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In hindsight, considering the way his life tended to go, Dean probably shouldn’t have actually been surprised, but in the moment it was fairly difficult not to be. The dinosaur, which had those mean looking sickle claws on each foot like right out of Jurassic Park, leapt from Sam’s bed to the table.
Then when that started to tip over, it immediately leapt onto Dean’s bed. Its sickle claws were held up, but the other claws on its feet dug into the cheap motel blanket. It turned its head and flashed its teeth at Dean. Almost like a smile, only with the promise of ripping Dean’s face off.
20 Hours Earlier
Dean tapped his fingers against his thigh nervously, while Sam had half the wires on the museum security system out of their casing.
“Next time we hunt a ghost, lets make sure it’s one that hasn’t left its DNA in a goddamn museum artifact,” Dean grumbled. This was taking forever and they were going to get caught.
“Shh,” said Sam, a look of worried concentration on his face.
“Where’d you learn to do this anyway?”
“Uh… Internet,” he said, then flashed Dean a sheepish grin and the puppy dog eyes to keep himself from getting smacked.
He was lucky too, because Dean still had a good mind to smack him up the backside of his head. What kind of moron over the age of seventeen really, honest to god, thinks he can pull off a spy movie-level heist with crap he learned off Wikipedia? They were so going back to jail. There’d be all new FBI files on them; the whole shebang.
“We’re in.”
“What?”
“We’re in. Security footage from last night is being looped in, and we have a dummy code that should give us entrance access to the store rooms for the next two hours.”
“What really?”
“Yeah,” Sam looked at Dean incredulously. “That’s why we’re here, right? C’mon.”
The ghost they were hunting apparently had an amulet, which in life he’d believed to have some sort of transformative powers. So he’d left a droplet of his own dried blood inside, believing that as long as part of him was always with the amulet, he would never die and his powers would continue. Clearly that hadn’t totally worked, since he’d died over 100 years ago. However, in death he did seem to have continued use of his powers, given people were seeing ghosts of a bear, wolf, a couple different horses, and of the guy himself, but they were all the same spirit.
The museum was quiet after dark, and deceptively empty, but Dean knew there were at least five security guards who made rounds every hour. He and Sam wouldn’t show up on the camera feed, but they still had to be on alert for actual people.
“It’s okay,” said Dean. “I’ll just duck in, pretend to be part of a display.”
“Don’t do that, Dean,” Sam rolled his eyes.
“Whatever, bossy. Don’t think I can pull off being part of a mastodon hunt. Can’t let people reach for their dreams—“
“Quiet, Dean,” Sam shook his head at him, before looking around nervously.
“If you’re gonna get us caught, can you at least make it after we’ve burned the amulet?”
Dean rolled his eyes again and continued on silently to the back hallway. There was the employees only elevator that led to the storage access.
Less than twenty minutes later and they were digging through boxes of valuable ancient stuff.
“Found it!” Dean said triumphantly, holding the amulet up by its string. It was kind of ugly, actually. He shrugged and began coating it in salt.
“Wait, Dean—You can’t burn the thing down here. The fire alarm will go off with even the slightest hint of smoke.”
“I thought you said we shouldn’t leave the museum with it, genius. You said if we’re gonna get caught, it’ll most likely be leaving, and we shouldn’t have it on us.”
“Yeah.”
“So we burn it here, then book it out of here.”
“Only if you want to guarantee we get arrested. Here, give it to me.” Sam held out his hand. “I’m gonna take it to the nearest lab. Burn it under a fume hood.”
Dean reluctantly dropped the amulet into his brother’s hand, then followed him out of the storage area. The nearest lab was the paleo lab, which Dean assumed Sam was going to be a huge dork about, telling him all sorts of dinosaur facts. Sam was all business though, keeping his eye on the clock for the next security sweep.
Sam punched in the same code to get himself into the lab, leaving Dean to stare down a fossilized Triceratops. “You’re brother a nerd too?” he said to the dinosaur bemusedly. “What am I saying? You live in a museum. You’re the nerdy one.”
Sam smiled to himself, running his fingertips over a smooth pelvis bone that was still half encased in plaster casing. There were ribs and what looked like a leg bone in the plaster as well. Sam’s curiosity over what dinosaur they belonged to nearly got the best of him, but they had a job to do. Fifty minutes left on the clock; they had plenty of time, but museum security was still a concern.
He grasped the amulet and allowed himself to touch the smooth fossils one more time; appreciating how millions of years ago those bones were alive and part of a living creature. How they still existed now, despite how long dead the dinosaur was. He concealed his awe at it all, and turned to find the fume hood.
Twenty minutes later and Sam and Dean were running down an alley, sirens blaring on police cars, completely missing the point of the silent alarm they had just tripped.
“Well, mission accomplished, I guess,” Dean said through heavy breaths.
“Hopefully that ghost didn’t leave any other hints of DNA around.”
“Guess we’ll find out if we hear anymore reports of bear ghosts.”
* * * *
Dean wished he could just be dealing with bear ghosts. Bear ghosts seemed simple compared to this. The dinosaur looked a lot like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park, but it was much smaller and had tufts of grey feathers under its arms. Sam had always said they’d made the dinosaurs in the movie too big, but… There was no sign of Sam anywhere in the motel room.
The dinosaur was eyeing Dean almost curiously, and still looked like it might be smiling. Its face was less than a foot from Dean’s and he realized he hadn’t been breathing. His lungs burned, but he didn’t dare to refill them.
The fear he felt was primal and surreal and completely unexpected. Not that one can expect to find a dinosaur in their bedroom, but all in all it really wasn’t that big. But those claws. And something about the dinosaur’s teeth and its eyes just chilled Dean’s blood to his core. His heart thudded in his chest almost painfully.
Jesus, where the fuck was Sam?
Dean dared to let his eyes scan the room. Sam’s bed was ripped up from where the dinosaur had been standing on it, all the blankets had been ripped off and the top sheet was shredded. But there wasn’t any blood. Sam must’ve gone out for some air.
Was that when the dinosaur got in? Dean’s brain finally caught up enough to wonder where the hell the damn dinosaur came from.
Then it nudged his chine with its nose.
Dean let out a keening noise that was more than a little embarrassing. The dinosaur nudged him again.
Dean’s fight or flight response kicked in now that Dean was actually breathing in those embarrassing, keening gasps. Only by now it was more like fight and flight. He threw up his hands, pushing the dinosaur away and kicking it off him. He leapt off the bed, heading for the door.
Find Sam, he thought.
The dinosaur was getting up again.
Dean punched the side of its head as he ran past and out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
Fuck. He hadn’t thought to grab the key to the room.
Oh well, he needed to find Sam anyway. Dean scanned the parking lot. The car was still there, and there was no sign of Sam. The motel was a few miles out of town, so there weren’t a lot of places Sam could go, unless he wanted to take a walk alongside the interstate.
Back up a second—There was a dinosaur in their motel room. Like a live, breathing, moving, nudging Dean in the face dinosaur. Dean rubbed his hand across his jaw where the dinosaur had touched him, trying to convince himself that it was real.
It was goddamn impossible.
And yet, the dinosaur’s nose had felt solid and bumpy against his skin.
Dean really needed to talk to someone to convince himself he wasn’t crazy.
“Sam?” he called out into the empty parking lot. There was no way not to make the syllable sound lonely and pathetic, so Dean immediately decided against calling out, and instead began a lonely and pathetic search around the building and nearby gas station.
Clad only in his t-shirt and boxer briefs he was only just extra lost and stupid looking. Dean tried to stick to the shadows.
Half-hour later, and with no sign of Sam whatsoever, Dean was starting to worry. What if Sam had been in the bathroom when the dinosaur showed up? However it was that the dinosaur… showed up.
Because… dinosaur? What the fuck? There was no way there was actually a dinosaur. Dean was freaking out over some crazy dream, and now he was going to look stupid when had to knock for Sam to let him back in the room.
He went back to the motel room and looked in through the window. There was only a small gap in the curtains where Dean tried to peer through to the room. He could see his bed, empty, with the blankets thrown off on the ground. Dean ducked down further, so he could see through to the other side of the room, where he hoped to see Sam’s body stretched out under the covers.
He could just make out the bottom of the dinosaur sitting with its legs splayed out on Sam’s bed. It wasn’t doing anything; just sitting on the bed, almost as if it were thinking—planning out what to do next.
Dean jumped—fuck—bumping his head upon the window frame.
The dinosaur turned toward the noise, spotting Dean outside the window. Son of a bitch, thought Dean. He ducked down again, but a moment later he could hear the dinosaur scratching at the door. And then the door handle was rattling.
Okay, so clearly this dinosaur was exactly like the ones in the movies. Dean was still contemplating his best move when the door opened and the dinosaur’s head swung out around the doorframe.
Dean had to concentrate on not peeing himself. Goddamn that thing’s face was menacing. He wished badly for his gun, and not to be sitting on the sidewalk in his underwear.
The dinosaur looked right at his eyes, but didn’t approach him this time. It maintained its eye contact though, and began making a strange, low, baleful sound.
Dean started to back away, although still afraid to break eye contact. He scooted backward on his ass down the sidewalk. The dinosaur didn’t follow him, but instead ducked back inside the room.
Dean took the opportunity to run away, but for lack of anywhere better to actually go, he wound up crouching behind the Impala. When the dinosaur emerged again, it had the keys to the room. The hell? Dean could maybe buy that the dinosaur could figure out doors—at least it had seen Dean operate one and maybe dinosaurs were quicker on the uptake than people gave them credit. But how on earth could the thing be cognizant of how keys work? That was just too insane.
There was a witch involved or something. Well, of course or something—it was a freaking dinosaur. But no way was it just a freaking dinosaur.
And the money question: what the hell did it do with Sam? Unless… “Sam?” Dean peeked up from behind the Impala to look at the dinosaur. It had gone over to the edge of the parking lot and was scratching something out in the dirt with its foot claws. It glanced back over its shoulder, nodded, then turned back to whatever it was working on.
Dean was still trying to decide if he dared go check it out, whatever the dinosaur was doing, when it apparently finished its project. It looked back at him again, gestured dramatically with its forearms, then stepped away from its masterpiece.
Dean walked over and scrawled into the dirt with extremely messy handwriting—claw-writing—read, “So get this, I’m a dinosaur.”
“Really?” asked Dean, unintentionally responding in his annoyed big brother voice. Like Sam had gotten everything in his duffels soaked from a leaking shower or something. Not, you know, turned into a fucking dinosaur.
To be fair, it was kind of hard to know how to react to that.
The dinosaur had gone to lean against the Impala’s door, shotgun side, like he owned the damn thing. It nodded.
“But how?”
The dinosaur, Sam, began making more of those low guttural sounds, but soon gave up and gave Dean a look like he was deeply annoyed with him.
Okay, no one could mistake that bitchface, even on a Velociraptor’s face. The dinosaur was definitely Sam.
“Whatever, Dr. Grant. Give me the keys.”
The bitchface continued, but Sam tossed Dean the keys and they went inside.
* * * *
“Is this permanent?” Dean asked.
Sam was lying on his side in his bed, trying to sleep, but Dean sat up looking at him, asking questions. Even though Dean knew Sam couldn’t answer and that fact was annoying him, he couldn’t help it. His brother was a dinosaur. Anyone would be curious to figure the situation out. Dean thought he was actually being quite calm about the whole thing, once you put it all into perspective.
Sam sighed in annoyance.
“Well maybe it’ll be useful, y’know? You take out the big monsters with your scary dino claws.”
Sam tried to roll over and glare at Dean, but his tail got in the way.
“Do you think Cas speaks dinosaur? Maybe if you’re still all scaly in the morning, he can come down and translate for you.”
Sam made a bellowy, depressed sound.
“Okay, fine,” said Dean. “We’ll get some sleep.”
Dean didn’t really sleep, so much as he watched the dinosaur sleep across the room from him. Probably a lot of scientists out there would be jealous as fuck to know what a Velociraptor looked like when it was sleeping. They snored.
* * * *
By morning Sam was human again, lying fully naked on top of his covers. Dean woke him up by throwing a pillow at him. “Jeez, cover yourself up; you’re indecent.”
Sam glared at him, pulling the ripped up bedspread around himself. “Like I’ve not been forced to look at you walking around clothesless my entire life.”
“That’s different,” said Dean. “I have a more liberated personality.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Whatever you say.”
“Well at least you aren’t a Velociraptor anymore.”
“Dromeosaurus,” Sam corrected.
“What?”
“I was a Dromeosaurus. Similar to a Velociraptor, but stockier in build.”
“And how did you become a Dromeosaurus?” Dean ignored the obvious nerd-brother dig in favor of answers.
“It must’ve been the amulet,” said Sam. “I was touching it when I was in the lab last night, and there were some fossils, and I touched those too.”
“Smooth move.”
“Oh like you don’t touch everything you see. If I’d sent you, you’d probably have put something in your mouth.”
Dean rolled his shoulders. “So then was that it? Are you human for good now, or…”
“I don’t know. The ghost was able to control his transformations, but he did so through the use of the amulet. Which we destroyed. I think I will either transform every night, or every time the moon is a waning crescent as it was last night when I inadvertently used the amulet.”
“Like a were-dinosaur?”
“Before our ghost had it, the amulet was originally used by a werewolf to control her transformations. So, yeah. Were-dinosaur, basically.”
“My brother the Were-Velociraptor.”
“Were-Dromeosaurus.”
Dean held back a laugh.
Three Months Later
Sam handed Dean his coffee, then slid into his side of the booth. “A Rakshasa?” he asked incredulously. “You mean like the clown monster thing?” He shuddered unconsciously, eliciting a smirk from Dean.
Dean removed the plastic lid from his coffee. “Yeah, only don’t worry, this one doesn’t become a clown. It… doesn’t seem to become anything really. Other than invisible.”
“So how does it eat people?”
“Um, did you not hear me? It becomes invisible. Four joggers have disappeared in the last nine days. Two days ago bodies, or what’s left of them, began showing up. That is, back at their homes and jobs, walking around and rotting and dropping bits of themselves on the carpet.”
“That’s right,” said Sam, “because Rakshasas are also capable of reanimating the dead. But why’s he doing it?”
“Who cares? He’s been jumping them at a local park, which has a couple good hiding places for a monster who wants to sleep on a bed of filth. Let’s just go kill the son of a bitch.”
* * * *
After staking out the park, they’d narrowed down to a walking bridge just a little way off from where police reports speculated the first of the joggers had been attacked. There was filthy water underneath, and tucked in between bricks where a chunk of concrete was missing was a ratty looking sleeping bag. Sam pulled it out, immediately dropping it and shaking centipedes from his hands.
“We have a winner.”
“Well all right,” said Dean. “Guess we’ve got ourselves a stake out.”
It isn’t until well after dark, closing in on midnight, that the Rakshasa shows up. When it did, Sam was still in his human form, Dean at his side clutching a brass dagger and ready to leap into action.
The Rakshasa rooted around in its home under the bridge for a bit, before noticing that it’s being watched. It’s taken the form of an average looking man in his mid-fifties, wearing jogging sweats and tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners. But when it whips its head around looking for whoever was following it, the weird supernatural gleam was present in its eyes. Dean was sure, this wasn’t a homeless guy who’d mistakenly stumbled upon the wrong bridge.
The Rakshasa crept toward them. “Here Hunter, Hunter, Hunter. I know you’re here. I can smells ya,” it says, then disappeared.
“Fuck,” Dean said. “It’s gone invisible.”
“No shit,” said Sam, before the thing knocked him flat on his ass.
Dean leapt toward him, sweeping around blindly with his blade, but hitting nothing.
Just then, like a beacon of impeccable timing, the moon crept out from behind the clouds. A waning crescent moon, at just the right part of the lunar cycle.
Sam’s skin rippled, then popped out in scales. Like bad acne at first, until it spread down his neck and turned brown. His hair shrunk back into the short feathers that decorated his skull, while his jaw and face elongated.
He struggled to get his jeans off with rapidly transforming fingers, before his tail ruined another pair. Just in time he got them low enough before his spine stretched out behind him with a loud rip as it busted through the fabric of his boxers.
Meanwhile his shoulders shrank to fit the much smaller collarbone of the Dromeosaurus, so Sam was easily able to shrug out of his button down shirt. His feet were somehow the weirdest thing—weirder than his face elongating and his teeth rearranging into the much sharper carnivore teeth, so that was saying something. His head felt like having the world’s most insane sinus headache where your skull actually does explode, but somehow you kind of have to expect that.
The feet had all his toes fusing together into one mega-toe, then pop, pop, splitting again into three, and covering in scales more callused and hardy than most of the rest now serving as his skin. Then the nails turned into claws, but the one claw just grew and grew. It felt like when you have an itch under your toenail and you can’t get it, and it just drives the nerves crazy all the way up to your knees, and then all the way up to your teeth. Sam scratched at his arms with his newly grown Dromeosaur hands until the anxious-feeling of sickle toe growth went away.
So yeah, turning into a Dromeosaurus was weird. It was also weird to be shorter than Dean again. Dean, who was currently still trying to fend off the Rakshasa while Sam had been busy transforming. It was still invisible, but now Sam could smell it very clearly. It basically stunk of the very last thing Sam wanted to bite into, like someone vomited after eating rotting meat.
Nonetheless, Sam lunged forward, his jaws clamping around the monster’s middle. He shook his head and could feel his teeth sinking in deeper.
He kicked upward, his big claw snagging in what he assumed to be the belly of the Rakshasa, and ripped it open. Wet guts fell with a plop on his other foot.
At this point the monster was visible again, using whatever energy of life it had left to merely stay alive, rather than hide.
Sam spat it out, then stepped on where the body was, holding it in place with one foot, while ripping into the head and neck with the other.
His claw catching on ears and a nose, ripping the face apart.
He ripped into the chest with his mouth, pulling out lungs and the heart. It tasted just as foul as it smelled. Sam spat out the organs and whatever else ended up in his mouth in whichever direction would get them out of his mouth fastest.
Dean had to dodge out of the way.
Eventually there wasn’t anything left for Sam to rip apart.
“Uh, Sam?” asked Dean. “I think we’re supposed to kill it with the brass dagger.”
Sam growled and stuck his nose in the air matter of factly, as if to say, “I think it’s dead.” The fact that his nose was covered in Rakshasa gore punctuated the point.
Dean was getting good at reading his dinosaur body language after three months and replied, “Maybe I’ll stab it just to be sure?” He hadn’t heard anything about Rakshasa’s having the ability to reconstitute themselves, but he’d also never heard anything regarding what happened when a creature that was supposed to have died in the Cretaceous ripped one apart either.
Dean looked around for the biggest piece he could find of what was left of the Rakshasa, and stuck the dagger in with a lackluster motion. Sam made a weird huffing sound, which Dean knew to be the dinosaur version of laughing.
“Shut up,” said Dean.
Sam turned his head on him dramatically, flashing him a crazy dinosaur grin.
“Let’s just get outta here before someone sees you, Jurassic Park.”
Sam rolled his eyes, but followed Dean back to the car, holding up his sickle claws up politely over the Rakshasa’s gore.
Once at the Impala, Dean shoved Sam back into the shadows. “Upholstery!” he reminded, before pulling a large piece of leather from the trunk and laying it over the backseat. Then he motioned to the door with both hands for Sam to enter.
Sam hopped in and Dean got in the front.
“Well, until next month,” he said, smiling back at the Dromeosaurus in the rearview mirror. Sam chirped cheerfully, and Dean drove them off, headlights leading them out of town.
Until next month.