A Car's Tires on a Road

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I don't know what's real and I don't know if I even care anymore. Even though it was supposed to be a normal, unspectacular hunt, things went their usual way down the drain. I wasn't prepared for it. All of it was nothing but a clever illusion.

It started when Sam and I took a job somewhere in the middle of bumfuck, Minnesota.

Snow scrunched under my black shoes on the way to the morgue and I pulled my coat a little tighter around myself against the stabbing cold. But the horror just wouldn't end as I stepped from terrible weather conditions into my own personal hell. Wherever you looked, tinsel, garlands, mistletoes and other godawful Christmas decoration.

Christmas time used to be one of my favorite things. Building a Christmas tree with beer cans, buying cheap presents for Sam, or adding too much booze to my brother's eggnog just to annoy the crap out of him. And let's not forget hooking up with chicks feeling acutely lonely this time of the year. But what do you know, Sam had to pull me out of my cheerful celebratory mood at home and into a case that could as well be no case at all. Not for us, at least. It looked just like a normal, down-to-earth wack-job killing. And if I couldn't have Christmas, nobody should.

Turning up in our usual fake FBI dress-ups, giving off our serious, overworked vibes — which we didn't even have to fake anymore at this point — we were quickly shown to the body in question, one Emilia Johnson.

"As you can see," the forensic pathologist elaborated, "the victim's eyelids were cut off. Clean cut, too. I'm thinking very sharp object."

"Like a scalpel," Sam threw in.

"Yes"

"So what's the cause of death?"

The pathologist frowned. "Well. I have to get back to you on that. There are no other injuries I could detect, nor any visible damage to her internal organs. Blood test came back with zero evidence, too. My working theory at this point is heart failure."

My eyes followed the pathologist walking out. As soon as we were alone I said, "Heart failure, huh?" I had a closer look at the victim's eyes, staring back at me blankly, with only bloody, incrusted cut wounds where her eyelids used to be. She looked horribly panicked.
"Look, though freaking creepy, I don't think this is our kind of deal, Sam."

My brother's face was all frown and consideration, not paying me much attention as he was deep inside the report he was reading. Which pissed me off a little bit.
"I don't know, Dean. We've gone on less. And no determinable cause of death? Seems worth checking out for me."

"Yeah sure," I mumbled more to myself than to Sam. "Sure you would've managed to make just about anything worth checking out just so you don't have to have a real Christmas with me."

That, at least, made Sam look up. "Dean. Is this about your weird new obsession with Christmas? Or maybe the fact that you made me carry an eight feet tall tree into the bunker so you could decorate it with things that are wrong in— so many ways. Something killed this woman. This is our job."

It was hard to argue with Sam when he was all self-righteous and heroic like that. One might almost think he'd always been this dedicated. A true hunter, born and raised. But the way I remembered it, Sam only had this job because years ago I'd dragged him back into it. What happened to wanting a normal life?

"Okay, first of all, it wasn't just a tree, Sammy, it was a Christmas tree. And second, it could as well be a who, who killed this girl."

Sam didn't seem to agree on either of those points. If anything, it seemed to annoy him even more.

"It's probably just some wacko human being, Sam," I went on. "I mean, there's not a single sign this was supernatural. No bite marks, no missing heart, no sulfur, or even any wound at all. Well, except for the fact that poor Emilia here doesn't need mascara anymore." I raised my eyebrows, hoping it would deliver the speech. Which it did not.