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Captured by the Game 8/9
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Also,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meret made me a picture! 
John shared his research, explaining that he picked up the demon’s trail nearly a year ago, which was what prompted his Dean-dump. Sam hadn’t asked Dean about it, but he assumed that Dean had come to the same conclusion as he had: this was deliberate manipulation by Father.
But Sam hadn’t known what bait Father had used. He hadn’t known that children and their mothers were dying again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dean asked John when he’d heard the story. His voice was low, almost incurious, as if he were pretty sure he knew the answer and was asking against his better judgment. Sam had never hated John Winchester more, for getting his chance to explain.
John just shifted on his feet, refusing to meet Dean’s eyes. Sam wanted to shout at him: tell Dean that there was never anything wrong with him. Tell him that you were stupid but that you only meant to protect him.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” John said, finally. Sam wanted to get up and hit him, except that he was trying not to call further attention to himself.
Dean just sat back down on the unmade bed and braced his elbow on his knee, hiding his face in his hand.
We did this, you and I, Sam thought at John. We took all his choices away even though we both knew who he was.
If he could have, Sam would have made the sun run backwards and undone everything since they’d met. Unconditional support from now on was a pitiful next-best, but it was all he had.
****
When John went on a meal run, Dean asked another relevant question. “Was that true, that your mom died when you were six months old?” he asked, speaking as softly as if he might be overheard.
“I was just pulling it out of my ass,” Sam admitted. “But with all this I think maybe, I might have sensed more than I knew.”
Dean nodded.
“He could be rebuilding, in case he screws up this round. Or maybe he just did it to give me a chance with you.”
Dean tilted his head, narrowing his eyes. “Those kids, that isn’t your fault.”
Sam frowned: now, Dean chose to let him off the hook? “No, but it’s my problem.”
Dean slapped his thigh in exasperation. “Right, in eighteen years they might be competition.”
“Dean--”
“Yeah, whatever. One way or another, those kids aren’t gonna have the same thing happen to them.”
Maybe it would have been smarter to leave Dean with John and strike out on his own. But Father had gone to a great deal of trouble to get Dean involved, and Sam still had no idea why. There were demonic rituals that required the sacrifice of a pure soul of some kind, or a warrior. The problem was, Sam could identify at least fifty of them, and not a one generated enough power to open the gates of Hell.
****
John had figured out the pattern of strange weather and unexpected deaths that preceded one of Father’s visits to a family. Sam wasn’t sure whether this was intentional or a mere side effect of Father’s powers, but it did offer a wonderful tracking opportunity.
And now the signs were present in Salvation, Iowa, which had to be an ironic gesture on Father’s part.
Sam made the drive with Dean in silence, occupying himself with reviewing John’s research in case something jumped out at him. Nothing did, but reading about the new deaths was a sharp reminder of why Dean was still putting up with him. Dean was being professional, the only thing left for him to be. And Sam needed to emulate that: he’d told Dean to shoot him, but it turned out that it was much harder to live with what he’d done. Living with it in order to take Father out was exactly what he owed Dean.
No sooner had they passed the town line than John got news that one of his close friends had died. He stopped his truck even though it was raining and pulled off the road, so they did the same. When Dean hurried over to check on him, a ghost-faced John told him that a demon had killed Pastor Jim.
Dean took it hard. Sam thought that the grief made him forget how angry he was at Sam; in the car on the way to the first hospital they were checking, he told Sam that the pastor had been a good friend to him, growing up. Sam wondered if Dean had ever had a friend close to his own age, but that was an old, secondhand regret, no time for it now.
Coming out of the hospital, rain spattering his face like slow tears, the vision slammed into him like an out-of-control car. Each image was a shard of glass driven into his brain. The noise corkscrewed into his ears, making him whine in sympathy.
There was a nursery and a baby and a child on fire.
A couple of nurses on their cigarette break, hiding from the drizzle under the short lip of the building, saw him stagger and grab his head. He had to talk fast to avoid being admitted to the ER.
And then he had to search the map, looking for the train tracks to match the train he’d heard along with the vision. It was either their good luck or Father’s clever construction of a trap that put them in a small town, because the train only went through a small residential area.
He called Dean and let him know about the vision, then started jogging towards the right part of town. The slowly dwindling rain felt good on his abused head.
He had every intention of waiting for Dean, until the woman from his vision nearly ran over his toe with her stroller.
“Oh, excuse me!” she said, fumbling with her umbrella.
She was Monica; her child was Rosie. Sam told her he was visiting town, thinking of moving, and prayed she wouldn’t ask him why anyone would move to Salvation. But she was more interested in showing off her just-six-month-old baby girl, who seemed pleasant enough. Monica swore that Rosie looked at people as if she could read minds; the fact that Rosie didn’t immediately burst into tears when she looked up at Sam was evidence to the contrary, but he wasn’t ruling it out.
Monica left him on the street, waving goodbye, just as he heard the growl of the Impala’s engine. The car pulled up next to him. He leaned in to open the door—
The vision hit like a broken bone on top of a sprain; he’d never had two in such quick succession. His brain felt like it was going to burst out through his eyesockets as it liquified. He saw Monica hurrying into Rosie’s room, then thrown to the ceiling, split across the middle, bleeding down as she lit up like she was made of paper. Then the vision changed. It wasn’t the same room, or the same woman. It was Mary Winchester, whom he’d seen burst into flames in Lawrence.
She looked just like Monica when she disappeared under the orange-yellow fire.
****
He came back to coherence lying down. His head felt wet and cold, and under that was the distant drumbeat of a fading headache. He opened his eyes and carefully turned his head to the side. He was in a room he’d never seen before, dingy but unremarkable, as if Dean hadn’t given much thought to the choice. Dean himself was slumped over a side table, asleep in his leather jacket.
He didn’t want to get up for fear of tempting the headache to worsen. “Dean?”
Dean pulled himself upright like he was tearing off a bandage. “You gotta stop that,” he said, yawning as he stumbled over to Sam.
With Dean’s hands urging him up, he managed to get himself sitting against the headboard without vomiting. Dean gave him sips of flat-tasting orange juice from a wobbly plastic cup and made him take two Aleve.
“Uh, what happened?” Sam asked after he swallowed the pills.
“You pitched a fit, landed right in my lap,” Dean said. “Bled like somethin’ out of Kill Bill.” He took Sam’s face in his hands, his thumbs rubbing the tired skin under Sam’s eyes, tilting his head back and forth as if looking for renewed bleeding. Sam tried not to read too much into the touch, but his heart still pounded painfully and his fingers itched to reach out for Dean in return.
Forcing himself to face reality, Sam quickly summarized the visions—Dean didn’t like the plural, and especially didn’t like the mention of his mother.
“He’s coming tonight,” Sam concluded. “But it feels bad.”
“You’re sure it’s him. Azazel.”
Sam shrugged; the motion set his head ringing again. “He can possess any body. I saw a man who could have been him.”
A key scraped in the door, and John Winchester walked in, holding what looked like a bag of takeout. Dean shifted a few inches away from Sam on the bed, but he didn’t get up.
“You’re up,” John said, sounding dubious about it.
“It was another vision,” Dean told him. “This time, about the demon.”
Sam straightened himself further, shoulders pushed up against the carved wood of the headboard. “Azazel is coming for that family tonight.”
“Then we’ll be there to stop it,” John said.
Sam’s cell phone trilled out from the end table where Dean must have tossed it. They all froze for a moment, then Sam reached out tentatively.
“Hello?” Sam said.
“Samael,” Arba cooed.
“Arba,” he said grimly, then covered the speaker. “The demon that’s possessing Meg.” Dean nodded and waved his father’s protest silent.
“Put me on speaker, I’ve got things to say to the lot of you.”
“I don’t think so.” He made himself sit up, planting his legs on the floor, feigning strength.
“Why, afraid I’ll rat you out?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.” Dean and John were watching him like snakes hypnotized by a mongoose. Every muscle in John’s body was tightened, as if he were a second away from lunging for the phone himself.
“It’s sweet that you still care. Love isn’t as easy as it seemed, is it? First you have to get into young Dean’s head, not to mention his pants, but you’re not the only one in his world. Kinda blows, doesn’t it? All those tangled webs humans weave, sucking each other dry. Who do you think Dean would choose if I made him?”
“What do you want?” It didn’t come out as commanding as he’d hoped.
She chuckled. “You’ve put yourself in an enviable position, young man. You have the Colt and you have Daddy’s blessing. I need a little leverage: I want the Colt.”
Arba’s assumptions about how much John and Dean trusted him stung a little. “Why would we give you the Colt?” John jerked forward at that, and it took Dean’s hand on his shoulder to keep him from grabbing Sam.
Sam stood up warily as Arba continued.
“I just killed Jim Murphy, and I’m with John’s friend Caleb in Lincoln now. Sure you don’t want this on the speaker?”
He didn’t, but Caleb’s protest and blood-drenched death were audible anyway.
“I’m gonna keep killing every one of their allies until you hand the Colt over. Anyone who ever helped them, anyone who gave them shelter, anyone they ever smiled at.”
He couldn’t point out that Arba was assuming that he cared, because he couldn’t claim to be in charge while John was listening, even if Dean would forgive the lie. In fact, the conversation was untenable, which gave him only one option.
He ended the call.
John was already yelling before he’d brought the phone down from his ear, and Dean wasn’t far behind.
“Your friend Caleb’s dead,” he told them. “And there’ll be more. She wants the Colt.”
That silenced them for a couple of seconds. “Why?” Dean asked when the shock had begun to fade.
“Demon politics, I’m guessing. A demon capable of inflicting true death on other demons would have a lot of leverage.”
“You got this from your visions,” John said. He didn’t sound like he believed it.
Dean’s eyes whipped from Sam to John. “We’ve been doin’ a lot of research,” Dean began.
“The first thing to do is to stop the attack tonight,” Sam said, not only to change the subject.
John nodded. “I’ll take the Colt to the house,” he said. “No demon is destroying that family.”
Sam closed his eyes. For a moment, he wondered why this baby should get to escape. With their intervention, Rosie could have a mother and learn to use her powers, if they ever manifested, on her own and not in a constant cage match.
He remembered the serious little face from the morning. Imagining that uninterrupted life, full of a thousand ordinary disasters and everyday joys, was enough to make him want it for her. Everybody should be able to be a civilian.
“What about Arba?” Dean asked.
“She’ll call back if she wants the Colt that bad. Here’s the plan,” John said.
****
“I won’t do it,” Dean said. “I won’t split up.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” John said right back, his face granite.
“Dad,” Dean said, so close to tears Sam could practically taste them, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
John closed his eyes, then took the Colt off of the table in front of him. He put it in his lap and ran his fingers over it like a man petting a cat. “And I don’t want Mary and Sam to be dead. I don’t want a demon to have ruined our lives. I don’t want any of this. I just want it to be over.”
Sam had the feeling that John didn’t have the slightest idea what his words meant, what Dean heard. But the little speech worked: Dean shut up and went to go acquire the fake gun from one of John’s seemingly infinite number of contacts.
“You’re a real piece of work,” Sam told John once the door had closed on Dean.
John was leaning over, one hand cupping his chin as his elbows rested on his knees, his whole pose one of exhaustion. His head came up when Sam spoke. “You want to get into it with me, boy? Here and now?”
“Not particularly,” Sam admitted. “But I’ll take a rain check if you’re planning to stick around to honor it.”
John snorted and sat back in his chair, the Colt still on his lap like he was afraid it would float away if he let go. “Sam Marshall,” he said, almost contemplatively. “Not an uncommon name, but you don’t match any of the pictures or ages in any federal database. Now, every person I talk to says the same thing: Dean and Sam, they’re a perfect team, they’ll kill anything that even thinks about doing evil. So I’ve let it slide. You want me in Dean’s life so bad, you think about what I might do there.”
The desire to say that Dean knew everything was a bolus in his throat, impossible to breathe around. But knowing and forgiving were two different things, and using Dean’s knowledge to score points with his father felt like a lie.
Sam swallowed his anger and stomped out to check the weapons in the Impala.
****
The fake Colt looked pretty much like the real one, though Dean swore that there were five obvious differences and seven that required a minute’s inspection. The only reassurance was that Sam was reasonably confident that Arba wasn’t as much of a buff as Dean.
Arba called back within a few hours. “Ready to deal?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, not giving her the satisfation of anything more. She provided an address and a time: midnight, of course. How very fucking typical.
“We’ve gotta haul ass to Lincoln,” he said as soon as he shut the phone. “Warehouse there.”
The car was already loaded. Dean paused to hug his father; neither of them seemed comfortable doing it, but Dean stood a little straighter when he pulled back. “See you soon,” John said, and Dean nodded without looking at him.
Sam climbed in the car.
John Winchester was the man Father’s plans had made. They were all caught in a cycle of misery, cutting deeper every time the wheel turned. Growing up, Sam had always known that there was no one to rely on, because Father could always offer something to tempt any alliance into defections. But now, here, he thought there might be a chance to sabotage the infernal machine.
****
“You could go with him,” Sam pointed out, before Dean started the car.
Dean swallowed and turned on the headlights. “Yeah, like I’m lettin’ you out of my sight. Anyway, Dad can handle himself.”
“We all know this is a trap, right?” Sam asked over the engine’s starting grumbles. “If Arba gets me and the Colt—”
“’s why she’s not getting’ the Colt,” Dean said, far too pragmatically for Sam’s taste. “Only four bullets left, can’t waste ‘em.”
Whereas I’m expendable, Sam thought.
“We’re gonna finish this,” Dean said.
“Dean, I want you to know, just in case—”
“Fuck no,” Dean said, and reached to twist the radio on, loud. “No way you’re gettin’ off that easy.”
****
Before they went into the warehouse, Dean insisted on breaking into the system and blessing the water supply. “Don’t you have to be ordained to bless holy water?” Sam asked.
Dean grinned mirthlessly up from his crouch where he had his hands deep in the guts of a maintenance box. “You’re lookin’ at an ordained minister of the Revised Anglican Church.”
Sam frowned, distracted. “You don’t even believe in God!”
“I believe in holy water,” Dean said, and turned back to his blessing.
****
“Honey, I’m home,” Dean called out as they entered the main area of the warehouse. Sam felt the same itch at the back of his skull he remembered from their first fight with Arba; she’d warded the place to make his TK inoperative.
“Remind me why we’re doing this, again?”
“Buying time,” Dean said, almost too softly to hear. They stopped only a few feet inside the main room, next to a stack of wooden pallets taller than Sam. Prey never benefited from being out in the open.
Sam nodded, then scanned around again, still seeing nothing but dusty ropes and abandoned boxes. Hope, hope for John Winchester, thumped painfully in his chest.
“If it isn’t Frick and Frack,” Arba said from the side of the room.
They turned, shoulder to shoulder. Sam put his hand on his gun for reassurance. Arba was standing next to an unfamiliar man, tallish and crisp-featured, brown hair as short as Dean’s but not as pretty.
“Ready to hand it over?”
“Aren’t you even going to pretend we’ll be safe if we do?” Sam asked.
Arba rolled her eyes. “I could do that, and you could pretend to believe me, but wouldn’t it be simpler to cut straight to the bleeding?”
“Fine,” Dean said, getting down on one knee so that he could spin the Colt across the floor. It came to a stop about five feet from Arba.
“Tom,” Arba ordered.
“Tom? Demons named Tom, what’s the world coming to,” Dean said to no one in particular. It was pretty much the same thing Sam was thinking.
Tom hurried forward and scooped up the gun, examining it carefully.
Fuck, she brought her own gun nut, Sam thought, preparing to start shooting.
“Well?” Arba snapped. “Is it the Colt?”
Tom stuck out his lower lip a little, thoughtfully. Then he brought the gun up and shot Arba in the chest.
“Hey!” she yelled, looking down at the dark, nearly bloodless hole in the center of her white shirt, her hands rising to paw at herself.
“It’s a fake,” Tom drawled.
Arba closed her mouth and snapped her head up. Dean shrugged.
Then they ran, ducking behind the pallets to get out of her line of sight. Arba screamed, and the pallets lurched at them, nearly pinning Sam to the wall before they made it to the corridor.
Dean began chanting in Latin. Arba yowled back a curse involving Dean’s mother that Sam deeply hoped Dean didn’t understand.
Exorcism or not, they were badly outmatched without the TK. Dean pushed Sam ahead of him, around a turn—and right into Tom. Sam slammed into him at speed, nearly falling backwards with the shock of it.
Then he was flying, not falling, shoved back against the corridor wall with bits of broken wood and stray stapled notices digging into his back. Tom held him pinned easily, none of Sam’s ingrained mental defenses effective.
Dean fired his gun, emptying his gun in not much more than a second. Tom’s body shifted with the impacts, but his grip on Sam didn’t loosen. The empty clip clattered to the ground, and then Dean was firing again, this time straight into Tom’s face.
That might have been a bad idea; if there was anything worse than being pinioned by demon powers, it was being held pinioned by demon powers by a possessed body with no face left.
“I’m gonna make you eat this,” Arba said in his ear, shoving the fake Colt in his face.
A human body could only take so much, even strengthened by demonic energies. Tom’s was going to have to fall apart soon.
Sam struggled for breath. “Kill me and Father’s gonna assign a torturer to each part of your body.”
Arba’s eyes darkened with annoyance. “Sweet talker. You don’t need legs for his plan. Or maybe I’ll just take your boy here, stick the gun in him and pull the trigger.”
“Same thing,” Sam said, seeing sparkles at the edges of his vision. “I was sent to get him.”
“Oh, honey,” she whispered, syrupy and mocking, “you just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” he asked, knowing himself for a fool.
Tom’s overtaxed body released him as the demon spewed out of the already-dead man. As Sam fell a foot to the floor, he spat Christ’s name at Arba. She reared back, right into an arc of water that went immediately to steam around her. Sam propped himself up against the wall and saw Dean holding a dripping bucket; he must have gone scrounging for it after the shooting failed. As Arba screamed and smoked, Dean grabbed his arm and they ran towards the exit.
Water was cascading across the floor, evidence of Dean’s activities. They splashed through it, nearly losing their footing a couple of times, and ran back to the car. No doubt Arba would find a way around the holy water swiftly enough—at worst, she could jump out another window.
****
“He’s not answering his phone,” Dean snarled, flipping his cell closed with one hand and swerving to avoid some invisible obstacle with another.
“Let me try,” Sam told him. “You keep dialing and you’re gonna kill us both.”
“He promised,” Dean said, which Sam didn’t remember, but he wasn’t about to say that, and even more he wasn’t about to reassure Dean that John was probably just dead, not ignoring his son.
In lieu of commentary, he held out his hand for the phone. Dean made a pissed-off sound, but he handed it over.
They often drove late nights, and Sam had come to enjoy the way the world narrowed to headlights cutting through the night, the highway a through-line pulling them across the face of the earth, the darkness inside the car warm and unthreatening. Now all of that was lost. Dean was barely present, yearning towards John, and Sam knew that Father was out there as well. He remembered Father’s hands, clamping down on his shoulders while Father read his homework over his shoulder. He remembered how Father would make little spider-steps with his fingertips all the way down Sam’s arm, chuckling as Sam grew ever more still against the touch.
“If we come to it,” he said, “I’d rather be dead than do what Azazel wants. You get me?”
“Shut up,” Dean answered.
“No, this isn’t just about us any more. This is about everybody he’s gonna hurt. Everybody he’s gonna use me to hurt.”
Dean’s mouth was pinched painfully, his shoulders drawn so far up that his neck nearly disappeared into his jacket.
“What, I’m not good enough to sacrifice myself?”
“Not gonna happen!” Dean roared, and they both flinched.
“Then it won’t make a difference for you to promise,” Sam said, inexorably.
Dean’s phone buzzed, startling Sam so badly that he nearly dropped it. There was a new message. He put the speaker on and dialed in.
“I missed,” John said over some loud background noise. “I missed and I have to go get the baby now. I’m leaving the Colt in a Devil’s Trap under a pile of leaves in the front yard. You come and get it before anything happens to it.”
“I’ll start calling hospitals.” Sam reached for his own phone, but it came alive in his hand before he could start to dial. “Yes?”
“Nice try, kids,” Arba’s voice said. “No, really, nice try. Playtime’s over now, though. You’re never going to see Daddy Winchester again. Ready to open your eyes and face facts?”
The phone clicked off with a sound like a gun dry-firing.
****
They sped back to Salvation. Dean snuck past the firefighters still working on the smoldering ruins, while Sam walked straight up to the fire captain, who was perfectly willing to tell an insurance investigator that an unknown man had roused the household and carried the baby to safety before disappearing.
“Three bullets left,” Dean told him when they were back in the car.
“What now?”
Dean had been about two pieces of duct tape away from shaking apart since Arba’s taunting call, and now that they’d retrieved the Colt Sam thought he might lose it completely. He was letting Dean drive because he feared what Dean would do in the passenger seat more than he feared an accident, but it was close.
“Bobby Singer,” Dean said after a minute. “He knows his demons.” He started the car and turned them towards the interstate.
****
Bobby Singer turned out to be the redneck hunter Sam had imagined Dean to be all those months ago, a grizzled man with a full beard and a baseball cap over squinty blue eyes. Dean gave him the gist of the problem standing in the dirt in front of the steps to his house, talking straight into the barrel of Bobby’s shotgun while Sam kept his attention on the very angry-looking dogs that hovered well within biting distance.
As soon as they stepped inside Bobby’s house, he stood the shotgun just inside the door and held out two flasks. He made Dean and Sam toss back holy water, then whiskey, watching Sam just as carefully with the whiskey as with the holy water.
Dean handed back the second flask and wiped his mouth dry with the back of his hand. “Thanks, Bobby. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure we should come.”
“Nonsense,” he said, old-fashioned and righteous. “Your daddy’s in trouble.”
Dean winced. “Last time we saw you, you did threaten to blast him full of buckshot. Cocked the shotgun and everything.”
“What can I say? John just has that effect on people.”
“Mr. Singer,” Sam said, his mouth still stinging from the bite of the alcohol on cuts he hadn’t remembered getting, “you and I are gonna get along just fine.”
Dean pulled a face, but Bobby only examined Sam sharply. “Bobby’ll do, son.”
They explained what had happened in more detail.
“Well, you fellas are standin’ in the center of the whirlwind, I’ll tell you that,” Bobby said, before telling them about a nationwide spike in demonic possessions.
They were mapping the possessions against John’s records of the mother-and-child burnings when the door came off its hinges, crashing to the floor, and Arba stalked in over it.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You just killed another one of your friends.” Bobby flew backwards into a desk, whimpering as his back bowed. She smiled and stepped forward. Then she halted, frowning, and Bobby fought back to his feet, ignoring the books and papers that spilled to the floor behind him.
“Demons,” Bobby said, shaking his head and rubbing gingerly at his back.
“What the fuck!” Arba spat, lunging forward only to bounce off of the barrier created by the Devil’s Trap above her head. Dean sniggered.
“John Winchester, where is he?” Sam asked. Sam didn’t believe that John was still alive. He was too much of a variable. But Dean wouldn’t believe it until he saw the corpse.
“Dead!” she said. “With any luck he’s already being sodomized by my closest friends. He probably likes it—I hear that sort of thing runs in the family.”
Dean took out Bobby’s flask and flung an arc of water across her face. She hissed and her eyes went full black. “Sam knows it’s true. I stuck my fist into his stomach and I pulled out his guts.”
Dean shook off Bobby’s hand, taking two quick steps that nearly brought him across the lines defining the Devil’s Trap.
“Dean!” Sam pointed up. “Let me do this, okay?”
Dean regarded him the way he might have examined a shotgun for task suitability. Sam didn’t flinch; he’d asked for it. “Exorcise her,” Dean said. “Do it slow, until she talks.”
A freestanding exorcism would just remove the demon from the possessed person. But an exorcism in a Devil’s Trap, as Sam understood it, would send the demon back to Hell. Hell wasn’t fun even for demons.
Even assuming John was dead, he owed the man at least a hunter’s pyre.
He began reciting.
Arba cursed and gibbered, bashing herself up against the binding circle even though her fists flared with fire whenever she made contact with the edge. As he finished the first prayer, she roared.
He leaned in close, careful not to get even a hair within the circle. “Got a better answer for me?”
“Daddy’s gonna take your skin off for doing this!”
“Okay then!” He continued, until she was collapsed on the floor, jerking like a landed fish. Her eyes fluttered and her blood smeared across her cheeks, and he had to remind himself that she was one of the Nephilim, not a victim.
He stopped when she seemed about to lose consciousness entirely. “John Winchester,” he said.
“Jefferson City,” she gasped.
“Do better,” he suggested.
Blood was pooling at the corner of her mouth, spreading out on the floor like a time-lapse photo of a flower.
“Sunrise Apartments,” she managed.
Dean grunted. “Finish it,” he said.
“No!” she whimpered, but why she’d expected better from humans Sam couldn’t imagine.
Now that there was no reason to delay, he hurried through the rest of the exorcism. The Latin thrummed through him like an electric current, charging him even as Arba convulsed. A black cloud spewed from the girl’s mouth, abandoning the body, and rushed towards the ceiling, but was caught in the Devil’s Trap. It circled like a miniature tornado, then turned white around the edges and collapsed in on itself with a clap and a rush of displaced air.
The only sound was the hitching, choking breaths of the girl on the floor.
“Fuck me,” Dean breathed, pushing past Sam and dropping to his knees. “Call 911.”
They all knew that the victim couldn’t possibly survive—she’d probably broken most of her major bones in Chicago, and she’d been shot in the chest hours ago. But Dean gathered her in his arms and propped her up, his movements so gentle that she might not even have noticed them amidst all her other hurts.
She blinked up at Sam. “Thank you,” she said. The words brought a new flood of red from her lips, coating her teeth and her chin and dripping down to her collar.
Then she died.
Dean held her there for a minute, staring down at her forehead. Slowly, carefully, he used his thumbs to close her eyes.
“You can lay her out on the kitchen table,” Bobby suggested. “We’ll bury her later.”
“Her name might’ve been Meg Masters,” Sam said. “She might have family that—people who want to know.”
Bobby sighed and tugged at his cap. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Dean picked the girl’s body up, just like he was going to carry her across a threshold, and took her out of the room.
They didn’t say a word until Dean returned. Somehow he’d acquired a streak of her blood along one cheek.
“So,” Sam said. “I guess we go to Jefferson.”
“Yeah.” Dean turned to Bobby. “There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to try. You got a laser printer?”
Part 9.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Also,
meret made me a picture! John shared his research, explaining that he picked up the demon’s trail nearly a year ago, which was what prompted his Dean-dump. Sam hadn’t asked Dean about it, but he assumed that Dean had come to the same conclusion as he had: this was deliberate manipulation by Father.
But Sam hadn’t known what bait Father had used. He hadn’t known that children and their mothers were dying again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dean asked John when he’d heard the story. His voice was low, almost incurious, as if he were pretty sure he knew the answer and was asking against his better judgment. Sam had never hated John Winchester more, for getting his chance to explain.
John just shifted on his feet, refusing to meet Dean’s eyes. Sam wanted to shout at him: tell Dean that there was never anything wrong with him. Tell him that you were stupid but that you only meant to protect him.
“I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” John said, finally. Sam wanted to get up and hit him, except that he was trying not to call further attention to himself.
Dean just sat back down on the unmade bed and braced his elbow on his knee, hiding his face in his hand.
We did this, you and I, Sam thought at John. We took all his choices away even though we both knew who he was.
If he could have, Sam would have made the sun run backwards and undone everything since they’d met. Unconditional support from now on was a pitiful next-best, but it was all he had.
****
When John went on a meal run, Dean asked another relevant question. “Was that true, that your mom died when you were six months old?” he asked, speaking as softly as if he might be overheard.
“I was just pulling it out of my ass,” Sam admitted. “But with all this I think maybe, I might have sensed more than I knew.”
Dean nodded.
“He could be rebuilding, in case he screws up this round. Or maybe he just did it to give me a chance with you.”
Dean tilted his head, narrowing his eyes. “Those kids, that isn’t your fault.”
Sam frowned: now, Dean chose to let him off the hook? “No, but it’s my problem.”
Dean slapped his thigh in exasperation. “Right, in eighteen years they might be competition.”
“Dean--”
“Yeah, whatever. One way or another, those kids aren’t gonna have the same thing happen to them.”
Maybe it would have been smarter to leave Dean with John and strike out on his own. But Father had gone to a great deal of trouble to get Dean involved, and Sam still had no idea why. There were demonic rituals that required the sacrifice of a pure soul of some kind, or a warrior. The problem was, Sam could identify at least fifty of them, and not a one generated enough power to open the gates of Hell.
****
John had figured out the pattern of strange weather and unexpected deaths that preceded one of Father’s visits to a family. Sam wasn’t sure whether this was intentional or a mere side effect of Father’s powers, but it did offer a wonderful tracking opportunity.
And now the signs were present in Salvation, Iowa, which had to be an ironic gesture on Father’s part.
Sam made the drive with Dean in silence, occupying himself with reviewing John’s research in case something jumped out at him. Nothing did, but reading about the new deaths was a sharp reminder of why Dean was still putting up with him. Dean was being professional, the only thing left for him to be. And Sam needed to emulate that: he’d told Dean to shoot him, but it turned out that it was much harder to live with what he’d done. Living with it in order to take Father out was exactly what he owed Dean.
No sooner had they passed the town line than John got news that one of his close friends had died. He stopped his truck even though it was raining and pulled off the road, so they did the same. When Dean hurried over to check on him, a ghost-faced John told him that a demon had killed Pastor Jim.
Dean took it hard. Sam thought that the grief made him forget how angry he was at Sam; in the car on the way to the first hospital they were checking, he told Sam that the pastor had been a good friend to him, growing up. Sam wondered if Dean had ever had a friend close to his own age, but that was an old, secondhand regret, no time for it now.
Coming out of the hospital, rain spattering his face like slow tears, the vision slammed into him like an out-of-control car. Each image was a shard of glass driven into his brain. The noise corkscrewed into his ears, making him whine in sympathy.
There was a nursery and a baby and a child on fire.
A couple of nurses on their cigarette break, hiding from the drizzle under the short lip of the building, saw him stagger and grab his head. He had to talk fast to avoid being admitted to the ER.
And then he had to search the map, looking for the train tracks to match the train he’d heard along with the vision. It was either their good luck or Father’s clever construction of a trap that put them in a small town, because the train only went through a small residential area.
He called Dean and let him know about the vision, then started jogging towards the right part of town. The slowly dwindling rain felt good on his abused head.
He had every intention of waiting for Dean, until the woman from his vision nearly ran over his toe with her stroller.
“Oh, excuse me!” she said, fumbling with her umbrella.
She was Monica; her child was Rosie. Sam told her he was visiting town, thinking of moving, and prayed she wouldn’t ask him why anyone would move to Salvation. But she was more interested in showing off her just-six-month-old baby girl, who seemed pleasant enough. Monica swore that Rosie looked at people as if she could read minds; the fact that Rosie didn’t immediately burst into tears when she looked up at Sam was evidence to the contrary, but he wasn’t ruling it out.
Monica left him on the street, waving goodbye, just as he heard the growl of the Impala’s engine. The car pulled up next to him. He leaned in to open the door—
The vision hit like a broken bone on top of a sprain; he’d never had two in such quick succession. His brain felt like it was going to burst out through his eyesockets as it liquified. He saw Monica hurrying into Rosie’s room, then thrown to the ceiling, split across the middle, bleeding down as she lit up like she was made of paper. Then the vision changed. It wasn’t the same room, or the same woman. It was Mary Winchester, whom he’d seen burst into flames in Lawrence.
She looked just like Monica when she disappeared under the orange-yellow fire.
****
He came back to coherence lying down. His head felt wet and cold, and under that was the distant drumbeat of a fading headache. He opened his eyes and carefully turned his head to the side. He was in a room he’d never seen before, dingy but unremarkable, as if Dean hadn’t given much thought to the choice. Dean himself was slumped over a side table, asleep in his leather jacket.
He didn’t want to get up for fear of tempting the headache to worsen. “Dean?”
Dean pulled himself upright like he was tearing off a bandage. “You gotta stop that,” he said, yawning as he stumbled over to Sam.
With Dean’s hands urging him up, he managed to get himself sitting against the headboard without vomiting. Dean gave him sips of flat-tasting orange juice from a wobbly plastic cup and made him take two Aleve.
“Uh, what happened?” Sam asked after he swallowed the pills.
“You pitched a fit, landed right in my lap,” Dean said. “Bled like somethin’ out of Kill Bill.” He took Sam’s face in his hands, his thumbs rubbing the tired skin under Sam’s eyes, tilting his head back and forth as if looking for renewed bleeding. Sam tried not to read too much into the touch, but his heart still pounded painfully and his fingers itched to reach out for Dean in return.
Forcing himself to face reality, Sam quickly summarized the visions—Dean didn’t like the plural, and especially didn’t like the mention of his mother.
“He’s coming tonight,” Sam concluded. “But it feels bad.”
“You’re sure it’s him. Azazel.”
Sam shrugged; the motion set his head ringing again. “He can possess any body. I saw a man who could have been him.”
A key scraped in the door, and John Winchester walked in, holding what looked like a bag of takeout. Dean shifted a few inches away from Sam on the bed, but he didn’t get up.
“You’re up,” John said, sounding dubious about it.
“It was another vision,” Dean told him. “This time, about the demon.”
Sam straightened himself further, shoulders pushed up against the carved wood of the headboard. “Azazel is coming for that family tonight.”
“Then we’ll be there to stop it,” John said.
Sam’s cell phone trilled out from the end table where Dean must have tossed it. They all froze for a moment, then Sam reached out tentatively.
“Hello?” Sam said.
“Samael,” Arba cooed.
“Arba,” he said grimly, then covered the speaker. “The demon that’s possessing Meg.” Dean nodded and waved his father’s protest silent.
“Put me on speaker, I’ve got things to say to the lot of you.”
“I don’t think so.” He made himself sit up, planting his legs on the floor, feigning strength.
“Why, afraid I’ll rat you out?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.” Dean and John were watching him like snakes hypnotized by a mongoose. Every muscle in John’s body was tightened, as if he were a second away from lunging for the phone himself.
“It’s sweet that you still care. Love isn’t as easy as it seemed, is it? First you have to get into young Dean’s head, not to mention his pants, but you’re not the only one in his world. Kinda blows, doesn’t it? All those tangled webs humans weave, sucking each other dry. Who do you think Dean would choose if I made him?”
“What do you want?” It didn’t come out as commanding as he’d hoped.
She chuckled. “You’ve put yourself in an enviable position, young man. You have the Colt and you have Daddy’s blessing. I need a little leverage: I want the Colt.”
Arba’s assumptions about how much John and Dean trusted him stung a little. “Why would we give you the Colt?” John jerked forward at that, and it took Dean’s hand on his shoulder to keep him from grabbing Sam.
Sam stood up warily as Arba continued.
“I just killed Jim Murphy, and I’m with John’s friend Caleb in Lincoln now. Sure you don’t want this on the speaker?”
He didn’t, but Caleb’s protest and blood-drenched death were audible anyway.
“I’m gonna keep killing every one of their allies until you hand the Colt over. Anyone who ever helped them, anyone who gave them shelter, anyone they ever smiled at.”
He couldn’t point out that Arba was assuming that he cared, because he couldn’t claim to be in charge while John was listening, even if Dean would forgive the lie. In fact, the conversation was untenable, which gave him only one option.
He ended the call.
John was already yelling before he’d brought the phone down from his ear, and Dean wasn’t far behind.
“Your friend Caleb’s dead,” he told them. “And there’ll be more. She wants the Colt.”
That silenced them for a couple of seconds. “Why?” Dean asked when the shock had begun to fade.
“Demon politics, I’m guessing. A demon capable of inflicting true death on other demons would have a lot of leverage.”
“You got this from your visions,” John said. He didn’t sound like he believed it.
Dean’s eyes whipped from Sam to John. “We’ve been doin’ a lot of research,” Dean began.
“The first thing to do is to stop the attack tonight,” Sam said, not only to change the subject.
John nodded. “I’ll take the Colt to the house,” he said. “No demon is destroying that family.”
Sam closed his eyes. For a moment, he wondered why this baby should get to escape. With their intervention, Rosie could have a mother and learn to use her powers, if they ever manifested, on her own and not in a constant cage match.
He remembered the serious little face from the morning. Imagining that uninterrupted life, full of a thousand ordinary disasters and everyday joys, was enough to make him want it for her. Everybody should be able to be a civilian.
“What about Arba?” Dean asked.
“She’ll call back if she wants the Colt that bad. Here’s the plan,” John said.
****
“I won’t do it,” Dean said. “I won’t split up.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” John said right back, his face granite.
“Dad,” Dean said, so close to tears Sam could practically taste them, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
John closed his eyes, then took the Colt off of the table in front of him. He put it in his lap and ran his fingers over it like a man petting a cat. “And I don’t want Mary and Sam to be dead. I don’t want a demon to have ruined our lives. I don’t want any of this. I just want it to be over.”
Sam had the feeling that John didn’t have the slightest idea what his words meant, what Dean heard. But the little speech worked: Dean shut up and went to go acquire the fake gun from one of John’s seemingly infinite number of contacts.
“You’re a real piece of work,” Sam told John once the door had closed on Dean.
John was leaning over, one hand cupping his chin as his elbows rested on his knees, his whole pose one of exhaustion. His head came up when Sam spoke. “You want to get into it with me, boy? Here and now?”
“Not particularly,” Sam admitted. “But I’ll take a rain check if you’re planning to stick around to honor it.”
John snorted and sat back in his chair, the Colt still on his lap like he was afraid it would float away if he let go. “Sam Marshall,” he said, almost contemplatively. “Not an uncommon name, but you don’t match any of the pictures or ages in any federal database. Now, every person I talk to says the same thing: Dean and Sam, they’re a perfect team, they’ll kill anything that even thinks about doing evil. So I’ve let it slide. You want me in Dean’s life so bad, you think about what I might do there.”
The desire to say that Dean knew everything was a bolus in his throat, impossible to breathe around. But knowing and forgiving were two different things, and using Dean’s knowledge to score points with his father felt like a lie.
Sam swallowed his anger and stomped out to check the weapons in the Impala.
****
The fake Colt looked pretty much like the real one, though Dean swore that there were five obvious differences and seven that required a minute’s inspection. The only reassurance was that Sam was reasonably confident that Arba wasn’t as much of a buff as Dean.
Arba called back within a few hours. “Ready to deal?”
“Yeah,” Sam said, not giving her the satisfation of anything more. She provided an address and a time: midnight, of course. How very fucking typical.
“We’ve gotta haul ass to Lincoln,” he said as soon as he shut the phone. “Warehouse there.”
The car was already loaded. Dean paused to hug his father; neither of them seemed comfortable doing it, but Dean stood a little straighter when he pulled back. “See you soon,” John said, and Dean nodded without looking at him.
Sam climbed in the car.
John Winchester was the man Father’s plans had made. They were all caught in a cycle of misery, cutting deeper every time the wheel turned. Growing up, Sam had always known that there was no one to rely on, because Father could always offer something to tempt any alliance into defections. But now, here, he thought there might be a chance to sabotage the infernal machine.
****
“You could go with him,” Sam pointed out, before Dean started the car.
Dean swallowed and turned on the headlights. “Yeah, like I’m lettin’ you out of my sight. Anyway, Dad can handle himself.”
“We all know this is a trap, right?” Sam asked over the engine’s starting grumbles. “If Arba gets me and the Colt—”
“’s why she’s not getting’ the Colt,” Dean said, far too pragmatically for Sam’s taste. “Only four bullets left, can’t waste ‘em.”
Whereas I’m expendable, Sam thought.
“We’re gonna finish this,” Dean said.
“Dean, I want you to know, just in case—”
“Fuck no,” Dean said, and reached to twist the radio on, loud. “No way you’re gettin’ off that easy.”
****
Before they went into the warehouse, Dean insisted on breaking into the system and blessing the water supply. “Don’t you have to be ordained to bless holy water?” Sam asked.
Dean grinned mirthlessly up from his crouch where he had his hands deep in the guts of a maintenance box. “You’re lookin’ at an ordained minister of the Revised Anglican Church.”
Sam frowned, distracted. “You don’t even believe in God!”
“I believe in holy water,” Dean said, and turned back to his blessing.
****
“Honey, I’m home,” Dean called out as they entered the main area of the warehouse. Sam felt the same itch at the back of his skull he remembered from their first fight with Arba; she’d warded the place to make his TK inoperative.
“Remind me why we’re doing this, again?”
“Buying time,” Dean said, almost too softly to hear. They stopped only a few feet inside the main room, next to a stack of wooden pallets taller than Sam. Prey never benefited from being out in the open.
Sam nodded, then scanned around again, still seeing nothing but dusty ropes and abandoned boxes. Hope, hope for John Winchester, thumped painfully in his chest.
“If it isn’t Frick and Frack,” Arba said from the side of the room.
They turned, shoulder to shoulder. Sam put his hand on his gun for reassurance. Arba was standing next to an unfamiliar man, tallish and crisp-featured, brown hair as short as Dean’s but not as pretty.
“Ready to hand it over?”
“Aren’t you even going to pretend we’ll be safe if we do?” Sam asked.
Arba rolled her eyes. “I could do that, and you could pretend to believe me, but wouldn’t it be simpler to cut straight to the bleeding?”
“Fine,” Dean said, getting down on one knee so that he could spin the Colt across the floor. It came to a stop about five feet from Arba.
“Tom,” Arba ordered.
“Tom? Demons named Tom, what’s the world coming to,” Dean said to no one in particular. It was pretty much the same thing Sam was thinking.
Tom hurried forward and scooped up the gun, examining it carefully.
Fuck, she brought her own gun nut, Sam thought, preparing to start shooting.
“Well?” Arba snapped. “Is it the Colt?”
Tom stuck out his lower lip a little, thoughtfully. Then he brought the gun up and shot Arba in the chest.
“Hey!” she yelled, looking down at the dark, nearly bloodless hole in the center of her white shirt, her hands rising to paw at herself.
“It’s a fake,” Tom drawled.
Arba closed her mouth and snapped her head up. Dean shrugged.
Then they ran, ducking behind the pallets to get out of her line of sight. Arba screamed, and the pallets lurched at them, nearly pinning Sam to the wall before they made it to the corridor.
Dean began chanting in Latin. Arba yowled back a curse involving Dean’s mother that Sam deeply hoped Dean didn’t understand.
Exorcism or not, they were badly outmatched without the TK. Dean pushed Sam ahead of him, around a turn—and right into Tom. Sam slammed into him at speed, nearly falling backwards with the shock of it.
Then he was flying, not falling, shoved back against the corridor wall with bits of broken wood and stray stapled notices digging into his back. Tom held him pinned easily, none of Sam’s ingrained mental defenses effective.
Dean fired his gun, emptying his gun in not much more than a second. Tom’s body shifted with the impacts, but his grip on Sam didn’t loosen. The empty clip clattered to the ground, and then Dean was firing again, this time straight into Tom’s face.
That might have been a bad idea; if there was anything worse than being pinioned by demon powers, it was being held pinioned by demon powers by a possessed body with no face left.
“I’m gonna make you eat this,” Arba said in his ear, shoving the fake Colt in his face.
A human body could only take so much, even strengthened by demonic energies. Tom’s was going to have to fall apart soon.
Sam struggled for breath. “Kill me and Father’s gonna assign a torturer to each part of your body.”
Arba’s eyes darkened with annoyance. “Sweet talker. You don’t need legs for his plan. Or maybe I’ll just take your boy here, stick the gun in him and pull the trigger.”
“Same thing,” Sam said, seeing sparkles at the edges of his vision. “I was sent to get him.”
“Oh, honey,” she whispered, syrupy and mocking, “you just don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?” he asked, knowing himself for a fool.
Tom’s overtaxed body released him as the demon spewed out of the already-dead man. As Sam fell a foot to the floor, he spat Christ’s name at Arba. She reared back, right into an arc of water that went immediately to steam around her. Sam propped himself up against the wall and saw Dean holding a dripping bucket; he must have gone scrounging for it after the shooting failed. As Arba screamed and smoked, Dean grabbed his arm and they ran towards the exit.
Water was cascading across the floor, evidence of Dean’s activities. They splashed through it, nearly losing their footing a couple of times, and ran back to the car. No doubt Arba would find a way around the holy water swiftly enough—at worst, she could jump out another window.
****
“He’s not answering his phone,” Dean snarled, flipping his cell closed with one hand and swerving to avoid some invisible obstacle with another.
“Let me try,” Sam told him. “You keep dialing and you’re gonna kill us both.”
“He promised,” Dean said, which Sam didn’t remember, but he wasn’t about to say that, and even more he wasn’t about to reassure Dean that John was probably just dead, not ignoring his son.
In lieu of commentary, he held out his hand for the phone. Dean made a pissed-off sound, but he handed it over.
They often drove late nights, and Sam had come to enjoy the way the world narrowed to headlights cutting through the night, the highway a through-line pulling them across the face of the earth, the darkness inside the car warm and unthreatening. Now all of that was lost. Dean was barely present, yearning towards John, and Sam knew that Father was out there as well. He remembered Father’s hands, clamping down on his shoulders while Father read his homework over his shoulder. He remembered how Father would make little spider-steps with his fingertips all the way down Sam’s arm, chuckling as Sam grew ever more still against the touch.
“If we come to it,” he said, “I’d rather be dead than do what Azazel wants. You get me?”
“Shut up,” Dean answered.
“No, this isn’t just about us any more. This is about everybody he’s gonna hurt. Everybody he’s gonna use me to hurt.”
Dean’s mouth was pinched painfully, his shoulders drawn so far up that his neck nearly disappeared into his jacket.
“What, I’m not good enough to sacrifice myself?”
“Not gonna happen!” Dean roared, and they both flinched.
“Then it won’t make a difference for you to promise,” Sam said, inexorably.
Dean’s phone buzzed, startling Sam so badly that he nearly dropped it. There was a new message. He put the speaker on and dialed in.
“I missed,” John said over some loud background noise. “I missed and I have to go get the baby now. I’m leaving the Colt in a Devil’s Trap under a pile of leaves in the front yard. You come and get it before anything happens to it.”
“I’ll start calling hospitals.” Sam reached for his own phone, but it came alive in his hand before he could start to dial. “Yes?”
“Nice try, kids,” Arba’s voice said. “No, really, nice try. Playtime’s over now, though. You’re never going to see Daddy Winchester again. Ready to open your eyes and face facts?”
The phone clicked off with a sound like a gun dry-firing.
****
They sped back to Salvation. Dean snuck past the firefighters still working on the smoldering ruins, while Sam walked straight up to the fire captain, who was perfectly willing to tell an insurance investigator that an unknown man had roused the household and carried the baby to safety before disappearing.
“Three bullets left,” Dean told him when they were back in the car.
“What now?”
Dean had been about two pieces of duct tape away from shaking apart since Arba’s taunting call, and now that they’d retrieved the Colt Sam thought he might lose it completely. He was letting Dean drive because he feared what Dean would do in the passenger seat more than he feared an accident, but it was close.
“Bobby Singer,” Dean said after a minute. “He knows his demons.” He started the car and turned them towards the interstate.
****
Bobby Singer turned out to be the redneck hunter Sam had imagined Dean to be all those months ago, a grizzled man with a full beard and a baseball cap over squinty blue eyes. Dean gave him the gist of the problem standing in the dirt in front of the steps to his house, talking straight into the barrel of Bobby’s shotgun while Sam kept his attention on the very angry-looking dogs that hovered well within biting distance.
As soon as they stepped inside Bobby’s house, he stood the shotgun just inside the door and held out two flasks. He made Dean and Sam toss back holy water, then whiskey, watching Sam just as carefully with the whiskey as with the holy water.
Dean handed back the second flask and wiped his mouth dry with the back of his hand. “Thanks, Bobby. Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure we should come.”
“Nonsense,” he said, old-fashioned and righteous. “Your daddy’s in trouble.”
Dean winced. “Last time we saw you, you did threaten to blast him full of buckshot. Cocked the shotgun and everything.”
“What can I say? John just has that effect on people.”
“Mr. Singer,” Sam said, his mouth still stinging from the bite of the alcohol on cuts he hadn’t remembered getting, “you and I are gonna get along just fine.”
Dean pulled a face, but Bobby only examined Sam sharply. “Bobby’ll do, son.”
They explained what had happened in more detail.
“Well, you fellas are standin’ in the center of the whirlwind, I’ll tell you that,” Bobby said, before telling them about a nationwide spike in demonic possessions.
They were mapping the possessions against John’s records of the mother-and-child burnings when the door came off its hinges, crashing to the floor, and Arba stalked in over it.
“Congratulations,” she said. “You just killed another one of your friends.” Bobby flew backwards into a desk, whimpering as his back bowed. She smiled and stepped forward. Then she halted, frowning, and Bobby fought back to his feet, ignoring the books and papers that spilled to the floor behind him.
“Demons,” Bobby said, shaking his head and rubbing gingerly at his back.
“What the fuck!” Arba spat, lunging forward only to bounce off of the barrier created by the Devil’s Trap above her head. Dean sniggered.
“John Winchester, where is he?” Sam asked. Sam didn’t believe that John was still alive. He was too much of a variable. But Dean wouldn’t believe it until he saw the corpse.
“Dead!” she said. “With any luck he’s already being sodomized by my closest friends. He probably likes it—I hear that sort of thing runs in the family.”
Dean took out Bobby’s flask and flung an arc of water across her face. She hissed and her eyes went full black. “Sam knows it’s true. I stuck my fist into his stomach and I pulled out his guts.”
Dean shook off Bobby’s hand, taking two quick steps that nearly brought him across the lines defining the Devil’s Trap.
“Dean!” Sam pointed up. “Let me do this, okay?”
Dean regarded him the way he might have examined a shotgun for task suitability. Sam didn’t flinch; he’d asked for it. “Exorcise her,” Dean said. “Do it slow, until she talks.”
A freestanding exorcism would just remove the demon from the possessed person. But an exorcism in a Devil’s Trap, as Sam understood it, would send the demon back to Hell. Hell wasn’t fun even for demons.
Even assuming John was dead, he owed the man at least a hunter’s pyre.
He began reciting.
Arba cursed and gibbered, bashing herself up against the binding circle even though her fists flared with fire whenever she made contact with the edge. As he finished the first prayer, she roared.
He leaned in close, careful not to get even a hair within the circle. “Got a better answer for me?”
“Daddy’s gonna take your skin off for doing this!”
“Okay then!” He continued, until she was collapsed on the floor, jerking like a landed fish. Her eyes fluttered and her blood smeared across her cheeks, and he had to remind himself that she was one of the Nephilim, not a victim.
He stopped when she seemed about to lose consciousness entirely. “John Winchester,” he said.
“Jefferson City,” she gasped.
“Do better,” he suggested.
Blood was pooling at the corner of her mouth, spreading out on the floor like a time-lapse photo of a flower.
“Sunrise Apartments,” she managed.
Dean grunted. “Finish it,” he said.
“No!” she whimpered, but why she’d expected better from humans Sam couldn’t imagine.
Now that there was no reason to delay, he hurried through the rest of the exorcism. The Latin thrummed through him like an electric current, charging him even as Arba convulsed. A black cloud spewed from the girl’s mouth, abandoning the body, and rushed towards the ceiling, but was caught in the Devil’s Trap. It circled like a miniature tornado, then turned white around the edges and collapsed in on itself with a clap and a rush of displaced air.
The only sound was the hitching, choking breaths of the girl on the floor.
“Fuck me,” Dean breathed, pushing past Sam and dropping to his knees. “Call 911.”
They all knew that the victim couldn’t possibly survive—she’d probably broken most of her major bones in Chicago, and she’d been shot in the chest hours ago. But Dean gathered her in his arms and propped her up, his movements so gentle that she might not even have noticed them amidst all her other hurts.
She blinked up at Sam. “Thank you,” she said. The words brought a new flood of red from her lips, coating her teeth and her chin and dripping down to her collar.
Then she died.
Dean held her there for a minute, staring down at her forehead. Slowly, carefully, he used his thumbs to close her eyes.
“You can lay her out on the kitchen table,” Bobby suggested. “We’ll bury her later.”
“Her name might’ve been Meg Masters,” Sam said. “She might have family that—people who want to know.”
Bobby sighed and tugged at his cap. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Dean picked the girl’s body up, just like he was going to carry her across a threshold, and took her out of the room.
They didn’t say a word until Dean returned. Somehow he’d acquired a streak of her blood along one cheek.
“So,” Sam said. “I guess we go to Jefferson.”
“Yeah.” Dean turned to Bobby. “There’s something I’ve been wantin’ to try. You got a laser printer?”
Part 9.
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I've never "de-cloaked" to leave a comment in this fandom
(Anonymous) 2008-09-08 01:41 pm (UTC)(link)APo
Re: I've never "de-cloaked" to leave a comment in this fandom
awesome picture...
Re: awesome picture...
My current problem is shutting the stories up, not generating them; but that will come in time, too.
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I really have no *good* feedback, just incoherent sort of flopping around. Just...Dean! John! Sam!!
*flails more*
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