TEN

“Y’know,” Sam Winchester said, “it still freaks me out a little.”

Dean was still staring at the printout of the forty year-old San Francisco Chronicle article.

“What, that Mom and our grandparents were hunters?” Dean remembered how stunned he’d been when a nineteen year-old girl had started beating the crap out of him—and then he’d seen the protective charm bracelet she was wearing and put two and two together.

Mom really knew how to kick ass.

Family history had never been a huge priority for the Winchesters while they were growing up, though. Dean’s grandparents were barely remembered faces on faded pictures that had hung on the staircase wall. The only family that had mattered after Mom died were Sam and Dad, and later folks like Bobby—who had become a surrogate uncle to the boys, and more as they grew older. And Caleb and Pastor Jim.

Sam smiled when he answered Dean’s question.

“No, somehow it makes sense that they would be hunters,” he said. “But it’s weird that we were named after them, and Dad never told us.”

Dean snorted derisively.

“Add it to the list of things Dad never told us. We could fill a damn—” Suddenly, he got a faraway look in his eyes. “—book. Sonofabitch.”

Bolting from the kitchen into the living room, Dean made a beeline for the worn duffel bag he always traveled with and pulled out the leather-bound notebook that had been an integral part of their lives as hunters these past four years— ever since Dad had disappeared, and Dean had gone to Stanford to drag Sam back to the life that he’d left behind.

Dad’s journal.

Furiously, he started flipping pages until he found the section that covered the late 1980s and found what he was looking for.

“Here we go,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Heart of the Dragon—San Francisco, 1989. Twenty years later—and Dad faced it!”

Sam got up from the kitchen table and followed his brother.

“Okay, yeah, that’s starting to ring a bell. There was a sword involved, wasn’t there?”

“Yup,” came a voice from the back room. Bobby wheeled himself into the living room, a long, thin package wrapped in brown parcel paper and twine sitting on his lap as he navigated his wheelchair until he was sitting next to the brothers.

Staring up at them from under the bill of his omnipresent baseball cap, he held up the parcel.

“If you two’re goin’ after Doragon Kokoro, you’re gonna be needin’ this.”

Sam took the package.

Expecting a katana, Dean was surprised when Sam undid the twine, ripped off the plain brown paper, and unwrapped a hook sword. It had a hilt with a wrist guard and an additional piece beyond that, with the long blade that curved around at the very end to form the hook.

That wasn’t the interesting part, though: that was the runes in Asian characters—Dean could never tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese—etched into the sword’s blade.

“When your father faced off against Doragon Kokoro twenty years ago,” Bobby began, “this is what he used to send the spirit away. We were hopin’ it was permanent, but we knew we’d probably just accomplished what your grandparents apparently did, and got rid of it for two decades.

“S’why I kept the damn thing.”

Dean snorted again. Bobby didn’t need a reason to keep anything—he was the classic pack rat. And as they’d discovered time and again, in this line of work, it didn’t pay to get rid of anything that might be useful in the future.

Sam looked at Dean.

“It’s been years since I read that part of Dad’s journal. What’s it say?”

Dean looked back down at the leather-bound notebook.

“A whole bunch, actually.”