Within a matter of days, Lex got used to both heat and cold. He was even getting used to hunger, and to the earthy taste of the fresh water pools of the island.

Little things bothered him more.

Lex had grown into his baldness over the years, and most of the time, it really didn't bother him. But the sunburns on his scalp were hell, and having to sleep on rough sand and stone with his head uncovered was a new and fresh level of pain. It kept him awake late into the night, which was a problem, because in the darkness, without the—fairly futile—work of finding food and building shelter to distract him, he thought about Helen.

On a good night, he only worried about whether she had survived. He longed for her company—her witty conversations, her quiet compassion, her lips against his. He desperately hoped she had somehow made it to safety, and that she would be among the rescue team that found him. In his dreams, he spent the rest of his days and nights with her.

But most nights, Lex agonized about whether Helen had betrayed him. He wanted to believe the jet had been sabotaged by his father, but try though he did, he couldn't ignore the signs. The biggest red flag being, of course, that she had ever claimed to love him in the first place. He had known for as long as he could remember that he would never be loved.

It was more than that, though, of course. He hadn't heard anything from her when the plane was damaged. He was beginning to suspect he might've been drugged by the champagne, but then, had she only avoided it by drinking so little? Was it really that she didn't like the vintage, or did she know it was poisoned? Had she even tried to wake him up before grabbing a parachute? If she had grabbed a parachute and fled, where had she ended up? Has she died in the water, or did anybody find her and rescue her? Why hadn't they found him?

If his mind was going to be the first thing to go, he couldn't let himself agonize over this. And he was sure he could distract himself enough to keep it off his mind, just long enough for someone to find and rescue him—if only he could sleep.

But lying awake, alone? Even on the nights he was most convinced Helen had betrayed him, he desperately missed her. It hurt more than anything, more than any hunger or thirst or soreness or sunburn or fear of death. He wanted his wife.

Lex kept track of the days that passed with a little sharp piece of stone he had found—or rather, his foot had found—by carving lines into a tree with smooth bark, one he could easily find. He was carving the eighth tally mark when he heard a voice.

He couldn't make out the words. He wasn't even sure they were in English, but stranger still, it didn't sound like a human voice, exactly. It was muffled and garbled, almost like a bird imitating human speech.

And it did seem to be coming from above him . . .

Great. He was going crazy.

Just for curiosity sake, he looked up in the tree to see that there was, in fact, a bird above him. Staring at him. When it spoke, its mouth didn't move; Lex couldn't have even been sure that it was the bird speaking, except that he somehow knew it was. It was speaking directly to him, and when it repeated the words, he almost stumbled back, because he could hear them clearly:

What are you doing?

Lex tried to think about this logically and rationally, even as his heart pounded. He hadn't seen any other people on the island, even though he had searched it thoroughly, but if the bird could imitate human speech, it must've heard it before. Of course, this was a strange phrase for it to have picked up, and Lex had never seen a bird like this talk before. It almost looked like a pigeon, but its beak was a bright green. It would've made him suspect the meteor rocks if he were in Smallville now. Years ago, Lex had been able to speak with a nonverbal werewolf who was infected; maybe this could be something similar. As it was, though, he highly doubted any of the birds from Smallville had migrated this far, nor that any meteor rocks had landed—

With the rock. What are you doing?

This time, Lex almost jumped out of his skin. That wasn't an imitation. The bird had been watching him.

He supposed if he was going crazy, he couldn't make things much worse by testing his own hallucinations. "I . . . I've been tracking the days."

Why?

"You . . . You can understand me."

Yes . . .

"How? I mean . . ." Lex took a step closer to the tree. "Have you talked with other people before?"

No. Then the bird cocked its head. You.

"You've seen me before? Or I'm the first person you've spoken to."

The bird ruffled its feathers, then it flew away.

Lex shook his head and turned his attention back to finding food for the day. He really was going crazy.

Dean had hoped Chloe's notes would be helpful. He had had no idea what he was in for. He had hit the jackpot.

From what he could tell, Chloe and Lex had started by researching everything they could about monsters in general. Her notes began with a detailed repository of all of the fundamentals he had learned from years of hunting with his father: signs of supernatural activity, every weapon needed to kill various creatures, every item a hunter should have in his stock piles. Dean suspected a lot of the information had come from resources he had sent to Lex over the years, but Dean himself hadn't read most of those books. He was sure Sam had, and it was clear now that Chloe and Lex had poured over them cover to cover.

From there, they had begun cataloging every potential instance of both Supernatural beings passing through the town, and people being infected by meteor rocks. Some seemed a little ambiguous to Dean, but often Chloe seem to have trouble telling the difference as well. And there were cases where meteor rocks gave an ordinary person abilities similar to those of monsters, like with the Shapeshifter from a couple years ago. There were crimes in town that they couldn't explain, which they suspected were the work of monsters or meteor mutants, with differing amounts of certainty. There were also people in town that they suspected, even though the evidence wasn't solid enough to pin them down.

There was one common question throughout the research, and Dean wasn't sure what to make of it any more than they were. Sooner or later, the major criminals were generally caught and neutralized, either taken to prison or an asylum equipped to deal with them, more or less. But it wasn't always clear how. There were cases and stories of people being rescued with no explanation of how or why. This was the biggest ongoing question they had, and from what Dean could tell, they hadn't made any progress on it. He made a mental note to keep it on the back burner in case he encountered any clues about it.

He was most interested in how the meteor rocks affected monsters, of course, because it was almost always monsters that followed him, even though it seemed that most of the enemies Lex and Chloe had encountered had been humans infected by meteor rocks. They hadn't been able to test many life subjects, but they had obtained samples of tissues from a few different creatures, though Dean did not want to know how, and they had managed to infect them and test the signals they gave off. A Geiger counter was a good call.

Now all Dean had to do was break into the mansion again.

But he started with the chapel, because it was easier and no one tried to keep him out of it. There were faint signals there. He then went to the runway for the jet, and found faint signals there as well; that was both exciting and concerning, since presumably, fewer people had been there, and still fewer both at the wedding and at the site where the plane launched.

The mansion was harder to break into, but Lex had taught him a few tricks, and the security guards were surprisingly easy to sneak past. Dean would have to tell Lex to improve his home security. It was terrible.

His goal was to find any records that might exist of who had been at the jet takeoff site. He tried calling Helen about it, but she wouldn't take his calls, even though he tried to explain to the servants who answered that Lex might still be alive, and if he was alive, Dean might be able to help. He couldn't exactly explain the supernatural activity or anything about meteor mutants over the phone, so he wondered if Lex had ever talked to Helen about them. Clearly he had spent a lot of time talking to Chloe about them.

On a whim, he tried the geiger counter as he walked through the empty halls. He ended up having to turn it off immediately. It registered constantly; whoever or whatever had sabotaged that flight must've spent a lot of time at the mansion. The geiger counter was loud enough that Dean had to put it away for fear of being found.

He turned a corner, heading towards the study, when he heard a voice. He hadn't known Helen for very long, but he could swear it was hers.

Then he heard what sounded like a click, then a gasping, gurgling sound, then a thud.

Dean ran until he reached the door of the study, but just before he could burst in to try to save Helen, he heard her voice:

"I didn't ask for your excuses. You were supposed to call me. Now I'm down another servant, and they're starting to suspect I'm not telling the truth about who I am. Now for the last time . . . Hold on, I think I hear something."

Footsteps headed toward the door, growing louder.

Dean's heart nearly jumped out of his chest, and he ran.