Felis Leo

Chapter VII: Thatcher

The Impala screeched into a parking spot outside of the Sioux Falls police station, and Sam went out to meet him. Grabbing his small back from the passenger seat, Dean hurriedly lunged from the car and slammed the door shut behind him, perhaps a little too hard. Sam knew he would be in this state of anxious panic until Ellie was back safely, but it was still unsettling nonetheless. Whenever Dean got that focused, that frustrated, and had a direction to point that anger in, he had a tendency to be volatile. His boots scraped on the gravel beneath them as he strided up to Sam where he waited in front of the police station doors. No greetings were exchanged between them, only glares of worry.

Dean was not the only one distressed about losing Ellie, but if Ellie's soullessness was any indication, he had a tendency to act as though he was the only one who cared about her. Logically, he understood that Sam was attached to Ellie too, in some way. Though he did not understand the full extent of how exactly Sam felt about her. Already dreading having to deal with Dean's explosiveness until Ellie was found, Sam ushered him inside the police station and filled him in on where they were at.

"So I looked all around the church. There was no blood, no bodies, no weapons at all. The only sign that there was even a struggle at all was Ellie's cracked phone and what looked like claw marks around the door frame," Sam explained. They hurried towards the back of the police station towards Jody's office, shuffling past cubicles of deputies filing paperwork into metal cabinets.

"Like from a werewolf?" Dean asked, and Sam cinched his brows together.

"Like Ellie was trying to hang on to it for some reason," He admitted, feeling a slight trace of sympathy for Dean. The thought of Ellie being terrified enough and fighting hard enough to leave claw-marks was a sickening one. She had gone through enough.

Sam cleared his throat and continued.

"When I left the church there were a bunch of cars there, all empty. Ellie's truck was there too, but she parked it in the treeline where no one would see it. The back door was left open and her duffle was unzipped. She tore a bunch of stuff out there and left in a hurry, but I couldn't tell what she took. I spent about a half hour looking through her car, but after I walked back to the church, all the cars were gone. I didn't hear a thing."

"So what, they've got some sort of underground tunnel or something?"

"Maybe," Sam shrugged, though it seemed unlikely. The idea of humans disappearing that fast and silently and being able to overpower Ellie were all also unlikely, to be fair. Yet here they were.

Sam opened the door to Jody's office and they both pushed through the doorframe side-by-side, bumping into each other and stepping on one another as they did. The scent of lavender air freshener greeted them as they stumbled in.

"Hey boys!"

Jody looked up from a stack of papers with a thin smile. The warm sunlight from the window behind her desk illuminated her with a bright halo, silhouetting the unease on her face. Though she was happy to see them, she also pitied their situation, and her strong maternal instinct fostered a personal worry for Ellie as well. Sam had called a couple hours prior, requesting she open a missing persons case, and she already had several officers working on it. The Winchesters were best adapted to hunting monsters, while Jody was trained in finding people.

"Hey so that book I dropped off this morning-" Sam began, rushing through his greeting.

"We're gonna need that back," Dean chimed in, cutting to the chase. Jody's lips parted with a slightly regretful expression, and her right hand tapped a pen against her desk.

"Ah, see I would love to give that back to you boys, but unfortunately our forensics guy juuuust picked it up. Couldn't have been more than an hour ago," She explained with a clinched half-smile. Sam and Dean's expressions dropped to being noticeably less hopeful, and Dean broke eye contact from her.