To the day we burned maps [1/3]

[dayadhvam_triad]

1. carved into arrows

”Look-bang bang, you’re dead. That’s all there is to it.” She slots a magazine into her semiautomatic without hesitation, the ease of an action repeated too many times to count. Her skin pulls taut over her cheekbones like tanned deer hide, dipping into the dark circles under her eyes. “You get them in the head first before they get you.”

“But I’m not,” he says.

“Right. Excuse you?” Risa arches her eyebrows, the ghosts of questions present.

And Castiel slowly taps the hollow at the base of his throat-once, twice-says, “I’m not dead.”

*
HENRIKSEN: You’re a funny guy, Winchester. Not trying hard to fly under the radar with this crap, are you? Looks like you’re stuck with me, and you won’t like it one bit.

WINCHESTER: You saying I can’t get anything outta this-like a beer? A man needs a goddamn beer every once in a while.

HENRIKSEN: You ain’t getting a beer till you tell me where your father is.

WINCHESTER: [silence]

HENRIKSEN: You’ll be thirsty for a while, you know.

WINCHESTER: Yeah, I can deal with that.

HENRIKSEN: Three dead girls, Winchester, and you were about to make their bodies into a celebratory bonfire, of all the messed up things you could do. Caught in the act. Where’s the one who got away? I should bring her in and thank her for leading us to you.

WINCHESTER: I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.

HENRIKSEN: You don’t need to pretend about girl number four. We tracked her into the woods, who knows how much you traumatized her. You can tell now and spare us the trouble, else I’m sure we’ll find some girl missing from a nearby town and identify her. You really are a piece of work. You haven’t done a half-bad job at covering your tracks, but it’s all falling apart now.

WINCHESTER: Gotta say, I like to think I live to be a pain in someone’s ass. [pause] A very good pain.

HENRIKSEN: [pause] Well. It’s not going to last forever. We’ll take you to your cell-[lights dim; HENRIKSEN glances up briefly, pushes his chair back]-so you can just squat there for now.

[Lights start flickering, buzzing sound grows prominent]

REIDY: [off-screen] Victor-

HENRIKSEN: What’s going on-[WINCHESTER begins to stand]-Winchester! Sit down. You’re going nowhere.

REIDY: [background] Excuse me, you’re not cleared to enter-

[static]

[FILE: WINCHESTER, DEAN - security tape
Date: 20 October 2005, 8:32 pm CST
Location: Kankakee, IL]

*
For the fifth time: “ This is John Winchester. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean at 866-907-3235.” Beep.

“Fuck it, answer the goddamn thing,” he said aloud to the ceiling, and grimaced as he slammed the hotel phone down. The clock on the nearby nightstand blinked innocently at him as the numbers inched closer to midnight-as if, at any moment, the spell would break, and Dean would wake up in a world where the entire night had never, ever happened.

“He usually doesn’t pick up, then.” Not a question there. The girl wasn’t much of a talker, her voice soft and scratchy like scuffed felt.

“Busy,” Dean said shortly. “We’ve got other hunts out there besides this, you know.” It had been a routine split-Dad heading up to Wisconsin on the track of reports that lined up with a werewolf, Dean swerving off to tackle a ghost’s serial spree in Illinois. Neither of them could’ve expected anything to go haywire like this.

She rotated her face around, slick as an oiled gear. “Yes,” she said, folding her hands together. “I understand. I saw.”

“... right. And you don’t see anything else? Who got me out, who...?”

“No.” She didn’t look at him. “I just knew where to find you.” She pulled her shoulders forward, shrugged, and then brought her stare around to fix upon him.

Dean had to look away. Can’t read your mind, he reminded himself. But it was not a coincidence they were sitting on opposite sides of the room; Dean had been sure to pick the one closer to the door. John Winchester rarely had a kind word for psychics-though, Dean conceded, he rarely had a cruel word either. Bad form, if Dean were to up and leave her like that when she’d been the one to find and hide him despite the fact that he’d been unconscious and labeled a murderer on the loose, lighting out with a stolen car and breaking into the motel room. She had been the one to get him caught too, the FBI guy’s “girl number four” who’d been in the woods and made enough noise for the agents to follow, but there was no use getting angry at a psychic who had apparently foreseen your demise at the whims of a ghost otherwise.

Or so she said.

How the fuck had he been busted out of prison? There was absolutely no way that he could just waltz around now with a nickel and dime to spare, considering the pictures of his face infesting WANTED posters and television news. He’d stopped flipping through the news channels. Blah blah blah dangerous and at large blah blah killed three girls blah. Dad was going to be pissed at him for such a monumental cock-up. Fuck, he was pissed at himself. Count them-one two three. It was no coincidence that all three families had suffered mysterious deaths in the past; the ghost which trailed them in the name of vengeance had no inclination to limit itself to one generation. And the FBI would be sure to say it was no coincidence that Dean Winchester had been near the occurrences of all three deaths. The Houdini escape was just another black mark on his record.

“You knew any of them?” he asked, knocking his chair back against the wall, which winked at him in a horrific torrent of chartreuse and purple diamonds. “Classmates?”

She shook her head in the negative; said nothing. She looked about the same age as the dead victims, fifteen or sixteen but too skinny. The look of the underfed hung upon her knobbly elbows and hollowed-out eye sockets, her body a toughly coiled string of wary restraint. She would not have qualified to be one of the ghost’s victims, Dean thought-now they, they lived lives fraught with sibling spats, boy concerns, grade anxieties-knew little of the drowning miseries which the old suicide had borne in silence while alive, and let loose once dead.

If he squinted, he could almost say the ghost wasn’t quite gone yet. Ghosts-they could possess people, couldn’t they? Dean stroked the barrel of the gun in his hand. Checked again: safety on-

-and the phone rang, a shrill clang. He fumbled for the receiver, breathed out, “Dad.”

“Dean.” John Winchester’s words came through slurred and tinny. Dean could hear someone honking a car horn nearby. “Where the hell are you?”

“Galesburg, near I-74. We’re in a motel. Look, I know I screwed up big-time-”

“Last I knew the reporter on TV was saying you were in custody,” his father snapped briskly, “but now they’re saying you engineered some miraculous escape. I don’t really need to know your crazy ass methods, but it doesn’t sound right. The electricity cut and the security clearances fritzed-”

“Dad-”

“-and the agents all knocked out as easy as pie. Dean, I know you’re not a bad hunter but being a hunter is worthless when you’re locked up-”

“Dad!” Dean stared down at his free hand, balled up into a fist so tightly that his knuckles stood out under his skin. “I don’t know what happened. I swear to God.”

“Dean, you’re on the other side of the state from Kankakee. You don’t remember anything?”

“Damn it, Dad, I don’t know what’s going on! I just got sprung somehow, someone drove me away, and the FBI’s out there.”

Dean couldn’t even begin to guess what his father was thinking. But John Winchester never wasted his time-a fleeting pause, and then, “You tell me about that later. I want you out of there now as fast as possible.”

“... Yessir,” Dean squeezed his eyes shut, opened them and stared at chartreuse on the walls, blocks of aged mustard in thin violet pincers. “Anyway, got a four-wheeler.”

A harsh puff of breath echoing out of the receiver. “More interference? What kind? Or the guy who got you away?”

“That one, kinda. Not exactly. Usually the kind I’d take out for a spin, but, uh--” He winced. It was harder to talk about someone sitting right across the room from you when you phrased it like she was a damn car. This really wasn’t Dean’s idea of a hook-up.

“I get it. Keep your mouth zipped around her, get rid of her if you can. We don’t need anyone poking into our business more than they ought to.”

“Yeah, you mean not at all,” Dean said. Too late for that now. “I got that.”

“Bad enough the FBI’s caught wind of us,” John muttered. “Might have to go under for a while, dammit.”

“About that. They’ve gotta be tracking my phone, Dad, they took it from me. I got out of there with the shirt on my back and not much else.”

“Caleb can always resupply us. But there’s only one of you. Ain’t the same thing as a brainwashed shifter, son.”

He liked to think he was definitely a better shot than a shifter. And a much better charmer. “They’ve got the Impala too,” Dean said dully. “I-there wasn’t any time.”

John grunted. “... they’re not going to destroy it. It’s evidence.” The car I bought for your mother, Dean could practically imagine the words scorching marks into his mind. You lost it? You lost that, Dean?

I’m just that awesome. Shit, I really did.

“I got the truck, don’t worry about the Impala. Your phone-how many contacts you got?”

The last time he’d saved a new number had been back in that bar in Tennessee-”Had ‘bout a hundred,” Dean said. “But you know it’s just what you have. You, Bobby, Caleb, Pastor Jim.”

The list ended there. There were the one-night stands, the people from cases past, that old man playing chess every day at a cafe who’d taught him some extra-fancy lock picking, though Dean had long since forgotten his name. His father didn’t bother much to go out of his way to run into most other hunters, and Dean had followed his lead. If the FBI went down the list and checked every single one of them, his contacts would say either that he was a fantastic lay or that he was a fantastic lifesaver, whichever messed with the agents’ minds the most. Cassie might say he was a bastard. Others might say they didn’t remember him at all. And the last one-

Dean waited. His father said, “That sounds about right.”

“Dad,” he said sharply. “No, it ain’t yet.” John Winchester knew it as well as Dean did.

Over the line Dean heard his father swear in exasperation. “That girl’s still there listening to this, isn’t she? Fuck. Dean, I can call the others and tell them the FBI comes knocking, they’re all old hands and they can lie their hides right off, but there’s no way Sam could do that knowing in advance. He wouldn’t look surprised enough.”

“Sam’s not a crappy liar.”

“But he’s not good enough to pull off ignorance like this. I think I’d know my own son.”

But he’s my brother. The words stuck in Dean’s throat, a tangle of prickly thorns. I think I’d know him too. And you never knew about Stanford till it was too late. Fuck all, ‘cause I didn’t either.

He was a pretty good liar, then.

“You want the FBI to tattletale on us?” Dean asked. “Not even get the news straight from us. He’s gonna be pissed.”

“Sam wanted to get out of hunting,” John said, his voice inexorable. “He wants out, then we keep him out.”

“... yessir.”

“I closed the case up here. At Chippewa right now. You remember that rundown place a few miles out from Sioux Falls, end of June? In Iowa.”

“Where we ganked the shifter?”

“That one. I’ll meet you there-get out of Illinois. I’m going now. Call me when you get there.”

“Yeah, I’ll-” Dean heard the click on the other end. “... see you then,” he finished.

He set the phone back down; ran his hands through his hair.

“You’re leaving now.”

Dean jerked his head up and gave the girl a careful look-over. She had the uncanny ability to turn her statements into questions, her eyes a pair of faded blue discs that reflected nothing back. But he pushed his uneasiness aside; said with a grin, “Yeah, I’ll get outta your hair now. Thanks for the lift,” and dialed up the charm-after all, why not make nice with the girl helping him out? See what else the psychic might know. At least there was one thing he was good at.

“I guess you know I’m Dean Winchester,” he said. “I save people, hunt things. So what’s your name?”

*

“Hey, my man Victor. Need more meds?”

“Keep your ibuprofen to yourself, Reidy,” Victor grumbled. “I don’t need another stash in my desk. What I need is a goddamn explanation for...” He scrambled to pick up his line of thought. Glared at the computer screen as if he could gut its innards and string them out, pixel by bloody pixel, like Chinatown poultry ripe for the picking.

Calvin Reidy stuck his head in around the door. “I meant a chill pill, but ibuprofen for your headache works too. You realize you’re not going to be able to get the answer out of the tape by staring holes into it, yeah? You’ve burned enough midnight oil tonight.” Reidy-always Reidy, “never Calvin, god, do I look like I’m eighty?”-stepped up behind Victor, clicking his heels on the linoleum floor, and braced his elbows on top of Victor’s chair.

“You mean early morning. Thanks. I got that already.” Victor rewound the security tape from the end, setting it on the slowest mode. A blur of total static resolved itself into a uniform darkness, before the electric lights began to revive like blinking fireflies on the screen. The Dean Winchester in the video stood up from his seat at the table and started walking backward with knees swinging out. At such a crawling pace, his bowlegs were particularly pronounced.

In the recording, Victor uncrossed his arms and sat back in his chair. He remembered leaning forward to press Winchester about the nastiness, that one bruise that looked like he’d kicked Natalie Wright in the stomach again and again. The action of a bully writ large-what a piece of work he was. What a piece of work is a man, he had read in school so long ago, and so were they all, no angels but demons, the people he had run to ground as a hunting dog would tree its prey.

And yet somehow Winchester had managed to walk out the front door and leave him and Reidy and the others like a pile of knocked out fools. Reidy claimed he could remember a girl walking up to him before everything went black. Victor was sorely tempted to remind Reidy that they were in the FBI and were not supposed to be using hallucinogens.

Click. Stop. Reidy reached past him, his hand resting lightly on the controls.

“Agent Henriksen,” he said crisply. ”As you well know, we need to check security and confirm the others detained here first. Figuring out how Winchester got the hell out of this place isn’t half as important making sure that others don’t get the hell out of this place too. You gonna walk the perimeter with me or not? I promise I’ll wrack my brains later with you, cross my heart and hope to die.”

Victor tilted his head back and looked up. “Well, I need to get out of my chair first, so get off it,” he said.

“I’m not that heavy.”

“Your elbows, man.” Victor straightened up; said, “I really piss you off, don’t I?”

“All the time,” Reidy said without any hesitation. But he grinned and slung his arm over Victor’s shoulder. “That’s why you’re awesome, partner of mine. It’s only when I’m most pissed that we think best. Now let’s go talk to the personnel. They’ve got some interesting stories to tell.”

This was what made Reidy a good partner-he was damn good at breaking Victor out of his tunnel vision. The reports he’d requested were in the fax machine by the time he’d gotten back to the desk, and he hadn’t even thought about them too much.

“What’s this?” Reidy was looking through one group Victor had set aside to staple. “Credit card fraud...”

“Credit card fraud. The Winchesters do it all the time.” Victor tucked a yellow highlighter behind his right ear and shuffled some more to the side. “The credit companies are goddamn stupid, just look at some of these names. Luke Sky, Anakin Walker. William Picard and George Worf... You’d think they would know that at least some of these are flat out fakes.”

Reidy snorted. “It’s the number of customers, Victor. More customers for them, so you can’t fault them for it. Sucks for them when it backfires.”

“Right. So credit card fraud here. Here’s a list of unsolved cases dating back several years. What history we could dig up on the Winchesters, here-” Victor tossed another folder at Reidy, who snatched it out of the air.

“It’s pretty spotty,” Reidy said, flipping it open. “Anything else beside old man Winchester’s wife dying in the house fire and them going totally off the grid?”

“Check it out.” Victor didn’t raise his head. “I’m trying to see a pattern in their MO right now. Got more of their history since the last time we spoke.”

Mary Winchester, dead in a house fire, and a grief stricken man who dragged his two boys around the country like a set of rag dolls ready for kindling. Known interaction with a weapons supplier at one point. It would be damn near impossible for them to track their movements, but the boys’ school records were a boon, fractured as they were. A half year stint at one school, two months at another-jumping around without rhyme or reason, from Nebraska to Indiana to Minnesota. At one point they lived in Maine, where John Winchester had done a month of crab fishing. The younger son had done academic decathlon. The older son had gotten five detentions in two months.

“Interesting...” Reidy drawled the word out, like laffy taffy pulled flat. “Younger Winchester checks out squeaky clean. Sam Winchester, starting his senior year at-guess where?”

“Let’s not play games, Reidy. Harvard or whatever small-ville community college, you take your pick.”

“Senior at Stanford, of all places,” Reidy commented. “Full ride, Jesus Christ, what’d he do to get that? Hmmm, let’s see... he’s doing a double major in political science and classics with a Latin track. He’s just about as clean as a whistle as one could be-when you’re trying to get away from a fishy family history and make a name and place for yourself in the world. He’s gunning to become a lawyer.”

“What kind of law?”

“... criminal, huh. Funny, that.”

Victor looked up at that. Prosecution or defense? he thought-not an easy thing to guess, but if they could gain access to his class transcripts those might provide some insight. “So the Winchesters can either head to him for help, or avoid him altogether if he bucked them first,” he commented. “Wonder why Wonder Boy here decided to go straight.”

“Because he has a conscience? Because he has brains? Maybe he ate brains? Who knows?” Reidy shrugged.

“Don’t even start with that, damn it,” Victor said. “We already have to deal with people, don’t give me monsters to think about too. We’re not starring in a zombie movie any time soon.”

“Whatever you think, man. Maybe it’s easier to have monsters, ‘cause you can blame it on them instead of people. The people we see in our line of work-they practically are monsters, except they’re people like us.”

“You depress me.”

“I inspire you all the time,” Reidy said grandly.

“Your ego always does.” Victor paused. “Calvin.”

“Next time you call me that, I’m filling your drawers with tuna sandwiches. Or do you want that smell hanging around your desk?”

His FBI partner was terrible at planning vengeance proper. Victor raised his eyebrows. “I don’t mind bulking up a bit.”

Reidy scowled; abruptly jumped back on track and said, “We should put up a stake out at Stanford then, what do you say? And then we can see which way the Winchesters might be headed, though to be honest I don’t think it likely they’re going to Mr. Sam Winchester here. Makes more sense to me that either they broke off and won’t go to him, or that they would avoid the place to throw off our suspicions in the first place. Turn Sam Winchester into a red herring while they go underground completely. Considering that we haven’t caught on to them all these years, they’re damn good at covering their tracks. They’ve even got friends, how the hell do serial criminals have those?”

Reidy was a straightforward person, but Victor was sure the Winchesters were a bit more counter-intuitive. “I’m not so sure they wouldn’t take a gamble on it. We could take a little trip to California, enjoy the weather ourselves. I’d like to talk to Sam Winchester in person.”

Reidy looked delighted. “You bastard, you just want the sunshine. And dibs on the stake out-”

Victor rolled his eyes. “Your nostalgia is utter shit, and so is your memory. No matter what we’re working on, we’re bound to be stuck with paperwork if you haven’t forgotten. I’ll have you filling out more forms than you can shoot.”

“Paperwork can go screw itself. We need a proper regular bonfire sometime, what do you say to that?”

“If you let me be the one who holds the match-”

“Nah, you can gather the wood. It’s my idea, I’m gonna be the one to do it. And where the hell is your imagination? Matches are small fry. You need a flaming torch that’s ready to take care of it all.”

“Right, right, as you like it. I’m not arguing, I just want to see the sights of this.” Victor tilted his chair back on its hind legs, balanced like a see saw. “Will you look at this? Here’s the local missing girl reports for girl number four. Also, we’ll need someone to take down all the data from Winchester’s phone, sort through his belongings to see if there’s anything we can tag to a specific location, person, whatever.”

“We can call in Doyle for that.”

“I thought she was assigned to-”

“Nah, Bodie broke that one. Doyle’s completely free now.”

“Great, then give it to her. She’s got an eye for the detail that gets someone caught.”

“Done and done, I’ll take care of that with the old bums.”

“Great. Just need to scour the local areas for any suspicious news...”

Reidy snagged the missing persons reports and started flipping through them. Victor turned his attention back to the information compiled on the Winchesters. They didn’t run in the normal networks of popular sovereignty, not the kind of people who eluded taxes and claimed the illegitimacy of government; their movements were erratic even for that group, and they weren’t loud enough about any sort of imagined right. Persistently unpredictable in their locations and their crimes-Victor sketched the timeline in his notepad. Grave desecration in Idaho, residential arson at Cape Cod, reported presence in Galveston during a string of murders-wasn’t that a coincidence, he thought darkly, and drew a thick dark line underneath his entries. That case was still cold as a dead fish.

“Girl number four, huh... this one fits the description right. She disappeared from Kankakee State Hospital yesterday, before we caught Winchester. Blonde, kind of malnourished. She’d been in a coma for a month-they found her going barefoot on the street, mumbling nonsense to herself, though they couldn’t pinpoint what was actually wrong with her. Only woke up a week ago and injured a nurse when they tried to give her the prescribed meds. That’s when they moved her to Kankakee. Psychiatric, you know.” Reid frowned, gestured to her picture. “She looks kinda familiar. Got the thousand yard stare.”

Victor bit down on the urge to say to Reidy, All girls look the same to you. It was to his credit that he refrained from the jab.

“She looks about right. I only saw her in the dark before she ran off. What’s her name?”

“Never gave one while she was conscious. She wouldn’t answer them. They just called her Jane Doe and reported her escape to the local station. She couldn’t have gotten far on foot, though.”

“Yeah.” Victor chewed on the tip of his pen. It hadn’t rained yet, and traffic wasn’t that heavy around the place where Winchester had first been caught-

“We need to call the hospital,” he said. “If they have some clothing of hers that she used during her stay at Kankakee-”

“You can take care of that,” Reidy interrupted. “I’ll take care of the dogs.”

Victor laughed. “Reidy, you read my mind.”

*
“I was dreaming the other day, Sam.” Jess’s voice caressed the curve of his neck up to his earlobes, slid down to vibrate against his eardrum. Sam tensed. Two days ago, that bastard Walt had set off the dynamite underneath them both; it had taken forever to wash the blood out and banish the sharp stench of piss, the last gift of Walt’s oh so human fear. Since then he’d half expected the last sad wall of defense to crumble between him and the outside world-for the black smoke, the stifling silence, the uproar of oblivion to waft in gently, almost regretfully, as if it had arrived home at long last.

“You aren’t going to ask about my dream?” she said wistfully. Whispered, It’s inevitable, don’t you know it? My dreams are yours. We’ll purge this world of its imperfections and start all over again-

Sam didn’t much bother to distinguish his hallucinations from the visions of reality anymore. He didn’t answer, and never looked back. Behind him lay the discarded husks of empty houses that shone like hollow cicada shells, and scattered themselves among leaves of grass bleached brittle and dry like slivers of bone. The dust that had married itself to his tongue and his throat was truly the devil of them all, for nothing he ate went down and sat right in his belly, not even his own lukewarm spit and mucus. He had not seen water since he left the last town, where the faucets had streamed with blood like a river. Above his head the rising sun was the color of tarnished steel.

He heard the rumbling on the road before he saw its source, a truck with fender smashed and windshield cracked. The driver brought it to a screeching halt, still some distance, and came out with a rifle cocked and ready. “Winchester, you fucker!”

The words shattered the air, slithered into Sam’s ears like chittering bugs. Sam shied suddenly, turned, and tried hard not to cough up the blood that was ready to crawl out of his mouth. “Don’t,” he called, the strain of the forced volume showing in his voice. “Don’t follow-”

“Fuck you, what’d you do? And all those other places before, you think people just drop dead like that and turn into zombies? You’re carrying the croat virus with you, damn you. You’re a goddamn danger to everybody and everything, and you just keep moving. Look at your footsteps, damn it!”

“Shut up,” he screamed. “It’s not me!” It’s the voice in my head, he moaned silently to himself. It won’t let me die, it won’t... Sam had a stab wound in the chest, traces of arsenic flowing in his veins, a gunshot to the head, but they existed only in his memory.

He could not trust his memory any more. His skin and muscle and bone had knitted themselves back together so flawlessly till he resembled nothing more than the untouched state of a newborn, with his blood purged of all impurities of the world but one. He reeked of the sulfur-no, he was the sulfur. He was the shadow in the valley of the shadow of death.

Don’t shoot, he thought. If you do--

The soles of Sam’s shoes sketched out tracks all the way from the last town, each a perfect red imprint in the dry ground. It was his personal seal-the completion of his every step, the expiration of a person’s breath in the trail he left behind.

The crack of the gunshot whipped through the air like the snap of a tree branch. Sam twisted his wrist sideways, and the crack that followed was steady and soft and inexorable.

Jessica giggled.

When next he finally looked up, his eyes stinging in the light and bathed in the acidic sharpness of the wind, the nameless hunter had shambled to a stop, his posture loosening, till he slumped to his knees and embraced the grounded shadow with open arms. The shade settled underneath him and moved no longer. There he lay prostrate with his lips pressed to the dirt in a silent prayer, bent forth toward Sam across the road. Behind him the rickety truck stood sentinel to the dead trees and to the ground baked hard the color of charred vermilion, to Sam alone.

He could not cry. He walked to the poor dead thing and crouched down with the wind stirring up dust round the man’s body. He said, softly, “Guess you do look like a croat.”

He said, “You shouldn’t have come after me.”

That’s number nineteen, said Jess. What a clean break of his neck you made. So neat. So talented.

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut up. Leave me alone. I want to dream for myself. My dream. Not yours. Not yours-”

Sam, Sam, Sam. That odd arpeggio that Jess would hum, and that Lucifer sang even better. You’ve always been here for me, Sam-

“-Sam. Sam. Sam-ow!”

Sam groaned and pushed himself up to lean against the headboard of their bed, the pain dully dancing at the top of his head.

“Oh god,” he said. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, Jess, I didn’t mean to --”

“Unless you have eyes in the middle of your forehead, I doubt you meant to hit my front teeth,” Jess mumbled through her hands. She rubbed under her nose, massaging her gums. “Those sleeping pills-they’re working too well. You-you really should lay off them for now.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said automatically, though it was a lie. They had started to lock him into his dreams-he no longer woke up from bleak, uneasy nightmarish images, but went right on living them.

This wasn’t something he would let Jess worry about. She shouldn’t have to.

He grinned weakly at her and ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth, parched and mummified. “Omelet with milk sounds good,” he said. “My turn for dishes?”

“Hand washed. I know you like to fiddle with the dishwasher but you suck at the controls.”

“Hey, I’m not that bad.”

What had he been dreaming of? Right, Jess. The two of them in a bleak desert; Jess had been wearing a white lily in her hair. Maybe it was a sign he needed a vacation already from school, Death Valley or elsewhere. God, it’d only been a few weeks since school started and he was already feeling burned out...

He got a face full of shirt and sputtered into the fabric. “Slowpoke,” Jess said, poking him in the shoulder. “Hurry up or I’ll eat your omelet for seconds. Can’t be late to your work shift. I’m not gonna throw your pants at you either.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Right. You don’t need to be sleep-deprived before law school, god knows you’re going to be worked to the bone then anyway.”

“Trust me, sleep deprivation isn’t a big deal.” Sam swung out of bed and stretched his arms. Jess eyed him. Her mouth smiled but her eyes did not. Winked at him, before she turned, threw over her shoulder a “hurry up, you,” and pivoted out into the hallway.

She looked good like that, Sam thought, the lingering loveliness in the curve of her mouth and the brightness of her eyes. She’d been in his dreams. It had been just the two of them, traveling together. No nightmare, certainly not.

It was a surprise, then, that when he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror-Sam Winchester, twenty-two years old, Stanford student, his image the very epitome of ordinary, wearing an ordinary T-shirt and ordinary jeans and smiling an ordinary smile-the bile rose up in his throat so fast that he bit down on his tongue and gagged at the sensation, the press of clammy fingers on his throat.

“Shit!” He spat into the sink. But the iron taste of blood clung to the insides of his mouth like a soft smothering blanket, and would not let go.

*
He didn’t so much as bat an eyelash of surprise when his son finally came around the corner of the barn with the blonde girl following him like a fucking ghost, but that was all the better. He’d learned that in Vietnam-you could never give away your face to the enemy.

Not their enemy, John mentally revised. But not exactly their friend, either.

“Dad!” Dean tried hard to look as if he wasn’t running, but relief wrote itself blindly across his eyes.

“I’ll get my stuff,” said the girl flatly, and turned back before John had so much as said a word to her. Retreated like a soldier, her back straight and her gait disciplined, though she didn’t look old enough to be one.

“Well, isn’t that something.” John glanced at Dean. “We even got alone time too.” Real considerate of her, he thought, and narrowed his eyes.

“She found me in the woods. And she’s psychic-but she said she wouldn’t tell me anything till she saw you too. Hell, she wouldn’t even say her weird psychic mumbo-jumbo, she just didn’t say anything at all. Damn it”-and Dean, his eldest, his crutch, his right hand, had the cheery temerity to crack a grin and add, “You’d think I was a butt ugly monster, because I’ve never met a girl who didn’t like me before.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Dean,” John grumbled. “Where does she live? She’s not coming with us.”

Dean dropped his eyes to the ground. “Well-yeah. She’s not from around here. She was tracking us down because something’s gonna go wrong and we need to stop it, as if that’s anything new.”

Just their luck that a psychic would tag onto them like a goddamn bloodhound. “Well, she can tell us what she knows,” he said, “and then we’re dropping her off at the next bus station. We’re going to have to go deep, Dean-I talked to Jim and he says we can stay at his place for now. Swing by Caleb’s to grab some stuff and we can get out of here-”

“Then-” Dean stopped. “I told her but she said she’d come with us-”

“Where the hell are her parents? They’re okay with her giving them the slip? Jesus, Dean, just think. On top of a murder rap we get kidnapping charges and detectives tracking us down for taking a live human with us.” A live human, rather than a corpse bundled into the trunk. There was some novelty in the situation. Above Dean’s shoulder, John saw the girl approaching, and looked her in the eye; said, “No, she’s going home to her parents, and that’s that.”

“My family,” said the girl, “is very thoroughly dead to me.”

Dean twitched. “Fuck, be noisier so I can hear you,” he said to the girl, who had padded up silently behind him. “Jesus Christ, Cassie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“She doesn’t need to be noisier-pay more attention next time,” John said shortly. And her name. Dean couldn’t still be hung up on that reporter girl a while back, was he? Of course he’d soften around any reminder of that. He was going to have to have words with his son about that...

“He was only listening to your opinion, Mr. Winchester,” she said.

He hadn’t been called that in a while. Usually it was “John,” or “sir,” or “you motherfucking bastard, get the fuck out of here.” Mr. Winchester-now that was something of the old days. (“Mr. Winchester,” says the old geezer Hancock from four houses down, “I am so sorry about that fire and your wife-”)

Mr. Winchester. That might have been deliberate on her part. “What happened to your parents?” John looked down at the crown of her head, the sweep of hair that partially obscured her left eye.

“They’re dead,” she said, her lips twisting down in a grimace more bitter than sorrowful. “And so they’re gone. It’s none of your concern. We should go, Mr. Winchester-the police will be coming soon. I can hear the hounds.”

“Call me John,” John said. With psychics you had to pick and choose: no need to grill her on family deaths right away, and the talk of hounds was just total gibberish. “But look, what makes you think you’re coming with us? Or that we’d agree to it? We don’t need civilians riding along with us, and we don’t need extra baggage. We’ll drop you off somewhere.”

She shoved her hands into her jean pockets as the early morning wind went whistling across the Impala-through her hair-down into John’s lungs, and he breathed in again like it was salvation. Clean and new and not tainted yet by the smell of smoke.

“You’ve met psychics before,” she said, and did not ask.

John grunted. “We run into them, in our line of work.”

“So you know what we’re like. Most of us need physical proximity to our targets. So.” She looked away from him, and spoke to Dean instead, her words fletched like arrows for the bullseye. “Your brother Sam. There’s something going on at Stanford, and that thing you’ve both hunted for ages-it’ll be there. I can’t see specifics because I’m on the other end of the country, but you take me with you to California and I can help you track that demon down.”

He’d breathed in too much air. It’d gone to his head. “Demon?” John said hoarsely. “How would you-what’d you see-” If her parents were like Mary-if that meant she was like Sam-

“Sam!” The freckles stood out on Dean’s face, a smattering of skin-dirt dark on pale. “What the fuck do you know about him?”

She raised her chin higher-an absurd gesture, a sorry attempt at intimidation, John thought. Five foot three inches at most, and still trying to stare them down, mirroring their stances and the hostility of their eyes. She pulled it off better than he would have imagined from a girl of her stature. “There’s no need for you to ask,” she said.

“Dad-”

“That’s pathetic,” John cut in. Jerked his head sideways to glance at Dean, gave him the signal for silence-his son backed down then, mouth clamped shut and his eyes making up for all that he wasn’t saying. “You have to give us more than that to even start convincing us.”

“About the demon?” She held out her hands, palms up. “It’s interested in your son-and not for good reasons. It needs to be destroyed.”

“What’s your horse in this race?” John mused. He made a motion as if to clasp his hands behind his back, but instead stroked the holder of his revolver. “It got your parents too?”

“Nothing to do with them.” The line of her mouth sharpened and then crumpled as she spoke again. “But you’ve known the purity of evil, haven’t you? I’ve seen it enough. This vision-it follows me. Always. And I know the demon will realize sooner or later. It’ll come after me too. I’m sure you can understand the self-interest inherent in self-preservation.”

This was easier ground to work on. John had never been comfortable around anyone who professed unlimited generosity; people who did were usually liars.

Or, he thought as he eyed her, maybe the psychic was just playing on his suspicions. Judging the strength of a psychic’s powers was never easy: there were psychics like Bryan Martell, who could say what kind of clothing you’d worn the day before and nothing more, and then there were psychics like Missouri Moseley, who had a second sight so uncanny that John wasn’t ever going back to Lawrence unless his family’s lives were staked on it. “What are you proposing? We go to Palo Alto like lambs to slaughter?”

“No,” she said. “We’re going elsewhere first. Manning, Colorado. So we can do the slaughtering.”

A threat coming from a little girl like her-ridiculous as hell, but who was John to complain? Who the ever loving fuck this was, she’d sure done her research. “Daniel Elkins? What do you want with him?”

“Elkins?” John heard Dean break in, raising his voice, snapping the buckle of his belt in irritation. “Who’s he?”

“Hunter. Retired. Specialized in vampires.”

“Vampires? Wait, I didn’t think they-”

John snapped, “It doesn’t matter, Dean! They’re extinct. That’s not relevant.” Dean didn’t need to know anymore, he thought, and frowned at the girl. “Why do we need him? He’s not gonna be helpful with the demon.”

“We don’t need him. We need his gun.”

John stared. “His-”

It sank into his mind slowly, that silent realization. How many times had he mentioned it to Elkins? The countless moments when he had spoken of how to destroy the monster that had taken his wife-regardless of what it had been, a vampire, a shifter, a demon, a ghoul? Who had the power to string Mary up to the ceiling like a cluster of Christmas lights? Even back then, and him so young, there had been a touch of the Vietnam killer left over in him from the war-the Charlie was your enemy, so the Charlie was the one you shot. These things that were your enemies: they too were the ones you set out to destroy.

He’d always believed exorcism was just a total cop out.

He had sworn to kill Mary’s killer. You could exorcise a demon, but he’d yet to hear how to kill one. There’s a myth, he’d said to Elkins once. John had been cleaning out his revolver, drying it off carefully, inspecting the barrels, while Elkins sat back in his chair, a languid sprawl of limbs, and poured bourbon for them both, a shot of the old strong stuff. An old Colt that could kill anything. Made by Samuel Colt way back in the 1800s, with special bullets and all. Something that could kill anything, do you think-

That’s a real yarn right there, Winchester, Elkins had said, and rolled his eyes. His arm shook when he raised his glass-Elkins was getting old, young John Winchester had thought to himself, no wonder he’s retiring, but now the truth lodged in his throat like a stone, He was lying, he was and he knew it-and Elkins had said, You put your faith in pipe dreams like that and you’ll never get anywhere in life. Or death. Dead end, boy, sure and simple. Can’t rely on stupid objects like that. There’s nothing that will save you so easily as if you save yourself.

The John of that time had stopped listening, though. If the Colt was nonexistent then whatever else Elkins had said to him did not particularly matter.

“His-gun,” said John. “You mean to be telling me that he lied to me all this time?”

“I don’t know what he told you,” the girl Dean had called Cassie said, and shrugged, “and I don’t care. We need the Colt to kill the demon.”

“The Colt?”

John ignored Dean’s question, jerked his head toward the truck and said, “Get in. We’re getting out of here. You tell me about this on the way.”

“I’m glad that you’re not too unreasonable,” the girl said very coldly.

“Dad. Dad!” Dean hissed at him. “I need a fucking explanation, Elkins and the Colt thing and-you didn’t say anything about who or what this is before-”

John whirled around. “Damn it all, Dean, I’ll tell you on the road! We’re leaving before the police pick up on our trail. Go!”

Dean bit his lip; said, “Yes, sir,” in a lower voice than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground and his shoulders a tense line, and trotted off.

John turned back to the girl. “So. Cassie, right?” he said. Behind them, Dean slung his bag into the truck bed and cursed at the mud. “Your name’s Cassie.”

“No,” she said so vehemently that John cut her a glance and a frown. “That’s not my name. No one calls me that.”

“Right then,” said John, opening the door. “So?”

She slid into the backseat and slipped off her sneakers, tucking knees under chin.

“That’s your cue. You’re supposed to say your name.” The seat sighed heavily under John’s weight.

The girl had oriented her head to look toward the steering wheel, but the weight of her gaze passed straight through and on toward some undefinable, intangible dimension, as of one inhabited by the invisible shadows of the soul. “... I was named Castiel,” she said, as Dean climbed into the front.

“Kind of a weird name, Cassie,” Dean commented, and grinned weakly. “Cas-tee-el. You sure you don’t want-”

Her voice flattened to a monotone. “No. Call me Cas. Nothing else.”

1. carved into arrows | 2. and singing bones | 3. out of our flesh
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