Hell's Bells Part 3: If Good's On The Left Then I'm Sticking To The Right
Title: Hell's Bells Part 3: If Good's On The Left Then I'm Sticking To The Right
Authors LJ Username: safiyabat
Artists LJ Username: disreputabled0g
Pairing(s): Meg/Abaddon
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 16.603
Summary: This Chapter: Everything intensifies - the hunt for Crowley, the affair between Meg and Abaddon. Encounters with old "friends" complicate matters.
Warnings: Violence, hellhounds, Meg does something mean involving phobias that you probably shouldn't do in real life, gore.
Link to fic masterpost here. View previous chapter here. View next chapter here.
Link to art masterpost here.
Of course, finding Crowley and being able to do something about him were two different things entirely. If Meg thought he’d been slippery before he was even worse now that he was the one on the run. Sam set up a website that allowed her to track Crowley’s actions using the techniques he’d described but without his active involvement because that was important. Dean had kept a pretty suspicious eye on little Sammy for a while now and it hadn’t gotten better with the Mark of Cain; he had to be very careful about his conversations and his texting.
Fortunately neither Meg nor Abaddon were exactly shrinking violets. Sam tipped them off to the existence of one of the “demon factories” in Mansfield, Ohio, on the grounds of an old stove manufactory. Some of their colleagues and allies wanted to ignore the manufactories - they weren’t exactly high priority targets since the demons thus manufactured would not necessarily be loyal to Crowley and they hadn’t actually produced any demons yet, and getting rid of Crowley would get solve the need for the factories in the first place. Both Meg and Abaddon disagreed. Disrupting the operations at this stage kept Crowley busy trying to establish the factories instead of allowing them to run themselves. It also frustrated him, leading him to hopefully make less rational or well-reasoned decisions. Hence the assault on Mansfield, Ohio.
Intelligence showed three demons guarding the facility. That was okay; Meg could take them. She grabbed her hounds and took the job on herself with an angel blade and a bad attitude. She thought about walking right up to the front door and knocking - she liked to make a big entrance sometimes. At the same time she really, really needed to not let Crowley know she’d survived. Not yet.
She decided to sneak around the back and let herself in through a back door. Most of the building was derelict, which was the kind of thing that happened when structures were left vacant since 1950 or so, but she was able to make her way through the rubble and occasional mummified rodent to find places where the sky didn’t actually peer through the roof. A lot of factories were set up in such a way that the manufacturing floor was a large, open space with office space and storage space off of that floor. The equipment was all long gone now, of course - recycled to wherever the original company had moved or sold (or stolen) for scrap - but the office areas still remained and it was here that Meg sensed that her “brethren” awaited her.
She could see the occasional smudge of sulfur on the floor, hear their voices from time to time. There was a window, of course - how else would the manager be able to look out over his little worker bees? - but shades had been drawn so that she could see only shadows. She privately wondered why they bothered with the shades in here - clearly there was nothing that they needed to keep private, the only eyes that would be looking at the office belonged to the occasional unfortunate rat, but whatever. It was in a demon’s nature to be secretive.
She drew closer, keeping the hounds perfectly silent, and skittered half a brick across the cement floor. “Did you hear that?” a male voice demanded. He sounded tall, but she couldn’t tell which of the three was speaking.
“Probably just another raccoon,” a bored-sounding female commented. “Play your cards, Ralph.”
She almost snorted. The mighty demon Ralph. Somehow the idea didn’t leave her quaking in her boots.
“Go check on it, Lise,” a third voice directed, probably another male and equally bored.
A demon in a heavy-set meatsuit emerged from the office. She looked around and closed the door behind herself. Meg acted quickly, gesturing with her hand to close up the meatsuit’s throat and ensure that no sound escaped. She didn’t do that often. After all, she generally liked the screaming - it was part of the appeal of the whole fighting and killing thing for her. Right now though she was on a mission and that had to take precedence. She drove the angel blade into Lise’s sternum and watched as the lights flickered for a moment. When she dropped the corpse to the floor she stabbed her again in the throat for good measure - she wasn’t about to make the same mistake Crowley had.
Ralph and his apparent supervisor seemed to be quick enough on the uptake to notice that Lise had taken longer to investigate a stupid raccoon than she should have. They had already risen to their feet when she opened the door but that didn’t matter. A pair of hellhounds each ensured that they weren’t going anywhere. She was able to stand back and watch, ensuring that neither of them had the chance to smoke out of their meatsuits or make a call to the home office or wherever to report the sudden setback. Within five minutes the walls were covered in blood. She used the angel blade to ensure that the demons were in fact granted the peace of oblivion and went to find the souls.
Part of her rebelled at this aspect of the mission. She was not some hero, she was no saint. Human souls were of no interest to her; even her meatsuit’s little spirit had vacated the premises a long time ago and good riddance to the whining little cow. Let little brother go on and on about this and that and saving people and all that jazz; if he wanted to pretend to be some kind of savior let him. She was a demon and she liked it. Human souls were weak and frankly kind of pointless. Unfortunately just leaving the things here meant that when Crowley’s little cronies got around to checking in on the suddenly quiet stove factory crew the souls they’d already harvested would still be sitting there waiting for them and this whole exercise would be pointless. She poked through the storage areas until she realized that she hadn’t needed to go poking at all; fifteen souls in jars lit up a room about two hundred times better than any kind of fluorescent lighting ever could.
Her breath caught at the sight. This… this was something. Had she ever had - had she ever been something like this before? Had she - an entity of infinite black smoke and power that remembered the days when Christianity was just a really weird offshoot of Judaism - ever born the slightest resemblance to one of these wispy, delicate things?
Of course she hadn’t. She couldn’t really remember the time before she’d become a demon but she’d never been fully human, she’d been one of the “other generations” her father had once mentioned to Sam. She’d been created to become a demon and delicacy like this wispy creatures in jars had never been her medium. She dealt in power, in strength, in survival. She wouldn’t want to be a wisp in a jar, patiently waiting for rescue like some kind of victim. Maybe black smoke and sulfur couldn’t light up a room but they could sure as Hell tear one down. She started unscrewing the lids from the jars, tossing them behind her once the vessels were empty just for the pleasure of hearing them break.
She considered bringing one back as a pet for Abaddon, but ultimately decided against it. Sam would get all angsty about it if he found out and besides, keeping souls in jars, however they got that way, ran the risk of making her as big a scumbag as Crowley. It was pretty, though. She took a picture and sent that to her lover instead.
When she got back to the Bronx, Abaddon was waiting for her. She was proud of her general, and she wanted to show it. Yeah, the human souls could take their glowing little wisps or whatever and flit off back to their owners. She’d take the feel of Abaddon, the taste of Abaddon, the scent of Abaddon over anything they had any day of the week.
Getting to enjoy Abaddon’s company was a rare pleasure. It wasn’t like there was a war on or anything. Neither woman was exactly the type to lead from the rear and neither was particularly fond of inaction. At a word from Sam Abaddon was following up on a Crowley sighting outside of Rapid City while Meg chased after another factory near Provo. They managed to reunite briefly for one torrid, sheet-soaking, neighbor-terrifying night near Casper only to be pulled apart when Crowley went after some of Abaddon’s men in Billings and diverted some of his resources to going after Tammuz in Pueblo. Since Tammuz was on the fence and was Meg’s contact that made him Meg’s problem.
Meg teleported to her father’s friend’s living room. He was wearing a dark-skinned older man, impeccably groomed. “Nice suit,” she commented, looking him up and down. “Did you pick him just because he has Morgan Freeman’s hair?”
The older demon raised his eyebrows. “You know, I didn’t think of that. It was the profession that drew me in. He was a man of the cloth. You know I always loved taking priests.”
She acknowledged the truth of this. The old devil had never been picky about the gender of his hosts or the religion of the priest he possessed, but he did always insist that he took spiritual leaders of some sort. Was it the extra challenge or the irony that held the appeal for him? “I got your call,” she told him. “The streets look pretty calm and I know you’re not an alarmist. What’s going on?”
“The Winchesters,” he spat. “I saw that rolling phallus parked at the sleaziest motel in town yesterday.”
Meg cursed. “We can’t have that,” she admitted. “Did you see both of them or just one?”
“Just the car.”
“All right. Let me see if I can get any information.” She pulled out her phone and sent Sam a quick text, demanding to know what the fuck he was doing in Pueblo.
She was rewarded with a telephone call. “I’m not in Pueblo,” he told her crossly. “I’m in our super-secret hideout researching how to get that damn brand off my brother. He got a call yesterday, hung up and took off without another word.”
“Well he’s here in Pueblo and he’s got one of our allies treed.”
Sam barked out an expletive she’d only ever heard from Lucifer, and even then only once. “Okay. Um. Try to keep them apart, okay? I’ll see what I can do.”
“I don’t think there’s a lot you can do from all the way wherever you are, hot stuff. But if you can think of a way to snap him out of it without snapping that perfect little neck of his I’m all ears.”
“Usually I have to talk to him to bring him around. I’d say pray to Cas or something but the angels can’t teleport anymore.”
Meg smirked. “Power of wuv doesn’t exactly cut it for demons, li’l bro,” she pointed out, trying to keep his name out of it. Tammuz was a nice enough guy - for someone who liked to bite the heads off religious acolytes as a snack - but she wouldn’t say she trusted him with Sam’s involvement in their plot. “We’ll just have to go with plan B.”
Both the demon and the human had the same question: “What’s plan B?”
“Something that’s always worked a little better for me. Listen up. If I can get the damn car to someplace specific is there any way that you can get it back to wherever it is that you’re squatting or whatever?”
She could feel the eyeroll in her own eyes if she didn’t actively try not to block it. That was the problem with trying to have a relationship with people you’d possessed before, especially when you actually shared blood with them. “Yes, Meg. I think I can manage that.”
“Good boy. You might even get a biscuit when this is all over.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t want whatever kind of treat it is that you feed your dogs.”
She had a good twenty hellhounds at her disposal at the moment, hounds that weren’t busy with other tasks or already out with Abaddon chasing Crowley down. She called them all to her now. She didn’t want to do this. Demons weren’t supposed to get attached to things like dogs but would be sincerely sad if any of the little snarling balls of hate got hurt. Her entire gambit depended on the Mark not having managed to erase Dean’s old phobias enough to matter at the end of the day.
“Your plan has halitosis,” Tammuz informed her, nose disdainfully in the air.
Meg bit back a retort that involved the demon’s last girlfriend; they still needed him. Instead she smiled sweetly. “Wait until you get a load of Dean,” she told him.
They didn’t have to wait long. Dean put in his appearance as himself, not as an FBI agent or an insurance adjustor or a reporter or a priest. Apparently when he was on a mission for Crowley Dean didn’t bother playing dress-up. He walked right up to the front door and kicked it in. Meg rolled her eyes and hid in the kitchen with her protégé and the hounds, waiting. “Tammuz!” the hunter yelled. Meg made a face. Sam hadn’t been exaggerating. Even Dean’s voice was different - harsher, devoid of humanity. “Tammuz! I know you’re in here damn it! Come out and fight like a man!”
She held the dogs back and kept them quiet. Even Crowley couldn’t keep his dogs silent, not like she could.
Dean’s footsteps echoed in the house, landing hard enough to break the tile floor. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp - that was far enough to pass the doorway. Stomp, stomp, stomp - now he had turned away from the door and toward the fireplace. Stomp, stomp. “Tammuz!” he roared again.
Meg released the hounds. The sound should have been enough to terrify any ten men, but this was Dean Winchester. He’d been to Purgatory. She had to let them get close enough for him to smell them, close enough to feel their hot breath on his face. Okay, and maybe she didn’t mind if he got a little chewed up. She’d promised to make a good faith effort not to let him get killed, not to wrap him in cotton batting and rock him to sleep. Still, she put on her best wicked smile as she walked into the living room. The poor guy’s skin had gone so pale that his freckles actually stood out and sweat poured from his body like his pores were fountains. He still gripped that angel blade though. She told the hounds to sit and they did, even as she used her telekinesis to pin Dean to the wall. She reached up and grabbed him by the neck. “Sleep now, Dean-o,” she ordered him, and reached out with her mind to make sure that he did.
Dean Winchester slumped, unconscious, into her arms. Tammuz raised an eyebrow. “Would you like for me to dispose of that for you?”
“He’s got the Mark of Cain, Tammuz,” she pointed out. “I don’t think he can be disposed of. I’ve got someone working on that, though. In the meantime I know where I can leave him. If you have any more problems with him let me know.”
She dismissed the dogs and teleported into the car, then fished the keys out of his pocket and drove back to his motel. Once at the motel she called Sam. Sam was there in ten minutes. “How did you manage that?” she demanded when she answered the door.
“I told you. Ancient secret society lair. You learn things. I don’t suppose you can keep him asleep for another seven hours or so?”
She thought about it for a second, reached out and made a few adjustments. “No charge.”
He gave her half a grin. “Thanks, Meg. Hopefully we can get this whole thing over with soon.” He picked Dean up in a fireman’s carry and tucked him carefully into the passenger seat of the Impala. He even stole a motel blanket to tuck in carefully around him. “At least this way he’ll get a decent night’s sleep out of the deal.” He looked her over. “He didn’t give you any problems, did he?”
“No, I’m not sure he ever knew I was there. I’ll be in touch, Sam.”
She teleported back to the Bronx. Abaddon followed three days later, a little beat up and with no Crowley to show for it. She did have the heads of three perfidious followers to take it out on, though, so that was something. They hung them from one of the light fixtures to make the place feel more like a home. Meg was able to console her with Tammuz’ declaration of support - which brought in Kafkefoni as well, apparently she was only waiting - and a bubble bath in one of the old, elegant hotels overlooking Central Park. Abaddon was a Queen. A queen deserved nice things, especially if her mission hadn’t gone as planned.
Sometimes they even managed to fight by each other’s sides, and those were the best times of all. Bubble baths were all well and good but blood baths were better and it wasn’t like Crowley was their only enemy. They had angels to contend with too, because while the angels apparently preferred to fight amongst themselves evidently they weren’t about to stop themselves from taking out a demon or two if the opportunity arose. “They think they’re so much better than we are,” Abaddon sneered. “As though they have some kind of moral superiority over us because they were never human.”
“They might not have any kind of moral superiority over us,” retorted Tammuz over a strategy meeting one day, “but they certainly have a superiority in terms of power. They can smite us at a touch.”
“Maybe,” Meg smirked. “But our claws still cut them, our powers still affect them and our spells still have bite against them. Alistair had a spell that could pull an angel out of its vessel.”
“Do you have that spell?” the redhead demanded, not letting much enthusiasm inflect her voice. Meg knew what she actually felt so that was okay.
“No. It wasn’t necessary when I apprenticed under him. But I know who can probably find it.” She smirked. “I know about it because Li’l Bro was there when he last used it.”
“Interesting.” Tammuz stroked his chin. “It’s worth looking into.”
Meg knew from angels, of course. She’d had the pleasure of their company during the Apocalypse, and then after during the whole running and hiding thing. She didn’t have Sam’s visceral hatred for the feather duster crowd - she didn’t buy the whole righteousness thing but as far as she was concerned they didn’t need to ever really cross paths, just like it had been in the olden days.
Of course, Sam had never been in love with an angel. Meg had. She wasn’t anymore. Her angel had left her for dead, more than once. She’d believed that he’d loved her once and she’d even believed he’d felt something for her back before he’d broken his little feathery brain, but apparently all of that had gone away once he’d gone to Purgatory. If it had ever been there to begin with. It naturally followed that she would encounter him again, because life always seems to work like that.
It happened when they were hot on Crowley’s trail, hot being the operative word, hopping the border between Florida and Georgia like it was the foul line in a baseball game. The bastard had figured out somehow that they must be using security cameras to track him - probably because he hadn’t gotten as far as he had by being a total idiot - and gotten a shifter to impersonate him, which of course was tripping the facial recognition software Sam had set up so Meg and Abaddon didn’t need to rely on direct contact with him. By the time they figured out he wasn’t actually there it was too late. He’d have changed already. After about two hours of hopping from bank to bank and backwater to backwater Meg finally got hold of Sam, who took a look at the footage and told her that the shifter was only present in three-quarters of the video and explained about the reflective eyes. Crowley’s actual footage was leading them further into Florida where there were reports of more people without souls, so possibly a new factory as well.
The duo groaned. Which to address - Crowley or the factory? “Crowley is likely to give us the slip again,” Abaddon pointed out.
“Let’s try the factory. They at least seem to piss him off.”
They set course for the factory. Of course once they found the factory they found it filled with a good seven demons - more than they’d bargained for, by far. They might be able to take them but then again, they might not. Of course, the two angels standing in the middle of the circle of demons were another matter. “Clarence?” Meg gasped involuntarily.
“Abaddon,” Castiel sneered. A female angel with dark hair stood back-to-back with him, both with their angel blades drawn. “I should have known that you’d come to defend your abomination factory. I didn’t expect that you’d fall back into such bad habits, Meg.”
She shook her head. “Clarence, Clarence, Clarence. Always flying to judgment. Oh wait- you can’t actually fly, can you?” She stepped forward and stabbed one of the demons encircling the angels. “It’s a good thing you’re cute.”
Abaddon raised an eyebrow. “You think he’s cute?” One of the other demons tried to stab up and through her ribcage; the knight blocked it easily and tore through him like ripping silk. The angels gaped.
Two more demons came after Meg. She used her ability to manipulate souls to send them to their knees, howling in pain. “Any time you glowing peacocks want to join in would be a good time,” she urged, stabbing her victims at the base of their skulls as another went after Abaddon.
“Right.” The two angels each reached forward and touched the forehead of a demon, releasing their light into the room and smiting them. Meg grimaced. She was used to some terrible smells but the scent left behind after a smiting always lingered, the way old cigarettes never seemed to come out of your clothes after one night at a smoky bar. “Meg, what are you doing here?” Castiel wanted to know. “Why are you helping Abaddon steal souls?”
“Where did you hear that Abaddon is stealing souls?” she smirked. “Dean? Dean is working for Crowley, you nincompoop.”
“Nincompoop?” Abaddon repeated.
“What? It works.”
“Better the devil you know,” the strange woman angel retorted.
“As it happens, honey, I’ve known both of them for a very, very long time and I’m in a position to tell you that Hell is in much better hands under Abaddon than under Crowley.” She grinned. “I like those hands.”
Castiel grimaced. “Meg, she’s a knight of Hell.”
“And I’m Azazel’s daughter. Remember?” She snorted. “What, you thought that a few kisses and a little fooling around was going to change my whole species? Fat chance. I’m a demon. I’ve always been a demon. I always will be a demon. I may be capable of doing good but I like doing good while I’m doing bad, Cas. Now come on. Do you want to free those souls or what?” They stopped. “What?”
It was the woman angel again. “You. A demon. Want to… save souls.”
It was Abaddon’s turn to roll her eyes. “We take souls when it’s their time. We want them to be corrupted, yes, but only by their own choices. You can’t just take a soul out of a living body and turn it. That’s not… no. That’s not how it works. You go to Hell because of the choices you made, whether you sold your soul or because of your sins. Not because someone came along and did something to you. That’s just repugnant.” She turned and looked at Meg. “Really? This guy?”
“What? He was a good kisser. And you weren’t available.”
She sniffed, but held Meg’s hand as she stormed off to find the souls. The storming ceased as soon as they were away from the celestial beings. “I don’t think I like him,” Abaddon informed her. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“He’s had better moments,” she admitted. “Right now I can’t remember what I ever saw in him.” She kissed her lover deeply, wallowing in the taste and the feel of her mouth. “Come on. Let’s find those souls before the God Squad gets to be all self-righteous about it. I like the idea of them having to remember that it was demons who saved souls and not angels, don’t you?”
Abaddon’s laughter followed her all the way to the storage room.
Authors LJ Username: safiyabat
Artists LJ Username: disreputabled0g
Pairing(s): Meg/Abaddon
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 16.603
Summary: This Chapter: Everything intensifies - the hunt for Crowley, the affair between Meg and Abaddon. Encounters with old "friends" complicate matters.
Warnings: Violence, hellhounds, Meg does something mean involving phobias that you probably shouldn't do in real life, gore.
Link to fic masterpost here. View previous chapter here. View next chapter here.
Link to art masterpost here.
Of course, finding Crowley and being able to do something about him were two different things entirely. If Meg thought he’d been slippery before he was even worse now that he was the one on the run. Sam set up a website that allowed her to track Crowley’s actions using the techniques he’d described but without his active involvement because that was important. Dean had kept a pretty suspicious eye on little Sammy for a while now and it hadn’t gotten better with the Mark of Cain; he had to be very careful about his conversations and his texting.
Fortunately neither Meg nor Abaddon were exactly shrinking violets. Sam tipped them off to the existence of one of the “demon factories” in Mansfield, Ohio, on the grounds of an old stove manufactory. Some of their colleagues and allies wanted to ignore the manufactories - they weren’t exactly high priority targets since the demons thus manufactured would not necessarily be loyal to Crowley and they hadn’t actually produced any demons yet, and getting rid of Crowley would get solve the need for the factories in the first place. Both Meg and Abaddon disagreed. Disrupting the operations at this stage kept Crowley busy trying to establish the factories instead of allowing them to run themselves. It also frustrated him, leading him to hopefully make less rational or well-reasoned decisions. Hence the assault on Mansfield, Ohio.
Intelligence showed three demons guarding the facility. That was okay; Meg could take them. She grabbed her hounds and took the job on herself with an angel blade and a bad attitude. She thought about walking right up to the front door and knocking - she liked to make a big entrance sometimes. At the same time she really, really needed to not let Crowley know she’d survived. Not yet.
She decided to sneak around the back and let herself in through a back door. Most of the building was derelict, which was the kind of thing that happened when structures were left vacant since 1950 or so, but she was able to make her way through the rubble and occasional mummified rodent to find places where the sky didn’t actually peer through the roof. A lot of factories were set up in such a way that the manufacturing floor was a large, open space with office space and storage space off of that floor. The equipment was all long gone now, of course - recycled to wherever the original company had moved or sold (or stolen) for scrap - but the office areas still remained and it was here that Meg sensed that her “brethren” awaited her.
She could see the occasional smudge of sulfur on the floor, hear their voices from time to time. There was a window, of course - how else would the manager be able to look out over his little worker bees? - but shades had been drawn so that she could see only shadows. She privately wondered why they bothered with the shades in here - clearly there was nothing that they needed to keep private, the only eyes that would be looking at the office belonged to the occasional unfortunate rat, but whatever. It was in a demon’s nature to be secretive.
She drew closer, keeping the hounds perfectly silent, and skittered half a brick across the cement floor. “Did you hear that?” a male voice demanded. He sounded tall, but she couldn’t tell which of the three was speaking.
“Probably just another raccoon,” a bored-sounding female commented. “Play your cards, Ralph.”
She almost snorted. The mighty demon Ralph. Somehow the idea didn’t leave her quaking in her boots.
“Go check on it, Lise,” a third voice directed, probably another male and equally bored.
A demon in a heavy-set meatsuit emerged from the office. She looked around and closed the door behind herself. Meg acted quickly, gesturing with her hand to close up the meatsuit’s throat and ensure that no sound escaped. She didn’t do that often. After all, she generally liked the screaming - it was part of the appeal of the whole fighting and killing thing for her. Right now though she was on a mission and that had to take precedence. She drove the angel blade into Lise’s sternum and watched as the lights flickered for a moment. When she dropped the corpse to the floor she stabbed her again in the throat for good measure - she wasn’t about to make the same mistake Crowley had.
Ralph and his apparent supervisor seemed to be quick enough on the uptake to notice that Lise had taken longer to investigate a stupid raccoon than she should have. They had already risen to their feet when she opened the door but that didn’t matter. A pair of hellhounds each ensured that they weren’t going anywhere. She was able to stand back and watch, ensuring that neither of them had the chance to smoke out of their meatsuits or make a call to the home office or wherever to report the sudden setback. Within five minutes the walls were covered in blood. She used the angel blade to ensure that the demons were in fact granted the peace of oblivion and went to find the souls.
Part of her rebelled at this aspect of the mission. She was not some hero, she was no saint. Human souls were of no interest to her; even her meatsuit’s little spirit had vacated the premises a long time ago and good riddance to the whining little cow. Let little brother go on and on about this and that and saving people and all that jazz; if he wanted to pretend to be some kind of savior let him. She was a demon and she liked it. Human souls were weak and frankly kind of pointless. Unfortunately just leaving the things here meant that when Crowley’s little cronies got around to checking in on the suddenly quiet stove factory crew the souls they’d already harvested would still be sitting there waiting for them and this whole exercise would be pointless. She poked through the storage areas until she realized that she hadn’t needed to go poking at all; fifteen souls in jars lit up a room about two hundred times better than any kind of fluorescent lighting ever could.
Her breath caught at the sight. This… this was something. Had she ever had - had she ever been something like this before? Had she - an entity of infinite black smoke and power that remembered the days when Christianity was just a really weird offshoot of Judaism - ever born the slightest resemblance to one of these wispy, delicate things?
Of course she hadn’t. She couldn’t really remember the time before she’d become a demon but she’d never been fully human, she’d been one of the “other generations” her father had once mentioned to Sam. She’d been created to become a demon and delicacy like this wispy creatures in jars had never been her medium. She dealt in power, in strength, in survival. She wouldn’t want to be a wisp in a jar, patiently waiting for rescue like some kind of victim. Maybe black smoke and sulfur couldn’t light up a room but they could sure as Hell tear one down. She started unscrewing the lids from the jars, tossing them behind her once the vessels were empty just for the pleasure of hearing them break.
She considered bringing one back as a pet for Abaddon, but ultimately decided against it. Sam would get all angsty about it if he found out and besides, keeping souls in jars, however they got that way, ran the risk of making her as big a scumbag as Crowley. It was pretty, though. She took a picture and sent that to her lover instead.
When she got back to the Bronx, Abaddon was waiting for her. She was proud of her general, and she wanted to show it. Yeah, the human souls could take their glowing little wisps or whatever and flit off back to their owners. She’d take the feel of Abaddon, the taste of Abaddon, the scent of Abaddon over anything they had any day of the week.
Getting to enjoy Abaddon’s company was a rare pleasure. It wasn’t like there was a war on or anything. Neither woman was exactly the type to lead from the rear and neither was particularly fond of inaction. At a word from Sam Abaddon was following up on a Crowley sighting outside of Rapid City while Meg chased after another factory near Provo. They managed to reunite briefly for one torrid, sheet-soaking, neighbor-terrifying night near Casper only to be pulled apart when Crowley went after some of Abaddon’s men in Billings and diverted some of his resources to going after Tammuz in Pueblo. Since Tammuz was on the fence and was Meg’s contact that made him Meg’s problem.
Meg teleported to her father’s friend’s living room. He was wearing a dark-skinned older man, impeccably groomed. “Nice suit,” she commented, looking him up and down. “Did you pick him just because he has Morgan Freeman’s hair?”
The older demon raised his eyebrows. “You know, I didn’t think of that. It was the profession that drew me in. He was a man of the cloth. You know I always loved taking priests.”
She acknowledged the truth of this. The old devil had never been picky about the gender of his hosts or the religion of the priest he possessed, but he did always insist that he took spiritual leaders of some sort. Was it the extra challenge or the irony that held the appeal for him? “I got your call,” she told him. “The streets look pretty calm and I know you’re not an alarmist. What’s going on?”
“The Winchesters,” he spat. “I saw that rolling phallus parked at the sleaziest motel in town yesterday.”
Meg cursed. “We can’t have that,” she admitted. “Did you see both of them or just one?”
“Just the car.”
“All right. Let me see if I can get any information.” She pulled out her phone and sent Sam a quick text, demanding to know what the fuck he was doing in Pueblo.
She was rewarded with a telephone call. “I’m not in Pueblo,” he told her crossly. “I’m in our super-secret hideout researching how to get that damn brand off my brother. He got a call yesterday, hung up and took off without another word.”
“Well he’s here in Pueblo and he’s got one of our allies treed.”
Sam barked out an expletive she’d only ever heard from Lucifer, and even then only once. “Okay. Um. Try to keep them apart, okay? I’ll see what I can do.”
“I don’t think there’s a lot you can do from all the way wherever you are, hot stuff. But if you can think of a way to snap him out of it without snapping that perfect little neck of his I’m all ears.”
“Usually I have to talk to him to bring him around. I’d say pray to Cas or something but the angels can’t teleport anymore.”
Meg smirked. “Power of wuv doesn’t exactly cut it for demons, li’l bro,” she pointed out, trying to keep his name out of it. Tammuz was a nice enough guy - for someone who liked to bite the heads off religious acolytes as a snack - but she wouldn’t say she trusted him with Sam’s involvement in their plot. “We’ll just have to go with plan B.”
Both the demon and the human had the same question: “What’s plan B?”
“Something that’s always worked a little better for me. Listen up. If I can get the damn car to someplace specific is there any way that you can get it back to wherever it is that you’re squatting or whatever?”
She could feel the eyeroll in her own eyes if she didn’t actively try not to block it. That was the problem with trying to have a relationship with people you’d possessed before, especially when you actually shared blood with them. “Yes, Meg. I think I can manage that.”
“Good boy. You might even get a biscuit when this is all over.”
“I’m pretty sure I don’t want whatever kind of treat it is that you feed your dogs.”
She had a good twenty hellhounds at her disposal at the moment, hounds that weren’t busy with other tasks or already out with Abaddon chasing Crowley down. She called them all to her now. She didn’t want to do this. Demons weren’t supposed to get attached to things like dogs but would be sincerely sad if any of the little snarling balls of hate got hurt. Her entire gambit depended on the Mark not having managed to erase Dean’s old phobias enough to matter at the end of the day.
“Your plan has halitosis,” Tammuz informed her, nose disdainfully in the air.
Meg bit back a retort that involved the demon’s last girlfriend; they still needed him. Instead she smiled sweetly. “Wait until you get a load of Dean,” she told him.
They didn’t have to wait long. Dean put in his appearance as himself, not as an FBI agent or an insurance adjustor or a reporter or a priest. Apparently when he was on a mission for Crowley Dean didn’t bother playing dress-up. He walked right up to the front door and kicked it in. Meg rolled her eyes and hid in the kitchen with her protégé and the hounds, waiting. “Tammuz!” the hunter yelled. Meg made a face. Sam hadn’t been exaggerating. Even Dean’s voice was different - harsher, devoid of humanity. “Tammuz! I know you’re in here damn it! Come out and fight like a man!”
She held the dogs back and kept them quiet. Even Crowley couldn’t keep his dogs silent, not like she could.
Dean’s footsteps echoed in the house, landing hard enough to break the tile floor. Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp - that was far enough to pass the doorway. Stomp, stomp, stomp - now he had turned away from the door and toward the fireplace. Stomp, stomp. “Tammuz!” he roared again.
Meg released the hounds. The sound should have been enough to terrify any ten men, but this was Dean Winchester. He’d been to Purgatory. She had to let them get close enough for him to smell them, close enough to feel their hot breath on his face. Okay, and maybe she didn’t mind if he got a little chewed up. She’d promised to make a good faith effort not to let him get killed, not to wrap him in cotton batting and rock him to sleep. Still, she put on her best wicked smile as she walked into the living room. The poor guy’s skin had gone so pale that his freckles actually stood out and sweat poured from his body like his pores were fountains. He still gripped that angel blade though. She told the hounds to sit and they did, even as she used her telekinesis to pin Dean to the wall. She reached up and grabbed him by the neck. “Sleep now, Dean-o,” she ordered him, and reached out with her mind to make sure that he did.
Dean Winchester slumped, unconscious, into her arms. Tammuz raised an eyebrow. “Would you like for me to dispose of that for you?”
“He’s got the Mark of Cain, Tammuz,” she pointed out. “I don’t think he can be disposed of. I’ve got someone working on that, though. In the meantime I know where I can leave him. If you have any more problems with him let me know.”
She dismissed the dogs and teleported into the car, then fished the keys out of his pocket and drove back to his motel. Once at the motel she called Sam. Sam was there in ten minutes. “How did you manage that?” she demanded when she answered the door.
“I told you. Ancient secret society lair. You learn things. I don’t suppose you can keep him asleep for another seven hours or so?”
She thought about it for a second, reached out and made a few adjustments. “No charge.”
He gave her half a grin. “Thanks, Meg. Hopefully we can get this whole thing over with soon.” He picked Dean up in a fireman’s carry and tucked him carefully into the passenger seat of the Impala. He even stole a motel blanket to tuck in carefully around him. “At least this way he’ll get a decent night’s sleep out of the deal.” He looked her over. “He didn’t give you any problems, did he?”
“No, I’m not sure he ever knew I was there. I’ll be in touch, Sam.”
She teleported back to the Bronx. Abaddon followed three days later, a little beat up and with no Crowley to show for it. She did have the heads of three perfidious followers to take it out on, though, so that was something. They hung them from one of the light fixtures to make the place feel more like a home. Meg was able to console her with Tammuz’ declaration of support - which brought in Kafkefoni as well, apparently she was only waiting - and a bubble bath in one of the old, elegant hotels overlooking Central Park. Abaddon was a Queen. A queen deserved nice things, especially if her mission hadn’t gone as planned.
Sometimes they even managed to fight by each other’s sides, and those were the best times of all. Bubble baths were all well and good but blood baths were better and it wasn’t like Crowley was their only enemy. They had angels to contend with too, because while the angels apparently preferred to fight amongst themselves evidently they weren’t about to stop themselves from taking out a demon or two if the opportunity arose. “They think they’re so much better than we are,” Abaddon sneered. “As though they have some kind of moral superiority over us because they were never human.”
“They might not have any kind of moral superiority over us,” retorted Tammuz over a strategy meeting one day, “but they certainly have a superiority in terms of power. They can smite us at a touch.”
“Maybe,” Meg smirked. “But our claws still cut them, our powers still affect them and our spells still have bite against them. Alistair had a spell that could pull an angel out of its vessel.”
“Do you have that spell?” the redhead demanded, not letting much enthusiasm inflect her voice. Meg knew what she actually felt so that was okay.
“No. It wasn’t necessary when I apprenticed under him. But I know who can probably find it.” She smirked. “I know about it because Li’l Bro was there when he last used it.”
“Interesting.” Tammuz stroked his chin. “It’s worth looking into.”
Meg knew from angels, of course. She’d had the pleasure of their company during the Apocalypse, and then after during the whole running and hiding thing. She didn’t have Sam’s visceral hatred for the feather duster crowd - she didn’t buy the whole righteousness thing but as far as she was concerned they didn’t need to ever really cross paths, just like it had been in the olden days.
Of course, Sam had never been in love with an angel. Meg had. She wasn’t anymore. Her angel had left her for dead, more than once. She’d believed that he’d loved her once and she’d even believed he’d felt something for her back before he’d broken his little feathery brain, but apparently all of that had gone away once he’d gone to Purgatory. If it had ever been there to begin with. It naturally followed that she would encounter him again, because life always seems to work like that.
It happened when they were hot on Crowley’s trail, hot being the operative word, hopping the border between Florida and Georgia like it was the foul line in a baseball game. The bastard had figured out somehow that they must be using security cameras to track him - probably because he hadn’t gotten as far as he had by being a total idiot - and gotten a shifter to impersonate him, which of course was tripping the facial recognition software Sam had set up so Meg and Abaddon didn’t need to rely on direct contact with him. By the time they figured out he wasn’t actually there it was too late. He’d have changed already. After about two hours of hopping from bank to bank and backwater to backwater Meg finally got hold of Sam, who took a look at the footage and told her that the shifter was only present in three-quarters of the video and explained about the reflective eyes. Crowley’s actual footage was leading them further into Florida where there were reports of more people without souls, so possibly a new factory as well.
The duo groaned. Which to address - Crowley or the factory? “Crowley is likely to give us the slip again,” Abaddon pointed out.
“Let’s try the factory. They at least seem to piss him off.”
They set course for the factory. Of course once they found the factory they found it filled with a good seven demons - more than they’d bargained for, by far. They might be able to take them but then again, they might not. Of course, the two angels standing in the middle of the circle of demons were another matter. “Clarence?” Meg gasped involuntarily.
“Abaddon,” Castiel sneered. A female angel with dark hair stood back-to-back with him, both with their angel blades drawn. “I should have known that you’d come to defend your abomination factory. I didn’t expect that you’d fall back into such bad habits, Meg.”
She shook her head. “Clarence, Clarence, Clarence. Always flying to judgment. Oh wait- you can’t actually fly, can you?” She stepped forward and stabbed one of the demons encircling the angels. “It’s a good thing you’re cute.”
Abaddon raised an eyebrow. “You think he’s cute?” One of the other demons tried to stab up and through her ribcage; the knight blocked it easily and tore through him like ripping silk. The angels gaped.
Two more demons came after Meg. She used her ability to manipulate souls to send them to their knees, howling in pain. “Any time you glowing peacocks want to join in would be a good time,” she urged, stabbing her victims at the base of their skulls as another went after Abaddon.
“Right.” The two angels each reached forward and touched the forehead of a demon, releasing their light into the room and smiting them. Meg grimaced. She was used to some terrible smells but the scent left behind after a smiting always lingered, the way old cigarettes never seemed to come out of your clothes after one night at a smoky bar. “Meg, what are you doing here?” Castiel wanted to know. “Why are you helping Abaddon steal souls?”
“Where did you hear that Abaddon is stealing souls?” she smirked. “Dean? Dean is working for Crowley, you nincompoop.”
“Nincompoop?” Abaddon repeated.
“What? It works.”
“Better the devil you know,” the strange woman angel retorted.
“As it happens, honey, I’ve known both of them for a very, very long time and I’m in a position to tell you that Hell is in much better hands under Abaddon than under Crowley.” She grinned. “I like those hands.”
Castiel grimaced. “Meg, she’s a knight of Hell.”
“And I’m Azazel’s daughter. Remember?” She snorted. “What, you thought that a few kisses and a little fooling around was going to change my whole species? Fat chance. I’m a demon. I’ve always been a demon. I always will be a demon. I may be capable of doing good but I like doing good while I’m doing bad, Cas. Now come on. Do you want to free those souls or what?” They stopped. “What?”
It was the woman angel again. “You. A demon. Want to… save souls.”
It was Abaddon’s turn to roll her eyes. “We take souls when it’s their time. We want them to be corrupted, yes, but only by their own choices. You can’t just take a soul out of a living body and turn it. That’s not… no. That’s not how it works. You go to Hell because of the choices you made, whether you sold your soul or because of your sins. Not because someone came along and did something to you. That’s just repugnant.” She turned and looked at Meg. “Really? This guy?”
“What? He was a good kisser. And you weren’t available.”
She sniffed, but held Meg’s hand as she stormed off to find the souls. The storming ceased as soon as they were away from the celestial beings. “I don’t think I like him,” Abaddon informed her. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“He’s had better moments,” she admitted. “Right now I can’t remember what I ever saw in him.” She kissed her lover deeply, wallowing in the taste and the feel of her mouth. “Come on. Let’s find those souls before the God Squad gets to be all self-righteous about it. I like the idea of them having to remember that it was demons who saved souls and not angels, don’t you?”
Abaddon’s laughter followed her all the way to the storage room.