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“The plague.”
“Yes.”
“The plague, like, Middle Ages, rats, those weird masks, plague.”
“Plague doctor masks, and yeah. The bubonic plague.”
Dean chewed thoughtfully, and offered Sam an unappetizing glimpse of masticated pancakes as he said, “I thought that was gone, like, uh, smallpox.”
“It’s not completely eradicated.” Sam took a bite of his own pancakes—the diner’s specialty, and deservedly so—and chewed and swallowed before he continued. “But it’s not a problem anymore with antibiotics.”
“Huh. So, why should we care if a guy who was about to shoot up a school was whacked by the plague? I say, great timing.”
Sam skimmed on his laptop the article he’d already read twice. “Elliot Dunne was completely fine that morning—two different witnesses said he was ‘agitated’ but apparently healthy—but then he dropped dead about ten feet into the school building, covered in, uh, buboes.”
Dean’s eyebrow rose over his coffee cup. “‘Buboes’?”
Sam silently turned his computer around on the table toward Dean.
Dean almost choked on his coffee, then glared at Sam. “Dude, I’m eating.”
As if anything kept Dean from his food. Sam shrugged as he reclaimed his laptop. “Plague doesn’t work that fast, even if there were some way a random guy in the middle of Oklahoma came down with it.”
Dean pushed his plate—his empty plate—away and signaled to the waitress for a refill of coffee. “Okay, so it’s weird. But, bad guy’s dead before he can shoot some kids, nobody else is sick—I’m not really seeing why this is a problem, or our kind of thing.”
“It’s not the first weird thing that’s happened at that school. Or, more exactly, the second grade.”
They went silent as the waitress arrived with the coffeepot, Sam unobtrusively angling his laptop away from her. Dean smiled and winked his thanks, and the waitress, fifty if she was a day, blushed. Sam shook his head: his brother.
Waiting until the woman was out of earshot, Dean sipped his coffee and returned his gaze to Sam. “Hit me.”
“So, one boy was in a serious car crash and walked away without a scratch.”
Dean shrugged. “It happens.”
Sam put a finger up: wait. “Another boy fell off the jungle gym at recess, and several of the kids swear he floated before he hit the ground.”
“Dude, they’re, what, six?”
“Seven. Also, I checked the school attendance records—”
“Seriously?”
“—and none of the second grade has been out sick all year.”
Dean rolled his eyes. “So they take their vitamins. Sam—”
“Dean, kids are germ factories. Remember that case we had at that elementary school in Baton Rouge?”
Dean grimaced, clearly remembering. The Winchesters had been stuck in that motel for a week before they were well enough to hit the road again.
“I think we should check it out,” Sam summed up.
Dean carefully set his mug down. “You realize none of these are bad things, right?”
“Right. Because good things never come with a price.” He could see Dean still wasn’t convinced, and Sam finished with the best argument he could. “Dean, they’re little kids.”
Sam could see the moment of capitulation; Dean had always had a soft spot for kids. Maybe because he was still one inside. He drained his coffee and pulled out his wallet to toss a couple of bills on the table. “Where is this place again?”
“Oklahoma.” Sam closed his laptop and slid it into his bag. “About an hour east of Oklahoma City.”
Dean, the walking road atlas, did the calculation as they left the diner. “Almost twenty hours.”
“You want me to drive?” Sam offered with a grin.
Dean rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’re hilarious.”
They were between credit cards, so they slept that night in the car on the shoulder of an empty country road. Sam’s back always gave him Hell after sleeping in the back seat, so he went for a short run to loosen up while Dean consulted the map and checked in with Bobby. Then they spent the next hour on the road arguing who the best Bond was.
The Winchesters rolled into town a little after lunch, stopping in front of a quiet school next to an empty playground.
“They just had a school invasion,” Sam murmured as they looked the place over.
“Yeah, they’re gonna be on high alert,” Dean agreed. He turned to Sam. “Feds?”
Sam was already digging out the IDs.
They changed into their suits in the local Hardee’s bathroom after a quick lunch, then headed over to the school on foot.
It wasn’t a big building; from what Sam had read, they had less than two hundred students. Dunne had gotten in through a side door and had three guns and a freaking grenade on him. Any school would’ve been shaken after a near-miss like that, but a small town one? Their IDs were thoroughly vetted, twice, including a call to “Assistant Director Singer” to verify that Agents Hill and Beard were who they said they were.
“I’m not sure what else I can tell you,” the principal, Mrs. Taggart, told them nervously as they walked down the main hallway. “We’re doing hourly checks now to make sure all doors are locked, and—”
“I’m sure your students are in good hands,” Sam soothed. “We’re just following up on a few things. You didn’t know Elliot Dunne, right?”
“Not personally.” Some steel entered her voice now: she was still furious at the man who’d even considered harming her kids. Good for her. “But of course you know about his connection to Miss Menlo.” Valerie Menlo was the second-grade teacher, and Dunne had gone on one app-arranged date with her before she told him she wasn’t interested. No one seemed to know if Dunne had come looking to kill only her, but three guns had suggested a more lethal mission.
Sam exchanged a sober look with his brother.
They arrived at a sky-blue door, surrounded by homemade pipe cleaner butterflies and pom-pom caterpillars on the wall. Signs of rebirth, Sam noted. Looking through the window in the door, he could see a young woman with short dark hair walking around the room supervising what looked like a picture-drawing session for the kids. Sam and Dean exchanged another look before Dean knocked on the door.
Miss Menlo jumped at the interruption. Sam regretted the fear he saw for a moment on her face, until she registered the principal’s presence. She said something to the kids and walked to the door.
“Yes?” she asked, polite but wary, as she opened the door just enough to stick her head out.
Mrs. Taggart did the honors. “These are Special Agents Hill and…”
“Beard,” Dean provided.
“…Beard from the FBI. They’d like to speak with you and observe the class for a few minutes.”
Miss Menlo, wide-eyed, studied both of them and their IDs. Then she warily nodded and stepped out into the hall, the principal slipping inside the room to take her place. Dean went with her without hesitation; the brothers both knew who was better with kids and whose strength was rattled victims.
“Miss Menlo,” Sam said in a low, calm voice. “Could you please tell me about the day Dunne came?”
He listened with only half an ear, having read the reports and witness statements. She’d never actually seen Elliot Dunne that day, hadn’t even known there was anything wrong until the school locked down with Dunne already lying dead in the hallway. He’d never made it to her classroom—no one knew if he even knew where her class was—and she had only met him the one time, where his oddness had set off warning bells.
Inside the classroom, the principal was talking to the kids from the front of the room. And then Dean was stepping forward to say something. Sam wondered what that was about, even more curious when the kids started taking turns bringing up their pictures. It looked like they were explaining them to Dean. He crouched down and listened carefully to each one on their own level, and Sam swallowed a smile, focusing again on the teacher.
“How about your class? Has anything unusual happened with them in the last few months?”
Miss Menlo went still; apparently no one had asked that before. “My class?” she repeated, sounding confused…but not totally surprised. Interesting.
“Any accidents, illnesses, weird events, anything like that?” Sam asked, smiling encouragingly.
“Uh, no. I mean, Cory was in a car accident in November, but he wasn’t hurt, thank God. But they’re actually a pretty healthy, happy bunch of kids.”
“How many years have you been teaching?” Sam held his pen poised over his notepad as if, again, this was new information for him.
“This is my fourth year.”
“And anything different about this class?” Sam pressed carefully.
Valerie Menlo hesitated. “No. They’re good kids,” she added quickly.
Yeah, that was what he thought. Sam glanced past her and saw that Dean was circling the room now, apparently studying the art and posters on the walls. He stopped in the back where the kids’ cubbies were, and gave them a good onceover. Sam his shoulders straighten suddenly, and Sam knew it was time to wrap up the interview.
“Thank you,” he gave the anxious teacher his full attention. “That was very helpful. We’d just like to look at the room after the kids are gone, and then I think we’re done.”
She took a breath, visibly relaxing. “Right. Of course.” With a stiff smile, she excused herself and returned to her class, relieving the principal. Dean trailed Mrs. Taggert again with a wave and a few words to the kids, most of whom waved excitedly back. Sam could hear the sing-song “Good-bye, Mr. Beard!” follow him out.
Mrs. Taggart eyed them. “Miss Menlo says you would like to see the classroom after the bell?”
“Yes, please,” Sam said. “Then I think we’ll have everything we need.”
“All right.” She tipped her head. “You can wait at my office.”
They actually waited on the bench just outside the school office, under the watchful eye of a much less pleasant school secretary. She looked like she should have retired ten years before, but Sam had no doubt she could’ve marched them outside if they did something she didn’t approve of.
“Dude,” Dean said, mouth twitching up. “You know how many times I sat on the bench outside the principal’s office?”
“Half your school life?” Sam guessed. His eyes moved between the four hallways that converged at the office, making mental notes, on alert for anything unusual.
“Pretty much.” Dean sounded smug. And maybe a little nostalgic.
Sam shook his head. “So, what did you find?”
“Kids all seem normal. You know, for seven-year-old chaos machines. They love recess, Miss Menlo, and lunchtime, not in that order. One kid plans to be the first person to learn how to talk to dogs, and half the girls want to be the next Katy Perry.” His grin had softened.
Sam smiled. “They seemed to like you.”
“‘Course they liked me! I’m an FBI agent with a gun and good taste in finger-paintings. What’s not to like?”
“Okay, the kids are all right. But you saw something.”
Dean glanced over his shoulder through the window at the secretary, who was watching them like it was her job—which, okay, it sorta was—but wouldn’t hear them through the glass. Still, Dean lowered his voice, eyes narrowing. “Might be nothing. But there was this…statue.”
Sam blinked. He hadn’t been expecting that. “Like, a drawing of a statue?”
“No, this actual little…dude.” Dean’s fingers sketched something in the air about two inches tall. “Carved stone. Looks…old. Real.”
“Huh. Which kid?”
“The name above the shelf said ‘Penny.’ I didn’t get a chance to talk to her.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Okay, that’s the best we’ve got.”
“The teacher tell you anything?”
“No, but…she’s noticed something, too, I could tell. But what was she gonna say, her kids were too healthy? Too safe?”
“Yeah, okay.” Dean looked over their shoulder, made a face at the glaring secretary, and turned back. “I say if we don’t find anything, we come back and talk to Miss Snape here. She looks like she’s got a few skeletons in her closet. Or bodies.”
Sam snorted.
The bell rang, and the classroom doors soon opened, releasing a flood of kids in backpacks and jackets. A few gave the Winchesters curious looks, but most were chattering with friends or focused on leaving. One pony-tailed little girl Sam thought he recognized from Miss Menlo’s class shyly waved to Dean, and he smiled and waved back at her. Parents immediately swooped down on their kids as they left the building, no doubt also still traumatized by the near-miss with Dunne, and the rest of the children were herded into buses or pick-up lines by teachers.
It wasn’t until the halls were completely clear that the office door next to them opened. Mrs. Taggart was outside with the few remaining kids, so it was the secretary who told them reluctantly they were free to return to Miss Menlo’s classroom. Not waiting for acknowledgment or even asking if they remembered where to go, she banged the door shut behind her.
“I had a few teachers like her,” Dean muttered as they made their way back down the hallway toward second grade.
Yeah, some of the teachers treated the Winchesters’ arrivals and departures mid-school year as an inconvenience rather than a cause for sympathy. Sam had had some great teachers over the years, like Mr. Wyatt, but also a few like the secretary. Sam would just hunker down and work hard, usually winning over the more sour instructors, but Dean tended to lean into the bad-student image and give as good as he got. One of the many, many ways they were different.
The second-grade room door was open, Miss Menlo nowhere in sight. Sam figured she’d known they were returning and had made herself scarce. He quietly closed the door behind them, and Dean pulled out the EMF detector, doing a quick sweep of the room. Nothing but electricity residuals, even in the back.
Sam joined him there, and immediately noticed the statue. Not that it was so noticeable: it was small, gray, perched on a shelf marked “Penny” next to some sort of art project made of empty toilet paper rolls. At first glance, it seemed like just another piece of misshapen kid art, waiting to be taken home and admired before being surreptitiously trashed.
But looking a little closer, Sam could see what had caught Dean’s attention. For one, it was made out of rock, not clay, and pockmarked with age. And it had odd proportions: large head and eyes, small body, sitting with one arm raised. It looked more like something one would find in an Aztec temple than in a modern classroom.
Sam reached out, and with Dean watching warily, picked up the small statue.
Something buzzed through his fingers, even as the EMF detector let out a shriek.
“Sam—”
But the feeling wasn’t worsening and…it didn’t feel malicious. Which wasn’t exactly reliable, but still, Sam had been hunting long enough to have developed a pretty good sense for evil. This little statue, whatever it was, wasn’t setting it off.
And then the room shifted.
He heard Dean’s bark of his name, felt his brother trying to peel his hand off the statue. But Sam was frozen, staring, as the room around them blurred like an oversaturated watercolor. And a shadow appeared before them, where the back wall of the classroom had been.
The voice was in his head, deep and powerful and demanding. Why are you here?
It took all his effort to turn his head toward his brother. Dean’s face was grim, hand still clutched around Sam’s wrist, but his eyes were on the shadow. He heard and saw it, too.
Why are you here? It was speaking English…or maybe that was just how they heard it.
The shadow had coalesced into something more recognizable: big head, compact but formidable body. But its features were indistinct, except for the huge dark holes of its eyes.
The vibration in Sam’s hand grew uncomfortably.
WHY ARE YOU HERE?
“We, uh, were checking on the kids.” That was Dean, designated—by self—interactor with anything potentially dangerous. “There was a guy—”
He is no more.
“You did that,” Sam realized. His hand was starting to ache.
He is no more.
“So,” Dean spoke up again. “You’re, what, protecting the kids?”
Why are you here?
“We’re trying to protect the kids, too,” Sam said quickly. “We wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.”
The buzz from the statue faded again. They are mine.
“When you say ‘mine’…” Dean started carefully.
I slept many years. My followers were gone; I had no strength.
Then Penny found me. There was a brief image in Sam’s mind of vaguely South American ruins in a jungle, a bunch of tourists tromping through, a little girl in braids who lingered behind to crouch by a tangle of bushes and a statue mostly buried below them. She talked to it as she brushed off some of the dirt. Then someone called to her, and she quickly tucked it into her pocket before running to catch up.
Not many things surprised them after so many years of hunting, but a kid finding and picking up an old god was up there. Sam saw his brother’s face mirror his astonishment.
“So how—?” Sam started.
Penny gave me tributes. An image of a flower tucked into the statue’s arm, a tiny crown made of paper. It restored me. These are my children.
“And you protect them,” Sam offered.
Yes. Now I am…cool.
Sam heard his brother choke on a laugh, and wondered which kid had made that assessment.
Dean collected himself. “But you’re not gonna, you know, get mad at them if they move on or something, right? I mean, they’re kids—they’ve got the attention span of a fruit fly.”
Sam rolled his eyes at his brother’s analogy. “You wouldn’t hurt them, right?” he clarified. “Even if they don’t…keep you here or present more offerings?”
The power emanating from the statue grew, pulsing strong enough to make Sam’s teeth chatter.
I WILL NOT HURT MY CHILDREN.
Sam looked over at his brother just as Dean looked over at him. They had a silent discussion: believe the…god? Trust that it wouldn’t harm the kids even if they—Penny—stopped caring about it? Could they do anything about it even if they didn’t trust it? Sam tilted his head questioningly, and Dean raised an eyebrow: he could live with this. He probably didn’t sense any malice, either, and nothing bad had happened except to a very bad guy. It was taking a chance, yes, but a calculated one. Not everything supernatural needed to be destroyed.
“Okay, no problem, we just needed to be sure,” Dean said to the shadow. “We were worried about the kids, too. But, dude, if you’re going to stay, maybe try to be a little less obvious? The plague and floating kids is just gonna bring in more people like us, you know?”
There was a pause. I will watch quietly.
That was probably the best they were gonna get. “Thank you,” Sam said, and Dean echoed him.
The shadow started shrinking, even as the room resolidified around them. The dark eyes were the last to go.
When even they vanished, replaced by a bright rainbow on the wall, Sam could suddenly move again. He quickly broke Dean’s grip and put the statue down, shaking out his numb hand.
“You all right?”
“Yeah.” He tucked the hand against his body, but the ache was already fading.
“Well, that was…different.” Dean returned his Colt to under his jacket.
Sam hadn’t realized his brother had drawn his gun. It probably wouldn’t have done much good, but it was always reassuring to know Dean had his back. “You think it’s safe to just…leave it here?”
“Hey, it’s keeping the kids safe, right? I got no problem with that. But we might wanna tell Miss Menlo to, uh, make it the class mascot or something, make sure it isn’t tossed.”
“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “Yeah, okay.” He rubbed his tingling hand against his shirt.
Dean side-eyed him as he shoved a hand into his pocket and pulled out a dime. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. It wasn’t trying to hurt me.”
“Uh-huh.” Dean still sounded skeptical. He reached toward the statue, but touched it experimentally with one finger before lifting it. Then he tucked the dime he’d retrieved under the statue and set it back. Off Sam’s look, he said a little defensively, “Figured another tribute wouldn’t hurt.”
Sam didn’t argue.
They talked to Miss Menlo about keeping the statue. Sam fed her some line about happening to notice it and that it seemed to be a real relic and they should take care of it, but it was a small enough request and she agreed. It probably helped that she also gave Dean her number. They told the principal that everything looked fine, and waved cheerfully to the secretary as they left. Dean might’ve also stuck his tongue out at her; Sam didn’t check.
He did some research that afternoon before they hit the road. Didn’t find anything that looked exactly like the statue, but there were definitely similar figures in Aztec art. Sam would’ve bet that if he checked, he’d have found that Penny’s family had vacationed in Mexico the previous summer, but he didn’t bother. As far as he was concerned, it was a closed case. With a minor god finding a new following in Midwest America.
Their lives were weird. Not that that was news.
“So, what were you and the kids talking about?” Sam only asked when they were back on the road, heading to Tennessee for what sounded like a generational curse.
“When?” Dean asked absently, as if he talked to kids all the time.
“Back in Miss Menlo’s classroom.”
“Oh. They wanted to know what it was like to be an FBI agent, and then they showed me their drawings. Reminds me of some of the pictures you brought home from school.”
Dean still had one tucked in his wallet, Sam knew but never mentioned. “What did you tell them?”
“Uh, you know, it’s a cool job, we get to catch bad guys, guns are dangerous—the usual.”
Sam grinned. “Bad guys, huh?” It wasn’t even a lie.
“And that I’ve got a partner who’s a little wet behind the ears, but he’s turning out okay.” Dean grinned at him a second before turning back to the road.
“’Wet behind the ears’? Hey, I’ve been doing this more years than those kids have been alive,” Sam said with exasperation.
“They’re only seven, dude.”
“You’re seven.”
“Yeah, whatever, Agent Scully.”
“Scully was tougher than Mulder,” Sam shot back.
Dean opened his mouth, closed it again. “You weren’t this much of a pain in the ass when you were a kid,” he finally muttered.
Sam kinda doubted that, but he just smiled.