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The wind arrived on a Tuesday.
John didn't think much of it as it swirled merrily around the playground, carrying the first scent of spring through the air and sprinkling tendrils of cut grass across the teeter-totter and through the swings. A blonde toddler in pigtails and pink-and-blue overalls giggled and ran along behind it, chasing after the leaves that seemed to stay just out of reach. The breeze danced its way across the playground until it reached the sandbox where Dean and Sam were playing. He watched them for a moment – Dean trying to build a castle and Sam the bratty younger brother trying to knock it down – then glanced away, the way you did when you wanted to tell your wife how cute the kids you made together were, and then remembered that you couldn't because-
Just because.
He didn't look away for long, maybe a minute, he thought, when Sam's howl made his head whip back towards the sandbox. "Boys-"
Sam was on the ground, wailing like only a toddler who'd had his favorite toy taken away could, and Dean-
Dean had one hand on his brother's forehead, playing keep-away, and whatever it was Sam was crying about was in Dean's hand. It didn't look like any of the toys they'd come here with, he thought, kind of weird and oval shaped, like one of those Russian nesting dolls. He walked faster.
"Whatcha got there, buddy?" The key to dealing with kids, Mary'd told him once, was to act like everything was normal even when you were screaming internally. "They can sense fear," she'd said, "and the little bastards feed on it."
Dean shrugged his shoulders. "I dunno." He twisted it this way and that in his hand, inspecting it.
Below him, Sam squirrelled up every last bit of energy a not-quite-two-year-old could muster and tried to lunge for the thing again, but the sand gave way under his feet and slid heavily back down, setting off a small explosion of sand that poofed up into the air and whirled around in a circle in the breeze.
"Let me see it." It came out sharper than John intended, but he was proud at how Dean immediately snapped to attention, his green eyes suddenly furrowed and serious as he held it out to John.
"It's a toy." Dean said. "It was stuck in the sand."
It wasn't a toy, but John could see why Dean had thought that. It looked old and hand-carved, a bit like one of those Venus of Willendorf figures but with a weird, misshapen lion's head. Some kind of Egyptian thing, maybe? They had all those animal-headed gods. Whatever it was, it gave John a bad feeling, being so obviously out of place in a tiny playground in Whiteville.
John reached for the carving and the wind whipped up around them, blinding him for a moment as sand and grass blew into his eyes. The little girl with the pigtails yelled in distress as sand flew into her mouth, He paused for a moment to wipe his eyes and Dean staggered back, the force of the wind knocking him sideways. For a crazy moment, John swore it was intentional, and his gut screamed that something bad was going to happen.
He lunged for Dean's arm but the kid wobbled again, arms pinwheeling as he lost his balance and slowly toppled backwards. The figure flew up into the air – and then Sammy was there, bursting up from the sand like an avenging angel now that Dean was no longer pressing on him. He snatched the figure and ran away giggling like a madman.
John's heart plummeted into his shoes as the wind got even more intense. Goddamn it, he was right there, and-
And then, right at the edge of the sand, Sam tripped, like the goddamn toddler with his shoelaces untied that he was. He went down hard, hands out in front of him like he was Superman, and the figure in his hand whacked against the wooden side of the sandbox with a ckrrak, popping its head clean off.
Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
The wind died instantly, and John's heart started beating again. He picked up the pieces of the idol – an ugly fucking thing, wasn't it, with donkey teeth and weird bird-feet, carved in some kind of clay or soft stone. Contraband safely out of reach, he rubbed Sam's shoulder. "How about some ice cream, hey?" he said, pointing to the ice cream cart across the way.
The giggling and grumbling cut off instantly. "Race you!" Dean yelled. "No!" Sam yelled back… and then chased after him anyway.
John dropped the clay pieces of the figurine onto the concrete curb, ground them to dust beneath his heel, and followed after.
* * *
The wind returned two days and one town away. Maybe it was John's imagination, but it seemed a little faster, a little angrier as it tossed twigs and flower petals at the window and battered against the walls of the daycare where John had left the boys while he talked to a midwife about the three children who'd been born in the town with a caul. It hadn't been anything in the end – hospital records showed the area had an unusually large number of kids born that way, but it also had a pretty small gene pool.
"No," Sam giggled as John scooped him up, pointing at the petals that had blown into his hair. John shifted him onto his hip so he could shake Mrs. Baker's hand with the other.
"Don't you have any other words for your dad?" John asked, smiling as the babysitter rolled her eyes and mouthed, he's been like that all day.
"No," Sam said again, blithely unaware of their conversation as he solemnly brushed the petals away, watching them drift down to the floor.
"You're making a mess, Sammy," Dean scowled, picking them up and trotting over to the garbage can. "Can we go now?" Dean hated these periods when they were apart – he'd have to man up and grow out of it, John knew, but if the truth were told, he was also going to miss it just a little.
"Yeah, scout, grab your and Sam's bags and we'll get out of here."
"Yeah!" Dean said exuberantly. "Thank you for the cookies, Mrs. Baker!"
Tightening his grip on Sammy, John held the door open with his other arm, waiting for Dean to pass underneath. Right on cue, the wind picked up, whirling leaves and petals over and around Dean and on into the house.
"Goodness," Mrs. Baker said, laughing. "In like a lion for sure!"
John was two blocks away before he remembered it was May, not March.
The wind rushed them along the whole way back to the hotel. It was time, John thought, to put South Carolina in his rearview window for a while.
* * *
The wind followed them all the way to Maryland, where John had no luck with any information about a yellow-eyed man and the woman who'd died in a fire shouldn't have been smoking in bed.
"Gonna be a blustery May!" the weatherman said cheerfully.
Blustery my ass, John thought bitterly. He'd driven into Washington, DC for the day to visit the Natural History Museum. Dean had dragged him through all the dinosaurs on display, chattering excitedly while Sam had dozed in the rented stroller, which made John feel a little less guilty about the fact that he hadn't thought about how much Dean would enjoy it at all. His real reason for the visit was the Egyptian wing, just in case he could find anything else out about that figurine back in Whiteville. If only that part of the trip had been as successful as Dean's dinosaur hunt.
"Come to Sioux Falls," Bobby said over the phone that night, while the wind buffeted the hotel window.
It was as good a direction as any. Not for the last time, John wished he'd taken a polaroid of that figurine before crushing it, or at least sketched it out while it was still fresh in his memory.
* * *
Careful what you wish for, he thought bitterly two days later in an alley in Joliet, looking up at a stylized, graffiti rendition of a naked woman with a lion's head. He'd pulled off the highway to feed his boys and let them stretch their legs at the park, and there it was – larger than life and twice as ugly.
Truth be told, he'd almost walked on by without seeing her, his head down against the wind that seemed to follow them wherever they went. Sam, on the other hand-
John had heard the "WHY!" first, yelled at the top of Sam's little toddler lungs, and not even looked up. Sam had moved from "No" to "Why" someplace between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods at the museum, a constant questioning of the universe – "Do you want fries, Sam?" "WHY?" "Let's get those sneakers off now." "WHY?" – that was incessant enough to make him almost miss "No."
Then he heard the splat. Or something more like thok-splat-shusssssh, the noise made when a toddler takes his plastic cup half full of chocolate shake and chucks it at the wall in a throw that wouldn't have been all that impressive if the wind hadn't given the throw a lot more oomph behind it.
He'd looked up instinctively, lips forming what was either gonna be a cussing out worthy of his dad or an apology, depending on whether Sam had just wasted the shake or caused property damage.
And there she was, malevolently grinning down at him with chocolate shake dripping down over her tits in some weird parody of modesty.
"Dad, she's naked," Dean pronounced solemnly. "Why?" Sammy agreed.
John sighed. "Yes, she sure is." He squatted down and flipped open his backpack, rifling through it.
"Her teeth look ugly, too," Dean observed sagely. "Like a beaver or something."
John kept digging, until – aha – there was the polaroid he'd bought back in Maryland. "Do me a favor, kiddo. Take Sam and go look at the other side of the alley. Hold his hand, don't go where I can't see you."
He fumbled with the film, almost dropping it when the breeze whipped up even more, but finally got it loaded.
Click – Snap – Whirr.
He shook the picture impatiently, waiting for the image to form.
"Gotcha, bitch."
"Bit'," Sam said, coming up behind him with Dean in tow.
…"No, Sam," John started.
"Why?"
The polaroid snapshot began to clarify – not the best photo, but good enough, he thought.
"I thought I told you boys to go wait over there, Dean."
"But Dad-" Dean waved his hand.
"Bit'." Sam scowled and tried again. "Bitchchchchch."
"Sammy-" John started again, but then Dean pushed past him, hand outstretched.
"DAD!" He opened his hand. "How'd you know?"
It was another figurine.
* * *
"Lamashtu," Bobby said eventually, slammed a stack of dusty old books down on the table.
"Gesundheit," John said, pulling the top one over towards him – Die Welt des Orients – and flipping it open to the page with the paperclip on it. He couldn't read the text – German, no, Dutch – but the image wasn't far off. The face looked more like a horse with a lion's mane, and she was nursing a pig, maybe? And a dog? At least the image in the alley hadn't had any of that nonsense; he didn't even want to think about trying to explain that to Dean.
"It's this section here," Bobby tapped at the text. "It's a prayer against her. Roughly translated, it says, 'Her head is a lion’s head, her body is a donkey’s body, she roars like a lion, she constantly howls like a demon-dog.'" He grabbed another book and plopped it open right on top of the first. "Then there's what Budge says right here – 'The goddess Lamashtu was a violent, raging devil of terrifying aspect…With her hair tossed about wildly, and her breasts uncovered she burst out of the cane brakes like a whirlwind'." He ticked off points on his fingers. "Breasts, lion, donkey, wind, roaring, kids. Sound familiar?"
Bobby had the figurine Dean had found stashed away in his safe. He swore up and down that it was warded to hell and back, but John wasn't sure it mattered. The idol hadn't caused the wind - if anything it was more like its calling card.
The fucking wind. At the moment, it was raging outside so fiercely that Bobby'd even brought the dog inside. It rattled the shutters and made the roof moan, slipping in through every misaligned shingle and windowpane.
"Does it say what she wants? Is there something we can do to pacify her or something?" John had to raise his voice to speak clearly.
"She's a kid-killer," Bobby said. "I called around. Brunswick, Chadbourn, Calabash – weird rash of miscarriages going on out there, doctors were blaming the water supplies but…"
John slammed the book shut. "So why me? Why us?"
Bobby closed his book as well and sighed. "Beats the hell out of me. You got cute boys, John, maybe that's all it takes."
"And you don't think-"
"There's nothing anywhere that talks about her having yellow eyes, John. Nothing else in the pattern matches."
John slumped back into the chair and took the beer Bobby offered him. "So what now, then? How do we kill it?"
Bobby used his lighter to pop the top of his beer open and shrugged. "Jury's still out. I don't think breaking that idol you brought me will do anything, but I've got a lot of calls in the wind – no pun intended. As soon as I hear something, I'll get back to you."
"And in the meantime?" John glanced over at Dean and Sam, curled up asleep on the couch. Almost on cue, Sam grumbled in his sleep, lips pursing into a frown, and slung an arm possessively over Dean.
Bobby sighed. "Don't let her catch you, I guess."
They woke up the next day to find the house's lightning rod cracked in half and dangling off the roof.
John packed up and got on the road that afternoon and drove.
* * *
The wind followed.
It set weather vanes spinning and windsocks cartwheeling through the air, cracked the window glass at the first hotel they stayed at in Duluth. (John told himself it was old, and probably fragile.) It hummed and whispered when Dean looked out through the window, howled behind them when John hit the gas and sent the Impala racing ahead of it.
The voicemail box stayed frustratingly silent.
John bought a bunch of used kid's books and cassette tapes to keep the boys occupied, turning the drive into a surreal combination of "Hop on Pop" and "Red Fish Blue Fish" interspersed with Sammy's "Why?", spattered with a resurgence of "No!" and the occasional "Bich!" With any luck, it'd help Sammy's vocabulary as well - John knew he'd talk in his own good time, but he could sure use a bit of variety.
He found a nice six-story hotel with a parking garage, thick concrete fire walls and interior rooms with no windows. The wind sent a pickup truck careening off-course and through the hotel's front doors.
In New Bern, he found what was probably a ghost hunt, but had to call in Caleb when a storm broke out so hard the rain was coming down sideways.
When the first tornado warning sprang up, he turned off the main roads and tried to stay away from the cities.
"Do you hear that?" Dean asked him that Saturday night.
"The wind?" John asked. He'd driven all the way up to Vermont, pausing only long enough to let the boys pee before hustling them back on the road, until they reached a hunting cabin set so far back in the woods that the wind couldn't blow through. After salting all the windows and doors and setting the room to rights, he was looking forward to the first quiet night of sleep in almost two weeks.
"The lady," Dean said dreamily.
John looked out the window sharply. There was no one there – just shadows and trees.
"Can't you hear her?" Dean said again. "She's sayin-"
A little metallic red car flew out of nowhere, nailing Dean in the back of the head. Behind him, Sammy stared unrepentantly. "NO!"
"OW!" Dean forgot about the window in favor of chasing Sam around the room until he could grab him and give him a noogie, strange voice forgotten.
John poured more salt in all the corners and along the window panes, pinned blankets up over every window and splashed the door with holy water. He didn't get much sleep that night regardless.
* * *
How do you outrun the wind?
"Father Jim's got a lead," Bobby said to John when he called from a phone booth in Michigan. "It's gonna take him a few more days but-"
"I don't think we have that long." The wind shredded a newspaper in front of him, battering it against the phone booth until the glass was wallpapered with it.
"O – B – I – T" Dean read slowly, one hand pressed against the glass. "Dad, what's-"
Sam just watched John, eyes solemn and slightly narrowed. He looked concerned – or maybe just exasperated, an expression more fitting for a grumpy senior than a little kid.
The glass cracked slightly under Dean's hand then, and John grabbed his fingers and pulled them safe before any splinters could get in. Outside, the wind howled more. Dean's right, John thought absently. If you concentrate, it does kind of sound like a woman-
They kept on driving.
In Ohio, John saw a cloud with the mane of a lion, and Sam drew bird feet on all the people in his coloring book.
In Tennessee, Dean said the woman told him he can rest soon. ("Bic! No!" Sam announced at that moment, combining two of his still-favorite words, and for once, John agreed.)
In Arkansas, the wind knocked over a hundred-year-old oak which rolled off its hill and onto the road, sending an 18-wheeler spinning into John's path. He fishtailed past it – barely – and hyperventilated through the next five miles without stopping.
In Florida, Sam found two – two – more little figurines, resting innocuously in a discarded Happy Meal box. John let the boys each smash one with a hammer.
In Louisiana, John was nearly impaled when a metal clothesline pole broke free, tumbling end over end down the road. It bounced against the windshield, chipping the glass as John swerved wildly before clattering against the roof and onto the road behind them. Guess she didn’t like the hammer, he thought.
"An exorcism," Bobby said in John's voicemail the next night. "We can do the ritual from here, as soon as we figure out the pronunciation, so just hang tight and-"
John hung up and got back on the road.
There was more graffiti in Oklahoma – on the road, scratched out in chalk like some obscene crosswalk; in the men's room at the quick-mart, roughly etched into the metal stall door; scribbled out like a madman's illustration on a piece of lined paper flying by.
John stopped at a motel that night, too exhausted to keep driving. When the wind howled and roared, he threw open the door and yelled, "YOU CAN'T HAVE HIM!"
The wind was so loud, he could barely hear his own words.
* * *
They were in Texas when the wind caught them, driving 95 miles through nowhere on their way to Albuquerque when the radio spit out something about a derecho warning and John's blood went cold.
"Warning" was a lie – one moment the sky was clear, the next the sky was dark and the horizon was filled with a wall of hurricane-level storms sweeping toward him like the Biblical judgement day. The sand and dirt came next, obscuring the road and the sky alike until John had to pull over just to figure out if he was still on the asphalt. A big rig vaulted past, betting on its momentum to outrun the wind and disappearing from view almost as fast as it had appeared.
They couldn't stay there – but there was nowhere to run, either.
He had to try. He told Dean and Sam to hold on and hit the gas as the wind rocked the car to and fro.
Not five hundred yards later, he realized his original assessment had been right, because suddenly the rig was right there, tipped over and tossed across the lanes like a discarded child's toy.
They were trapped.
John hit the brakes, and then the wind hit them, lifting the Impala's wheels off the ground and pitching it end-over-end into the truck, and-
* * *
John woke up and the world was sideways.
No, he was sideways, he was sideways and the car, the car was wedged against the cab of the 18-wheeler, listing slightly to one side, the doors open and Sammy, Dean and Sammy were-
John clicked open his seatbelt and fell to the pavement five feet below, scrambling to right himself. Where-
And then he heard it – or rather didn't hear it.
It was silent. Still. Like the eye of a hurricane, only derechos didn't have eyes. And there-
He staggered to his feet, body aching like he was back in boot camp and staggered off the road because Dean, Dean was standing out in the desert, and there was a woman in front of him.
And for a moment John faltered because for a moment she- she looked like Mary, blonde hair and white nightgown gently waving in the wind as she held her arms to Dean, and Dean was running to her…
And then the lightning struck, and she didn't look like Mary anymore.
"DEAN!" he yelled, but he was too far, too far away. He pulled out his pistol, but the wind whipped up again, pushing him back, the muzzle too unsteady to risk firing.
Dean had seen it too, now, but it was too late. She had her hand around his wrist, skeletal fingers pulling Dean closer to her horrid, emaciated frame, lips extending into a feral mockery of a donkey's muzzle-
And the heavens opened up. Lightning lanced the ground around the woman – one, two, three strikes. Illuminated in the lightning's flare was the silhouette of a small figure, impossibly walking between the strikes without being hit and tackling Dean out of her arms.
"NO!" Sam yelled. "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!"
John crouched low to the ground and pressed forward, fighting against the wind with everything he had to inch forward as his sons tumbled towards him. An eternity later, he pulled them into his arms, shielding them with his body as he waited for whatever the woman – Lamashtu – whatever – would do now. Dean burrowed in deeper, sobbing like he had that first horrible night as the firefighters rushed past, but Sam – Sam pushed himself up and looked sternly in her direction, eyes flashing angrily.
He put his hand on Dean's back and patted it.
"Mine."
A second later, two gigantic strikes of lightning struck down, lighting up the sky once more. For a moment, he swore he saw the outline of a man in the clouds – larger and even more terrible, with a dog's head and four huge wings spread out before him. And it looked down at Sam, and smiled.
And then both figures – the winged man and the maned woman – were gone, as if they had never been there.
And neither was the wind.
John held his family tight, rocking them both in his arms, and tried not to think of the fact that the figure's smile was just like Sam's.
* * *
Later on, the Impala would be towed to safety and his small family would be rested and fed, and John would sketch Lamashtu's likeness into his journal. Dean would wake up and be mute for a few days just like before, but swinging back to Sioux Falls to watch Bobby and John fix up the Impala would be enough to snap him out of it.
In Sioux Falls, he would find out that Father Jim had finished the ritual at the same time the lightning had struck, and feel embarrassed for thinking it might have been Sam. He would hold both his sons that night, and remember how much he loved them both, and how grateful he was they were still there, and vow to protect them with his life.
Against all odds, somehow, they had outrun the wind. But late at night, a small part of him would remember Sam's tiny silhouette and the way the lightning had escorted him like he was some kind of king, and wonder if another storm would come someday they couldn't outrun.
~ fin ~
