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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Dean was sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, flipping through his father’s journal in search of anything relevant to supernatural car accidents. Sam heaved himself down onto the other bed, feeling it give under his weight. He’d have a backache in the morning, and worse he’d have to wake up to a bevy of swans, from the ones worked into the quilts on the beds to the shapes of the cloudy glass sconces on the walls. “Tell me about your friend,” Sam said.
Dean gaped for a second, but then apparently decided to ignore the tone. “Cassie? She—I met her when Dad and I were on a job in Athens, Ohio. I, uh, she was at the library, and she came right up to me.” He turned a little, so that he was looking at the dark and silent television rather than at Sam. “I told Dad the research was takin’ longer than I’d thought, and we spent a lot of time together. And then I decided I had to tell Dad about her, but first I told her about me, about what I did, and she called me a liar and a crazy person and kicked me right to the curb.” The words ran together in Dean’s haste to get them out.
Sam didn’t know whether to be angry at her idiocy or satisfied that she’d screwed up her chances, so he settled on both. “So, you were sleeping together.”
Dean scrutinized him, then broke into the biggest damned grin Sam had ever seen on him, like sunrise all over again. “You’re jealous!” But it was only a little bit taunting; mostly Dean just sounded surprised and happy.
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Of course I’m jealous,” he admitted. “She’s gorgeous and smart and has a stable life, and she’s obviously still into you.”
Dean snorted and moved himself to the other bed, sitting close enough to Sam that their knees bumped together. “Dude, if you wanted compliments, all you needed to do was ask. A, I know there are mirrors in every one of these cheap-ass rooms, B, Cassie’s plenty smart but I doubt she’d be able to teach herself Akkadian in six easy lessons, and C, not even getting into your crazy theory about Cassie, if you’re seriously suggesting that I oughta settle down I’m gonna have to rethink that B.”
In his peripheral vision, Sam saw Dean’s hands wrap around his knees and squeeze as he leaned forward. “But none of that means shit. I guess I haven’t said it, and I don’t plan on sayin’ it much, but you gotta know you’re it for me.” Sam’s head turned so fast that something inside his neck snapped, warm and painful. Dean looked as pale as if he’d just been forced to write out those words in his own arterial blood.
After that was a blur. The next thing Sam really remembered was Dean staggering into the bathroom to piss, not bothering to close the door. “Jeez,” he said, tilting his chin up as he inspected his neck in the swan-shaped mirror, “blind, deaf virgins are gonna know what we did this afternoon. You don’t think a big tattoo that says ‘If found, please return to Sam Marshall’ woulda been more subtle?”
“Not going for subtle,” Sam pointed out. “But a tattoo’s not a bad idea.” Now that Dean had mentioned it, an anti-possession sigil would be a good precaution, what with Arba and probably others hanging around them.
“You gonna get one too?”
With his years of built-up defenses, he needed it less than Dean. But the thought of them wearing the same ink was … it was foolish, but if Dean wanted it, there was no harm to it. “I think I will,” he said, and Dean came out of the bathroom and kissed him back onto the bed, making them half an hour late to meet Cassie again.
****
Cassie sent them off with good grace, still thanking them for saving her mother. Sam wanted to see her as a bitch offering gratitude through clenched teeth, but that would have been delusion. She was a good-hearted woman, even if she didn’t want to know about the things that made the world irrational. They’d done good work, saving her.
Dean maybe cast off a little more light than usual, but Sam couldn’t begrudge him the satisfaction: the two of them had wiped out a racist ghost truck by sending it into a spectral flaming church. No part of that was less than supremely cool.
They found a place a couple of towns over to do the tattoos. Sam made sure the tattoo artist had the design right, then sat down on a stool by Dean’s head to watch him work on Dean. Dean had taken off his shirt, and stretched out on his stomach like that, Sam could see the elastic of his boxers just at the edge of his jeans. At the first prick of the needle, Dean’s arms twitched, but his back stayed perfectly still.
By the time the artist had finished the first prong of the star, Dean’s eyes were completely unfocused, his irises just a thin ring of glass-green around pupils big enough to scry in. His mouth was open, teeth and tongue visible, and he was panting, not loud but steadily.
Before Sam took his place on the table, he grabbed Dean by the arm, squeezing the solid muscle there, and pulled Dean close enough to whisper in his ear. “Don’t you jerk off in that bathroom. You wait for me.” Dean nodded dazedly and hitched himself up on the stool.
He’d read different things about how much a between-the-shoulderblades tattoo was going to hurt. With Dean’s example, not to mention Dean himself sitting shirtless and hard only eighteen inches away, the pain twisted easily into stinging pleasure and heat. Somehow Dean knew when he was about to start humping the table, and grabbed his hand to give him focus.
They took the aftercare instructions and practically ran out of the place, making it to the car only because the brick of the alleyway would have been too painful for whoever got shoved against the wall. Neither of them had bothered to button up their shirts, so they just collapsed into the back seat, legs tangling and jostling as they crammed too much of themselves into too little space, and stuck their hands down each other’s jeans. It all lasted about fifteen seconds, and right after it was over Sam started to feel the ache of his abraded flesh as it rubbed up against the old leather of the seats.
“Awesome,” Dean said, his lower half slumping down into the footspace.
“Awesome,” Sam agreed.
****
Telling Dean about the telekinesis was about as uncomfortable as Sam had expected. He picked an evening after a good hunt in Virginia, a lair of black dogs they’d put down without a scratch. They’d had steak and fries at a local hangout, then returned to their room: miniature railroads, including a track that ran all around the room just under the ceiling. Dean insisted on turning the little red train on as soon as they finished setting the wards, even when Sam threatened him with an ass-kicking. Dean flopped down on the bed (signals and tracks printed on the bedspread) and watched the train whir around the room, clicking as it turned the corners. Dean grinned every time it made its programmed steam-whistle sound.
Dean pouted when Sam flipped the switch. “We need to talk,” Sam told him before he could begin a wrestling match or any other distraction. Dean groaned and dropped his face into the triangle formed by his arms on the bed.
“What’s happening to me has gone beyond visions,” Sam said.
Dean’s head snapped up, fast as a switchblade.
Sam thought about demonstrating by smashing the fucking red train to scrap, but that would probably not make Dean very happy. Instead, he pointed at John Winchester’s journal, sitting on a side table that was painted to resemble a boxcar. “Watch,” he said. The journal came speeding into his hands.
Dean cursed, then he got up and paced, then he cursed some more. Then he made Sam swear that no one else had seen him move anything with his mind.
After Dean calmed down, he became a hunter again, and his speculations soon brought him near where Sam needed him to be.
“You’re the only kid who survived the demon. Psychic mojo doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Maybe you have the power to destroy him.”
Sam hesitated; this was so delicate, and he didn’t quite see a way to prepare Dean that wouldn’t get his hopes up unfairly. Dean was strong, and Sam was going to make him stronger, so he just said it: “We don’t know all those kids died.”
Dean frowned at him, confused.
“I’ve been over all of the records, Dean, and the evidence that every one of those kids died with the mothers, it’s thin. It’s really thin. There should have been more remains. One time wouldn’t be that surprising, but there were dozens without more than a handful of—well, you know.”
Dean’s voice was as flat as day-old soda. “What do you think we buried beside my mother, then?”
Sam bit his lip. “Most of the kids died, there’s not much doubt of that. I don’t think your brother is out there. But there’s a possibility that the demon deliberately took some of the children, maybe put them where he could watch them grow up. Like an experiment. Maybe if they were psychics, like me, he thought he’d be able to control them.”
Dean rubbed his hands through his hair, making the short spikes stand up even more stiffly. “And you, what about you? What makes you so special that you didn’t get taken or dead?”
Sam got hung up on ‘I don’t know,’ because he couldn’t make himself tell the lie again when Dean was this raw. “My childhood didn’t exactly leave me filled with love for humanity. I think I’m just another one of the demon’s experiments. But I’m not planning to let a demon push me around.”
****
Hibbing, Minnesota was a kick in the pants. Or, as Father would have said, a lesson in the necessity of humility. Ordinary fucking humans—except for being psychotic serial killers—and they got the drop on Sam. By the time Sam woke up, Dean had already started scamming the local law, though Sam didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that Alvin Jenkins was not going to enjoy his little run through the forest. He did try to warn Jenkins when the cage opened.
And then, after Jenkins had been gone for two minutes, he sighed and busted open the seams of his cage. If any of his captors were watching, he’d be hard put to explain himself, and his powers weren’t good around corners or through walls, which made houses a bad place to fight. But he could just imagine how Dean would behave if he’d been the one who got cold-cocked, and how Dean would say terribly awkward things to make him feel better if Jenkins ended up dead. So he followed Jenkins out into the trees.
The men (the Benders, as he later found out) might have been good hunters, but they were terrible prey. His only woodcraft had been learned from Dean, and yet he had no trouble following Jenkins and finding the two men on his trail. He didn’t even have to use TK against the first one, just walked up behind him and snapped his neck, swinging the still-twitching body around in case the second one had a shotgun. But no, it was just a big fucking knife.
Sam didn’t want to have to explain too much to Dean about how these guys had shuffled off this mortal coil, so he pushed the second one up against a tree, holding him there until he could walk over and repeat the process.
He hadn’t been eye-to-eye with anyone he was killing since Max. The guy was smelly and disgusting, and probably a cannibal, but it was still—he couldn’t explain it to himself, but it was more like the grim scutwork of spell prep than the satisfaction of victory.
Jenkins could find his way to the road on his own, so Sam headed back to the house. And that decision might have come from a premonition, because then he was just in time to help out Dean and the cop, the one who’d locked Dean to her squad car for impersonating a police officer. The cop, who got revenge but didn’t get her brother back.
Dean sat with her for a while before the evidence vans showed up. She talked more than he did, and at the end they clasped hands. Sam felt no jealousy this time. Instead, he had the oddest thought: if he could convince Dean to give up the hunt for the demon, maybe Dean could be happier.
Except that Father was going to force the issue, and Sam would have to find a way to satisfy Dean’s thirst for revenge without getting him and Dean both skinned. If he could appease Father, he could then order Dean to forget, but he’d never had Andy’s fine control and it was very easy to take away vital parts of a person.
Father’s death would be the optimum solution, as always. Still, Sam was pretty sure that a Devil’s Trap and an exorcism weren’t going to get the job done.
It was the same problem that had stymied him for the past few months, and he was no closer to a solution, no matter how many local libraries they visited.
****
“How many people would you say we’ve saved, together?” Sam asked.
Dean didn’t answer immediately. Rain turned the world outside into blurry, bruise-dark streaks; his hands tightened and relaxed on the steering wheel in unconscious imitation of the windshield wipers. “I haven’t been keeping count. Why? You gonna quit when we hit three digits?”
“No,” Sam protested. Then, when he’d had a chance to interpret the look on Dean’s face: “Of course not. Just—I wondered, you know. I never saved anyone before I met you.” He felt the understatement like a fist-sized rock in his stomach.
“If it makes you feel good, we can keep a list,” Dean said. “Write it in glitter pen.”
Sam flipped him off and turned the heat up, letting it bake the dampness out of his clothes. Dean spent the next fifty miles suggesting that a handjob would be a good reward for inducting Sam into the ranks of heroes.
****
“I can’t believe you never learned how to sew a button,” Dean bitched, then cursed and sucked on the needle-stung tip of his index finger, which guaranteed that Sam wasn’t paying any attention to his words. “Seriously,” he said, squinting as he threaded the needle again, “not even once?” Sitting cross-legged on the other bed with his shoulders rounded as he bent over his work, fiercely intent, he looked younger than usual, softer.
“I never needed to,” Sam said, idly counting the balloons painted on the lampshade nearest him. Circus-themed room: fucking creepy, and also bright. “Never had to think about it. When I needed new clothes, I just—got them.”
“Well, so did I,” Dean said, raising his eyebrows as he glanced over at Sam. “Dunno what you mean by need.”
“I wasn’t spoiled,” Sam said, feeling obscurely attacked. “Material abundance can coincide with emotional deprivation, you know.”
Dean brought the needle up, down, criss-crossing the thread over itself. “Uh, sure I knew … whatever the hell you just said.”
“You can have a lot of stuff and still have nothing,” he snapped, and reached out to turn the lamp so that the damned red-mouthed clown wouldn’t be smirking at him. Unfortunately, there was an equally disturbing clown on the other side, though this one had a drum instead of a bunch of balloons.
Dean threw the shirt down. Its dark green plaid engaged in a color war with the cavorting circus animals embroidered on the bedspread. “Help me out here, dude.”
He put his head down and pushed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “I’ve never been happier than I am right now.”
Dean breathed, loud in the otherwise silent room. “I can see the problem.” But the bravado was hollow and the words didn’t sound mocking at all.
“No,” he said, wanting Dean to understand. The only thing he could see was the pressure-created starbursts of white behind his eyes. “I mean, I have never felt like this, and I am so fucking terrified that—that you’re going to get hurt, or—It was so much easier when I didn’t have anything to lose.”
After a moment, Dean’s weight made the mattress dip underneath him. Dean’s shoulder brushed against his, Dean’s version of Eskimo kisses. “After we kill that demon—” Dean said, then stopped. He was still a terrible liar.
Sam let his hands drop to his knees. “You are who you are, Dean. I just—I worry.”
“If you don’t want me gettin’ hurt,” Dean said at last, “you could start by learning how to fix your own damn shirts.”
As deflection, it was far from his best effort. Sam gave him a watery smile anyway, and managed to sew the button a good half-inch from the right spot on his shirt.
****
Sam made them wear the alarm company uniforms in Chicago mostly because he planned to do a little roleplaying later on. Dean had already played the police angle, talking a hapless tech support guy into giving him a password, so they knew that Meredith Moore’s heart had been removed. But it was different to see the blood all over her apartment. Even with her body gone, the smell of rot had sunk into the furniture and the walls.
Walking through the dead girl’s rooms, checking out the food she’d never get to eat and rifling through the mail she’d never get to read, Sam felt that there was a hole in the world. He tried to shake the unfamiliar regret off. It wasn’t his fault she was dead, and he was going to get the thing that killed her.
Dean was staring at the bloody carpet when Sam returned to the living room. “You find any masking tape?” Dean asked.
Later, they stared down at the symbol formed when Dean connected the key blotches of blood. It was a rounded Z interrupted by a circle in the middle.
“I’ve seen that before,” Sam said.
Dean raised his eyebrows. “You must really be doin’ your homework, ‘cause I never did.”
“It’s Zoroastrian. A sigil for a Daeva.”
“Hunh,” Dean said. “Daeva’s a demon of darkness, right? Savage even for demons. Which, when you think about your ordinary, average demon, means they really make an impression.”
They looked around at the blood again. “Not false advertising,” Sam said.
“A Daeva has to be summoned.” Dean bent down on one knee, not touching any of the lines. “I don’t think anything in this apartment did the summoning; there’s no other sign here.”
“If I remember right, they’re not known for being happy about being conjured. They like to slip the leash, take it out on the summoner.”
“Yeah, but bringing up a demon nobody’s seen in millenia, that’s got to take some pretty serious chops. Maybe our conjurer thinks he’s got it under control. Your extracurricular reading give you any idea what they look like? I never saw a picture, just some references to legends.”
Sam shook his head, wishing that he’d managed to break into Father’s private stash of profane texts before he’d left.
****
At the bar they found for dinner, Dean was showing him the records on the earlier victim, Ben Swardstrom, when Sam felt a ripple of attention pass over him. He snapped his head up and saw Arba’s latest host across the room.
She smiled and came over. “Hey there, Sam!”
He could practically feel every muscle in Dean’s body turn to stone.
“Hello,” Sam said cautiously. “I’m sorry—”
“Meg,” she said brightly. “Meg Masters. We met a couple of weeks back,” she confided to Dean. “You must be Dean.”
Dean’s eyes grew bigger.
“Dean, you mind taking care of our tab?” Sam asked, reaching out without looking to squeeze Dean’s forearm. Dean didn’t say anything, but he stood and headed for the bar.
“What the fuck do you want?” Sam asked, keeping his tone pleasant.
“Just checking in,” she said. “Daddy’s getting ready to make his move. We wanted to be sure you had the hunter wrapped around your finger.”
“Why?” he asked. Even a lie might give him useful information.
She shrugged. “You know Daddy.”
“I’ve got it under control,” he said. “Even with you trying to fuck it up like this.”
Arba laughed, a trilling sound that cut through the babble of other conversations. Dean’s head swiveled away from the bartender, who was attempting to chat him up as she made his change. “Seriously? A little mystery is good for a relationship, I always say. Hey, here’s my number—we should talk more when your patsy’s not here.”
Sam took the scrap of paper from her, barely concealing his sneer, and she was gone before Dean made it back to their table.
“Who was that?” Dean asked.
“Not here.”
Dean managed to keep silent until they got back to the motel (framed pictures of John Deere tractors and lampshades that looked like they were made out of sheaves of wheat), even though Sam caught him opening his mouth several times.
Full disclosure was still out of the question, but Dean needed to know that they’d made the major leagues and were about to start the playoffs.
“I met her outside of Burkitsville,” Sam began as soon as he’d put down the last line of salt. “I thought she was just another hitchhiker, but running into her again, when we’re on a case like this—I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
“You think she’s our summoner?”
“I think she’s something. And she wants us to know it.”
“What did you tell her about me?” Dean was absolutely terrible at feigning casual interest, and would have been unconvincing even if he hadn’t been rifling distractedly through Sam’s bag instead of his own.
Sam took a half step towards Dean. “Nothing, just your name. She was fucking with you, Dean.” He didn’t even know if he was credible, that’s how badly she’d thrown him. No, be honest. Arba wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he wanted Dean to believe him. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t.”
Dean stopped his busywork and put up his hands. “Hey,” he began, and then swallowed whatever he’d meant to say. Instead he reached out, and Sam stepped into his arms.
“There’s things I haven’t told you,” Sam whispered into his shoulder. “But I would never hurt you.”
At least his priorities were clear. Fight off Arba and her Daeva; take Ava and Jake and the rest out of the running; using the leverage of being the last child left, make whatever deal with Father was necessary to keep Dean safe. Whatever Dean was for, there had to be alternatives that kept him alive—Father wouldn’t raise forty kids to get one survivor and then hang it all on one hunter.
Dean shifted under his touch, slowly raising his hands to stroke down Sam’s back.
When they broke apart, they still couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. Finally, Dean laughed, a little too loud. “We really need to get our heads out of our asses. That Daeva is not gonna care about our high school drama.”
“I’ve got an idea about how to take the edge off,” Sam said immediately, reaching for the hem of his shirt.
Dean raised one eyebrow. “Dude, that’s the same idea you always have.”
“And has it ever gone wrong? Don’t talk about the whipped cream,” he warned as he retrieved the alarm company uniform from its place at the top of his bag. “Anyway, this idea is a little different.”
Dean didn’t ever really lose the look of incredulity the entire time he was playing the clueless customer. But being the hunky service provider was a good idea because Dean kept cracking up and making bow-chicka-bow sounds. By the time they actually made it to the bed Dean was as happy and sweet as Sam could have hoped.
Sam reinforced the wards with his own blood before making sure that Dean would stay down with the same sleep spell as before. He didn’t need Arba’s phone number, but the piece of paper she’d given him was good for other methods of location as well. In fact, the charm he used led him right to the warehouse, which was the best result he’d ever had: in the past, he’d never been able to get more specific than a few city blocks.
He didn’t recognize Arba’s black altar with its Zoroastrian symbol garnished with human hearts, but the silver chalice of blood was fairly self-explanatory.
For a moment, Sam wished he was the one making the call, hearing that satisfied, confident voice that always promised a reward just over the horizon. Father had set the terms of his self-image for so long; even rebellion was a way of measuring himself against Father. But both obedience and defiance were tools, not ends. Father had hung in Sam’s life like a gibbous moon, too big to see anything else. He had Dean to think of now.
He shook off the introspection and listened closely. Unfortunately, Arba didn’t actually say much to Father; nothing she couldn’t have said using a cellphone, if she hadn’t been behaving in classic demonic fashion. One of the Nephilim would never use cheap, effective technology when bloodshed could substitute. Sam wondered, given her blatancy at the bar, whether she was working with some other party against Father. If that were so, then that increased the danger to Dean and to him—collateral damage killed just as dead as direct aim.
He left the warehouse just after she did, nervous all over again about the wards he’d left on the motel room.
****
The sleep spell snapped as soon as he opened the door to their room, but he made it to the side of the bed before Dean could do more than reach for his gun.
“Sammy?” Dean rubbed at his eyes. Sam tugged at his boots as if he were just putting them on.
“I had a vision,” he said.
Dean rolled into a sitting position, still blinking, his face scrunched up and creased from being shoved into the pillow. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. But Meg—she’s controlling the Daeva. I saw where she’s doing it, a warehouse down on West Erie. And I saw her communicating with someone, or something, using blood, a cup of blood.”
Dean reached for his discarded T-shirt on the floor, grumbling as he tugged it on. “Someone or something other than the Daeva?”
“She was talking about waiting for it to show up, and the Daeva’s already here. I don’t think you have a conversation with a Daeva anyway; ‘sit’ and ‘heel’ are the best you’re gonna do.”
Dean stood and shuffled into his boxers. “Listen, there was something I thought of—” He stopped to yawn and scratch his belly.
Sam waited as Dean made his still-slow way over to the laptop and fired it up. “The complete records of the two victims—we missed something the first time.”
“What?” Sam came over and leaned one elbow on the table next to Dean’s, reading over his shoulder.
“The first victim, the old man—he spent his whole life in Chicago, but he wasn’t born here. Look where he was born.”
“Lawrence, Kansas.”
“Meredith, second victim—turns out she was adopted. And guess where she’s from.”
They stared at each other; Dean’s eyes were inches from his, bright and worried. He could feel the heat coming from Dean’s skin, even as Dean shivered.
Sam pushed himself back. “So, Meg’s connected to the demon, who may be coming here. But that’s not near enough information.”
Dean was pulling out his cellphone. Sam frowned at him, confused, but Dean held up his hand and waited long enough that the call plainly went to voicemail. “Hey, uh. We think we’ve got a serious lead on the thing that killed Mom and Sam. Dad, if you get this, get to Chicago as soon as you can.”
“We?” Sam couldn’t help asking.
Dean gave him a full duh-face, brows lowered and quizzical dimples. “What’d you want me to say?”
Sam didn’t really have an answer for that. It wasn’t like Old Man Winchester was going to show, anyway. If he didn’t come when his son was dying, then he was unlikely to run to Dean’s side because of some vague hint.
“So what happens if we take this thing out?” Dean asked. “Send the demon back to Hell. Is that it?”
Sam wished he’d gotten even the few hours of sleep Dean had managed. “What?”
“You got into this because of your freaky visions about me, and we’re connected by the demon. With it gone, you could go back to the real world, do whatever you wanted.” Dean said it carefully.
“What do you want to do?”
Dean bent over the computer and started closing files. “Always gonna be hunts.”
“That’s not what I asked.” His voice came out soft. “What do you want, Dean? You’ve got to say it.”
“I want—I want everything, all right?” Dean closed the laptop, just a little too forcefully. “I want to stay with you and I want to save people and kill bad things.”
Hearing Dean’s definition of ‘everything’ made Sam’s chest feel hollowed-out and waterlogged. He’d been raised to think that all the kingdoms of the earth were only the beginning. “Done,” he said.
Dean turned his whole body in the chair as Sam went to his knees beside him. “You couldn’t make me go,” he breathed, low enough that Dean bent his head to get closer.
Somehow, some way, he’d explain everything to Dean. Depending on what they had to do to survive, there might be a much greater call for hunters in the future.
****
Five hours later, Sam was thinking that he might have been just a bit arrogant in starting to make plans. Arba had warded the warehouse down against Sam’s powers, which he ought to have anticipated. And then she’d smashed him and Dean up pretty good before tying them to separate pillars, like sacrifices lined up for processing. His only consolation was that she hadn’t said anything about him to Dean, which meant that she was keeping her options open.
Dean got angriest when she admitted that she’d just picked two random people from Lawrence in order to draw them in. Sam felt the same rage: the victims weren’t players. They’d done nothing, nothing, and she’d just reached out and swatted them. Arba watched him twitch in his bindings and laughed, the same musical sound that had turned so many heads in the bar earlier.
“Why don’t you kill us already?” Dean asked.
Arba crossed back over to him. “I guess it’s true that the pretty ones never need to think. Why would this be a trap for you two kids?”
“It’s a trap for John Winchester?” Sam blurted without thinking, because if Arba had just fucked his face up as a side effect he was going to—
“Wow,” Dean said, snapping him back to rationality. “News flash, bitch: your cunning plan sucks. Even if Dad was in town, which he is not, he wouldn’t walk into something like this. He’s too good.”
Arba smiled. “He is pretty good, I’ll give you that.” She straddled Dean’s legs and sat down, pressed heavily against his crotch. Sam decided that she had officially taken a side, and it wasn’t his. “But you, sweetness, he can’t leave you in trouble.”
She ground down and put her hands on Dean’s chest, squeezing, bringing her mouth to his neck and angling her whole body so that Sam could see her lick from collarbone to ear. Dean refused to flinch, but his head thunked back against the post and his nostrils flared in disgust.
“Get off him,” Sam said, every word outlined in fire.
“Why?” she asked. Her hand disappeared behind Dean’s back and returned with Dean’s second favorite knife.
She swung her leg off of Dean and stood, moving swiftly back to Sam. Mouth quirked in what could have been a charming smile, she knelt in front of him, idly slapping the flat of the knife against her palm. “That’s your best shot? Have your little hunter cut free while I’m distracted?”
“No,” Sam said, and felt the last strands of the bindings part against his own knife. One thing was obvious: Father and everyone behind him, demon or psychic, had vastly overcommitted to mystical weapons over physical ones.
He shoved the knife deep into Arba’s gut, twisting. It wouldn’t slow her down much, but it wasn’t wasted. While she was still bringing her hands in to protect herself, he grabbed her shoulders and slammed their heads together, which hurt like a motherfucker but sent her to the floor.
“Get the altar!” Dean yelled.
That was smarter than running for Dean, but he didn’t have to like it. With one shove, he sent the table over, beads and bones and hearts flying everywhere. He stomped his boot down on the Daeva’s symbol painted onto the altar cloth and twisted, smearing it out of true.
Arba screamed rage. All light and air left the room for half a second, leaving Sam gasping as he stumbled back towards Dean. Arba was trying to beat him there, but a figure coalesced out of the shadows and grabbed her.
She kicked and cursed in Sumerian as she was dragged across the floor. The Daeva shook her like a noisemaker at a New Year’s party. Sam blinked blood out of his eyes, dropping painfully to his knees so that he could reach the ropes still keeping Dean in place, just as the Daeva pulled Arba through the window in a shower of glass and wooden struts.
Sam helped Dean to his feet and they rushed over to the window, the night wind chill against the drying blood on Sam’s face and neck. Arba was sprawled on the sidewalk, her broken limbs twisting her into the shape of the rune for fate.
Her injuries wouldn’t stop her long. “I think she’s possessed,” he said.
Dean gave him a funny look. It would, Sam realized, have been trivial to invoke the Lord’s name against her at any time; he’d been holding back in instinctive concealment of his own secrets. “She didn’t seem to react much to the gut wound. And that was Sumerian she was using on the way out—if you automatically go back to a language four thousand years older than Christ when you’re under stress, I’m thinking you’re a demon.”
It didn’t take long to reclaim the bags of weapons Arba had kicked into the corner. But when they got out to the street, the body was gone.
“Next time,” Dean said, “exorcise first, ask questions later.”
Sam nodded and they limped off.
Part 6.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Dean was sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, flipping through his father’s journal in search of anything relevant to supernatural car accidents. Sam heaved himself down onto the other bed, feeling it give under his weight. He’d have a backache in the morning, and worse he’d have to wake up to a bevy of swans, from the ones worked into the quilts on the beds to the shapes of the cloudy glass sconces on the walls. “Tell me about your friend,” Sam said.
Dean gaped for a second, but then apparently decided to ignore the tone. “Cassie? She—I met her when Dad and I were on a job in Athens, Ohio. I, uh, she was at the library, and she came right up to me.” He turned a little, so that he was looking at the dark and silent television rather than at Sam. “I told Dad the research was takin’ longer than I’d thought, and we spent a lot of time together. And then I decided I had to tell Dad about her, but first I told her about me, about what I did, and she called me a liar and a crazy person and kicked me right to the curb.” The words ran together in Dean’s haste to get them out.
Sam didn’t know whether to be angry at her idiocy or satisfied that she’d screwed up her chances, so he settled on both. “So, you were sleeping together.”
Dean scrutinized him, then broke into the biggest damned grin Sam had ever seen on him, like sunrise all over again. “You’re jealous!” But it was only a little bit taunting; mostly Dean just sounded surprised and happy.
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Of course I’m jealous,” he admitted. “She’s gorgeous and smart and has a stable life, and she’s obviously still into you.”
Dean snorted and moved himself to the other bed, sitting close enough to Sam that their knees bumped together. “Dude, if you wanted compliments, all you needed to do was ask. A, I know there are mirrors in every one of these cheap-ass rooms, B, Cassie’s plenty smart but I doubt she’d be able to teach herself Akkadian in six easy lessons, and C, not even getting into your crazy theory about Cassie, if you’re seriously suggesting that I oughta settle down I’m gonna have to rethink that B.”
In his peripheral vision, Sam saw Dean’s hands wrap around his knees and squeeze as he leaned forward. “But none of that means shit. I guess I haven’t said it, and I don’t plan on sayin’ it much, but you gotta know you’re it for me.” Sam’s head turned so fast that something inside his neck snapped, warm and painful. Dean looked as pale as if he’d just been forced to write out those words in his own arterial blood.
After that was a blur. The next thing Sam really remembered was Dean staggering into the bathroom to piss, not bothering to close the door. “Jeez,” he said, tilting his chin up as he inspected his neck in the swan-shaped mirror, “blind, deaf virgins are gonna know what we did this afternoon. You don’t think a big tattoo that says ‘If found, please return to Sam Marshall’ woulda been more subtle?”
“Not going for subtle,” Sam pointed out. “But a tattoo’s not a bad idea.” Now that Dean had mentioned it, an anti-possession sigil would be a good precaution, what with Arba and probably others hanging around them.
“You gonna get one too?”
With his years of built-up defenses, he needed it less than Dean. But the thought of them wearing the same ink was … it was foolish, but if Dean wanted it, there was no harm to it. “I think I will,” he said, and Dean came out of the bathroom and kissed him back onto the bed, making them half an hour late to meet Cassie again.
****
Cassie sent them off with good grace, still thanking them for saving her mother. Sam wanted to see her as a bitch offering gratitude through clenched teeth, but that would have been delusion. She was a good-hearted woman, even if she didn’t want to know about the things that made the world irrational. They’d done good work, saving her.
Dean maybe cast off a little more light than usual, but Sam couldn’t begrudge him the satisfaction: the two of them had wiped out a racist ghost truck by sending it into a spectral flaming church. No part of that was less than supremely cool.
They found a place a couple of towns over to do the tattoos. Sam made sure the tattoo artist had the design right, then sat down on a stool by Dean’s head to watch him work on Dean. Dean had taken off his shirt, and stretched out on his stomach like that, Sam could see the elastic of his boxers just at the edge of his jeans. At the first prick of the needle, Dean’s arms twitched, but his back stayed perfectly still.
By the time the artist had finished the first prong of the star, Dean’s eyes were completely unfocused, his irises just a thin ring of glass-green around pupils big enough to scry in. His mouth was open, teeth and tongue visible, and he was panting, not loud but steadily.
Before Sam took his place on the table, he grabbed Dean by the arm, squeezing the solid muscle there, and pulled Dean close enough to whisper in his ear. “Don’t you jerk off in that bathroom. You wait for me.” Dean nodded dazedly and hitched himself up on the stool.
He’d read different things about how much a between-the-shoulderblades tattoo was going to hurt. With Dean’s example, not to mention Dean himself sitting shirtless and hard only eighteen inches away, the pain twisted easily into stinging pleasure and heat. Somehow Dean knew when he was about to start humping the table, and grabbed his hand to give him focus.
They took the aftercare instructions and practically ran out of the place, making it to the car only because the brick of the alleyway would have been too painful for whoever got shoved against the wall. Neither of them had bothered to button up their shirts, so they just collapsed into the back seat, legs tangling and jostling as they crammed too much of themselves into too little space, and stuck their hands down each other’s jeans. It all lasted about fifteen seconds, and right after it was over Sam started to feel the ache of his abraded flesh as it rubbed up against the old leather of the seats.
“Awesome,” Dean said, his lower half slumping down into the footspace.
“Awesome,” Sam agreed.
****
Telling Dean about the telekinesis was about as uncomfortable as Sam had expected. He picked an evening after a good hunt in Virginia, a lair of black dogs they’d put down without a scratch. They’d had steak and fries at a local hangout, then returned to their room: miniature railroads, including a track that ran all around the room just under the ceiling. Dean insisted on turning the little red train on as soon as they finished setting the wards, even when Sam threatened him with an ass-kicking. Dean flopped down on the bed (signals and tracks printed on the bedspread) and watched the train whir around the room, clicking as it turned the corners. Dean grinned every time it made its programmed steam-whistle sound.
Dean pouted when Sam flipped the switch. “We need to talk,” Sam told him before he could begin a wrestling match or any other distraction. Dean groaned and dropped his face into the triangle formed by his arms on the bed.
“What’s happening to me has gone beyond visions,” Sam said.
Dean’s head snapped up, fast as a switchblade.
Sam thought about demonstrating by smashing the fucking red train to scrap, but that would probably not make Dean very happy. Instead, he pointed at John Winchester’s journal, sitting on a side table that was painted to resemble a boxcar. “Watch,” he said. The journal came speeding into his hands.
Dean cursed, then he got up and paced, then he cursed some more. Then he made Sam swear that no one else had seen him move anything with his mind.
After Dean calmed down, he became a hunter again, and his speculations soon brought him near where Sam needed him to be.
“You’re the only kid who survived the demon. Psychic mojo doesn’t seem like a coincidence. Maybe you have the power to destroy him.”
Sam hesitated; this was so delicate, and he didn’t quite see a way to prepare Dean that wouldn’t get his hopes up unfairly. Dean was strong, and Sam was going to make him stronger, so he just said it: “We don’t know all those kids died.”
Dean frowned at him, confused.
“I’ve been over all of the records, Dean, and the evidence that every one of those kids died with the mothers, it’s thin. It’s really thin. There should have been more remains. One time wouldn’t be that surprising, but there were dozens without more than a handful of—well, you know.”
Dean’s voice was as flat as day-old soda. “What do you think we buried beside my mother, then?”
Sam bit his lip. “Most of the kids died, there’s not much doubt of that. I don’t think your brother is out there. But there’s a possibility that the demon deliberately took some of the children, maybe put them where he could watch them grow up. Like an experiment. Maybe if they were psychics, like me, he thought he’d be able to control them.”
Dean rubbed his hands through his hair, making the short spikes stand up even more stiffly. “And you, what about you? What makes you so special that you didn’t get taken or dead?”
Sam got hung up on ‘I don’t know,’ because he couldn’t make himself tell the lie again when Dean was this raw. “My childhood didn’t exactly leave me filled with love for humanity. I think I’m just another one of the demon’s experiments. But I’m not planning to let a demon push me around.”
****
Hibbing, Minnesota was a kick in the pants. Or, as Father would have said, a lesson in the necessity of humility. Ordinary fucking humans—except for being psychotic serial killers—and they got the drop on Sam. By the time Sam woke up, Dean had already started scamming the local law, though Sam didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that Alvin Jenkins was not going to enjoy his little run through the forest. He did try to warn Jenkins when the cage opened.
And then, after Jenkins had been gone for two minutes, he sighed and busted open the seams of his cage. If any of his captors were watching, he’d be hard put to explain himself, and his powers weren’t good around corners or through walls, which made houses a bad place to fight. But he could just imagine how Dean would behave if he’d been the one who got cold-cocked, and how Dean would say terribly awkward things to make him feel better if Jenkins ended up dead. So he followed Jenkins out into the trees.
The men (the Benders, as he later found out) might have been good hunters, but they were terrible prey. His only woodcraft had been learned from Dean, and yet he had no trouble following Jenkins and finding the two men on his trail. He didn’t even have to use TK against the first one, just walked up behind him and snapped his neck, swinging the still-twitching body around in case the second one had a shotgun. But no, it was just a big fucking knife.
Sam didn’t want to have to explain too much to Dean about how these guys had shuffled off this mortal coil, so he pushed the second one up against a tree, holding him there until he could walk over and repeat the process.
He hadn’t been eye-to-eye with anyone he was killing since Max. The guy was smelly and disgusting, and probably a cannibal, but it was still—he couldn’t explain it to himself, but it was more like the grim scutwork of spell prep than the satisfaction of victory.
Jenkins could find his way to the road on his own, so Sam headed back to the house. And that decision might have come from a premonition, because then he was just in time to help out Dean and the cop, the one who’d locked Dean to her squad car for impersonating a police officer. The cop, who got revenge but didn’t get her brother back.
Dean sat with her for a while before the evidence vans showed up. She talked more than he did, and at the end they clasped hands. Sam felt no jealousy this time. Instead, he had the oddest thought: if he could convince Dean to give up the hunt for the demon, maybe Dean could be happier.
Except that Father was going to force the issue, and Sam would have to find a way to satisfy Dean’s thirst for revenge without getting him and Dean both skinned. If he could appease Father, he could then order Dean to forget, but he’d never had Andy’s fine control and it was very easy to take away vital parts of a person.
Father’s death would be the optimum solution, as always. Still, Sam was pretty sure that a Devil’s Trap and an exorcism weren’t going to get the job done.
It was the same problem that had stymied him for the past few months, and he was no closer to a solution, no matter how many local libraries they visited.
****
“How many people would you say we’ve saved, together?” Sam asked.
Dean didn’t answer immediately. Rain turned the world outside into blurry, bruise-dark streaks; his hands tightened and relaxed on the steering wheel in unconscious imitation of the windshield wipers. “I haven’t been keeping count. Why? You gonna quit when we hit three digits?”
“No,” Sam protested. Then, when he’d had a chance to interpret the look on Dean’s face: “Of course not. Just—I wondered, you know. I never saved anyone before I met you.” He felt the understatement like a fist-sized rock in his stomach.
“If it makes you feel good, we can keep a list,” Dean said. “Write it in glitter pen.”
Sam flipped him off and turned the heat up, letting it bake the dampness out of his clothes. Dean spent the next fifty miles suggesting that a handjob would be a good reward for inducting Sam into the ranks of heroes.
****
“I can’t believe you never learned how to sew a button,” Dean bitched, then cursed and sucked on the needle-stung tip of his index finger, which guaranteed that Sam wasn’t paying any attention to his words. “Seriously,” he said, squinting as he threaded the needle again, “not even once?” Sitting cross-legged on the other bed with his shoulders rounded as he bent over his work, fiercely intent, he looked younger than usual, softer.
“I never needed to,” Sam said, idly counting the balloons painted on the lampshade nearest him. Circus-themed room: fucking creepy, and also bright. “Never had to think about it. When I needed new clothes, I just—got them.”
“Well, so did I,” Dean said, raising his eyebrows as he glanced over at Sam. “Dunno what you mean by need.”
“I wasn’t spoiled,” Sam said, feeling obscurely attacked. “Material abundance can coincide with emotional deprivation, you know.”
Dean brought the needle up, down, criss-crossing the thread over itself. “Uh, sure I knew … whatever the hell you just said.”
“You can have a lot of stuff and still have nothing,” he snapped, and reached out to turn the lamp so that the damned red-mouthed clown wouldn’t be smirking at him. Unfortunately, there was an equally disturbing clown on the other side, though this one had a drum instead of a bunch of balloons.
Dean threw the shirt down. Its dark green plaid engaged in a color war with the cavorting circus animals embroidered on the bedspread. “Help me out here, dude.”
He put his head down and pushed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. “I’ve never been happier than I am right now.”
Dean breathed, loud in the otherwise silent room. “I can see the problem.” But the bravado was hollow and the words didn’t sound mocking at all.
“No,” he said, wanting Dean to understand. The only thing he could see was the pressure-created starbursts of white behind his eyes. “I mean, I have never felt like this, and I am so fucking terrified that—that you’re going to get hurt, or—It was so much easier when I didn’t have anything to lose.”
After a moment, Dean’s weight made the mattress dip underneath him. Dean’s shoulder brushed against his, Dean’s version of Eskimo kisses. “After we kill that demon—” Dean said, then stopped. He was still a terrible liar.
Sam let his hands drop to his knees. “You are who you are, Dean. I just—I worry.”
“If you don’t want me gettin’ hurt,” Dean said at last, “you could start by learning how to fix your own damn shirts.”
As deflection, it was far from his best effort. Sam gave him a watery smile anyway, and managed to sew the button a good half-inch from the right spot on his shirt.
****
Sam made them wear the alarm company uniforms in Chicago mostly because he planned to do a little roleplaying later on. Dean had already played the police angle, talking a hapless tech support guy into giving him a password, so they knew that Meredith Moore’s heart had been removed. But it was different to see the blood all over her apartment. Even with her body gone, the smell of rot had sunk into the furniture and the walls.
Walking through the dead girl’s rooms, checking out the food she’d never get to eat and rifling through the mail she’d never get to read, Sam felt that there was a hole in the world. He tried to shake the unfamiliar regret off. It wasn’t his fault she was dead, and he was going to get the thing that killed her.
Dean was staring at the bloody carpet when Sam returned to the living room. “You find any masking tape?” Dean asked.
Later, they stared down at the symbol formed when Dean connected the key blotches of blood. It was a rounded Z interrupted by a circle in the middle.
“I’ve seen that before,” Sam said.
Dean raised his eyebrows. “You must really be doin’ your homework, ‘cause I never did.”
“It’s Zoroastrian. A sigil for a Daeva.”
“Hunh,” Dean said. “Daeva’s a demon of darkness, right? Savage even for demons. Which, when you think about your ordinary, average demon, means they really make an impression.”
They looked around at the blood again. “Not false advertising,” Sam said.
“A Daeva has to be summoned.” Dean bent down on one knee, not touching any of the lines. “I don’t think anything in this apartment did the summoning; there’s no other sign here.”
“If I remember right, they’re not known for being happy about being conjured. They like to slip the leash, take it out on the summoner.”
“Yeah, but bringing up a demon nobody’s seen in millenia, that’s got to take some pretty serious chops. Maybe our conjurer thinks he’s got it under control. Your extracurricular reading give you any idea what they look like? I never saw a picture, just some references to legends.”
Sam shook his head, wishing that he’d managed to break into Father’s private stash of profane texts before he’d left.
****
At the bar they found for dinner, Dean was showing him the records on the earlier victim, Ben Swardstrom, when Sam felt a ripple of attention pass over him. He snapped his head up and saw Arba’s latest host across the room.
She smiled and came over. “Hey there, Sam!”
He could practically feel every muscle in Dean’s body turn to stone.
“Hello,” Sam said cautiously. “I’m sorry—”
“Meg,” she said brightly. “Meg Masters. We met a couple of weeks back,” she confided to Dean. “You must be Dean.”
Dean’s eyes grew bigger.
“Dean, you mind taking care of our tab?” Sam asked, reaching out without looking to squeeze Dean’s forearm. Dean didn’t say anything, but he stood and headed for the bar.
“What the fuck do you want?” Sam asked, keeping his tone pleasant.
“Just checking in,” she said. “Daddy’s getting ready to make his move. We wanted to be sure you had the hunter wrapped around your finger.”
“Why?” he asked. Even a lie might give him useful information.
She shrugged. “You know Daddy.”
“I’ve got it under control,” he said. “Even with you trying to fuck it up like this.”
Arba laughed, a trilling sound that cut through the babble of other conversations. Dean’s head swiveled away from the bartender, who was attempting to chat him up as she made his change. “Seriously? A little mystery is good for a relationship, I always say. Hey, here’s my number—we should talk more when your patsy’s not here.”
Sam took the scrap of paper from her, barely concealing his sneer, and she was gone before Dean made it back to their table.
“Who was that?” Dean asked.
“Not here.”
Dean managed to keep silent until they got back to the motel (framed pictures of John Deere tractors and lampshades that looked like they were made out of sheaves of wheat), even though Sam caught him opening his mouth several times.
Full disclosure was still out of the question, but Dean needed to know that they’d made the major leagues and were about to start the playoffs.
“I met her outside of Burkitsville,” Sam began as soon as he’d put down the last line of salt. “I thought she was just another hitchhiker, but running into her again, when we’re on a case like this—I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
“You think she’s our summoner?”
“I think she’s something. And she wants us to know it.”
“What did you tell her about me?” Dean was absolutely terrible at feigning casual interest, and would have been unconvincing even if he hadn’t been rifling distractedly through Sam’s bag instead of his own.
Sam took a half step towards Dean. “Nothing, just your name. She was fucking with you, Dean.” He didn’t even know if he was credible, that’s how badly she’d thrown him. No, be honest. Arba wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he wanted Dean to believe him. “I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t.”
Dean stopped his busywork and put up his hands. “Hey,” he began, and then swallowed whatever he’d meant to say. Instead he reached out, and Sam stepped into his arms.
“There’s things I haven’t told you,” Sam whispered into his shoulder. “But I would never hurt you.”
At least his priorities were clear. Fight off Arba and her Daeva; take Ava and Jake and the rest out of the running; using the leverage of being the last child left, make whatever deal with Father was necessary to keep Dean safe. Whatever Dean was for, there had to be alternatives that kept him alive—Father wouldn’t raise forty kids to get one survivor and then hang it all on one hunter.
Dean shifted under his touch, slowly raising his hands to stroke down Sam’s back.
When they broke apart, they still couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. Finally, Dean laughed, a little too loud. “We really need to get our heads out of our asses. That Daeva is not gonna care about our high school drama.”
“I’ve got an idea about how to take the edge off,” Sam said immediately, reaching for the hem of his shirt.
Dean raised one eyebrow. “Dude, that’s the same idea you always have.”
“And has it ever gone wrong? Don’t talk about the whipped cream,” he warned as he retrieved the alarm company uniform from its place at the top of his bag. “Anyway, this idea is a little different.”
Dean didn’t ever really lose the look of incredulity the entire time he was playing the clueless customer. But being the hunky service provider was a good idea because Dean kept cracking up and making bow-chicka-bow sounds. By the time they actually made it to the bed Dean was as happy and sweet as Sam could have hoped.
Sam reinforced the wards with his own blood before making sure that Dean would stay down with the same sleep spell as before. He didn’t need Arba’s phone number, but the piece of paper she’d given him was good for other methods of location as well. In fact, the charm he used led him right to the warehouse, which was the best result he’d ever had: in the past, he’d never been able to get more specific than a few city blocks.
He didn’t recognize Arba’s black altar with its Zoroastrian symbol garnished with human hearts, but the silver chalice of blood was fairly self-explanatory.
For a moment, Sam wished he was the one making the call, hearing that satisfied, confident voice that always promised a reward just over the horizon. Father had set the terms of his self-image for so long; even rebellion was a way of measuring himself against Father. But both obedience and defiance were tools, not ends. Father had hung in Sam’s life like a gibbous moon, too big to see anything else. He had Dean to think of now.
He shook off the introspection and listened closely. Unfortunately, Arba didn’t actually say much to Father; nothing she couldn’t have said using a cellphone, if she hadn’t been behaving in classic demonic fashion. One of the Nephilim would never use cheap, effective technology when bloodshed could substitute. Sam wondered, given her blatancy at the bar, whether she was working with some other party against Father. If that were so, then that increased the danger to Dean and to him—collateral damage killed just as dead as direct aim.
He left the warehouse just after she did, nervous all over again about the wards he’d left on the motel room.
****
The sleep spell snapped as soon as he opened the door to their room, but he made it to the side of the bed before Dean could do more than reach for his gun.
“Sammy?” Dean rubbed at his eyes. Sam tugged at his boots as if he were just putting them on.
“I had a vision,” he said.
Dean rolled into a sitting position, still blinking, his face scrunched up and creased from being shoved into the pillow. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. But Meg—she’s controlling the Daeva. I saw where she’s doing it, a warehouse down on West Erie. And I saw her communicating with someone, or something, using blood, a cup of blood.”
Dean reached for his discarded T-shirt on the floor, grumbling as he tugged it on. “Someone or something other than the Daeva?”
“She was talking about waiting for it to show up, and the Daeva’s already here. I don’t think you have a conversation with a Daeva anyway; ‘sit’ and ‘heel’ are the best you’re gonna do.”
Dean stood and shuffled into his boxers. “Listen, there was something I thought of—” He stopped to yawn and scratch his belly.
Sam waited as Dean made his still-slow way over to the laptop and fired it up. “The complete records of the two victims—we missed something the first time.”
“What?” Sam came over and leaned one elbow on the table next to Dean’s, reading over his shoulder.
“The first victim, the old man—he spent his whole life in Chicago, but he wasn’t born here. Look where he was born.”
“Lawrence, Kansas.”
“Meredith, second victim—turns out she was adopted. And guess where she’s from.”
They stared at each other; Dean’s eyes were inches from his, bright and worried. He could feel the heat coming from Dean’s skin, even as Dean shivered.
Sam pushed himself back. “So, Meg’s connected to the demon, who may be coming here. But that’s not near enough information.”
Dean was pulling out his cellphone. Sam frowned at him, confused, but Dean held up his hand and waited long enough that the call plainly went to voicemail. “Hey, uh. We think we’ve got a serious lead on the thing that killed Mom and Sam. Dad, if you get this, get to Chicago as soon as you can.”
“We?” Sam couldn’t help asking.
Dean gave him a full duh-face, brows lowered and quizzical dimples. “What’d you want me to say?”
Sam didn’t really have an answer for that. It wasn’t like Old Man Winchester was going to show, anyway. If he didn’t come when his son was dying, then he was unlikely to run to Dean’s side because of some vague hint.
“So what happens if we take this thing out?” Dean asked. “Send the demon back to Hell. Is that it?”
Sam wished he’d gotten even the few hours of sleep Dean had managed. “What?”
“You got into this because of your freaky visions about me, and we’re connected by the demon. With it gone, you could go back to the real world, do whatever you wanted.” Dean said it carefully.
“What do you want to do?”
Dean bent over the computer and started closing files. “Always gonna be hunts.”
“That’s not what I asked.” His voice came out soft. “What do you want, Dean? You’ve got to say it.”
“I want—I want everything, all right?” Dean closed the laptop, just a little too forcefully. “I want to stay with you and I want to save people and kill bad things.”
Hearing Dean’s definition of ‘everything’ made Sam’s chest feel hollowed-out and waterlogged. He’d been raised to think that all the kingdoms of the earth were only the beginning. “Done,” he said.
Dean turned his whole body in the chair as Sam went to his knees beside him. “You couldn’t make me go,” he breathed, low enough that Dean bent his head to get closer.
Somehow, some way, he’d explain everything to Dean. Depending on what they had to do to survive, there might be a much greater call for hunters in the future.
****
Five hours later, Sam was thinking that he might have been just a bit arrogant in starting to make plans. Arba had warded the warehouse down against Sam’s powers, which he ought to have anticipated. And then she’d smashed him and Dean up pretty good before tying them to separate pillars, like sacrifices lined up for processing. His only consolation was that she hadn’t said anything about him to Dean, which meant that she was keeping her options open.
Dean got angriest when she admitted that she’d just picked two random people from Lawrence in order to draw them in. Sam felt the same rage: the victims weren’t players. They’d done nothing, nothing, and she’d just reached out and swatted them. Arba watched him twitch in his bindings and laughed, the same musical sound that had turned so many heads in the bar earlier.
“Why don’t you kill us already?” Dean asked.
Arba crossed back over to him. “I guess it’s true that the pretty ones never need to think. Why would this be a trap for you two kids?”
“It’s a trap for John Winchester?” Sam blurted without thinking, because if Arba had just fucked his face up as a side effect he was going to—
“Wow,” Dean said, snapping him back to rationality. “News flash, bitch: your cunning plan sucks. Even if Dad was in town, which he is not, he wouldn’t walk into something like this. He’s too good.”
Arba smiled. “He is pretty good, I’ll give you that.” She straddled Dean’s legs and sat down, pressed heavily against his crotch. Sam decided that she had officially taken a side, and it wasn’t his. “But you, sweetness, he can’t leave you in trouble.”
She ground down and put her hands on Dean’s chest, squeezing, bringing her mouth to his neck and angling her whole body so that Sam could see her lick from collarbone to ear. Dean refused to flinch, but his head thunked back against the post and his nostrils flared in disgust.
“Get off him,” Sam said, every word outlined in fire.
“Why?” she asked. Her hand disappeared behind Dean’s back and returned with Dean’s second favorite knife.
She swung her leg off of Dean and stood, moving swiftly back to Sam. Mouth quirked in what could have been a charming smile, she knelt in front of him, idly slapping the flat of the knife against her palm. “That’s your best shot? Have your little hunter cut free while I’m distracted?”
“No,” Sam said, and felt the last strands of the bindings part against his own knife. One thing was obvious: Father and everyone behind him, demon or psychic, had vastly overcommitted to mystical weapons over physical ones.
He shoved the knife deep into Arba’s gut, twisting. It wouldn’t slow her down much, but it wasn’t wasted. While she was still bringing her hands in to protect herself, he grabbed her shoulders and slammed their heads together, which hurt like a motherfucker but sent her to the floor.
“Get the altar!” Dean yelled.
That was smarter than running for Dean, but he didn’t have to like it. With one shove, he sent the table over, beads and bones and hearts flying everywhere. He stomped his boot down on the Daeva’s symbol painted onto the altar cloth and twisted, smearing it out of true.
Arba screamed rage. All light and air left the room for half a second, leaving Sam gasping as he stumbled back towards Dean. Arba was trying to beat him there, but a figure coalesced out of the shadows and grabbed her.
She kicked and cursed in Sumerian as she was dragged across the floor. The Daeva shook her like a noisemaker at a New Year’s party. Sam blinked blood out of his eyes, dropping painfully to his knees so that he could reach the ropes still keeping Dean in place, just as the Daeva pulled Arba through the window in a shower of glass and wooden struts.
Sam helped Dean to his feet and they rushed over to the window, the night wind chill against the drying blood on Sam’s face and neck. Arba was sprawled on the sidewalk, her broken limbs twisting her into the shape of the rune for fate.
Her injuries wouldn’t stop her long. “I think she’s possessed,” he said.
Dean gave him a funny look. It would, Sam realized, have been trivial to invoke the Lord’s name against her at any time; he’d been holding back in instinctive concealment of his own secrets. “She didn’t seem to react much to the gut wound. And that was Sumerian she was using on the way out—if you automatically go back to a language four thousand years older than Christ when you’re under stress, I’m thinking you’re a demon.”
It didn’t take long to reclaim the bags of weapons Arba had kicked into the corner. But when they got out to the street, the body was gone.
“Next time,” Dean said, “exorcise first, ask questions later.”
Sam nodded and they limped off.
Part 6.
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