Chapter Text
April 15th, 2012
Midtown, Lincoln, Nebraska
The roar of the Impala and the thrum of falling rain were the only sounds in an otherwise sleepy town.
It was past midnight and the Winchesters had been around-the-clock awake for thirty-six hours, hitting the books, newspapers, and town history, all of it photocopied and neatly arranged in a record they’d absconded with from the police station.
The dim pocket flashlight wobbled in Sam’s hand as he yawned and checked his watch by its dim glow. One-thirty. Time was crawling.
“Read me the case file again,” Dean said hoarsely, flexing his hands around the steering wheel. His bloodshot eyes were pinned on the swatch of road visible beyond the rain drumming off the Impala’s hood. When Sam just sagged his head against the window, Dean glanced over and popped him on the leg with the back of his hand, startling him. “Sam! Case file!”
“Right, right.” Sam pawed the haziness from his exhausted eyes, blinked a few times to orient his staggered vision, and opened the manila file folder in his lap again. “Sixteen people have disappeared from Lincoln over the last six and a half years. No one knows why.”
“First disappearance?”
“Craig Fergesun. He vanished December third, two-thousand-and-five.” Sam rubbed his forehead. “Dean, we’ve gone over this file, like, a hundred times tonight. Do you really want me to keep reading?”
“Practice makes perfect, Sammy.”
Sam heaved a sigh. “All right, uh, all the victims have disappeared at night, like clockwork from this place called the Refraction Factory. The police tore the place apart, but, never found anything suspicious. They think some serial killer might be staking the place out, using it to choose the people he’s going after. But that’s speculation.”
“And you got all that from the hot receptionist at the station, huh?” Dean said with a cheeky grin.
“Shut up, man.” Sam shook his head.
“I’m just sayin’.” Dean grabbed his coffee and took a long drink, then crumpled up the paper cut and lobbed it out the window. “Sounds more like a ghost than a serial killer to me.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“So, what, we do some investigating of our own?” Dean didn’t take his eyes off the road. “Hm? Little excavating, find the skeleton in the closet—literally—and then hit the road again?”
“Maybe after we get some sleep.” Sam raised his eyebrows as the confused look Dean sent his way. “Dude. We’ve been hunting like crazy since Kansas. That was a month ago. We’ve only caught two leads on the Mohera this whole time. We need to take a day off. Seriously.”
“We’ll do that when we’re dead.” Dean sniffed.
“Dean.” Sam insisted. “Let’s take some time off. Grab some quality food, drive out in the middle of nowhere—like old times.”
“You know how much I hate those chick-flick moments.” Dean grumbled. “You heard anything from John lately?”
Sam shut the file folder and leaned back in his seat. “Talked to him yesterday. He didn’t have anything new. Guess Mohera, whatever it is, is pretty scarce in the lore.”
“He need our help?”
Sam’s lips tugged into half a smile; Dean’s offer to help the Shifter he’d wanted to kill four months ago seemed like a step in the right direction. Not that Sam knew what direction that was, exactly; he just knew that he trusted John, and he wanted his brother to do the same.
“Nah. He said he’d call us if anything came up that he couldn’t handle.”
“He say anything about that pressure in his head coming back?”
Sam hesitated. “He said he still hasn’t felt it. And with the decrease in monster attacks lately—I dunno, Dean. It’s weird.”
“Dude, this whole thing is weird.”
“Tell me about it.” Sam angled forward slightly in his seat, squinting, then slapped his flat palm on the dashboard and pointed. “Here, here, turn here.”
Dean yanked the wheel hard right and coasted along the curb, bringing the Impala to halt across the street from a wide building, windowed front walls and a sign on the front half-obscured by the rain: Refraction Factory. The windows were strung up with multicolored globes.
“Looks totally haunted.” Dean said, sarcasm dripping from his tone. “What are those, lightbulbs?”
“Blown glass orbs, actually.” Sam said. “Takes a lot of work to shape them that perfectly, though. Whoever owns this place must have a real talent for the art.”
“My God, you geek.” Dean sighed. “You ready to get this over with?”
“More or less.” Sam checked the gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans, then climbed out into the soaking rain.
Underneath a striped awning with a small waterfall cascading over its edges, Sam crouched, pulled out his lockpicking kit and got to work on the front door while Dean kept an eye on the street; not that they were expecting much interference at this time of night. Still, it paid to be careful.
“Got it,” Sam said triumphantly, feeling the tumblers slide into place. He jostled the knob and eased the door open, letting Dean in first and then backing in after him.
The insulation on the roof and walls muffled the sound of rainfall; Sam shook the water from his hair, splashing Dean’s arm. Dean swiped at his sleeve with an offended expression, then fished out the flashlight from his jacket and clicked it on, sweeping the beam around the store.
The thin beam bounced back off two dozen mirrors hanging from shabby, propped-up cubicle siding spaced unevenly around the room, a cashier’s desk lost in the seat of glass. Sam squinted at the glare coming back to them, twice as bright, raising a hand to shield his eyes. “Dean. Shut that thing off.”
“Good idea.” Dean stowed the flashlight and pulled out his cell phone instead; the more muted glow was enough to light their way through the tangled web of mirrors, glass artifacts and old furniture. “This place seem creepy to you?”
“Uh, seems like any other glass store, Dean.”
“Yeah, you’re like a moose in a china shop here, huh?” Dean quipped, smirking.
“Quit it with the big-guy jokes.” Sam said absently, running his hand over the dusty surface of a table shoved into the corner, wrinkling his nose. “Looks like a lot of this stuff hasn’t been touched in a few years.”
“Yeah, well, I can guess what keeps business going.” Dean shined the dim light from his phone off the rafters. “Sixteen people disappearing in six years? Generates a lot of attention.”
“I’m surprised more people aren’t freaked.” Sam admitted, crouching and running his fingertips over the floor; solid cement. “I mean, sure, one or two people going missing is spooky—but sixteen?”
“Ah, you know people, Sam, half the time they’ve got no sense of—”
“What the hell are you doing in here?”
Sam whirled onto his feet, sidestepping toward Dean as a scrawny, middle-aged, bespectacled guy stepped from the back room. There was a shotgun in his hands, aimed directly for Sam’s heart.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey.” Dean said uneasily, eyes following the muzzle of the gun. “Let’s just take it easy, all right?”
“We’re not here to rob you.” Sam added, lifting his hands out in a soothing gesture. “We’re investigating the disappearances.”
The man’s sights wavered. “What are you, some kind of reporters?”
“Exactly.” Dean improvised. “That is exactly what we are.”
“And you broke into my shop?”
“The door was unlocked.” Sam said quickly; Dean shot him a look, and Sam shrugged with a hapless expression.
The man hesitated, then lowered the shotgun. “So you’re—looking into what happened here, huh?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam said. “Can you tell us anything about the disappearances?”
The shop-owner snorted. “Nothing that you’d believe.”
Sam smiled disarmingly. “Try us.”
“Why do you wanna know?” The guy asked.
“So we can help put a stop to it. Obviously.” Dean said.
The guy went incredibly still, staring at Dean.
And then his face split into a horrible sneer. “What makes you boys think I want it to stop?”
He swung the shotgun up, but Dean was already moving; he grabbed the barrel and yanked it sideways, discharging the shot into the wall instead of its intended target, Sam’s head. Dean rammed his elbow into the guy’s forearms, snapping his hold, and he flung the shotgun sideways.
Sam caught it and aimed, trying for a clear shot as the shop owner and Dean wrestled against the edge of the desk. The scrawny man slithered rapidly from Dean’s grasp and took off running into the back room.
“Damn, he’s slippery!” Dean swore. He charged through the door with Sam right on his heels—and Sam nearly collided with him when a burst of glass and blood stopped Dean cold in his tracks.
“Dean!” Sam grabbed the back of his brother’s jacket as Dean swiped an arm down the side of his face, where the shop owner’s aim had hit home: shards from one of the spun-glass orbs were imbedded deep in the side of Dean’s face.
“Son of a bitch!” Dean howled.
There was a crash of more glass as the man leaped toward the door on the far side of the room; there was another exit, a beaded doorway blocked by a bureau that was chest-high to Sam. Eyes narrowed, Sam shoved past Dean and took off.
He scaled the bureau in one leg-swinging maneuver, sliding across the top, dropping down on the far side and rushing through the cascade of beads. Smacking them out of his way, Sam found himself in a room stacked completely floor-to-ceiling with mirrors; the harsh fluorescent glow of the streetlamp outside the window on the far wall caught and reflected a hundred times back to him,
Squinting, Sam prowled through the room, watching every mirror for a companion reflection to his, some hint of where the shop owner was hiding.
Sam heard a rustle of fabric to his left, against the back wall. He rounded the edge of a makeshift wall and leveled the shotgun for the shop owner’s back. “Freeze.”
The man did, hands up, a drab olive blanket clenched in his fist. There was a gold-rimmed mirror leaning against wall in front of him, glinting mutedly and littered with dust from the blanket that had been covering it.
“Face me.” Sam commanded, low and intent.
The shop owner obeyed, slowly, his breathing labored, his glasses askew.
“Tell me why you ran.”
The man laughed. “Let me show you.”
He looked toward the mirror.
And dropped like a stone.
Sam slid forward a step, shock making his forehead scrunch and his head turn to one side. He stared at the man’s inert form—
A bright flash engulfed the room, ping-ponging off the dozens of mirrors, so bright Sam had to shield his face with his arm. When he looked again, the man’s eyes were closed. Breathing, but…completely still otherwise.
“What the hell?” Sam muttered.
Drawn by something more powerful that curiosity, Sam looked at the mirror.
Digging shards of glass out of his unshaven jaw, Dean stormed toward the back room, slamming the door out of his way. Before, he’d just been annoyed by this guy; now he was pissed, bleeding, in pain, and pissed.
“I’m gonna flay your ass, you sack’a—” Dean stopped, squinting against a vivid glare that spun across the faces of a hundred mirrors, searing into his retinas. “Son of a bitch!”
The glow faded, and Dean caught sight of Sam, standing over the body of the shop owner at the back of the room.
Okay. Either Sam had some kind of mojo Dean didn’t know about.
Or.
Dean heard Sam mumble something under his breath, and then he looked up at the mirror leaning against the wall.
The sense of danger gripped Dean like a fist before he’d even figured out what was going on. “Sam, no!”
For half a second, Sam’s head turned his way.
Another burst of light arced through the room, like someone holding a miniature sun in their hand, or flicking on the world’s brightest flashlight. Then it winked out two seconds later, and Sam crumbled to the floor.
Dean kicked a broken rocking chair and shoved several glass statues out of his way, letting them fall as he ran to his brother’s side, dropping to his knees and rolling Sam over on his back.
Sam almost looked peaceful; and at least he was still breathing.
“Sammy?” Dean grabbed the front of Sam’s shirt and hauled him up. “Answer me. Sam!”
Sam didn’t move.