Run Like Hell, part three
Part two
He was climbing endless stairs in semi-darkness, hearing them creak under his weight, feeling the smooth sensation of the banister running under his hand as he went up. There was a lamp lit up on the landing and he stopped there to look at the portrait that was hanged on the wall: it was a family portrait done on a blue-gray background, probably by a professional, showing a couple in their early forties, two teenage boys, and a small fluffy dog, all dressed in navy blue and red baseball jerseys, the colors of the Lincoln Saltdogs. How nice. He smiled in anticipation, started to softly whistle a tune that had just popped up in his mind, and resumed his slow ascension until he reached the top floor. There, he had to pause for a moment: the end of the corridor was plunged in shadows, but he could make out two identical white doors, one on his left and one on his right. Decisions, decisions… Eeny meeny, miney, moe.
He turned the doorknob to the left one and opened the door. A light snore was coming from the bed, where two sleeping shapes bumped the covers. They didn’t wake up at his approach. They only stirred when he reached out and pressed hands against their mouths - then, they both started to flail, and he could feel the teeth of the woman dig into his palm as she tried to scream and the sound was pushed back into her throat.
“Hey there,” he said cheerfully.
Jesse woke up gasping for air, covered in cold sweat. The blankets weighed like a chainmail on him, there was a pressure on his chest and he felt too hot, on the verge of suffocating. He threw the blankets off him in a panic and thrust his legs out of the bed, sitting up on the edge, elbows on his knees, taking huge gulps of air. Immediately it felt like a weight had fallen off him, liberating him suddenly.
“Jesse?”
Jesse felt Ben, who occupied the middle spot, scoot on the bed and crowd at his back.
“What’s wrong?” Ben murmured, his breath warm against Jesse’s ear.
Ben’s hand started to rub up and down his arm, but Jesse’s skin was sensitive almost to the point of pain so he gripped Ben’s fingers to stop him. There was a rustle of sheets and the bed moved as Claire crawled up to them.
“What is it?”
“I think Jesse had a nightmare,” Ben said. “It looked pretty brutal, man,” he said matter-of-factly to Jesse. He hadn’t made a move to reclaim his hand, interlacing their fingers together instead. “You startled me.”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“What about now?” Claire asked. Her feet touched the floor with a thump, and Jesse almost jumped out of his skin. He could see her standing tall in the half-light from the street lamp outside, wearing her night gear - navy blue tank top and checkered shorts - with her long hair tangled from sleep. “Do you need anything?”
His breathing had quieted and his heartbeat had slowed down to a normal pace, but he felt slightly nauseous and he rubbed his stomach with a grimace. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d felt like throwing up in his life, and there was always a direct cause he could blame it on, like the time he’d eaten too much cotton candy as a kid, or the time he’d accidentally drunk holy water at Ben’s mom’s. This was something else, and it didn’t seem to pass as easily as it should.
“A glass of water, maybe? I feel a little sick.”
“Sure. I’ll get it for you.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Jesse and Ben alone in bed. Feeling less like there was electricity running over his skin, Jesse rested back against Ben’s chest and Ben circled him with his arms, delicately, like he was afraid Jesse might break if he held him too tight.
“Will you be able to go back to sleep?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to.”
“You need sleep. Come on, I’ll sing you a lullaby. Mmh? What d’you think? I’ll rock you back to sleep.”
Ben’s chuckle at his own humor strangled in his throat when Jesse elbowed him in the ribs, but the joke had done its job because Jesse was smiling, something he felt he hadn’t done in forever. They’d been in Alliance for three days now, and the last two had been dull as rain. The Winchesters had kept on interviewing people, claiming they were trying to determine how long Jesse’s father had been possessed, if other people had been possessed, if there had been more than one demon in town, if they were still around. Jesse was done trying to tell them that there were no more demons, because he would feel them otherwise. The demon was gone and what could they do about it now? How to begin looking for it?
“It’ll be back,” the brothers said. “It won’t have gone through all this and then just give up and leave.”
Maybe they even had a point, but all Jesse could feel was powerless and depressed and it seemed to him that they were headless chickens running blindly around town.
“Don’t zone out on me,” Ben said, tickling Jesse’s side until he swatted at his hand. “Hey, I’ll blow you. What do you say? Nothing like a blowjob to get your mind off things.”
The offer came just as Claire was coming back with a glass of water in her hand. The corner of her mouth quirked up, but she didn’t comment, and merely handed Jesse his water.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
She climbed on the bed and sat next to him, one bare foot tucked under herself while the other stroked feather-like over Jesse’s leg. She leaned against his side, trapping one of Ben’s arms between them, and started to play with his hair, burying her fingers in the tangled mess, frowning a little. Jesse choked on his water when he felt sudden pain from Claire tugging at his hair.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “You hair is all… knotted. What did you do with it?” She stopped pulling at it and smoothed it over with her hand. “Here, I’ll leave it alone.”
“Yeah, I’d rather,” he grumbled.
He probed his head and indeed his hair felt coarse and matted, like he’d fallen asleep with a head full of little braids and they’d gotten all messed up from sleep. He twisted his neck to shoot a suspicious look at Ben.
“Hey, I didn’t do anything to it,” Ben said. His fingers joined Jesse’s, fingering the tangled strands. “Looks like someone’s not taking care of his hair.”
Jesse pushed Ben's hand away and finished his water. His mind had cleared from sleep but his dream still felt too present, too vivid.
“Still feeling sick?” Claire asked.
Jesse shook his head. That was a lie, he was still feeling queasy, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment. Claire took the glass from his hands, put it on the nightstand, and cupped his face and kissed him with slow deliberation, catching his lower lip, sucking on it.
“So, do you want Ben to blow you?” she said when she let him go.
“When I answer no to that question, poke me with a stick.”
“Good boy.”
They pushed him back on the bed, propping him comfortably on the pillows. He let them manipulate him like a rag doll, a strange laziness coming over him.
“We’re going to make you feel better,” Ben said.
“Promises, promises.”
They helped him get rid of his underwear and he lay there, butt-naked on the bed, feeling like a decadent emperor from ancient times. Ben kneeled between his legs and took hold of his dick, stroking it at a slow, torturous pace to hardness. Claire kissed him again, running her hand over his stomach, his chest, scraping her fingernails against the sensitive skin inside his thighs. Jesse tipped back on the pillows, closing his eyes, slanting his hips when Ben took him in his mouth and started to suck.
“Christ,” Jesse swore under breath, and the vibrations from Ben’s answering chuckles made pleasure spark through his cock.
His breathing deepened and quickened. Ben wasn’t an expert cocksucker and Jesse had technically had better blowjobs, but it felt shockingly good, a sharp pleasure that took his breath away and brought heat to his cheeks. He loved giving head, so he wasn’t on the receiving end that often, but for once he enjoyed the change of dynamics. He reached out and buried his fingers into Ben’s mop of curly hair.
Distracting him from the warmth and wetness of Ben’s mouth - or maybe enhancing the sensation - he could still feel Claire’s hands and mouth exploring him. It was like she was everywhere at once: nibbling at the line of his jaw, fingering his nipples, caressing the crease between his hip and leg, her touch light but persistent. Ben’s hand grasped at his knee, warm and strong. It was a new thing, them working in tandem with the sole purpose of getting him off, and it very much got him going - oh Jesus it did - not just their touch but the intent behind it, how badly they wanted him to feel good.
“Brace yourself,” he heard Claire whisper and reflexively opened his eyes, just in time to see that she was bending over Jesse’s thigh. Ben pulled back, and Jesse’s breathing hitched when Claire took him whole.
“Oh, shit,” he moaned, one hand flailing wildly before gripping the sheet. “Nng, fuck.”
“Watch your mouth,” Claire chided lightly, always a sticker for proper language. She then proceeded to mouth his balls and he barked a jerky laugh.
“You’re not making it easy, princess.”
He was breathing hard, feeling the heat build up, and his eyes went to the ceiling, to the mirror he’d almost forgotten was there. It was too dark for him to see much except for shifting shadows. That dark spot there had to be Ben’s head, and that lighter one Claire’s. He tried to recreate in mind the shapes of their backs, shoulders, asses - a little more curvy for Claire, a little more muscled for Ben - how they looked from above, moving as they took turns sucking him his brains out.
With this mental image and the both of them working him over, it didn’t take much longer for Jesse to come. He hit his head on the headboard in the process and dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter with Ben and Claire watching him, bright eyes and feverish cheeks and reddened lips.
“I say thank god for teamwork,” Jesse said when he could catch his breath.
“Partner,” Ben said, bowing to Claire. He put his hand up and they high-fived.
“How are you feeling now?”
The sound of Claire’s voice made Jesse realize he’d closed his eyes. He wasn’t one to fall dead on his pillow immediately after an orgasm, but exhaustion must have taken its toll because now he felt drowsy, incapable of staying awake any longer.
“Fine,” he mumbled, pressing his cheek against his pillow.
“Get under the covers, sleepyhead.”
Someone’s hand ran over his hair and face, and someone kissed his shoulder, but Jesse found it hard to concentrate on anything. He heard them murmur.
“You need-”
“Want me to?”
“No, you- Come here.”
Then the sound of them kissing, the swish of sheets, the brush of skin against skin. He had a few last thoughts before falling asleep: in good etiquette, he should be reciprocating to them, but it sounded like they could very well get each other off if needed. It was a shame, though, that he wouldn’t be awake to watch it.
---
The next day’s awakening was brutal. It started with Dean pounding on their door like a sudden roll of thunder.
“Get dressed,” he barked through the door. “We got a new one.”
It took Jesse a moment to get that a new one meant a new death, because they’d apparently been dropped into a Law and Order episode. He didn’t know if the police had called the Winchesters, still caught in the illusion that they were from some federal agency and had rightful access to crime scenes, or if Sam and Dean had a police scanner, but their news were fresh because when they got there the scene was still swarming with cops.
“Stay there while we talk to the police,” Dean said. “Don’t get out of the car.”
That sounded like a wise advice to Jesse. He so didn’t want them to attract the wrong kind of attention from the cops - especially Ben and Claire, because Jesse himself could always find a way to get out of it - but Ben seemed to resent being treated like a disobedient child.
“Why bring us if we’re going to stay in the car?”
“It would seem weird for two FBI agents to let three college-age kids tag along,” Claire said in a reasonable tone, which only seemed to annoy Ben, if the glare he gave her was any indication. “But that way we can have a look at where it happened. See if anything stands out.”
“Looks more like babysitting to me,” Ben grumbled, and he probably had a point.
Jesse let Claire try and convince Ben that they were not being patronized and looked outside to see if anything seemed familiar. The house at the center of the police’s attention was a wide light blue two-story house, its front lined with three high elm trees. Across the street was a low building whose walls were made of unpainted horizontal boards of wood, and Jesse recognized it as the Alliance Knight Museum, where he’d gone with his dad one day his mom was sick in bed and someone had to entertain the kid. The only thing he remembered from the visit was being fascinated by the colorful Native American costumes on display. His dad had bought him ice cream afterwards for being so well-behaved in the museum.
“Hey, they’re coming back.”
Sam and Dean were indeed marching in direction of the car, so purposefully that the cops and forensic people working around the house instinctively drifted aside to let them through. It was amazing how at home they looked for a pair of imposters. Sam tapped on the window with one finger and Ben rolled it down.
“Come with us,” Dean said. He was speaking oddly, in a clipped, business-like tone that let Jesse know he was concerned about being overheard. “Only Jesse,” he said when they all got out of the car.
“Why?” Ben asked in his most belligerent tone.
“Because,” Dean’s voice lowered to an annoyed hiss, “we’re going to smuggle Jesse as a consultant psychic so he can tell us if he feels demons on the scene, but the cops are gonna raise eyebrows if we bring them the whole Ghostfacer team.”
“Tell them I need my team,” Jesse said and started to walk to the house, not waiting to see if they were following him.
When he approached the house, he saw one of the uniformed cops frown and raise a hand, mouth open to tell him off.
“He’s with us,” said Sam Winchester, suddenly standing broad and tall at Jesse’s side and exuding quiet authority.
“Those two are with us too,” Jesse heard Dean grumble, and he turned around to see that Ben and Claire had followed. Ben wriggled his fingers at him, and Dean cuffed him. “Tone it down, kid.”
Inside the house it was even more crowded than outside, white-clad forensics who looked like astronauts scrutinizing furniture, curtains, doorknobs - one of them was even down on his knees taking samples of something from the carpet. A surly looking man, who had a thick wave of black hair and dark brown skin, greeted them at the bottom of a flight of stairs. He was wearing a blue polyester sport coat, a red and blue striped tie, black slacks, and there was a badge around his neck. Jesse understood the reason for the surliness when the man looked over them with open enmity.
“What the hell, Ford?” he said to either Sam or Dean. “I thought you said only one boy wonder. We’re not hosting a school outing here.”
“My apologies, detective,” Jesse told the man, offering him his best shit-eating grin. “But I need them with me. They help me, you know.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “Help me focus.”
The detective’s death glare was a good indication of how skeptical he was about the whole thing, but he must have had his hands tied somehow because he eventually shrugged.
“Whatever. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jack.”
Jesse had almost let his real name escape him, but the detective looked like he could be old enough to have been a cop back when he’d run away, and with his parents’ murder so fresh it paid to be careful.
“Well, Jack. I’m Detective Biswas. Follow me, the show’s upstairs.”
They all followed Detective Biswas in a line, up the stairs to a room whose entrance was crisscrossed with yellow tape. DO NOT CROSS, it commanded in alarming capital letters. The detective moved one band aside to let Jesse in, but when the others tried to follow he clicked his tongue. “Oh no, I won’t have five people trampling over my crime scene. The psychic’s the only one allowed to go.”
Jesse shrugged apologetically at his lovers and entered the room like you enter a vault, holding his breath, feeling on him the eyes of the people left outside. It was immediately clear what had happened in there: there were no more bodies but the bunched up sheets on the wide bed at the center of the room were bloodied and there was blood on the wall too. It also stunk like sulfur, but Jesse tried not to show his discomfort.
“It looks like something’s written on the wall,” Ben said from outside, twisting his neck trying to have a better look.
Jesse took a few steps back to be able to take the whole wall in, and, indeed, the stains on the wall formed letters and the letters made up words. The idea of reading out loud to an audience made him sweat, but he managed it without making too much a fool of himself. “‘They will,” he stumbled a bit on the next word, “reverence my son’.”
“‘They will reverence my son.’ I think it’s a Bible quote,” Claire said.
“The Bible? Are you sure?” Biwas asked.
“Pretty sure.” One of Claire’s hands rose to her face and she rubbed her eyebrow, deep in thoughts. “New Testament. Matthew, Matthew… Chapter 21? The parable of the vineyard.”
“So we have a religious nutjob on our hands,” Biswas said. “Terrific.”
Replace that with ‘demon with a taste for theatrics’ and Jesse shared the feeling. What the hell did that even mean? Who was the demon talking to? Certainly not the police. The weight of the Winchesters’ stares burned his face, and, taking advantage of the fact that Biswas was scowling at the wall, Jesse addressed them with a tiny nod, saying, yes, yes, demon aboard.
“What’s your conclusion?” Biswas asked suddenly, startling Jesse out of his thoughts.
“Uh, what?”
“What are the spirits telling you? Or the psychic vibes, I don’t know.”
“Oh, right. I’m still,” Jesse waved a hand at the room, “getting a feel for the place. Can you tell me more about the victim?” He looked at the bed, a couple’s bed: the pillows bore two heads’ indentations. “Victims?”
“Mark and Joan Miller, 40 and 43. Got their throats slit in their bed in the middle of the night. No sign of forced entry. They had two boys, Jacob and Isaac, but they were staying at friends’ that night.”
Biswas said nothing about his parents’ murder, but no doubt he was thinking about it because the similarities were striking. Jesse made a show of walking around the room and examining everything carefully. It was a clear, luminous room. The curtains were blue and white, and every piece of furniture was painted white, making the blood on the bed and wall seem all the more obscene. On one of the nightstands there was a dog-eared paperback, on the other a folded newspaper and a pair of reading glasses. No blood had dripped on the laminated tiles. If the Millers were both lying in bed when they were killed, then none of them had been possessed and the killer had used someone else’s body. Was probably still using it. And that message… They will reverence my son.
Reverence.
My son.
Oh, god. Jesse brought a hand to his mouth, suddenly sure he was about to throw up. The stench of sulfur was so bad he couldn’t tune it out anymore. He had to leave the room before he contaminated the crime scene and Biswas had his balls chopped off.
“I’m sorry, uh, I don’t - too much fear and pain,” he babbled before he slipped between the yellow bands and ran down the stairs, Biswas shouting behind him, “What’s this bullshit?”
All he wanted was to get the fuck out of that house, but on the landing there was a picture on the wall that he hadn’t seen going up and he was hit with brutal déjà vu.
“What the actual fuck?”
It was the all-baseball-gear family portrait from his nightmare.
---
“So you dreamed the whole thing?”
Ben and Claire had ditched the Winchesters - who were now trying to smooth things over with Detective Biswas - and the three of them were having breakfast in a small diner a few streets away; one that, thank god, post-dated the last time Jesse had been in town. Surprisingly, he’d found once he got there that he was actually hungry, and was now devouring a stack of pancakes drowned in maple syrup, while Ben attacked a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns with a side of toasts.
“Could it be some kind of premonition?” Claire asked, nursing a lonely cup of coffee.
“I’ve never had premonitions before,” Jesse said. “Not that I know of, at least. I don’t know, it’s a possibility, but… it felt like I was the killer.” He stabbed his fork into a bit of pancake. “This is seriously fucking me up.”
“And the Millers were killed in the middle of the night,” Ben pointed out, his left cheek bulging with food. “If it’s a premonition then it almost missed the train.”
“We can agree at least that the message’s addressed to Jesse, right?” Claire said.
Ben cursed at a bit of egg that had fallen on his lap, and started dabbing at his jeans with a napkin. “What’s this “parable of the vineyard” about?” he asked, one eye on Claire and the other to what he was doing.
“A farmer rents his vineyard but the tenants refuse to pay and kill his servants, and then his son, when they come to collect payment. This is a metaphor for people refusing the Christ’s message.”
They mulled that over for a moment.
“I’m probably the son,” Jesse said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense - why the demon would go after my parents, why I saw what it was doing while it was doing it. That demon must be the one who, uh, sired me.” For lack of a better term. Fathered sounded too human for the way he was born.
“And the message?” Ben said. “In that parable, the “son” represents Jesus, am I right?” He looked at Claire.
“Yes. And the servants are God’s prophets.”
“Okay. I’m guessing Jesse isn’t Jesus here but-”
“The opposite,” Jesse finished for him. “The Anti-Christ.” And wow, how come he’d never noticed the similarities between Jesse and Jesus?
“Like in the parable, the message has been rejected since you didn’t do what Hell expected of you,” Claire said. “So what now? This message sounds like a promise.”
“It came back for me,” Jesse murmured; the food left on his plate didn’t look too appetizing now. “I’m its accomplishment.”
“It won’t get you,” Ben said fiercely, reaching across the table to clutch white-knuckled at Jesse’s hand. “What’re we telling Sam and Dean?”
Jesse looked up sharply at him and disentangled his hand. “We’re not telling them. How do you think it’s going to sound to them? These people were killed and I dreamed about it. Probably as it happened.”
“You couldn’t have done it,” Ben protested. “You were in bed with us all night. In more ways than one.”
“It’s not going to take them long to remember that Jesse can be in one place, then another in a matter of seconds,” Claire said. Ben shot her a betrayed glare. “I’m only pointing out the obvious. I don’t think Jesse actually did anything, and maybe Sam and Dean won’t want to believe it either, but no alibi can hold unless we can swear we had our eyes on him all the time, and we can’t.”
Even though Jesse agreed with Claire, it was uncomfortable to hear her lay it out that way. He could have done it. The frightening thing was, he didn’t know the extent of what he could do.
“Claire’s making my point,” he said when it looked like Ben was going to protest. “Let’s just wait until we know more about this before we tell them anything, okay?”
The struggle was obvious on Ben’s face. He didn’t like lying to people he loved, and when he sighed and said, “Fine,” Jesse knew and appreciated what it cost him.
They were in public, in his hometown - not the most liberal place in the world, unless it had changed a lot since he was a kid - but Jesse still took Ben’s hand and brought it to his lips to lightly kiss his knuckles.
“Thanks, mate.”
Ben dropped his head, his cheeks a startling shade of red. “Whatever,” he said, using his fork to skewer pieces of bacon, sausage, eggs and toast together.
---
Sam and Dean joined them later at the diner and ordered themselves breakfast while Jesse told them what they’d talked about, minus the part about his nightmare. Maybe it was because he knew Ben didn’t like it, but the guilt of lying by omission weighed sorely on his mind, and he was convinced that every time one of the Winchesters looked at him he could see it written on his face in clear capital letters.
“You okay?” Sam asked him, taking a sip of his black-as-tar coffee.
“Yeah, just.” Jesse combed his fingers through his hair. “The smell of sulfur, you know. Reminds me of Stull Cemetery.”
It wasn’t untrue, but the general sympathetic look he received, even from the Winchesters, made him want to squirm on his seat. It was Dean, surprisingly, who redirected everyone’s attention.
“If you’re right and this demon’s trying to catch your attention,” he said.
“Then it got it,” Jesse said.
“Right, but I’d say that killing your parents was enough to do the job, wasn’t it?”
“Classic psychological warfare,” Sam said with a shrug, chillingly matter-of-fact about it. “It wants Jesse to know that it can do whatever it wants unless it’s stopped.”
“But why the Millers?” Claire asked.
Dean pointed a finger at her in a girl has a point gesture. “Did you know the Millers?” he asked Jesse.
Jesse furrowed his brow in concentration, but really, all he remembered from the Miller family portrait was the baseball clothing and the dog, a ridiculous fluff ball with black button-like eyes. Beyond that he thought maybe the woman had blond hair? And the man had a definitely receding hairline.
“I don’t think so, but honestly I can’t be sure.”
Sam wiped his mouth on a napkin and got a notepad from his jacket. “Mark Miller was a plumber,” he read. “He had his own company which he started with a partner about fifteen years ago. We’ll have to talk to the partner,” he said with a glance to his brother. “Joan Miller was an elementary school teacher. She worked at the Emerson Elementary School located at the corner of Black Hills Avenue and West 7th Street.”
“Wait,” Jesse said. “Emerson you said? I went to school there.”
“This can’t be a coincidence,” Sam said. “Are you sure you don’t remember Joan Miller?”
“I… I think I had a Mrs. Miller in second grade? But she was a brunet back then.”
“So it’s going after people you knew,” Dean said. “Typical. Who else could it go after?”
Sam tore a leaf from his notepad. “Here. Write us a list.”
“A list of what?”
“Of everyone you knew when you lived here.” Like it was that fucking easy.
Faced with the blank sheet of paper, Sam’s pencil in hand, Jesse felt at a loss, like all those years ago when he was still in school and he had test fright. Full-on paralysis, feeling like his brain had shrunken to raisin size, incapable of summoning any words. Then a few faces without names and a few names without faces popped up haphazardly in his mind. Jesse pressed the tip of the pencil so hard on the paper that it broke, leaving a dark smear on the first line.
“Well, there’s the neighbors we interviewed,” Ben said a little too loud. “Dona and her daughter - what was her name again?”
“Lizzie,” Claire said, running her finger around the rim of her empty cup.
“Right, Lizzie. You were friends with Lizzie, weren’t you, Jess?” Ben’s lips curved in a teasing smile. “I bet you had a crush on her.”
“He totally had a crush on her,” Claire said with a serious expression. “It was on his face when she came downstairs.”
“Okay, give it a rest, you two,” Jesse said, writing down Dona and Lizzie’s names.
“What about your other neighbors, Jesse?”
“And your other teachers?”
“Any friends at school?”
“What about your parents’ friends?”
“Relatives?”
“Friends’ parents?”
Questions after questions, while the Winchesters watched without comments, Ben and Claire helped Jesse jog his memories and soon enough he had close to a dozen names for Sam and Dean, with the Saunders’ at the top.
“Thanks,” Dean said when Jesse handed him out the list. He frowned. “Huh. Your handwriting is shit. Must be because you’re a leftie.”
Jesse flushed. “Fuck you too.”
“Is that it?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. I didn’t see that many people on a regular basis.”
“Still,” Dean said. “There are too many people for us to be able to watch over all of them. I guess the Saunders are a priority if you were close to them.”
“There are five of us,” Ben reminded him, and Dean rolled his eyes.
“Yes, Ben, but even five of us isn’t enough.”
“It should be possible to narrow the list down to five more likely targets. With Jesse being able to take us wherever in record time, we may actually have a chance to catch this demon red-handed.”
“Hey, I’m not a cab company,” Jesse protested, but it was mostly for show. He didn’t want anyone else to get hurt because of him.
“We also have to take a few hours to interview the Millers’ relations,” Sam said. “See if we can find who the demon possessed. Maybe it’s even still possessing the same host.”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “Let’s hope this demon does us the favor of keeping a low profile for at least a day.”
He pushed the list to Jesse and tapped a finger on it. “Find us five likely targets in this,” he said.
He stuck a bill under his cup, patted his brother on the shoulder, and the two of them left in a scraping of chairs.
“Sir, yes sir,” Jesse grumbled to himself, eyes on the list. “Would you like some coffee with your order?” Five targets more likely to draw the attention of a head-scrambled-by-Hell demon? No worries.
---
Emerson Elementary School was a rectangular block of red bricks topped with one chimney that made it looked like an old Victorian factory. The red blinds were drawn at the windows as the sun shone in an unflinching blue sky. There wasn’t a whiff of wind. It must have been class time because there were no kids in the asphalted courtyard attached to the side of the building.
Jesse tossed the butt of his cigarette on the sidewalk, and stubbed it out before he made his way to the double-panel entrance doors. It looked a lot smaller than in his memories, almost like a doll-sized house. He walked into empty hallways that echoed the voices of teachers from their classrooms and the buzzing sound of little kids’ babble.
Ethan, that’s enough!
Who can read what is on the board?
Quiet, please! Quiet!
Listen, and repeat after me.
He walked with his hands in his pockets, looking through the round openings cut into the doors and catching sight of parts of blackboards and teachers gesturing to their classes. One of them turned her head just when he walked by and he saw her eyes widen. He kept walking.
“Excuse me!”
He stopped but didn’t turn around, and heard her heels click as she caught up with him.
“Excuse me,” she repeated. “Are you looking for something?”
She put a hand on his shoulder and he turned lazily to look at her. Back in her classroom the open door let him hear the excited chatter of kids interrupted in their routine.
“Sir? If you want to talk to one of the teachers, you should make an appointment.”
She was polite but obviously wary. Pale-faced, she looked to be in her forties and didn’t try to hide the silver lines in her dark hair. She wore a white blouse over a long straight black skirt, and around her neck she had a golden locket. Jesse had always wondered what he would see inside if he could open it.
“Hi, Mrs. Foster,” he said.
“Do I know you?”
“You don’t recognize me, then. I’m Jesse Turner.”
Even if she didn’t recognize him, you didn’t forget the name of a student who’d gone missing. She gaped at him, bringing her hand up to hide her open mouth. Then she seemed to pull herself together and gave him her stern elementary teacher look.
“This isn’t funny, young man,” she said. “Jesse Turner is dead. His parents have just been murdered. You shouldn’t play that sort of game.”
“I’m not dead.” He opened his arms in an invitation to look at him. “Obviously. I just ran far, far away. Do you remember telling me I was too lazy to make it in life? Couldn’t even read properly.”
She looked troubled by his words, but unwilling to believe him just yet. She crossed her arms under her breasts and said, “Let’s say you really are Jesse Turner. What do you want?”
“Did you ever wonder why I ran away?”
He leaned toward her and she took a step back. He could see that she was growing afraid now.
“What’s your point?”
“It was because of this.”
She tried to scream when he lifted her off the floor without taking his hands out of his pockets, but she found then that she couldn’t open her mouth. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, gyrating in panic, and her face became red with her efforts to fight against her invisible restraints.
“Oh.”
A little dark-skinned kid, braver than his classmates, had appeared at the entrance of Mrs. Foster’s classroom and was now looking at his floating teacher with an awe-struck expression. Jesse smiled at the child, and shoved Mrs. Foster against the wall.
He woke up with his heart in his throat, and for a moment he was absolutely incapable of taking a breath and honestly thought he was going to choke to death. He rolled onto his knees, head down, clutching at his chest where his straining lungs screamed murder. He gripped blindly at the picket from the fence he had been leaning against, and fought to take a breath against the pressure that made his ribs ache. His vision whitened and he thought he was going to pass out.
He didn’t. After a few failed attempts he finally managed to take a gasping, painful breath, then another one, until his vision cleared and he didn’t think he was going to die anymore.
“Oh, motherfucking Christ.”
He leaned back against the fence, rubbing a hand over his face. He was across the road from the Saunders’ house, he could see that now. He was supposed to look out for them but apparently he’d fallen asleep. What a screwed-up rescuer he was.
Even if it was no thanks to him, Dona Saunders seemed to be fine: she was watering the plants at the front of her house, protected by a large-rimmed hat that flapped as she moved. Lizzie came out of the house and said something to her mother, hands on her hips. The pearly laugh Dona gave her in answer carried out to Jesse.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he’d fallen asleep. What the hell was wrong him? He’d fallen asleep and he’d dreamed. He’d dreamed about… He massaged his forehead, trying to remember his dream. He was in his old school and one of his old teachers was there. Mrs. Foster. And then…
He jumped to his feet, his dream suddenly clear and vivid in his mind.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, shit.”
He left the Saunders to jump to Emerson. He materialized in front of the small white church that faced the school, and before he could see anything he could hear a commotion. He whirled around and saw people gathered on the grass in front of the school. One of them was Mrs. Foster: she had blood on her face and was supported by another teacher. Several other adults were around them, talking in panicked voices to each other, raising their arms up in the air. Some kids spilled out of the school building and were harshly instructed to go back to their classrooms.
Jesse did the only thing he could think of. He called Ben.
“Jesse?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m where I’m supposed to be - I’m watching the house of your dad’s friend. I don’t think the dude has even moved from his couch in hours.”
“Okay, okay. So nothing happened? Everything’s fine?”
“What- Did something happen to you? Jesse?”
“I’m coming to you. Don’t move. I’ll be there in a sec.”
He called Claire for symmetry. His heart fluttered like a trapped bird in his chest and he couldn’t quiet it, couldn’t calm down, fingers drumming against his jean-clad thigh. Claire answered and sounded bored, then worried, but still told him not to panic. “No one died, right?”
“N-no.” Not that he knew of, at least.
“Then it can be fixed. Go talk to Ben if it makes you feel better, but believe me when I tell you it’s going to be fine.”
“Okay.”
“Jesse? I want to hear you say it.”
“It’s going to be fine,” he parroted, and had a small smile she couldn’t see: she was the one with the persuasion powers, apparently. “Thanks. Just… keep on with your surveillance and we’ll talk later.”
Ben was in the coffee shop facing the house he was watching over. Jesse had been there a few times in the past and could therefore materialize in the bathroom, which was fortunately unoccupied. When he got out he earned himself a puzzled look from a middle-aged man who probably thought there was no one inside and had been about to get in.
He grinned at the man. “Their hand dryer is the shit,” he told him.
He had to climb up a flight of stairs to get to the main room, and when he emerged there he swept a quick glance around. There were a few people chatting in the booths on one side, none of them Ben, and then Jesse saw him by the front window, turned to the outside and the small white house with the hip-shaped roof across the street. Relief washed over him and a calm feeling settled inside his chest. He sauntered his way to Ben, trying to look the picture of casualness. The floor had a checkered brown-and-white pattern and it made him feel like he was standing on a giant chessboard.
“Hey,” he said to Ben as he dropped on the chair across him.
Ben startled. “Oh, Jesus,” he cursed, one hand pressed on his heart. “You fucking scared me, man. So what happened? You sounded totally freaked out on the phone, but you look... okay.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said, dismissive. “I’m fine.” He told Ben what happened, the dream, how real it’d been, and then the reality.
“But that teacher didn’t die,” Ben said. “What’s the demon doing?”
Jesse hesitated. “What if it’s not the demon, but…”
“No. Don’t say it. You didn’t do this. It has to be the demon - it’s playing with us, with you. It didn’t kill that teacher so what is it doing?”
“I have no fucking idea.” Jesse rubbed at his chest; he thought he could still feel the pain from not being able to breathe and it was hard to think past that. “Drawing my attention?”
“Or drawing it away. What about the Saunders? You were watching over them, right?”
“They were fine when I… Oh, shit. Oh, I’m such a fucking moron. I left them alone.”
“You think the demon wants to get to them?”
“What else?”
“Then go, quickly. I’m staying here.”
Jesse ran back to the bathroom, not caring if he drew a few looks. When he materialized again in front of the Saunders, Dona wasn’t watering the plants anymore. There was no sound coming from the house, but when Jesse noticed that the front door was open his heart jumped in his chest, and without thinking he ran inside.
“Dona?” he called. “Lizzie?”
There was no answer, and Jesse thought for sure he was too late - too late, too late, too late - when he heard the sound of flushing and Lizzie appeared in the entrance hall.
“Who are you?” she asked imperiously. “What are you doing inside my house?”
“The door was open… Is your mom alright?”
“My… You know my mother? She’s taking a nap, what do you want with her?”
“Check on her.”
“She just went to bed, I don’t-”
“Do it!” He forced himself to speak more softly. “Please, do it, just check on her.”
Maybe he’d once again used his power without realizing it, or maybe she was taken over by the urgency in his voice, but whatever the reason Lizzie listened to him and went upstairs check on her mother. Jesse waited for her to come back, his heart pounding.
“She’s perfectly fine.” Lizzie’s voice floated down to him from the top of the stairs. “Now, are you going to tell me who-”
A male voice called for her, probably Dona's husband. Jesse didn’t wait for her to get back downstairs before he disappeared.
Part four
He was climbing endless stairs in semi-darkness, hearing them creak under his weight, feeling the smooth sensation of the banister running under his hand as he went up. There was a lamp lit up on the landing and he stopped there to look at the portrait that was hanged on the wall: it was a family portrait done on a blue-gray background, probably by a professional, showing a couple in their early forties, two teenage boys, and a small fluffy dog, all dressed in navy blue and red baseball jerseys, the colors of the Lincoln Saltdogs. How nice. He smiled in anticipation, started to softly whistle a tune that had just popped up in his mind, and resumed his slow ascension until he reached the top floor. There, he had to pause for a moment: the end of the corridor was plunged in shadows, but he could make out two identical white doors, one on his left and one on his right. Decisions, decisions… Eeny meeny, miney, moe.
He turned the doorknob to the left one and opened the door. A light snore was coming from the bed, where two sleeping shapes bumped the covers. They didn’t wake up at his approach. They only stirred when he reached out and pressed hands against their mouths - then, they both started to flail, and he could feel the teeth of the woman dig into his palm as she tried to scream and the sound was pushed back into her throat.
“Hey there,” he said cheerfully.
Jesse woke up gasping for air, covered in cold sweat. The blankets weighed like a chainmail on him, there was a pressure on his chest and he felt too hot, on the verge of suffocating. He threw the blankets off him in a panic and thrust his legs out of the bed, sitting up on the edge, elbows on his knees, taking huge gulps of air. Immediately it felt like a weight had fallen off him, liberating him suddenly.
“Jesse?”
Jesse felt Ben, who occupied the middle spot, scoot on the bed and crowd at his back.
“What’s wrong?” Ben murmured, his breath warm against Jesse’s ear.
Ben’s hand started to rub up and down his arm, but Jesse’s skin was sensitive almost to the point of pain so he gripped Ben’s fingers to stop him. There was a rustle of sheets and the bed moved as Claire crawled up to them.
“What is it?”
“I think Jesse had a nightmare,” Ben said. “It looked pretty brutal, man,” he said matter-of-factly to Jesse. He hadn’t made a move to reclaim his hand, interlacing their fingers together instead. “You startled me.”
“I couldn’t breathe.”
“What about now?” Claire asked. Her feet touched the floor with a thump, and Jesse almost jumped out of his skin. He could see her standing tall in the half-light from the street lamp outside, wearing her night gear - navy blue tank top and checkered shorts - with her long hair tangled from sleep. “Do you need anything?”
His breathing had quieted and his heartbeat had slowed down to a normal pace, but he felt slightly nauseous and he rubbed his stomach with a grimace. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times he’d felt like throwing up in his life, and there was always a direct cause he could blame it on, like the time he’d eaten too much cotton candy as a kid, or the time he’d accidentally drunk holy water at Ben’s mom’s. This was something else, and it didn’t seem to pass as easily as it should.
“A glass of water, maybe? I feel a little sick.”
“Sure. I’ll get it for you.”
She disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Jesse and Ben alone in bed. Feeling less like there was electricity running over his skin, Jesse rested back against Ben’s chest and Ben circled him with his arms, delicately, like he was afraid Jesse might break if he held him too tight.
“Will you be able to go back to sleep?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to.”
“You need sleep. Come on, I’ll sing you a lullaby. Mmh? What d’you think? I’ll rock you back to sleep.”
Ben’s chuckle at his own humor strangled in his throat when Jesse elbowed him in the ribs, but the joke had done its job because Jesse was smiling, something he felt he hadn’t done in forever. They’d been in Alliance for three days now, and the last two had been dull as rain. The Winchesters had kept on interviewing people, claiming they were trying to determine how long Jesse’s father had been possessed, if other people had been possessed, if there had been more than one demon in town, if they were still around. Jesse was done trying to tell them that there were no more demons, because he would feel them otherwise. The demon was gone and what could they do about it now? How to begin looking for it?
“It’ll be back,” the brothers said. “It won’t have gone through all this and then just give up and leave.”
Maybe they even had a point, but all Jesse could feel was powerless and depressed and it seemed to him that they were headless chickens running blindly around town.
“Don’t zone out on me,” Ben said, tickling Jesse’s side until he swatted at his hand. “Hey, I’ll blow you. What do you say? Nothing like a blowjob to get your mind off things.”
The offer came just as Claire was coming back with a glass of water in her hand. The corner of her mouth quirked up, but she didn’t comment, and merely handed Jesse his water.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
She climbed on the bed and sat next to him, one bare foot tucked under herself while the other stroked feather-like over Jesse’s leg. She leaned against his side, trapping one of Ben’s arms between them, and started to play with his hair, burying her fingers in the tangled mess, frowning a little. Jesse choked on his water when he felt sudden pain from Claire tugging at his hair.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “You hair is all… knotted. What did you do with it?” She stopped pulling at it and smoothed it over with her hand. “Here, I’ll leave it alone.”
“Yeah, I’d rather,” he grumbled.
He probed his head and indeed his hair felt coarse and matted, like he’d fallen asleep with a head full of little braids and they’d gotten all messed up from sleep. He twisted his neck to shoot a suspicious look at Ben.
“Hey, I didn’t do anything to it,” Ben said. His fingers joined Jesse’s, fingering the tangled strands. “Looks like someone’s not taking care of his hair.”
Jesse pushed Ben's hand away and finished his water. His mind had cleared from sleep but his dream still felt too present, too vivid.
“Still feeling sick?” Claire asked.
Jesse shook his head. That was a lie, he was still feeling queasy, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment. Claire took the glass from his hands, put it on the nightstand, and cupped his face and kissed him with slow deliberation, catching his lower lip, sucking on it.
“So, do you want Ben to blow you?” she said when she let him go.
“When I answer no to that question, poke me with a stick.”
“Good boy.”
They pushed him back on the bed, propping him comfortably on the pillows. He let them manipulate him like a rag doll, a strange laziness coming over him.
“We’re going to make you feel better,” Ben said.
“Promises, promises.”
They helped him get rid of his underwear and he lay there, butt-naked on the bed, feeling like a decadent emperor from ancient times. Ben kneeled between his legs and took hold of his dick, stroking it at a slow, torturous pace to hardness. Claire kissed him again, running her hand over his stomach, his chest, scraping her fingernails against the sensitive skin inside his thighs. Jesse tipped back on the pillows, closing his eyes, slanting his hips when Ben took him in his mouth and started to suck.
“Christ,” Jesse swore under breath, and the vibrations from Ben’s answering chuckles made pleasure spark through his cock.
His breathing deepened and quickened. Ben wasn’t an expert cocksucker and Jesse had technically had better blowjobs, but it felt shockingly good, a sharp pleasure that took his breath away and brought heat to his cheeks. He loved giving head, so he wasn’t on the receiving end that often, but for once he enjoyed the change of dynamics. He reached out and buried his fingers into Ben’s mop of curly hair.
Distracting him from the warmth and wetness of Ben’s mouth - or maybe enhancing the sensation - he could still feel Claire’s hands and mouth exploring him. It was like she was everywhere at once: nibbling at the line of his jaw, fingering his nipples, caressing the crease between his hip and leg, her touch light but persistent. Ben’s hand grasped at his knee, warm and strong. It was a new thing, them working in tandem with the sole purpose of getting him off, and it very much got him going - oh Jesus it did - not just their touch but the intent behind it, how badly they wanted him to feel good.
“Brace yourself,” he heard Claire whisper and reflexively opened his eyes, just in time to see that she was bending over Jesse’s thigh. Ben pulled back, and Jesse’s breathing hitched when Claire took him whole.
“Oh, shit,” he moaned, one hand flailing wildly before gripping the sheet. “Nng, fuck.”
“Watch your mouth,” Claire chided lightly, always a sticker for proper language. She then proceeded to mouth his balls and he barked a jerky laugh.
“You’re not making it easy, princess.”
He was breathing hard, feeling the heat build up, and his eyes went to the ceiling, to the mirror he’d almost forgotten was there. It was too dark for him to see much except for shifting shadows. That dark spot there had to be Ben’s head, and that lighter one Claire’s. He tried to recreate in mind the shapes of their backs, shoulders, asses - a little more curvy for Claire, a little more muscled for Ben - how they looked from above, moving as they took turns sucking him his brains out.
With this mental image and the both of them working him over, it didn’t take much longer for Jesse to come. He hit his head on the headboard in the process and dissolved into slightly hysterical laughter with Ben and Claire watching him, bright eyes and feverish cheeks and reddened lips.
“I say thank god for teamwork,” Jesse said when he could catch his breath.
“Partner,” Ben said, bowing to Claire. He put his hand up and they high-fived.
“How are you feeling now?”
The sound of Claire’s voice made Jesse realize he’d closed his eyes. He wasn’t one to fall dead on his pillow immediately after an orgasm, but exhaustion must have taken its toll because now he felt drowsy, incapable of staying awake any longer.
“Fine,” he mumbled, pressing his cheek against his pillow.
“Get under the covers, sleepyhead.”
Someone’s hand ran over his hair and face, and someone kissed his shoulder, but Jesse found it hard to concentrate on anything. He heard them murmur.
“You need-”
“Want me to?”
“No, you- Come here.”
Then the sound of them kissing, the swish of sheets, the brush of skin against skin. He had a few last thoughts before falling asleep: in good etiquette, he should be reciprocating to them, but it sounded like they could very well get each other off if needed. It was a shame, though, that he wouldn’t be awake to watch it.
---
The next day’s awakening was brutal. It started with Dean pounding on their door like a sudden roll of thunder.
“Get dressed,” he barked through the door. “We got a new one.”
It took Jesse a moment to get that a new one meant a new death, because they’d apparently been dropped into a Law and Order episode. He didn’t know if the police had called the Winchesters, still caught in the illusion that they were from some federal agency and had rightful access to crime scenes, or if Sam and Dean had a police scanner, but their news were fresh because when they got there the scene was still swarming with cops.
“Stay there while we talk to the police,” Dean said. “Don’t get out of the car.”
That sounded like a wise advice to Jesse. He so didn’t want them to attract the wrong kind of attention from the cops - especially Ben and Claire, because Jesse himself could always find a way to get out of it - but Ben seemed to resent being treated like a disobedient child.
“Why bring us if we’re going to stay in the car?”
“It would seem weird for two FBI agents to let three college-age kids tag along,” Claire said in a reasonable tone, which only seemed to annoy Ben, if the glare he gave her was any indication. “But that way we can have a look at where it happened. See if anything stands out.”
“Looks more like babysitting to me,” Ben grumbled, and he probably had a point.
Jesse let Claire try and convince Ben that they were not being patronized and looked outside to see if anything seemed familiar. The house at the center of the police’s attention was a wide light blue two-story house, its front lined with three high elm trees. Across the street was a low building whose walls were made of unpainted horizontal boards of wood, and Jesse recognized it as the Alliance Knight Museum, where he’d gone with his dad one day his mom was sick in bed and someone had to entertain the kid. The only thing he remembered from the visit was being fascinated by the colorful Native American costumes on display. His dad had bought him ice cream afterwards for being so well-behaved in the museum.
“Hey, they’re coming back.”
Sam and Dean were indeed marching in direction of the car, so purposefully that the cops and forensic people working around the house instinctively drifted aside to let them through. It was amazing how at home they looked for a pair of imposters. Sam tapped on the window with one finger and Ben rolled it down.
“Come with us,” Dean said. He was speaking oddly, in a clipped, business-like tone that let Jesse know he was concerned about being overheard. “Only Jesse,” he said when they all got out of the car.
“Why?” Ben asked in his most belligerent tone.
“Because,” Dean’s voice lowered to an annoyed hiss, “we’re going to smuggle Jesse as a consultant psychic so he can tell us if he feels demons on the scene, but the cops are gonna raise eyebrows if we bring them the whole Ghostfacer team.”
“Tell them I need my team,” Jesse said and started to walk to the house, not waiting to see if they were following him.
When he approached the house, he saw one of the uniformed cops frown and raise a hand, mouth open to tell him off.
“He’s with us,” said Sam Winchester, suddenly standing broad and tall at Jesse’s side and exuding quiet authority.
“Those two are with us too,” Jesse heard Dean grumble, and he turned around to see that Ben and Claire had followed. Ben wriggled his fingers at him, and Dean cuffed him. “Tone it down, kid.”
Inside the house it was even more crowded than outside, white-clad forensics who looked like astronauts scrutinizing furniture, curtains, doorknobs - one of them was even down on his knees taking samples of something from the carpet. A surly looking man, who had a thick wave of black hair and dark brown skin, greeted them at the bottom of a flight of stairs. He was wearing a blue polyester sport coat, a red and blue striped tie, black slacks, and there was a badge around his neck. Jesse understood the reason for the surliness when the man looked over them with open enmity.
“What the hell, Ford?” he said to either Sam or Dean. “I thought you said only one boy wonder. We’re not hosting a school outing here.”
“My apologies, detective,” Jesse told the man, offering him his best shit-eating grin. “But I need them with me. They help me, you know.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “Help me focus.”
The detective’s death glare was a good indication of how skeptical he was about the whole thing, but he must have had his hands tied somehow because he eventually shrugged.
“Whatever. What’s your name, kid?”
“Jack.”
Jesse had almost let his real name escape him, but the detective looked like he could be old enough to have been a cop back when he’d run away, and with his parents’ murder so fresh it paid to be careful.
“Well, Jack. I’m Detective Biswas. Follow me, the show’s upstairs.”
They all followed Detective Biswas in a line, up the stairs to a room whose entrance was crisscrossed with yellow tape. DO NOT CROSS, it commanded in alarming capital letters. The detective moved one band aside to let Jesse in, but when the others tried to follow he clicked his tongue. “Oh no, I won’t have five people trampling over my crime scene. The psychic’s the only one allowed to go.”
Jesse shrugged apologetically at his lovers and entered the room like you enter a vault, holding his breath, feeling on him the eyes of the people left outside. It was immediately clear what had happened in there: there were no more bodies but the bunched up sheets on the wide bed at the center of the room were bloodied and there was blood on the wall too. It also stunk like sulfur, but Jesse tried not to show his discomfort.
“It looks like something’s written on the wall,” Ben said from outside, twisting his neck trying to have a better look.
Jesse took a few steps back to be able to take the whole wall in, and, indeed, the stains on the wall formed letters and the letters made up words. The idea of reading out loud to an audience made him sweat, but he managed it without making too much a fool of himself. “‘They will,” he stumbled a bit on the next word, “reverence my son’.”
“‘They will reverence my son.’ I think it’s a Bible quote,” Claire said.
“The Bible? Are you sure?” Biwas asked.
“Pretty sure.” One of Claire’s hands rose to her face and she rubbed her eyebrow, deep in thoughts. “New Testament. Matthew, Matthew… Chapter 21? The parable of the vineyard.”
“So we have a religious nutjob on our hands,” Biswas said. “Terrific.”
Replace that with ‘demon with a taste for theatrics’ and Jesse shared the feeling. What the hell did that even mean? Who was the demon talking to? Certainly not the police. The weight of the Winchesters’ stares burned his face, and, taking advantage of the fact that Biswas was scowling at the wall, Jesse addressed them with a tiny nod, saying, yes, yes, demon aboard.
“What’s your conclusion?” Biswas asked suddenly, startling Jesse out of his thoughts.
“Uh, what?”
“What are the spirits telling you? Or the psychic vibes, I don’t know.”
“Oh, right. I’m still,” Jesse waved a hand at the room, “getting a feel for the place. Can you tell me more about the victim?” He looked at the bed, a couple’s bed: the pillows bore two heads’ indentations. “Victims?”
“Mark and Joan Miller, 40 and 43. Got their throats slit in their bed in the middle of the night. No sign of forced entry. They had two boys, Jacob and Isaac, but they were staying at friends’ that night.”
Biswas said nothing about his parents’ murder, but no doubt he was thinking about it because the similarities were striking. Jesse made a show of walking around the room and examining everything carefully. It was a clear, luminous room. The curtains were blue and white, and every piece of furniture was painted white, making the blood on the bed and wall seem all the more obscene. On one of the nightstands there was a dog-eared paperback, on the other a folded newspaper and a pair of reading glasses. No blood had dripped on the laminated tiles. If the Millers were both lying in bed when they were killed, then none of them had been possessed and the killer had used someone else’s body. Was probably still using it. And that message… They will reverence my son.
Reverence.
My son.
Oh, god. Jesse brought a hand to his mouth, suddenly sure he was about to throw up. The stench of sulfur was so bad he couldn’t tune it out anymore. He had to leave the room before he contaminated the crime scene and Biswas had his balls chopped off.
“I’m sorry, uh, I don’t - too much fear and pain,” he babbled before he slipped between the yellow bands and ran down the stairs, Biswas shouting behind him, “What’s this bullshit?”
All he wanted was to get the fuck out of that house, but on the landing there was a picture on the wall that he hadn’t seen going up and he was hit with brutal déjà vu.
“What the actual fuck?”
It was the all-baseball-gear family portrait from his nightmare.
---
“So you dreamed the whole thing?”
Ben and Claire had ditched the Winchesters - who were now trying to smooth things over with Detective Biswas - and the three of them were having breakfast in a small diner a few streets away; one that, thank god, post-dated the last time Jesse had been in town. Surprisingly, he’d found once he got there that he was actually hungry, and was now devouring a stack of pancakes drowned in maple syrup, while Ben attacked a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, and hashbrowns with a side of toasts.
“Could it be some kind of premonition?” Claire asked, nursing a lonely cup of coffee.
“I’ve never had premonitions before,” Jesse said. “Not that I know of, at least. I don’t know, it’s a possibility, but… it felt like I was the killer.” He stabbed his fork into a bit of pancake. “This is seriously fucking me up.”
“And the Millers were killed in the middle of the night,” Ben pointed out, his left cheek bulging with food. “If it’s a premonition then it almost missed the train.”
“We can agree at least that the message’s addressed to Jesse, right?” Claire said.
Ben cursed at a bit of egg that had fallen on his lap, and started dabbing at his jeans with a napkin. “What’s this “parable of the vineyard” about?” he asked, one eye on Claire and the other to what he was doing.
“A farmer rents his vineyard but the tenants refuse to pay and kill his servants, and then his son, when they come to collect payment. This is a metaphor for people refusing the Christ’s message.”
They mulled that over for a moment.
“I’m probably the son,” Jesse said. “That’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense - why the demon would go after my parents, why I saw what it was doing while it was doing it. That demon must be the one who, uh, sired me.” For lack of a better term. Fathered sounded too human for the way he was born.
“And the message?” Ben said. “In that parable, the “son” represents Jesus, am I right?” He looked at Claire.
“Yes. And the servants are God’s prophets.”
“Okay. I’m guessing Jesse isn’t Jesus here but-”
“The opposite,” Jesse finished for him. “The Anti-Christ.” And wow, how come he’d never noticed the similarities between Jesse and Jesus?
“Like in the parable, the message has been rejected since you didn’t do what Hell expected of you,” Claire said. “So what now? This message sounds like a promise.”
“It came back for me,” Jesse murmured; the food left on his plate didn’t look too appetizing now. “I’m its accomplishment.”
“It won’t get you,” Ben said fiercely, reaching across the table to clutch white-knuckled at Jesse’s hand. “What’re we telling Sam and Dean?”
Jesse looked up sharply at him and disentangled his hand. “We’re not telling them. How do you think it’s going to sound to them? These people were killed and I dreamed about it. Probably as it happened.”
“You couldn’t have done it,” Ben protested. “You were in bed with us all night. In more ways than one.”
“It’s not going to take them long to remember that Jesse can be in one place, then another in a matter of seconds,” Claire said. Ben shot her a betrayed glare. “I’m only pointing out the obvious. I don’t think Jesse actually did anything, and maybe Sam and Dean won’t want to believe it either, but no alibi can hold unless we can swear we had our eyes on him all the time, and we can’t.”
Even though Jesse agreed with Claire, it was uncomfortable to hear her lay it out that way. He could have done it. The frightening thing was, he didn’t know the extent of what he could do.
“Claire’s making my point,” he said when it looked like Ben was going to protest. “Let’s just wait until we know more about this before we tell them anything, okay?”
The struggle was obvious on Ben’s face. He didn’t like lying to people he loved, and when he sighed and said, “Fine,” Jesse knew and appreciated what it cost him.
They were in public, in his hometown - not the most liberal place in the world, unless it had changed a lot since he was a kid - but Jesse still took Ben’s hand and brought it to his lips to lightly kiss his knuckles.
“Thanks, mate.”
Ben dropped his head, his cheeks a startling shade of red. “Whatever,” he said, using his fork to skewer pieces of bacon, sausage, eggs and toast together.
---
Sam and Dean joined them later at the diner and ordered themselves breakfast while Jesse told them what they’d talked about, minus the part about his nightmare. Maybe it was because he knew Ben didn’t like it, but the guilt of lying by omission weighed sorely on his mind, and he was convinced that every time one of the Winchesters looked at him he could see it written on his face in clear capital letters.
“You okay?” Sam asked him, taking a sip of his black-as-tar coffee.
“Yeah, just.” Jesse combed his fingers through his hair. “The smell of sulfur, you know. Reminds me of Stull Cemetery.”
It wasn’t untrue, but the general sympathetic look he received, even from the Winchesters, made him want to squirm on his seat. It was Dean, surprisingly, who redirected everyone’s attention.
“If you’re right and this demon’s trying to catch your attention,” he said.
“Then it got it,” Jesse said.
“Right, but I’d say that killing your parents was enough to do the job, wasn’t it?”
“Classic psychological warfare,” Sam said with a shrug, chillingly matter-of-fact about it. “It wants Jesse to know that it can do whatever it wants unless it’s stopped.”
“But why the Millers?” Claire asked.
Dean pointed a finger at her in a girl has a point gesture. “Did you know the Millers?” he asked Jesse.
Jesse furrowed his brow in concentration, but really, all he remembered from the Miller family portrait was the baseball clothing and the dog, a ridiculous fluff ball with black button-like eyes. Beyond that he thought maybe the woman had blond hair? And the man had a definitely receding hairline.
“I don’t think so, but honestly I can’t be sure.”
Sam wiped his mouth on a napkin and got a notepad from his jacket. “Mark Miller was a plumber,” he read. “He had his own company which he started with a partner about fifteen years ago. We’ll have to talk to the partner,” he said with a glance to his brother. “Joan Miller was an elementary school teacher. She worked at the Emerson Elementary School located at the corner of Black Hills Avenue and West 7th Street.”
“Wait,” Jesse said. “Emerson you said? I went to school there.”
“This can’t be a coincidence,” Sam said. “Are you sure you don’t remember Joan Miller?”
“I… I think I had a Mrs. Miller in second grade? But she was a brunet back then.”
“So it’s going after people you knew,” Dean said. “Typical. Who else could it go after?”
Sam tore a leaf from his notepad. “Here. Write us a list.”
“A list of what?”
“Of everyone you knew when you lived here.” Like it was that fucking easy.
Faced with the blank sheet of paper, Sam’s pencil in hand, Jesse felt at a loss, like all those years ago when he was still in school and he had test fright. Full-on paralysis, feeling like his brain had shrunken to raisin size, incapable of summoning any words. Then a few faces without names and a few names without faces popped up haphazardly in his mind. Jesse pressed the tip of the pencil so hard on the paper that it broke, leaving a dark smear on the first line.
“Well, there’s the neighbors we interviewed,” Ben said a little too loud. “Dona and her daughter - what was her name again?”
“Lizzie,” Claire said, running her finger around the rim of her empty cup.
“Right, Lizzie. You were friends with Lizzie, weren’t you, Jess?” Ben’s lips curved in a teasing smile. “I bet you had a crush on her.”
“He totally had a crush on her,” Claire said with a serious expression. “It was on his face when she came downstairs.”
“Okay, give it a rest, you two,” Jesse said, writing down Dona and Lizzie’s names.
“What about your other neighbors, Jesse?”
“And your other teachers?”
“Any friends at school?”
“What about your parents’ friends?”
“Relatives?”
“Friends’ parents?”
Questions after questions, while the Winchesters watched without comments, Ben and Claire helped Jesse jog his memories and soon enough he had close to a dozen names for Sam and Dean, with the Saunders’ at the top.
“Thanks,” Dean said when Jesse handed him out the list. He frowned. “Huh. Your handwriting is shit. Must be because you’re a leftie.”
Jesse flushed. “Fuck you too.”
“Is that it?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. I didn’t see that many people on a regular basis.”
“Still,” Dean said. “There are too many people for us to be able to watch over all of them. I guess the Saunders are a priority if you were close to them.”
“There are five of us,” Ben reminded him, and Dean rolled his eyes.
“Yes, Ben, but even five of us isn’t enough.”
“It should be possible to narrow the list down to five more likely targets. With Jesse being able to take us wherever in record time, we may actually have a chance to catch this demon red-handed.”
“Hey, I’m not a cab company,” Jesse protested, but it was mostly for show. He didn’t want anyone else to get hurt because of him.
“We also have to take a few hours to interview the Millers’ relations,” Sam said. “See if we can find who the demon possessed. Maybe it’s even still possessing the same host.”
“Yeah,” Dean said. “Let’s hope this demon does us the favor of keeping a low profile for at least a day.”
He pushed the list to Jesse and tapped a finger on it. “Find us five likely targets in this,” he said.
He stuck a bill under his cup, patted his brother on the shoulder, and the two of them left in a scraping of chairs.
“Sir, yes sir,” Jesse grumbled to himself, eyes on the list. “Would you like some coffee with your order?” Five targets more likely to draw the attention of a head-scrambled-by-Hell demon? No worries.
---
Emerson Elementary School was a rectangular block of red bricks topped with one chimney that made it looked like an old Victorian factory. The red blinds were drawn at the windows as the sun shone in an unflinching blue sky. There wasn’t a whiff of wind. It must have been class time because there were no kids in the asphalted courtyard attached to the side of the building.
Jesse tossed the butt of his cigarette on the sidewalk, and stubbed it out before he made his way to the double-panel entrance doors. It looked a lot smaller than in his memories, almost like a doll-sized house. He walked into empty hallways that echoed the voices of teachers from their classrooms and the buzzing sound of little kids’ babble.
Ethan, that’s enough!
Who can read what is on the board?
Quiet, please! Quiet!
Listen, and repeat after me.
He walked with his hands in his pockets, looking through the round openings cut into the doors and catching sight of parts of blackboards and teachers gesturing to their classes. One of them turned her head just when he walked by and he saw her eyes widen. He kept walking.
“Excuse me!”
He stopped but didn’t turn around, and heard her heels click as she caught up with him.
“Excuse me,” she repeated. “Are you looking for something?”
She put a hand on his shoulder and he turned lazily to look at her. Back in her classroom the open door let him hear the excited chatter of kids interrupted in their routine.
“Sir? If you want to talk to one of the teachers, you should make an appointment.”
She was polite but obviously wary. Pale-faced, she looked to be in her forties and didn’t try to hide the silver lines in her dark hair. She wore a white blouse over a long straight black skirt, and around her neck she had a golden locket. Jesse had always wondered what he would see inside if he could open it.
“Hi, Mrs. Foster,” he said.
“Do I know you?”
“You don’t recognize me, then. I’m Jesse Turner.”
Even if she didn’t recognize him, you didn’t forget the name of a student who’d gone missing. She gaped at him, bringing her hand up to hide her open mouth. Then she seemed to pull herself together and gave him her stern elementary teacher look.
“This isn’t funny, young man,” she said. “Jesse Turner is dead. His parents have just been murdered. You shouldn’t play that sort of game.”
“I’m not dead.” He opened his arms in an invitation to look at him. “Obviously. I just ran far, far away. Do you remember telling me I was too lazy to make it in life? Couldn’t even read properly.”
She looked troubled by his words, but unwilling to believe him just yet. She crossed her arms under her breasts and said, “Let’s say you really are Jesse Turner. What do you want?”
“Did you ever wonder why I ran away?”
He leaned toward her and she took a step back. He could see that she was growing afraid now.
“What’s your point?”
“It was because of this.”
She tried to scream when he lifted her off the floor without taking his hands out of his pockets, but she found then that she couldn’t open her mouth. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, gyrating in panic, and her face became red with her efforts to fight against her invisible restraints.
“Oh.”
A little dark-skinned kid, braver than his classmates, had appeared at the entrance of Mrs. Foster’s classroom and was now looking at his floating teacher with an awe-struck expression. Jesse smiled at the child, and shoved Mrs. Foster against the wall.
He woke up with his heart in his throat, and for a moment he was absolutely incapable of taking a breath and honestly thought he was going to choke to death. He rolled onto his knees, head down, clutching at his chest where his straining lungs screamed murder. He gripped blindly at the picket from the fence he had been leaning against, and fought to take a breath against the pressure that made his ribs ache. His vision whitened and he thought he was going to pass out.
He didn’t. After a few failed attempts he finally managed to take a gasping, painful breath, then another one, until his vision cleared and he didn’t think he was going to die anymore.
“Oh, motherfucking Christ.”
He leaned back against the fence, rubbing a hand over his face. He was across the road from the Saunders’ house, he could see that now. He was supposed to look out for them but apparently he’d fallen asleep. What a screwed-up rescuer he was.
Even if it was no thanks to him, Dona Saunders seemed to be fine: she was watering the plants at the front of her house, protected by a large-rimmed hat that flapped as she moved. Lizzie came out of the house and said something to her mother, hands on her hips. The pearly laugh Dona gave her in answer carried out to Jesse.
It was the middle of the afternoon and he’d fallen asleep. What the hell was wrong him? He’d fallen asleep and he’d dreamed. He’d dreamed about… He massaged his forehead, trying to remember his dream. He was in his old school and one of his old teachers was there. Mrs. Foster. And then…
He jumped to his feet, his dream suddenly clear and vivid in his mind.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, shit.”
He left the Saunders to jump to Emerson. He materialized in front of the small white church that faced the school, and before he could see anything he could hear a commotion. He whirled around and saw people gathered on the grass in front of the school. One of them was Mrs. Foster: she had blood on her face and was supported by another teacher. Several other adults were around them, talking in panicked voices to each other, raising their arms up in the air. Some kids spilled out of the school building and were harshly instructed to go back to their classrooms.
Jesse did the only thing he could think of. He called Ben.
“Jesse?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m where I’m supposed to be - I’m watching the house of your dad’s friend. I don’t think the dude has even moved from his couch in hours.”
“Okay, okay. So nothing happened? Everything’s fine?”
“What- Did something happen to you? Jesse?”
“I’m coming to you. Don’t move. I’ll be there in a sec.”
He called Claire for symmetry. His heart fluttered like a trapped bird in his chest and he couldn’t quiet it, couldn’t calm down, fingers drumming against his jean-clad thigh. Claire answered and sounded bored, then worried, but still told him not to panic. “No one died, right?”
“N-no.” Not that he knew of, at least.
“Then it can be fixed. Go talk to Ben if it makes you feel better, but believe me when I tell you it’s going to be fine.”
“Okay.”
“Jesse? I want to hear you say it.”
“It’s going to be fine,” he parroted, and had a small smile she couldn’t see: she was the one with the persuasion powers, apparently. “Thanks. Just… keep on with your surveillance and we’ll talk later.”
Ben was in the coffee shop facing the house he was watching over. Jesse had been there a few times in the past and could therefore materialize in the bathroom, which was fortunately unoccupied. When he got out he earned himself a puzzled look from a middle-aged man who probably thought there was no one inside and had been about to get in.
He grinned at the man. “Their hand dryer is the shit,” he told him.
He had to climb up a flight of stairs to get to the main room, and when he emerged there he swept a quick glance around. There were a few people chatting in the booths on one side, none of them Ben, and then Jesse saw him by the front window, turned to the outside and the small white house with the hip-shaped roof across the street. Relief washed over him and a calm feeling settled inside his chest. He sauntered his way to Ben, trying to look the picture of casualness. The floor had a checkered brown-and-white pattern and it made him feel like he was standing on a giant chessboard.
“Hey,” he said to Ben as he dropped on the chair across him.
Ben startled. “Oh, Jesus,” he cursed, one hand pressed on his heart. “You fucking scared me, man. So what happened? You sounded totally freaked out on the phone, but you look... okay.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said, dismissive. “I’m fine.” He told Ben what happened, the dream, how real it’d been, and then the reality.
“But that teacher didn’t die,” Ben said. “What’s the demon doing?”
Jesse hesitated. “What if it’s not the demon, but…”
“No. Don’t say it. You didn’t do this. It has to be the demon - it’s playing with us, with you. It didn’t kill that teacher so what is it doing?”
“I have no fucking idea.” Jesse rubbed at his chest; he thought he could still feel the pain from not being able to breathe and it was hard to think past that. “Drawing my attention?”
“Or drawing it away. What about the Saunders? You were watching over them, right?”
“They were fine when I… Oh, shit. Oh, I’m such a fucking moron. I left them alone.”
“You think the demon wants to get to them?”
“What else?”
“Then go, quickly. I’m staying here.”
Jesse ran back to the bathroom, not caring if he drew a few looks. When he materialized again in front of the Saunders, Dona wasn’t watering the plants anymore. There was no sound coming from the house, but when Jesse noticed that the front door was open his heart jumped in his chest, and without thinking he ran inside.
“Dona?” he called. “Lizzie?”
There was no answer, and Jesse thought for sure he was too late - too late, too late, too late - when he heard the sound of flushing and Lizzie appeared in the entrance hall.
“Who are you?” she asked imperiously. “What are you doing inside my house?”
“The door was open… Is your mom alright?”
“My… You know my mother? She’s taking a nap, what do you want with her?”
“Check on her.”
“She just went to bed, I don’t-”
“Do it!” He forced himself to speak more softly. “Please, do it, just check on her.”
Maybe he’d once again used his power without realizing it, or maybe she was taken over by the urgency in his voice, but whatever the reason Lizzie listened to him and went upstairs check on her mother. Jesse waited for her to come back, his heart pounding.
“She’s perfectly fine.” Lizzie’s voice floated down to him from the top of the stairs. “Now, are you going to tell me who-”
A male voice called for her, probably Dona's husband. Jesse didn’t wait for her to get back downstairs before he disappeared.
Part four