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fannishlissTitle: Kat and the Case of the Cursed Campground
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fannishliss
Series: 42 Days of Metallicar and the Women of Supernatural (#13)
Rating: PG
Word count: 3,400
Pairing/Characters: no pairing. Kat, from "Asylum" (1.10), Sam and Dean, and cameo by the Impala.
Spoilers: this story refers to ep 1.10, but also to events through the end of s4. No spoilers for s5.
Notes/Disclaimers/Summary: This series of stories, ficlets and drabbles featuring the Impala and the Women of Supernatural are being posted as part of the 42 Days of Metallicar, hosted byalias_chick . This is a work of transformative fiction and is not for profit. Thanks todavincis_girl for the helpful read through!
If you read my journal, you might think this story takes place in a real-life campground I visited earlier this spring, with my son, who was bitten by a copperhead (and made a full recovery, thank goodness) but no. It is just a story, featuring a few details of the real-life events, for purposes of fun.
More about Kat in the s7 era in the story "His Very Absence"
Summary: Kat didn't set out to become a Hunter, but when she stumbled across a monster this big, she had to call for help. That's how she ended up on her first hunt, as backup to the fabled Wincesters, the very summer after they triggered the Apocalypse.
"Kat and the Case of the Cursed Campground"
After her escape from the old haunted asylum, Kat's life didn't take a turn for the weird.
She broke up with Gavin as promised, and didn't relent, despite his big sad eyes at parties.
Life went on as usual. End of sophomore year of college, she declared her major in outdoor education.
Weekends with family were often spent with her dad, out camping, hiking, hunting. Kat became a crack shot, learned how to fish, could build a fire and find shelter most anywhere.
And if she gave a little more credit to the outlandish stories people passed around the campfire late at night, considering which parts might have happened, which parts might have been exaggerated -- or more likely, explained away -- well, she was just exercising an open mind.
Summer after her Junior year, Kat got a really great summer job in a state park in Virginia, doing wildlife interpretation (the Nature Center had a Bald Eagle!), trail walks, and on the weekends, campfires and area folklore. She had to read up on the folklore of Tidewater Virginia, but that just entailed the three books already for sale in the Nature Center gift shop, plus a few things she picked up at the nearest branch library.
So it happened that Kat more "fell" into her first hunt than any other Hunter she met in later years. It was required reading for her job, for heaven's sake, not deliberate obituary combing.
What Kat fell into was blatant, supernatural, and bad, but it happened so rarely, and was attributed to natural causes, so no other Hunters had ever caught on.
There was a full-on lamia nested down in the park, and it looked to have been there for centuries. Kat figured that was why the place, surrounded by beautiful agricultural land, was wooded and wild, with a mature oak forest running right up against the beach head.
It was commonly known that the park had been part of a land grant parcel in the late sixteen hundreds, like so much of coastal Virginia. But unlike many other grants, which had brought their owners (through the use of slave labor) wealth, luxury, and power, this grant had never added to the prosperity of the family. Dwindling away in England as well as in the colony, their losses were ascribed to dissipation and poor judgment. Looking into their history (and finding an actual portrait of the lamia in a book devoted to the noble English origins of great Virginia families), Kat quickly saw the problem. The family had backed Charles II during the English Revolution -- many of the sons had gone to France with him during the Interregnum -- and the second son had returned from France with a mysterious wife, supposedly from one of the German states, but more likely, Bulgaria -- a lot of were beasts sprang up in that area, she'd noted.
The son had been sent to establish a farm on the Royalist land grant, and he and his new wife had crossed the Atlantic to try their hand in the new world. He had quickly succumbed to a wasting disease, leaving his wife alone, supposedly with a young son. A third brother and his wife had come to her aid, bringing their two young children with them, a boy and a girl, each lovely as day, with beautiful heads of sunny golden curls. All four soon sickened and died, just as the husband had, so that the young wife had to return alone to England, her own offspring having passed away as well, or so she had claimed. (Kat found no mention of infant baptism or burial in the parish church, which had good records dating back to the 1690s.)
She remained there for not quite a decade, during which she was praised as the belle of the season for several years running. The eldest brother's wife died too, but the lamia waited one discreet interval, not taking the eldest brother to husband until his aged parents had passed away, leaving the unencumbered title to him. At that point, he fell under her spell and went with her, against all advice, to Virginia, and for the rest of his life he handled his English and European business by correspondence only. Kat had a look at the hand on documents treasured by the local historical society -- as she expected, it was very nearly the same as the "daughter's" who was known to be the spitting image of her mother, an almost hypnotic beauty with gleaming black hair and glittering light green eyes.
This daughter (clearly none other than the lamia herself) lived a long, long life alone in the manor house her last husband had ordered built to her specifications. Around the time of the American Revolution, a young cousin had arrived from Bulgaria to keep her old relative company -- and soon, the old lady was heard from no more, and the cousin began to transact all business.
Thus the lamia, by the flimsiest subterfuge, lived off the income of a great English family, till at last it petered out during the War between the States (as it was called locally). At that time in England, the landed gentry had all but made the transition to industrial investments, and caring nothing for this, the ancient creature had neglected her ill-gotten holdings. So many records were destroyed, so many widows made, that the locals could be forgiven for not growing suspicious of the lady living alone in the old manor house. The lamia, Kat figured, was content to slither by moonlight among the rocks of the graveyard she had filled with her husbands and their relatives.
Someone more sympathetic to the were-kind might argue that the lamia's great crimes were so far in the past, and her fate fallen lately so low, as the estate and manor house had slowly crumbled to nothing, overtaken by the forest, that it was hardly worth the trouble to figure out the lore for putting her down for good.
But that was how Kat came into the story in the first place. After many, many years, the old estate was acquired by the Commonwealth of Virginia and developed into a recreation area, and Kat had come there to work, only by accident piecing together how many little children had come to bad ends in the area.
Some fell from the cliffs, some drowned in the shallows of the river, some were bitten by "snakes," some were lost in the small woods and never found. Some, and this was the worst thing to Kat, were found shivering and blue and crying for the Lady-- these never recovered their right minds.
Kat shivered in horror as she thought of the early weekends of the summer, as she sat with the families in the circle of benches around the campfire at dusk, telling tales of the crying children haunting these woods, gone blue for the Lady -- the folktale revealing the age-old curse of the place.
Well, she guessed she'd have to put an end to it. Still, a lamia is a powerful creature-- not like a death omen, or even a vengeful spirit, to be put down by a simple shovel, salt, and kerosene ceremony.
Kat was proud of her research, but not too proud not to do the right thing. She called in backup.
Hoping the cell phone number was still good, she dialed. It rang a long time, but she didn't hang up.
At last someone answered, a gruff, "Hello?"
"Hello! Hello. This is Kat, um, Katherine Powers. Am I speaking to Dean Winchester?"
"Yeah, I guess you are. How did you get this number."
Kat could've hoped for a warmer reception, but whatever, it had been what, three years-- no, coming on four.
"Well, I met you in Rockford, Illinois, back when I was still in high school -- you rescued me and my friend Gavin from that old haunted asylum?"
"Oh, yeah," Dean laughed a bit, warmth coming into his tone. "How are you? Not still with Gavin, I hope!!"
Kat remembered Dean's expressive green eyes clearly, and imagined them rolling back in his head. Gavin had been, to put it in the crude terms Dean would've used, a total douche. He really wasn't that bad, Kat admitted, just ... wasn't the man for her, it turned out.
"No, no. Poor guy. Listen, I called you for a reason. Are you and Sam still in this, um, ghost chasing business?"
"Hunting? Yeah. You never really get away from it, whether you like it or not."
Dean's tone was laced with something raw -- not the jovial bounce he'd had for a second.
"Well, uh, I need help with something. Uh, something big. I needed to call someone, and Sam gave me this number."
"And you kept it all these years?" Dean sounded, not incredulous, but more like, hopeful? Kat couldn't quite put the name to what she was hearing.
"Well, yeah! I was seventeen! You guys made quite an impression! You saved my ass! and Gavin's! and totally toasted that awful haunting!"
"How do you know that," Dean asked flatly.
"Well, I kept tabs," Kat said evasively. She hadn't gone back in. Not right away. Not till last summer, when the building was finally being renovated for shops, and the place was all clear, not a chill nor a weird story to be found.
"Ok, Miss Drew," Dean mocked. "What's up."
"I think it's a lamia. It's been haunting this state park where I'm working, since, like, forever."
"No shit! A lamia? Holy crap. Listen, you haven't tried to go after it or anything?" Dean's tone was stern. In the background, over the low roar of what Kat assumed was that creamy old Chevy the guys drove, Kat heard someone, Sam she guessed, saying, "what? Lamia? holy shit!"
"Of course not. But after this little kid got "snakebit" this spring, right before I got here? and the old volunteers at the nature center started going on about all the kids who've been "bitten" as far back as folks can remember, and no one ever sees the snake? plus, the ones who've "wandered off," fell off the cliffs, drowned in the shallows, or been driven mad by this thing? And at least three I've found have been..." Kat had to swallow, "lured into the fire."
"Sweet holy Jesus," Dean breathed, and Kat heard a pained exclamation from Sam. What was that all about, she wondered.
"I know, man. It's not like she strikes every week... and she has so many different, attacks, I guess, that no one's ever put it together. But dude, I count at least seventeen child victims, and that's just the twentieth century. Legend goes back even farther, with all the 'blue children.' "
Kat heard Dean breathe out heavily. "... do I really want to know?"
"Kids driven mad ---or their spirits -- who moan and cry in the night for the beautiful Lady."
"How many," Dean said, and his voice was angry now.
"I can't be sure. But it looks she ran a so-called orphanage after the Civil War, and most of the kids there died of a wasting disease. The records were lost, if there ever were any."
"And where was that located?"
"In the old manor house she lived in. Where the park is now."
"And the graveyard, I guess."
Kat grimaced. Usually, because lamias slept in graveyards, they were easy to locate and kill.
"Another fun tidbit? There are at least three separate graveyards here in the park --- the old seventeenth century family graveyard; the unmarked field where the slaves buried their dead; the orphanage graveyard; -- not to mention wherever she's hidden the kids she's stolen."
"Okay, okay, we're on our way."
Dean got the name of the park and gave her an ETA of lunchtime three days later. He hung up.
It was on a Wednesday, a little after lunchtime, when a dusty Chevy Impala rolled at a cautious speed into the gravel parking lot in front of the Nature Center.
Kat was just studying her butterfly book (there had recently been a plague of yellow butterflies in the soybean fields around the park that every single visitor to the center had inquired about), when she heard the loud engine and the crunch of gravel with a leap of excitement.
Two tall men got out of the long black car, stretched, and made their way inside. It was Sam and Dean Winchester, larger than life. Sam was bigger even than she remembered, super buff, with long hair brushed back from his forehead. Dean looked older, but somehow, cleaner than she remembered. Weird.
"Hey, guys," Kat said, coming out from around her counter to hug them.
Up close, Sam looked, frankly, bad, all hollow around the eyes, his lips tight, like a chronic pain sufferer. But he was still really strong, and gentle when he hugged her. Dean looked okay, kind of fresh, but sad and worried underneath, like things had not been good.
"I hope it's okay that I called you," Kat said, feeling awkward.
"Hey," Sam said. "Anything we can do to help." His eyes were so sad, Kat knew she was missing something.
"I told the volunteers my cousins were coming to visit," Kat whispered, "and they're covering the desk so I can leave early. You wanna go to this crab joint I know about?"
"Absolutely," Dean said.
For the rest of her days, Kat would remember that ride, with the Winchesters, in the Impala nearly as legendary as the brothers themselves, as she directed them to a crab joint, then to the Historical Society where Sam looked a bit deeper into the documentation.
She rode with them back to her rooming house and planned with them deep into the night, the cicadas singing loudly through the screens of the windows. The Winchesters actually slept in her bed (though it was only a queen), and she took the couch, and she served them her best farmer's market breakfast (eggs, bacon, sausage, bread, cheese and tomatoes, all local) the next morning. She worked all day on Thursday, mind in a haze, as the Winchesters gathered supplies.
That night, a full moon, thank goodness, the lamia was at her weakest--more snake than human, stupid and sluggish.
Sam had produced a topographical map of the area, and charted all the incidents they could account for. Sure enough, they were concentrated around the remains of the old manor house, with the nearby family cemetery under an ancient spreading oak, and the orphan's graveyard just beyond.
"I'm betting the disappeared children's burials are in this ravine here, between the two marked graveyards."
"What about the slaves' burial ground?"
"Well, they were probably Chri.... ahem, religious," Sam said, clearing his throat painfully, "but it's been said that many slave burials included protective rituals from Africa and the Caribbean as well, especially in places tainted by hauntings."
"So here, then," Kat pointed at the ravine on the topo. "Yeah, cause look, the far loop of the campground swings right by that ravine, and that's where the kid was bitten this spring. Treated it as a copperhead -- it's a general colubrid antivenin, with a ton of IV antibiotics."
Dean cleared his throat, and coughed a bit, then said, "You've done a great job with the research, Kat. But a rookie up against a lamia? Not a good plan."
"Look, I'll hang back, I'll keep my eyes open, I'll carry whatever gun you like, or whatever.... just don't make me sit this out," Kat begged.
She even used her puppy dog eyes. There were two Winchesters and one lamia. Plus Kat. She thought the odds were good.
"I don't like it," Dean said.
"Dean, it's her hunt," Sam said.
"Her first hunt. What a way to get started -- a four hundred year old European were beast. Crap."
"You big strong men will protect me," Kat insisted. "Now come on. Moonlight's a wasting."
The Impala carried the three of them smoothly and quietly into the park and out along the long loop of campground A. They reached site 18, where the boy had been bitten, and they parked the Impala. It was a gorgeous spot, the ravine dipping sharply down behind the well-developed campsite.
Sam and Dean had on thick jeans and tall boots, and Kat followed suit. She realized how stupid it would be to genuinely step on a copperhead while trying to take down a lamia.
They had tested her out on the target range, and approved of her biggest caliber handgun loaded with special wrought-iron bullets Dean produced. "A friend blessed these for me," Dean said, "so they ought to pack a pretty good punch," he added, as Sam looked away. She had the handgun in a holster and her shotgun loaded with salt rounds on a strap across her shoulder. It was still her favorite.
They picked their way cleanly down the ravine in the bright moonlight, aided by extra bright flashlights. In her full snake phase, the lamia would have trouble with bright light shone directly in her eyes.
Dean was carrying a crazy-looking long black spear. It looked so decorative that Kat had to joke that they'd stolen it from a wrought iron cemetery fence.
"We did," Dean grinned. "Consecrated wrought iron. Nothing better for a lamia."
Once they got to the bottom of the ravine, Sam gave Kat his flashlight, tucked his pistol into the back of his pants, and started throwing out a long, rough-looking greenish rope. Sam handled the rope with gloves, and Kat realized it was made of braided nettles. They must've gathered them at the family graveyard that morning, when they'd looked over the gravestones.
Sam threw the rope, gathered it in, and threw it as he was walking, in such a way as to crisscross the ground, like a net.
Soon enough, it drove the lamia out.
By moonlight, the monster was perfectly beautiful -- a million shimmering colors played across her scales, rainbow and peacock, while her sad woman's eyes were terrible-- Kat looked quickly away, before the glamour could take hold. Her arms were tiny, thin and blue, trailing down weakly from narrow shoulders, while her gleaming black hair flowed out from her serpentine head as though each lock were a serpent itself. No nose, but a pale blue forehead and sapphire cheeks, elegant and oval, and royal blue lips, perfectly formed.
Sam easily lassoed the monster, and though she lashed her tail, the graveyard nettles held her fast.
As Dean drew back his arm for the killing blow, iron lance poised to strike through the serpent's heart, a tiny spirit appeared behind the monster.
"Don't hurt the Lady, Sir," the blue child implored, tears in its eyes.
An eerie moan seemed to fill the air, and the trees stirred their branches all around.
"Don't hurt the Lady, please mister," piped another little voice.
And then there were a dozen of them, here, there, coming up from behind rocks -- probably the unholy markers she'd given them.
Kat quickly shouldered her shotgun and scattered two little spirits, reloading to take out two more. She was practiced, and easy.
Dean recovered from the shock of the child spirits, though their wailing continually increased.
He drew back his arm, and as Sam held the rope, he impaled the lamia on the cold iron lance.
Her body seemed to blacken and deflate, and instantly began to crumble away. As the last of her scales turned to dust, the moaning of the children faded to nothing, and the ravine was empty and clear in the moonlight.
They all trudged back to the Impala, and it carried them home to Kat's house, where they slept the sleep of the just.
The next morning, the Winchesters were up early, and with hugs after breakfast, Kat loading them up with goodies and bottles of water for the road, they roared away in the Impala and were gone.
In later years, Kat was still amazed that her first hunt was with the Winchesters, only a few weeks after they had triggered the Apocalypse they were lauded for putting to an end.
Author:
fannishliss Series: 42 Days of Metallicar and the Women of Supernatural (#13)
Rating: PG
Word count: 3,400
Pairing/Characters: no pairing. Kat, from "Asylum" (1.10), Sam and Dean, and cameo by the Impala.
Spoilers: this story refers to ep 1.10, but also to events through the end of s4. No spoilers for s5.
Notes/Disclaimers/Summary: This series of stories, ficlets and drabbles featuring the Impala and the Women of Supernatural are being posted as part of the 42 Days of Metallicar, hosted by
alias_chick . This is a work of transformative fiction and is not for profit. Thanks todavincis_girl for the helpful read through!If you read my journal, you might think this story takes place in a real-life campground I visited earlier this spring, with my son, who was bitten by a copperhead (and made a full recovery, thank goodness) but no. It is just a story, featuring a few details of the real-life events, for purposes of fun.
More about Kat in the s7 era in the story "His Very Absence"
Summary: Kat didn't set out to become a Hunter, but when she stumbled across a monster this big, she had to call for help. That's how she ended up on her first hunt, as backup to the fabled Wincesters, the very summer after they triggered the Apocalypse.
"Kat and the Case of the Cursed Campground"
After her escape from the old haunted asylum, Kat's life didn't take a turn for the weird.
She broke up with Gavin as promised, and didn't relent, despite his big sad eyes at parties.
Life went on as usual. End of sophomore year of college, she declared her major in outdoor education.
Weekends with family were often spent with her dad, out camping, hiking, hunting. Kat became a crack shot, learned how to fish, could build a fire and find shelter most anywhere.
And if she gave a little more credit to the outlandish stories people passed around the campfire late at night, considering which parts might have happened, which parts might have been exaggerated -- or more likely, explained away -- well, she was just exercising an open mind.
Summer after her Junior year, Kat got a really great summer job in a state park in Virginia, doing wildlife interpretation (the Nature Center had a Bald Eagle!), trail walks, and on the weekends, campfires and area folklore. She had to read up on the folklore of Tidewater Virginia, but that just entailed the three books already for sale in the Nature Center gift shop, plus a few things she picked up at the nearest branch library.
So it happened that Kat more "fell" into her first hunt than any other Hunter she met in later years. It was required reading for her job, for heaven's sake, not deliberate obituary combing.
What Kat fell into was blatant, supernatural, and bad, but it happened so rarely, and was attributed to natural causes, so no other Hunters had ever caught on.
There was a full-on lamia nested down in the park, and it looked to have been there for centuries. Kat figured that was why the place, surrounded by beautiful agricultural land, was wooded and wild, with a mature oak forest running right up against the beach head.
It was commonly known that the park had been part of a land grant parcel in the late sixteen hundreds, like so much of coastal Virginia. But unlike many other grants, which had brought their owners (through the use of slave labor) wealth, luxury, and power, this grant had never added to the prosperity of the family. Dwindling away in England as well as in the colony, their losses were ascribed to dissipation and poor judgment. Looking into their history (and finding an actual portrait of the lamia in a book devoted to the noble English origins of great Virginia families), Kat quickly saw the problem. The family had backed Charles II during the English Revolution -- many of the sons had gone to France with him during the Interregnum -- and the second son had returned from France with a mysterious wife, supposedly from one of the German states, but more likely, Bulgaria -- a lot of were beasts sprang up in that area, she'd noted.
The son had been sent to establish a farm on the Royalist land grant, and he and his new wife had crossed the Atlantic to try their hand in the new world. He had quickly succumbed to a wasting disease, leaving his wife alone, supposedly with a young son. A third brother and his wife had come to her aid, bringing their two young children with them, a boy and a girl, each lovely as day, with beautiful heads of sunny golden curls. All four soon sickened and died, just as the husband had, so that the young wife had to return alone to England, her own offspring having passed away as well, or so she had claimed. (Kat found no mention of infant baptism or burial in the parish church, which had good records dating back to the 1690s.)
She remained there for not quite a decade, during which she was praised as the belle of the season for several years running. The eldest brother's wife died too, but the lamia waited one discreet interval, not taking the eldest brother to husband until his aged parents had passed away, leaving the unencumbered title to him. At that point, he fell under her spell and went with her, against all advice, to Virginia, and for the rest of his life he handled his English and European business by correspondence only. Kat had a look at the hand on documents treasured by the local historical society -- as she expected, it was very nearly the same as the "daughter's" who was known to be the spitting image of her mother, an almost hypnotic beauty with gleaming black hair and glittering light green eyes.
This daughter (clearly none other than the lamia herself) lived a long, long life alone in the manor house her last husband had ordered built to her specifications. Around the time of the American Revolution, a young cousin had arrived from Bulgaria to keep her old relative company -- and soon, the old lady was heard from no more, and the cousin began to transact all business.
Thus the lamia, by the flimsiest subterfuge, lived off the income of a great English family, till at last it petered out during the War between the States (as it was called locally). At that time in England, the landed gentry had all but made the transition to industrial investments, and caring nothing for this, the ancient creature had neglected her ill-gotten holdings. So many records were destroyed, so many widows made, that the locals could be forgiven for not growing suspicious of the lady living alone in the old manor house. The lamia, Kat figured, was content to slither by moonlight among the rocks of the graveyard she had filled with her husbands and their relatives.
Someone more sympathetic to the were-kind might argue that the lamia's great crimes were so far in the past, and her fate fallen lately so low, as the estate and manor house had slowly crumbled to nothing, overtaken by the forest, that it was hardly worth the trouble to figure out the lore for putting her down for good.
But that was how Kat came into the story in the first place. After many, many years, the old estate was acquired by the Commonwealth of Virginia and developed into a recreation area, and Kat had come there to work, only by accident piecing together how many little children had come to bad ends in the area.
Some fell from the cliffs, some drowned in the shallows of the river, some were bitten by "snakes," some were lost in the small woods and never found. Some, and this was the worst thing to Kat, were found shivering and blue and crying for the Lady-- these never recovered their right minds.
Kat shivered in horror as she thought of the early weekends of the summer, as she sat with the families in the circle of benches around the campfire at dusk, telling tales of the crying children haunting these woods, gone blue for the Lady -- the folktale revealing the age-old curse of the place.
Well, she guessed she'd have to put an end to it. Still, a lamia is a powerful creature-- not like a death omen, or even a vengeful spirit, to be put down by a simple shovel, salt, and kerosene ceremony.
Kat was proud of her research, but not too proud not to do the right thing. She called in backup.
Hoping the cell phone number was still good, she dialed. It rang a long time, but she didn't hang up.
At last someone answered, a gruff, "Hello?"
"Hello! Hello. This is Kat, um, Katherine Powers. Am I speaking to Dean Winchester?"
"Yeah, I guess you are. How did you get this number."
Kat could've hoped for a warmer reception, but whatever, it had been what, three years-- no, coming on four.
"Well, I met you in Rockford, Illinois, back when I was still in high school -- you rescued me and my friend Gavin from that old haunted asylum?"
"Oh, yeah," Dean laughed a bit, warmth coming into his tone. "How are you? Not still with Gavin, I hope!!"
Kat remembered Dean's expressive green eyes clearly, and imagined them rolling back in his head. Gavin had been, to put it in the crude terms Dean would've used, a total douche. He really wasn't that bad, Kat admitted, just ... wasn't the man for her, it turned out.
"No, no. Poor guy. Listen, I called you for a reason. Are you and Sam still in this, um, ghost chasing business?"
"Hunting? Yeah. You never really get away from it, whether you like it or not."
Dean's tone was laced with something raw -- not the jovial bounce he'd had for a second.
"Well, uh, I need help with something. Uh, something big. I needed to call someone, and Sam gave me this number."
"And you kept it all these years?" Dean sounded, not incredulous, but more like, hopeful? Kat couldn't quite put the name to what she was hearing.
"Well, yeah! I was seventeen! You guys made quite an impression! You saved my ass! and Gavin's! and totally toasted that awful haunting!"
"How do you know that," Dean asked flatly.
"Well, I kept tabs," Kat said evasively. She hadn't gone back in. Not right away. Not till last summer, when the building was finally being renovated for shops, and the place was all clear, not a chill nor a weird story to be found.
"Ok, Miss Drew," Dean mocked. "What's up."
"I think it's a lamia. It's been haunting this state park where I'm working, since, like, forever."
"No shit! A lamia? Holy crap. Listen, you haven't tried to go after it or anything?" Dean's tone was stern. In the background, over the low roar of what Kat assumed was that creamy old Chevy the guys drove, Kat heard someone, Sam she guessed, saying, "what? Lamia? holy shit!"
"Of course not. But after this little kid got "snakebit" this spring, right before I got here? and the old volunteers at the nature center started going on about all the kids who've been "bitten" as far back as folks can remember, and no one ever sees the snake? plus, the ones who've "wandered off," fell off the cliffs, drowned in the shallows, or been driven mad by this thing? And at least three I've found have been..." Kat had to swallow, "lured into the fire."
"Sweet holy Jesus," Dean breathed, and Kat heard a pained exclamation from Sam. What was that all about, she wondered.
"I know, man. It's not like she strikes every week... and she has so many different, attacks, I guess, that no one's ever put it together. But dude, I count at least seventeen child victims, and that's just the twentieth century. Legend goes back even farther, with all the 'blue children.' "
Kat heard Dean breathe out heavily. "... do I really want to know?"
"Kids driven mad ---or their spirits -- who moan and cry in the night for the beautiful Lady."
"How many," Dean said, and his voice was angry now.
"I can't be sure. But it looks she ran a so-called orphanage after the Civil War, and most of the kids there died of a wasting disease. The records were lost, if there ever were any."
"And where was that located?"
"In the old manor house she lived in. Where the park is now."
"And the graveyard, I guess."
Kat grimaced. Usually, because lamias slept in graveyards, they were easy to locate and kill.
"Another fun tidbit? There are at least three separate graveyards here in the park --- the old seventeenth century family graveyard; the unmarked field where the slaves buried their dead; the orphanage graveyard; -- not to mention wherever she's hidden the kids she's stolen."
"Okay, okay, we're on our way."
Dean got the name of the park and gave her an ETA of lunchtime three days later. He hung up.
It was on a Wednesday, a little after lunchtime, when a dusty Chevy Impala rolled at a cautious speed into the gravel parking lot in front of the Nature Center.
Kat was just studying her butterfly book (there had recently been a plague of yellow butterflies in the soybean fields around the park that every single visitor to the center had inquired about), when she heard the loud engine and the crunch of gravel with a leap of excitement.
Two tall men got out of the long black car, stretched, and made their way inside. It was Sam and Dean Winchester, larger than life. Sam was bigger even than she remembered, super buff, with long hair brushed back from his forehead. Dean looked older, but somehow, cleaner than she remembered. Weird.
"Hey, guys," Kat said, coming out from around her counter to hug them.
Up close, Sam looked, frankly, bad, all hollow around the eyes, his lips tight, like a chronic pain sufferer. But he was still really strong, and gentle when he hugged her. Dean looked okay, kind of fresh, but sad and worried underneath, like things had not been good.
"I hope it's okay that I called you," Kat said, feeling awkward.
"Hey," Sam said. "Anything we can do to help." His eyes were so sad, Kat knew she was missing something.
"I told the volunteers my cousins were coming to visit," Kat whispered, "and they're covering the desk so I can leave early. You wanna go to this crab joint I know about?"
"Absolutely," Dean said.
For the rest of her days, Kat would remember that ride, with the Winchesters, in the Impala nearly as legendary as the brothers themselves, as she directed them to a crab joint, then to the Historical Society where Sam looked a bit deeper into the documentation.
She rode with them back to her rooming house and planned with them deep into the night, the cicadas singing loudly through the screens of the windows. The Winchesters actually slept in her bed (though it was only a queen), and she took the couch, and she served them her best farmer's market breakfast (eggs, bacon, sausage, bread, cheese and tomatoes, all local) the next morning. She worked all day on Thursday, mind in a haze, as the Winchesters gathered supplies.
That night, a full moon, thank goodness, the lamia was at her weakest--more snake than human, stupid and sluggish.
Sam had produced a topographical map of the area, and charted all the incidents they could account for. Sure enough, they were concentrated around the remains of the old manor house, with the nearby family cemetery under an ancient spreading oak, and the orphan's graveyard just beyond.
"I'm betting the disappeared children's burials are in this ravine here, between the two marked graveyards."
"What about the slaves' burial ground?"
"Well, they were probably Chri.... ahem, religious," Sam said, clearing his throat painfully, "but it's been said that many slave burials included protective rituals from Africa and the Caribbean as well, especially in places tainted by hauntings."
"So here, then," Kat pointed at the ravine on the topo. "Yeah, cause look, the far loop of the campground swings right by that ravine, and that's where the kid was bitten this spring. Treated it as a copperhead -- it's a general colubrid antivenin, with a ton of IV antibiotics."
Dean cleared his throat, and coughed a bit, then said, "You've done a great job with the research, Kat. But a rookie up against a lamia? Not a good plan."
"Look, I'll hang back, I'll keep my eyes open, I'll carry whatever gun you like, or whatever.... just don't make me sit this out," Kat begged.
She even used her puppy dog eyes. There were two Winchesters and one lamia. Plus Kat. She thought the odds were good.
"I don't like it," Dean said.
"Dean, it's her hunt," Sam said.
"Her first hunt. What a way to get started -- a four hundred year old European were beast. Crap."
"You big strong men will protect me," Kat insisted. "Now come on. Moonlight's a wasting."
The Impala carried the three of them smoothly and quietly into the park and out along the long loop of campground A. They reached site 18, where the boy had been bitten, and they parked the Impala. It was a gorgeous spot, the ravine dipping sharply down behind the well-developed campsite.
Sam and Dean had on thick jeans and tall boots, and Kat followed suit. She realized how stupid it would be to genuinely step on a copperhead while trying to take down a lamia.
They had tested her out on the target range, and approved of her biggest caliber handgun loaded with special wrought-iron bullets Dean produced. "A friend blessed these for me," Dean said, "so they ought to pack a pretty good punch," he added, as Sam looked away. She had the handgun in a holster and her shotgun loaded with salt rounds on a strap across her shoulder. It was still her favorite.
They picked their way cleanly down the ravine in the bright moonlight, aided by extra bright flashlights. In her full snake phase, the lamia would have trouble with bright light shone directly in her eyes.
Dean was carrying a crazy-looking long black spear. It looked so decorative that Kat had to joke that they'd stolen it from a wrought iron cemetery fence.
"We did," Dean grinned. "Consecrated wrought iron. Nothing better for a lamia."
Once they got to the bottom of the ravine, Sam gave Kat his flashlight, tucked his pistol into the back of his pants, and started throwing out a long, rough-looking greenish rope. Sam handled the rope with gloves, and Kat realized it was made of braided nettles. They must've gathered them at the family graveyard that morning, when they'd looked over the gravestones.
Sam threw the rope, gathered it in, and threw it as he was walking, in such a way as to crisscross the ground, like a net.
Soon enough, it drove the lamia out.
By moonlight, the monster was perfectly beautiful -- a million shimmering colors played across her scales, rainbow and peacock, while her sad woman's eyes were terrible-- Kat looked quickly away, before the glamour could take hold. Her arms were tiny, thin and blue, trailing down weakly from narrow shoulders, while her gleaming black hair flowed out from her serpentine head as though each lock were a serpent itself. No nose, but a pale blue forehead and sapphire cheeks, elegant and oval, and royal blue lips, perfectly formed.
Sam easily lassoed the monster, and though she lashed her tail, the graveyard nettles held her fast.
As Dean drew back his arm for the killing blow, iron lance poised to strike through the serpent's heart, a tiny spirit appeared behind the monster.
"Don't hurt the Lady, Sir," the blue child implored, tears in its eyes.
An eerie moan seemed to fill the air, and the trees stirred their branches all around.
"Don't hurt the Lady, please mister," piped another little voice.
And then there were a dozen of them, here, there, coming up from behind rocks -- probably the unholy markers she'd given them.
Kat quickly shouldered her shotgun and scattered two little spirits, reloading to take out two more. She was practiced, and easy.
Dean recovered from the shock of the child spirits, though their wailing continually increased.
He drew back his arm, and as Sam held the rope, he impaled the lamia on the cold iron lance.
Her body seemed to blacken and deflate, and instantly began to crumble away. As the last of her scales turned to dust, the moaning of the children faded to nothing, and the ravine was empty and clear in the moonlight.
They all trudged back to the Impala, and it carried them home to Kat's house, where they slept the sleep of the just.
The next morning, the Winchesters were up early, and with hugs after breakfast, Kat loading them up with goodies and bottles of water for the road, they roared away in the Impala and were gone.
In later years, Kat was still amazed that her first hunt was with the Winchesters, only a few weeks after they had triggered the Apocalypse they were lauded for putting to an end.
