Recon was never Dean's favorite part of a hunt, and he'd expected it to be weird not to have his dad around. That part wasn't weird. Having a ten-year-old tagging along, though—that was more than a little worrying. And wandering around in a cornfield wasn't exactly his idea of fun.

But still, being with Sam, and being back with Lex and Clark—it felt good. It felt complete.

They didn't talk about the hunt while they walked out to find the trail, or what was left of it. They talked about the year they'd spent apart. Sam told about some of the occasional sightseeing they'd done while visiting different states, Clark talked about the animals on the farm, and Lex even told a few funny stories about the professors at his boarding school. For a moment, Dean could almost forget that he was here on business.

Then they reached the trail.

It was a few days old, and the smashed-in cornstalks had begun to recover, but the fences hadn't all been rebuilt. And Dean had never seen anything quite like it. Monsters had to retain their secrecy to survive; they weren't usually reckless. This was.

Clark looked really nervous. Lex put a hand on his shoulder, and Sam distracted him by talking about other hunts they'd been on—successful ones where no one had been injured, of course.

But the more Dean looked around, the more he wondered if Clark's fear stemmed from something else.

There were bits of fabric in the most jagged shards of the broken fence. And they perfectly matched the little tears in Clark's jacket sleeves.

Dean might have thought it was a coincidence, but then he found half of a blue shoelace and looked down to see that Clark had blue laces on one shoe and an old piece of twine on the other.

Clark knew something. He'd seen something. And he was better at keeping secrets than Dean had thought.

But Dean didn't have time to ponder it any further. Something hit him in the back of the head, hard enough that he fell to the ground, blacked out, and knew no more.