“Samara,” Brian supplied. When Dean lifted his brows and stared at him, Brian looked away, abashed. Okay, so it was awkward that he knew the character’s name even though the movie was several years old. Whatever. Dean could roll his eyes all he wanted, Brian thought.
Baylee looked up from the colorful picture he was drawing at the kitchen table. “Daddy, was S’mara the little girl from the movie? The one Mommy said I wasn’t s’posed to watch ‘cause it’s not good for kids’ eyes? But you sneaked me into see it when Mommy was sleepin’ ‘cause it wasn’t that scary?”
“Uh, well, yes.” Brian looked uncomfortable again as the truth of his sneaky adventures with Baylee were unraveled. “But that was supposed to be a secret between you and me. Remember that, bud?”
Baylee plucked a blue crayon out of his box before looking up at Brian and frowning with his nose scrunched up. “It’s just a secret from Mommy. You said so, Daddy. You said if Mommy found out that I was watching scary movies that she’d be really mad at you, and then you wouldn’t get any.” Baylee paused and cocked his head curiously. “Any what, Daddy?”
Sam had to stifle the snicker that tickled his throat at the look on Brian’s face. The man was obviously horrified that his personal life was being aired for two virtual strangers. He felt bad for Brian…a little. Dean, on the other hand, held out a hand to Baylee.
“Hit me, kid. That’s the greatest question I’ve ever heard from a four year old.”
Baylee slapped Dean’s hand and looked over at Brian again. “But, Daddy, what wontcha get? Huh?”
“We’ll talk about this later, Baylee,” Brian said through clenched teeth. The need to kick Dean’s encouraging ass was just too strong. Of course, he couldn’t say anything in front of Baylee anymore because it appeared that his little boy loved to tell Sam and Dean everything. And, if he was this comfortable in front of Sam and Dean, who knew what he’d spill to Leighanne when she came back? “Right now, we’re trying to figure out how to get rid of the monster in your closet. So, we’re going to focus on that and not what Daddy told you to keep a secret. Is that okay, Bay?”
Baylee nodded and went back to his picture. “Uh-huh.”
“Great.” Brian shook his head and turned to see Dean smirk. “You know, Dean, if it weren’t for the fact that you’re apparently the only hope I have of saving my son, I would’ve kicked you out of my house by now. Now, if we could just get back to the saving my son portion of today, that would be peachy.”
Dean snickered and turned to Sam. “He said peachy. I like him.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “It can’t be the yellow-eyed demon, Dean.”
That seemed to snap Dean back to the task at hand. “What do you mean? I thought you always had visions of that bast—uh, loser?” he corrected when Brian glared at him. “Dude, you seriously need to relax.”
“Just keep working, man.” Brian folded his arms and sat back in his chair. “So, would one of you mind explaining who this ‘yellow-eyed demon’ is? And I can’t believe I just said that like it’s something real,” he muttered to himself.
“It is something real,” Sam assured him. “This demon is ridiculously powerful, and, every so often, he kills. However, he only kills the mothers of those six-month-old babies who are or will be special. Kids who have powers.”
“Like your visions?” Brian asked.
Sam nodded. “Yeah, like that. Or telekinesis or mind control or lots of different powers.”
“You say that like you’ve seen these powers in action.” Telekinesis definitely sounded interesting, Brian thought off-handedly. Then again, mind control could have its perks. Surely, if he had the powers of mind control, he’d be able to push Jive into backing off and letting the Boys record how they wanted.
“We’ve seen them,” Dean said simply, interrupting Brian’s errant thoughts.
Brian thought he’d been freaked out before, insane for believing these two, and it all had to be a side effect of skipping church earlier, but, now, he was just plain horrified. “So these kids with these powers…all of their mothers were killed?”
Sam and Dean exchanged glances fraught with a meaning that Brian didn’t really want to decipher. “Yeah,” Sam answered after a few moments. “The demon killed them all on the night of each child’s six month birthday.”
“Wow.” Brian was finding all of this hard to digest, harder still to accept. How could it be possible that such terrible creatures existed on God’s green earth? How could God even allow them to exist? He felt so sorry for all the children who’d had to grow up without mothers. And then a thought occurred to him. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Sam, you have powers, too. Does that mean…Did your…Uhh-”
“She was killed twenty-three years ago,” Sam replied solemnly, his eyes taking on that lost look that always made Dean want to rewind the clock and somehow prevent Sam from having to carry the burden of their mother’s death on his shoulders.
There was a moment of silence while Dean shuffled his feet, Sam stared blankly at their father’s beat-up journal, and Brian sent up a prayer for Sam and Dean’s mother. Then, Dean cleared his throat and broke the silence.
“Baylee’s mother is still alive, Sammy.”
Sam paced Baylee’s room. Back and forth, side to side. He’d pretty much covered every foot of floor space that could possibly be walked over…and then some. Or so it felt. Every moment inched by so slowly, and his thoughts were just sluggish. He didn’t really have any ideas about what could possibly be lurking within the Littrell household.
There was no way that he could sense the yellow-eyed demon’s involvement in this case. Obviously, Baylee was not twenty-three, nor was he six months old. His mother was still alive, and, usually by this point, Sam would’ve known if they were dealing with the bane of his existence. They weren’t. Not this time.
So he paced some more. Every so often, he would stop to stare at the closet that Baylee’s monster had initially crept out of, trying to think of all the evil creatures that it could have been. After nearly an hour, he was still batting zero.
The house was silent for the moment. Brian had taken Baylee out for lunch and, from there, the park. Brian had figured that it was time, for his own sanity, that he got away from the place. It was obvious that nothing was going to get done, no demon, ghost, or evil spirit would be banished during the daylight hours. So off they’d gone. Dean had driven off to the local town hall in hopes of uncovering something in the town records. Perhaps there had been a violent death in the house before Brian and Leighanne had bought the place. At this point, the spirit could be anything, Sam thought.
So he was stuck pacing Baylee’s room in search of answers that may lie within his own mind. At the moment, though, his brain was giving him nothing either. He scrubbed his hands over his face and stared hard at the inside of Baylee’s closet.
The kid surely had a ton of stuff. Besides the hordes of clothes—holy crap, he probably never wore the same outfit in a year—there were toys spilling out of a wooden toy chest in the far corner of the closet. When he stepped out of the closet, Sam noted the large bookcase along one wall of the bedroom. Books were neatly stacked along its shelves, and, when he slipped one off, he noted that the worn copy was of “Little Red Riding Hood”.
“I can’t believe kids still like this story,” Sam murmured, flipping through the book. The illustrations in this one were better than they’d been in the one Dean had sneaked into the car for him when he’d been four. Their dad hadn’t believed in letting them read the garbage that was in fairytales, claiming that all the evil creatures were out in the real world. What was the point in reading about them when you could easily see them? “Well, we never came across a wolf that could talk and eat a kid, so I guess this one doesn’t count.”
When the phone rang, Sam nearly dropped the book before he caught himself. Sticking it back on the shelf, he walked into the hallway and stared at the telephone that sat on the table in the middle of the hall. Debating whether or not to pick it up, he finally did.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice came through. “Hello. Who is this?” she demanded.
Sam’s brows rose. “Uh, my name’s Sam.”
“Sam? I’m sorry. I know I didn’t dial the wrong number, and I’m wondering who you are and where my husband is.” She sounded fairly suspicious, and he figured that a celebrity wife probably had cause to be easily suspicious of people.
He picked his words carefully, not wanting her to freak out and call the cops on him for trespassing or something. “Leighanne, right?”
“That’s right. Where’s Brian? And who are you, Sam?”
“I’m a friend of Brian’s, actually. Brian took Baylee out for lunch, but they should be back soon. Should I have him call you back?”
There was a short silence. Then, “Let me get this right. Brian took our son out for lunch and left his friend at home? I have a hard time believing that. Bri would have taken you out, too, if you were really a friend. Besides, I don’t recall Brian mentioning any friend named Sam.”
“That’s because we just met. I’m, uh, I’m actually the exterminator.” Sam could’ve smacked himself for the words as soon as they slipped out. That wasn’t what he meant to say.
“The exterminator? The one who came yesterday?”
He rubbed at the spot on his forehead that was beginning to throb. Brian’s wife was one suspicious woman, he decided. “Yeah. My partner and I came back today because you have a major infestation, and Brian wanted it looked at right away. So that’s why I’m here.”
“Do you usually pick up the phone in customers’ houses?”
Do you never ease up on the interrogation, ma’am? He decided to keep that question to himself. “Brian said that he might call if something came up, and he was delayed getting back. I thought it was him, so I picked up. Sorry, Mrs. Littrell.”
“Oh, no. That’s fine.” She seemed to soften a bit. “I’m sorry for being so nosy. It’s just that my husband’s got a lot of fans, and some of them are not exactly sane all the time. I just didn’t expect someone else to pick up the phone, so I thought something bad had happened. I really am glad that you’re taking the time to fix our problem. How bad is it?”
Sam sighed. “We’re working on it. It shouldn’t take more than a day or two to solve.” He paused as a thought struck him. “Mrs. Littrell, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, of course. And call me Leighanne.”
“Right. Leighanne. Did you ever hear any strange noises in your house? Or see anything weird? Paranormal, even?”
“Strange noises? Paranormal things? What do you mean?”
“Did you ever hear or see something that scared you, freaked you out a little? Maybe it sounded like an otherworldly type thing?” Sam hoped he didn’t sound too weird to her by asking such a question.
Leighanne seemed to ponder his question for a few moments before she answered. “Well, there may have been a few times that I heard almost a growling noise in Baylee’s room when I was tucking him in. Honestly, though, I just thought it was my imagination because I’d just finished reading him “Little Red Riding Hood”. It’s one of his favorite stories, and, sometimes, I swear I dream about it because I read it so much. But, whatever I heard, I just thought it was my imagination. It was just my imagination, right? Or is the infestation so bad that the insects are getting noisy?”
“Uh, well, I think, in that case, it may have been your imagination,” Sam told her, though he was mentally jotting it all down. It was too much a coincidence that she heard a growl and Baylee described the monster as the wolf in Red Riding Hood. “Thanks, anyway, for your help. I promise, by the time you’re home from your trip, everything will be fine.”
“Well, then, Sam, thank you. And, please, let my husband know I called to check up on my men.”
“Will do.”
When he’d hung up, Sam trooped back to Baylee’s doorway and stared at the closet door, his eyes narrowed in speculation. There was something there, he thought, and he was beginning to wonder why he hadn’t thought of it before.
