Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Winchester gen
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: through "Dead Man's Blood"; set before that episode.
Summary: In which Sam buys okra, Dean hates on the great state of North Carolina, ritual arson is committed, and at least one local legend remains unsolved. 12,000 words.

They drove over from Memphis, up into the mountains and back down, along I-40. It was spring in Tennessee but winter in the mountains, bare branches and snow still patchy on the ground. The sun came up in front of the car as they were climbing down the mountains. Dean was tired. They hadn't started out until 10 p.m., checking out of the motel on the outskirts of town just past nine, and the sun was coming up as they spiraled down towards Hickory.

North Carolina was all pine trees stripped by the wind to nearly the tops of their trunks, sandy scrubby soil on the side of the road, and wisteria in full bloom up the trees wherever kudzu hadn't taken hold first. The further east Dean drove, sun shining up into his eyes, the greener everything got. The road was straight, the grade was steep, and he was fucking exhausted.

Sam was sleeping against the window, drooling a little, and he kept twitching, like a dog dreaming about chasing a rabbit. More likely Sam was dreaming about the poltergeist they flushed out of a Beale Street bar last week, or the demon in the train up in Paducah the week before. Dean has never slept deeply - too much that could come out and grab you if you slept like the dead - but lately Sam was sleeping badly, waking Dean up at 2 am thrashing around like he was being choked to death by a Strega.

The highway flattened outside of Hickory, and Dean pulled off 40 onto Highway 64, signs advertising Asheboro, Pittsboro, Siler City a hundred miles to the east. Siler City was where they were headed. Dad called last night, while Sam was hustling truckers for beer money over games of eight ball, and Dean was trying to pick up the curvy blonde who had waited on them every night they were in Memphis, trying to whoop the ghost out of the best blues bar in town.

Sam won 300 bucks and nearly got his ass kicked; the waitress smacked Dean across the face when his hand slipped across her ass; they both got tossed onto the street, but Sam at least got to keep his 300 bucks. They missed Dad calling, actually, but he was better than usual lately at leaving the details and not just leaving the directions.

Sam laughed his way back to the car, doubled over and practically crying with laughter, after the bouncer shoved Dean out the door. "Shut up," Dean had said. "Give me that cash, that's our beer money, not your beer money, and then get in the damn car, Sam."

Sam went from hysterical to sober faster than anybody Dean's ever met, and he said, "Dad?"

"Yeah," Dean said, and Sam didn't have his door shut before Dean reversed out of the parking spot and jammed the car into gear, pulling onto the access road and heading for the highway.

Dean has been to Siler City before, twice. Once with Dad, when Dean was 22, and Sam had just left for Stanford. They'd spent that fall running all over the country; put 10,000 miles on the Impala and 14,000 on Dad's old pick-up. Everyone in their line of work knew what people said about Siler City and the Devil's Tramping Grounds. Some kids had turned up dead a couple of miles away, suspicious circumstances, and that damn empty circle in the woods, so they went. They found nothing, and they'd spent four boring as hell days camped out watching the stupid circle before they gave up.

Siler City had been one of the last stops on that trip, before they headed back to Gulfport and a six-month home stand working out of a shitty rented apartment instead of a shitty rented motel room for once. Sam didn't call once the whole time they were on the road, and Dean's first trip to Siler City was marked by listening to Sam's voicemail rattling in his ear, hanging up before the beep sounded.

Dean went back by himself two years later, another two teenagers dead on the side of the road after an illegal overnight trip to the Devil's spot. Nothing again, just big skies and bright stars, and Dean, careless and bored, nearly shot himself in the foot fiddling with his shotgun waiting for something to happen.

Sam had never been there, though.

It wasn't really Sam's kind of place - Sam liked answers, liked to track down the tiny bits of history through the Lexis Nexis database and phone calls to Dad's old buddies. Sam didn't like anything that stayed unexplained for years and years, and the Devil's Tramping Grounds had been unexplained for at least a couple hundred, despite the best efforts of geologists, botanists, and Winchesters.

64 was a dumpy little road, calling itself an interstate but not really anything better than a two lane highway full of potholes, lined with falling down brick buildings that used to be gas stations and now sold oyster burgers and plates of meat and three. It was only 5 a.m., though, and even though the sky was all pink with sunrise, none of the places Dean was passing were open. He wanted eggs, he wanted bacon, he wanted some real grits loaded down with butter and salt and a fucking cup of coffee. And none of the dives on the side of the road had turned their flashing arrow signs on yet.

Just east of Asheboro, Dean was almost past the driveway for a place called Gene's Old Fashioned Breakfast when the sign flipped on. He jerked the car off the road, scattering gravel behind him, and Sam's head cracked against the window. "What the hell," Sam mumbled, rubbing at his head and twisting around to crack his back.

"Breakfast," Dean said.

"You didn't have to try to kill me just for breakfast," Sam complained.

The waitress in Gene's could have been 30 or she could have been 50, but she had coffee on the table before Dean even had his coat off. It didn't matter how old she was, because the coffee smelled like the best thing Dean had ever drunk. The menu was cheap and full of things like three eggs over easy with sides of bacon and sausage, and biscuits slathered in gravy.

Dean was only halfway through his breakfast - and he was about to flag the waitress down for another biscuit - when Sam set his fork down on the table, snagged Dean's cup of coffee from right out of Dean's hand, and said, "Okay, so explain, where are we going?"

"The Devil's Tramping Grounds," Dean said. "Give me my goddamned coffee back."

"You can't talk and drink at the same time," Sam said. "Talk first, eat later."

"South of Siler City," Dean said. "40 foot circle in the middle of the woods where nothing will grow. Stories go back, documented, um, about 200 years. Geologists say the soil is full of salt, that's why nothing grows there, but even the guy who Dad used to call for all his science shit can't tell us why the land hasn't regenerated. What's-his-name, Dennis, says that about ten years should do it, except that it hasn't."

"So what's that got to do with us?" Sam said. He cocked an eyebrow, but slid the coffee cup back to him, too, so Dean didn't punch him in the face for being a smartass.

"Dumbass kids get the idea to sleep in the middle of the fucking thing," Dean said. "And they always turn up dead the next day."

"You think it's really the Devil?"

"I've been there twice, and I ain't seen a fucking thing, Sammy," Dean said. "Three nights, both times, once full moon, once new moon, and nothing. Nothing. Nothing human, nothing supernatural, no goddamned thing."

"Why're we going back?"

"More dead kids," Dean said. "And Dad said to."

"Third time's the charm?"

"Yeah," Dean snorted. "Or the curse. Look, it's nothing, it's never been anything, but some teenaged couple turned up half a mile from the Tramping Grounds two days ago, not a mark on them, hearts stopped cold, and Dad has a buddy, called in a favor. That's what happened the last time I was here, anyway."

Sam's mouth was a tight line, and his eyes were shadowed when he looks up at Dean.

"Come on," Dean said. "Sammy, I swear, would I lie to you?"

Sam's mouth twitched like he's trying to laugh, but it didn't make it up to his eyes. He still had that steel-strong gaze fixed on Dean when he lifted his coffee mug up to his lips, and Dean had seen this expression on Sam's face far more than he'd liked to have, since Sam came back from California. Sam as a kid had a fierce, wide gaze that he trained on anybody he thought was lying to him, but when Sam was a kid, it wasn't ever quite this hopeless. Dean didn't like this new look Sam's learned. It made his stomach twist up in ways he never wanted to feel, and it made him want to send his little brother off somewhere that nothing bad to get to him, ever.

He couldn't, though, because there was no place like that in the world, so he did the next best thing.

"Here," Dean said, and pushed his last fried green tomato across the table to Sam. "Eat this, then let's go. We got an hour before we get to the place, and we got to make sure the guy owns the property now knows we're coming by."

"Private property?" Sam mumbled around a mouthful of tomato.

"Yeah," Dean said. "But he's a friend of Dad's buddy, that's why we get the call. Every time some kid tries to spend the night on this guy's land and ends up dead, this guy calls Chuck and Chuck calls Dad, and I get to haul ass out to North goddamned Carolina to sit in the dark for three nights and see jack shit. He just likes to know we've hit town."

Sam shoved the rest of the tomato into his mouth, slurped down his coffee and got up from their table without another word. Dean bummed a cigarette he didn't really want off the waitress and asked for another cup of coffee, just because he knew it'd piss Sam off. Dad had always told them not to fight with each other, because in their line of work, you never knew when you'd need somebody at your back, but they're brothers, too, and Dean could never resist the urge to needle Sam, just a little bit.

He paid up and tossed a handful of those little red and white plastic-wrapped mints into his pocket. By the time he got out the door, it was light, finally, and the air smelled so fresh and clean and wet that Dean stopped right outside the door to Gene's and breathed for a minute. Car air got stale fast, and Dean had spent too many nights with the stink of sulfur and burning salt and evil in his nostrils; sometimes he forgot that the air in some places actually smelled good.

He swiveled his head, looking for his brother, and found Sam in front of the falling-down shack that was masquerading as a produce stand ten yards from the restaurant. "Sammy," Dean said. "Get a move on, I want to do laundry before we have to go out tonight."

He didn't, actually, but Sam hadn't let Dean wash any of their clothes since he tossed them all in together and Sam's Stanford t-shirt turned all of their white t-shirts pink, and nothing got Sam's ass in the car faster than Dean threatening to do the laundry. Dean slid into the driver's seat and checked the directions in Dad's journal from 64 - 10 miles on SR 1106 South, hitch west on SR 1100 outside of Harper's Crossing, and hope he could remember which goddamned gravel road goes down to Chuck's buddy's place instead of the one that went to the public parking lot.

Sam climbed back into the passenger seat with a green plastic pint basket full of okra in his hand. "The fuck you buy that for," Dean said.

"The guy said it was good fried," Sam snapped, and set the okra carefully on top of the dashboard. He fished a pod out and stared at it like the answer to why the hell is Dean's little brother such a dumbass smart kid was written on it, and Dean just shook his head.

"You hiding a deep fryer in between the shotguns and the rock salt, Sammy?" Dean asked. "Because I don't know how else you're going to fry that shit in this car."

Sam shrugged. "We going?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "You got to take a piss before we go? Because you know I'm not stopping between here and Siler City."

"God," Sam said, rolling his eyes and thumping Dean in the arm. "You sound just like Dad."

"Shut your mouth or I'll shut it for you," Dean said, which was a John Winchester classic, and Sam laughed, but he shut up. Dean eased the car back onto 64, between three thundering trucks hauling Vidalia onions, smell strong enough to make Dean's eyes water with the windows down.

They'd just bumped off 64 onto SR 1106 when Sam said, "Full moon tonight or tomorrow night, you know?"

"Tomorrow," Dean said, but he'd almost forgotten. A trip to Siler City was halfway to a damn vacation, as close as they ever got to one, at least. Dean had been down to the Tramping Grounds on a full moon before and still nothing but trees and sandy dirt, but he never wanted to discount that a full moon might fuck something up.

That's why he needed Sam around, 'cause there's only so much Dean could remember by himself all at once, and he never wanted to get caught on a new moon by a vengeful spirit operating in the dark again.

"Think it'll change anything?"

"Nope," Dean said. "But you never want to forget that shit, either."

Dean stopped at a good old-fashioned combination general store, laundromat, gas station and bar in Harper's Crossing. It was April, but the sun, only partially overhead, was already beating down strong enough to make the pavement steam under their feet. The back of Dean's neck felt slick with sweat, and he always forgot that about the Carolinas, the way the heat was wet with swamp and ocean. Felt like breathing in a swimming pool every time he took a step.

"Fill up the tank," Dean said. "And then bring the laundry in. I got to buy some stuff."

The inside of the place - no name, and Dean bet if he asked anybody in Harper's Crossing where he could get a beer, buy some shrimp, wash his clothes, they'd just say, "Over to the store" - was dark and dusty. He squinted, yanked his sunglasses off, and squinted some more - standard half-dozen old-timers already halfway drunk at the bar, pretty girl behind the cash register (the daughter of somebody with a shotgun and no taste for out-of-town fast-talkers like Dean, if Dean knew his Southern towns), mom with two kids under six leaning tired against one of the washers.

He bought the place out of rock salt, because they were running low, and a six pack of Cheerwine in cans, because they lived in Asheville for six months when Dean was 10 and Sam was 6 and Sammy drank the sickly cherry-flavored stuff like it was water. They couldn't find it anywhere else, though, and Sam whined about it for months after they moved to Phoenix, and then to Baton Rouge.

He was sitting at the bar, can of PBR in front of him and bags full of salt at his feet, when Sam came through the door with a duffel slung over his shoulder. He frowned at Dean's beer. "Isn't it, isn't it early for that?"

"Drinking PBR's like drinking water," Dean said. "Just tastes better." He yanked a thumb at the washers on the other side of the place and said, "You want I should?"

"No," Sam said. "I got it. Whites stay white when I do laundry, Dean."

Dean watched Sam load the laundry into two washers, and watched the young mother look Sam up and down before leaning over to touch him on the hip and say something. Sam jumped when she touched him, and Dean smirked behind his beer. Whatever she asked him, Sam ducked his head and rolled one shoulder in that lazy shrug that he didn't learn from Dean or Dad, so God only know where he picked it up, and said something short but undoubtedly polite back.

He didn't learn that from Dean, either.

Sam slid onto the stool next to Dean once the washers were clanking away, and the old-timer who'd been sneaking half looks at them caught Dean's eye and nodded. "Hey," the old-timer said. "You two John Winchester's boys?"

Dean shot a look at Sam, who raised an eyebrow. "Maybe," Dean said. Dad had buddies all over the place, but they only ran into Dad's buddies when they went looking for them, not just sitting in a laundromat-cum-bar in rural North Carolina. "Who wants to know?"

"Yeah, you're John's boys, all right," the old-timer said, laughing. "I'm Chuck. You need a haircut, so you must be Sam, which makes you Dean, the careful one. Nice to finally meet you kids. Heard a hell of a lot about you from John." He banged on the bar and the cashier came running to fish three fresh cans of PBR out from the Coleman cooler that was masquerading as a fridge, sliding one to Chuck and the other two in front of Dean and Sam. Chuck flipped the pop-top open and hoisted it up in the air, clearly a toast, and drank a long swig before clanging the can back to the scarred wood of the bar top.

"Guess John called you," Chuck said.

"Yes, sir," Dean said. Most of the time, being a fast talker got Dean the places he needed to go, and hell if sometimes he thought he should have been on Broadway, the performances he's turned in - but Dad raised them to respect the people they knew they should. Something about Chuck's honey-slow drawl told Dean that sir was the right thing to be saying, even if Sam choked on his beer a little, hearing that word out of Dean's mouth.

"I know you've been down here with your daddy before," Chuck said. "And once by yourself, I got that right?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said. "Couple of years ago, on the new moon."

"I remember that one," Chuck said, and Dean knew what he meant - three kids, two girls and a boy who had reminded Dean of Sam at 17, all knees and elbows and hair in his eyes, dead and no trail for anybody, police or Dean, to follow. He slid his eyes over to Sam, who was drinking his beer thoughtfully and staring at the chalkboard menu of specials - meat and three, $2.99; hamburger, $1.99, cheeseburger, $2.99; collard greens, $1.50 a plate - like it was offering a deep fryer for sale. "You've never been down here, son, have you?" Chuck said.

"No, sir," Sam said, and Dean almost choked on his own beer at Sam's surprised expression at hearing sir out of his own mouth. You can take the boy out of a huntin' family, but you can't take the things a father taught his son out of the boy.

"Well," Chuck said. "It ain't as exciting as some of the things I'm sure you've seen, but it's still strange, all right. You two planning to spend the night out there?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said. "Tonight, tomorrow, night after."

"I'm heading down that way, stop in and see Jimmy. I'll tell him you'll be down there, so's you won't have the troopers on your tail when he sees a fire out in the woods later."

"Thank you," Dean said.

"Oh, you know," Chuck waved a lazy hand and finished the rest of his beer in two large gulps. "Anything for John's boys."

"Likewise," Dean said. "Anything for a friend of Dad's."

"You two give a holler you need anything," Chuck said, and slid off the stool, grabbing his hat from the top of the bar. "I'm always around."

"Will do, sir," Sam said, and he stuck his hand across Dean's personal space and shook Chuck's hand. Chuck winked at Dean and ambled out of the store, sunshine slicing brightly across the floor where the door pulled open and shut.

They killed another hour drinking beer and waiting for the laundry to dry. Dean caught the young mother shooting curious looks at the two of them, and guessed that she'd tried to make a move on Sam and got shot down. From the looks of it, she was trying to figure out if Sam and Dean were traveling partners, or partners partners, and he would have done something, rubbed a thumb across the back of Sam's wrist or something, except Dean didn't a need broken nose on top of a totally useless trip.

Harper's Crossing had one motel, which was really just six rooms all strung together, and frankly it didn't really need all six of them. Dean took Room 6, furthest from the office, because for some reason, motel clerks got all het up when people came back to their rooms at dawn not reeking of beer and women - like not drinking was a clear sign of criminal intentions.

Sam settled on the bed to flip through Dad's notes about the Tramping Ground - nothing Dean hadn't read a hundred times before, but he guessed Sam had just skipped those pages - while Dean threw himself across the creaky, musty bedspread. Next thing he knew, he was swimming blearily up from sleep and the sun was hanging low in the sky.

"Grunk?" Dean said, and then cleared his throat and tried again, so it came out in a sleepy croak. "The fuck?"

Sam was tossing shit into his backpack; Dad's journal, waterproof matches, a dented can of lighter fluid. "You passed out, man. If you hadn't snored, I would have thought you were dead."

Dean rolled over and cracked his neck. "You ready?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "Are you?"

"Shut up," Dean said. "Let's get out there before the sun sets, give it a walk around."

"That was the plan," Sam said, hoisting his backpack onto his shoulder. "I double-checked the shotguns, everything's good to go."

"You got marshmallows?" Dean said.

"What?"

"Marshmallows, dumbass," Dean said. "We're going to sit in the middle of the forest with a fire for three straight nights, we need something to do with our time. Didn't anybody ever take you camping when you were a kid?"

Sam rolled his eyes at Dean and said, "Yeah, camping. All the time. Lots of nights spent in a tent not searching for wendigos or tree spirits. Staple of my childhood."

Like it hadn't been Dean's childhood, too - and maybe Dean took to it earlier than Sam did, but his childhood wasn't any more of a piece of TV sitcom normal, either. "Whatever," Dean said, and it came out nastier than he meant to sound. Sam's shoulders tightened, and Dean didn't want another fight, but he didn't know what to do with Sammy, either. He bit his nastiness down and said, "Let's go."

The gravel road had grown over even further since the last time Dean had driven down it; he left the Impala in a cove of trees, one tire sinking into a hidden hole. Half a mile hike down to the tramping ground, and the sun was setting in the west and the moon rising, halfway to the top of the tree line and glowing just as orange as the sun, in the east. Dean was on edge, the noises of the outside world fading to a murmur the further they trekked into the woods, the silence eerier than he remembered it. Sam was dragging his feet, kicking dead pine needles and leaves up against the backs of Dean's legs, making irritation crawl up the back of Dean's neck.

There was no open entrance into the hollow where the circle lay; that much Dean had remembered. They shoved through the heavy underbrush, and the whole place was glowing with sunset when they stepped into the grove. "Shit," Sam said, and Dean had to agree.

He had never gone for textbook multiple-choice sorts of answers, and most of the time, if a question didn't have an answer, Dean didn't need it to have an answer. Either there was an answer and it was something he could fix, or there wasn't an answer and nothing needed fixing.

Still, the Tramping Ground was something that had to be seen to be believed, and Dean wouldn't die of curiosity if nobody ever figured out what caused it, but it was one place that an answer would have been interesting. Dean's whole life had been one definition or another of interesting, but this was something else entirely - a glen in the woods, with a four foot ring of your standard North Carolinian underbrush, pine needles and scrubby grass growing out of sandy soil, scattered with heavy rocks and fallen trees, that surrounded a bare circle of that same sandy soil, but not a single piece of grass or scrub or fallen debris on it.

If it hadn't been in the middle of nowhere, if it hadn't been so close to a full moon, if the whole thing hadn't been linked to disappearances and inexplicable scientific phenomena - it would have been unbelievable.

Except dead teenagers, and inexplicable science, and the fact that even if Dean had never seen a damn thing come through the grove, the silence was almost deafening once you stepped out from the trees and closer to the ring. It wasn't the sort of place Dean would choose to have a barbeque, put it that way.

Sam scanned the perimeter, scaring off four squirrels, two chipmunks, and what looked like a doe and two babies, hiding in the shadows. Dean cleared scrub, set a fire, and settled down with his back against a rock, a little higher than the rest of the ground, and scanned the circle. It was still glowing orange, and the sun was almost set. Sam slumped down beside him and checked both barrels on the shotgun he was holding. His eyes flicked up to the moon, hanging huge and round at the top of the tree line, and said, "You sure tomorrow's full moon?"

"Yes," Dean said. "Jesus fuck, you ask a lot of annoying questions."

"Just don't want to get surprised," Sam said placidly, the same damn tone of voice he'd been using on Dean for years; soothe the savage beast and all that, and all it did was make Dean want to torture his little brother in new and unusual ways.

Well, he did that anyway - but not usually while they were actively working a job.

It had been clear all day, the sun strong without any kind of cloud cover, but the more the sky darkened to a deep inky indigo, the more clouds started to float across the moon. It was past midnight, the moon high in the sky and hidden behind a wisp of grey cloud, and they'd run out of names to call each other an hour earlier. Dean was about to say, "See, we should have brought marshmallows, we could have told ghost stories," (which would have gotten him a punch in the arm from Sam, because who needs ghost stories when you you've got ghost non-fiction?) when Sam tensed next to him.

The rocks were uncomfortable. They'd slid closer together the longer they'd sat there, until Dean's shoulder was bumping companionably up against Sam's, and when Sam tensed up, Dean could feel the muscles along his biceps twitching. "Sammy?" Dean said.

"Shut up," Sam hissed, voice rasping into a whisper. Dean tossed a glance away from the circle and toward Sam. Sam had his hunting face on, his entire body vibrating with having seen something that shouldn't exist in nature. Dean traced his gaze into the very middle of the clearing.

"The fuck was that," Sam said. Dean blinked, twice, and maybe there was a murky spot in the center of the circle, but damned if Dean had ever seen it before.

Before Dean could move, the distortion was gone.

Sam said, "You saw that, right?"

"Saw what?" Dean said.

"That apparition. That black spot in the middle of the damn circle. You've never seen anything down here before?"

"Nope," Dean said. "Didn't see it now. Your eyes are going, Sammy."

"I swear to God, Dean, there was something out there."

"And I've always sat three days, too - full moon, day before, day after. New moon once, too."

"That wasn't an animal," Sam said. "It was ... a person, or something like it - something in a human shape."

"Too big," Dean said. "Too big to be anything lives down here. No bears around this area."

"People live here," Sam said.

"People stay the hell away from this place, that's what they do," Dean said. "So you saw something. So what are you going to do about it?"

"Think it was the Devil?"

"How the hell should I know?" Dean snapped.

"There's holy water in the pack," Sam said. "And salt. Circle?"

"I swear I didn't see shit, but I guess my opinion doesn't count for anything," Dean said. "Well, you can never be too careful, Sammy."

"You've been working on your impression of Dad," Sam said, but he was rifling his pack at the same time, shoving a box of salt into Dean's hands and pulling the stopper from a bottle of holy water with his teeth.

"Nah," Dean said. "I'm just not ready to end up dead yet."

They sat back-to-back, shotgun cocked across Sam's lap, until the moon turned silver-pale in the lightening sky and the sun started filtering gold across the grass. Might not have been anything, Dean thought, but not worth risking a life over, either, at least until they could see something. Nothing else moved that night, not until a squirrel crept through the trees as the first shade of dawn hit the sky.

When it was bright enough to see the center of the circle, Dean stretched, cracked his back out, and stood up.

"What do you think it was?" Sam asked.

"The boogeyman," Dean said.

"Shit," Sam said. "No use talking to you before you get a cup of coffee."

There was nothing in the center of the circle - no marks, no trails, no smell of sulfur or burnt grass. Nothing but a circle where nothing would grow, and a distortion hidden behind the cloak of darkness. "I don't know what it was, Sammy," Dean said. "Malevolent wood spirit, pissed-off colonial ghost, the damn Devil himself, I don't know. I didn't see it. I don't think there's shit out there, just some fucked up legends that people take too seriously."

Sam was quiet for a minute, and Dean could hear birds starting to chirp after the night's long silence. He remembered that well enough, that even though they'd never seen a thing here before, nothing made a noise between sunset and sun up. Should have been enough to tip him off, but it never had been. "Well," Sam finally said, straightening up from his seat on the ground. "If it's actually the Devil, not much we can do but put up really serious signs."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Guess so."

"Breakfast?" Sam said.

"Yeah," Dean said.

Dean drank four cups of coffee at the counter of the general store. Sam ate like he was still growing - Dean would never forget the six months that Sam spent shooting up 8 inches, because he nearly ate them out of house, home, and hotel room - three fried eggs and what looked like half a pound of bacon. It was only 8 a.m. when they stumbled back out into the sun, and the air was already baking hot.

Dean closed the shades over the windows as soon as they walked through the door, and while he was still trying to untie the knots in his bootlaces, Sam slammed the door to the bathroom. "Goddamnit, Sammy, I'm covered in dust," he shouted, and threw his left boot at the door. It crashed noisily against the plywood and bounced halfway back to where he was sitting on the bed.

Sam sing-songed, "I can't hear you" as he turned on the water and Dean slumped backwards onto the scratchy bedspread. He hated North Carolina and he hated the month of April and he hated his stupid little brother. When Sam finally emerged from the bathroom, all the dirt and bits of grass from the night before washed off, he said, "Hot water's gone."

"Fuck you," Dean said, closing his eyes and trying to muster up the energy to get up again and take his own shower. He'd regret it if he didn't, but he still had one boot to untie and his back hurt from sitting on the ground all night. It seemed like a little too much work when he could just sleep instead. And he was pissed about the hot water, so instead of getting up, he said, "Go to the library, look up property records."

"I'm going to sleep for a while," Sam said.

"No, you're going to go to the library, and I'm going to sleep for a while."

"Whatever," Sam said. "Couple of hours, tops, and then the library, and yesterday, that woman in the grocery store said there's a place to get barbeque a mile past the turnoff for the circle."

"You think with your stomach," Dean said, and levered himself up off the bed. His back screamed when he bent over to wrench his other boot off, and they had at least another two nights of sitting on the rocky ground.

"You think with your dick," Sam said. Dean chucked the other boot at him and hit him in the chest. "Ow, that hurt, you asshole."

"Fucking go to sleep, Sam," Dean said. "Set the alarm for, I don't know, 1 or 1:30."

He slammed the door behind him, took a too-long lukewarm shower, and when he came out, feeling only marginally better, Sam was asleep on his stomach, one hand thrust underneath the pillow. Resting on a knife, Dean knew. Dean shimmied into a pair of boxers and flopped down onto the bed, not even bothering to crawl under the covers. He felt for his own knife under the pillow and slept dreamless, fingers wrapped around the hilt, until the alarm shocked him awake.

The library was a bust - Harper's Crossing didn't have one, and then it was a Saturday, so by the time they drove back to Siler City, the public library was closed and they were renovating City Hall. "Shit," Dean said.

"Let's go eat barbeque," Sam said.

The barbeque was good, grease and vinegar and just a little sweetness underneath, and for a long moment, bottle of beer up against his mouth, Dean almost didn't hate North Carolina anymore - and then Sam said, "So, seriously, Dean, you didn't see that last night?"

"I'm trying to eat here," Dean complained, and Sam reached for bucket of barbeque sitting on the plastic red-and-white tablecloth and pulled it away from Dean.

"You really didn't see anything?" Sam asked again. "Just, yes or no, Dean, it's not that hard. Maybe I'm going crazy."

"I don't know," Dean said. "It was dark, maybe there was something, maybe there wasn't. I never saw anything before, why should it be different?"

"Manifestations change," Sam said. "You know that as well as I do. Spectral manifestations evolve, sometimes, environmental factors and population shifts and, well, you know."

"Yeah," Dean said. "I know. Just, Sam, I'm not lying, I didn't see anything. Swear to God."

"Maybe I'm going crazy," Sam said.

"You already were," Dean said, and Sam pelted him in the forehead with a hush puppy and the waitress hustled them out of the restaurant pretty fast after that.

"Second verse," Sam said when they walked into the clearing, pausing at the edge to look around - picture-perfect, not a leaf out of place from the night before.

"Same as the first," Dean said. "Want to set up the same place?"

Sam hummed thoughtfully, turning slowly in a circle to check out the scene. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe we get another view?"

"And maybe you don't see anything at all," Dean said.

"Don't fuck with a pattern," Sam said. "Yeah, okay."

They don't build a fire, just sprawl out with their backs against a rock. "It wasn't interested in us last night," Sam said.

"How the hell do you know that?"

"I just ... I just do, okay? It was interested in us, because warm bodies, living people, you know the drill, but it wasn't interested in us like it was interested in those kids." Sam frowned, twisting pine needles around one finger, and he sounded like he wasn't all that wild about knowing this stuff.

"So whatever the fuck you saw, whatever it is, you could tell that it's responsible for all the dead kids in Jimmy's driveway?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "Don't ask how, I saw the shadow and I could tell, all right? I saw it move, I stared at it, I could tell it wasn't interested in us."

"Yeah, well," Dean said. "That's good to know but I think I'll keep my hand on my shotgun all the same."

"God, shut up," Sam said, and that was that. The sun went down, slowly, and the full moon, which looked huge in the sky, started to rise.

By the time the moon was overhead, the temperature had dropped - not cold enough to see his breath, sure, but cold enough that he was pretty sure it hadn't been quite as cold last night. "Is it just me," he said.

"No," Sam said. "It's cold, yeah. It was 93 degrees today, how is it cold?"

"The devil lives in Charlotte," Dean said. "This place is creepy even if there's nothing here."

"There's," Sam said, and he stopped, scrambling up to a crouch and pointing. "There's definitely something there, can't you see it?"

It was dark, and somehow the moonlight casting across the tops of the trees didn't make it down to the forest floor. Dean couldn't see his own feet, much less a shadow, spirit or haint, but he squinted, and maybe, okay, the air was bending at one edge of the circle.

Or maybe he was hallucinating; maybe he was just so damn tired of all of this that he was suggestible. "I don't know, Sammy," Dean said, and Sam made a disgusted noise under his breath and dropped his hand.

"It's gone," Sam said. "But there was something there, Dean, my hand to God."

"Sure, Sammy," Dean said. "And we'll sit here until the sun comes up, and maybe it'll come back and when it's light out, we can talk about what to do. But I didn't see anything concrete, and I don't know."

"You can't see everything," Sam said, dropping heavily onto the ground. "Maybe it doesn't want you to see it."

"Maybe it doesn't," Dean said. "But what's it want with you?"

Sam shrugged. Dean couldn't see him; the moon had drifted behind a dark bank of clouds, but he could feel the movement next to him. "What's anybody want with me?" Sam said. "What do you want with me?"

Dean punched him in the arm, and Sam laughed. Another night in North Carolina, and Dean still hadn't seen a damn thing, but Sam almost had him convinced all the same.

Dean headed straight for the shower when they hit the door of their motel, locking the cheap lock (it'd take Sam ten seconds to pick, if he was serious about flushing the toilet while Dean was trying to finally wring five minutes of decent water pressure and hot water out of the shitty shower) behind him. When he opened the door, steam billowing into the room ahead of him, Sam was already sitting in front of the laptop. "Nothing there I haven't read before," Dean said, wiping water out of his ears.

"Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, Dean," Sam said distractedly.

"They teach you that at Stanford?"

"No," Sam said, shoving the chair back from the desk. "Dad taught me to check land records and libraries when I was 8 years old."

"Shut up," Dean said, but he settled into Sam's abandoned chair when he'd pulled on a pair of jeans. Sam had trailed clothes, damp with dew and dirty with sand around the cuffs of his jeans, across the room on his way to the shower. Still too skinny, Dean thought every time he saw Sam take his shirt off; three years of soft college living had left Sam with the corded muscle of a hunter under his skin, but Dean could count Sam's ribs, too, which was never the case when he was still living the road life with Dean and Dad.

Dean shook the image out of his head; Sammy was back and most of the time he acted like he was content, if not happy, to be here, and that was enough for Dean - well, most days.

Well. Today.

The land records showed 25 different owners dating back the last 150 years. It looked to Dean like nobody had kept the place longer than about 5 years. Chuck's buddy had owned the place since '93, which made 13 years, which made him the longest owner since 1900. Except for the state, which had owned rights in the middle of the century - '41 to '74 - before they sold it. Dean pulled building records up in another window and discovered that the cabin on the property only dated back to '86.

Which coincided with the first year dead bodies had turned up on the property.

Sure, the circle had been around for as long as anybody had bothered recording the details of the land, but it wasn't until anybody bothered putting a building within a mile of the circle that shit started going down.

He was about to pull up the Lexis Nexis records for the spring of '86 when Sam emerged from the bathroom, toweling his hair dry with one hand and clutching at the towel around his waist with the other. "Hey," Dean said. "You remember any kind of demon that turns up when people start developing the land?"

Sam shook water out of his eyes and said, "Um. No?"

"Me neither," Dean said. "But that's what it looks like."

"I thought you didn't believe there was anything out there," Sam said.

"I didn't see shit. That doesn't mean I don't believe in it."

Sam was quiet, frowning, when Dean craned his neck to look back at him. "I don't know," Sam said slowly. "Jesus Christ, Dean, sometimes I just don't fucking now."

"What the hell are you on about," Dean said.

"Either you believe it all or you don't believe any of it," Sam said. "That's what we learned, right? That's the deal - it's all out there and it'll all get you, or there's nothing hiding underneath the bed and you're safe. You can't pick both, you can't."

"Sammy," Dean said, shoving his chair back and starting to get up. Sam was twisting a t-shirt in his hands, and Dean remembered this crisis of faith, turning 15 and being told he could hunt full time. Only the first time he went out, it wasn't what he was expecting at all - Dean hadn't really understood the word brutal until he'd seen a demon go through fifteen Devil-worshipping teenagers - and he puked afterwards, standing beside the pickup with Dad's hand on his back.

So he hadn't seen anything, so he'd snapped at Sammy that it didn't exist - so what?

"Dean," Sam said.

"Look, something's out there," Dean said, trying for conciliatory and finding something that wasn't nasty. "I was tired, I haven't seen anything out there before, maybe something was there. Don't be an asshole, Sam, you know I believe in this."

"Yeah," Sam said.

"Would I have come to get you in California if I hadn't believed?" Dean asked, and this was something that had ridden heavy in the car between them ever since he'd gone to get Sam back.

"You wouldn't have come to California if you weren't selfish," Sam snapped, shirt still in hands, head still down. He looked up and fixed Dean was an expression that was halfway between hurt and frightened. "But I guess you're right."

"I'm always right, Sammy," Dean said. "That's why I'm the big brother."

"So there's something out there?" Sam said. And it wasn't better, it wasn't going to be better for a damn long time, but they'd been having the same argument for years and it never ended, but sometimes it waned. Dean wasn't going to push, and the flame under the burner simmered low for the time being.

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "I think it's pissed about the cabin Chuck's buddy lives in. Somebody built a cabin on the property in '86, first death in early '87."

"Before that?" Sam said, muffled under the shirt he was finally pulling over his head.

"Disappearing items in the middle of the circle," Dean said. "Attribute them to people pranking the people who left them there, probably. Or animals, Dad says all the early records just show that people left food in the circle, the dumb shits."

"And the fact that nothing grows there, and there's no kind of noise at all after the sun sets," Sam said.

"No record of that," Dean said. "That's all hearsay, and, you know, first person experience."

Sam leaned over Dean's shoulder and stared at the screen. "So," he said slowly. "Native spirits? What's the history of the place, before this?"

"Don't know," Dean said. "That's your job."

Sam leaned a hip against the chair, and Dean knew if he looked back over his shoulder, Sam would be wearing his thinking-really-hard face, trying to remember something. 23 years of living with Sam, and Dean knew every silence Sam had in his lineup. Sulking silence, thinking silence, sleepy silence. "The Lost Colony," Sam said.

"No pilgrims in North Carolina," Dean said. "I thought you learned history in college."

"No," Sam said. "Raleigh's colony. On the Outer Banks, Roanoke Island. Sir Walter Raleigh founded a colony in the 1500s, and then he went home to England. When he came back three years later, the entire colony was gone, the Native Americans, too."

"Supernatural?"

"Nobody ever proved it, nobody ever found them," Sam said. "Look it up, there was some word carved in a tree, and some speculation about where the colony was heading when they left. Historians think they might have headed for the middle part of the state."

"Like maybe Siler City," Dean said, punching "lost colony" into the search box.

Sam shrugged. Sam's hip was still pressed against Dean's shoulder blades, and even with his eyes on the computer screen, Dean could feel the motion. "I mean, it's just an idea."

"Connect up the two great unsolved mysteries of North Carolina, huh," Dean said, watching the results load on the page.

"We probably can't prove anything about the colony," Sam said. "But, you know, if the deaths started when the building was finished, there's got to be something out there that's pissed about it, right?"

"Right," Dean said. "I don't know, Sammy, you're hare-brained but this is more hare-brained than normal." And then, scanning the page, "Croatoan. But it's another island, not further inland."

"Just an idea," Sam said, pushing off the chair to flop across the bed with a great creaking of bedsprings and clouds of dust from underneath. "Not everybody has unending moments of genius like you, asshole."

"Why'd you know so much about the damn Outer Banks, anyway?" Dean said, closing the browser and shoving back in the chair.

"We spent three months in Wilmington," Sam said. "When I was 13, and you were supposed to be in high school." Dean snorted; by the time he could drive, school wasn't the place he wanted to be, not if he could help it. Most of the three months in Wilmington, which he'd forgotten about until Sam mentioned it, he'd spent on trips down into the marshes with Dad, chasing a water spirit that was upending boats, or out at Wrightsville Beach with a pack of kids from the college in town. "Yeah," Sam said. "You missed the local history lessons, but I didn't. That story freaked me the hell out."

"Old enough to know that there was probably something other than natural death involved," Dean said.

"Yeah," Sam said. Dean had shared enough motels room with his brother to know when Sam was sliding towards sleep, and he was on his way now. Dean had spent the best years of his life watching his brother sleep, making sure that nothing got to Sammy while Dad wasn't around to keep them safe. Sam still woke shouting from nightmares even now, and when he shocked awake with rough cries, Dean was always awake first.

He was quiet long enough that Dean thought he'd actually fallen asleep, but he mumbled, without opening his eyes, "I always thought Dad could figure out what had happened to them."

Then he was out cold. Dean shut the top of the laptop and set the alarm clock for the middle of the afternoon. Sam was asleep on the bed further from the door, and Dean settled onto the other bed to watch the local news station report on a sex scandal in the philosophy department at the state university. Sam rolled over onto his side, mumbling about shadows and the dark - or maybe shadows in the dark, Dean had given up trying to interpret Sam's sleep-talk years ago - and threw an arm across his eyes. The twiggy blonde newsgirl mispronounced Heidegger and that was the last thing Dean remembered for a couple of hours.

When he swam up into consciousness, the TV was showing an afternoon talk show and Sam was hunched over the computer again, frowning in concentration. Dean's neck hurt and they hadn't done any drinking last night but he felt like he'd been halfway down a bottle of Jim. The sun was still high overhead through the window, so he hadn't slept too long, at least.

"Find anything?" Dean croaked.

"Land used to belong to the Catawba tribe, it looks like," Sam said. "It's not in the land records, but I called the courthouse and the oldest man in the world told me all about it."

"They pissed about it?" Dean said.

"He didn’t think so; seemed like the Catawba offered to sell, guess the circle freaked them the hell out, too," Sam said.

"Still," Dean said.

"Yeah," Sam said.

"Pissed-off spirit," Dean said. "Just because they sold it doesn't mean they wanted it developed."

"You can hardly call one cabin development," Sam said. "But yeah."

"Just a regular old exorcism," Dean said. "Then maybe we set the cabin on fire, just to be on the safe side."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Or not," he said. "I haven't been arrested for arson yet, I'm not going to start now. Maybe we explain before we light the place up."

"Whatever," Dean said. "Dirt?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "Let's go."

One of the things Dean loved best about the South was the cemeteries everywhere. You never knew when you were going to need a couple of handfuls of graveyard dirt, and out West, sometimes you had to drive for miles before you found a place to steal some. In the South, though, tiny local cemeteries lined the back roads like convenience stores, names worn off the stones and ivy growing over the gates, and it was never a problem to find a quick voodoo stop in low country South Carolina.

Rolling along east of SR 1100, looking for a graveyard, Sam said, "It is too early to sing and dance at funerals."

"What the hell," Dean said.

"Carl Sandburg."

Dean raised an eyebrow and Sam flapped the hand that was hanging out of the open window on the passenger side. "He was a poet. I read him in a class. I don't know, I just thought of, I thought of that line. Been a while since I went digging for graveyard dirt."

"Do me a favor," Dean said. "Don't quote any poetry while I'm skimming dirt off the top of graves. I don't want to get jumped by a cop because you're making with the blank verse, okay?"

"You're scared of this thing," Sam said.

"What?" Dean said. "No."

"No, you are," Sam insisted, poking Dean in the shoulder, hard. "You're acting just like Dad when he's scared of something." And then, "There, on the left."

Dean turned across the highway into an almost-hidden dirt track, ten feet long leading to a very rusty farm gate, and fought with equal parts irritation (Sam knew him too damn well) and gratitude (hard to look for cemeteries when he's driving). Dean pulled the car behind the cover of a weeping willow's heavy branches, popped the latch on the trunk lid, slammed the door and leaned across the top of the car.

"Just because you'd have been mauled by a bear if I wasn't around to watch out for you doesn't mean I'm turning into Dad, Sammy," Dean said. Sam pinned Dean with an unbelieving look - usually reserved for unusually stupid police officers - and walked around to the back of the car, sifting through the machetes and a battle-ax Dean had bought in Wichita before pulling the shovel out.

"You said there were no bears around here," Sam said.

"Metaphorical bear," Dean said. "Give me that shovel, you've got pipe-cleaner arms."

"How much do you think we need?"

"Dump the salt in the trunk and grab that paper bag," Dean said. "That should cover it. And the pliers, gate's wired shut."

"What're we going to use it for?" Sam asked.

"Enough to cover the ground," Dean said. "We got a spirit that's maybe linked to a big group of people, but we don't know who it was specific. Got to cover the circle, dump the holy water on top of that, shout 'til the damn thing gives up, or hit it with the salt if it doesn't. Torch the cabin after. Should leave us enough dirt to fill a coffee can, never know when we're going to need it again."

Sam hummed agreement under his breath while he snipped the wire and used his shoulder to force the gate open. Dean scanned the place, looking for even half a foot of open ground - there was kudzu on the walls, and on the ground, and a heavy layer of ivy fighting back against the kudzu. "Back west corner," Sam said. "God, you're going to need glasses soon, your eyes are for shit."

"Shut the fuck up, Sammy," Dean said. "I'll still be hunting when you're in the old folks home, and you know it."

The dirt in the cemetery was just the same as the dirt in the forest, and the dirt in the parking lot of the Harper's Crossing general store. More sand than dirt, and the low clinging ground cover fighting every shovelful Dean tried to take. It took half an hour, sweaty work even under the cover of the willows and pine trees shading the place, and Dean was glad when Sam waved a hand at him to say they had enough. Sam covered their tracks and hefted the paper bag of sand up onto a hip. "What now?" Sam said as they were stashing the dirt in the backseat of the Impala, wedged firmly between the passenger seat and the back seat, surrounded by four boxes of rock salt.

"Chuck," Dean said.

"You know where he lives?" Sam said.

"Know where he drinks," Dean said. "Let's go."

Chuck was exactly where Dean thought he would be, sitting up to the bar in the general store with a can in his hand. They pulled him outside, standing in the parking lot beside the Impala, dust climbing up their ankles. Dean explained the situation, low-voiced and as detail-free as possible. When he was finished, Chuck scratched the back of his head and said, "I don't know, boys. I mean, I'm no hunter like your daddy - "

"You're not a hunter," Sam said flatly, and Dean could see a basic tenet of Sam's life disintegrate like bones with acid poured on them: People Dad considers friends always equal other hunters.

"Nope," Chuck said with a half-smile. "Just an old buddy who believed a lot more of John's bullshit that most people - and I've seen a few things, but I don't do what y'all do. Not my bag."

"But you understand," Sam pressed. "You understand that the cabin your friend is living in is the whole reason that there's an angry spirit on the land."

"Sure, if you say so," Chuck said. Dean liked this guy - he was amiable in a way that Dad's other hunting buddies weren't and never would be. Guess if you only hear about all the shit's trying to eat you in your sleep, you stay a lot more mellow. "Jimmy won't be happy, but he owns half the county, he could live anywhere he wanted - just the cabin was already there."

"Just get him out," Dean said. "We're going to spread the ground before sunset, and we'll need to torch the cabin, I don't know, about 1 a.m."

"Working your mojo," Chuck said, with a huff of laughter. "Just like your daddy."

"Just explain it to Jimmy," Sam said.

"It's nothing personal, we know he didn't build the place, but it's got to go," Dean said. "And I think he'd be happy to have the dead kids on his property stop, even if he can't live there."

"Well, all right," Chuck said. "But like I said to John about a hundred times, he'll go, but ain't nobody going to actually believe this shit."

"Make something up," Dean said. "You've known Dad long enough, you got to know how to lie. Make up a story and don't worry about us - we know how to get the hell out without catching the arson rap."

"Hope so," Chuck said. "Police chief's a buddy of mine, too, hate to have to turn you in."

"You wouldn't," Sam said, and Dean heard the 16 year old who said to Dad, You're going to get arrested, and then who will take care of me? (Dean, Dad had said, does a better job of it than I do anyway, because that was one of the years that Dad was drinking, and that was the year that Sam started talking about college, too - that was the year they started fighting bad, and -)

"Nah, I wouldn't," Chuck said. "But I scared you, didn't I?"

Dean bumped his hip against Sam's, and Sam scowled at him. "You don't know from scared," Dean said. "Sammy doesn't scare that easy."

"Well, I do," Chuck said. "That's why I'm not in your business, boys. I get Jimmy and his junk out of that place, you don't need anything else from me?"

"No, sir," Dean said. "Thanks for your help."

"Aw," Chuck said, flapping a hand at them. "T'ain't nothing I wouldn't have done for your daddy. You're the ones helping me out, Jimmy doesn't need any more trouble than he makes for himself."

Sam nodded. "It's what we do."

"And we got to go do it," Dean said. "Thank you, sir. We'll be gone soon as we can be, so don't worry about us. Come on, Sammy, let's roll."

Chuck sketched off a salute as they pulled out of the parking lot, and Sam sighed. "You know Dad had any friends who weren't in the business?"

"Dad's been around a lot longer than you, Sammy," Dean said. "Man's got to have a secret or two we don't know."

"Sure," Sam said. "Just, surprised me is all."

"You're too old to be surprised by anything," Dean said.

"Yeah," Sam said. "I guess so."

A mile from Harper's Crossing, the wind started to blow harder, kicking up clouds of dust on the road and flipping the leaves on the trees upside down, showing their undersides to the world. "Thunderstorm," Sam said. "Natural, you think?"

Dean peered at the horizon, still blue, but with the dark clouds chasing it down. "Looks like," he said. "Moving natural, at least. Goddamned fucking South, the weather's never predictable in April." Before he could say anything else, a clap of thunder crashed down around and the skies opened up.

"Shit," Sam said.

"Yeah," Dean said.

They worked fast, Sam pushing dripping hair out of his eyes every couple of steps. "You should get a hair cut," Dean said.

"Shut up," Sam said.

The graveyard dirt stuck to their hands, and even with a plastic garbage bag tossed over the paper bag full of dirt, it still clumped in the rain and clung to their hands as they spread it over the ground. "This is disgusting," Sam said.

"Life's messy, Sammy," Dean said. "Get over it."

The rain had slowed by the time Sam started pouring holy water overtop the graveyard dirt, but the humidity had crawled up to unbearable levels. The ground was steaming, clouds of wet heat puffing up and turning the entire clearing into something even more eerie than it normally was. It was dark by the time Sam finished, and there was no way to tell if the ground was wet from holy water or rain or settling clouds of steam.

They had just finished spreading the dirt when Sam shoved his hand into his jacket and pulled out a handful of okra. "Goddamnit, what're you going to do with that?" Dean said.

"It's got seeds, right?" Sam said, snapping a pod open and showing Dean. "Thought we could plant it. I thought maybe it would help, if we got the spirit out of here, to make stuff grow again."

"That's the dumbest fucking idea I ever heard," Dean said. "But at least it'll get it out of my car, I guess."

They snapped the pods in half, pressed the seeds into their hands and sprinkling them into the dirt at the center of the circle. "I never had an urge to be a gardener," Dean complained. "It's why I'm in the hunting business, nobody asks me to plant anything more than salt."

By the time they finished with the okra, the clouds overheard were rolling, thick and black, and gave no clues away about the rise of the moon or the setting of the sun. "Time is it?" Dean asked, and Sam shrugged.

"Watch gets in the way when I aim," Sam said. "Before sunset, though, there's still birds."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Okay." Too wet to build a fire, they settled at the edge of the circle, the toes of Sam's boots grazing the damp graveyard dirt - mud, now, it was a circle full of graveyard mud - and waited.

"Is it just me, or do we spend a whole lot of our life just waiting," Sam said.

Dean was wet and cold and cranky, and he was starting to think that the shadow they'd seen the night before was nothing more than a scared rabbit magnified by the ghosts of legend and word-of-mouth. The sun had set, though, or it would have if they could have seen it, because the birds had stopped singing what felt like hours ago. "Shut up," he said. "Better to spend your life waiting than to end up dead, you hear me?"

"Yes, Dad," Sam said.

Dean was getting ready to smack Sam upside the head, except that something moved in his peripheral vision, on his left, and Sam started to move, too, cocking his shotgun and inching over the line that divided the relatively healthy scrub grass from the barren spread of graveyard mud and holy water mixed with rain. Whatever was out there, it was nothing more than a black shadow skirting the edge of the circle - it could be anything.

But where Sam said that the shadow had streaked across the center of the Devil's circle the night before, tonight it lurked at the edges. The rain picked up again, cold streaks against the back of Dean's neck, but the clouds cleared despite the downpour. The moon, just past full, heavy and shining gold instead of silver, hit the edge of the clearing and Dean couldn't see a thing, couldn't see a single detail except that there was a shadow.

"Damn, Sammy," Dean said. "Sorry. Guess you were right. Shit."

But he could see the shadow try to creep across the circle, could see the moon light a trail of dirt pushed out of shape in the circle, could see steam rising from the edges of that displaced dirt.

He waited for Sam to take the point, dropping behind Sam into the six spot. Dean heard Sam say, "Oh, yeah, come and get it," under his breath, and the mud squelched under Sam's boots as he shifted another foot forward.

The shadow hovered at the edge of the circle.

"Hey," Dean said, casting his voice towards the shadow. "We get it, okay, we get it? Building on your ground, and maybe this isn't your godforsaken crop circle, but it's your land. You get out of here, whatever or whoever you are, and we'll do our part."

Sam turned and glared at him. Dean shrugged, and the shadow slipped forward, a visible trail of footprints following behind it, steam and the smell of burning sulfur hissing up from the ground. "So talking it down didn't work," Dean said, watching the movement - five footprints a slow advance, and still ten feet from where they stood. Maybe it wouldn't cross the circle tonight, but it might tomorrow, except Dean'd be damned if it would ever cross the circle again. "Shoot it."

"Talking the Devil down never works," Sam said.

The shotgun blast split the silence with a deafening crash, almost like thunder overhead, and the spray of salt was visible in between the sheets of rain. Dean had heard a hundred thousand different unearthly howls, the death throes of a dozen creatures that would kill him in his sleep, and this one sounded no different than any other. The sulfur smell got stronger, the shadow twitched and steamed.

Just another night's work, and Sam, finished reloading, fired another shot. The shadow shrieked and flew apart, the steam kept rising, and the rain trailed off.

The moon slipped behind another cloud, and if Sam hadn't been breathing like he'd just run a marathon (or had a really good fuck), Dean wouldn't have had any idea where he was.

"You okay, Sammy?"

"Yeah," Sam said, and stepped back, the line of his profile resolving out of the darkness, eyes fixed on the spot where the demon - or the ghost or whatever the hell it had been, Dean knows that rock salt offs almost everything, when you double it up with holy water and graveyard dirt - had dissolved. "All in a night's work."

Chuck must have known more about hunting than he'd let on, because there was a gas can, full, sitting on the porch of Jimmy's cabin, and the rooms were entirely empty. "It's all wood," Dean said. "Get the floors, bust a couple of back windows, and see if you can find any empty bottles."

Sam turned, hand on the gas can, and looked like he was going to ask a question before his face resolved into an answer. "Right, cocktails, toss them through the windows," he said. "Okay."

"You never miss a trick, Sammy," Dean said.

"Yeah, and you said this would be an easy sit on our ass job for three days," Sam snapped. "Like you're the authority on everything these days."

"Dump the damn gas," Dean said.

Sam stomped up the stairs, can swinging loosely from his fingers, and not two minutes later, Dean could smell the gas rising up as Sam passed through the rooms. A shatter of glass, the gas got stronger, and then Sam stumbled out the front door. He doused the front porch and scrambled down the stairs, back to Dean, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. "No bottles," he said, shoving a box of kitchen matches into Dean's hand.

"We'll just light the whole damn box," Dean said.

A box of kitchen matches went up faster than a normal person could probably imagine, and Dean almost didn't get it out of his hand before he caught on fire, too. Toss a match into a puddle of gasoline, and it doesn't actually got straight up in flames, like it did in movies - gasoline was as wet as it was flammable, and a single cardboard match will flame out before it flames up. Soak a wooden cabin in an entire can of gas and toss in a whole box of matches, and the thing went up like - well, like a tinderbox.

They watched it start to burn, just to make sure it was going to take (when Dean was 16 and Sam was 12, Dad tried to send up a warehouse infested with a pack of spider demons, the fire guttered out before it took, and six more people ended up dead), and the sky was clear when they hiked the half mile back to the car.

Dean was tired, way more tired than he thought this trip would make him, and Sam was walking next to him like he was an old man. It was still dark, and when Dean checked his phone, it was barely past midnight. "Get out of here tonight?" he asked.

"Yeah," Sam said. "Never want to stay at the scene of an arson, right?"

They checked out of their place and drove down to the coast, after, because they were headed aimlessly toward Atlanta and Dean was fucking tired of I-95. Siler City to Wilmington, 64 to 70 to 17, and Dean still always thought of everything in terms of the numbers needed to get where he was going. The sun was rising behind them when they sat down to a table at another roadside breakfast shack looking out over salt marsh and open water, and even at 6 AM, the beer he ordered tasted sweet and cold against the back of Dean's throat.

Sam leaned back in his chair, haloed by the sunrise, and snagged the USA Today on the table behind them. They both learned a long time ago that you didn't read the front page when you were looking for anything supernatural, and Sam flipped to the second page and started scanning.

Dean was tipping the bottle back as far as it would go when Sam looked up and said, "Hear from Dad?"

"Sammy," Dean said.

"Yeah?" Sam said, head already back in the newspaper.

"The last two days, you ever been further than 25 feet from me?"

"No," Sam said. "Why? Oh. Okay."

"North or south, do you think?"

Sam folded the paper back to the third page and tapped a finger on a two-column photo. "Unsolved grave robberies at St. Bonaventure in Savannah," he said.

"South, then," Dean said.

"Guess so," Sam said.

The sun rose over the Atlantic, and Dean ordered a second beer. All in a night's work.

author's notes: sid, as always, held my hand all the way through this one, read two drafts, and betaed the hell out of this. at the beginning of april, when i turned to the girls at the beach and said, "i want a legend local to north carolina for a supernatural story," resmin said, "oh, the devil's tramping ground". it's a real place - as are siler city, harper's crossing, wilmington and st. bonaventure cemetery in savannah, georgia - though i don't think anyone's ever died at the tramping grounds; i made that part up. you can read about the devil's tramping ground here and raleigh's lost colony here. i owe a great debt to john harden and his book the devil's tramping ground and other nc mysteries for providing scenic details, as well as several back issues of the north carolina journal of folklore. title from mike garrigan, "maybe i'm wrong".