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corn nuts, having to hold your pee for fifty miles. Such fun. Get your fanny-pack.” And with that the demon disappeared again.
    “Damn it.” Samuel pinched his brow. Then he called out, “Sam! Sam!”
    A few moments later, his grandson opened up the steel door of Samuel’s office. His bulk almost filled the entire seven-foot doorframe.
    “Yeah?” Sam asked.
    “We have to go. Reconnaissance mission,” Samuel said, hefting himself out of the chair and toward the wall that served as his mini-armory.
    “For what?” Sam asked.
    “We have to follow Dean,” Samuel said.
    “What? Why?”
    “Because he’s...” Samuel trailed off. He didn’t know if he should tell Sam that Dean was trying to resurrect him. Would that cause Sam undue pain to see his brother manically searching for a way to bring him back from the dead? Samuel wasn’t sure. Sam was so cold and calculating, it was hard to know how he would react. But reconnaissance wasn’t a good enough carrot on a string for Sam, he had to pique the boy’s hunting instincts.
    “Witches,” Samuel said firmly. “We have to find some witches.”
    “What does that have to do with Dean?” Sam asked.
    “He’s after them too, and we need to get there first.”
    “What are they doing? I mean, they’re kind of small fry compared to the monsters we’ve been hunting.”
    “They’re trying to create monsters. Just trust me. We could pull in the motherload with this one.” Samuel was peeved he needed to give any explanation at all. “Go tell the others they’re on their own for a few days—and you and I are going to need the van.”
    Sam shrugged and left the room. It was hunting—that was all that mattered to him.
    Outside he stared out across the fields that surrounded the camp. He wondered why he felt disconnected from the thought of following his brother. Was it for the same reason that, though there was a breeze, he couldn’t feel it on his face? Did it have to do with the fact that he hadn’t slept since he got back? And though he had been eating, as sort of a facade so he wouldn’t freak the others out, he hadn’t been hungry. Not even once. Did it have to do with that?
    And that other feeling Sam remembered having—when he and Dean would come out alive after a particularly nasty battle, or the first time he saw Dean after his brother had been pulled out of Hell—what was that feeling? Because Sam didn’t have that feeling anymore. Not about anything.

SEVEN

    The only thing Sam did feel was the intense need to hunt. It was almost as if an animal within him had woken up. He could literally feel the move a monster was about to make, and be there before it was. Sam was singular in his drive. Hunt. It was as if he no longer needed to intellectualize the right and wrong of it. All he cared about was getting the monster. For this reason Sam really was Samuel’s perfect weapon. Except Sam’s new nature wasn’t without its dangers.
    Three weeks ago he and Samuel had been hunting down a monster that had taken up residence in a halfway house full of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. The local paper had covered a murder-suicide and another unexplained death at the house. Police thought the deaths were due to the unsavory characters of the residents, most of whom had been in and out of jail or had some type of police record, but Sam knew better. He talked his grandfather into going with him to investigate.
    The next morning they arrived at the door of the facility posing as priests.
    “May I help you?” A short-haired, round woman answered the door.
    “Bless you, child. I’m Father Tipton,” Sam introduced himself, “and this is Father Halford. We’re with the Cumberland County Prayer Outreach Center. We were hoping to come and help your residents in their time of need. Two deaths in three weeks. Terrible.”
    The woman assented with a pudgy-cheeked smile. She introduced herself as Beverley and led them into a meeting room, where they talked