Sam nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. Baylee loves the Red Riding Hood story, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not afraid of the Wolf. Your wife did say that she thought she heard a growling sound when she was in his room.”
“Yeah, well, maybe she was just really tired.” But Brian knew it was a futile attempt on his part to explain away the reality of an evil spirit. His insides were in turmoil at the thought of it striking when both his wife and son were in the room. He would never be able to handle losing them and was infinitely glad that this was happening while he was here and Leigh was gone.
Dean stood from where he’d perched himself on the edge of Brian’s desk. “We all know you don’t believe that one bit, so let’s just cut through all that bullshit.” He was tired of Brian’s constant flip-flopping. One second, the guy believed everything Sam and Dean told him about the supernatural, and the next, he was back to the tired old Jesus lover routine. He may be a Backstreet Boy, Dean thought, but it didn’t mean he was an easy man to deal with.
“Okay, fine. You’re right. So…evil spirit.” Brian ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Now that we know what it is and how it works, you can get rid of it. Right?”
Sam looked at Dean, and Dean looked at Sam. Neither of them had an answer. Sam had spent a good amount of time poring through their father’s journal for something that sounded anything at all like the monster they were dealing with in the Littrell household. The search had resulted in nada. Zip. Zero. Uh oh.
Brian saw their looks and immediately knew what it meant. “You don’t know. You don’t know? You don’t know?! You do this, this demon exterminating thing for a living! How the hell do you not know how to get rid of the one in my house?!”
Dean let out a long-suffering sigh. Ah, the short-sightedness of a new believer. “Look, Brian. This might be our job, but that doesn’t mean we always have every, single answer. Hell, a possessed truck nearly killed us once because we didn’t know, until the last minute, how to destroy it. We might not know what to do right now, but that doesn’t mean we won’t protect you and your kid.”
“Trust us,” Sam encouraged quietly. “He’s right. We’re going to do our best to help you. We’re not leaving until this house is free of whatever this evil spirit is.” He paused, his eyes studying Brian in that calm, direct way he had that cut through to the core of a person. “Do you trust us to keep Baylee and you safe?”
Brian pressed his fingers to his eyes and took deep breaths to calm down. He was close to hysterical, and he knew it. It was very rare that he got this way, but he knew now was not the time to be hysterical. He had a dangerous spirit in his home that was threatening his son. Baylee could very well die if he didn’t pull himself together and trust the two men in the room with him. They’d proven themselves by actually figuring out what was going on, and they’d promised to take care of the problem.
He opened his eyes, met Sam’s quietly confident ones then Dean’s cocky look. “Okay. I trust-” An ear-splitting scream cut him off. He had one terrifying moment in which he felt the ground fall away beneath his feet before those feet moved. “Baylee.”
Brian was fast, but Sam and Dean were faster and had far more experience in such matters. In seconds, they were in the den. Dean had an instant to see Baylee cowering in a corner and screaming, crying at the top of his lungs before he focused on the other figure in the room. The pale and ragged figure of a girl with tangled hair moved towards Baylee, her arms stretched towards him, nails sharp.
It happened in mere seconds. Baylee covered his eyes, Brian moved to grab him. Dean whipped out his gun and fired one shot. Then another. The rock salt did its job—for the moment, anyway, Dean thought—and the figure exploded with an unearthly scream. At the sound of the gunshots, Baylee’s cries turned into louder shrieks of fear.
Brian scooped Baylee into his arms and dropped onto the couch, cradling his whimpering child against him. “It’s okay, Baylee. Everything’s going to be fine. The monster’s gone. Shh, buddy, everything’s okay.”
Baylee just pressed his face into Brian’s shoulder and sobbed, his little fingers clutching Brian’s shirt. “No. No, no, no,” he kept crying. “Make it stop. Make her go ‘way. Please, Daddy. Please!”
Brian continued to murmur soothing words as he rubbed a hand comfortingly over his son’s back. His eyes met Dean’s with something close to rage burning in them. Dean figured the message was clear. We’ll talk. You can bet your ass we’ll talk.
Sam placed a hand on Dean’s shoulder. He, too, understood Brian’s expression, and he understood Brian’s reaction perfectly. Brian needed someone to take his anger out on, and, having been unable to prevent Baylee from another experience with the monster, Dean was the first one in line to feel that anger.
“Let’s give them some privacy.”
An hour later, Baylee was peacefully sleeping in Brian’s bed. He’d sobbed for a while before the cries had subsided, and exhaustion had taken over. Brian didn’t plan on taking his eyes off his son for even an instant, so the three men spoke in low tones in Brian’s room. Though his anger had cooled considerably, it was far from gone.
“We trusted you,” he nearly hissed. “And then he had to suffer through that traumatizing experience. He’s going to have nightmares for months, years about that. Unless, of course, you fail completely, and I lose my son.”
Sam shook his head. “Brian, we didn’t know that the spirit would strike in the middle of the day.”
“That’s a rotten lie.” Brian’s fists clenched at his sides. “Didn’t you have that vision? The one where Baylee was-was…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it. “You said it was during the afternoon.” He flung one arm to gesture towards the window and the time of day the sunlight indicated. “What the hell time is it if it’s not afternoon, right now?”
“Look.” Sam held up a hand. “We were wrong. We didn’t expect for the spirit to show up when it did. We made a mistake.”
“Sam,” Dean began, but Sam cut him off.
“Dean, we made a mistake,” he repeated. “We miscalculated, but we learned something.”
Brian crossed his arms over his chest. “Oh, yeah? And what’s that? That you’re incompetent?”
With what he considered an incredible amount of patience, Sam shook his head. “It’s not just a night thing. This spirit doesn’t just appear when it’s dark out or when Baylee’s sleeping. In my vision, Baylee was sleeping when he was attacked. Baylee usually wakes you up in the middle of the night with stories about the monster, right?”
Brian didn’t know where Sam was going with his analysis of the evil spirit, but he wished the man would just get to the point. He didn’t care about what the habits of the monster were, he just wanted it gone. He just wanted his house to be safe again, to know that his family was safe. Home shouldn’t be a dangerous place, he thought furiously.
“Yeah,” he finally answered with a sigh. “It was the middle of the night.”
Sam sent him an appreciative look before continuing. “I just assumed that Baylee had a nightmare about the Big Bad Wolf or Samara, which caused them to appear, but that can’t be the case.” He glanced over to the bed where Baylee was wrapped up in blankets, tears dried on his face. “We need to find out what happened before Samara showed up.”
Brian and Dean followed his gaze. Neither wanted to interrogate the little boy. Brian wanted his son protected and didn’t want him to have to relive whatever had happened. Dean just felt guilty about making the kid more upset. He knew what it was like to be five and scared that the demon that had killed your mom was gonna come back and burn you up, too. He’d been an insomniac for a couple years after their mom had died. Staying up until dawn, he’d kept watch over his family, his eyes and ears alert for any sights or sounds that might indicate the coming of the demon. Of course, the damned son of a bitch hadn’t come back then, but he remembered how he’d felt at that age.
Damned if he wanted another little boy to constantly be afraid of the dark and the evil, ugly things it hid.
“You want to ask him what happened.” Brian’s voice was flat, hollow. He knew it was the right thing to do. His gut, his head were telling him that it was the only logical way to find out what Baylee had been doing or thinking before Samara had materialized. His heart wasn’t in it at all. “When he wakes up.”
Sam nodded, pleased that Brian seemed to understand what they had to do. It was no longer a choice. Whatever had to be done to keep Baylee safe would be done. Having the little boy go backwards and talk about whatever he’d done and seen was part of that.
“When he wakes up,” he agreed.
