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Summary and warnings in part 1.
Part 2. Note: obviously, written before tonight, and blithely ignoring whatever we found out there. (I have a whole bitter rant that is only half about the ethical issues; the other half is about Bad Characterization in Lazarus Rising; but, whatever.)
“What the fuck was that?” Dee asked again once they were safe in their room, struggling into one of Dean’s T-shirts to replace the shirt she’d ruined with the victim’s blood. Sam recognized the habit of cursing a way through a problem, if not the timbre of the voice.
Sam took another drink of water, chasing the last of the pain pills he was going to allow himself. He’d taken enough to blunt the worst of it, but he needed to be able to think. “We need to find out if Castiel knows anything about Dee. Will he be in touch soon?”
“The demons weren’t expecting that, why would he know?” Dee snapped.
“Different sources,” Sam said, as mildly as he could. “He does have a line to the All-Knowing.”
Dean put an awkward hand on Dee’s shoulder. Dee shuddered, but didn’t shove him away. Sam wouldn’t have thought that Dee would be so put out by losing a power she—Dean—claimed to hate so much. Then again, failing in the middle of a battle like that had to have been frightening.
“I can summon him,” Dean said slowly, which was another fun new fact. “But he gets pissed if I do it for no reason.” The way he said it, he didn’t want Castiel angry, which was unusual since Dean generally lived to make steam come out the ears of non-Dad authority figures.
Sam frowned. “Don’t mention parallel realities or anything like that. Ask him if Lilith sent Dee to, I don’t know, tempt us.”
“Us?” Dee repeated, her eyebrow raised, distracted from her anger.
Dean paused briefly, his mouth working on some undoubtedly awful quip, but then he shook his head. “And if he says he’s got no clue?”
Dee snorted. “Tell him you’re starting to believe that there’s only one solution.”
“What?” Sam demanded. He had a bad feeling about this.
Dean rubbed a hand through his hair, then over his mouth, then turned away. “He said stop you or the angels would. But he’s bluffing, he can’t touch you.”
Dee nodded.
“How do you know he’s bluffing?” Sam asked, feeling as if this was information he should have had beforehand.
“Because if he coulda done something, he woulda already—you scare the shit out of him and Uriel even when you’re not using the powers,” Dean said.
“But why can’t he act?” he insisted, knowing he sounded too much like the annoying little brother. “He’s an angel.”
“Because he’s a fucking angel and you’re a human!” Dee snarled, shoving herself in between them as she jabbed a finger in Sam’s chest. Sam stepped back because if he didn’t he was going to start swinging himself. “Because those are the rules, and God made ‘em and right now God doesn’t wanna change ‘em!” Dee swiped her hand across her face and looked down as Dean nodded agreement. “Fuck if I know. Engines, they make sense. God? God didn’t tell Job what the deal was, and He isn’t stopping to explain Himself to a Winchester.”
Sam had never stopped hoping that angels were good. Getting Dean out of Hell bought a lot of slack with him. But that didn’t put them on the same side. It didn’t mean he was going to lie down and get killed because the angels disagreed about how best to fight Lucifer. Yes, Sam was playing with fire. But Winchesters knew how to use fire.
“I’ll talk to him,” Dean said, unhappily. “But if he gets angry—”
“He’s already angry,” Dee snapped.
“More angry,” Dean snarled right back. “I’m just sayin’, poking at an angel without a plan is dumb even for us.”
“There’ll be a plan,” Sam interrupted. They stared at him. He shook his head: he didn’t have it together yet, but he could feel the pieces moving, shifting.
Dean blew out a breath. “Hope you know what you’re doin’, Sammy.”
So did he.
****
Sam hadn’t thought through the fact that Dean’s communication with Castiel would leave him alone with Dee. Dean would normally have dealt with being cooped up together by throwing spitballs or something equally annoying. It wasn’t the same with Dee, but she was at least as antsy, pacing around like a newly caged tiger. His headache faded into mere background discomfort, but he still had trouble concentrating.
He tried to work on a ritual to open the door between the worlds. He still had no idea what the fortune-teller had done. Bobby was trying to track her down, but their only contacts had been online and he wasn’t hopeful.
The room smelled different with Dee in it. There was the usual faint detergent scent of every halfway decent motel—some had a hint of powdery orange, others were floral, but you could always tell that not all the chemicals had come out in the wash. Over the past few years, he’d gotten used to it again, along with the lean warm smell of Dean, running from Irish Spring-clean to hunt-rank but always fundamentally Dean. Dee smelled like—well, Dean was all over her, of course, but under that was something sweet, like sugar cookies.
Sam opened his eyes and hoped that he hadn’t been sniffing. The blank page on his screen regarded him chidingly.
Then it was obscured by Dee, who was—fuck, pouring herself into his lap, straddling him and leaning back, her hands braced against his shoulders. “Dee!” he squeaked, lurching backwards in his chair.
She smiled at him, her eyes grass-green and her lips shining pink where she’d just licked them. “C’mon, you haven’t done a damn thing in twenty minutes. I figure you could use a break to clear your head. I always think better after a good lay.”
“I can’t even figure out where to start on how wrong this is!” He was pleased that his voice didn’t break. Dee was warm against his legs, soft in just the right ways, pressing him down into the cheap wood. “Even aside—you—Dean,” he stumbled to a halt, working on a way to explain the completely obvious to the utterly oblivious.
“We aren’t dating, Sammy.” She slid forward, her jeans rubbing roughly against his hips.
This was exactly like trying to talk to Dean about—which was why it was such a bad-- He’d spent four months chasing the little death, then half a year celibate as a monk, and she smelled so—
“You have a better body than Dean,” Dee said, which shouldn’t have made Sam thrust up against her ass. “I mean, he’s a ten, don’t get me wrong, but you’re just like Samantha, hiding what she’s got even though her tits are better than mine.”
Involuntarily, Sam’s eyes dropped to Dee’s chest, her nipples outlined even through her bra and the thin cotton of Dean’s undershirt. “Honestly,” he said, clenching his fists on the denim of his jeans to keep his hands from deciding for him, “I find that very hard to believe.”
Dee wriggled happily. “Aren’t you sweet?” Cooing it like he was a kid, like she wasn’t giving him a lap dance.
And that was it, the end of his self-control. He stood, grabbing her waist, and practically threw her onto the bed. Dee laughed, her head back, as he tore at her jeans and ripped her panties down until they hung off one of her ankles. Seconds later, he buried his face between her legs.
She tasted sweeter and darker than molasses—nectar and ambrosia, he thought wildly, understanding now why Dean had been acting so drugged. He could do this for hours, and he wanted to tell her so, only that would require taking his tongue off of her, so instead he just hummed as he suckled, wet curls of hair scraping against his face. She jolted up and he wrapped his hands around her hips to keep her in place. “Fuck, yeah, baby,” she said, and kept on like that, words spilling out of her like she was doing phone sex.
She fisted a hand in his hair, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, as he brought a hand up to slide two fingers into her, curling into her slickness.
When she arched up and tightened around him, he was tempted to keep going, but his hardon argued strenuously against that. “Strip,” he ordered, and pulled back to shed his own clothes. It was hard to remember what he was doing while she was obeying, especially when she took off her bra, naked except for her amulet. He could see the full circle-and-pentagram of her tattoo, sloping across her breast.
Dean had left a box of condoms on the table between the beds, and Sam grabbed one. He paused above her, looking down at her naked body, breasts and pussy spread out for him, and groaned without meaning to. She giggled, which made her breasts bounce even more enticingly, and he put his hands on her thighs, still wet from his spit and her own arousal, pushing them apart.
He had to close his eyes when he slid into her. She gasped and brought her legs up to wrap around his hips. She was tight hot slick around him, lunging up and sticking her tongue in his mouth, sucking her own taste out of him, salt-sweet and musky, like something he’d always wanted but never quite known.
He put his hands on her shoulders, shoving her back into the mattress, fucking her so hard he expected a protest. She just surged up, meeting each thrust with a wriggling twist. He felt the grind of her amulet against his chest, digging bruises into his skin. With each girl he’d fucked during that endless four months, he’d twisted the thong around before they started so that the amulet hit his back and didn’t touch her, didn’t get tarnished with a stranger’s sweat. This amulet wasn’t his to protect. It was right where it belonged.
He pulled back to see it: the golden-brown bull’s head bouncing between her breasts, a red mark on her sternum where their fucking had shoved it into her flesh. He looked further down, to where his cock was sliding in and out of her, thick and red beneath the cloudy yellow of the condom. She moved a hand down, fingering herself while he watched, and he bit his lip and sped up his thrusts.
She had the same handprint on her shoulder, looking even bigger given her smaller size. His hand fit right over the marks, hiding them away, the red raised flesh hot under his skin like it was still feeling the flames.
Dee moaned when he dug his fingers in, throwing her head back in a gesture too pornographic to be uncalculated, but the clench around him was perfectly real. Her hair spread on the pillow around her, a few shades more golden than the amulet.
“He can’t have you,” he told her. “He can’t have you.”
She nodded, eyes closed, as if he’d just said something profound. Then speech was beyond him. He grabbed her and held on, fingers slipping over her sweat-slick skin, while she ran her hands over his shoulders, his back, his arms. She hitched her legs up, around his waist, drawing him deeper. The noises they made were ridiculous, wet and thick and loud. Her skin was salty, almost sour. It didn’t taste any different on her shoulder, even though he could feel the scar-thickness of the brand, smooth and hot under his tongue, rough edges where it merged with her untouched skin. She moaned when he tested it with his teeth, losing her rhythm as he bit down and pounded into her.
She screamed when she came this time, her fingernails scraping down his back, pushing him over the edge and into pleasure as intense as a lightning strike in a thunderstorm.
The last time he’d felt this good, he’d just pushed a demon back into Hell.
Sam forced the thought aside and made himself reach down, grabbing the condom as he pulled back and off. He was still mostly hard, sensitive enough that the feeling of his own fingers made him gasp. Dee’s eyes followed his hands as he pulled the rubber off and cast it aside. When he collapsed on his back, she rolled until she was snugged up against him, one leg thrown over his and her breasts soft against his side.
“How long until you can go again?” she asked, following the hot words in his ear with a hotter swipe of tongue. He twitched, and even though he couldn’t see her face he could tell she was as smug as Dean when he’d just emptied a clip and hit the bullseye with every shot.
“Sooner if you don’t start comparing,” he warned her.
She smiled into his shoulder. “Are you sure about that?”
So yeah, this had been an All-Star Bad Idea. He pressed his lips tight and chalked up any other reaction to aftershocks.
Dee’s right hand wandered idly over his chest, stroking over his collarbones, circling his nipples briefly, lingering over the scattering of moles on his side. Her thumb rubbed over his abs, like he was some weapon she was thinking of buying.
He was not ready for her to push herself down the bed and put her face up against his half-mast cock, bracing her hands to either side of his hips as she breathed in and out, damp against his skin. Her hair covered her face and tickled his thighs. “Fuck,” he moaned, and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to pull her away. But then she opened her mouth and started licking the head, cleaning him off, moving down the shaft in slow teasing circles.
“Yeah,” she mumbled, right up against his dick, and then took him in her mouth for real, halfway in one quick swallow. His fingers tightened on her, hard enough that he felt her shoulderbones, but she only opened her mouth further, her tongue fluttering against him.
“Ohfuck,” he said, and that was about as coherent as he got for the next however many minutes.
She didn’t let him come in her mouth—he had a moment of black rage, wondering if—anyway, she pulled off and rolled another condom on, quick as reloading a shotgun, then climbed on top, using the position to rock against him like he was just there for her convenience, her eyes closed and her head thrown back and her breasts just begging for his hands.
He wrapped one arm around her waist and sat up, dragging her to her knees; it wasn’t as deep but the angle was better, allowing him to press against her, his other hand hard between her shoulderblades to keep their bodies locked together. She hooked her chin over his shoulder and moved up and down like she could hear a metronome.
Sam didn’t hear the door open.
He did hear it close.
He pulled away from Dee’s neck and looked up. Dean was standing a couple of feet inside, his mouth open and his eyes comically wide.
Dee stilled, so suddenly that Sam nearly screamed, and turned her head. At this angle, Sam couldn’t interpret her expression, but then she smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Well?” she asked, then pushed Sam down so that he was flat on his back again, unable to see what Dean was doing.
There was a soft, collapsing sound—Dean’s jacket hitting the floor, Sam realized. Dee squeaked as Sam thrust up uncontrollably, then moaned her way through what Sam was pretty sure was an exaggerated, albeit real, orgasm.
The bed whined when Dean got on, but Sam still couldn’t see him. Sam felt like his body weighed a thousand tons, unable to move even a fraction. Dee made a soft, pleased sound, and her knees pressed more closely into Sam’s hips, forced there by Dean. Dean’s heels bumped against Sam’s calves as he shifted around, and Sam shivered in reaction. Sam closed his eyes, but he could imagine it: Dean up on his knees, pulling Dee back against his chest.
Dee twitched and slipped backwards, pulling half off Sam. He blinked up at her, sweat stinging his eyes. Her face was twisted in concentration as she panted, just out of time with Dean, who had his arm tight just under her breasts. Sam could see the veins standing out as he held her in place. “Ah!” she yelped, bringing one hand back to brace against Dean’s thigh as she curled down, her hair falling over her eyes.
Then Dean pushed forward, and Dee slid back down, gasping. Sam’s hips pulsed up. Dean was practically sitting on his upper thighs, not resting his weight there but nonetheless impossible to ignore. Dean had his face pressed into Dee’s neck, mouthing over the tendons standing out as she tilted back, her skin shining where he’d left his mark. Dean’s eyes were closed, lashes dark against his cheeks, as focused as if he were reloading his gun by touch.
Sam was—they were—could he tell, if he moved right? She was tighter than before around him, unbelievable. The smell was different, too, darker under the chemical tang of lubricant.
“Suck her tit for me,” Dean instructed, his voice strained and deeper than usual. “Make it nice and wet.”
And no fucking way was Sam taking orders from Dean, except that it was a really good idea, so Sam pulled his head and shoulders off of the bed, levering himself up to take her right nipple into his mouth. Dee made a pleased sound and Sam opened his mouth further, sucking in as much of her breast as he could. She tasted like sweat and honey. He braced himself on his elbow and brought his free hand up to squeeze her other breast, where his fingers collided with Dean’s. But Dean pulled away quickly, his hand running down Dee’s belly to settle between her legs, fingering her so that his knuckles brushed against the top of Sam’s groin every time Sam thrust up.
Pretty soon Sam couldn’t keep it all coordinated and fell back, still holding Dee’s breast because that felt too good to stop. Dean brought his hand back up, rubbing shiny fingers around Dee’s spit-wet nipple, sliding his other hand around from where it had been resting on her hip to take over working her clit. His ring caught flashes of light as his fingers moved on her breast.
“C’mon, Sam,” Dee urged. “Lemme see.” She put her hand over his tattoo—she was too small to hide the whole thing, edges of black peeking around her fingers—and pushed down. His pulse lurched, like a wasps’ nest bursting open inside him.
He came so hard that he didn’t know what happened next.
At one point, he opened his eyes a fraction and saw Dean’s hand rubbing over Dee’s shoulder, inches from his face. The bed was warm and shaking just a little as they moved in it.
Sleep was the better part of valor, he decided.
****
He woke with a gasp, bursting through his own skin like dough rising in some infernal oven. Another seal had broken, out in the world, and power pulsed through him with such force that it almost felt like excitement.
Fifty-seven.
Stuffing his face back into the pillow, he concentrated on calming his breathing. Someone had put a sheet over him while he was out. He turned his head carefully, checking through the screen of his bangs to see if either of them had been watching.
Dee had her hair wrapped in a towel and had thrown on yet another of Dean’s shirts, along with her jeans. She was cleaning some of the guns. Dean was sitting in front of Sam’s computer, frowning at something while he chewed on a pen. A pile of styrofoam containers near his elbow suggested that Dean had combined angel consultation with a lunch run, which was almost ridiculous enough to make Sam smile despite everything.
Flush with the shock of the seal breaking, Sam wanted something to kill, but he’d settle for a situation report. He grabbed for his boxers and jeans, puddled exactly where he’d dropped them beside the bed, and jumped into them.
Dean looked up, his face a near-blank, worry lurking underneath it. Same as ever, these days. “Hey.”
“How’s Castiel?”
He didn’t miss, but couldn’t interpret, the glance Dean exchanged with Dee. “Doesn’t know a damn thing.”
“That’s good,” Sam said.
“It is?” Dean asked.
“I think I can see how this is gonna work for us,” he told them. “But here’s the part you’re not gonna like: I need to talk to Ruby—”
He stopped because they were both shaking their heads, each “No!” exactly as loud as the other, both standing and moving towards him as if the problem was that he simply wasn’t close enough to accept their judgment.
“Ruby doesn’t like whatever Castiel has planned, and she also doesn’t want Lucifer walking free, so she’s our best bet to cross-check, make sure that this—Dee being here and not where she should be—isn’t one of Lilith’s schemes.”
“And what if it’s not?” Dean asked. “Let’s pretend you can trust her and she tells you she doesn’t know what’s up. What then?”
“Give me a little more time, Dean.” He didn’t want to say anything before he knew whether it was worth trying. Neither of them needed any more ripped-away chances for salvation.
Dean threw up his hands and turned away.
“I’m telling you, I need to see her. I’m telling you.”
Dean looked over at Dee. Years ago, during his one uncomfortable visit with Jess’s parents, he’d watched her mom and dad have an entire conversation about him with just their expressions. This was like that, except much more painful. He could live with Dean not trusting him. He knew so because he had survived this far. He didn’t think he could live with being replaced.
“When you get back, you’d better have a plan,” Dean said at last, his eyes still locked with Dee’s.
Sam tossed on his shirt and began looking for his boots. He wasn’t going to give them time to rethink.
As he started the car, he glanced over at the window of their room and saw Dean and Dee, blurry through the glass. He couldn’t tell whether they were looking at him, or at each other.
****
The newspaper boxes outside the diner had ominous headlines: TROOPS MASSING IN CHINA. FOOD RIOTS SPREAD. PENINSULA EVACUATED, THOUSANDS DEAD. Even if they stopped the opening of the seventh seal, Sam wondered if the world was too far gone to be saved.
He could only do his part. Or not do his part, as the case might be.
He kept his head down and ordered a burger and a side of fries—Dean’s meal, the one he’d eaten regularly while Dean had been dead, never tasting a bite. He’d mostly stopped since Dean’s return, but the order came out automatically, maybe because he was distracted.
“So, Dean’s taken up with another slutbomb,” Ruby said by way of introduction, sliding into the bench across from him.
Sam looked up from his burger and suppressed his half-hearted objection. “Is she a player?” It was good not to have to feign his deep uncertainty.
Ruby shrugged, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “She’s nothing, except that you really don’t want your brother splitting his loyalties right now. A change in the pattern from one-night stands is not in our favor.”
“We’re getting along fine,” Sam reassured her, trying not to show his renewed hope.
Ruby snorted, then grabbed his plate of fries. “I don’t care if you have to get down on your knees and suck his cock, you’d better keep him on your side for when this thing goes down.” She stopped, a french fry halfway to her mouth, and examined him, tilting her head up. “Sam? Sam, are you—you’re fucking her! Does big brother know?”
Sam nodded, keeping his lips together.
“And he’s okay with that? Because if you’re going to lose us the apocalypse in some kind of dick-measuring competition—”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t—I think it will help. I don’t know,” he admitted, which was more than he’d meant to say.
Ruby pursed her lips. “Well, I have to admit, a tawdry threesome is more our side than theirs, though given how much Dean’s already been forgiven I’m not sure it matters. But yeah, if the family that plays together stays together, then you go ahead and rock her world. Just keep your eyes on the prize.”
What does that even mean? Sam wondered.
The important thing was that Ruby didn’t see anything special about Dee, any more than the other demons had. And while he knew she’d happily weave a tapestry out of his intestines if it would serve her own interests better than teaching him how to use his powers, he thought she was sincere in her desire to keep the world turning. She was the likeliest one to admit it if she saw what Dee was.
“Hey,” she said, waving her hand in front of his eyes, which had dipped down to the table. He raised his head, but the suddenness of the motion set every sore muscle to singing out its agonies and he didn’t suppress a wince.
“Oh, for—why haven’t you healed yourself?” she demanded.
He glared at her through his bangs. “I don’t think we covered that.” They’d been too busy working on exorcism.
“How do you think we keep the meatsuits alive past their expiration dates?”
He hadn’t. Ruby sighed and grabbed his hand, the way she’d done when she was first teaching him how to drive out a demon. The old connection between them zinged open, and he scrambled to lock his defenses down. If she saw anything she shouldn’t—but she was pushing into him, not pulling, an uncomfortable fullness like choking down mouthful after mouthful of near-spoiled food. The knowledge curled in his belly, greasy and uneven but useful all the same.
Her hand was so cold in his. He pushed the concern for her borrowed body away and focused on what she’d shown him. Swollen and leaking blood vessels wanted to heal themselves, lacked only time and energy. He could provide that, or something alien in him could, and right now he needed the extra edge.
When Sam opened his eyes again, the headache was gone. Ruby was finishing the last of his burger. Despite all the work he’d just done, Sam felt no hunger, just an impulse to grab her and choke her until even demon healing wouldn’t work on her.
It occurred to him that perhaps demons got energy from something other than food.
“So why’d you get over your allergy to me all of a sudden?” she asked. She was looking down, but he could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was angry.
Sam shook his head. “Castiel threatened my life if I kept on practicing. So your lessons were kind of irrelevant. Whatever I do in the endgame, I do from a cold start.”
She raised her head, black-eyed. “That wasn’t an answer, Samuel.”
Too smart. Sam listened to the small sounds of other people chatting around them, forks clinking, glasses clonking against formica tables. He kept his body as tense as Ruby would expect it to be. “Two questions. First, like you said, Dean’s new girl’s an unexpected variable. It had me worried, and I don’t trust Dean to give me a straight answer. But if you don’t know anything about her, then I figure she’s Dean’s last hurrah. Like soldiers going off for war, you know.”
Ruby let her eyes flicker back to her host’s, dark and serious. “I know,” she said, almost wistful. Sam wondered what she’d have done if he’d made a pass at her, either during the months without Dean or in the few weeks after. He pushed his plate away, no longer hungry.
“Second, Dean’s—his ability, it hurts me even when I’m not doing anything. If there’s no way to protect me from it, then you and I might as well both just run.”
Ruby nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve got an idea about that. Give me a day or so.” He watched her throat, how it moved with her breath, how he could see veins sketched just below her pale skin. He wondered whether her host still lived.
“I’ll be in touch soon,” he promised, and got out. He stuck her with the check.
****
Halfway back to the motel, the phone rang. “We got a message from a bunch of demons,” Dean said grimly. “Come to where they say or they’ll kill everyone at the high school. It’s game night, Sam. I saw the signs when we were drivin’ earlier.”
Dean had to know he couldn’t sacrifice himself for a town full of people. Not even a state full of them. Dean was a keystone, on this Sam and Heaven agreed.
"You know what they'll do to you," he said, hopeless. The cage from last time would be there now. Lilith’s demons meant to take Dean apart slowly. Just like Heaven was doing, he thought, only with more blood.
"I need you at that high school," Dean told him. "So I’ll know those kids're safe." Dee couldn’t take out a bunch of demons, not with only Ruby’s knife and no backup nor time to prepare the location. Sam was the logical and inevitable choice. And Dean was tacitly acknowledging that Sam’s powers were the lesser evil. It was what he’d wanted for months, only edged with disaster.
Sam swallowed. "Where is it?"
Dean rattled the address off, then paused. "And when you're done there, come for us." Sam had to close his eyes when Dean gave him the second address. Dean didn’t express any doubt that Sam would go save a bunch of clueless teenagers first.
Lilith had the right idea: if she managed to take Dean out, he’d race her to end the world, because a Heaven that wouldn’t save Dean didn’t deserve any of its plans to come to fruition.
****
Game night meant that he couldn’t find parking, so he slung the Impala into a loading dock. Pocketing the keys made him wonder whether Dean had actually taken a cab to go get tortured by a bunch of demons. He broke into the high school through the nearby door. That put him in an area near the cafeteria, gray-walled and smelling of oranges and fryer grease.
He pushed open a set of double doors and entered the student side. Big place, like half the schools he’d attended, hand-drawn posters on the walls advertising college counseling and suicide prevention and the prom committee. Rough-painted arrows over the yellow metal lockers, pointing to different areas of the school: vocational, arts, sciences.
Crowd noise penetrated through the empty halls, echoing off the industrial-block walls and the infinite rows of lockers, dented here and there where some football player had hammered some ninety-pound-weakling. He followed the sounds, like searching out the source of a fire in the middle of a forest, until he was close enough that he could feel the vibrations under his feet. Warm golden light spilled through the windows in the heavy doors that led to the gym.
He sent his senses out, little tendrils of thought creeping softly through the walls and over the floors, checking for any likeness. Five, six—eight, he counted, then checked again to be sure. Six of them among the bleachers, probably armed and ready to create bloody chaos at the right signal, and two of them deeper in the building, one on either side of the gym. Sam was guessing that they were blocking the exits.
The bleachers shook with feet pounding, families and friends yelling their support. Pompoms flashed as cheerleaders tumbled and jumped, leading a cheer that combined insult with pep. The whole gym seemed to pulse in and out, like a heartbeat.
Sam was bitterly grateful to Lilith for having made it so far as he gathered his powers, which were surging like a pack of wolves even though he’d ignored them for so long. He was so out of practice that he knew he’d have less pain actually sticking his head into a blender. No way around it, though, so he closed his eyes and concentrated.
The command exploded out of him like a grenade going off, sending a psychic blast wave through the school. His vision rippled like reality was a sheet being shaken out. The noise faltered, as if the humans had all sensed the presence of the uncanny; as if they’d all suddenly been standing in Sam’s shoes, alone in the hallway dripping with unwanted power and death.
He felt the demons fall apart, popping like ink-filled bubbles as their hosts hiccupped them up.
And then the backlash hit him. He was a snake too large for its skin, a balloon overfilled and exploding, trapped like Gulliver in a net held by thousands of Lilliputians too small to see. He was instantly drenched in sweat, shivering before the heat died down, staggering sideways until he clanged against a locker, then sliding down into a heap against the cool, dirty floor.
Sam’s head felt like it had been scraped clean on the inside with a sharp stick. The feeling was not unlike being badly hurt and heavily dosed with oxycodone. There was pain somewhere, and the somewhere was him, but he was light enough to float away so it didn’t actually matter.
This wasn’t the familiar brain-crushing headache of using the powers. If anything, he was brimful with power, gorged with it.
The fifty-eighth seal had broken.
He flashed back to the positions the demons had been in. They’d formed the outline of an eye; it must have been a mystical symbol. The simultaneous exorcism, like a mass human sacrifice, had triggered some mechanism, probably one Lilith couldn’t have operated on her own.
Tonight was a trap for him as much as for Dean. One more seal and it was open season on him, not to mention probably mere days before the Morningstar brought Hell to earth.
The roar of the game resumed, as if someone had just muted it for a second to answer the phone but had thought better of it. Sam couldn’t stand here and worry. He couldn’t even stop to check whether the hosts needed medical attention.
part 4a.
Part 2. Note: obviously, written before tonight, and blithely ignoring whatever we found out there. (I have a whole bitter rant that is only half about the ethical issues; the other half is about Bad Characterization in Lazarus Rising; but, whatever.)
“What the fuck was that?” Dee asked again once they were safe in their room, struggling into one of Dean’s T-shirts to replace the shirt she’d ruined with the victim’s blood. Sam recognized the habit of cursing a way through a problem, if not the timbre of the voice.
Sam took another drink of water, chasing the last of the pain pills he was going to allow himself. He’d taken enough to blunt the worst of it, but he needed to be able to think. “We need to find out if Castiel knows anything about Dee. Will he be in touch soon?”
“The demons weren’t expecting that, why would he know?” Dee snapped.
“Different sources,” Sam said, as mildly as he could. “He does have a line to the All-Knowing.”
Dean put an awkward hand on Dee’s shoulder. Dee shuddered, but didn’t shove him away. Sam wouldn’t have thought that Dee would be so put out by losing a power she—Dean—claimed to hate so much. Then again, failing in the middle of a battle like that had to have been frightening.
“I can summon him,” Dean said slowly, which was another fun new fact. “But he gets pissed if I do it for no reason.” The way he said it, he didn’t want Castiel angry, which was unusual since Dean generally lived to make steam come out the ears of non-Dad authority figures.
Sam frowned. “Don’t mention parallel realities or anything like that. Ask him if Lilith sent Dee to, I don’t know, tempt us.”
“Us?” Dee repeated, her eyebrow raised, distracted from her anger.
Dean paused briefly, his mouth working on some undoubtedly awful quip, but then he shook his head. “And if he says he’s got no clue?”
Dee snorted. “Tell him you’re starting to believe that there’s only one solution.”
“What?” Sam demanded. He had a bad feeling about this.
Dean rubbed a hand through his hair, then over his mouth, then turned away. “He said stop you or the angels would. But he’s bluffing, he can’t touch you.”
Dee nodded.
“How do you know he’s bluffing?” Sam asked, feeling as if this was information he should have had beforehand.
“Because if he coulda done something, he woulda already—you scare the shit out of him and Uriel even when you’re not using the powers,” Dean said.
“But why can’t he act?” he insisted, knowing he sounded too much like the annoying little brother. “He’s an angel.”
“Because he’s a fucking angel and you’re a human!” Dee snarled, shoving herself in between them as she jabbed a finger in Sam’s chest. Sam stepped back because if he didn’t he was going to start swinging himself. “Because those are the rules, and God made ‘em and right now God doesn’t wanna change ‘em!” Dee swiped her hand across her face and looked down as Dean nodded agreement. “Fuck if I know. Engines, they make sense. God? God didn’t tell Job what the deal was, and He isn’t stopping to explain Himself to a Winchester.”
Sam had never stopped hoping that angels were good. Getting Dean out of Hell bought a lot of slack with him. But that didn’t put them on the same side. It didn’t mean he was going to lie down and get killed because the angels disagreed about how best to fight Lucifer. Yes, Sam was playing with fire. But Winchesters knew how to use fire.
“I’ll talk to him,” Dean said, unhappily. “But if he gets angry—”
“He’s already angry,” Dee snapped.
“More angry,” Dean snarled right back. “I’m just sayin’, poking at an angel without a plan is dumb even for us.”
“There’ll be a plan,” Sam interrupted. They stared at him. He shook his head: he didn’t have it together yet, but he could feel the pieces moving, shifting.
Dean blew out a breath. “Hope you know what you’re doin’, Sammy.”
So did he.
****
Sam hadn’t thought through the fact that Dean’s communication with Castiel would leave him alone with Dee. Dean would normally have dealt with being cooped up together by throwing spitballs or something equally annoying. It wasn’t the same with Dee, but she was at least as antsy, pacing around like a newly caged tiger. His headache faded into mere background discomfort, but he still had trouble concentrating.
He tried to work on a ritual to open the door between the worlds. He still had no idea what the fortune-teller had done. Bobby was trying to track her down, but their only contacts had been online and he wasn’t hopeful.
The room smelled different with Dee in it. There was the usual faint detergent scent of every halfway decent motel—some had a hint of powdery orange, others were floral, but you could always tell that not all the chemicals had come out in the wash. Over the past few years, he’d gotten used to it again, along with the lean warm smell of Dean, running from Irish Spring-clean to hunt-rank but always fundamentally Dean. Dee smelled like—well, Dean was all over her, of course, but under that was something sweet, like sugar cookies.
Sam opened his eyes and hoped that he hadn’t been sniffing. The blank page on his screen regarded him chidingly.
Then it was obscured by Dee, who was—fuck, pouring herself into his lap, straddling him and leaning back, her hands braced against his shoulders. “Dee!” he squeaked, lurching backwards in his chair.
She smiled at him, her eyes grass-green and her lips shining pink where she’d just licked them. “C’mon, you haven’t done a damn thing in twenty minutes. I figure you could use a break to clear your head. I always think better after a good lay.”
“I can’t even figure out where to start on how wrong this is!” He was pleased that his voice didn’t break. Dee was warm against his legs, soft in just the right ways, pressing him down into the cheap wood. “Even aside—you—Dean,” he stumbled to a halt, working on a way to explain the completely obvious to the utterly oblivious.
“We aren’t dating, Sammy.” She slid forward, her jeans rubbing roughly against his hips.
This was exactly like trying to talk to Dean about—which was why it was such a bad-- He’d spent four months chasing the little death, then half a year celibate as a monk, and she smelled so—
“You have a better body than Dean,” Dee said, which shouldn’t have made Sam thrust up against her ass. “I mean, he’s a ten, don’t get me wrong, but you’re just like Samantha, hiding what she’s got even though her tits are better than mine.”
Involuntarily, Sam’s eyes dropped to Dee’s chest, her nipples outlined even through her bra and the thin cotton of Dean’s undershirt. “Honestly,” he said, clenching his fists on the denim of his jeans to keep his hands from deciding for him, “I find that very hard to believe.”
Dee wriggled happily. “Aren’t you sweet?” Cooing it like he was a kid, like she wasn’t giving him a lap dance.
And that was it, the end of his self-control. He stood, grabbing her waist, and practically threw her onto the bed. Dee laughed, her head back, as he tore at her jeans and ripped her panties down until they hung off one of her ankles. Seconds later, he buried his face between her legs.
She tasted sweeter and darker than molasses—nectar and ambrosia, he thought wildly, understanding now why Dean had been acting so drugged. He could do this for hours, and he wanted to tell her so, only that would require taking his tongue off of her, so instead he just hummed as he suckled, wet curls of hair scraping against his face. She jolted up and he wrapped his hands around her hips to keep her in place. “Fuck, yeah, baby,” she said, and kept on like that, words spilling out of her like she was doing phone sex.
She fisted a hand in his hair, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, as he brought a hand up to slide two fingers into her, curling into her slickness.
When she arched up and tightened around him, he was tempted to keep going, but his hardon argued strenuously against that. “Strip,” he ordered, and pulled back to shed his own clothes. It was hard to remember what he was doing while she was obeying, especially when she took off her bra, naked except for her amulet. He could see the full circle-and-pentagram of her tattoo, sloping across her breast.
Dean had left a box of condoms on the table between the beds, and Sam grabbed one. He paused above her, looking down at her naked body, breasts and pussy spread out for him, and groaned without meaning to. She giggled, which made her breasts bounce even more enticingly, and he put his hands on her thighs, still wet from his spit and her own arousal, pushing them apart.
He had to close his eyes when he slid into her. She gasped and brought her legs up to wrap around his hips. She was tight hot slick around him, lunging up and sticking her tongue in his mouth, sucking her own taste out of him, salt-sweet and musky, like something he’d always wanted but never quite known.
He put his hands on her shoulders, shoving her back into the mattress, fucking her so hard he expected a protest. She just surged up, meeting each thrust with a wriggling twist. He felt the grind of her amulet against his chest, digging bruises into his skin. With each girl he’d fucked during that endless four months, he’d twisted the thong around before they started so that the amulet hit his back and didn’t touch her, didn’t get tarnished with a stranger’s sweat. This amulet wasn’t his to protect. It was right where it belonged.
He pulled back to see it: the golden-brown bull’s head bouncing between her breasts, a red mark on her sternum where their fucking had shoved it into her flesh. He looked further down, to where his cock was sliding in and out of her, thick and red beneath the cloudy yellow of the condom. She moved a hand down, fingering herself while he watched, and he bit his lip and sped up his thrusts.
She had the same handprint on her shoulder, looking even bigger given her smaller size. His hand fit right over the marks, hiding them away, the red raised flesh hot under his skin like it was still feeling the flames.
Dee moaned when he dug his fingers in, throwing her head back in a gesture too pornographic to be uncalculated, but the clench around him was perfectly real. Her hair spread on the pillow around her, a few shades more golden than the amulet.
“He can’t have you,” he told her. “He can’t have you.”
She nodded, eyes closed, as if he’d just said something profound. Then speech was beyond him. He grabbed her and held on, fingers slipping over her sweat-slick skin, while she ran her hands over his shoulders, his back, his arms. She hitched her legs up, around his waist, drawing him deeper. The noises they made were ridiculous, wet and thick and loud. Her skin was salty, almost sour. It didn’t taste any different on her shoulder, even though he could feel the scar-thickness of the brand, smooth and hot under his tongue, rough edges where it merged with her untouched skin. She moaned when he tested it with his teeth, losing her rhythm as he bit down and pounded into her.
She screamed when she came this time, her fingernails scraping down his back, pushing him over the edge and into pleasure as intense as a lightning strike in a thunderstorm.
The last time he’d felt this good, he’d just pushed a demon back into Hell.
Sam forced the thought aside and made himself reach down, grabbing the condom as he pulled back and off. He was still mostly hard, sensitive enough that the feeling of his own fingers made him gasp. Dee’s eyes followed his hands as he pulled the rubber off and cast it aside. When he collapsed on his back, she rolled until she was snugged up against him, one leg thrown over his and her breasts soft against his side.
“How long until you can go again?” she asked, following the hot words in his ear with a hotter swipe of tongue. He twitched, and even though he couldn’t see her face he could tell she was as smug as Dean when he’d just emptied a clip and hit the bullseye with every shot.
“Sooner if you don’t start comparing,” he warned her.
She smiled into his shoulder. “Are you sure about that?”
So yeah, this had been an All-Star Bad Idea. He pressed his lips tight and chalked up any other reaction to aftershocks.
Dee’s right hand wandered idly over his chest, stroking over his collarbones, circling his nipples briefly, lingering over the scattering of moles on his side. Her thumb rubbed over his abs, like he was some weapon she was thinking of buying.
He was not ready for her to push herself down the bed and put her face up against his half-mast cock, bracing her hands to either side of his hips as she breathed in and out, damp against his skin. Her hair covered her face and tickled his thighs. “Fuck,” he moaned, and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to pull her away. But then she opened her mouth and started licking the head, cleaning him off, moving down the shaft in slow teasing circles.
“Yeah,” she mumbled, right up against his dick, and then took him in her mouth for real, halfway in one quick swallow. His fingers tightened on her, hard enough that he felt her shoulderbones, but she only opened her mouth further, her tongue fluttering against him.
“Ohfuck,” he said, and that was about as coherent as he got for the next however many minutes.
She didn’t let him come in her mouth—he had a moment of black rage, wondering if—anyway, she pulled off and rolled another condom on, quick as reloading a shotgun, then climbed on top, using the position to rock against him like he was just there for her convenience, her eyes closed and her head thrown back and her breasts just begging for his hands.
He wrapped one arm around her waist and sat up, dragging her to her knees; it wasn’t as deep but the angle was better, allowing him to press against her, his other hand hard between her shoulderblades to keep their bodies locked together. She hooked her chin over his shoulder and moved up and down like she could hear a metronome.
Sam didn’t hear the door open.
He did hear it close.
He pulled away from Dee’s neck and looked up. Dean was standing a couple of feet inside, his mouth open and his eyes comically wide.
Dee stilled, so suddenly that Sam nearly screamed, and turned her head. At this angle, Sam couldn’t interpret her expression, but then she smiled and raised an eyebrow. “Well?” she asked, then pushed Sam down so that he was flat on his back again, unable to see what Dean was doing.
There was a soft, collapsing sound—Dean’s jacket hitting the floor, Sam realized. Dee squeaked as Sam thrust up uncontrollably, then moaned her way through what Sam was pretty sure was an exaggerated, albeit real, orgasm.
The bed whined when Dean got on, but Sam still couldn’t see him. Sam felt like his body weighed a thousand tons, unable to move even a fraction. Dee made a soft, pleased sound, and her knees pressed more closely into Sam’s hips, forced there by Dean. Dean’s heels bumped against Sam’s calves as he shifted around, and Sam shivered in reaction. Sam closed his eyes, but he could imagine it: Dean up on his knees, pulling Dee back against his chest.
Dee twitched and slipped backwards, pulling half off Sam. He blinked up at her, sweat stinging his eyes. Her face was twisted in concentration as she panted, just out of time with Dean, who had his arm tight just under her breasts. Sam could see the veins standing out as he held her in place. “Ah!” she yelped, bringing one hand back to brace against Dean’s thigh as she curled down, her hair falling over her eyes.
Then Dean pushed forward, and Dee slid back down, gasping. Sam’s hips pulsed up. Dean was practically sitting on his upper thighs, not resting his weight there but nonetheless impossible to ignore. Dean had his face pressed into Dee’s neck, mouthing over the tendons standing out as she tilted back, her skin shining where he’d left his mark. Dean’s eyes were closed, lashes dark against his cheeks, as focused as if he were reloading his gun by touch.
Sam was—they were—could he tell, if he moved right? She was tighter than before around him, unbelievable. The smell was different, too, darker under the chemical tang of lubricant.
“Suck her tit for me,” Dean instructed, his voice strained and deeper than usual. “Make it nice and wet.”
And no fucking way was Sam taking orders from Dean, except that it was a really good idea, so Sam pulled his head and shoulders off of the bed, levering himself up to take her right nipple into his mouth. Dee made a pleased sound and Sam opened his mouth further, sucking in as much of her breast as he could. She tasted like sweat and honey. He braced himself on his elbow and brought his free hand up to squeeze her other breast, where his fingers collided with Dean’s. But Dean pulled away quickly, his hand running down Dee’s belly to settle between her legs, fingering her so that his knuckles brushed against the top of Sam’s groin every time Sam thrust up.
Pretty soon Sam couldn’t keep it all coordinated and fell back, still holding Dee’s breast because that felt too good to stop. Dean brought his hand back up, rubbing shiny fingers around Dee’s spit-wet nipple, sliding his other hand around from where it had been resting on her hip to take over working her clit. His ring caught flashes of light as his fingers moved on her breast.
“C’mon, Sam,” Dee urged. “Lemme see.” She put her hand over his tattoo—she was too small to hide the whole thing, edges of black peeking around her fingers—and pushed down. His pulse lurched, like a wasps’ nest bursting open inside him.
He came so hard that he didn’t know what happened next.
At one point, he opened his eyes a fraction and saw Dean’s hand rubbing over Dee’s shoulder, inches from his face. The bed was warm and shaking just a little as they moved in it.
Sleep was the better part of valor, he decided.
****
He woke with a gasp, bursting through his own skin like dough rising in some infernal oven. Another seal had broken, out in the world, and power pulsed through him with such force that it almost felt like excitement.
Fifty-seven.
Stuffing his face back into the pillow, he concentrated on calming his breathing. Someone had put a sheet over him while he was out. He turned his head carefully, checking through the screen of his bangs to see if either of them had been watching.
Dee had her hair wrapped in a towel and had thrown on yet another of Dean’s shirts, along with her jeans. She was cleaning some of the guns. Dean was sitting in front of Sam’s computer, frowning at something while he chewed on a pen. A pile of styrofoam containers near his elbow suggested that Dean had combined angel consultation with a lunch run, which was almost ridiculous enough to make Sam smile despite everything.
Flush with the shock of the seal breaking, Sam wanted something to kill, but he’d settle for a situation report. He grabbed for his boxers and jeans, puddled exactly where he’d dropped them beside the bed, and jumped into them.
Dean looked up, his face a near-blank, worry lurking underneath it. Same as ever, these days. “Hey.”
“How’s Castiel?”
He didn’t miss, but couldn’t interpret, the glance Dean exchanged with Dee. “Doesn’t know a damn thing.”
“That’s good,” Sam said.
“It is?” Dean asked.
“I think I can see how this is gonna work for us,” he told them. “But here’s the part you’re not gonna like: I need to talk to Ruby—”
He stopped because they were both shaking their heads, each “No!” exactly as loud as the other, both standing and moving towards him as if the problem was that he simply wasn’t close enough to accept their judgment.
“Ruby doesn’t like whatever Castiel has planned, and she also doesn’t want Lucifer walking free, so she’s our best bet to cross-check, make sure that this—Dee being here and not where she should be—isn’t one of Lilith’s schemes.”
“And what if it’s not?” Dean asked. “Let’s pretend you can trust her and she tells you she doesn’t know what’s up. What then?”
“Give me a little more time, Dean.” He didn’t want to say anything before he knew whether it was worth trying. Neither of them needed any more ripped-away chances for salvation.
Dean threw up his hands and turned away.
“I’m telling you, I need to see her. I’m telling you.”
Dean looked over at Dee. Years ago, during his one uncomfortable visit with Jess’s parents, he’d watched her mom and dad have an entire conversation about him with just their expressions. This was like that, except much more painful. He could live with Dean not trusting him. He knew so because he had survived this far. He didn’t think he could live with being replaced.
“When you get back, you’d better have a plan,” Dean said at last, his eyes still locked with Dee’s.
Sam tossed on his shirt and began looking for his boots. He wasn’t going to give them time to rethink.
As he started the car, he glanced over at the window of their room and saw Dean and Dee, blurry through the glass. He couldn’t tell whether they were looking at him, or at each other.
****
The newspaper boxes outside the diner had ominous headlines: TROOPS MASSING IN CHINA. FOOD RIOTS SPREAD. PENINSULA EVACUATED, THOUSANDS DEAD. Even if they stopped the opening of the seventh seal, Sam wondered if the world was too far gone to be saved.
He could only do his part. Or not do his part, as the case might be.
He kept his head down and ordered a burger and a side of fries—Dean’s meal, the one he’d eaten regularly while Dean had been dead, never tasting a bite. He’d mostly stopped since Dean’s return, but the order came out automatically, maybe because he was distracted.
“So, Dean’s taken up with another slutbomb,” Ruby said by way of introduction, sliding into the bench across from him.
Sam looked up from his burger and suppressed his half-hearted objection. “Is she a player?” It was good not to have to feign his deep uncertainty.
Ruby shrugged, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “She’s nothing, except that you really don’t want your brother splitting his loyalties right now. A change in the pattern from one-night stands is not in our favor.”
“We’re getting along fine,” Sam reassured her, trying not to show his renewed hope.
Ruby snorted, then grabbed his plate of fries. “I don’t care if you have to get down on your knees and suck his cock, you’d better keep him on your side for when this thing goes down.” She stopped, a french fry halfway to her mouth, and examined him, tilting her head up. “Sam? Sam, are you—you’re fucking her! Does big brother know?”
Sam nodded, keeping his lips together.
“And he’s okay with that? Because if you’re going to lose us the apocalypse in some kind of dick-measuring competition—”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t—I think it will help. I don’t know,” he admitted, which was more than he’d meant to say.
Ruby pursed her lips. “Well, I have to admit, a tawdry threesome is more our side than theirs, though given how much Dean’s already been forgiven I’m not sure it matters. But yeah, if the family that plays together stays together, then you go ahead and rock her world. Just keep your eyes on the prize.”
What does that even mean? Sam wondered.
The important thing was that Ruby didn’t see anything special about Dee, any more than the other demons had. And while he knew she’d happily weave a tapestry out of his intestines if it would serve her own interests better than teaching him how to use his powers, he thought she was sincere in her desire to keep the world turning. She was the likeliest one to admit it if she saw what Dee was.
“Hey,” she said, waving her hand in front of his eyes, which had dipped down to the table. He raised his head, but the suddenness of the motion set every sore muscle to singing out its agonies and he didn’t suppress a wince.
“Oh, for—why haven’t you healed yourself?” she demanded.
He glared at her through his bangs. “I don’t think we covered that.” They’d been too busy working on exorcism.
“How do you think we keep the meatsuits alive past their expiration dates?”
He hadn’t. Ruby sighed and grabbed his hand, the way she’d done when she was first teaching him how to drive out a demon. The old connection between them zinged open, and he scrambled to lock his defenses down. If she saw anything she shouldn’t—but she was pushing into him, not pulling, an uncomfortable fullness like choking down mouthful after mouthful of near-spoiled food. The knowledge curled in his belly, greasy and uneven but useful all the same.
Her hand was so cold in his. He pushed the concern for her borrowed body away and focused on what she’d shown him. Swollen and leaking blood vessels wanted to heal themselves, lacked only time and energy. He could provide that, or something alien in him could, and right now he needed the extra edge.
When Sam opened his eyes again, the headache was gone. Ruby was finishing the last of his burger. Despite all the work he’d just done, Sam felt no hunger, just an impulse to grab her and choke her until even demon healing wouldn’t work on her.
It occurred to him that perhaps demons got energy from something other than food.
“So why’d you get over your allergy to me all of a sudden?” she asked. She was looking down, but he could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was angry.
Sam shook his head. “Castiel threatened my life if I kept on practicing. So your lessons were kind of irrelevant. Whatever I do in the endgame, I do from a cold start.”
She raised her head, black-eyed. “That wasn’t an answer, Samuel.”
Too smart. Sam listened to the small sounds of other people chatting around them, forks clinking, glasses clonking against formica tables. He kept his body as tense as Ruby would expect it to be. “Two questions. First, like you said, Dean’s new girl’s an unexpected variable. It had me worried, and I don’t trust Dean to give me a straight answer. But if you don’t know anything about her, then I figure she’s Dean’s last hurrah. Like soldiers going off for war, you know.”
Ruby let her eyes flicker back to her host’s, dark and serious. “I know,” she said, almost wistful. Sam wondered what she’d have done if he’d made a pass at her, either during the months without Dean or in the few weeks after. He pushed his plate away, no longer hungry.
“Second, Dean’s—his ability, it hurts me even when I’m not doing anything. If there’s no way to protect me from it, then you and I might as well both just run.”
Ruby nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve got an idea about that. Give me a day or so.” He watched her throat, how it moved with her breath, how he could see veins sketched just below her pale skin. He wondered whether her host still lived.
“I’ll be in touch soon,” he promised, and got out. He stuck her with the check.
****
Halfway back to the motel, the phone rang. “We got a message from a bunch of demons,” Dean said grimly. “Come to where they say or they’ll kill everyone at the high school. It’s game night, Sam. I saw the signs when we were drivin’ earlier.”
Dean had to know he couldn’t sacrifice himself for a town full of people. Not even a state full of them. Dean was a keystone, on this Sam and Heaven agreed.
"You know what they'll do to you," he said, hopeless. The cage from last time would be there now. Lilith’s demons meant to take Dean apart slowly. Just like Heaven was doing, he thought, only with more blood.
"I need you at that high school," Dean told him. "So I’ll know those kids're safe." Dee couldn’t take out a bunch of demons, not with only Ruby’s knife and no backup nor time to prepare the location. Sam was the logical and inevitable choice. And Dean was tacitly acknowledging that Sam’s powers were the lesser evil. It was what he’d wanted for months, only edged with disaster.
Sam swallowed. "Where is it?"
Dean rattled the address off, then paused. "And when you're done there, come for us." Sam had to close his eyes when Dean gave him the second address. Dean didn’t express any doubt that Sam would go save a bunch of clueless teenagers first.
Lilith had the right idea: if she managed to take Dean out, he’d race her to end the world, because a Heaven that wouldn’t save Dean didn’t deserve any of its plans to come to fruition.
****
Game night meant that he couldn’t find parking, so he slung the Impala into a loading dock. Pocketing the keys made him wonder whether Dean had actually taken a cab to go get tortured by a bunch of demons. He broke into the high school through the nearby door. That put him in an area near the cafeteria, gray-walled and smelling of oranges and fryer grease.
He pushed open a set of double doors and entered the student side. Big place, like half the schools he’d attended, hand-drawn posters on the walls advertising college counseling and suicide prevention and the prom committee. Rough-painted arrows over the yellow metal lockers, pointing to different areas of the school: vocational, arts, sciences.
Crowd noise penetrated through the empty halls, echoing off the industrial-block walls and the infinite rows of lockers, dented here and there where some football player had hammered some ninety-pound-weakling. He followed the sounds, like searching out the source of a fire in the middle of a forest, until he was close enough that he could feel the vibrations under his feet. Warm golden light spilled through the windows in the heavy doors that led to the gym.
He sent his senses out, little tendrils of thought creeping softly through the walls and over the floors, checking for any likeness. Five, six—eight, he counted, then checked again to be sure. Six of them among the bleachers, probably armed and ready to create bloody chaos at the right signal, and two of them deeper in the building, one on either side of the gym. Sam was guessing that they were blocking the exits.
The bleachers shook with feet pounding, families and friends yelling their support. Pompoms flashed as cheerleaders tumbled and jumped, leading a cheer that combined insult with pep. The whole gym seemed to pulse in and out, like a heartbeat.
Sam was bitterly grateful to Lilith for having made it so far as he gathered his powers, which were surging like a pack of wolves even though he’d ignored them for so long. He was so out of practice that he knew he’d have less pain actually sticking his head into a blender. No way around it, though, so he closed his eyes and concentrated.
The command exploded out of him like a grenade going off, sending a psychic blast wave through the school. His vision rippled like reality was a sheet being shaken out. The noise faltered, as if the humans had all sensed the presence of the uncanny; as if they’d all suddenly been standing in Sam’s shoes, alone in the hallway dripping with unwanted power and death.
He felt the demons fall apart, popping like ink-filled bubbles as their hosts hiccupped them up.
And then the backlash hit him. He was a snake too large for its skin, a balloon overfilled and exploding, trapped like Gulliver in a net held by thousands of Lilliputians too small to see. He was instantly drenched in sweat, shivering before the heat died down, staggering sideways until he clanged against a locker, then sliding down into a heap against the cool, dirty floor.
Sam’s head felt like it had been scraped clean on the inside with a sharp stick. The feeling was not unlike being badly hurt and heavily dosed with oxycodone. There was pain somewhere, and the somewhere was him, but he was light enough to float away so it didn’t actually matter.
This wasn’t the familiar brain-crushing headache of using the powers. If anything, he was brimful with power, gorged with it.
The fifty-eighth seal had broken.
He flashed back to the positions the demons had been in. They’d formed the outline of an eye; it must have been a mystical symbol. The simultaneous exorcism, like a mass human sacrifice, had triggered some mechanism, probably one Lilith couldn’t have operated on her own.
Tonight was a trap for him as much as for Dean. One more seal and it was open season on him, not to mention probably mere days before the Morningstar brought Hell to earth.
The roar of the game resumed, as if someone had just muted it for a second to answer the phone but had thought better of it. Sam couldn’t stand here and worry. He couldn’t even stop to check whether the hosts needed medical attention.
part 4a.
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From:
oh man...
this is so complex, and it seems like the game is stacked against our boyz...
*worries*
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And oh Sammy!
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Sometimes you really need an Oh, Sammy to balance out all the Oh, Dean.
From:
Re: oh man...
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awesome update...
hugs
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