stammered. Was that some kind of pickup line? He took a step back, trying to get out of range of her hand.

“Drape runners. They’re completely silent. I designed them myself. If you would like to come inside, I would be happy to give you a demo.” She winked at Sam. At least, he was pretty sure it was a wink, it was hard to tell given she just had the one eye.

“Uh, no thanks. We don’t have any drapes.” That was true enough, the bunker was underground and therefore lacking in windows.

“Oh, well, that’s all right. I mean, maybe you would be interested in the carpet instead.” Okay, that was definitely a wink that time.

Harry came to his rescue. “Sorry, Nadine, we’ve got work to do.” He herded Sam away down the street.

“Well, you’re welcome back anytime,” she called after them, looking disappointed.

Dean, the shit, was cracking up. Harry and Cooper looked amused, too. “Believe it or not, she’s a millionaire,” Harry said. “She really does hold a patent on silent drape runners, and for some reason people really do buy them.”

They continued down the street. Sam had lost all sense of direction. Navigating the network of suburban streets was like wandering a corn maze. Branching off from the main street was a seemingly endless series of cul-de-sacs, with wrought-iron signs listing their names. Fir Place, Cedar Way, Hemlock Drive. All named after the trees that had been cut down to build them.

A faint engine sound approached. They hadn’t seen any moving vehicles since entering the development. Turning, they saw a golf cart driving up the street behind them. Pulling up alongside them, it stopped. Its driver was a woman around Sam’s age, small and dark, dressed in a black pantsuit. “Can I help you gentlemen?” she asked in a husky voice.

“I’m Sheriff Truman, this is Deputy Cooper and FBI Special Agents Page and Plant.” So there was at least one person in town Harry and Cooper didn’t already know. “We’re investigating the death of Helen Briggs.”

“Oh, yes, I heard about that on the news. My name is Trixie.” She didn’t offer a last name. Beside him, Sam could sense Dean sizing her up and trying to figure out if she moonlighted as a stripper, given that there was probably no one in the world named Trixie who wasn’t a stripper. “I manage Ghostwood Estates on behalf of Gateway Holdings.” So that was probably why Harry and Cooper didn’t know her. She wasn’t a local, she worked for the San Francisco-based real-estate company.

Harry pulled out a photo of Helen Briggs and handed it to Trixie. “Have you ever seen this girl around the development?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, studying the photo. “I don’t remember her specifically, but teenagers from town do sometimes come to the estates to cause trouble.”

“Our office hasn’t received any calls about that.”

“Oh, it’s just minor trouble. They sometimes hang out in the woods surrounding the development, drinking, partying, things like that. Just kids being kids. We have our own security here, so we prefer to handle these matters in-house rather than getting law enforcement involved.”

“Can you show us where these teenagers typically go?” Cooper asked.

“Of course. It’s not far, follow me.”

She drove her golf cart at about three miles an hour so the four of them could walk behind. A short distance up the street, she pulled over to park. They were now in the outer ring of the development, with cookie-cutter houses and lawns lining one side of the street and the dark, wild forest on the other side. Having parked the golf cart, Trixie led them along a faint path through the trees, for maybe half a mile’s distance. There was one point where they had to squeeze between two fir trees growing close together, their interleaved branches forming a ceiling overhead, with an effect like walking through a gate.

“This is the usual spot,” Trixie said. Surrounded by log seats was a fire ring built out of rocks, containing half-charred pizza boxes and melted candy wrappers, and several empty bottles of Captain Morgan rum were scattered about. “They leave so much garbage here, it attracts the damn coyotes.” She flashed a grin.

Cooper walked around the site, scrutinizing every inch. He poked at the ashes in the fire ring with a stick, picked up and examined every piece of garbage, turned over all the empty bottles. The rest of the group just stood watching, silently. Sam couldn’t tell if Cooper was looking for anything specific or not, but he was definitely being thorough about it. At one point, he got down on his hands and knees and literally sniffed the dirt next to the fire ring. At that, he froze. “Harry,” he said.

Harry knelt down next to Cooper and brought a handful of dirt up to his own face. “That’s it. This is where he found her.”

Exchanging a look, Sam and Dean joined the dirt-sniffing party. There was a strong odor in the dirt, but Sam couldn’t identify it. It smelled sort of like burned engine oil. He looked at Dean, who shrugged.

“I believe we’ve found everything we need to here,” Cooper said. “Sam, Dean, would you be willing to come back to the station with us? It may be advantageous at this time for us to compare notes.”

Trixie (who Dean was convinced must have a second job as a stripper) took her leave, and the four of them retraced their steps back to the clubhouse (hilariously, although Nadine was no longer in her front yard, Sam crossed over to the other side of the street when they passed her house, clearly afraid that his new deadlifting one-eyed drape-running girlfriend was going to come out and tackle him). They drove on the highway back into town, pulling into the sheriff’s station.

The station, like every other building they had been inside in Twin Peaks, had wood paneling all over the place like a log cabin. They were greeted at the front door by a grey-haired woman, around sixty, who looked up from her computer at the reception desk. “I guess these must be the FBI agents,” she said upon seeing Sam and Dean. Her voice was piercingly shrill. “Even though they don’t look like FBI agents, because they’re not wearing suits. But I’ve never understood why FBI agents have to wear suits all the time anyway –”

“Lucy,” Harry cut her off. “They’re not really FBI agents. They’re a different kind of expert. Can you call everyone into the conference room, please?”

Lucy nodded, eyes wide. Harry and Cooper led Sam and Dean into the conference room, where Dean’s attention was immediately drawn to the piles of donuts stacked in towers on the table. It was like Homer Simpson’s wet dream. Automatically, as if it was a choreographed routine they had practiced, Cooper poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Harry, accepting in return the jelly donut Harry had picked up for him. “Please, help yourselves,” Cooper said to Sam and Dean.

Dean needed no further invitation. He grabbed a Boston crème and a chocolate glazed and immediately stuffed half of one of the donuts into his mouth. Sam poured himself a cup of coffee, giving him side-eye. “Mmm, donuts,” Dean said with his mouth full, just to annoy Sam.

Lucy entered the room, followed by three of the people Dean had seen sitting with Harry and Cooper at the bar the previous night. Harry introduced everyone. “Lucy Moran, our receptionist. Her husband Deputy Andy Brennan,” the skinny balding guy smiled and waved, “and their daughter Deputy Lily Brennan.” That was the intense-looking blond girl, who looked barely old enough to drink. Nepotism was apparently a thing in the Twin Peaks sheriff’s department. “And this is Deputy Hill.”

“Call me Hawk,” said the Native guy.

Everyone sat around the conference table, and Harry began the meeting. “As we talked about at the meeting last night, Sam and Dean here are hunters. They have experience in fighting monsters, and I think we all agree that we can use all the help we can get.”

Dean felt his hackles raise a bit at finding out that the sheriff had blown their covers without asking first, but whatever, these people all worked for the sheriff’s department. If Harry trusted them, he guessed he and Sam could trust them, inasmuch they trusted Harry and Cooper. And, for whatever reason, he found that he did trust Harry and Cooper. Cooper was bizarrely likeable, and Dean was a good enough judge of character to be confident that he was a straight arrow. As for Harry, he reminded Dean of a hunter, like their dad or Bobby, with the same reserves of quiet strength, a sense of having seen it all, and giving zero fucks. He even had a badass-looking scar on his neck, like someone had tried and failed to slash his throat, which Dean respected. Anyway, Harry and Cooper had had the opportunity to screw them over by turning them in to the real FBI, but instead had seemed to genuinely want their help. So yeah, Dean was pretty sure they had made the right call in agreeing to work with these guys.

“Sam, Dean,” Cooper took over. “Would you please tell us what you have uncovered so far in your investigation?”

Despite being put on the spot, Sam spoke confidently. “Well, we know that the thing that killed Helen Briggs was the same thing that killed Laura Palmer twenty-five years ago. We believe that thing goes by the name Bob.” Dean really wished the thing had a less dumb name, it was undercutting the drama of Sam’s spiel. “We don’t know exactly what kind of monster Bob is, but it’s possible that he has some kind of connection to a place of evil known as the Black Lodge.”

“You guys are good.” Harry sounded impressed.

“So if you knew all that, what did you need us for?” Dean asked. He didn’t like having his time wasted.

“We know Bob is the killer,” Cooper said. “We don’t know how to defeat him. We would be very interested in learning, based on your prior experience with supernatural entities, your assessment of Bob’s nature.”

“Well, like I said, we don’t know exactly what he is.” Sam glanced at Dean. “But from what we’ve seen so far, it seems like the thing he’s closest to is a demon.”

Cooper looked intrigued. “You’ve encountered demons.”

Dean snorted. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Okay, here’s Demonology 101.” Sam was launching into lecture mode, the nerd. “One of the key characteristics of demons is that they can’t exist outside of hell in their true form. They need a meatsuit.”

“Meatsuit?” Andy repeated. He looked faintly ill.

“A human to possess,” Dean explained. “Most people don’t survive the experience of being possessed. We’re thinking maybe Bob was possessing Leland Palmer when he killed Laura. Then when you fine officers had him in your custody, Bob bugged out and left Leland to die.” 

“That is pretty much what happened,” Harry said. He leaned across the table. “Can you kill a demon?”

“Can we?” Dean laughed. “Yeah, we have our ways.”

“What are those ways?”

“Various sharp objects, mostly. We’ve got a special knife that works nicely, and an angel blade that usually gets the job done.”

“Do you have them with you?”

Well, that was a dumb question. “Why wouldn’t we have them with us? Of course we do. They’re out in the trunk.”

Harry looked, as always, to Cooper, who met his gaze. “Harry, it’s risky. We don’t know that these weapons will work on Bob. He may be different from other demons.”

“Yeah, most of them have way cooler names,” Dean muttered.

Sam jumped in. “I don’t think you need to worry about that. In our experience, these blades will kill most things.”

Harry and Cooper still hadn’t looked away from each other. “Coop, it has a better chance of working than anything else we’ve got.” Harry’s voice was pitched low, like Cooper was the only one in the room.

“Not anything else.” Cooper’s response was equally soft.

“Yes, anything else.” Harry’s voice hardened with resolve, and he finally broke his intense eye contact with Cooper to look at Hawk. “What do you think, Hawk?”

“The weapons we have are useless against Bob,” Hawk said thoughtfully. “We would be foolish not to at least try the blades these hunters have brought us.”

“So we’re agreed, then.” Harry didn’t bother to ask the Brennans for their opinion, but all of three of them looked like they were fine with not having a vote.

“Okay, glad that’s settled,” Dean said. “So where do we find this Bob douchebag so we can introduce him to the sharp end?”

“That’s the other problem we’re currently facing,” Cooper said. He looked a bit upset after whatever his disagreement had been with Harry. “We don’t know his whereabouts.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Sam asked.

“It’s like you said,” Harry replied. “It seems he needs to possess people. So we’re assuming that he’s possessing someone in town now, but we don’t know who.”

“Well, today’s your lucky day,” Dean said cheerfully. “We offer a full range of demon-related services, including summoning spells.”

“Spells? You mean, like magic?”

“Yeah, it’s not as impressive as it sounds. Get some herbs and candles together, draw a sigil, recite some Latin, and boom, Bob and his current meatsuit show up.”

“How much time do you need to get this spell ready?”

Dean looked at Sam, who shrugged and said, “I’m pretty sure we’ve got everything we need. So we’re ready to go when you guys are.”

Harry glanced over at Cooper, apparently didn’t like the look he received, and looked away again. “We’ll do it at the Bookhouse tonight,” he said, determined, and glanced at his watch. “In the meantime, we should get going to Helen’s funeral. I want us all there, just in case Bob shows up.”

Meeting adjourned, they all dispersed. Dean grabbed one more donut for the road, and he and Sam followed Harry and Cooper out of the station. When they pushed open the front door, Lucy was standing on the front steps, coat halfway on, holding a small cardboard package about the size of a cupcake box from a bakery. “Deputy Cooper, this package was on the top step here. It’s for you. It has your name on it anyway. Your first name, which is kind of strange, because no one calls you by your first name, not even the sheriff.”

“Let me see it, Lucy,” Harry said, grabbing the box out of her hand. He examined the label, with “Dale” scrawled on in block letters, then shook the box, trying to determine what was inside. “It’s something small and light.” He turned to Sam and Dean. “Do you boys have any magic spell that can see inside here without needing to open it?”

“Uh, no, not that I can think of,” Sam said. “I think x-ray machines do that though.”

“Harry, I’ll just open it.” Cooper sounded resigned.

“No, it has to be from Bob. It could be something dangerous.”

“He wouldn’t send something dangerous in a package, he prefers to take a hands-on approach. I have no doubt that the box contains something unpleasant, but it may also be a clue to Bob’s current whereabouts or the identity of the person he’s possessing.” Cooper reached out for the box, but Harry turned away and hunched over it protectively.

“I don’t want you opening it, Coop.”

Cooper sighed heavily. “Harry, as always I appreciate your concern, but –” he was interrupted by the sound of tearing cardboard. Harry had opened the box himself so Cooper wouldn’t have to. “Very well,” Cooper said patiently. “What is it?”

“Nothing dangerous,” Harry said, turning back around to show them. “Something unpleasant, like you said, but not nearly as unpleasant as I expected. I thought it was going to be a human body part or something.”

“So did I,” Cooper said in mild surprise.

“What is that?” Dean asked, peering into the box. It contained nothing but a small mass of organic material he couldn’t identify.

“It’s an owl pellet.” Harry sounded puzzled.

“What the hell is an owl pellet?”

“Owls and other birds of prey regurgitate parts of their food they can’t digest. Bones, fur, teeth, things like that.”

“Okay, first of all, gross,” Sam said. “Second, why would Bob send you that?”

“It’s a clear enough message,” Cooper said flatly. “It symbolizes what he did last time, what he’s going to do again. Swallow me whole and spit out the bones.”

Harry flinched as though the box he was holding had burned him. He wheeled around and threw it, owl pellet and all, into the garbage can by the door. The he turned back to Cooper, taking his hand. “Coop. I’m not going to let him near you this time. I mean it. He’s going to have to get through me first.”

“Harry, that’s not what I want to hear.” Cooper closed his eyes and gripped Harry’s hand back.

“It’s the truth.”

“I know.”

Lucy, who had been watching the whole drama silently, hit Dean’s arm and gestured with her head toward the parking lot. Taking the hint, Sam and Dean walked over to the Impala. “What was that about?” Sam asked Lucy, leaning against the hood.

“It’s happening again,” Lucy said. She had tears in her eyes. “All of it.”

“What’s happening?”

Lucy shook her head, unable to say any more, which was a problem she didn’t seem to have very often. “We’d better head over to the funeral,” she said simply, and walked over to the SUV where her husband and daughter were waiting for her.

“Well, it sounds like Cooper has some history with Bob,” Sam said.

“Yeah. That might complicate things. It’s never good when demons get to Fatal Attraction levels of obsession with someone.” Dean spoke from experience, given that he and Sam had been the favorite playthings of way too many monsters over the years.

Looking back at the entrance to the sheriff’s station, Dean saw that Harry and Cooper were still standing there, holding hands, heads bent together so that their foreheads were almost touching. He couldn’t tell if they were talking, or just standing there silently, but he could see the look on their faces in profile, turned toward one another. It was a look he recognized, from all the times he and Sam had gone into battle together against hopeless odds, fully expecting to lose. A look of you and me, against the world. A look of maybe we’re going down, but we’re going down together.

Chapter Text

Everyone was at the funeral. Not that Sam knew everyone in Twin Peaks, of course, but literally every single person they had met in town was there, as well as probably a couple hundred people they hadn’t, milling around the cemetery where he and Dean had torched Leland Palmer’s bones the previous night. Sam cast a critical eye at the reburying job they had done on Leland’s grave, and was pleased to see that there was no sign of disturbed-looking soil. Of course, it helped that it had rained overnight and the ground everywhere was soggy, with mud squelching out of every footfall on the grass.

Dr. Hayward was with a guy around her age in a leather jacket, who looked like he was apologizing to her for something. Shelly Briggs stood with her arm around Raven, whose face looked pale in contrast with her newly dyed black hair, while Bobby escorted his confused-looking father to a chair. Ben Horne came up to Bobby and shook his hand, extending what appeared to be sincere condolences. Norma, accompanied by a big guy who must be her husband, threw her arms around Shelly, and the two women cried together for a bit.

Sam wandered through the crowd on Bob-meatsuit patrol, keeping an eye out for anyone who looked weird. Then he saw the Log Lady, who had draped her log with a black veil for the occasion, and realized he needed to reframe his objective. He needed to be looking for people who were not just weird, but weird in a suspicious, murder-y way. Then he accidentally made eye contact with Nadine, who was skulking around the edge of the crowd. Panicking, Sam fled over to the Brennans so he could pretend to be engrossed with conversation with them to dissuade Nadine from approaching him. There was a fourth person standing with the Brennan family. Sam recognized him as the kid who worked the front desk at the Great Northern, Clyde or something. As Sam tried to position himself to use the Brennans as a human shield against Nadine, Harry strolled up. He and Cooper had arrived at the cemetery a few minutes after Sam and Dean.

“Do you have the knife?” Harry asked Sam in a low voice.

“Dean does.” Sam nodded toward Dean, who was mingling with the crowd. Before they left the sheriff’s station, Dean had gotten the demon-killing knife out of the trunk and hidden it in a holster on the inside of his jacket. He was going to keep it there until they dealt with Bob. Sam’s hands itched for the angel blade, but they had left it in the trunk because it was too big to be concealed.

Harry nodded. “Good. During the service, I’d like to spread us all out evenly so we can watch the crowd. Coop and I will be in the front, and Hawk is going to stay by that tree. Sam, you and Dean take the back. Andy and Lily, you can stay right here. Everyone just keep an eye out for anything strange, and especially for any physical changes in anyone’s face. Bob’s probably here, he wouldn’t want to miss the fun, and maybe he’ll get so excited he won’t be able to completely conceal himself.”

“I won’t let you down, Sheriff,” Lily said. She didn’t actually salute but might as well have.

“Lily,” Harry said, “the last time you said that was when I sent you out to write traffic tickets on Highway 31, and you ended up in a high-speed chase with a snowmobile. So, please, just take it down a few notches.”

“Yes, Sheriff.”

As soon as Harry moved on, Clyde started mocking Lily. “I won’t let you down, Sheriff. You’re such a dork!”

“Some of us have careers we take seriously,” she retorted. “We can’t all spend our work days playing smartphone games and sneaking out to smoke pot by the dumpsters.”

“Hey, it’s legal now!”

“It wasn’t the first time I busted you for it.”

“You weren’t even a cop then, you were twelve years old!”

“I’ve always been a cop.” Sam kind of believed her on that.

“Children,” Lucy broke in, “please be nice. This is a funeral.”

“Yeah, there’s no need to fight,” Andy agreed. “Your mom and I are real proud of both of you.”

Sam saw that Nadine had wandered off, so he felt safe moving away again. He and Dean convened at the back of the crowd at the spot Harry had designated, just as the funeral service began. As the minister droned on, Sam and Dean scanned the faces in the crowd. Everyone Sam could see looked appropriately somber, many in tears. It seemed that Helen Briggs had been well-known and well-loved in town.

Just as the minister wrapped things up and the coffin was starting to be lowered into the grave, there came a scream from the middle of the crowd. Sam whipped his head around to see who it was. It was an old woman with white frizzy hair. She screamed again and again, placing her hands over her face as if it pain. She sounded like she was being tortured. As people moved away from her uncertainly, Sam and Dean shoved their way toward her from the back of the crowd as Harry and Cooper made their way from the front.

Dr. Hayward, who had been nearby, was the first person to reach the woman. “Come on, Mrs. Palmer,” she said soothingly, taking her by the arm and guiding her to a less crowded spot. The woman allowed herself to be led but didn’t relent her screaming for even a second.

“Palmer?” Sam asked Hawk, who had joined them over by where Dr. Hayward was examining the old woman.

Hawk nodded. “That’s Sarah Palmer. Laura’s mother.”

Damn. That woman had been through a lot, with her husband raping and murdering her daughter. Sam couldn’t blame her for being a bit unstable, especially given that Helen’s funeral was probably giving her flashbacks of Laura’s death. Still, the constant screaming seemed a bit excessive.

Harry and Cooper arrived, and the Brennans a moment later. “Doc? What’s wrong with her?” Harry shouted at Dr. Hayward over Sarah’s continued screaming.

“I don’t know.” The doctor had produced a water bottle and was trying to get Sarah to drink. “I can’t find anything physically wrong. It could be from the emotional trauma.”

“It’s more than that,” Cooper said grimly. He took Sarah’s hands between his own and looked right in her eyes, even though the volume must have been deafening at that close of a range. “Sarah, he’s here, isn’t he?”

Sarah made no acknowledgement that she had heard him. The screaming continued unabated.

“Sarah, I promise that we’ll protect you from him.” It was impressive how calmly Cooper could speak while someone was screaming bloody murder in his face. “We need you to tell us where he is. Can you help us, please?”

Still no reaction. Dr. Hayward started pulling Sarah toward the parking lot. “I’m going to have to bring her to the hospital and sedate her, otherwise she’s going to do herself serious harm from all this stress.”

“We’ll come with you,” Harry said. “Hawk, you’re with us. Sam, Dean, Andy, Lily, you stay here and keep watching the crowd. Bob has to be here. If we don’t find him now, we’ll meet at the Bookhouse tonight at eight. Andy can give you guys directions.” With that, he and Cooper hurried after Dr. Hayward and Sarah Palmer.

As Sarah was escorted away, the sounds of her screams gradually subsided. The funeral crowd had already begun to disperse, apparently weirded out by the disturbing interruption. Sam and Dean watched as a steady stream of people came up to the Briggs family to offer hugs and condolences. As he watched, Sam reflected that one of these people, who the Briggs family saw as their friends and neighbors, was in all likelihood harboring the demon who had killed their daughter. Bob was probably getting off at watching the suffering he had caused. The thought made Sam angry, but there was nothing to do about it now. The crowd grew thinner and thinner, until eventually the only people left in the cemetery were the Winchesters, the Brennans, and the Briggses. As if she had been holding herself together by a thread, Shelly started to sob again. Both Bobby and Raven wrapped their arms around her, Garland Briggs still sitting in his chair and staring listlessly into space. Sam, Dean, and the Brennans quietly left the grieving family alone in the cemetery, the smell of wet earth filling the air from the freshly dug grave.

Dean hadn’t known exactly what the Bookhouse was, but it turned out it was pretty much what it sounded like. He and Sam arrived there just before the appointed time of eight, having spent the evening grabbing dinner at the Double R Diner (complete with more awesome cherry pie) and then checking their stash of supplies to make sure that they had everything they needed for the summoning spell. Harry and Cooper were already at the Bookhouse when they arrived, along with Hawk, Lily, and the big guy Dean had seen at the bar last night, the one who had taken away the douchebag who tried to start a fight over Donna. “This is Big Ed Hurley,” Harry said by way of introduction. “He’s another one of the Bookhouse Boys.”

“Bookhouse Boys?” Dean asked.

“It’s sort of a club,” Harry explained. “We’ve been keeping an eye on the darkness in the woods for quite a few years.”

“Kind of like the Men of Letters,” Sam said. At Harry’s questioning look, he clarified, “Another secret society that researches the supernatural, which is now defunct in the US. When we’re not on the road, we live in an old Men of Letters bunker in Kansas. It has even more books than this place does.”

“Yeah, I guess all monster-fighting secret societies were formed by a bunch of book-obsessed nerds,” Dean said.

“And sexists. Don’t forget sexists,” Lily pointed out.

“Well, we took a vote,” Harry said to Sam and Dean, “and you guys are in. Welcome to the Bookhouse Boys. Or Bookhouse People,” he corrected himself at a look from Lily.

“Awesome,” Dean said. “Do we get a secret decoder ring?”

Harry grinned. “Nope, just a patch.” He tossed them said patches, which depicted an evergreen tree with a sword going through it.

“Thank you,” Sam said politely. Clearly this club was a big deal to these people, so Dean guessed it was a good sign that he and Sam had earned enough trust to be welcomed in.

“Well, we couldn’t get any information out of Sarah Palmer,” Harry said. “Doc Hayward had to sedate her. I had Andy go over to the hospital to keep an eye on her. I’m worried Bob might go after her now that it’s clear she knows who he’s possessing.”

“Well, all the more reason to get this show on the road, I guess,” Dean said. “You don’t mind if we mark up your floor here, do you?”

He drew a devil’s trap on the floor in chalk while Sam readied the sigil and herbs for the spell. Then Dean got out the demon-killing knife and filled some shotgun shells with rock salt while Sam, who had the angel blade, lit the candles that were arrayed on the sigil.

“If I may ask, what exactly is your plan here?” Cooper spoke from the back of the room, where he was leaning against the wall. He had been uncharacteristically quiet all evening.

“The plan is, we summon the demon, we kill the demon.” Dean made a jabbing motion with the knife to demonstrate.

“Dean, I think they want a bit more detail than that,” Sam said. He turned to Cooper. “When we say the incantation, Bob should appear here, wearing his current meatsuit. The devil’s trap should immobilize him, and also make him unable to use most of his powers. So we should be able to use the blades to take him out. That is,” Sam paused, “unless you want us to try to save whoever he’s possessing.”

“You can do that?” Harry asked.

“Well, maybe. Exorcisms can be a bit tricky. And the host usually dies anyway. But if you want, we can try.”

“No.” Cooper spoke flatly. “There’s no saving them. Believe me, death will be a mercy.” Harry shot him a troubled look at that.

“Okay.” Sam shrugged. “Well, we’re good to go if you guys are.”

The seven of them positioned themselves around the devil’s trap. Sam and Dean held the blades, and the others had their shotguns, loaded with rock salt. That should at least slow Bob down if all else failed. Sam recited the Latin incantation. As he finished, the flames from the candles flickered as though from a breeze.

Nothing happened.

Sam raised his eyebrows at Dean, who shrugged back. Sam cleared his throat and recited the incantation again.

Nothing continued to happen.

“Well, this is embarrassing,” Dean said into the awkward silence.

Harry lowered his salt-loaded shotgun. “I thought you said you’d done this before,” he said reproachfully. He looked like he was about to demand that they return their Bookhouse Boys patches.

“We have.” Dean felt defensive. “Lots of times. We’ve don’t usually have, uh, performance problems.”

“It’s because Bob is different,” Cooper said quietly. He left the circle, pacing across the room. “He’s not like other demons.”

“Okay, different how?” Sam asked. “Maybe if we have a better understanding of what he is, we can find a different spell, one that will work.”

“What exactly are demons?” Cooper asked. “The kind you usually encounter, I mean.”

“Well, they’ve lying, evil scum,” Dean answered. “Most of them have very little sense of humor and poor social skills.”

“They start off as humans,” Sam answered, seeming to get what Cooper was asking. “When human souls are condemned to Hell, they’re tormented until they become demons.”

“That’s the difference,” Cooper said with certainty. “Bob was never human.”

“So where did he come from?” Sam asked.

“From the Black Lodge.” Cooper turned to look out the window at the dark woods outside.

“I found some references to the Black Lodge in the lore. So it’s a real place?”

“Yeah, it’s real,” Harry said, a hard edge in his voice.

Hawk spoke up. “The Black Lodge is a place of dark forces. It’s balanced by the White Lodge. The entrance to both Lodges is right here in Twin Peaks. Fear is the path to the Black Lodge, love leads to the White Lodge.”

Sam was furrowing his brow. “But what are these Lodges, exactly?”

“We’ve learned that they are part of a network of liminal spaces around the world,” Cooper said.

“Liminal?” Dean asked.

“In-between spaces, where reality can be directly encountered,” Cooper clarified. “There’s a sort of axis that runs through the world, and there are places where it intersects the surface. Invariably, these are places of great spiritual significance, playing a foundational role in the mythos of the local culture.”

“For us, the Lodges are the mouth of an ancient monster,” Hawk said. “This monster ate the world that came before this one. Coyote, the trickster, entered the monster’s mouth and cut out its heart. Then the monster’s body and blood became the land and the people.”

Well, maybe they were getting somewhere now, sort of. “Okay, so it seems like the reason the summoning spell didn’t work is that Bob’s not really a demon,” Dean reasoned. “Instead of coming from Hell, he comes from this Black Lodge. Maybe there’s a way to send him back there. I mean, that’s where he’s been for the past twenty-five years, right?”

Harry shook his head. “We have to destroy him this time. We can’t send him back again.”

“You sent him back last time? How?” Dammit, Dean fumed, this was the exact kind of information that really needed to be shared.

“It doesn’t matter.” Harry’s tone made it clear that he was not accepting any argument on the topic. “It’s not something we can do again.”

“Harry –” Cooper started to say.

“No, Coop. Not again.”

There was an awkward silence. “Okay,” Sam said slowly. “So we’re sticking with the plan of killing Bob. That should be doable, we have the weapons.” That statement earned him some raised eyebrows, and Sam added, “Even if he’s not a demon, the blades should still take care of him. They’re pretty indiscriminate in their killing ability.” The locals still looked a bit skeptical. Dean fumed again about the summoning spell being a bust. He and Sam screwed things up all the time, of course, just not usually in front of an audience. Sam continued, “So all we need to do is find him. Maybe we can find another summoning spell in the lore.”

Yay, more research. Lily and Big Ed both left for home, citing family obligations. Hawk volunteered to stay and help with the research. He found a book of Nez Perce mythology from a bookshelf and sank onto a couch in the back of the Bookhouse to leaf through its pages. Sam and Cooper sat at a table in the front. Cooper had also found some sort of book from the shelves, while Sam opened up his laptop to peruse their go-to online references to the occult. “This would be easier if we had access to the library at the bunker,” Sam said, staring at his screen.

“Yeah.” Dean remembered something. “I think we still have one of the spellbooks in the trunk, from the last coven we busted. I’ll go get it, maybe it has something.”

“I’ll come with you,” Harry said.

That seemed like kind of a weird offer, because the Impala was right outside, it wasn’t like he was on a major quest. Maybe Harry just wanted some fresh air, things seemed kind of tense between him and Cooper at the moment. Dean shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” As he and Harry stepped outside, Sam and Cooper appeared glued to their respective research materials.

Outside, Dean opened the hidden compartment in the Impala’s trunk, rummaging through it. There was a lot of crap in there, they should really do a spring cleaning sometime. Next to him, Harry leaned against the rear fender. “Dean, can I tell you something?”

“Yeah, sure.” Dean was only half-listening, distracted by his search for the spellbook. His hand encountered a small object with the texture of a peach pit, and he picked it up out of curiosity. A shrunken head. He couldn’t even remember where that had come from. His train of thought was derailed by Harry’s next words.

“I’m dying.” Harry gave a sort of half-laugh. “That’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.”

“What do you mean?” Dean dropped the shrunken head and straightened up to look at Harry in the glow of the lights from the Impala’s trunk.

“Pancreatic cancer. They tell me I only have a 25% chance of making it through the year, and a 5% chance of living for another five years.”

“Damn, that sucks. I’m sorry, man.” Dean was sorry. Harry was a good guy, and not really that old. Dean sat on the edge of the Impala’s trunk, and Harry sat next to him. Dean reflexively pulled his flask of whiskey from his jacket pocket and almost offered it to Harry before remembering that Harry was a recovering alcoholic. Feeling like a jerk, Dean took a quick sip himself and then returned the flask to his pocket.

“Didn’t mean to dump that on you,” Harry said. His voice and face were both calm. “We don’t really know each other, or course. But I felt like I had to tell someone, and I can’t tell anyone I do know right now.”

“Wait, so no one knows?”

Harry shook his head. “Just Doc Hayward. She was the one who sent me to see the oncologist in Spokane last week.” Dean remembered the brief interaction between Harry and Donna at the Roadhouse the previous night. Harry was gazing through the lit-up windows of the Bookhouse, where Cooper had put down his book and looked like he was in an intense conversation with Sam.

“You mean you haven’t told your—” Dean, realizing that he didn’t know the exact nature of Harry and Cooper’s relationship, paused and rephrased. “You haven’t told Cooper?”

“Not yet.” Now Harry’s voice was miserable. “Like I said, I just got the diagnosis last week. I was going to wait until after the 24^th, because the anniversary of Laura’s murder is always a tough time for us. But then, of course, with Helen’s murder and Bob being back …” Harry shook his head. “Coop needs to stay focused now. He can’t have dark thoughts or feelings, not when Bob’s around. It’s too dangerous for him.”

“You gotta tell him, man.” It was true that Dean didn’t know Harry and Cooper well, but it was clear that each was the other’s entire world. That was a painfully familiar feeling to Dean. “Listen, Sam and I just went through some serious shit. The details of what happened are insanely complicated, but the upshot is I lied to him, and he was pissed at me for it. I did it to protect him, and he knows that, but he’s still pissed. And he’s right to be.” Dean looked back through the Bookhouse window, where Sam had turned away from his laptop, apparently engrossed in his conversation with Cooper.

“But you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?” Harry’s voice was soft.

Dean sighed. “Yeah. But this is one of those ‘do as I say, not as I do’ things. You wouldn’t believe all the shit Sam and I have gone through. But lying to each other always seems to make things about ten time worse.” Then again, things between him and Sam seemed to better now. They always were when they fell into the familiar rhythms of a hunt. Standing up, Dean went back to rifling through the trunk.

“Coop’s never lied to me, and I’ve never lied to him.” Harry’s voice was so sure, Dean believed him. “And I’m not lying to him now. I will tell him. I just have to wait until Bob’s no longer a threat.”

“Well, all the more reason to find him and kick his ass, I guess.” Dean finally found the book he was looking for. “Got it. You okay to go back inside?”

“Yeah. Thanks for listening.”

“Anytime.” They walked back into the warm light of the Bookhouse, the darkness of the woods seeming to press in around the edges.

While Dean and Harry went outside to retrieve the spellbook from the Impala, Sam leaned back and tried to think of any dark-web hunter blogs he hadn’t already checked for information possibly relevant to Bob and the Black Lodge. Everything in this case seemed to be so regionally specific, the usual lore was failing them. Looking away from his laptop screen, Sam’s eye caught the title of the book Cooper was reading.

“The Tibetan Book of the Dead?” Sam asked. That seemed like an odd choice of reference material.

“It’s more relevant to our current predicament than you might expect,” Cooper said. “At root, there are more similarities than differences among the cosmologies of different cultures. And on a personal level, I’ve found this text to be especially helpful in developing the mental preparation I need for what lies ahead.”

Sam was silent for a moment, debating whether to ask what he wanted to ask, and ultimately deciding to go for it. “You were possessed by Bob back in 1989, weren’t you?”

Cooper didn’t miss a beat in replying. “Yes, that’s right.”

“So after Bob left Leland Palmer, he went after you.” Sam tried to reconstruct the sequence of events. “And you took him back into the Black Lodge.”

“There were some additional events in the interim, but that is essentially correct.” Cooper put down his book. “You would have been successful as an actual FBI agent, Sam.”

“Thanks.” The pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall into place in Sam’s mind. “So that’s why Harry is so freaked out. He’s afraid Bob will come after you again.”

Cooper glanced reflexively out the window to where Harry was outside, even though they couldn’t see anything with the Bookhouse’s interior light reflecting against the glass. “Harry is a man of action. He’s desperate to do something. It’s difficult for him to accept that some things may be outside of his control.” Based on all the available evidence, Sam figured there was no way in hell Harry would accept anything happening to Cooper, regardless of whether it was in his control or not. Cooper, seeming to want to change the subject, asked, “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any psychic proclivities?”

That came from out of left field. “Why do you ask?”

“I have some abilities in that regard myself, and I sense the same about you.”

“I used to have premonitions. It’s kind of a long story, but I was sort of, um, cured of that.” Sam hadn’t thought about Azazel in a while. “Anyway, it’s been years since I last had a vision.”

“But you had a dream last night,” Cooper said confidently. “You dreamed of a red room.”

“Well, yeah.” Sam was taken aback. “Laura Palmer wrote about the red room in her secret diary, and Helen Briggs talked about it in her videos. I figured it was just on my mind, and that’s why I dreamed of it.”

“No. That was the Black Lodge you dreamed of. While the Lodge is active, it emits a powerful energy. It’s not surprising that a psychically sensitive individual like you would detect it.”

“Oh.” That was a bit disconcerting. Sam knew Dean had been worried about that the dream had some larger significance, and maybe he had been right. “It was a weird dream. It felt almost like the room was inviting me in.”

Cooper nodded. “I’m familiar with the sensation. Here is my advice. Do not overestimate your abilities or underestimate the power of the Black Lodge. You don’t want to repeat the mistakes I made.”

“Okay.” They were interrupted by the return of Dean and Harry. It had taken them forever to find that spellbook.

Harry slid into the empty chair at their table. He laid his hand on Cooper’s wrist, and Cooper reached over with his other hand and squeezed Harry’s before picking up the Tibetan Book of the Dead again. They didn’t say anything to each other, but it looked like whatever tension had built up between them over how to handle the Bob situation had dissipated. Sighing, Sam went back to the dark underbelly of the Internet and continued his search for answers.

Chapter Text

They spent hours at the Bookhouse, scouring the spellbook and the Internet and reference texts on mythology for any information that could lead them to a summoning spell that might work on whatever Bob was. With no success, in the wee hours of the morning, they decided to call it a night. Sam and Dean made arrangements to check in again with Harry and Cooper in the morning, then drove the Impala back to the Great Northern.

Exhausted, Sam fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. But his sleep was troubled by dreams. He once again saw the red room, hung all around with red curtains, where a dwarf wearing a red suit sat on a couch. Sam tried to say something, to ask the dwarf what was going on, but his own words came out sounding like a foreign language. Then the entire scene fractured, like a reflection in a broken mirror, and the red curtains hanging down the sides of the room began flowing viscously downward like blood pooling from a wound.

Sam was awoken by something soft hitting him in the face. “What the fuck?” he found himself saying.

“Yeah, what the fuck is right,” Dean said. He was sitting propped up on his elbow in his bed, having apparently just thrown a pillow at Sam. “Did you have another dream? You were yelling in your sleep.” Grey dawn light was streaming through the window, illuminating the worried look on Dean’s face.

Sam suddenly felt, with a strong certainty, that there was something in the room with them. Not here, exactly. The bathroom. It was a cold feeling, like from a ghost, but harder somehow, and much stronger. He leapt out of bed and sprinted into the bathroom. Just as he entered, the ambient light from the window showed a flash of the bathroom mirror, shattered and dripping with blood as if someone had smashed their head into it. And in the shards, he caught a glimpse of a face, with gray stringy hair and wild eyes. Then, with another flash, the blood, the broken mirror, and the thing in it were all gone. All that was left was the smooth surface of the intact mirror, with nothing but Sam’s own face reflected in it.

“I repeat. What the fuck?” Dean said from where he had come up behind Sam.

“I don’t know.” Sam caught his breath, a bit freaked out. “I thought I felt something in here, then I thought I saw something in the mirror.”

“Like what?”

“I think it was Bob.”

Dean brandished the demon-killing knife, which Sam hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He must have grabbed it from the nightstand where they’d left it overnight. “Where?”

“He’s gone now.” Sam went back to his bed and flopped onto it.

“So more psychic vibrations from the Black Lodge?” Dean asked. Sam had filled him in on his conversation with Cooper the previous night.

“I guess so.”

“Awesome.” Dean put the knife back onto the nightstand and looked out the window. “Well, it’s morning, I guess we might as well get in gear.”

They went to the hotel dining room for breakfast again. While eating, they kept an eye on the waterfall area outside, but the few people milling around on the overlook platform seemed to be acting normally, so Sam supposed the waterfall had decided to obey the laws of physics this morning. As they were finishing breakfast, an announcement came over the hotel’s intercom. “Would the owner of the really sweet old black Chevy Impala come to the front desk, please?”

Sam looked at Dean, who immediately threw down his utensils and started toward the front desk. “If someone scratched up Baby, I’m going to disembowel them.” Sam rolled his eyes and followed.

Clyde Brennan was at the front desk, sipping a frozen coffee drink that looked more like a milkshake. “What happened to my car?” Dean demanded of him.

“That Impala? Awesome ride, dude. Anyway, no big deal, we just got a couple complaints about the smell of the fish. So if you could just clean them out, or at least park further away from the entrance, that would be great.”

“What?” The look of confusion on Dean’s face was comical. Sam was also confused, not sure if he’d heard Clyde right.

“The fish. You know they’re just going to go bad without refrigeration anyway. I mean, based on the smell, they probably already have. I’d just throw them out if I were you. One time, I ate this sushi I bought at 7-11, and I was in the bathroom all night—”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about it coming out both ends, dude. All night long—”

“I mean, what the fuck are you talking about with my car?” Dean’s face was a mask of fury.

Clyde paused, now seemingly as confused as Sam and Dean were. “Your car,” Clyde said, enunciating clearly as if talking to an idiot, “is full of fish.”

Dean whirled around and ran out of the lobby and into the parking lot. Even with his longer stride, Sam could barely keep up. The smell hit them before they arrived at the Impala. It was a rotten, low-tide kind of small, probably similar to Clyde’s 7-11 sushi. Dean slowed as he caught sight of the Impala. “Oh, no, Baby, what have they done to you?”

Clyde’s description had been accurate. The car was full of fish. Over-full, actually. The interior was packed so densely it looked like the car was about to burst. Dean, looking stunned, opened the driver’s side door, and a cascade of fish poured out. Sam poked at one that had landed on the pavement at his feet. It was a large fish, about two feet long, bright red, with a sort of hooked mouth. “I got nothing,” Sam said.

“How did this happen?” Dean asked, sounding dazed. “How did anyone get through the wards?”

A thought occurred to Sam, and he hurried to open the trunk. It was also packed full of fish. Grimacing, he plunged his arms up to his elbows into the fishy mess, sweeping as many fish as possible onto the ground so he could open the hidden compartment. “Looks like all our stuff’s still here,” he reported in relief. The fish-leavers apparently hadn’t known about the hidden compartment, because there were no fish inside it, and the assorted weapons, books, and random magical objects they kept in there seemed to be undisturbed.

“Screw the stuff.” Dean had opened the hood, where fish were crammed into every nook and cranny of the engine block. “What about my Baby? We can’t drive her like this.”

“I’ll call Harry.” Sam pulled out his phone while Dean ran his hands across the car’s chassis, whispering soothingly to it. Harry answered the phone immediately. “Hey, Harry, it’s Sam. Look, would you mind coming over to the hotel? We have a bit of a situation.”

“Anything serious?”

“Just some—” Sam looked over at the Impala, where Dean had started digging out the fish and throwing them onto the ground. “Car trouble. Weird car trouble.”

Harry, to his credit, did not ask for any further information, but said simply, “On our way.”

While they waited, Sam rescued whatever weapons and supplies they really cared about from the hidden compartment, putting them into a couple of canvas shopping bags he found in the trunk. He toted them back to the room, leaving a trail of fishy smell in his wake that drew him some dirty looks from other guests in the lobby. He cracked the window in the room so the smell from their fish-contaminated stuff would hopefully have a chance to dissipate. When he arrived back at the Impala, Harry and Cooper were already pulling up alongside it in their pickup truck.

 “Huh,” was all Harry said as he beheld the fish-filled car. Cooper picked up one of the discarded fish and examined it with an air of fascination.

“I told you it was weird,” Sam said, shrugging.

“It’s weirder than you probably even realize,” Cooper said.

“I don’t know if that’s possible.”

“Harry, what kind of fish are these?” Cooper dangled his specimen in front of Harry.

“Sockeye salmon. And Coop’s right,” Harry said to Sam and Dean, “it is even weirder than you probably realize. These guys are red, which means they’re in their spawning phase. But it’s not the season for that. Sockeye spawn in either summer or fall. Also, there’s no fish passage at the Grand Coulee Dam, so there are no more spawning runs in the entire upper Columbia River basin, including on tributaries like the Pend Oreille River here in Twin Peaks. That means there’s no way these fish could have been caught recently or locally. And that is a lot of fish.”

“Yeah, we did realize that,” Dean snapped.

“I don’t know how much that volume of sockeye is worth, but it’s a lot,” Harry went on. “So someone caught a bunch of sockeye in the summer or fall from a river that still supports large runs, and instead of selling their haul to a restaurant and making a lot of money, they froze them for months just so they could fill your car with them. Seems like an odd thing to do.”

Sam agreed with that assessment. “Yeah, and no one should have been able to break into our car anyway,” he said. “We don’t just rely on locks put on the car by General Motors. It would have taken powerful magic to get through the warding.”

“So, in all likelihood, some sort of supernatural entity was responsible,” Cooper said, letting his fish drop back to the ground. “The question is who, and why.”

“It must have been Bob,” Dean said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. He gestured at the car. “I mean, if this isn’t pure evil, I don’t know what is.”

“I don’t know, Dean,” Sam said. “It’s the same as with the waterfall yesterday. Doesn’t it seem like these things aren’t so much evil as just kind of … dumb?”

“Dumb?” Dean sounded outrage. “Messing with my Baby isn’t dumb, it’s evil. Look at it.” He caressed the Impala’s hood. But Harry and Cooper looked unconvinced.

“It’s not Bob’s style,” Harry said. “There must be another player.”

 Sam thought about the almost comic timing with which the waterfall had started flowing the right way the day before, and the ridiculousness of the fish spilling out of the car when Dean opened the door. “Maybe a Trickster,” he ruminated out loud.

Dean gave him a dirty look. “A Trickster? In what universe is this funny?”

“What’s a Trickster?” Harry asked.

“Just what it sounds like,” Sam replied. “A demigod who likes to screw around with people.”

“Like Coyote in Native American mythology,” Cooper said.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “We’ve met one Trickster. I mean, we thought he was a Trickster, but that was, well, a trick, because he was really an Archangel pretending to be a Trickster. Wow, I never realized how meta that was until I said it just now.” He frowned.

Harry and Cooper looked confused, so Sam waved Dean’s explanation away. “Anyway, what are we going to do about the car?”

“You’re going to need the upholstery replaced,” Harry said, inspecting the car’s interior. “The fish guts have soaked right into the leather. Probably a good idea to get all your fluids flushed too, who knows how clogged with fish parts they are.” Dean groaned as if in physical pain. “Don’t worry,” Harry said reassuringly. “I’ll call Big Ed. He does a lot of work on classic cars. He’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

Soon after Harry’s call to Big Ed, a tow truck rolled up to the parking lot. Big Ed got out, along with the man Sam had seen talking to Dr. Hayward at the funeral.

“Oh, hell no,” Dean said, staring at the man.

“What? You know that guy?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, he took a swing at me at the bar the other night. He’s Donna’s ex-husband, he thought I was hitting on her.”

“Dean. I told you not to start any fights.”

“He started it, I finished it. But there’s no way in hell I’m trusting that guy with my Baby.”

“James is Big Ed’s nephew,” Harry said from behind them. “He has too much respect for classic cars to do anything to harm your Impala, no matter how much he might dislike you.”

After much cajoling from Sam and Harry, Dean finally relented and allowed Big Ed and James to tow away the Impala. Dean watched it go, misty-eyed.

“Well,” Harry said, “I guess you boys are riding with us for now.” He was interrupted by his cell phone ringing. “Lily?” he answered it. “Everything okay?” His expression darkened. “Okay, lock the place down. Don’t let anyone leave. We’ll be right there.” He hung up and started toward his pickup. “Come on. We have to get to the hospital.”

“Is it Bob?” Cooper asked, concerned. Sam and Dean followed after them.

Harry nodded grimly. “Sarah Palmer was just murdered.”

Sam and Dean rode over to the hospital in the bed of Harry’s pickup. They had grabbed their guns, loaded with rock-salt pellets, out of the Impala, and carried them along with the demon-killing knife and angel blade. Dean felt homeless without his Baby. No matter where he and Sam went, they always had the Impala. Being without her gave him an aching sensation as if from a phantom limb. He was going to find whatever monster had harmed his Baby and send them straight to Hell.

Arriving at the hospital, Dean made an effort to get his head back in the game. They were met in the lobby by Lily, who was snapping orders at hospital staff to make sure all the exits were secured, and Donna, who looked pale and shaken. Lily started giving her report of what had happened as soon as she saw Harry.

“Sheriff, Dr. Hayward ordered an MRI for Sarah Palmer this morning. The doctor and I accompanied Sarah down to the imaging department, where the technician prepared her for the exam. Of course, we had to wait outside the room while the machine was in operation, but we were watching through the window. I could see Sarah in the machine, she was fine.” Lily’s voice held a note of frustration. “But as soon as the technician activated the machine, it went crazy.”

“What did it do?” Cooper asked.

Donna beckoned to a young Asian man, who came over. “Josh here is the radiology tech, he was operating the machine,” she said.

Josh’s eyes were wide. “I’ve never seen it do anything like that before. I mean, we’ve all watched videos of what can go wrong, like if someone accidentally leaves a metal object in while the machine is in operation. But this was nothing like that. As soon as I turned it on, it was like a strobe light in a nightclub. Not just in the MRI room, but in the whole hospital. Everyone was panicking, yelling and running around. It must have gone on for fifteen or twenty seconds. When it stopped, the patient had disappeared. I don’t understand how, we were right outside.”

Lily took over the story. “I immediately radioed the hospital security staff to have them seal off the exits. Then we started a room-by-room search. We found her in the morgue.” She cast her eyes downward.

“Okay, we’ll go take a look,” Harry said. “You keep the lockdown going up here. And have those security guards keep checking all the rooms. Bob’s probably long gone by now, but it’s worth a try.”

“Got it. And Sheriff, I’m so sorry I let you down.”

“You didn’t, Lily. This wasn’t your fault.”

Lily still looked ashamed, but she nodded and went back to yelling at the security people. Sam, Dean, Harry, and Cooper went down to the morgue. The hospital was chaotic, with a sense of panic lingering in the air as nurses hurried from room to room and patients asked each other was going on. Arriving in the relative quiet of the basement, Harry flung open the doors to the morgue.

It was a gruesome scene, even by the standards Sam and Dean were used to. The murderer had apparently taken advantage of the availability of sharp cutting tools but had used none of the usual precision associated with them. Body parts were scattered from one side of the room to another, with blood puddling the floor, streaking the walls, and splashed on the ceiling. “Damn,” Dean said.

Cooper pushed his way inside, putting on a pair of latex gloves. Stepping gingerly around one of the larger blood puddles, he picked up a scalpel that was lying on the floor next to an unidentifiable body part. “This has a partial fingerprint on it,” he said, examining the scalpel closely.

“Could be from whoever handled it before Bob,” Harry said.

“Possibly, but any medical personnel who handled it would likely have been wearing gloves. It looks as though Bob was in a rage when he did this. He might not have taken care to conceal his identity.”

“So if it’s someone whose prints are on record, this could lead us to Bob’s current meatsuit,” Sam said.

“Exactly,” Cooper said, carefully placing the scalpel into a ziplock bag. “Harry, we should call Albert in to do the analysis.” Harry groaned.

“Who’s Albert?” Dean asked.

“Special Agent Albert Rosenfield,” Cooper said.

“A real FBI agent?” Dean’s alarm bells started going off.

“And a real pain in the ass,” Harry said.

Dean exchanged a panicked look with Sam, who said, “Uh, guys, not to make it an ultimatum or anything, but if the real FBI is coming, we’re leaving. We’ve had some dealings with the feds, and we’d like to avoid having any more of them.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Cooper said. “Albert is a friend and former colleague of mine. He’s the section chief for the Philadelphia office. He is well aware of the unique circumstances of Twin Peaks and can be counted upon to be discreet about your identities with the rest of the Bureau.”

Sam still looked as dubious as Dean felt, but Harry chimed in. “Yeah, that’s true. Like I said, Albert is a pain in the ass. As in, you won’t believe how much of a jerk he is. But he will stay quiet about you guys if we tell him to.”

Sam looked at Dean again, and Dean shrugged. “Okay, if you guys say he’s cool.”

“I definitely didn’t say that,” Harry said. “I’ll call him.” He said that with about as much enthusiasm as someone volunteering to unclog a toilet.

They stepped out into the hallway to get away from all the blood and guts, and Harry took out his phone and walked a short distance down the hall to make the call. “Hey, Cooper,” Sam said. “I meant to tell you before, but with all the excitement today, I forgot. I had another dream last night. And a sort of vision.”

“About the Black Lodge?”

“Yeah. Well, that was the dream. I was back in the red room, with the dwarf. But then it changed. It was like I was looking into a broken mirror, and there was blood everywhere.”

Cooper froze. “Then what?” He glanced up the hallway, where Harry had apparently succeeded in contacting Albert, because he looked to be on the verge of throwing his phone into the wall.

“Then I woke up. Well, Dean woke me up. But I could sense that there was a presence in the room. In the bathroom, actually, of all places. So I went to look, and for just a second, I saw that the mirror was broken and covered with blood, and there was something, or someone, in it, like a reflection. I think it was Bob. But it was just for a second, then it was gone and everything was back to normal.”

Cooper had gone pale. He stared at Sam for a moment, then asked, in an urgent tone of voice, what seemed to be a strange and irrelevant question (Dean was starting to recognize that as one of Cooper’s main investigative tactics). “What room are you staying in?”

“Uh, 315. Why –” Sam stopped as Cooper abruptly turned and walked over to Harry, who seemed to be wrapping up his phone call.

“Yes, fine, we’ll see you tonight,” Harry was saying. “I’m sure we’ll enjoy having you here just as much as you’ll enjoy being here. What? Yeah, same to you. Pleasure talking to you as always.” Harry emphatically pressed the end-call button on his screen, looking as though he wished he had an old-fashioned landline handset to slam back into its cradle instead. Then he caught sight of Cooper’s face. “Coop, what’s wrong?”

“We need to go to the Great Northern. Now.”

“Okay.” Harry immediately started for the elevator. “Why?”

“Sam had a vision of Bob this morning. I believe we may be able to determine the identity of the person he’s currently possessing if we go into Room 315.”

Harry stopped so suddenly that Sam and Dean, who were following behind, almost crashed into him and Cooper. “No.”

“Harry, that’s the room where Sam and Dean are staying. Do you realize how unlikely a coincidence that is? There must be some remnant psychic energy lingering there. This may be the best chance we have of finding Bob before he kills again.”

Harry shook his head. “No. I swore I’d never set foot in that room again. And I sure as hell don’t want you going anywhere near it.”

“What the fuck happened in our room?” Dean asked. “Is it haunted or something?” That would be typical. The Winchesters are in town, give them the haunted hotel room.

Harry and Cooper completely ignored him. Cooper put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I understand why you don’t want to go there, Harry. And you don’t have to. But I do.”

“You’re not going alone.” Harry was adamant.

“What are we, chopped liver?” Dean asked. Apparently they were, because he was still being completely ignored.

“We’ll be fine,” Cooper said softly. “It will be difficult, but we can get through it.”

Harry took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.” As they set off again, Dean wondered just what the hell awaited them in Room 315.

On the way out of the hospital, they stopped and gave Lily the scalpel Cooper had recovered from the crime scene. They left her with instructions to lift the lockdown, as it was clear Bob had already left the hospital, but Harry told her to take the scalpel back to the sheriff’s station. Apparently, they had some sort of high-resolution scanner there that they could use to take an image of the fingerprint and send it to the FBI for comparison with federal databases. Harry grumbled a bit about why Albert needed to come to Twin Peaks at all if the FBI could do the fingerprint analysis remotely, but Cooper insisted that there could be additional forensic evidence to recover from the morgue.

Sam and Dean then hopped back into the bed of Harry’s truck for the ride back to the hotel. As Sam swiped the key card into the door of Room 315, Harry and Cooper hung back a little, looking as though they were preparing for battle. The only immediate threat Sam perceived when the door swung open was the smell permeating the room from the bags of fish-contaminated hunting gear he had salvaged from the Impala’s trunk. “Dude, you couldn’t have cracked a window?” Dean complained, entering the room.

“I did,” Sam retorted. “That stuff is pungent.” He held the door open behind him for Harry and Cooper, who also looked reluctant to enter, but not because of the smell.

As soon as Harry and Cooper stepped inside, letting the door close behind them, something in the room changed. Sam could feel a sort of current zipping through the air, that same feeling he had had that morning of something that was cold like a ghost, but sharper. Cooper took one step further, then stopped right outside the open bathroom door. “This is where it happened,” he said in a strangled-sounding voice. Harry didn’t say anything, but nodded. Cooper reached out a trembling hand, tracing it gently along the scar on Harry’s neck. Harry caught his hand and held it tightly.

All at once, Sam saw a flash, and the bathroom mirror was shattered again. There was blood on the mirror and blood dripping on the floor where Harry and Cooper stood. Looking into the broken mirror, Sam could see his own face reflected, next to Harry and Cooper. But then came another flash, and Sam and Harry were gone. Now the mirror reflected only Cooper, wearing blue silk pajamas. But Cooper’s face was different. He had a cruel smile and a crazed light in his eyes, distorting his features so much that he looked like a completely different person. His forehead was cut, blood running down into his eyes, and he held a shard of glass from the broken mirror, laughing and making a slashing motion. Staring into the face in the mirror, Sam suddenly saw another face behind it, the one he had glimpsed that morning, with the long gray hair and wild eyes. But then that face also morphed, into another one he recognized, one of a bald, haggard old man, staring vacantly into space without recognition of anything or anyone –

There was one more flash, and then the mirror was intact again, the blood was gone, and the only reflections were of Harry, Cooper, and Sam himself, all looking freaked out. “It’s Garland,” Cooper said immediately.

“Are you sure?” Harry asked. Apparently, he hadn’t seen the vision, and it looked like Dean hadn’t either, judging from his confused expression. Sam guessed the show was for the enjoyment of psychically inclined people only.

“Yes. I should have realized it before. Of course, Garland is also psychically gifted, which would make him an attractive target for Bob. And he lives in the same house as Helen. He could easily have been abusing her like Leland did with Laura.” Cooper looked devastated.

Harry squeezed Cooper’s shoulder and said, “I’ll call Bobby and find out where Garland is.” He crossed the room and sat on Dean’s bed, pulling out his cell phone.

Sam pulled Cooper over to the desk chair and forced him to sit. The poor guy was obviously shaken. “So Garland Briggs is the meatsuit. Helen’s grandfather.” Sam recapped the situation mostly for Dean’s benefit.

“Yes, that’s right,” Cooper confirmed sadly. “He was a good man.”

“I guess it makes sense,” Dean mused. “I mean, the guy has dementia, right? Possessing a crazy guy is a good way to hide in plain sight. No one thinks anything of someone acting weird when there’s a medical reason for it.”

“That’s true. It’s been at least two or three years since Garland was diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and his condition has deteriorated rapidly since then. I wonder whether his condition made him vulnerable to being taken over by Bob, or alternatively whether he never had dementia at all and the change in his behavior coincided with when Bob took over.”

Harry turned to them from the bed, where he had just finished his call with Bobby Briggs. “Bad news,” he said. “Bobby just went up to Garland’s room to check on him, and he’s not there. Bobby and Shelly haven’t seen him since breakfast this morning, they thought he was in his room all that time.”

“So he had ample time to go to the hospital and murder Sarah,” Cooper said.

“And now he could be anywhere,” Sam added. Having a murderous meatsuit on the loose was definitely not a good development.

“Yeah, this is awesome,” Dean said. “We finally find out who the meatsuit is, but then he disappears, so we’re basically back where we started.”

“Did you fill Bobby in on the situation?” Cooper asked Harry.

“The basic outlines, yeah. He’s a bit upset, understandably. I’ll call Hawk and have him put out an emergency alert notifying the public that Garland Briggs should be considered dangerous. Hawk can start putting together teams to search the woods too. Now that we know who we’re looking for, we’ll find him, Coop.” Sam wondered whether Harry himself really believed that, but Cooper nodded, and Harry turned back to his phone.

“All that other stuff I saw in the mirror,” Sam said to Cooper. He kind of hated to bring it up, because Cooper was obviously having a tough time right now, but it might be important. “That was you when you were possessed by Bob, right? It happened here, in this room.”

“Not exactly.” Cooper was staring at the back of Harry’s head. “That wasn’t me. My possession by Bob came later.”

“So who was it?”

“My doppelganger.”

“Your what now?” Dean asked.

“I was in the Black Lodge at the time,” Cooper explained patiently. “I had gone in voluntarily, to try to rescue someone who needed help. Harry waited in the woods for me to come back.” He looked down, and his voice grew rougher. “He waited all night and the next day and into the next night, I believe it was. But I was trapped.” Sam remembered Hawk saying that fear was the path that led to the Black Lodge. It must be a truly terrifying place to have trapped Cooper there, because he didn’t seem like a fearful person at all. Cooper went on, “Then something that looked like me came out. It was a doppelganger, the shadow self of a soul trapped in the Black Lodge. But Harry thought it was me, and he took it back here, to this room where I was staying at the time.” He stopped talking abruptly, as if his voice had stopped working.

“And the doppelganger almost killed Harry,” Sam said, putting together the shard of glass he had seen the reflected Cooper holding, the blood on the floor, and the scar on Harry’s neck.

“Enough,” Harry said. He had apparently gotten off the phone with Hawk and heard the last part of their conversation. He stalked around the bed to the chair where Cooper was sitting. Cooper stood up and wrapped his arms around Harry. “You guys don’t need to ask him about that,” Harry said, glaring over Cooper’s shoulder at Sam and Dean. “It’s none of your business.” In contrast to the anger in his voice, his movements were gentle as he ruffled the hair on the back of Cooper’s head.

“We’re sorry,” Sam said, and he meant it. These guys had clearly been through a lot. “But it’s helpful for us to know about these doppelgangers. That’s something we haven’t run into before.”

“Yeah, just when I thought this case couldn’t get any better,” Dean said. “Turns out this Black Lodge gives out two-for-one deals on demons and shifters.”

Harry and Cooper stayed in their embrace for another moment, then broke apart. “Let’s get out of here,” Harry said. He put his arm around Cooper’s shoulder and guided him out of the room as if there were hellhounds on their heels.

Sam and Dean spent the afternoon alternating between riding in the back of Harry’s pickup over bumpy logging roads and tramping through the woods with Harry and Cooper, looking for signs of Garland Briggs. They investigated an abandoned railroad car near a tall river bridge, an old cabin that the forest was in the process of reclaiming, and the burned-out rubble of the old mill. They found nothing more interesting than a lot of mud and a couple of cannabis farms. Dean was getting frustrated by this Bob character. Usually, hunting didn’t involve quite so much, well, hunting. Most monsters were pretty good at making their presence known.

As evening approached and the light started to die out, they called it quits and headed back to the station. It was time to be getting back anyway because, as Harry had unenthusiastically reported an hour or so ago, Albert had called from the Spokane airport where his plane had just landed, and he was due to arrive in Twin Peaks soon.

When they returned to the station, Sam and Dean followed Harry and Cooper into Harry’s office. There was a deer head mounted on the wall, as there always seemed to be wherever Sam and Dean went, but this one had a sign on it saying, “The buck stopped here.” Sam cracked up when he saw it, and Harry smiled at him. “I don’t get it,” Dean said.

“President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office saying ‘the buck stops here,’” Sam explained.

“Nerd,” Dean muttered. It was a miracle Sam ever got laid at all.

They idled away a few minutes playing darts, then the door to Harry’s office was unceremoniously flung wide open and a man and a woman walked in. The man was around sixty, thin and balding, and had a look of determined unpleasantness on his face that appeared to come from years of dedicated practice. The woman was in her early forties and gorgeous, with dark hair and a great figure. They both wore the be-suited attire that screamed “FBI,” that look Sam and Dean worked so hard to cultivate.

“Well, we’re here,” the man said. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic, Albert,” Harry deadpanned. He got up from his desk and came around to shake Albert’s hand, while Cooper said in delight, “Audrey, I didn’t realize you were coming.” He gave the woman a hug, which she returned warmly, saying, “I wouldn’t miss it.” She then hugged Harry as well, and Albert gave Cooper a sort of rough but affectionate half-hug as he said, “It made sense to bring her. I wouldn’t want to subject another agent to this benighted little hamlet, so it was better to take a local who’s already immune to its corrupting influence.”

Greetings over, Harry introduced them (as simply Sam and Dean) to FBI Special Agents Albert Rosenfield and Audrey Horne. Dean remembered Audrey’s name as having come up during the saga of Ghostwood Estates. “Are you Ben Horne’s daughter?” he asked her.

“Yes, I guess you’ve met my father. My condolences on that.” She laughed. Damn, she had a killer smile. It was hard to imagine her being the offspring of that slimy rat bastard Ben Horne. Then again, it was also hard to imagine her chaining herself to bulldozers as a hippie college student, and then going on to become an FBI agent after that.

They all reconvened in the conference room, where Hawk and the three Brennans had assembled a bunch of delicious-looking greasy takeout food from the diner. Another round of greetings followed, then the large group crammed around the table for dinner.

“How are you enjoying your new role as Section Chief, Albert?” Cooper asked, accepting the coffee Harry had poured for him.

“Enjoying? Coop, it’s not something one enjoys.” Albert eyed the meatloaf, poking at it with a fork. “Gordon had a much easier time of it. He couldn’t hear what anybody was complaining about, so after a while everyone just gave up on it. Actually, I have my suspicions that he was faking his deafness all along so he wouldn’t have to deal with office assignments and leave requests. It seems like a sound managerial strategy, and one I may adopt myself.”

As they ate, Harry and Cooper filled in the FBI agents on the details of the case so far. They also got the not-exactly-earth-shattering results from the partial print on the scalpel used in Sarah Palmer’s murder, which FBI technicians had confirmed was a match to the prints on record in Major Garland Briggs’ military personnel file. Dean wasn’t sure what more forensic information could be obtained from the crime scene now, but Albert and Audrey said they would head over to the hospital and do their thing anyway.

Dean also wasn’t initially sure what Albert and Audrey had been told regarding him and Sam, but that question was answered when Albert looked straight at him and said nonchalantly, “So you’re the infamous Winchesters. Let me tell you, if my colleagues knew you two were still alive, they would be falling all over themselves to bring you in. I’m talking a full-on Ruby Ridge, Waco, damn-the-collateral-damage, damn-the-PR assault. You boys are wanted.”

Dean almost choked on a French fry. Sam paused with his forkful of green beans halfway to his mouth, also looking horrified. Cooper said, with mild reproach, “Albert.”

“He’s just teasing you,” Audrey assured Sam and Dean. “We understand how, given the unique situation here in Twin Peaks, your expertise can be helpful. Plus, Harry and Coop think so highly of you.” She smiled her thousand-watt smile again. “As far as the rest of the Bureau is concerned, you were never here and you’re still dead.”

“Thanks,” Dean managed to say.

After dinner, the group dispersed. Harry said something to Albert about wanting to get a copy of the fingerprint analysis, to which Albert replied caustically that if Harry would just check his damn e-mail he would see that he already had a digital copy, and Harry glared at him meaningfully and said he was pretty sure Albert had a hard copy in his rental car, didn’t he, and Albert finally relented and went out to the parking lot with Harry. As they left, Cooper glanced after them suspiciously, but then was distracted by Hawk, who spread out a map on the table and started asking him about priority areas for the next day’s search. Meanwhile, Audrey was flirting with Sam, asking him about what the hunting life was like, and Sam, smooth as ever, was bumbling his responses like the giant dork he was. Realizing that part of the reason Sam was being so awkward was probably because he knew Dean was silently judging him, Dean decided to give Sammy a break by helping the Brennans clean up the remnants of dinner. The garbage can was overfull, so Dean generously hauled the bag out to the dumpster he had seen in the parking lot.

As he fumbled with the bear-proof latch on the dumpster lid, Dean heard angry voices. He looked up and saw Harry and Albert standing by Harry’s truck, having a hushed but furious argument.

“Albert, all I’m asking is for you to make sure he’s okay after,” Harry was saying, frustration thick in his voice.

“Well, I can’t make sure of that, because he very much will not be okay,” Albert snapped back. “How do you think could he be okay after watching you die a painful death?”

“I don’t know, but why are you yelling at me about this?”

“I’m yelling at you because I’m angry about this.”

“That’s not fair, it’s not like I asked for this to happen—”

“I didn’t say it was fair, I said I was angry.”

Dean finally succeeded in opening the dumpster lid. He threw the bag inside and accidentally let the lid slam back down. At the sound, Harry and Albert finally noticed him.

“Eavesdropping is so classy.” Albert’s glare was like a laser beam. “How much of that did you hear?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Harry leaned back against his truck. “I already told him.”

Dean wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but Albert’s glare got even more intense as he focused it back on Harry. “You told Sam Winchester before you told Coop?”

“I’m Dean,” Dean felt obligated to correct. “Sam’s my brother.”

“Do you really think I give a fuck which Winchester you are?”

“Nope. I guess not. I’ll leave you guys to it.”

As Dean beat a hasty retreat back to the station, he heard Harry say, in softer tones now, “Albert, please. You can probably imagine how much I don’t enjoy asking for your support, but I need it right now.” He couldn’t hear Albert’s answer.

Chapter Text

A few minutes after Dean returned from taking out the garbage, Harry and Albert also came back into the conference room, both looking pissed off about something. No one seemed to be surprised by that, as Harry and Albert’s contentious relationship was apparently a given. Audrey said that she hoped to see Sam again soon, and she and Albert took off for the hospital to inspect the crime scene. Harry told Hawk and the Brennans to go home and get a good night’s rest so they could get an early start on searching the woods for Garland Briggs the next day.

Sam and Dean looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that they needed to bum a ride back to the hotel, and also that they were going back to a room that was possibly sort of haunted and that definitely stank of fish. And to think their accommodations on this trip had started out so promising. Sam would take that room in Utah with the combo mini-fridge/toilet any day. And he was going to have to stop giving Dean such a hard time about his love affair with the Impala. Sam missed it too. Riding in the bed of a pickup really sucked when it was forty-five degrees and raining.

As if reading their thoughts about the hotel room, but more likely reading their facial expressions, Cooper said, “Sam, Dean, why don’t you come stay at our house tonight?”

“Sure, that would be great,” Sam said gratefully. So Harry and Cooper apparently lived together. Well, that answered the question he’d had in the back of his mind about exactly what their relationship was.

They hopped into the pickup bed for one more ride, this time a mercifully short one to a small house at the end of a long driveway on the outskirts of town. Walking inside, Sam was struck by the décor, which seemed to be half hunting cabin, half yoga studio. There was the requisite deer’s head mounted to the wall, above a large statue of the Buddha that sat on the floor. A painting of a colorful mandala hung above a table covered with birding books and an expensive-looking spotting scope. Neatly tied fishing flies and an assortment of meditation cushions were scattered all over the living room. “Nice place,” Sam said sincerely.

Cooper grinned. “Thank you. You know, when I first moved to Twin Peaks, I was only planning to stay with Harry for a short while before finding my own place.”

“He just never got around to the whole finding his own place part,” Harry said, also grinning.

Sam noticed that they appeared to have separate bedrooms, which was now making him question his earlier assessment of the nature of their relationship. Well, either way, it was clear that they had built a whole life together in this house. Sam looked at the framed photos that were arrayed on a set of wall shelves. There was one of Harry and Cooper from when they were many years younger, at a wedding or some other formal event. They were both wearing tuxedos and holding champagne flutes, and Sam thought he recognized the location as the overlook platform at Whitetail Falls. In the photo, their faces were turned toward each other, and Harry appeared to be laughing at something Cooper was saying. There was another photo where Cooper was proudly posing with a giant fish, Harry’s arm around his shoulders. There was one of them posing on a boulder on some mountaintop, with forested hills stretching off to the horizon, and another of them in their dorky sheriff’s department uniforms, seemingly at some sort of town festival. The photos stretched across decades of time, and there were other people in some of them, but the unifying characteristic was that in all the photos Harry and Cooper were together, their happiness shining through.

Cooper offered them coffee, which Sam accepted and Dean declined. Sam and Dean sat on the couch while Cooper and Harry bustled around in the kitchen. Their coffeemaker looked like a restaurant-grade piece of machinery, all stainless steel and digital readouts. Taking advantage of the first idle moment he’d had all day, Sam pulled out his phone and scrolled through his notifications. Twin Peaks’ fifteen minutes of Insta-fame with the #ImpossibleWaterfall hashtag seemed to have ended, as a new video of a baby panda at the National Zoo was now trending. The local news outlets, meanwhile, were all pushing out alerts about armed and dangerous fugitive Garland Briggs, wanted in the murder of his granddaughter. Some enterprising kid at the Twin Peaks High School student newspaper had put together a surprisingly astute story speculating on possible connections between the Helen Briggs murder and the Laura Palmer murder of twenty-five years before.

Sam opened up his photos and looked again at the pictures he had taken of Leland Palmer’s bones. That whole thing sort of made more sense now. It seemed like when Bob possessed someone, he left a physical mark behind. Sam frowned, wondering whether they could somehow use that to track down Garland Briggs. Lost in thought, he accepted the coffee Cooper held out to him.

“What are those images?” Cooper asked him, having caught a glimpse of the photos.

Sam handed him the phone. “We dug up Leland Palmer’s grave the first night we were in town. It’s kind of standard procedure for us,” he added in response to Harry’s and Cooper’s raised eyebrows. “Our first thought was that maybe it was Leland’s ghost who had killed Helen, so we salted and burned his bones. That’s how you get rid of ghosts.”

“That’s fascinating,” Cooper said. He sat down in the armchair, scrolling through the photos with one hand and holding his coffee mug in the other, while Harry perched on the chair’s armrest. “These are Leland’s bones?”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Let me tell you, we have dug up a lot of graves, and we’ve never seen anything like that before. I guess it must have been from Bob possessing Leland.”

“Bob is obsessed with fire,” Harry said, taking the phone from Cooper to examine the photos more closely. “Do you like to play with fire, fire walk me with me, he says stuff like that all the time.”

“I wonder if my bones look like that now,” Cooper mused, looking at the phone in Harry’s hand.

“Coop, don’t say that.” Horrified, Harry quickly returned to the phone to Sam, like it was burning his hand. Cooper apologetically put his hand on Harry’s knee.

“Well, if Bob does leave a physical mark on the meatsuits he possesses, maybe we can use that,” Sam said. “Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong kind of magic. Instead of a summoning spell, we could use a tracking spell.”

They were interrupted by Harry’s phone ringing. Harry got up and walked into the kitchen to answer it. Cooper looked thoughtful. “So to track Garland, you would need some sort of physical signature specific to Bob.”

“Yeah. Do you know of anything like that?”

“Possibly. We have observed that, wherever Bob goes, a fluid substance with the smell of burnt engine oil is left behind.” Sam remembered that Cooper had found some of that stuff in the soil at Ghostwood Estates where Helen had been taken from. “There’s also a large pool of it at the entrance to the Black Lodge.”

“Great. Maybe if we get a sample of that stuff, we could use it in a tracking spell. We might need some more ingredients too though.” Sam tried to remember what went into a tracking spell and what herbs he had rescued from the trunk of the Impala. His train of thought was cut off when Harry came back into the living room after finishing his phone call. Probably more bad news, although Sam was hopeful that no one was dead this time, because Harry looked more bemused than upset.

“What happened?” Cooper asked him.

“We need to get to the Roadhouse,” Harry said. “There’s been a robbery.”

“Uh, can’t you have one of your deputies handle it?” Dean asked. “I mean, is this really a priority right now?”

“Oh, we want to handle this one,” Harry said. He actually looked amused at something. “There are multiple eyewitnesses. The suspect has been identified.”

“Who is it?” Sam asked. There was no way Bob would reveal himself by just knocking over a bar, was there?

“It was a sasquatch.”

They pulled up to the Roadhouse, and Sam and Dean jumped out of the back of the pickup. “You know sasquatches aren’t real, right?” Dean asked Harry and Cooper. “I mean, other than Sammy, of course.” Sam shot him a dirty look. 

“You’re a skeptic?” Harry asked. “You guys fight monsters every day.”

“Yeah, real monsters.” This was a pet peeve of Dean’s, the idea that just because some monsters were real, hunters were expected to believe every bit of folklore, urban legend, and conspiracy theory out there. Come on, there had to be some freaking standards of evidence. “Bigfoot isn’t real. I don’t know who robbed this bar, but it’s much more likely that it was a guy in a sasquatch costume than an actual sasquatch.”

“Hawk says that the sasquatch have lived among his people for generations,” Cooper said. Dean was not at all surprised that Cooper was a Bigfoot truther. “They’re described as giants that live on the peaks of nearby mountains and sometimes steal salmon from fishermen’s nets. How can you be so sure that they don’t exist?”

“Well, for starters, we haven’t run into any,” Dean said. “And that’s saying something, because we’ve run into a lot of freaky things. And not just us, we don’t know of any hunter who’s seen Bigfoot.” Well, there was that one guy they had worked a werewolf case with in Ashland, Oregon. Steve or Shawn or something. But that guy also did magic mushrooms and talked to trees, so Dean wasn’t going to cite him as a credible witness.

“We’ve seen one,” Harry said casually. “Well, a yeti, which I guess is a related species.”

“You saw a yeti?” Sam asked.

Harry and Cooper both nodded. “In Tibet,” Harry said. “Had a conversation with him, actually.” Dean couldn’t tell if they were fucking with him or not.

“Okay.” Sam was clearly getting tired of the debate. “Let’s just go in and see what the people say.”

The Roadhouse was crowded and abuzz with excitement. Someone had apparently bought a round for the whole crowd in celebration of the sasquatch sighting, and the liquor was flowing freely. Harry went up to the guy behind the bar. “Hey, Stewie. You want to tell us what happened?”

“Hey, Sheriff,” Stewie said. He looked remarkably unperturbed for someone whose business had just been robbed by a mythical creature. “Well, Sasquatch walked in, the whole place went crazy, he went behind the bar and took a couple of bottles, he walked out.”

“What makes you say it was Sasquatch?” Dean demanded.

“Looked like Sasquatch,” Stewie said. He poured a round of tequila shots for a group of college-aged women sitting at the bar, who were laughing and reenacting the encounter.

“And what does Sasquatch look like?” Dean was trying very hard to be patient.

Stewie shrugged. “Huge, maybe nine feet tall. Muscular. Covered in brown fur. Looked like a gorilla. Big feet, just like they say.”

“Did he say anything, or do anything other than take the liquor?” Sam chimed in.

“Nope. He looked like he was on a mission. Knew just what he wanted.”

“You didn’t try to stop him? Was he armed?”

Stewie looked at Sam like that was the most idiotic question in the world. “He was Sasquatch.”

“Stewie,” Cooper stepped in. “I imagine that a number of your patrons may have gotten photo or video evidence of the incident.”

“Yeah, probably almost all of them. Feel free to ask around.”

“We will, thank you.”

Dean and Sam went up to the group of college girls. “Did you ladies happen to get any footage of the, uh, sasquatch?” Dean asked them.

They all nodded. A blond girl handed Dean her phone. “I just posted this video,” she said. “I bet it’s gonna go viral.”

Dean played the video. It started while the creature was already behind the bar, rifling through the bottles on the shelves, while the audio recorded the girls saying, “Oh my god, it’s a freaking Bigfoot!” and “Are you recording? This is so cool!” The video was shaky and oriented vertically (why did people never turn their phones while taking photos or video?). But it was clear in its depiction of what definitely resembled a sasquatch selecting two bottles of what looked like rum, then turning and walking casually out the door. Although it walked upright, there was something non-human in its gait, a sort of lumbering movement, that more than anything else made Dean wonder if it really was a sasquatch. He thanked the girl and gave her the phone back.

“Well?” Sam leaned against the bar next to Dean, having looked at a few of the other girls’ videos and photos. “What do you think?”

“I think Twin Peaks is about to have another trending hashtag on Instagram. That’s the first non-blurry Bigfoot video I’ve ever seen. You know some truthers say maybe Bigfoot himself is blurry and that’s why no one ever gets a clear video of him?” Dean was a bit disappointed that maybe those idiots were at least right about Bigfoot’s existence.

“What do you think the thing is? It doesn’t look like a costume. I mean, if it is, it’s like, movie-quality.”

“Yeah, and if someone went to the trouble of putting on that good of a costume just to steal two bottles of rum from a bar, then they’re just as weird as an actual sasquatch would be.”

Harry and Cooper joined them, after apparently having surveyed the smartphone evidence from the bar patrons themselves. “Sure looks like a sasquatch to me,” Harry said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean was not going to let anyone rub it in. “Let’s say it is. What the fuck does this have to do with anything? What is with this town?”

“We need to question the sasquatch,” Cooper said seriously. “I believe he may have information that could lead us to Garland Briggs.”

Okay, that seemed like a serious leap of logic, even by Cooper’s standards. “Um, why?” Sam asked. “Do you think he and Bob are working together or something?”

“No. But we have identified that there is another entity at work here, one with its own distinct agenda. I believe the sasquatch may be affiliated in some way with this unknown entity.”

“The Trickster?” Sam asked. “Yeah, I guess that does make sense. A sasquatch robbing a bar is a stupid enough thing that a Trickster would probably enjoy it.”

“So we find the sasquatch, and the sasquatch leads us to the Trickster,” Harry said. “And then we can figure out what the Trickster is up to and how that relates to Bob and Garland Briggs.”

“Exactly, Harry,” Cooper said. Dean wondered idly how much actual police work took place in this town.

“Okay, so how do we find the sasquatch?” Sam rolled his eyes at how ridiculous his own question sounded.

But Dean suddenly remembered something he had seen in the sasquatch video. “Hey, Stewie,” he yelled over to the bartender, who was busy shaking up a mojito. “What kind of liquor did the sasquatch steal?”

“Two bottles of Captain Morgan rum,” Stewie replied.

“Captain Morgan.” Dean snapped his fingers and turned to the others. “I know this isn’t much to go on, but someone who drinks a lot of Captain Morgan’s has been hanging out at Ghostwood Estates.”

“You’re right, Dean.” Cooper sounded excited. “There were many empty bottles of that particular brand scattered around the campfire ring where Helen Briggs was taken from. That has to be where the sasquatch is.”

“Well, I don’t know if it has to be –” Dean wasn’t willing to go that far out on a limb, it was just a guess.

But going out on a limb seemed to be how Cooper rolled. “Let’s go,” he said.

At night, Ghostwood Estates seemed even creepier than during the day. Rolling down the quiet streets, the lights in most houses were on. But with all the curtains drawn, the place seemed empty, like a, well, ghost town. The people, if there were any, were closed inside their mass-produced homes, in their meticulously planned subdivision, watching reality TV and eating processed meals and thinking about the next thing to buy to fill whatever empty spaces they still had left inside. Living the American dream. There were many things about Sam’s life that weren’t great but, on the whole, he was glad he hadn’t become a lawyer and moved to the suburbs and bought an SUV. There seemed to a horror to that kind of existence that was less bloody but equally real to the horrors he and Dean faced in the hunting life.

They parked on the street at the edge of the development, where the faint path led into the woods. The lights from the houses and streetlights on the other side of the street did not penetrate at all into the thick darkness of the woods. Harry handed each of them a Maglite from his truck. Sam and Dean grabbed their guns, loaded with rock salt, which they had been storing in the cab of Harry’s truck since the Impala was towed away that morning. Sam also got out the angel blade from behind the seat, and Dean patted his jacket to make sure the demon-killing knife was secure before they all set off along the path.

A short distance into the woods, the smell of woodsmoke reached them. “Someone’s there, all right,” Harry said quietly.

As they arrived at the spot where the two fir trees grew close together, they could see firelight flickering ahead. They slowed to a stop, and Dean made a series of hand gestures to indicate that he and Sam would go through first. Sam wasn’t sure what killed sasquatches, but the rock salt and magic blades he and Dean had seemed to stand a better chance than the regular bullets in Harry’s and Cooper’s guns, which might just piss the sasquatch off. Seeming to understand the logic, Harry and Cooper nodded. Dean counted to three on his fingers, then he and Sam squeezed through the narrow opening between the two fir trees, guns out, Sam going high and Dean going low. As they emerged into the opening by the fire ring, Harry and Cooper came through right behind them, their guns also drawn.

The light from the campfire illuminated the sasquatch, who was sitting on a log by the fire swigging from one of his purloined bottles of rum. But he wasn’t alone.

“Trixie?” Dean asked in disbelief.

Sure enough, the lady with the golf cart, the one who managed Ghostwood Estates, was sitting on the other side of the fire from the sasquatch. As Sam’s brain initially tripped on the surprising fact of her presence, she stood up, and he tripped again on the surprising fact of her outfit. She was wearing what could generously be called a dress, more like a strip of fabric, that barely covered her from the tops of her breasts to the tops of her thighs, and that appeared to made entirely of silver sequins. Also, go-go boots. Sam didn’t know what would be appropriate clothing to wear while sitting by a campfire drinking rum with Bigfoot, but this was not it.

“Gentlemen,” Trixie said in greeting. “I got myself all dolled up for you. I know how hard it is to get attention these days without something shiny.” She did a sort of sensual twirl around a nearby sapling, like it was a stripper pole, and the sequins flashed like a disco ball in the firelight. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw that she definitely had Dean’s attention. And okay, so Dean had been right about her having a stripper name.

“Trixie,” Cooper repeated. He seemed to find some significance in the name beyond its stripper connotations. “You’re the Trickster. You’re Coyote.”

“You got it, honey.” Something about the firelight made it clear in a way it hadn’t been before that there was something canine in her smile, something feral in her eyes. She gestured at the sasquatch. “And this is my friend Billy.”

The sasquatch lifted his bottle of rum. “What’s up,” he said in a deep voice.

“Why don’t you take a hike now, Billy,” Trixie said. “The boys and I have to talk.”

“Can I keep the rum?”

“Yes, Billy, you can keep the rum. You earned it.”

“Later.” With that, Billy the Sasquatch gathered up his bottles of Captain Morgan and disappeared into the woods.

“Please, sit,” Trixie said, retaking her place on a log by the fire. Looking fascinated, Cooper immediately sat across from her, so of course Harry immediately sat next to him, seeming to want to keep him within arm’s reach. Sam and Dean shrugged at each other and perched on the remaining log but kept their guns not-so-subtly pointed at Trixie.

“You filled my car with fish,” was Dean’s opener.

“Yeah, I think you’re going to have to explain your little jokes, because we don’t get it,” Sam added. “So having Billy the Sasquatch rob the Roadhouse was just to get us out here, which seems like a really convoluted way to do things, but whatever. But the thing with the waterfall? What was that about?”

“Yeah, and why the fuck did you fill my car with fish?” Dean was definitely not going to let that one go.

“Well, if you have to explain a joke, it sort of ruins it, doesn’t it? I thought it was funny. Especially the look on your face when you saw that car of yours, sweetie.” She smiled at Dean, and Sam put a hand on his shoulder to restrain him from leaping forward and trying to slice her throat with the demon-killing knife. “But really, I wasn’t going for humor so much as poetic social commentary. I mean, you humans make rivers flow any damn way you please nowadays. Down at Celilo Falls and Kettle Falls, just downstream from here on the Columbia, there were once so many salmon you could cross the river on their backs. The first peoples spent more generations than you can count fishing them with dipnets and spears. But where are those falls now? Drowned in the dead stinking reservoirs clogged up behind your monstrous dams. So now you can’t even find enough sockeye to fill a ’67 Impala without magicking them into existence.”

“Okay.” Sam tried to parse all that. It seemed that this Trickster was a member of the Monkey Wrench Gang, which was not an angle he had expected. He tried to establish a rapport. “You know, you’re the first real Trickster we’ve met.”

“Yeah, and definitely hotter than the other one,” Dean muttered.

“You’re talking about the one called Gabriel,” Trixie said dismissively.

“That’s right. The archangel pretending to be Loki,” Sam said.

“Oh, baby,” Trixie said, her eyes gleaming in the firelight. “Gabriel is a child. The real Loki is a child compared to me. I gave you religion, when I crowned you with antlers and taught you to dance like your prey to bring a good hunt. I stirred your tongues to give you language. I pressed your hands against the cave walls and gave you art. I was the lightning strike that brought you fire. I flaked the stone into the first tool and gave you technology.” She paused and smiled somewhat wistfully at that. “I may have gone too far with that trick. You really took that one and ran with it. That’s the tragedy of being a Trickster. If your tricks are any good, they end up coming back to bite you in the ass. You know those old cartoons with Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner? Story of my fucking life. And the Acme anvil about to fall on my head is right here in Ghostwood Estates.”

“What does Ghostwood have to do with it?” Harry asked.

“Well, darling, as you well know, these woods are one of the only places left that hasn’t been domesticated by the technology I so cleverly gave you. There is still raw power here, because of the Lodges and the direct access to reality that they grant. It’s that power that allows my kind to exist. But now your technology has run away from you as well. It’s become a fucking geological force, and it’s altering the fundamental nature of reality. It’s destroying reality, in fact. Now you take something like this forest, something as evolved and complex as the human mind itself, and you cover it with lawns and concrete. You don’t dance to bring a good hunt or to bring rain for the crops, because your food is a manufactured product that’s barely even connected to biology. Now that you all tether your souls to the devices you carry, you never even get lost or bored or lonely anymore. And without those feelings, how much longer will you even be human? What will happen to my kind then?”

“So that’s why you’re here now,” Cooper spoke up. “Since the last time the Black Lodge was opened twenty-five years ago, the world has changed. Twin Peaks has changed. The encroachment of Ghostwood Estates into the woods, all the civilizing forces of development and modern technology, are threatening the integrity of the liminal space of the Lodges, and therefore threatening your existence.”

“Not mine, honey. Tricksters like me, us old dogs can learn new tricks just fine. We’re wily. We thrive along the edges and in the margins. I mean, how many news stories do you see of coyotes hanging out in city parks or on fucking light-rail trains? It’s my sisters and brothers I worry about, the salmon and the owls and the rivers and the trees that are older than your goddamn civilization, the truly wild things. That’s who I’m fighting for.”

“And where does Bob fit in?” Harry asked.

Trixie smiled her animal smile. “Oh, we go way back. I’m of two minds about him. On a personal level, I find him rather distasteful. But on a professional level, I have to admire his dedication. He certainly keeps it real.”

“He’s an evil psychotic murderer,” Harry said angrily.

“No doubt, darling, but there is significant raw power in that.”

Now it was Harry who was being restrained from lunging at Trixie, by Cooper. Dean cut to the chase with his next question. “So whose side are you on?”

“Don’t be so dualistic, sweetie. I’m what you might call chaotic neutral.”

“That’s a Dungeons and Dragons term,” Sam muttered by way of explanation, in case the others were unfamiliar.

“Nerd,” Dean muttered back at him.

“I believe we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Trixie continued. “I know you’ve been having a hard time finding Bob.”

“The summoning spell didn’t work,” Sam confirmed.

“That’s because the magic you used wasn’t compatible. Kind of like when you go to Europe and your phone charger won’t work anywhere. You can’t summon Bob with a Latin incantation, you need a much deader language than that. But I can give you a spell that will work. It’s a two-for-one deal, tracking and binding, so it will have basically the same effect as a summoning spell.”

“And what do you want in return?” Dean asked.

“Nothing much. I only ask that you restrain yourselves from using those fancy blades you’re carrying. Leave Bob alive.”

“That’s not happening,” Harry said flatly, and stood up as if to leave. “Goodbye.”

Cooper tugged on Harry’s arm, saying, “Harry, wait. We should hear her out,” and Harry reluctantly sat down again.

“Why do you want Bob alive?” Sam asked.

“Because like him or not, he does embody the wild power of the Black Lodge, providing a much-needed shot of reality into this increasingly artificial world. As long as he lives, these woods will never be fully tamed, no matter how many subdivisions they build. However, he doesn’t need to be out running around murdering people to have that effect. It works just as well when he stays at home inside the Black Lodge. So this is my proposal. If you use my spell to bring him to Glastonbury Grove, I will meet you there and use my power to send him back to the Black Lodge where he belongs. That way, everyone’s happy. You get the evil psychotic murderer off the streets, and I get an eternal Energizer Bunny of mystical energy to keep Twin Peaks weird.”

Sam and Dean exchanged a skeptical look. “Why do you even need us to do that, if you’re so powerful?” Sam asked.

“Oh, I don’t. I would be fine with just letting him run around creating havoc. Havoc is my jam. But I know you boys want him dead, and that’s something I take seriously. You Winchesters have quite the track record. And you two,” she blew a kiss to Harry and Cooper, “former guests of the Lodges, that was quite a feat you pulled back in ’89. I’m offering my help because I would rather work with you and end up with Bob trapped in the Lodge than not work with you and end up with him dead. Or, alternatively, to end up with you dead if I have to intervene to stop you from killing him. I really don’t want to have to do that, because you are all so adorable just the way you are, with your heads still attached to your bodies.” Now her smile was like that of a scavenger who had just taken a big bloody bite of rotting meat.

“We don’t make deals with things like you,” Dean said.

“Okay, sweetie, that’s fine. We can keep things loose. I like it that way, more potential for chaos. So I’ll just give you the spell, no strings attached, and you can do what you want. Consider it a gift.” She held up her left hand, palm flat, and swiped across it with her left index finger, towards Sam. “It’s on your phone now, baby.” Sam’s phone chirped with a notification. “Well, I really must be going,” Trixie said, and stood up. “Those tricks aren’t going to turn themselves. I’ll see you tomorrow night. Midnight. Glastonbury Grove.” With that, her shape morphed from woman to coyote, and the coyote trotted off into the woods.

Chapter Text

“There’s no way we’re going along with this,” Harry said. They were all back in Harry and Cooper’s living room, it was now the wee hours of the morning, and they were drinking coffee and arguing about what to do.

Dean sympathized with Harry, who was adamant that Bob had to be killed, that merely trapping him in the Black Lodge was not enough. But Sam was pushing back on that, and Dean could kind of see his point as well. Cooper, meanwhile, was keeping strangely silent. “Look, I get it,” Dean said. “The guy’s evil, he needs to go. But does it really matter if he’s dead or just stuck in some kind of infinite extradimensional layover? Same difference, right?”

“No. We need to make sure he can never come back. Besides, I don’t trust her.”

“None of us trust her, that’s a given. But she did give us that spell, and it looks legit, right Sam?”

“Yeah, it looks legit,” Sam said, scrolling through it for the tenth time. Trixie had sent the spell in the form of a long text message, complete with emojis of a wizard’s hat and an eggplant. It was a bit ambiguous as to whether the eggplant was an ingredient or just innuendo, but otherwise the spell looked like others they had used in the past, no red flags.

“So we just use the spell anyway,” Harry said. “But we do it at a different place, or a different time, than what she told us. Then when Bob shows up, we can just use the blades to kill him. Problem solved. We don’t need her.”

“Um, no, bad idea,” Sam said. “Trying to trick a Trickster is risky. She’s a demigod, which makes her very powerful. I’m sure she’ll know when we do the spell and show up anyway. And if we don’t do it when and where she told us to, she’ll probably be pissed.”

“I don’t care.” Harry looked to be seething with rage. “There’s no way I’m letting Coop anywhere near Glastonbury Grove, especially not when Bob’s around.”

“Yeah, what is Glastonbury Grove, anyway?” Dean asked.

“It’s the entrance to the Lodges.” Cooper finally had something to contribute to the discussion. “In the woods, approximately a mile from where we were tonight. It seems that Trixie wants us to perform the spell there so that Bob will appear right next to the Lodge entrance, presumably to make it easier for her to force him inside.”

“If that’s even what she’s really going to do,” Harry said. “What if she leaves us high and dry?”

“Then we’ll be in much the same situation we are in now. We can still bring the blades and attempt to kill Bob in the event that Trixie fails to uphold her end of the bargain.”

“But killing him is a lot riskier at Glastonbury Grove, with the Lodge entrance right there. What’s to stop him from possessing you again? Or forcing you into the Black Lodge?”

“Or any of us, I guess,” Dean interjected. “For whatever that’s worth.”

Harry ignored him. “Coop, I don’t like this. It’s too much like what happened last time. We can’t go through that again.”

Cooper laid his hand on top of Harry’s. “We can go through anything, Harry, as long as we’re together. I think we’ve proved that by now.” He smiled, a bit sadly.

That seemed to settle the matter, although Harry clearly still didn’t like the plan. Neither did Dean, actually, but he didn’t see that they had another choice. “Okay,” Dean said aloud. “Plan A, Trixie is good as her word, and she kicks Bob’s ass into the Black Lodge and slams the door. Plan B, we introduce Bob to our little friends.” He patted his knife holster. “Either way it goes down, we need to do that spell tomorrow at midnight. How’s that looking, Sammy?”

“It doesn’t require anything too exotic,” Sam said, consulting the spell. “Human blood, of course, we’ve got plenty of that. Owl bones, should be able to find some of those. Angelica root. We had some in the trunk, but I’d like to get a fresh supply, I’m not sure how the quality of the herbs was affected by the whole fish incident.”

“And? What’s the other thing?” Dean prompted.

“What other thing?”

“Haven’t you ever noticed that, every time we try a new spell, there’s always one last ingredient that ends up being a huge pain in the ass to get? Like the head of a minotaur or fossilized angel snot or some shit like that?”

“Uh, nope, nothing like that this time. Just the physical sign of Bob that we’re going to use to track him. I guess that’s that burned engine oil stuff we were talking about.”

“Okay, cool. Well, I guess we can call it a night.”

“Isn’t there something else we can do now?” Harry asked, looking restless.

“Not unless this town has somewhere you can buy angelica root at two in the morning.”

Harry conceded that it did not, so they all went to bed. Dean took the couch, and Sam crammed his twelve-foot-tall frame into a borrowed sleeping bag on the living room. Harry and Cooper went off to their separate bedrooms (Dean had sort of been wondering about their sleeping arrangements).

After the string of late nights, Dean was tired enough to fall asleep quickly despite the couch being kind of old and saggy and likely to give him a sore back by the morning. He was awoken in the pitch black of what seemed to still be the middle of the night by someone yelling. Automatically, in a single motion, he reached for the gun he had left on the coffee table and lunged for the switch on the floor lamp next to the couch. “Sammy?” he shouted as the light flooded the room. Sam was still on the floor, tangled up in his sleeping bag, but had also drawn his own gun and was looking around the room blearily. It wasn’t Sam who had yelled.

Before they could investigate further, Harry came barreling out of his bedroom and into Cooper’s. “Coop?” they heard him ask from the darkened room. Cooper said something soft and inaudible in reply, and Harry stuck his head out through the doorway. “Everything’s fine,” he said to Sam and Dean. “Sorry about that, guys.” Harry didn’t go back to his own bedroom, but instead stayed in Cooper’s room, closing the door behind him. Dean tossed his gun back onto the coffee table, turned off the light, and lay back down on the couch. Bad dreams, he knew all about those, and god knows Sam did too. He wondered what Cooper had been dreaming about. Nothing good, from the sounds of it, so hopefully it wasn’t a premonition of what was waiting for them in Glastonbury Grove.

Sam woke up the in the morning light, initially unsure where he was. That didn’t bother him, because it was normal for him to wake up in different places and be momentarily confused about his location. Just part of life on the road. Then he saw the deer head and the Buddha statue looming over him and remembered, Oh yeah. Harry and Cooper’s place. Dean was still asleep on the couch. Sam searched for the zipper on his sleeping bag, found it, got it stuck on the fabric while trying to unzip it, got it unstuck, and finally succeeded in unzipping the bag and started working his way out of it. Sometime during that process, the door to Cooper’s bedroom swung open and Harry came out and nodded good morning. Apparently, he had spent the whole night there. Sam decided to stop wondering about those two.

Soon, Dean was also up and groaning about his back like an old man. Sam pointed out that he had spent the night on the floor and wasn’t complaining, and Dean said the floor was probably better than the couch. Cooper overheard them bickering as he was heading out to the back porch with a yoga mat and invited Dean to join him for his morning session, saying that the physical and mental exercise was beneficial for sore muscles. Dean politely declined.

While Cooper was outside doing his yoga thing, Harry got the industrial coffee machine going and cooked breakfast. Soon, Cooper came back inside, and Harry handed him a mug of coffee. “I made pancakes,” Harry said. “Plus ham to drench in the maple syrup.”

“I know I keep saying it, but you’re all right, Harry.” The two of them grinned dopily at each other.

They all crowded around the table. Over breakfast, they made their plans for the day. They were going to enlist the rest of the Bookhouse People for some help in tracking down the ingredients for the spell and maybe as backup support at Glastonbury Grove that night. As they talked, Sam frowned down at his phone. He was reading though Trixie’s spell text again, and he had just noticed a potential complication.

“What’s up, Sammy?” Dean asked.

“Well, if I’m understanding these instructions right, the spell works by sympathetic magic. We imprint it with the physical sign we’re trying to track and bind, in this case the burnt engine oil. Like attracts like, so Bob should be drawn to wherever there’s a concentration of the stuff.”

“That’s not a problem,” Harry said. “There’s a whole pool of that stuff at Glastonbury Grove.”

“Yeah, but it looks like the thing being bound doesn’t necessarily go to wherever there’s the highest concentration of the binding agent. It might go to wherever’s closest, or it might just be random, it’s not really clear.”

“There is likely to be some amount of that material everywhere Bob has been since leaving the Black Lodge,” Cooper said.

“So we don’t know for sure where Bob will show up when we do the spell? It could be anywhere he’s been?” Harry asked.

“I think there would have to be more than just a trace amount of the stuff present, but other than that, yeah,” Sam said.

Cooper appeared thoughtful. “It seems that significant quantities of the material are only left behind when Bob is in a heightened emotional state.”

“Like when he kills,” Harry said. “Otherwise we would be able to detect the stuff on him all the time.”

“Exactly. We found it at the fire ring at Ghostwood Estates where he got to Helen, and I have no doubt that Albert will have discovered some in the morgue where Sarah was killed as well.”

“So that means there are two additional places where he could show up, besides Glastonbury Grove,” Dean said.

“That’s two too many,” Harry said. “We don’t have much of a margin for error as it is.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam said. He was re-reading a part of the long text he had scrolled past before. “It looks like there’s a way to neutralize the binding agents for places other than the target location.”

“Neutralize how?” Dean asked.

“I guess all we need is to have someone standing there burning sage,” Sam said, shrugging.

“Seriously?”

“Well, I guess that’s another job for the rest of the Bookhouse People,” Harry said. “And we can put our FBI colleagues to work on that too. I’m sure Albert will enjoy waving around some burning sage.” He grinned at the prospect. “We’ll station a couple of people at Ghostwood, a couple more at the hospital, and the four of us will handle the main event at Glastonbury Grove. That way, if something goes wrong and Bob doesn’t show at the grove as planned, we’ll have some of our people at the other sites as a first line of defense.” Plan made, Harry went off to call the others and give them their instructions.

Cooper started cleaning up the breakfast dishes, and Sam pitched in. “I would like to apologize for waking you last night,” Cooper said. “I sometimes have troubling dreams. More so than normal lately.”

“No problem, we get it.” Sam handed Cooper a stack of dishes, which he started loading into the dishwasher. “Hey, Cooper. I was wondering about something Trixie said last night. She said that you and Harry were both former guests of the Lodges.” Sam had been wanting to know more about what had happened in 1989 in case it was relevant to the current situation, but he hadn’t wanted to ask about it in front of Harry, because Harry tended to bite the head off of anyone who tried to make Cooper relive the experience.

“Yes, that’s correct.” Cooper closed the dishwasher and started to wipe down the kitchen counter with a rag.

“So, what happened? I mean, I know you said earlier that you were trapped in the Black Lodge, while your doppelganger was out causing trouble. But how did you get out?”

“Harry came after me, of course.” Cooper seemed a million miles away, wiping down the same patch of counter over and over. “He’s a much better man than I am, you know. So strong, and wise, like he’s lived a thousand lifetimes. I doubt there’s anyone else in the world who could have done what he did.”

“What did he do?” Dean was lounging lazily at the table, but now looked interested in the conversation.

“Fear is the path to the Black Lodge. That’s how I ended up there. I wasn’t prepared for the terror that awaited me, and I was arrogant about my abilities. But Harry walked in with no fear in his heart. Nothing but pure, selfless love. It was an act of love so powerful, it led him to the White Lodge, and there he was given the power to guide me back. I’ve always said that Harry’s a bodhisattva, a compassionate soul who leads others on the path to enlightenment. If it weren’t for him, I would still be in the Black Lodge now.”

Cooper put down his rag and walked over to the wall shelves where all the photos of his and Harry’s life together were arrayed. He examined the photos, as if seeing them for the first time, or as if trying to figure out if they were real or not. Sam saw that Cooper was smiling as he looked at the photos, but also looked sad. Like he was saying goodbye.

They spent the day at the Bookhouse, getting ready for the midnight showdown with Bob. The group gradually got larger as their helpers arrived, bearing the spell ingredients that Harry had assigned to them. First, Hawk arrived. For some reason, he had two tranquilizer guns with him, and he also brought the requisite owl bones. Dean wondered if he’d happened to have owl bones lying around, or if he’d found a dead owl in the woods, or if he’d had to go out and kill an owl specifically, but anyway the result was that they could check that ingredient off the list. Then Andy and Lily came, carrying shopping bags from some hippie grocery store. Inside was the fresh angelica root and a bunch of sage smudge sticks. Finally, Albert blew in like a hurricane made of bitching complaints, accompanied by Audrey. They had indeed found plenty of the burnt engine oil stuff in the morgue where Sarah Palmer was killed, which they had collected in a sample jar.  Harry seemed relieved that they didn’t have to make a special trip to Glastonbury Grove just to collect the stuff from the pool there. Albert had also apparently raided the hospital’s drug supplies. He took out a bunch of vials and laid them on the table.

“You brought us drugs? Awesome,” Dean said.

Albert shot him a withering glare. “It’s haloperidol.”

“I don’t think I’ve tried that one.”

“It’s an antipsychotic. Might do you some good.”

“We’ve found that it’s effective in suppressing Bob, allowing the person he’s possessing to temporarily regain control,” Cooper explained.

“Why would we do that when Trixie is hopefully sending him back to the Black Lodge anyway?” It struck Dean as cruel to bring poor Garland Briggs back to full awareness just so they send him to a place of unimaginable evil. Being a meatsuit sucked.

“It’s just a failsafe,” Harry said. “Part of the backup plan in case Trixie doesn’t hold up her end. Listen, this is important. If we shoot Garland, or kill him with any ordinary weapon, Bob will just leave him and find someone else to possess. Which probably means one of us, because we’ll be closest.”

“Got it,“ Dean said. “So we don’t kill him unless we’re killing him real dead, meaning with the demon-killing knife or angel blade, which will kill not just the meatsuit but Bob too.”

“Right,” Harry confirmed. “So if we can’t get to him at close range with the knives right away, we disable him with less-lethal weapons, like the haloperidol, which we can load into the tranquilizer guns.” Harry spoke with confidence, as if they’d done this kind of thing before, which Dean guessed they had.

“Our rock-salt pellets might have some disabling effect too,” Sam added. “They slow most things down.”

Albert and Andy worked on filling tranquilizer darts with haloperidol and loading them into the tranq guns. Dean enlisted Audrey and Lily in loading rock-salt pellets into the large number of regular guns they had amongst them. Sam and Hawk mixed up the ingredients for the spell.

“Well, that’s it,” Sam said, filling a mason jar with the completed sludge-like potion. He had wrapped a bandage around his hand following the requisite blood-letting that spells always seemed to require. “When we get to Glastonbury Grove tonight, all we do is dump this out on the ground while saying the incantation, and Bob should show up.”

“That’s it?” Harry eyed the foul-looking substance dubiously.

Dean shrugged. “As far as we know, yeah.”

Harry assigned Hawk and Andy to be the neutralizers at the Ghostwood Estates fire ring that night. With a wicked grin, he then assigned Albert and Audrey to fulfill the same duty at the morgue. Albert’s reaction to being ordered to wave around a smudge stick at a crime scene was hilarious, as predicted, but after much eye-rolling and name-calling, he agreed to do it. Lily, meanwhile, volunteered to join the FBI agents at the morgue. She seemed to have a bit of a hero-worship thing for Audrey, having worked hard to impress her with how quickly she could load a shotgun, while peppering her with questions about the process of applying to be an FBI agent.

After all the work was done, there was still a long time to wait until midnight. Lucy stopped by to drop off more diner food for dinner. Hawk and Andy found a checkerboard somewhere and played a couple of games. Lily dragged Audrey outside to set up some bottles for target practice, obviously hoping to impress her with her sharpshooting skills. Sam lounged on the sofa, messing around on his phone. Harry and Cooper, meanwhile, were sitting off by themselves in a corner of the room, chairs pulled up close together so that their knees were almost touching. They occasionally spoke to one another in hushed tones, but mostly they were silent, each seeming to just soak in the other’s energy like warmth from the sun.

That left Dean sitting at the table with Albert, which was not the company he would have chosen. Dean really wanted a beer, but there wasn’t any, and anyway it was probably better to go into the upcoming showdown stone-cold sober. Still, he had that restless pre-hunt feeling, which he tried to alleviate by looking through the leftover diner food for something else to munch on. Score, there was a whole container of tater tots that he’d missed before. Popping a lukewarm tot into his mouth, he noticed that Albert was staring at Harry and Cooper across the room. Albert noticed that he had noticed and glared at him. Then Albert leaned across the table and snapped in a whisper, which was sort of an impressive feat, “Harry still hasn’t told Coop, has he?”

“About the cancer thing?” Dean found a container of ranch dressing to dip his tots in. “Nope, I don’t think so.”

“He’s such an idiot,” Albert said fiercely. “Always has been.”

Dean felt obligated to defend Harry. “Well, now’s probably not the best time for them to have that conversation anyway. We’ve got enough drama dealing with the forces of evil right now.”

“That’s the excuse he’s telling himself. He’s really just a coward.” The level of vitriol in Albert’s voice surprised Dean, even though every sentence he had heard Albert speak sounded like it could corrode steel.

“Yeah, well, you’re really just a dick,” was the best retort Dean would come up with.

Albert ignored him. “Harry is so terrified of hurting Coop, but of course the longer he waits, the more it’s going to hurt him.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to ruin the time they have left.” Dean was getting sick of this conversation. It was too depressing.

“I think Harry’s hoping the cancer will get him before he has to tell Coop anything. Then the rest of us will be left to try to pick up the pieces. Selfish bastard.”

Dean stood up. “Well, maybe Bob will kill us all tonight, and then it will be a moot point.” He wandered off to go see what Sammy was up to, leaving Albert sitting at the table, still staring at Harry and Cooper.

Finally, it was close enough to midnight that it was time to head out. Sam and Dean took their customary place in the bed of Harry’s truck, while Albert, Audrey, and Lily headed to the hospital and Hawk and Andy to Ghostwood Estates. Harry took them on the highway out of town. Just past Ghostwood, they turned onto a dirt logging road. The night was clear, cold, and moonless, and the truck’s high-beams sliced through the darkness to reveal thicker woods than any they had visited so far, with an aura of something ancient and wild. As they bumped along, Sam had to duck down to avoid the tree branches that grew low over the road, slapping against the truck’s cab. A white snowy owl flew across the road right in front of the truck, so quickly and silently it might have been a ghost or an omen.

They stopped at an unremarkable wide spot on the road. Harry distributed Maglites again, and Sam and Dean grabbed the blades and their rock-salt loaded guns, as well as the mason jar filled with the ingredients for the spell. Harry and Cooper had the tranquilizer guns, loaded with haloperidol darts. Sam and Dean followed Harry and Cooper on a path that led deeper into the woods.

Soon, their flashlight beams illuminated an opening in the dense forest canopy, where a group of sycamore trees grew in a circle. The light glinted on what looked like a small puddle at the far side of the opening, and Sam caught a faint odor of burnt engine oil.

“Here we are,” Harry said grimly. “Glastonbury Grove.” He seemed to be on edge to a degree Sam hadn’t seen before, having taken hold of Cooper’s elbow as if afraid he might suddenly vanish.

Dean turned to Sam. “We’ve got everything we need, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve got the mixture right here, and the incantation is on my phone.” Sam opened up the text from Trixie and squinted at the incantation. It was written phonetically, but he was still a bit worried about getting the pronunciation right. There were a lot of consonants crammed together in combinations he wasn’t used to seeing. “So all we have to do is dump this stuff out on the ground while saying the incantation.”

Harry was looking at his own phone. “Albert and Hawk both just texted me. They’re in position at the other two sites.”

“Awesome,” Dean said. “What time is it?”

“Five minutes to midnight,” Sam said.

“So do we wait for Trixie to show up, or start now?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess we’ll wait five minutes until it’s midnight exactly, then we’ll start whether or not she shows.”

“Harry,” Cooper said suddenly, with such a serious tone that all three of them wheeled around to look at him. “Since we only have a few minutes, there’s something I need to tell you now.”

“What is it, Coop?”

“This isn’t going to work.” Cooper spoke with absolute certainty.

Harry seemed taken aback. “Coop, you were the one who wanted to try this.”

“Yes, but the truth is that any course of action would have led to the same outcome. I’m going back into the Black Lodge. Tonight.”

Harry’s face darkened with anger. “Like hell you are. Is this about those dreams you’ve been having?”

“Yes, but it’s more than just the dreams.” Coop looked down at the ground, as if he couldn’t stand to watch Harry’s face as he said his next words. “I’ve known all along that my destiny is to return to the Black Lodge. When I was first there, the Laura doppelganger told me so. She said, ‘I’ll see you in twenty-five years.’”

Harry looked stunned. “All those years—” He seemed to be lost for words. “You never said anything.”

“It seemed like such a long time.” Cooper smiled sadly and took Harry’s hands in his. “Harry, I was never meant to leave in the first place. Those twenty-five years you gave me were a gift. I am so grateful that I got to spend them with you, and I had to tell you that. But now I have to go back. And I don’t want you coming after me this time.”

Harry shook his head. “No, Coop. You can’t ask that from me.” His voice broke. “We’ll find another way, we always do—”

“Sounds like you boys started the fun without me.” The voice came from the woods. A coyote walked into the light of their flashlight beams, then morphed into the shape of a woman. Trixie stood grinning her inhuman grin. “First things first, let’s adjust the lighting,” she said. “No flashlights. They kill the mood.” She clapped her hands twice. Their flashlights extinguished themselves, and a large bonfire appeared at the edge of the grove. “There, that’s how humans should see the woods at night.” Now, it looked as though anything could be looming in the woods, just beyond the glow of the flickering firelight. “I hope you don’t mind my outfit, I decided to go old-school tonight.” She was wearing a dress that was just as skimpy as the one from last night, but it was made of rawhide. She had also accessorized with a necklace made from the skulls of what appeared to be rodents, bracelets on her wrists made of the teeth of some unidentifiable creature, and rattlesnake rattles as earrings. Incongruously, she was still wearing her go-go boots.

“Yay, you’re here,” Dean said sarcastically. “Can we just get this done now?”

“Not quite, sweetie,” Trixie said, walking up to Harry and Cooper. “I think we have some unresolved issues to deal with first.”

Cooper looked at Harry and said, in a low voice, “Let’s just stick with the plan, Harry. But no matter what happens, please remember what I said, and what I asked for.”

“No, you don’t get to just drop something like that and then go on like nothing happened,” Harry said furiously. “We’re not doing anything to bring Bob here until you’re far away from him and the Black Lodge.” Sam sighed and put his phone back in his pocket. It sounded like they weren’t going to be doing the spell anytime soon.

“Harry,” Cooper said. His tone was equal parts frustration and affection. “You can’t protect me from this. Not this time.”

“Well, you can’t leave me alone like this. I need you.” There was raw desperation in Harry’s voice.

“Come on, darling,” Trixie said to Harry. “He told you his secret, now you tell him yours. It’s only fair.”

At that, Cooper’s gaze, which had not left Harry’s face, turned searching. “Harry?” he asked.

Harry just shook his head. “Please, Coop.”

“Hey, Trixie,” Dean called. “Here’s an idea. Fuck off, you nosy bitch.”

Ignoring Dean, Trixie continued to cajole Harry. “You know, darling, if you tell him, he’ll at least feel bad about leaving you alone to die a horrible death from cancer.” Both Harry and Cooper froze, and Sam heard Dean mutter awesome under his breath. “Oops,” Trixie said cheerfully. “I guess I am a nosy bitch.”

Harry took another step closer to Cooper, as if trying to shut the rest of them out. “I’m so sorry, Coop,” he said, sounding defeated. “I was going to tell you as soon as all this was over with. I just found out last Friday, when I told you I was going to see Frank. I was really going to see the oncologist in Spokane.”

It looked like Cooper’s soul was going through a slow-motion demolition. “But you’re not sick,” he said, gripping Harry’s shoulders with both hands and looking him up and down as though for signs of illness. “I would know if you were sick—”

“I’m not sick yet,” Harry said quietly. “But I will be. I’m sorry.”

Cooper looked like he was sick himself now. “But you’ll get better.” He said it like a statement, not a question.

“No, it’s not like that. It’s inoperable. I’ve got months, maybe.” At that, Cooper apparently couldn’t stand any more. He sank to his knees in the dirt, and Harry sank down with him. Cooper buried his face in Harry’s shoulder, and Harry wrapped his arms around him. “Coop, it’s just impermanence,” Harry murmured. “Like a sand mandala.”

 Cooper was shaking. “No, Harry. You’ve always been stronger than me. I can’t just let go. Not of you.” The last words came out in a sob.

Sam exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Dean. Well, this sucked. He felt for Cooper, and Harry as well. He wished that they could give them some privacy, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go, not with Trixie still standing there with her scavenger smile.

“Well, that’s the sound I’ve been waiting to hear,” she said, cocking her head as Cooper continued to cry in ragged, uneven gasps. “Absolute despair. I’d better call Bob to the club now, they’re playing his song.” She made a sudden flicking with her finger, and the mason jar of spell ingredients flew out of Sam’s hand and into hers. “I’ll handle the incantation, baby,” she said to Sam. “The pronunciation is a bit, well, tricky.” She unceremoniously opened and upturned the mason jar. As its sludge-like contents flowed out onto the ground, a string of words poured forth from her lips. At least, Sam assumed they were words. It didn’t sound like any language he had ever heard. It sounded more like someone choking on a mouthful of blood and broken glass.

As the last of the sludge dripped out and Trixie reached the end of the incantation, another figure appeared in the grove. It was Garland Briggs, or had once been. In the firelight, Sam swore he could see something else flickering in and out of Garland’s features, a trace of the wild-eyed man he had glimpsed in the shattered mirror of Room 315. The thing stood there, threw its head back, and laughed. It was as unearthly a sound as Sam had ever heard, evoking the baying of hellhounds and the screams of condemned souls.  

Harry had gotten to his feet, pulling Cooper up with him. Sam and Dean both cocked their guns, pointing them at Bob. Harry pulled out his tranq gun as well, pushing Cooper behind him. Cooper, meanwhile, looked completely defeated, not even bothering to get out his own weapon.

“Now, now, boys,” Trixie said. “Let me take those toys before someone gets hurt.” She waved her hand lazily, and all the guns flew to her. One by one, she removed the rock-salt shells and haloperidol darts, tossing the now-unloaded guns onto the ground. “Oh, yeah, can’t forget those things,” she said, snapping her fingers, and the demon-killing knife and angel blade also flew into her hands. She tucked one of the blades into each of her go-go boots.

“You’re a babe, Trixie,” Bob leered at her. “You even got the fire going for me. You know how I like fire.”

“And you know how you make my skin crawl, you disgusting creature,” she said idly. “But here they are. I hope you’re satisfied.”

“You bitch,” Dean said, furious. “You were on his side the whole time.”

“Hey, Trickster’s gonna trick,” she said defensively. “You know that, sweetie. And I’m not on anyone’s side. Chaotic neutral, remember? I have to say though, I was rooting for you boys. The forces of good are always so much more attractive than the forces of evil. But I have my own people to think about, and unfortunately the forces of evil are the safer bet when it comes to preserving the kind of wild chaos my kind needs to survive in the world today. I can at least count on Bob here not to turn these woods into a shopping mall or something.”

“Is it really just the development of Ghostwood you care about?” Harry asked weakly. “I mean, there were people who tried to stop it. Coop tried to stop it—”

“People can’t stop things like that, darling. It’s progress.” She spat the word. “But things like Bob, he can. I’d love to see them try to turn this place into the next trendy retirement community when there’s something like him running around.”

Bob had been just watching this exchange, but now he walked slowly forward, towards the four of them. Sam tensed up, ready to fight, and he sensed Dean and Harry doing the same, while Cooper seemed resigned to whatever was coming. “The Winchesters,” Bob said, grinning at them. “I’ve heard of you, of course. I’m a big fan. Especially of you, Sammy. I’ll definitely have to try you on at some point. I love it when someone with a mind like yours comes to town. So shiny and new.” Sam noted with disgust that Bob was licking his lips at the prospect.

“Just try it, douchebag,” Dean growled, taking a step forward.

“Relax, big brother,” Bob said. “He’s not my priority right now. No offense, Sammy, but Dale and I go way back. We’ve had some great times together, and I’ve been looking forward to catching up.”

With a sudden movement, Harry launched himself at Bob. He tackled him to the ground and, with a violence that was both shocking and impressive for a guy his age, started whaling on Bob’s face with both fists. The action snapped Cooper out of his lethargic state, and he rushed forward to Harry’s side. Wordlessly, Sam and Dean agreed to take advantage of the opportunity and made a grab for Trixie. Maybe if she was distracted enough, they could get to one of the blades she had stashed in her boots –

No such luck. The second Sam and Dean moved in Trixie’s direction, she lazily waved her hand, and the two of them went flying. Sam grunted as his back impacted hard with one of the sycamore trees, knocking the wind out of him. He hated being telekinetically flung around by monsters like that, it was very demoralizing. He managed to struggle to his feet, but found that he couldn’t move, that he was pinned to the tree by an invisible force. Yeah, he hated when that happened too, it usually didn’t end well. At a neighboring tree, Dean was in the same boat.

Harry was still going at it, though. He now had his hands wrapped around Bob’s throat and was in the process of choking him, while Cooper crouched next to him. Sam didn’t know what Harry’s endgame was there, because he himself had told them that killing Bob’s meatsuit wouldn’t do any good, but it looked like he wasn’t giving a lot of thought to the matter other than that he really, really wanted to hurt Bob. Trixie was watching with the air of someone observing a slightly dull sporting event, like cricket or golf. After another long moment, however, she said, “Okay, as much as I’m enjoying this, that’s enough,” and waved her hand again. Harry and Cooper also went flying through the air and got their own sycamore trees to be magically pinned against.

Bob got to his feet, rubbing his neck and grinning. He was bleeding from the nose, lip, and a cut above his eye. As the blood streamed down Garland Briggs’s face, Bob laughed his chilling laugh again. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to Dale while that one was still around,” he said, gesturing at Harry. “I learned my lesson last time. So I was willing to be patient. After all, I’ve been waiting for twenty-five years, I could wait another few months, until the cancer gets him.” Cooper flinched at that. “Then, in his despair, Dale would be easy prey. But thanks to Trixie, I didn’t have to wait any longer.” He started to approach Cooper, reaching out as if to caress his face. Harry struggled wildly against the invisible restraints.

“Sorry, you do have to wait just a smidge longer,” Trixie interrupted.

Bob paused, letting his hand drop, and turned to glare at Trixie. “I’m taking Dale back. This one,” he gestured at Garland Briggs’s bleeding face, “is old and damaged.”

”I don’t care what you wear, and I can definitely see that it would be an upgrade,” Trixie said. “But I’ve made them a reservation for a stay in the Lodge first.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good. Sam still wasn’t sure what exactly the nature of the Black Lodge was, but he had not liked the glimpse of it he had gotten in his dreams.

“Why?” Bob sounded like a toddler whose mom had taken away his toys.

“Because if you try to possess any of them before they’re fully broken, they may resist and find a way to kill you. They’re wily. Believe me, I know wily.”

“Dale is fully broken,” Bob said petulantly. “Just look at him. He can’t resist.” Sam had to admit that Bob had a point. Ever since Cooper had found out about Harry’s illness, he had looked like a zombie.

“Better safe than sorry,” Trixie said. “I’ll keep them on ice for you, don’t worry. You can even use them to build some new doppelgangers.”

Cooper spoke up for the first time since Bob’s arrival, addressing Trixie. “It’s just me he wants. You have no reason to send the others to the Lodge. If you let them go, I’ll let Bob in. I won’t resist.”

“Coop, don’t say that,” Harry said. He was still helplessly struggling to break free of the magical bonds.

“Relax, darling,” Trixie said, looking bored again. “I’m sure you all know I’m going to have to pass on that generous offer. I can’t have you all running around planning a rescue mission. No, all four of you are going. It’s gonna be a party in the Black Lodge tonight, the likes of which hasn’t been seen for generations. I hope you all brought your dancing shoes, because I hear they really like to boogie in there. Have fun.”

Trixie made a pushing motion with her hand, and the four of them went flying again. This time, Sam saw a flash of red along the edges of his vision, like curtains opening. Then the forest was gone, and they were in the space, made half-familiar through his dreams, of the Black Lodge.

Chapter Text

Dean’s first reaction was that maybe the Black Lodge wasn’t that bad. It was just what Sam had described seeing in his dream and Laura Palmer and Helen Briggs in theirs, a room with red curtains hung all around. There was a couch with a dwarf sitting on it, but that barely registered as noteworthy compared to the kind of things he and Sam were used to dealing with. All in all, the Black Lodge seemed quite a few steps below Hell in terms of the sheer evil and terror and whatnot. Okay, the décor was a little odd, but he and Sam had stayed in more horrifying lodges while on the road. Maybe the whole “place of unspeakable evil” thing was a bit overhyped.

But his next reaction was that, despite the lack of hellfire or demons or screams of torment, something was – off. An uneasy feeling crept along his spine, like the fingers of a ghost. The fact that there wasn’t anything overtly evil in view somehow enhanced rather than mitigated the growing sense of dread.

The dwarf got up off the couch and shot a dirty look at the four new arrivals, who were all standing in a clump in the center of the room. “They’ll let anyone in nowadays,” he said. At least, that’s what Dean thought he said. His words were garbled and difficult to understand. Okay, that must be the famed backwards speech. The dwarf sauntered out of the room, apparently miffed at how crowded his hangout suddenly was.

Turning to Sam, Dean said, “What the fuck?”, which he thought to be a pretty concise summary of their predicament. But Dean’s own words came out garbled, just like the dwarf’s had. “What the fuck?” he repeated, alarmed. It came out backwards again. Okay, now he was getting a bit freaked out. He had never encountered something like that before, where reality itself seemed to be distorted by some dark force.

Sam also looked a bit spooked. Harry and Cooper, meanwhile, looked not so much scared as devastated.

“I thought it was my fate to return to the Black Lodge alone,” Cooper said, sounding shocked.

“We’re sorry we got you boys dragged into this,” Harry added. It was really annoying trying to have a conversation when everyone’s words were coming out sounding so strange, like they were being run through a bad version of Google Translate.

Dean shrugged as casually as he could. “That’s okay. This kind of thing happens to us all the time.” Sam made a “meh, kind of” gesture with his hand. Well, yeah, not always quite as weird as this, but still.

Cooper sank down on the couch recently vacated by the dwarf, and Harry joined him. “You okay, Coop?” he asked. That seemed to be kind of a dumb question to Dean, because it was pretty clear that none of them were okay, least of all Cooper.

But Cooper just reached out to hold Harry’s hand. “I should be asking you that, Harry. I was selfish in my reaction to finding out about –” He broke off, maybe from not being able to bring himself to mention Harry’s cancer, maybe from frustration at the slow, halting way the Lodge made everyone speak. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that alone,” he managed to say.

Dean figured that whole thing was a moot point now, because it looked like they were all stuck in the Black Lodge for eternity, or until Bob decided to borrow one of them for a meatsuit. But Cooper still seemed more upset about the cancer revelation than he was about being trapped in the Black Lodge again. Well, that sort of made sense. He had been expecting to return to the Lodge, but had been completely blindsided by Harry’s illness.

The curtains at the side of the room stirred, and someone else came to join the party. It was a beautiful blond girl, dressed like a homecoming queen. Laura Palmer. Dean recognized her from the photos in the case file. But her eyes were completely white, like they were rolled back in her head, and she moved with an awkward gait, like something trying to figure out how to imitate human movements without having ever seen an actual human.

Laura waltzed awkwardly across the room, over to the couch. She perched on the armrest next to Cooper, leaned over, and kissed him on the cheek. “Welcome back,” she said. Harry shoved her roughly away. She laughed, the same kind of crazed laugh that they had heard from Bob. She grabbed Cooper’s wrists with both hands, trying to get him to stand up, and Harry pushed her away again. She said, “Dance with me,” and started dancing herself, a shambling pirouette like a marionette on strings, swaying back and forth to unheard music. She laughed again as she danced, but gradually her laugh morphed into a scream. Her screams got louder and louder as she twirled faster and faster.

Sam and Dean looked at each other and made a mutual decision to start looking for a way out of Dodge. Walking through the curtains along one side of the room, they entered a hallway hung with yet more red curtains. Dean opened one set of curtains at random and stepped through, finding himself back in the red room. From across the room, Sam entered through another set of curtains. It looked like all roads led back to the red room.

“You can’t get out,” Cooper said, unhelpfully, from his seat on the couch. He was now sort of leaning against Harry, who had his arm around his shoulders, and the two of them were just blankly staring at Laura’s dance routine like they were watching the world’s most horrifying reality TV show.

“You guys did,” Sam snapped back.

“That won’t work again,” Cooper said. He had to almost shout over Laura’s continued screaming.

“Not with that attitude, it won’t,” Dean muttered. He was getting tired of Cooper’s defeatism. He was also getting really tired of the screaming and the backwards speech and the damn red curtains. He plunged through the curtain again into the hallway, then tried another set of curtains. Of course, he ended up right back in the Red Room again. But this time, as he re-entered, he collided with someone, his face smacking right into a broad chest. He looked up to see a face, high above him. It was a giant. The thing made Sam, standing nearby, look short, so it definitely qualified as a giant. Dean hastily took a step back, hoping he hadn’t pissed off the guy by running into him. “Sorry, man,” he said.

The giant stared down at him impassively, then turned to address Harry and Cooper. Mercifully, Laura had disappeared, so things were a lot quieter now. “As former guests of the White Lodge,” the giant said, “the door remains open to you.”

Harry stood up at that, with a glimmer of hope in his eyes for the first time since they had entered the Black Lodge. “How?” he asked.

“The path is the same as it has always been.”

Nodding over at Sam and Dean, Harry asked, “What about them?” That was nice of him. Dean appreciated being included.

The giant turned his searching gaze on Sam and Dean. “They are also travelers to other realms,” he said, in an assessing tone. “The door is open for them as well if they can find the path.” Dean assumed he was referring to the fact that he and Sam had literally been to Hell and back. Well, it was cool if those excursions had finally paid off by granting them some kind of interdimensional passports.

The giant moved away slowly, disappearing through the curtains. Dean and Sam stepped over to the couch. Cooper had gotten to his feet as well, standing with Harry. “What the fuck does that mean?” Dean demanded.

“It means we can leave,” Harry said.

“Awesome. How?”

“The same way we did before. Through the White Lodge.”

Dean remembered Cooper talking about love being the path to the White Lodge. Okay, sounded kinda cheesy, but he was willing to give a shot.

“So, what are we waiting for?” Sam asked.

Harry turned to Cooper. Oh, that was what they were waiting for. Cooper still had that shell-shocked look on his face, like his soul had been blown to smithereens. “I can’t, Harry.”

“Coop,” Harry said, very reasonably. “We can’t stay here. What about Sam and Dean?”

“They can find their own path.” Cooper looked directly at Sam and Dean. “I hope you do, because you deserve better than to be trapped here. And I believe you can do it.” Then he looked back at Harry. “But I can’t.”

“You did it before.” Harry’s voice was still very calm.

“Before, I wanted to leave. Now I don’t.”

“Coop.” Harry’s vast reserves of patience seemed to be running low. “That’s crazy.”

“I realize it’s irrational, but it’s how I feel. If we stay here, at least we’re together. If we go back –” Cooper took a deep, shuddering breath. “I can’t watch you die, Harry. Being trapped here forever would be far less painful. That’s the way I feel, and I can’t change that.”

Harry took Cooper’s hand, looking heartbroken. “Maybe we can change it,” he said, a bit desperately. “We need to meditate.”

“Seriously?” Dean muttered. But apparently Harry was serious, because he and Cooper both sat down cross-legged on the floor, facing each other and holding hands. They both closed their eyes and, incredibly enough, seemed to be almost instantly in some sort of meditative state. It looked like something they had practiced a lot.

Sam kept shooting Dean meaningful looks, like they were supposed to give Harry and Cooper some privacy. Well, too bad, there wasn’t anywhere to fucking go. So Dean just flopped onto the couch. As a reflex, he took out his phone. Of course, no goddamn service in here, and no wifi either. And no plugs, so eventually the battery would die. Well, his phone might as well go out fighting. He started playing the offline version of Angry Birds. There would be no way to sync his scores, but at least it was something to do. Damn, this place was boring. One thing Hell had in its favor was that it was entertaining, in its way.

Sam wandered around between the Red Room and the hallway, popping in and out of the curtains in unexpected places like he was in a Scooby-Doo chase scene. He glared at Dean when the sounds from Angry Birds got too loud, jerking his head toward Harry and Cooper. Dean rolled his eyes at that. It didn’t look like there was any way the two yogis would be disturbed by the sounds of the game, they were apparently deep in meditation to an impressive degree. Laura had come screaming through the room a couple of times, and so had another beautiful teenage girl whom Dean recognized at Helen Briggs. Harry and Cooper hadn’t flinched even at that commotion, but Dean muted the volume on his phone anyway. At one point, the dwarf wandered back in and sat next to him on the couch. He leaned over Dean and stared at the game in apparent interest. Dean sighed and shoved his phone back into his pocket. Having a creepy dwarf watching him play sucked whatever little fun he had been having out of the game. The dwarf glared at him and left the room again.

Dean wondered when would be an appropriate time to ask Harry for more specific directions to this path to the White Lodge, since it looked like he and Sam were on their own. He didn’t want to interrupt the meditation session, insane though it was, so he figured he’d try to bring up the matter as delicately as possible as soon as they were finished. He had no idea how long Harry and Cooper had been meditating, or how long they had all been in the Black Lodge for that matter. Glancing at his phone again, he saw the clock kept flashing different numbers that weren’t real times. One second it was 73 o’clock, the next it was 61 minutes past 33. So he just leaned back on the couch and twiddled his thumbs, while Sam kept exploring the different passageways as if one of these times one of them would actually lead somewhere, and Harry and Cooper sat like the Buddha statue in their living room. The strange, sinister energy of the Black Lodge crackled continuously in the background.

Suddenly, Harry moved. He jumped to his feet, with realization dawning on his face. “Harry?” Cooper questioned, getting up as well.

“Come on,” Harry said, tugging on Cooper’s arm in a determined way. He dragged Cooper out to the hallway, and Sam and Dean trailed after.

Harry stopped in front of one of the identical sets of curtains that lined the hallway. With his hand still on Cooper’s arm, he turned to face Sam and Dean. “You have to let go of all your fear, anger, any negative emotions,” he told them urgently. “When you step through, there has to be nothing but love in your heart. Got it?”

“Um, okay,” Sam said uncertainly.

“Love, got it,” Dean added. He guessed those were the specific directions he had been waiting for. Not necessarily as helpful as he had hoped, but he had come to expect that.

Harry turned back to Cooper. “It’s time to leave,” he said.

“I told you, Harry,” Cooper said miserably. “I can’t. How could I?”

“You can,” Harry said with complete confidence. “I’ll tell you how.” As he spoke, somehow his words seemed to come through clearer, sounding almost normal and free of distortion, like he was speaking from outside the Black Lodge. “I’m not letting you stay here. I love you too much for that. So I’m leaving. If you stay here, I’ll have to face the cancer on my own. And you won’t let me die alone. You love me too much for that. So we’re leaving, together. Now.”

As Cooper listened, tears brimmed in his eyes, and his face changed. The zombie-like expression he had been wearing since the cancer revelation was replaced by one of mingled grief and gratitude, tangled up together so that it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, blending into something that looked a bit like acceptance and a whole lot like love. Seeing the change in Cooper’s expression, Harry apparently judged that the time was right. He took Cooper’s hand, and the two of them plunged through the red curtains together.

Now it was just Sam and Dean standing in the hallway of the Black Lodge. “Ready?” Sam asked hesitantly. Dean looked at his dorky genius little brother. He thought of miles driven, ribbings taken and given, greasy diner food eaten, cheap motel rooms crashed in, monsters slayed, fights won and lost, deals and promises and secrets kept and broken.

“Ready,” Dean said. Nothing but love in his heart? Yeah, he could do that.

Grabbing on to each other so as to not get lost, Sam and Dean followed Harry and Cooper through the curtains.

Chapter Text

Sam wasn’t sure what to expect as he and Dean emerged from the curtains, but the fact that it was somewhere other than the red room came as a welcome relief. It seemed to be a much nicer place, although still weird. The ground was completely covered with flowers of all shapes and colors, and a million trees grew like walls off to the sides, their interleaved branches overhead forming a ceiling. The air was sweetly perfumed from the flowers, and birdsong formed the soundtrack. Harry and Cooper were standing just in front of Sam and Dean. They had all made it.

“Welcome back,” said a girl’s voice. Laura Palmer walked out from between the trees, across the meadow. She was dressed just like the horrible version of herself in the Black Lodge, but this Laura had beautiful eyes and a warm smile. She walked up to Cooper and kissed him on the cheek. Seeing the tears still on his face, she gently wiped them away with her thumb. Then she kissed Harry as well.

“What’s up,” Dean said. Sam shot him a look.

Laura smiled at them and placed one hand on each of their shoulders. “This is the White Lodge,” she said.

“Yeah, we kind of figured that,” Sam said. It was a relief to once again hear his own words come out the way they sounded in his head.

Laura turned back to Harry and Cooper. “You have to stop him again,” she said. “For good, this time.”

“That’s the plan,” Harry said. “Any advice?”

“Keep close to Coyote,” Laura said cryptically.

Cooper spoke up, with a note of hope in his voice. “Laura. Sam and Dean can handle Bob.” Sam appreciated the vote of confidence. “Would it be possible for Harry and me to just stay here?”

“Not now.” Laura looked at him compassionately. “You will both return when it’s time.”

Harry put his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “Well, I guess we should get going then,” he said. “Same exit as before?” As he spoke, red velvet curtains appeared at the edge of the meadow.

“Not quite the same,” Laura said. “No sacrifice this time. You’ve already paid.”

Harry looked relieved at that. Sam didn’t know what that was about, but it sounded like they’d dodged a bullet.

“One more thing,” Laura said. She bent over and picked two flowers from the living carpet at her feet. “A gift.” She held the two flowers out to Harry and Cooper. They were marigolds. “For when you need to find the path back.”

Harry and Cooper both nodded, each taking a marigold and tucking it carefully into a jacket pocket. “Thank you, Laura,” Harry said.

Harry and Cooper walked over to the curtains, and Sam and Dean tagged along behind again. As they all pushed through to the other side, the sound of songbirds and the scent of flowers faded away, replaced by the nighttime forest symphony and the smell of woodsmoke.

The first thing Sam saw when they exited the White Lodge was the glow of the bonfire, still burning in the middle of the grove of sycamore trees. Its smoke mingled with the stench of the pool of bunt engine oil, stinking like junkyard arson. Beyond the firelight, the night was still pitch black, so maybe they hadn’t been gone as long as it felt. Two figures were silhouetted against the blaze.

“Well, gentlemen,” Trixie called to them, “that was fast. Did you enjoy your stay? If so, please rate and review.”

“You Trickster bitch,” Bob said to her, his voice low and dangerous. “You let them out. You tricked me.”

 “Hey, I didn’t let anyone out,” Trixie said, sounding offended. “They did that on their own.”

“You said you’d keep them on ice!”

“I told you they were wily.”

As Bob and Trixie argued, Sam edged around the grove. Remembering Laura’s advice to stay close to Coyote, he figured maybe there would be an opportunity to get their weapons back while Trixie was distracted. Dean saw what he was doing and followed his lead.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bob said. “I’ll take Dale now. He was already broken, and his stay in the Black Lodge will have weakened him even more.” He started advancing across the grove toward Cooper, and Harry moved in front of Cooper again. “I suppose I’ll have to kill this one first,” Bob said, waving at Harry. “Too bad. Dale, I would have had such fun killing him with your hands, or maybe just making you watch him waste away slowly from the cancer. But at least this way, the death of your beloved sheriff will crumble the last of your defenses, and you won’t even be capable of trying to stop me.”

With a movement like a cheetah pouncing, Bob suddenly had his hands around Harry’s throat. Cooper yelled Harry’s name and jumped on Bob, knocking him to the ground. Dean jumped in as well, helping Cooper to pull Bob’s arms away from Harry’s neck. Harry wrenched himself free and started pounding on Bob’s face with both fists again while Dean and Cooper struggled to hold Bob down.

Despite the fact that it was three against one, Bob was holding his own, getting in some hits. He seemed to have strength far beyond that of the old man whose meatsuit he was using, but his main advantage was that he seemed not to feel pain at all, or felt it as ecstasy. The more Harry hit him and the more his face got bloodied, the more he laughed, spitting blood and broken teeth at the three men holding him down.

Sam’s mind was racing. At this rate, Harry might very well succeed in beating Bob to death, but that wouldn’t do them any good. Bob would just grab another meatsuit, most likely Cooper. They needed to kill Bob, not just his meatsuit, which meant they needed their weapons. He was now just a couple feet from Trixie, who was once again watching the fight with mild interest. Sam glanced down at her feet, where the blades were still tucked into her go-go boots.

Bob was apparently finally getting tired of the assault, and in an inhuman show of strength, he jerked his arms out of Cooper’s and Dean’s grasp and shoved Harry away, scrambling to his feet. “A little help, Trixie?” he shouted, still laughing.

“If you want help, baby, all you have to do is ask,” Trixie replied. But her voice was pitched low, like she wasn’t talking to Bob at all, and she slowly stretched her leg out toward Sam.

Sam lunged for Trixie’s boot, pulling out the demon-killing knife. “Harry!” he called, tossing the knife to Harry, who caught it and, in a single fluid movement, plunged it up to the hilt into Bob’s chest. Bob had clearly not been expecting that. His laughter was cut off in a pained gasp. He looked down at the knife sticking out of his chest, where instead of blood, the thick oil-like sludge was oozing out. Then he raised up his head again, laughed one more burst of crazed laughter, and lurched over to the bonfire, falling backwards onto the flames. Garland Briggs’s body ignited like it was soaked in gasoline, and black sludge leaked out onto the ashes.

As the flames crept up from the body’s torso, the head, not yet burning, moved. The face turned toward Harry, saying in a low rasp, “Thank you.”

“Garland?” Harry, looking horrified, dropped to his knees next to the fire. Cooper knelt beside him. The burning old man’s face was different now. There was no hint of the wild look that had flickered in and out of the eyes before. Sam felt a bit sick. Garland Briggs was apparently back, just in time to be burned alive.

But there was no pain in the old man’s face. Instead, incredibly, he looked peaceful. “It’s enough,” Garland said. “It’s enough.” Then the flames licked across his face as the fire consumed him.

Cooper helped Harry to his feet, pulling him away from the blaze. Sam and Dean joined them to form a dazed little circle. “What did that mean?” Sam asked. “What’s enough?”

“Love,” Harry said simply, kneading his fingers into Cooper’s shoulder as if making sure he was still there. Sam looked at Dean and remembered, years ago, the army man crammed in the Impala’s ashtray. Yeah, sometimes it was enough.

Trixie elbowed her way into their little circle, looking smug. “You’re welcome, boys,” she said.

“Yeah, thanks for nothing,” Dean said. “If you were on our side the whole time, why did you trick us into going on that all-expenses-paid trip to the Black Lodge in the first place? Why not just help us kill Bob from the start?”

“Sweetie,” Trixie said condescendingly. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m on no one’s side but my own? The only games I play are the ones I’ve rigged so that no matter what happens, I win. In this case, if you had failed and stayed trapped in the Black Lodge, Bob would have kept up his rampage and the woods would have been protected with his evil energy, so I win. As it happens, you succeeded in escaping the Black Lodge. But your visit gave the White Lodge a nice burst of sweet sugary good energy, which will also keep the woods protected for a long time to come, so, again, I win. Now the good vibes hanging around this place might attract the New Age crowd, but I can live with this place becoming the next Sedona.”

“Glad we could help,” Dean said bitterly.

“Well, gentlemen,” Trixie said, “now that our time together is drawing to a close, I guess this is where I tell you that you’ve already had brains, a heart, courage, and ruby red slippers all along. Oh yeah, and I guess this is yours too.” She took the angel blade out of her boot and handed it to Dean, who took it, glaring. Then Trixie took a step back as if to move away into the woods.

“Wait,” Cooper said. “Isn’t there—” He looked at Harry, then at Trixie. “Isn’t there something you can do for Harry?”

“No can do, honey,” she said, somewhat sympathetically. “Above my pay grade.”

“Please,” Cooper said, looking like he was fighting back tears again. “I’ll do anything.”

“Don’t say things like that to things like her,” Dean whispered to him urgently. “Trust me, we’ve been down that road before. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.”

Trixie was regarding Cooper seriously. “You’re breaking my heart, honey.” She sighed. “Look, I can’t do anything about quantity when it comes to mortal lives. That’s Death’s turf, and no one wants to piss off that old coot. But I might be able to help with quality.” She reached out and held Harry’s face between her hands, and light sparkled around her fingertips. “There you are, darling,” she said, letting her hands drop. “My little gift to you. The time that you have left will be good and happy and all that jazz.”

Harry nodded. Cooper said, “Thank you,” and the two of them walked off a short distance into the woods.

Sam looked at Trixie, who was wearing a slight smile as she watched Harry and Cooper. “That was a trick, wasn’t it?” Sam asked. “You didn’t give them anything.”

“Yes, baby, it was a trick,” she agreed. “The nice kind, not the naughty kind. The best tricks are the ones where the audience plays along. If you can trick yourself into being happy, then you’re happy. Simple as that.”

Sam looked over at where Harry and Cooper were standing beneath a giant fir tree, heads bent close together as they spoke in low voices. Something Cooper said made Harry grin, and a moment later Cooper smiled himself, like the sun breaking through a cloud.

“Well, enough of the self-help,” Trixie said breezily. “There will be quite enough of that once Deepak Chopra gets wind of this place. I’d better get back to work. Now you boys stay in trouble. And try not to miss me too much, I have a feeling our paths will cross again someday.”

“Awesome,” Dean muttered. Trixie blew them a kiss and morphed into her coyote form. She ran off into the trees, and the woods were filled with the sound of yipping howls.

Chapter Text

After that, there was some work to do. It turned out they had only been in the Lodge for a couple of hours. That was good, because Albert was pissed enough as it was that he had been sent to stand in the hospital morgue waving around a smudge stick for no good reason. Dean could hear his angry voice all the way through the phone as Harry called with an update on the situation. While they waited for the others to arrive, Sam gathered up all the guns that had been scattered about. Dean used a stick to poke at the now-smoldering remains of the bonfire and of poor Garland Briggs, trying to retrieve the demon-killing knife without burning himself. When he finally got it, he almost dropped it in disgust. The blade was still dripping with the foul-smelling oily sludge. Grinning evilly, he wiped the blade against the sleeve of Sam’s flannel, earning a girly shriek as his reward.

Soon, Hawk and Andy tromped into the grove with flashlights, followed shortly after by Albert, Audrey, and Lily. They all surveyed the scene grimly while Harry filled them in on the details of the story he hadn’t gone into on the phone. Hawk and Andy volunteered to go inform the Briggs family, as best they could, about what had happened. At least there would be no need for a burial, since there wasn’t much left of Garland Briggs.

As Hawk and Andy set off, Lily enthusiastically volunteered to document the crime scene and write up the report. Harry gratefully agreed, and Audrey, apparently having taken Lily under her wing, offered to stick around to teach her FBI procedures. Albert made it known that he had already spent more time in the woods than he cared to, so Harry and Cooper offered to give him a ride back to the Great Northern along with Sam and Dean.

They traipsed back to the road, and Sam and Dean clambered into Harry’s pickup bed, followed, with much complaining, by Albert. As they bumped back along the dirt road, Albert glanced toward the cab of the truck where Harry and Cooper sat. “So I take it they’ve talked?” he asked. Harry hadn’t specifically described the whole personal drama when he was relating the tale. But it was obvious from the way Cooper was now looking at him, like he was trying to take a mental recording of Harry’s every word and gesture and expression, that something was up between them.

“Yeah,” Dean said. “Cooper knows the whole deal now.”

Albert reflected a moment. “He’s taking it better than I expected.”

“Hah!” Dean snorted. “You should have seen him a while ago.” Albert glared at him, and Dean shrugged. “Hey, I think they worked it out. They’ll be okay.”

When the truck pulled up in front of the Great Northern, they all jumped out. Harry came around the truck to talk to them. “Will you guys be okay in your room tonight?” he asked, glancing back at the truck’s cab, where Cooper was sitting in the passenger’s seat.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” Sam assured him. “All the bad mojo in there is probably gone, now that we took care of Bob.” Dean wanted to correct him, in that the fish smell was a form of bad mojo that in all likelihood was not gone. But bad mojo or no, they weren’t going ask to crash with Harry and Cooper again. Those two clearly needed the space to talk some more tonight.

“Okay,” Harry said. “Big Ed should be done with your car tomorrow.” Dean felt a surge of sheer joy at those words. “I’ll call you when it’s ready, and we can give you a ride over to the garage to pick it up. Maybe we can all eat at the Double R one more time before you hit the road.”

“Awesome, thanks,” Dean said. He was definitely going to buy a whole cherry pie to bring with him, Sam’s inevitable snide comments about it be damned.

“And how about you, Albert?” Harry regarded Albert with a mixture of annoyance and what might have been long-suffering fondness. “How much longer will we have the pleasure of your company?”

“I assure you, I will not spend a minute longer in this town than is mandated by my duties on this case,” Albert snapped. The hard edge then came off his voice just a bit. “But unfortunately, I may be forced to spend the day tomorrow as well. I have a lot of paperwork to catch up on, and I know Audrey wants to spend more time with that young deputy of yours training her on FBI procedures.” He glanced at Cooper in the truck’s cab, and Dean got the sense that Albert wanted to stay in town until he had verified for himself that Cooper wasn’t completely falling apart.

“Sure thing,” Harry said. “Give us a call whenever you’re free. I know Coop would like a chance to catch up before you leave.”

“If I can’t find anything better to do, which seems likely given where I am.”

With that, Harry drove off, and Sam, Dean, and Albert headed into the lobby. “Hey, Albert,” Sam said in a friendly tone. “We’re leaving tomorrow, so if we don’t see you—”

“Then I’ll have a glass of champagne to celebrate not seeing you.” Albert stomped off to his room.

Sam raised his eyebrows, and Dean shrugged. “I’m sure he won’t tell anyone about us,” Dean said. “Pretty sure.”

They went back to Room 315, which seemed to be completely free of evil spirits, and even mostly free of fish odor. The cleaning staff had apparently come in and Febrezed the hell out of the place. Happily, Dean took a shower, to get the lingering ookiness of the Black Lodge and the impromptu funeral pyre off his skin, then flopped into bed. He could hear the familiar sounds of Sam going through his arcane bedtime rituals, moisturizing his skin and conditioning his hair and whatever else it was he did. Dean smiled as he drifted off to sleep.

When Dean awoke the next morning, Sam was already up, sitting at the table and tapping away at his laptop. “You got anything?” Dean asked, yawning, as he rolled out of bed.

“Maybe. Looks like some potential witch activity down in Santa Barbara.”

“Ooh, Santa Barbara. Sunshine sounds good.” Dean glanced out the window, where the rain was streaming like a waterfall down the glass. “I’m in.”

“We need a car first,” Sam reminded him, as if he needed reminding.

Before Dean had a chance to think of a snappy retort, his phone chimed. It was a text from Harry. “Yes, finally,” Dean said, reading the text. “Baby’s good to go.” He tapped back a reply.

“Are Harry and Cooper coming to get us?” Sam asked.

“Yup, they’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

They quickly packed up their stuff and went to the front desk to check out. Clyde said he hoped they’d had an awesome stay, and they both nodded politely. They stood out in the covered area in front of the main entrance while buckets of rain poured down off the roof. Soon, Harry and Cooper arrived. Harry had thoughtfully covered the pickup bed with a tarp, which they pushed aside and dumped the excess water off of before climbing into the relatively dry bed, only to immediately get soaked in the downpour while driving across town.

Harry dropped them off at Big Ed’s Gas Farm, which Dean had to admit was an awesome name. He and Sam went inside the garage, where Baby was parked. Dean immediately opened the doors, running his hands up and down the newly reupholstered interior. He grudgingly conceded that Big Ed and his guys had done a good job. Even the fish smell was gone, although it had been replaced by the fake pine tree scent from one of those stupid things hanging over the rearview mirror. Still, he felt complete again now that his Baby was back. He started her up, moaning in pleasure at the engine roar, and ran his hands over the interior again.

“Dean.” Sam spoke from where he was haggling with Big Ed over the cost of the repairs. He looked embarrassed. “Will you stop feeling up the car? At least in front of people?”

“Just shut up and pay the man, Sammy.” Sam rolled his eyes and obeyed.

They had arranged to meet Harry and Cooper at the Double R Diner after picking up the Impala. Dean was pleased to see that the diner had a good crowd for Saturday brunch. As they walked over to the back table where Harry and Cooper were sitting, Dean saw some familiar faces. The Log Lady was once again sitting at the counter drinking coffee with her log, and Dean avoided eye contact and gave her a wide berth. Nadine was sitting at a table making goo-goo eyes at a much younger man, and Sam avoided eye contact and gave her a wide berth. Donna was at the register getting coffee to go, and they did stop and say goodbye to her.

Sliding into the booth across from Harry and Cooper, Dean saw that, on the one hand, both of them looked like they had been through hell. Harry had some bruises on his neck, and Cooper had a cut on his lip from where Bob had apparently gotten in a hit. They also both had red eyes, like it had been a night with little sleep and probably lots of tears. But it also looked like they had been through hell and were no longer in it. They both smiled at Sam and Dean in greeting, and it looked genuine. They had already ordered coffee, and Norma immediately came along with the coffee pot and placed two additional cups on the table for Sam and Dean. As she filled them, Harry automatically took Cooper’s cup from his hand and slid it across the table for Norma to pour a refill. Then Harry handed the cup back to Cooper, who immediately took a sip without missing a beat. It looked like the dynamic duo was back to the easy rhythm Dean had noticed immediately upon first meeting them.

They all gave Norma their breakfast orders, and Dean and Cooper both also ordered pie. As they waited for their food, Cooper made polite inquiries about how they had slept last night and the condition of the Impala. That gave them all sufficient small-talk material until the food arrived.

When Norma placed Dean’s slice of cherry pie in front of him, he immediately shoved in a forkful. It really was awesome pie. “Hey, Norma,” he said through his full mouth as she turned to leave. “Can you box up a whole one of these for me?” Predictably, Sam rolled his eyes.

“Sure thing,” Norma said cheerfully, and went back to the kitchen.

“Norma’s pie really is particularly good today,” Cooper said in agreement with Dean, taking a bit of his own slice.

“You always say that,” Harry said, bumping his shoulder against Cooper’s and grinning affectionately.

“It’s always true,” Cooper said, smiling back.

“So,” Harry said, turning back to Sam and Dean, “where are you boys headed off to?”

“Santa Barbara, looks like,” Dean said. “Witches.” He waved a hand dismissively and took another bite of pie.

“That sounds fascinating,” Cooper said.

“We’re going on a trip soon ourselves,” Harry said, sipping his coffee.

“Yeah?” Sam asked. “Where to?”

“Tibet,” Harry said. “I want to see the Himalayas again. Visit the monastery, spin a few prayer wheels.” He smiled at Cooper again, whose return smile this time had a hint of sadness in it.

“Sounds cool,” Dean said, as sincerely as he could. He didn’t see why anyone would want to go to Tibet, let alone why Harry would want to spend his last few months hanging out in some mountain monastery, but hey, different strokes. “Say hi to the yeti for us.”

“We will,” Harry said, and Cooper nodded. They were still smiling, but Dean got the feeling they were serious about the yeti.

They finished their meal. As they paid, Norma handed Dean his boxed pie. The Log Lady lifted her coffee mug to them, as if making a toast, as they walked out the door.

In the parking lot, Dean stashed his pie in the Impala’s backseat, then the four of them stood around, a bit awkwardly, getting further soaked by the rain. “Well,” Dean said, “it’s been … weird.”

“That’s how we like it in Twin Peaks,” Harry said.

Cooper shook both of their hands. “Thank you very much for your assistance,” he said seriously. “This town owes you a massive debt of gratitude, as do Harry and I.”

“Hey, we live for this stuff,” Dean said.

Harry also shook hands with each of them. “Thanks, guys,” he said. “Keep fighting the good fight. And take care of each other.”

“Same to you,” Sam said.

With that, they got in the Impala. Dean reveled again in the engine sound, sweeter than any music. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Harry and Cooper, standing in front of the diner. Cooper looked to be in the midst of some earnest longwinded statement, and Harry looked to be listening in faint amusement, with his head tilted and his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. It looked like they had been standing that way forever, like it was in the very nature of their beings to be standing like that together.

Then Dean turned onto the highway that led south out of town. He got some tunes going, and Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” filled the interior of the Impala as the rain-blurred streets of Twin Peaks streaked by. “Hey, hand me that pie, will you?”

“Seriously?” Sam asked in disbelief.

“Yeah, seriously, I don’t joke about pie. Give it here.”

“You can’t possibly still be hungry after that huge breakfast, and anyway you can’t eat a pie while driving.”

“Says who?”

Even though he kept his eyes on the road, Dean could sense Sam’s eye-rolling. Still, Sam handed him the pie. He even rummaged around in the glove compartment until he found a plastic fork from some long-ago fast-food meal and handed that over as well. Dean balanced the pie on his knee and dug into the pie with the fork with one hand while steering with the other. “Mmm, pie,” he said with his mouth full.

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

Despite the outward show of disgust, Dean could tell Sam was trying not laugh. They were back in their groove, the one they naturally fell into while on the hunt, on the road. A sign flashed by, “Leaving Twin Peaks Town Limits.” The southbound highway opened up before them, with no one ahead or behind. Dean gave Baby a burst of speed. They had more monsters to kill, more miles to drive, on the highways that went on forever.