And Die In Thee - 3/7
And Die In Thee - 3/7
4,205/26,000 R, Het
Right doesn’t ever count the cost. Should it?
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Part 3
Dean unlocked the door to their motel unit before dawn the next morning, stepping automatically over the salt on the floor, and flicking on the light. God, I’m beat. He couldn’t think how long it had been since he was this tired after an all-night stakeout. What a bust that was. Annie hadn’t come near her cache. He would have sworn she’d come back. Maybe she’d been so spooked by them, that she’d ditched everything and left town that same day.
He just needed to crash for a few hours before he got up to make Sammy breakfast and get him to school. Then he’d blow off his classes and keep on looking for Annie. He wasn’t going to relax until he knew where she was. He kept remembering the look on Sammy’s face last night as he worried about Annie. The same scared look that was on her face the first time he saw her. He wasn’t going to worry about her. Her mother was a demon and his Dad had killed her. He couldn’t think about her like she was someone he could have … wanted to … damn it! She must be. That was probably why he couldn’t stop thinking about her like that. Ever since she’d smiled, just that once, at him. Like she really saw … him … the one he’d kept locked up since his mother died. Fuck! He wasn’t going to think about this anymore. Sleep that was all he needed. And he certainly didn’t need any more of those dreams about her, because cold showers weren’t working and neither was anything else. In fact it just kept him more focussed on her, even when he was awake.
Dean half opened the door to their room and eased quietly inside hoping like hell that Sammy wouldn’t wake up the way he always did. Either a sliver of light from the other room, or the slight snick of the door handle was usually enough to disturb any of them. It was one of the few disadvantages of their father’s training. There was very little he could hide from his brother.
Sure enough, Sammy stuck his head up out of his usual twisted nest of bed sheets. ‘Dean,’ he said excitedly. ‘I found her!’
Dean dropped his bag and grabbed for his gun as he saw another small shape huddled up in his own bed. Shit! ‘Stay down, Sammy!’ My fault! I left him alone again. Dad’s gonna kill me. Always my fault.
‘No!’ Sammy screamed, rolling out of bed and landing in front of Annie. ‘Don’t shoot her! She’s my friend!’
‘Sammy! Get out of the way!’ Dean yelled as Annie scrambled upright on the bed waving her knife at him in sleepy panic.
‘No, it’s okay Annie,’ Sammy said soothingly as he turned towards her. ‘Dean won’t hurt you. He just got scared is all. I should have stayed up to warn him. We just need to talk to him. It’s all right. Put down the knife. I won’t let him hurt you.’
‘Sammy,’ cried Dean in desperation. ‘Get the fuck away from her.’
Sammy turned again, both hands outstretched. ‘It’s fine, Dean. She’s been here all night, and she hasn’t tried to hurt me. I told her we’d help her. Get her out of town before …’
‘Before what?’ Dean asked not shifting his aim from Annie. He just needed to get his brother back beside him. Out of reach of her knife. He’d just play it cool till he could get him in the other room, and then he’d deal with her.
‘Before the … person … that killed her mother, comes and gets her,’ Sammy explained cautiously.
‘Oh, that person,’ Dean said ironically. ‘The same person that might be here tomorrow, is that it?’ He watched Annie balancing uncertainly on the bed, weaving a bit as she held the knife out in front of her. She looked frightened and determined to protect herself. But she wasn’t trying to harm Sammy, and she hadn’t actually lunged at him either. But then, he had the gun, and he could tell that was scaring her. She was shaking, but she still gripped that knife like it was her lifeline.
‘Annie,’ he said calmly. ‘Why don’t you just put down the knife? And we’ll talk.’
‘Knife? What about your gun?’ she yelled at him, finally putting a voice to her fear. ‘What kind of a teenager pulls a gun on a girl? What kind of a freak are you?’
‘Freak? Who are you calling a freak?’ he burst out. ‘You’re the … uh …’ He glanced at Sammy now standing with his arms crossed looking pretty pissed off for a twelve-year-old. ‘I’m not a freak, I’m just careful.’
Sammy snickered, relaxing a bit as Dean’s tension eased off. ‘Of course you’re a freak, Dean. But you’re my freak,’ he added with a cheeky grin.
‘Okay,’ Dean said. ‘What say we all go into the other room, and sit down and talk? I’ll go first.’
He kept his eyes on Annie as he reached behind him with his foot, nudged the door wide open, and cautiously backed through it; gun still trained on his target. ‘Come on, Sammy, let’s go. You next, then Annie.’
Sammy just rolled his eyes at Dean’s predictable behaviour. ‘Whatever, dude.’ He deliberately ignored his brother’s hint that he put some distance between himself and Annie, and grabbed her free hand. ‘Come on, we’ll get Dean to make us some breakfast and then we can talk.’
~~~
Only Sammy could have done it Dean thought later. Somehow his geek kid brother had not only ‘accidentally’ found the object of the entire family’s current hunt, but also managed to gain her confidence simply by being himself. Dean would have died before admitting such a thing aloud, but Sammy had a purity of spirit that scared the hell out of him. Despite everything that had happened to their family and all that they had seen, Sammy still expected the best out of people. Dean intended to make damn sure that the world didn’t ever disappoint his brother, even if it took an entire truckload of explosives.
Annie was still terrified; there was no doubting that. Even sitting there, making herself laugh at one of Sammy’s weird jokes she still looked somehow - blank. That was it. For the moment she was desperately struggling not to think about her mother. Hell, he knew what that was like. Block it out as much as you can, sweetheart.
As he watched Sammy and Annie argue over who should get the last pancake Dean decided that there was only one possible course of action. He reached over, grabbed the knife Annie had left on the table, and quickly used it to slide the object of the fight onto his own plate. ‘Kitchen rules - customers lose out, cook gets the last pancake,’ he said, calmly tucking the knife through his belt next to the gun.
Annie took a breath, made a visible choice and blew him a raspberry while she clutched the jug of syrup closer. ‘Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, you’ll just have to have it straight. Right, Sammy?’
Sammy grinned impishly up at her, then slipped Dean a look that said he knew exactly what Dean had done removing Annie’s weapon from the equation.
Dean ignored him and started demolishing the pancake. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you think happened to your mother, Annie? Then we’ll tell you what we know. And maybe,’ he said with a warning look at his brother, ‘Maybe, we can help you.’
~~~
‘So, she drove over to visit my aunt in Phoenix that night, the way she always did.
‘Every night?’ Dean interrupted, eyes tense. ‘She left you alone every night?’
‘Yeah, but she wasn’t used to having a kid. I’d only been with her a year, and you can’t expect someone to change their whole life just because they get stuck with their kid again can you?’ Annie said defensively. ‘Besides, how can you talk? Where are your parents?’
‘Our dad will be home soon, and anyway, he only leaves us when he has to. He doesn’t have a choice.’ Dean answered with conviction.
‘But he lets you have weapons? What kind of father does that?’ Annie demanded.
‘Don’t you talk about our dad like that!’ Dean yelled. ‘He just taught us how to protect ourselves.’
‘With a pistol? You’ve got a gun, Dean. A gun!’
‘Well, you had a knife!’ Dean snarked right back. ‘And it was a big one.’
‘At least my knife wasn’t loaded!’ she retorted quickly.
Damn, she’s hot. Somehow she’d managed to move from being scared to sassy with the speed of light, with no stops in between to drop off any prisoners. Chicks, what’s with them? Of course, understanding wasn’t what he had in mind …
‘Stop it!’ Sammy shouted, suddenly shoving back from the table and knocking his plate onto the floor. ‘Please, just stop fighting.’
‘Sammy, it’s okay. We’re sorry. Calm down,’ Dean said, crouching to clean up the mess.
‘Hey, watch out,’ he said not quickly enough as Annie flinched back, dropping a bloody shard of china back to the floor. ‘Shit! Let me look at that.’
‘No, it’s just a cut,’ Annie said clenching her hand into a fist and trying to stop both Dean and Sammy from fussing over the wound. ‘I’ll be fine; I just need a bit of tape.’
‘Come on, I’ll get the first aid kit out and we’ll see what it really needs.’ Dean said as he dragged her unceremoniously into the bathroom.
He quickly flipped the toilet seat cover closed and gently pushed her down. ‘Sammy, grab the …’
‘On it,’ Sammy said, pulling one of their kits out of the cupboard, flipping it open and sorting through it with practised hands. He passed Dean a bottle, and started laying other items out on the tiles.
‘Sssh,’ Dean murmured, as he slowly uncurled her fingers. ‘I’m good at this. I patch my dad up all the time. I just need to flush the wound out in case there are any fragments left.’ He’d barely started pouring the liquid over her palm before she hissed in pain.
‘That hurts,’ she moaned. ‘What was that? Undiluted disinfectant?’
‘No, just a … saline … solution.’ Fuck! ‘Sometimes it can sting a bit,’ he finished briskly.
‘Salt,’ Sammy mouthed at him, eyes wide in shock as he passed him the combine to cover the wound.
No shit?
‘I don’t think we need any more, looks like a clean gash,’ Dean said mechanically, glancing down at the blood on his hands. Seemed normal. Isn’t, not by a long shot.
He looked over at his brother who’d deftly twisted the first aid kit around in front of him to hide the back-up gun he’d just slipped out of the cupboard. That’s my boy. ‘Got everything?’
‘Yes.’ Sammy said anxiously, but his hands were steady as he passed Dean the suture case.
‘I’ll just keep some pressure on it for a few minutes till the bleeding eases off, and then I need to put a couple of stitches in because it’s a decent slash.’
‘Stitches?’ Annie moaned her brown eyes turned almost black with distress. ‘Shouldn’t I go to a doctor then?’
‘You’ve been on the run for a month. Do you really think it’s safe to go to a doctor?’ Dean asked dryly.
‘Uh, no,’ she said. ‘But …’
‘But, nothing,’ Dean said. ‘I told you I could fix it. I’ve done this lots of times. Don’t worry. Soon have you back to … normal.’ He eased off on the pressure and gently peeled the padding off her wound. ‘Yup, just a couple of stitches. But it’s gonna hurt like a bitch. I can give you something first if you like.’
‘What kind of something?’ she asked faintly.
‘Ah, we’ve got some extra strength painkillers, but they might take a while to kick in. Or I could give you a shot of local anaesthetic - No?’ he said as he saw her start to get agitated at the thought of an injection. ‘No needles? Well, we could just go with family tradition, and give you some of Dad’s whiskey,’ he finished with a grin, trying to pretend there was nothing out of the ordinary in the situation. Hah!
‘Is it family tradition to try and get your women drunk?’ Annie asked with a brave attempt to assert her independence.
‘He hasn’t got any women,’ Sammy piped up helpfully. ‘I mean,’ he said as he brother flushed. ‘He hasn’t had any … uh … he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment.’
‘Sammy,’ Dean glared at him. ‘I swear if you open your mouth one more time, I’ll use you for target practice! Get back in the kitchen now, and leave this to me.’ His tension lessened as he watched his brother discretely slide the gun into his jacket before flouncing out of the room.
‘We’d better make it the anaesthetic,’ he said. ‘It’ll work the fastest. Don’t worry; it’ll all be over soon.’
~~~
‘And she didn’t come back the next morning. Our neighbour, Mrs Claremont, called the police, and they said they couldn’t do anything for a few days. That maybe she’d turn up on her own. But she didn’t come back! And there were those murders in Phoenix too. Maybe she saw something. Maybe the same person who killed them got her. She would have come back if she could, if she was still … alive. And my aunt didn’t come for me either. Maybe both of them were - killed. When the cops finally decided it was serious and came over, I … just … ran. Because what if I was next? My mom always told me if there was trouble to just keep on running. That it was the safest thing to do. So I did. I just grabbed her knife and ran. Except that I didn’t run far enough. I couldn’t leave town, I wasn’t sure if I’d be running away from something or moving closer to it. I didn’t know what to do,’ she finished brokenly.
‘We’ll work out something,’ Dean said cautiously. ‘But first we need to know more about your mother. Why was she in Phoenix? Was it work? What did she do?
‘She used to go to visit my aunt Mara; they’d go out on the town - just the two of them. Always. Except … they were going to let me come the next time. I know they were planning something special to celebrate my birthday on Tuesday. Anyway, my mother didn’t have to do anything. Her family was rich.’
‘Her family?’
‘Our family,’ Annie said. ‘It’s … I just … my parents, my foster parents, we had a more normal life. My mother’s family, her life, it’s still new to me. You don’t know what it’s like to have your whole life turned upside down, and then to have to start again.’
‘Oh, I think I do,’ Dean said softly, with a glance towards Sammy curled up, quietly watchful, on the sofa.
‘She said once that I’d been better off without her, but that fate had brought me back and we had to make the best of it. Maybe she wasn’t a perfect mother, but she didn’t have to take me back.’ Annie glared at him. ‘She tried. She really did.’
‘She didn’t need a day job. She said she couldn’t see the point, that she and her sister preferred the nightlife; that it was in their blood. That people couldn’t fight what they were, no matter how hard they tried.’ Annie said thoughtfully, unconsciously rubbing her fingers across the bandage on the other hand. ‘She said you might as well give in to temptation and enjoy it. And someone must have killed her for it!’
‘Annie, there’s something we need to tell you about those deaths,’ Dean said, more reluctantly than he’d meant to. He didn’t know why this was suddenly so hard.
She shot off her chair in alarm, and backed herself foolishly into a corner. ‘Don’t tell me you killed them? Oh God, just when I was starting to like you. The guys I meet! Don’t even think of coming near me, or I’ll scream like a banshee.’
‘I just bet you can,’ Dean said with a smirk. Damn, he hadn’t intended it to come out like that. Just once he needed to be able to really focus, like Dad. Here he was trying to be serious, and another part of him was on freaking autopilot. Down, boy!
‘Dean!’ Sammy yelled, obviously of the same opinion for once in their lives. He’d jumped out of his chair and was making what were probably supposed to be soothing gestures with his hands.
Dean thought it looked more like he was trying to calm down a spooked horse, or maybe a goat? When Sammy started emitting weird shushing noises, Dean knew he was right. He got a little irritated though when it began to work on Annie, who was looking at them with more curiosity than fear now.
‘Ah, sorry,’ Dean apologized; feely oddly more relaxed all over and strangely calmer himself. Wow. ‘What I was going to say was that we know how those men got killed. Our father’s been researching it. It’s kind of his job.’
‘Your family’s pretty weird isn’t it?’ she asked, at long last, with a critical look at both of them. As she followed it up with a consoling pat on Sammy’s head Dean decided not to kill her for that second condemnation of their father. His judgement might still have been off, though.
‘You have no idea,’ Dean sighed. He looked over at his brother, now standing torn between the two of them. ‘Sammy, get Dad’s research, okay?’
~~~
‘So, you see, all these guys died the same way. One a month for the past few decades. Phoenix is a strange place, but even the cops have figured out that something unnatural is going on.’
‘What do you mean unnatural?’ Annie asked with a frown.
‘Look at the pictures. Every single one of them had the life sucked out of them. Does that look normal to you?’ Dean asked as he spread the photos across the kitchen table.
‘No, it looks gross,’ she said in disgust. ‘But how do you know that they just didn’t die of natural causes out in the desert, and that the sun desiccated them?’ she finished hopefully. ‘We are in the middle of a heat wave, after all.’
‘Because, according to our dad’s notes, every single one of these men had the same symptoms for weeks before they died - in their beds.’ Dean said.
‘What kind of symptoms?’ Annie asked queasily.
‘Their families said they were different, distant. They complained of nightmares, of waking up choking. They spent a lot of time sleeping, but had less and less energy every day. It was like they were fading away. Then they were dead, and they looked like that,’ Dean said gesturing again at the photographs.
‘But that could be anything,’ Annie said logically. ‘Any number of diseases.’
‘It could, but it isn’t,’ Dean said. Got to be firm.
‘Dean, no!’ Sammy cried with distress. ‘Don’t tell her. She doesn’t need to know everything.’
‘Tell me what?’ For a minute Annie looked like she was reconsidering the whole calming down thing.
‘The truth,’ Dean said more hesitantly than he intended. ‘Have you ever heard of succubi?’
‘What? You mean like those myths, and stuff in horror films?’ Annie asked with a puzzled look.
‘There’s a hell of a lot out there that isn’t just a story,’ Dean said plainly. Time to tell her. ‘Demons, monsters - all kinds of evil. Succubi and incubi drain the life force from their victims. They come to people in their dreams, seducing them, smothering them. And in the end, if they’re not stopped they kill them.’
‘You can’t believe this, surely?’ Annie said in amazement. ‘This is the 20th century. Those are just fairy tales to scare people.’
‘Well, those people aren’t scared, they’re dead,’ Dean said. ‘That’s a fact. And you should be scared. The other fact is that our Dad came here looking for whatever killed those men. He came here to hunt them down and kill them all.’
‘Your father kills people?’ Annie gasped in shock, shifting uneasily in her chair again.
Dean was trying to decide if she was going to bolt again. He thought about grabbing her arm and keeping her there, for her own good, before he figured that might frighten her even more. He wished he was better at dealing with normal people, particularly girls. Life as a Winchester conditioned you to assume the worst and react accordingly, usually violently. But then again, Annie wasn’t your average anything.
‘Monsters, not people; well, except for the kind of that are …’ Dean thought for a minute, and decided it might be better to gloss over the actual details. We all do, it’s kind of the family business.’ Dean said with an almost careless shrug. There, that couldn’t possibly upset her. Everything was under control. He had a plan, and …
‘I need to get out of here. This is just crazy,’ Annie choked out as she just erupted past Dean’s desperate grab and dodged towards the door, in too much of a panic to remember her shoes, or anything beyond the need to escape from the madhouse.
‘No, don’t!’ Sammy yelled too late as Annie stepped right on top of the wide trail of rock salt laid in front of the door.
She froze for a moment, looking down in confusion at the innocent looking crystals scrunched beneath the soles of her feet. Stood rigid just a shade too long, then reeled back from the salt-line, body doubled over and retching before finally collapsing on the floor at Dean’s feet as he stared down at her, gun drawn.
‘Dean, help me,’ Sammy begged, dropping down and trying to support her. ‘You can’t think about killing her. She doesn’t know!’
Dean tucked the pistol into the back of his jeans, bent down and gently picked Annie up. So light. Soft. No! ‘She’s going to find out soon enough, Sammy.’ He said as he carried her into their bedroom and laid carefully her down on his bed. Don’t think about it. ‘The reaction is getting stronger. The rock salt obviously didn’t affect her when you brought her home. Maybe because she’s hurt - even if only a little, or else because she’s changing and is more vulnerable than normal. She might not be a succubus quite yet. But it looks like that’s what she’s going to be when she grows up, whether she likes it or not. We just don’t know how much time we’ve got before then.’
~~~
‘You’d better go to school, Sammy,’ Dean said reluctantly.
‘Otherwise they’ll be trying to contact Dad. I can blow off school and the teachers won’t be surprised. But if their star student isn’t there, they’ll know something is definitely wrong.’
‘But I want to help,’ Sammy pleaded. ‘I should be here when she wakes up. You’re not … going to kill her are you?’
‘I can’t, not like this. Not unless she turns. I need some time to think. I need to talk to Dad.’ No. Bad idea. Really bad idea.
‘Fuck, that won’t work,’ Dean said. ‘You know Dad. He won’t even think. He’s already hunting her. He’d just say that she needed to be put out of her misery before she killed anyone.’ What Dean didn’t want to say aloud was that their father was more likely to shoot her on the spot, even with Sammy watching. Maybe more so, their father was big on object lessons. And as for ever thinking his targets had feelings? Not John Winchester. Dean shook his head. ‘Dad would be right.’
‘No he isn’t,’ Sammy exclaimed. ‘She’s a person, or at least she is at the moment.’
‘I … don’t know,’ Dean said. ‘I just don’t know. But whatever happens you can’t be here. I can’t put you in danger again. You’ll be safer at school. I just need time to work this out. In the meantime I need to find somewhere to stash Annie for a few days.’
‘She could stay here,’ Sammy said without much hope.
‘You think?’ Dean asked sourly. ‘How many minutes do you think she’ll last after Dad comes home?’
‘What about the public library?’ Sammy put that idea forward quickly. Yeah, he knew their father just as well as Dean did. ‘It would be the last place anyone would think to look, even Dad.’
‘Sammy, only you would suggest actually breaking into a library. You’ve got a book fetish you know that? But you might have a point. The old place is certainly big enough, and I bet the staff haven’t been in half the storerooms out the back.’ Dean said with a frown, as he weighed the pros and cons. ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’
~~~
Part 4
4,205/26,000 R, Het
Right doesn’t ever count the cost. Should it?
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Part 3
Dean unlocked the door to their motel unit before dawn the next morning, stepping automatically over the salt on the floor, and flicking on the light. God, I’m beat. He couldn’t think how long it had been since he was this tired after an all-night stakeout. What a bust that was. Annie hadn’t come near her cache. He would have sworn she’d come back. Maybe she’d been so spooked by them, that she’d ditched everything and left town that same day.
He just needed to crash for a few hours before he got up to make Sammy breakfast and get him to school. Then he’d blow off his classes and keep on looking for Annie. He wasn’t going to relax until he knew where she was. He kept remembering the look on Sammy’s face last night as he worried about Annie. The same scared look that was on her face the first time he saw her. He wasn’t going to worry about her. Her mother was a demon and his Dad had killed her. He couldn’t think about her like she was someone he could have … wanted to … damn it! She must be. That was probably why he couldn’t stop thinking about her like that. Ever since she’d smiled, just that once, at him. Like she really saw … him … the one he’d kept locked up since his mother died. Fuck! He wasn’t going to think about this anymore. Sleep that was all he needed. And he certainly didn’t need any more of those dreams about her, because cold showers weren’t working and neither was anything else. In fact it just kept him more focussed on her, even when he was awake.
Dean half opened the door to their room and eased quietly inside hoping like hell that Sammy wouldn’t wake up the way he always did. Either a sliver of light from the other room, or the slight snick of the door handle was usually enough to disturb any of them. It was one of the few disadvantages of their father’s training. There was very little he could hide from his brother.
Sure enough, Sammy stuck his head up out of his usual twisted nest of bed sheets. ‘Dean,’ he said excitedly. ‘I found her!’
Dean dropped his bag and grabbed for his gun as he saw another small shape huddled up in his own bed. Shit! ‘Stay down, Sammy!’ My fault! I left him alone again. Dad’s gonna kill me. Always my fault.
‘No!’ Sammy screamed, rolling out of bed and landing in front of Annie. ‘Don’t shoot her! She’s my friend!’
‘Sammy! Get out of the way!’ Dean yelled as Annie scrambled upright on the bed waving her knife at him in sleepy panic.
‘No, it’s okay Annie,’ Sammy said soothingly as he turned towards her. ‘Dean won’t hurt you. He just got scared is all. I should have stayed up to warn him. We just need to talk to him. It’s all right. Put down the knife. I won’t let him hurt you.’
‘Sammy,’ cried Dean in desperation. ‘Get the fuck away from her.’
Sammy turned again, both hands outstretched. ‘It’s fine, Dean. She’s been here all night, and she hasn’t tried to hurt me. I told her we’d help her. Get her out of town before …’
‘Before what?’ Dean asked not shifting his aim from Annie. He just needed to get his brother back beside him. Out of reach of her knife. He’d just play it cool till he could get him in the other room, and then he’d deal with her.
‘Before the … person … that killed her mother, comes and gets her,’ Sammy explained cautiously.
‘Oh, that person,’ Dean said ironically. ‘The same person that might be here tomorrow, is that it?’ He watched Annie balancing uncertainly on the bed, weaving a bit as she held the knife out in front of her. She looked frightened and determined to protect herself. But she wasn’t trying to harm Sammy, and she hadn’t actually lunged at him either. But then, he had the gun, and he could tell that was scaring her. She was shaking, but she still gripped that knife like it was her lifeline.
‘Annie,’ he said calmly. ‘Why don’t you just put down the knife? And we’ll talk.’
‘Knife? What about your gun?’ she yelled at him, finally putting a voice to her fear. ‘What kind of a teenager pulls a gun on a girl? What kind of a freak are you?’
‘Freak? Who are you calling a freak?’ he burst out. ‘You’re the … uh …’ He glanced at Sammy now standing with his arms crossed looking pretty pissed off for a twelve-year-old. ‘I’m not a freak, I’m just careful.’
Sammy snickered, relaxing a bit as Dean’s tension eased off. ‘Of course you’re a freak, Dean. But you’re my freak,’ he added with a cheeky grin.
‘Okay,’ Dean said. ‘What say we all go into the other room, and sit down and talk? I’ll go first.’
He kept his eyes on Annie as he reached behind him with his foot, nudged the door wide open, and cautiously backed through it; gun still trained on his target. ‘Come on, Sammy, let’s go. You next, then Annie.’
Sammy just rolled his eyes at Dean’s predictable behaviour. ‘Whatever, dude.’ He deliberately ignored his brother’s hint that he put some distance between himself and Annie, and grabbed her free hand. ‘Come on, we’ll get Dean to make us some breakfast and then we can talk.’
~~~
Only Sammy could have done it Dean thought later. Somehow his geek kid brother had not only ‘accidentally’ found the object of the entire family’s current hunt, but also managed to gain her confidence simply by being himself. Dean would have died before admitting such a thing aloud, but Sammy had a purity of spirit that scared the hell out of him. Despite everything that had happened to their family and all that they had seen, Sammy still expected the best out of people. Dean intended to make damn sure that the world didn’t ever disappoint his brother, even if it took an entire truckload of explosives.
Annie was still terrified; there was no doubting that. Even sitting there, making herself laugh at one of Sammy’s weird jokes she still looked somehow - blank. That was it. For the moment she was desperately struggling not to think about her mother. Hell, he knew what that was like. Block it out as much as you can, sweetheart.
As he watched Sammy and Annie argue over who should get the last pancake Dean decided that there was only one possible course of action. He reached over, grabbed the knife Annie had left on the table, and quickly used it to slide the object of the fight onto his own plate. ‘Kitchen rules - customers lose out, cook gets the last pancake,’ he said, calmly tucking the knife through his belt next to the gun.
Annie took a breath, made a visible choice and blew him a raspberry while she clutched the jug of syrup closer. ‘Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, you’ll just have to have it straight. Right, Sammy?’
Sammy grinned impishly up at her, then slipped Dean a look that said he knew exactly what Dean had done removing Annie’s weapon from the equation.
Dean ignored him and started demolishing the pancake. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you think happened to your mother, Annie? Then we’ll tell you what we know. And maybe,’ he said with a warning look at his brother, ‘Maybe, we can help you.’
~~~
‘So, she drove over to visit my aunt in Phoenix that night, the way she always did.
‘Every night?’ Dean interrupted, eyes tense. ‘She left you alone every night?’
‘Yeah, but she wasn’t used to having a kid. I’d only been with her a year, and you can’t expect someone to change their whole life just because they get stuck with their kid again can you?’ Annie said defensively. ‘Besides, how can you talk? Where are your parents?’
‘Our dad will be home soon, and anyway, he only leaves us when he has to. He doesn’t have a choice.’ Dean answered with conviction.
‘But he lets you have weapons? What kind of father does that?’ Annie demanded.
‘Don’t you talk about our dad like that!’ Dean yelled. ‘He just taught us how to protect ourselves.’
‘With a pistol? You’ve got a gun, Dean. A gun!’
‘Well, you had a knife!’ Dean snarked right back. ‘And it was a big one.’
‘At least my knife wasn’t loaded!’ she retorted quickly.
Damn, she’s hot. Somehow she’d managed to move from being scared to sassy with the speed of light, with no stops in between to drop off any prisoners. Chicks, what’s with them? Of course, understanding wasn’t what he had in mind …
‘Stop it!’ Sammy shouted, suddenly shoving back from the table and knocking his plate onto the floor. ‘Please, just stop fighting.’
‘Sammy, it’s okay. We’re sorry. Calm down,’ Dean said, crouching to clean up the mess.
‘Hey, watch out,’ he said not quickly enough as Annie flinched back, dropping a bloody shard of china back to the floor. ‘Shit! Let me look at that.’
‘No, it’s just a cut,’ Annie said clenching her hand into a fist and trying to stop both Dean and Sammy from fussing over the wound. ‘I’ll be fine; I just need a bit of tape.’
‘Come on, I’ll get the first aid kit out and we’ll see what it really needs.’ Dean said as he dragged her unceremoniously into the bathroom.
He quickly flipped the toilet seat cover closed and gently pushed her down. ‘Sammy, grab the …’
‘On it,’ Sammy said, pulling one of their kits out of the cupboard, flipping it open and sorting through it with practised hands. He passed Dean a bottle, and started laying other items out on the tiles.
‘Sssh,’ Dean murmured, as he slowly uncurled her fingers. ‘I’m good at this. I patch my dad up all the time. I just need to flush the wound out in case there are any fragments left.’ He’d barely started pouring the liquid over her palm before she hissed in pain.
‘That hurts,’ she moaned. ‘What was that? Undiluted disinfectant?’
‘No, just a … saline … solution.’ Fuck! ‘Sometimes it can sting a bit,’ he finished briskly.
‘Salt,’ Sammy mouthed at him, eyes wide in shock as he passed him the combine to cover the wound.
No shit?
‘I don’t think we need any more, looks like a clean gash,’ Dean said mechanically, glancing down at the blood on his hands. Seemed normal. Isn’t, not by a long shot.
He looked over at his brother who’d deftly twisted the first aid kit around in front of him to hide the back-up gun he’d just slipped out of the cupboard. That’s my boy. ‘Got everything?’
‘Yes.’ Sammy said anxiously, but his hands were steady as he passed Dean the suture case.
‘I’ll just keep some pressure on it for a few minutes till the bleeding eases off, and then I need to put a couple of stitches in because it’s a decent slash.’
‘Stitches?’ Annie moaned her brown eyes turned almost black with distress. ‘Shouldn’t I go to a doctor then?’
‘You’ve been on the run for a month. Do you really think it’s safe to go to a doctor?’ Dean asked dryly.
‘Uh, no,’ she said. ‘But …’
‘But, nothing,’ Dean said. ‘I told you I could fix it. I’ve done this lots of times. Don’t worry. Soon have you back to … normal.’ He eased off on the pressure and gently peeled the padding off her wound. ‘Yup, just a couple of stitches. But it’s gonna hurt like a bitch. I can give you something first if you like.’
‘What kind of something?’ she asked faintly.
‘Ah, we’ve got some extra strength painkillers, but they might take a while to kick in. Or I could give you a shot of local anaesthetic - No?’ he said as he saw her start to get agitated at the thought of an injection. ‘No needles? Well, we could just go with family tradition, and give you some of Dad’s whiskey,’ he finished with a grin, trying to pretend there was nothing out of the ordinary in the situation. Hah!
‘Is it family tradition to try and get your women drunk?’ Annie asked with a brave attempt to assert her independence.
‘He hasn’t got any women,’ Sammy piped up helpfully. ‘I mean,’ he said as he brother flushed. ‘He hasn’t had any … uh … he doesn’t have a girlfriend at the moment.’
‘Sammy,’ Dean glared at him. ‘I swear if you open your mouth one more time, I’ll use you for target practice! Get back in the kitchen now, and leave this to me.’ His tension lessened as he watched his brother discretely slide the gun into his jacket before flouncing out of the room.
‘We’d better make it the anaesthetic,’ he said. ‘It’ll work the fastest. Don’t worry; it’ll all be over soon.’
~~~
‘And she didn’t come back the next morning. Our neighbour, Mrs Claremont, called the police, and they said they couldn’t do anything for a few days. That maybe she’d turn up on her own. But she didn’t come back! And there were those murders in Phoenix too. Maybe she saw something. Maybe the same person who killed them got her. She would have come back if she could, if she was still … alive. And my aunt didn’t come for me either. Maybe both of them were - killed. When the cops finally decided it was serious and came over, I … just … ran. Because what if I was next? My mom always told me if there was trouble to just keep on running. That it was the safest thing to do. So I did. I just grabbed her knife and ran. Except that I didn’t run far enough. I couldn’t leave town, I wasn’t sure if I’d be running away from something or moving closer to it. I didn’t know what to do,’ she finished brokenly.
‘We’ll work out something,’ Dean said cautiously. ‘But first we need to know more about your mother. Why was she in Phoenix? Was it work? What did she do?
‘She used to go to visit my aunt Mara; they’d go out on the town - just the two of them. Always. Except … they were going to let me come the next time. I know they were planning something special to celebrate my birthday on Tuesday. Anyway, my mother didn’t have to do anything. Her family was rich.’
‘Her family?’
‘Our family,’ Annie said. ‘It’s … I just … my parents, my foster parents, we had a more normal life. My mother’s family, her life, it’s still new to me. You don’t know what it’s like to have your whole life turned upside down, and then to have to start again.’
‘Oh, I think I do,’ Dean said softly, with a glance towards Sammy curled up, quietly watchful, on the sofa.
‘She said once that I’d been better off without her, but that fate had brought me back and we had to make the best of it. Maybe she wasn’t a perfect mother, but she didn’t have to take me back.’ Annie glared at him. ‘She tried. She really did.’
‘She didn’t need a day job. She said she couldn’t see the point, that she and her sister preferred the nightlife; that it was in their blood. That people couldn’t fight what they were, no matter how hard they tried.’ Annie said thoughtfully, unconsciously rubbing her fingers across the bandage on the other hand. ‘She said you might as well give in to temptation and enjoy it. And someone must have killed her for it!’
‘Annie, there’s something we need to tell you about those deaths,’ Dean said, more reluctantly than he’d meant to. He didn’t know why this was suddenly so hard.
She shot off her chair in alarm, and backed herself foolishly into a corner. ‘Don’t tell me you killed them? Oh God, just when I was starting to like you. The guys I meet! Don’t even think of coming near me, or I’ll scream like a banshee.’
‘I just bet you can,’ Dean said with a smirk. Damn, he hadn’t intended it to come out like that. Just once he needed to be able to really focus, like Dad. Here he was trying to be serious, and another part of him was on freaking autopilot. Down, boy!
‘Dean!’ Sammy yelled, obviously of the same opinion for once in their lives. He’d jumped out of his chair and was making what were probably supposed to be soothing gestures with his hands.
Dean thought it looked more like he was trying to calm down a spooked horse, or maybe a goat? When Sammy started emitting weird shushing noises, Dean knew he was right. He got a little irritated though when it began to work on Annie, who was looking at them with more curiosity than fear now.
‘Ah, sorry,’ Dean apologized; feely oddly more relaxed all over and strangely calmer himself. Wow. ‘What I was going to say was that we know how those men got killed. Our father’s been researching it. It’s kind of his job.’
‘Your family’s pretty weird isn’t it?’ she asked, at long last, with a critical look at both of them. As she followed it up with a consoling pat on Sammy’s head Dean decided not to kill her for that second condemnation of their father. His judgement might still have been off, though.
‘You have no idea,’ Dean sighed. He looked over at his brother, now standing torn between the two of them. ‘Sammy, get Dad’s research, okay?’
~~~
‘So, you see, all these guys died the same way. One a month for the past few decades. Phoenix is a strange place, but even the cops have figured out that something unnatural is going on.’
‘What do you mean unnatural?’ Annie asked with a frown.
‘Look at the pictures. Every single one of them had the life sucked out of them. Does that look normal to you?’ Dean asked as he spread the photos across the kitchen table.
‘No, it looks gross,’ she said in disgust. ‘But how do you know that they just didn’t die of natural causes out in the desert, and that the sun desiccated them?’ she finished hopefully. ‘We are in the middle of a heat wave, after all.’
‘Because, according to our dad’s notes, every single one of these men had the same symptoms for weeks before they died - in their beds.’ Dean said.
‘What kind of symptoms?’ Annie asked queasily.
‘Their families said they were different, distant. They complained of nightmares, of waking up choking. They spent a lot of time sleeping, but had less and less energy every day. It was like they were fading away. Then they were dead, and they looked like that,’ Dean said gesturing again at the photographs.
‘But that could be anything,’ Annie said logically. ‘Any number of diseases.’
‘It could, but it isn’t,’ Dean said. Got to be firm.
‘Dean, no!’ Sammy cried with distress. ‘Don’t tell her. She doesn’t need to know everything.’
‘Tell me what?’ For a minute Annie looked like she was reconsidering the whole calming down thing.
‘The truth,’ Dean said more hesitantly than he intended. ‘Have you ever heard of succubi?’
‘What? You mean like those myths, and stuff in horror films?’ Annie asked with a puzzled look.
‘There’s a hell of a lot out there that isn’t just a story,’ Dean said plainly. Time to tell her. ‘Demons, monsters - all kinds of evil. Succubi and incubi drain the life force from their victims. They come to people in their dreams, seducing them, smothering them. And in the end, if they’re not stopped they kill them.’
‘You can’t believe this, surely?’ Annie said in amazement. ‘This is the 20th century. Those are just fairy tales to scare people.’
‘Well, those people aren’t scared, they’re dead,’ Dean said. ‘That’s a fact. And you should be scared. The other fact is that our Dad came here looking for whatever killed those men. He came here to hunt them down and kill them all.’
‘Your father kills people?’ Annie gasped in shock, shifting uneasily in her chair again.
Dean was trying to decide if she was going to bolt again. He thought about grabbing her arm and keeping her there, for her own good, before he figured that might frighten her even more. He wished he was better at dealing with normal people, particularly girls. Life as a Winchester conditioned you to assume the worst and react accordingly, usually violently. But then again, Annie wasn’t your average anything.
‘Monsters, not people; well, except for the kind of that are …’ Dean thought for a minute, and decided it might be better to gloss over the actual details. We all do, it’s kind of the family business.’ Dean said with an almost careless shrug. There, that couldn’t possibly upset her. Everything was under control. He had a plan, and …
‘I need to get out of here. This is just crazy,’ Annie choked out as she just erupted past Dean’s desperate grab and dodged towards the door, in too much of a panic to remember her shoes, or anything beyond the need to escape from the madhouse.
‘No, don’t!’ Sammy yelled too late as Annie stepped right on top of the wide trail of rock salt laid in front of the door.
She froze for a moment, looking down in confusion at the innocent looking crystals scrunched beneath the soles of her feet. Stood rigid just a shade too long, then reeled back from the salt-line, body doubled over and retching before finally collapsing on the floor at Dean’s feet as he stared down at her, gun drawn.
‘Dean, help me,’ Sammy begged, dropping down and trying to support her. ‘You can’t think about killing her. She doesn’t know!’
Dean tucked the pistol into the back of his jeans, bent down and gently picked Annie up. So light. Soft. No! ‘She’s going to find out soon enough, Sammy.’ He said as he carried her into their bedroom and laid carefully her down on his bed. Don’t think about it. ‘The reaction is getting stronger. The rock salt obviously didn’t affect her when you brought her home. Maybe because she’s hurt - even if only a little, or else because she’s changing and is more vulnerable than normal. She might not be a succubus quite yet. But it looks like that’s what she’s going to be when she grows up, whether she likes it or not. We just don’t know how much time we’ve got before then.’
~~~
‘You’d better go to school, Sammy,’ Dean said reluctantly.
‘Otherwise they’ll be trying to contact Dad. I can blow off school and the teachers won’t be surprised. But if their star student isn’t there, they’ll know something is definitely wrong.’
‘But I want to help,’ Sammy pleaded. ‘I should be here when she wakes up. You’re not … going to kill her are you?’
‘I can’t, not like this. Not unless she turns. I need some time to think. I need to talk to Dad.’ No. Bad idea. Really bad idea.
‘Fuck, that won’t work,’ Dean said. ‘You know Dad. He won’t even think. He’s already hunting her. He’d just say that she needed to be put out of her misery before she killed anyone.’ What Dean didn’t want to say aloud was that their father was more likely to shoot her on the spot, even with Sammy watching. Maybe more so, their father was big on object lessons. And as for ever thinking his targets had feelings? Not John Winchester. Dean shook his head. ‘Dad would be right.’
‘No he isn’t,’ Sammy exclaimed. ‘She’s a person, or at least she is at the moment.’
‘I … don’t know,’ Dean said. ‘I just don’t know. But whatever happens you can’t be here. I can’t put you in danger again. You’ll be safer at school. I just need time to work this out. In the meantime I need to find somewhere to stash Annie for a few days.’
‘She could stay here,’ Sammy said without much hope.
‘You think?’ Dean asked sourly. ‘How many minutes do you think she’ll last after Dad comes home?’
‘What about the public library?’ Sammy put that idea forward quickly. Yeah, he knew their father just as well as Dean did. ‘It would be the last place anyone would think to look, even Dad.’
‘Sammy, only you would suggest actually breaking into a library. You’ve got a book fetish you know that? But you might have a point. The old place is certainly big enough, and I bet the staff haven’t been in half the storerooms out the back.’ Dean said with a frown, as he weighed the pros and cons. ‘Okay, we’ll do it.’
~~~
Part 4