Supernatural: Six of One (5/8)
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Chapter 12a: March into Hell
Hell... really was other people, other people sitting in office cubes. Sam spun, startled at the ordinariness of it. Oatmeal-colored partitions in every direction, squares on squares on squares and ugly fluorescent lighting. Or maybe it was a bog at night, stinking like farts and full of biting black flies. After that it was vaguely proper, sulfuric and hot and underlit, Sam's tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. And then something else again, shifting, flickering, unreal, other-real. It was a realm of magic and the ordinary rules were different here. Here where Sam was.
Freddy and Jeff were right there, just out of sight, in the other world, anchoring him. He could feel them, smell the candles burning, hear the travel-spell still echoing in his ears. They probably couldn't see him, or only his empty body inside the circle. He couldn't even see the circle.
It was Shaniece's spell that showed him he could do it, do both finding and sending at the same time. He'd put it off a long time. He'd been busy, of course, but mostly it was fear of what he would find here. He had selected his talisman carefully, realizing how few objects he had available to him. The dogtags were gone, buried at his mother's headstone, and he'd left the wedding ring with Dean. There wasn't much Dad had left behind; he wasn't a sentimental guy. The thing that made the most sense was the journal, that had all their fingerprints and handwriting all over it. Except the front pages. The front pages were crammed with John's handwriting, so hard it imprinted through to the other side of each page, so full and frenzied no other writing would fit. Sam had held open it in both hands and started to read to the circle, to the ether: "I went to Missouri and I learned the truth --"
And that was how he had come to this Hell.
Sam wandered, curious, amused at himself a little that he should just walk into the underworld no questions asked. No honey-cakes to distract a hound that bars the gate; no ferryman to pay coins; not even a Virgil to narrate him the way. He closed the book and tucked it into his jacket, ready to pull his knife, but nobody challenged his presence. He was tall enough to see over the partition walls, and inside every office was a person, like ice cubes in a tray. Some of them wept and some of them screamed but mostly they sat silent, waiting. Sam did a little math and realized this wasn't anywhere near big enough to hold everybody in the world who deserved to suffer.
Ergo, he was in the right place. Not some kind of Biblical Hell, but a very specific one. Not those who deserved to suffer, but those who did. Very few people looked up as he passed. They were almost all young people, people his age or a little younger. They wore clothes from eras long past: Brylcreem hair from the fifties, styled bobs from World War I. There were a few shirtwaists and cravats, or else Sam wasn't seeing right. The way the place changed, it was hard to be sure.
"Sssstt!" A young woman in an old-fashioned dress tossed her head, eyes darting everywhere. Sam could not help but approach. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.
"Do I know you?" Sam looked her over, from her many-buttoned black boots to the prim collar at the base of her neck. Her hands were in front of her, worn like laborer's hands. She wore long black tresses up in a bun.
The woman waited, as if disbelieving that Sam could not know her. And then in an instant she transformed herself, not magically but repositioning her body like a dancer. She shifted one hip and raised one shoulder and lowered her chin to look up at Sam through her black eyelashes. "And I thought the Winchesters were smart," she said, with sour coquetry.
"Meg," Sam gasped. "Oh. I guess that's not really your name. This is your Hell too?"
"Well of course," said Not-Meg. She tugged at her bodice. "My name used to be Alice. How do you think I ended up under the big boss's power?"
The conclusion was inescapable. "No fucking way. You were a special, weren't you? You were just like me."
"Not like you, dearheart. Like your brother, though." Sam stiffened, and Alice got a laugh out of that. "How is he, by the way?"
Alice was seeing him wrong. It hadn't occurred to him that here he might not look like himself. He touched his chest: the brass pendant. The brass pendant he'd left behind with Dean more than a year ago. He looked at the back of his hand and saw freckles. Away from his body, he was Dean, for all anybody could see. He felt his way forward carefully. "Well, Sam's not here, that's something." If he was going to play Dean with somebody who'd actually met the real McCoy, he was going to have to pull out some wisecracks. "He'll never live down having been possessed by a girl."
Alice shrugged. "You take what you can get, when you're free out in the world. He's a terrible body, all elbows and knees. Like possessing a giraffe."
"Uh huh." The Dean in him was demanding closed fists and a fight stance. Sam controlled himself. "So if I could get you out of here, would you help me in return?"
"Sweetie, are you trying to make a deal with the devil's minion?"
"Keeping my options open. You've snuck your way back onto earth twice now, or maybe more, so clearly you know what you're doing. I could use some allies."
"You just want me in a real body so you can hand me that ass-kicking you think you owe me."
"Okay, that too. Just, next time you wiggle your way outta here, give me a call, will you? We might have some things in common."
"Like what?"
"We both hate your boss, for one."
Alice grumped to herself. Sam shrugged his leather jacket higher on his shoulders, and took a step. He had a lot of wandering to do to find what he was looking for.
As he walked away, Alice hissed. "Three more to the left, and two down."
"What?"
Alice was sly, smirking. "Like I don't know what you're looking for."
Sam went three to the left and two down. Alice had not lied, and she did know. Sam found what he was looking for.
Sitting on an ice floe in the middle of a deathly-cold sea, snow in his hair but not shivering, John Winchester: sitting still, leaning forward a little, examining his hands. He didn't hear Sam's footfalls (Sam seemed to be walking on water, wasn't that hilarious) and didn't look up. He looked the same, the same as he'd been when he died, a bit of gray on his chin but his hair mostly dark; lines around his eyes as if he'd stayed up vigil the night before at his son's bedside. That was nearly three years ago now. He was still wearing the same clothes, arm in a sling, the t-shirt cut only a bit at the collar, as if he'd actually given up the ghost just as the doctors were getting at his chest to revive him.
Sam could not restrain himself: "Dad!" That was probably the worst thing he could have done, calling out like that; John looked up and looked right through him with a hatred as thorough and unyielding as anything Sam had ever seen. John moved a little, like he was bored but playing along, and as he stood up the iceberg turned into a ladder-back chair and the floor was a grassy field, endlessly open. John retreated only as far as cube walls would have let him, if they had been there. He didn't even look; he just stopped exactly where the wall would be.
"You keep trying to mess with me," John said, low in his throat like a family rule had been broken. "I guess demons don't get bored." Sam was fascinated and terrified: that anger John had always kept in check was right out in the open, volcanic. When he had told his father he was leaving for Stanford, he had not come under such murderous boiling rage, not all of it, not ever. They had argued a thousand times and Sam had never seen John so implacably hateful.
He looked over John's shoulder at the cube wall, which was a blue-purple horizon, twister-clouds looming, and mastered himself. While he watched it became a stone wall, part of a cave, dripping and cold and dim. "I came to rescue you," said Sam, and put a hand into the cube. He hit a barrier, something invisible, and bounced off.
"Good idea, put on Dean's face, pretend like he's going to do something heroic." John twisted up his face in a sneer. "Knock yourself out."
So he saw the same thing Alice did. Sam raised his chin, the way his brother did when he was playing tough. Like his brother, he saved the tears for some other time, when it was safer. He bashed his fist a few times, poking around to find that barrier's weak spots. Not that a fist was the right tool to use against true evil, but, he tried it anyway.
"How do I get you out of here, Dad?" Sam was just glad he was here alone. "Is there a word or a spell or some kind of tool? What were the terms of your deal?"
John waved one hand, like he'd heard it all before. He held the other one close to his chest, still broken. He'd had the same broken arm for almost three years, never healing. Sam gulped and told him, "We stole your body out of the morgue and burned it in salt, Dad. We watched the flames go down and stuck our fingers in your hot ashes, making sure there weren't any bone-fragments left. It was terrifying. It was like being naked. You were never gonna come stomping in like a pissed off cavalry troop ever again. I asked --"
He barely managed to stop himself from naming names. Sam sniffled and continued. "We talked about the secret and everything. There's nothing left, just this fragment of you, stuck in that fucking deal you made. You should have gone to the reaper years ago."
"I know the terms." Even in Hell, which was suddenly a hallway of endless antiseptic white hospital -- and maybe this one was John's own personal idea of Hell, permanent bedside vigil --, even in Hell John Winchester could make his way sound like the only way. "I'll stay here a hundred years if it means they're alive, and smile at you every goddamn day."
At that, nobody on or under earth could have kept his eyes dry, or his voice low. "Those are the terms? You suffer as long as we're alive? What the hell kind of deal is that?" Sam's hand shook as he grasped at his knife. Not because it would avail him anyway; it was just something to hold onto.
John was serene in his hatred. He did not answer.
"Dad, I swear, you are the --" And Sam clamped his mouth shut just in time. No point in telling him how much leeway alive had already allowed. No wonder Dean hadn't been killed: he could be tortured right to the brink and the deal would still be in force. There was some kind of awful lawyer joke in there, that Dad's self-sacrifice had such horrible loopholes in it. Sam swallowed. "Fine. You get to be boss. I guess I'm just here to tell you, we know what you did. And we're pissed about it. And we're going to do something about that. You'll see the reaper soon, Dad. And not because one of us gets killed," Sam added hastily. "We do this my way."
John wasn't listening, or was masterfully pretending not to listen, his face that impassive mask that said I told you what the rules are and if you want to break 'em you'll find out the consequences.. It was kind of a shame the demon wasn't here, because that face should totally scare the shit out of him. But the demon wasn't afraid of anything, or not anything Sam knew of.
"I just. I had to make sure what you'd done. Of all the fucking rocks-for-brains stubborn old men."
"You're slipping," said John. "You sound like Sammy, now." He stood there in a pile of musty hay, trapped in a wooden barn like an animal, flames crackling overhead. He didn't care.
Sam let him have the last word -- what other kind of satisfaction was there to give him? -- and stumbled away. He recited the word to end the spell, and was present again in his physical body.
The others were sitting right in front of him, wide-eyed, as if he'd only been gone a moment. Sam gaped back at them, the rage still hot in his face, and it melted suddenly into despair. He had no idea how to free Dad, and was no closer to freeing Dean, and he was all alone with a gaggle of confused sysadmins and accountants and schoolteachers and whatever the hell Jeff did for a living. Sam put his arms around his knees and lowered his head and cried and cried, sitting with a cold numb butt inside a chalked five-pointed circle drawn in the basement of a house in Cincinnati. Freddy came and touched his shoulder, mumbling something nice, and then backed away. Jeff, the newest of their kind, went upstairs and made tea. Sam was grateful for it, and wiped the snot from his face while he accepted a mug. The warmth radiated into his fingers, made him know he was alive still.
"It was that bad?" asked Jeff, shy. Sam looked him over: not tall, pudgy and slow-moving, with white soft hands. Jeff wore a St. Christopher's medallion around his neck, and probably believed in the literal Hell.
"No," Sam lied. "I just miss my dad." Jeff slung an arm across his shoulder, and Sam let himself relax in someone else's grip.
Chapter 14: Sweet Child O' Mine
Alvin comes to the house late in the afternoon, on the second day Sam has called in sick with a bad case of parenthood. They're nice days to be playing hooky, sunny and clear, perfect April days -- But Sam has hardly seen them. He's had other things on his mind.
Sam is surprised when opens the door, eyeballing Alvin up and down. He's past fifty, carrying his fat in a great pad in front and in doughy rings at his knees and elbows. He wheezes when he breathes, now and then, and doesn't say anything about it when you ask him if he is okay. His hair is almost all white, including his beard, which he only shaves when he feels like it. He is not married and doesn't seem to talk to anybody and Sam doesn't know what he does at home, when he is not fixing cars. He has never hired anybody on, not till Sam came along.
"Hey, bossman," Sam says, and gestures him into the kitchen. "Sorry I didn't think to stock up on cigars."
Alvin says, "Hey, Sammy," vaguely, looking around the room. He has never been here; they have been friendly but not friends in the five months Sam has worked for him. Sam looks around too, noting only a few unwashed dishes in the sink, the bills neatly stacked on the table. It's a card table, nothing to brag about, and the chairs were picked up one by one at garage sales. But they've patched the dents in the wallboard, and given the room a fresh coat of paint. Alvin is fussing with his hands, just standing there.
"Can I get you anything, or you just want a look at the critter?" Alvin laughs, as Sam hoped he would, and sits in the chair Sam pulls out for him. He accepts a glass of water, but when Sam pulls down the Jack from on top of the fridge, Alvin puts up a hand.
"I don't drink any more."
The things you learn about your boss. "Hey, that's awesome," Sam tells him. "I can't get anybody to drink with me. Jo said she couldn't have any, even now the baby's born. It shows up in her milk." Sam chuckles to himself, and puts the Jack away.
He is watching out of the corner of his eye as Alvin fiddles with his glass of water. Sam really hopes he is not about to be fired. That would really suck. To fill up the silence, he says, "You wouldn't believe the paperwork there is in having a kid. Getting her out of the hospital was like breaking out of Fort Knox. I told Jo we shoulda had the kid at home -- without all that paperwork, we could skip town and nobody's even know she exists."
Alvin laughs at that too, rueful, the way he laughs at all of Sam's jokes about crime. They understand one another, where background checks are concerned. He asks, "Is she asleep?"
"She was staring at everything for like an hour, yesterday, and she's been out cold ever since. I'll go fetch her."
"No, no," Alvin is putting up that hand again. "I don't want to be a bother."
"No bother," Sam says over his shoulder, as he heads into the bedroom. There is no separate nursery room; he hasn't even gotten around to putting together the crib yet. Betty is nestled in a couple of towels in the bottom drawer of the dresser, a cotton sock on her head to keep her warm. He kind of likes to look at Betty in the dresser drawer, he doesn't know why. It's a familiar thing to him. Sam puts a finger on her cheek, and she doesn't stir at all.
"Hey," murmurs Jo, from the bed. She is on her side, purple shadows under her eyes. "Who's in the kitchen?"
"Alvin," he tells her, and lifts the baby up, wrapped in a square of flannel. Sam was stunned to discover a baby could be born needing its fingernails cut. Her eyes are blue, but Jo says all babies are born that way, and they'll change.
"Don't freak. If I'm fired I'm fired." He sits, baby in one arm, next to his wife on the bed. He traces her lips with a thumb. "I'll tell him you need to rest, cause you do." Jo drops her head back down on the pillow.
Sam carries the critter back into the kitchen, where Alvin is standing by the door, examining his toes. "Hey, Alvin, this is Betty." Sam shows her off, not so close Alvin will touch her. The nurses kind of got pissed at him, he was so careful about who was allowed to touch her. Alvin doesn't notice the physical maneuvering, thunderstruck by the creature in Sam's arm. Not even both arms; she is small enough he can fit her whole body on his forearm, with his hand under her skull.
For some reason Sam expected newborn babies to be bigger. Not that Betty isn't big enough to have given Jo a hard time, but seeing dimples on the back of a hand that small -- she looks like a toy, a little girl's doll, but her heart beats fast, pulse visible under her skin, and she is alive. He still hasn't wrapped his brain around it.
"Wow," says Alvin. "Wow." He leans over the child and puts out a thick hand, and then draws it back. Sam is controlling himself against territorial movements; you don't get pushy with your boss when he might still be here to fire you. He stands there and lets Alvin look his fill. "She looks like you," he says at last.
"Unfortunately," Sam adds. She does have a certain Winchester shape around forehead, but Sam thinks she looks like her grandfather, if her grandfather had ever been in a tranquil mood in his life. "I'd be the ugliest little girl in the world."
"Keep her out of the sun, or she'll freckle up, I bet."
"Yeah, I bet." Sam is standing in his kitchen with his boss, making small talk, and this is getting ridiculous. He doesn't know what to say to make him get to the point. Betty gives a big sigh and Sam picks at a booger crust on her nostril.
At last Alvin speaks up. "I'm glad I got to see her, Sammy. That's a pretty child. You should bring her into the shop some time."
Sam doesn't look up. At least he is not being fired, but he still doesn't know what is going on. Gazing at the critter, he says, "Good marketing hook, bring in the single women. Jo says they have, like, baby-radar."
Alvin chuckles. "I swear, your ideas are going to turn us into millionaires." He reaches into his jacket, hasty, and pulls something out. "Here. I want you to have this, okay?" Alvin tucks a white envelope next to the baby, between her body and Sam's chest. It's a fat envelope. Sam suddenly guesses what is inside, as Alvin is turning to leave.
"Whoa, boss, I can't --"
"Sure you can," says Alvin, and pats himself down for his keys. "How else you gonna take care of her shots and getting measured and all that?" His face is red, and that makes his hair whiter. He is wheezing a little now, like he's nervous or angry or ashamed. He doesn't just leave, like he's afraid Sam will throw it away or something. They stand there in the kitchen while the baby sleeps on. Sam doesn't know what to say next.
"Thanks, man," Sam tells him after a minute. He sees Alvin relax a little, edge a smile up one side of his face. "I don't know how to --"
"Babies are for spoiling, kid." And now Alvin employs both sides of his face, and it's a real smile -- the first one he's cracked since he arrived. "Take tomorrow off too, Sammy. I'll see you Friday." And he lets himself out the door quick, trotting down the walk back to his car. Sam is standing there in the doorway with a sleeping baby and an envelope with probably a thousand dollars in it.
There is already six thousand secreted around the house, in rolls hidden in places Jo won't think to look, because she still thinks they can pull all this off without resorting to fraud. Eight weeks ago Sam drove up to the San Fernando Valley and took out a post office box under the name Charles Parker and applied for six credit cards and when they came, took out cash advances on all of them. But Jo doesn't know about that, any more than Alvin does. Jo thinks that health insurance and the state will take care of everything. Sam has a higher margin for safe than he likes to admit.
Betty grunts and makes a face, like she's thinking about waking up. Sam carries her carefully back into the bedroom and sits down again at Jo's side. She props her head up, hair mussed in all directions. She's wearing one of Sam's t-shirts and a gigantic pair of granny underwear, and that's all. She is gorgeous.
"I need a shower," she grumbles, as he sits there staring. "What's that?"
Sam has forgotten about the envelope. He pulls it out from the crook of his elbow and passes it to Jo. "From Alvin," he tells her, shrugging.
Her nimble fingers tap through a double-handful of crisp twenties. "Ha! baby shower," she crows. Sam is busy imagining a horde of women invading his house and painting everything pink when Jo adds, "Of course, not like you would know what normal people do. You were raised by wolves."
"Hey, those were some badass wolves --"
"He's being a friend, Sammy. I don't think he has a lot of friends. Probably you're the only person he talks to all week."
"So, he's lonely so he gives his friends money?"
"He's trying to tell you he's happy for you. What else is he gonna give, a set of brake pads?"
"Car could stand a new fan belt."
"Men!" But she laughs. She lies there on her side, the baby on his arm between them sleeping fitfully, and Sam is blown away: this is his family. He is in love with that little critter like getting jumped from behind in a dark alley: a shatter against his skull and then the hot sensation spreading forward, red-gold ache through his eyes and jaw, messing with his sinuses. It strikes him dumb, it makes him a little shaky: he is completely responsible for the safety of that thing. Having a child is terrifying. Jo is looking at him funny.
"So I guess this is how it's supposed to work." Sam touches her thigh, shyly. "You feel okay? Want another icepack? If you're bleeding more than you should --"
"Well I don't know, babe," she mocks, "I think I might have spent ten hours squashing a basketball through a mail slot." He goggles at her, and busts out laughing. She twitches, trying to keep a straight face, and protests, "I'm not gonna die, I'm just fucking sore. And I feel gross and slimy and I'm like leaking from every orifice!" She flops onto her back theatrically.
Sam watches her breasts settle under the t-shirt -- they're big, heavy. They're marking up the shirt a little, just dribbles here and there. There's supposed to be some kind of rule about mothers not being sexy, or anyway not ones that you've seen the whole miracle of life business happening to right up close, like an extra special episode from public television. That rule is full of shit: she's pretty damned sexy right now, bedhead and maxipad and all. He leans in to kiss her and it turns into a makeout session, just the fun playful stuff while Betty grumbles to herself on Sam's arm. He could do this all day, but Betty finally works herself up to a full wail.
Betty's parents rest their foreheads together for a long moment before turning to their daughter. To Sam's delight, Jo doesn't even bother trying to lift the t-shirt modestly, just takes the whole thing off and holds Betty to one breast. "What?" she asks, at his amazed smile. "Get your butt over here and help me teach her to not just spill it all over the place. Did you even read that handout the nurses gave you?"
Sam did not read that handout. If there is one thing he knows, though, about the female body, it is breasts. He climbs around to watch over Jo's shoulder.
Chapter 15: Normal
The trouble with single parents on the run is that they have a habit of going to ground and blending in. Melvin had sent him off to Olympia, Washington with a frown and a "...but I'm not sure she'll still be there," and of course she wasn't. Sam had stopped for coffee in every eastbound truck stop he could find, hangdog and heartbroken, and wrung clues from the waitresses with Dean's charm. Nell Mackey had no idea she had left a sorrowful boyfriend behind, but steadily he was catching up with her.
Butte, Montana seemed like a big enough place to stop for a while, earn a little cash, park the kids in a school where they wouldn't be the only new faces. It was the kind of city John would have picked, if they'd ever ranged this far. Sam walked its streets, superimposing images of other small cities over it: train tracks or no; missing dog posters on the telephone poles; the convenience stores run by Greeks, or Algerians, or Punjabis, or second-generation Italians. It was warming spring, jacket weather, the sky big and limpid as if it could rain without clouds.
Legwork and some subtle thievery had turned up a woman and two children checking into Dew Drop Inn, and she'd had enough capital to put down for a month, which was cheaper overall than week-to-week. Sam had surveilled carefully, picked out his target, and was ready to make contact. He parked the Impala several blocks away from where Nell had gotten a job -- cash register at a mom-and-pop -- and practiced hunching himself smaller as he walked up. No point in scaring her just casting a shadow; or, well, he was going to scare her whatever he did.
He was a couple hundred yards out and passing an empty storefront when they struck. Two of them, the first rough like a teenager on a rampage and the second the cool head, standing back. Sam knocked Number One away, shoving him hard in the ribs, but Number Two danced out of arm's reach. He showed Sam the steel gleam under his jean jacket -- a .45. Business. Number One got back up, swearing, and came at Sam again, unaware of his irrelevance. He was a young kid, younger than Sam, blond in that thatchy way like his hair wasn't sure it wanted to stay on his head. He was beefy and dressed, like Sam, in patched plaid. He hit the ground pretty hard.
"Where we going?" Sam asked Number Two. Number Two was blond as well, with skin heavily wrinkled and spotted from smoking or from sun. Father and son, probably. Number Two gave a shrug and gestured at the alley next to the storefront. Sam entertained himself with the idea that it might really just be a mugging, that they weren't taking him out back to put him down like a beast. Undone by the car again, had to be.
He let them draw him in a ways, so they weren't obvious from the street, but not so far he'd have a long way to go if he broke for it. "Okay, fine, what do you want?" Sam asked, reaching for his wallet. Number One grabbed his arms from behind and knocked him, into the concrete wall. Sam breathed the stony damp and felt a hot body mashed against his back.
"Just making sure you aren't possessed." Number One had the aura of the fanatic about him, contempt thick in his voice. Number Two was calmer, hands-off. Sam turned his head to converse with the brains of the operation.
Number Two looked him up and down. "You are the demon-hunter, right?"
Sam didn't even bother lying. "I -- guess? I grew up hunting anything foul." Number One was breathing in his ear. The guy seemed like he was getting some kind of psychotic charge out of holding Sam captive. Sam wondered whether his father noticed, or cared, that he had a loose cannon for a son.
"But you're full time on possessions now." That was familiar language -- Sam realized it was his own language, that the man in the straw hat, down in Texas, had spread the word verbatim about Dean Winchester being on a mission. Number Two stuck one hand in his back pocket, like this was an ordinary conversation in the front of a general store. "What can you tell us?"
"Could you call off your guard dog? Please?" Same phrased it with as much dismissal as he could muster. Number Two nodded and Sam fell away from the concrete wall. He took his time feeling out his bruises, a scrape on his jaw, a certain sore twinge in his elbow, before answering colleague-to-colleague. "About possession? Not much. You know about holy water. The basic exorcism is written down in every horror novel from here to Hell and back. Most of what I know about possessions I learned from Bobby out Sioux Falls. You know Bobby?"
Number Two's body language was shifting subtly. With his eyes he called Number One back to his side, quelling him. "I talked to him. He said Dean Winchester was the hands-down expert these days."
Damn Bobby. Well, it was true, and there was no way to warn him off without telling him everything. "He and I did it together. He's the one knows how to make charms."
Number Two stiffened up again. "It's about that cursed brother of yours, aint it? You took care of him, I heard?"
Sam breathed carefully through his nose and formulated a response. "Yes," he said flatly, playing up the resentment of having to talk about it all over again. "Listen, I got to --" He pushed forward against Number Two, gambling that they'd have a spatial respect for grief. And they did, a little; Number Two stepped aside a bit, just enough for Sam to reach out suddenly and snatch that .45 from where it sat in his jean jacket. He shoved the butt back into Number Two's ribs and was on Number One before either of them could assess the situation.
Dean loved to fight, and he loved more to fight dirty. Sam had both men on the ground, looking up at their own gun, in a minute or two. Number One's nose was probably broken.
"Just leave me the hell alone," Sam told them, playacting grief a little longer. No point having to kill them. "Don't you know? A Winchester always hunts alone." He safetied the gun and walked away, leaving them surprised on the gravel. He got all the way back out to the street before realizing what he'd said, and how, under the Dirty Harry sloganeering, it was dreadfully truthful. He had to stop, just lean against the window of a barbershop, to gather himself up enough so he was ready to face Nell Mackey.
He walked into the grocery store where he'd seen her working, and wandered the short aisles casing the place. There was only one person in the store, an old man who usually didn't run the cash register. Nell was not in the back, that he could see. Nell was not there. Sam picked out a couple of candy bars and let himself be rung up as he fumbled for cash. "Hey, didn't there used to be a girl on the register? I swear I saw her yesterday."
"Nice girl," said the old man. "She up and left, just ten, twenty minutes ago. She was just standing there and she stiffened up and walked out the store. Didn't even say nothing, just bolted."
"Huh," said Sam, not feigning his confusion. "Did she see somebody, maybe out the window?"
"She wasn't looking out the window," said the old man. "She was tagging the soup cans. I still got her purse, in the back. Maybe something she forgot at home, I guess. I wisht she'd told me what it was, stead of leaving like that." He grumbled as he handed Sam his change. "I thought I had a reliable one in her, not like some of the teenagers I had in the past."
"Thanks," Sam told him absently, and managed not to break out into a run until after he was out of sight of the store.
It was just as well he ran. When he got back to the Impala he found that someone had taken a lipstick and scrawled on the windshield, "HI SAMMY," with the Y ending short, as if he'd scared the graffiti artist away. He drove back to the Dew Drop Inn and found Nell's motel room door open. Things were messy, but not so messy that anybody had had time to search it in detail. There were assorted socks and four pairs of children's underwear hanging from the shower rod, damp and drying in the spring sun. Two little pairs and two bigger pairs. The children.
There was a lot to do. He dug out his phone and called up Lillian. "Hey, Lil, I need a big favor," he told her. With his free hand he found a duffel on the floor and started shoving Nell Mackey's things into it. "I got two children who are going to need a place to stay. Can you persuade their school to let them go into my custody? Call me the biological father or something. I'll be there in an hour."
"Do you know which school?" asked Lillian, ever reasonable. "And the kids' names?"
"Uh, uh," Sam cast about the motel room, trying to remember where his dad had hidden important papers. He felt the edges of the television and found a manila folder. Of course. He lifted the TV -- it was chained to the wall -- and opened up the story of Nell Mackey's life. "Here we are. Jenny and James Mackey, ages eight and six. They're at, uhhh, here we go, James Madison Elementary School, and I got a phone number here. You ready?"
"You're going to bring them here?" Lillian asked at last.
"I -- where else am I gonna put 'em? I mean, you're closest, and you can persuade them that you really are friendly to their mom, right?"
"....Oh," said Lillian. "What happened to her?"
Sam hunted through a double-handful of picture books, their pages wavy from water damage, and ended up packing them all. Beside them, a romance novel, with a picture of the two children used as a bookmark. "Possessed, I think. We gotta move, Lil. Ready for that phone number?"
He heard her let out a breath, and then she was ready.
***
"She looks like hell," says Ellen. She squints into the California sun. "She is my daughter and I am allowed to say that."
"Just don't say it to her face," Sam sighs. He pulls into the driveway after their grocery trip. Sam has taken his mother-in-law shopping in order to avoid an epic mother-daughter cage-match, which always sounds so much sexier when they talk about it on pay cable, you know? It's not nearly as much fun in your own living room, when your wife hasn't had two hours' uninterrupted sleep in four weeks.
If anyone had told Sam that parenting was like being on a permanent stakeout, snatching a nap in between bouts of disgusting substances, he would have laughed, or run away. But he kind of has a handle on a stakeout, the entertaining yourself in limited circumstances and the iron stomach so that twelve hours of Cheez Doodles and Dr. Pepper don't leave you woozy and unfit for a foot chase. Jo isn't used to stakeouts, and she is the one with the built-in milk machine. Jo's hair is unwashed, and one big dark stripe where her natural color is growing in, seven or eight weeks' worth. It makes her skin look paler, like she needs any help with that. Two nights ago, Sam woke her out of a doze at the kitchen table, with macaroni unchewed in her mouth. Sam hasn't told Ellen that little story.
They unload the groceries -- or really, he should call them rations, since Ellen bought as if World War Three were starting -- onto the driveway and Sam opens the back seat for Betty. The baby is conked out in her carseat, her bitchin' sunglasses askew on her face. Sam takes them off and pulls down her Muscle Car sweatshirt, which has ridden up around her belly, and lifts her, seat and all, into the house. She is still so small, like a squirmy gallon of hot sour milk. It's freaky. He sits himself and the car seat on the floor while Ellen brings in paper bags of food, thumping them on the countertops like the noise won't wake anybody up. Betty fusses, wrinkling her nose, and that is enough reason to pick her up.
Sam rucks her upright into the crook of his neck like she belongs there, drool and all, because she does. He likes knowing that anything coming at her will have to go through him first. He likes having her right there, to touch and make sure she is okay. In the kitchen, Ellen puts away juice and steaks and things that are supposed to keep Jo healthy. She pauses with a loaf of bread in her hand as Sam ambles in to help her. He has become an expert at one-handed chores.
"I guess you're doing all right," she says, and puts her free hand on the back of Betty's head. "I forgot you have some experience at it."
He chuckles. "Everything I know I learned from Dean."
Ellen puts on a disapproving frown, goes back to putting things away. As with everything else in the household, she is reorganizing where things go in the kitchen as she sees fit. "Are you two still not talking?"
There is something in him that wants to play it smooth, be friendly and noncommittal and leave her with the wrong impression; keep her out of his business. But he just stands there, open-mouthed, while she stuffs a five-pound bag of flour into the bottom cabinet. The only thing he can think of he has ever made with flour is glue, for paper kites. He shuts his trap as Ellen turns to him, waiting for an answer. "He's not talking to me," he blurts, and then grabs up some things for the high cabinet and stuffs it all up there, brusque. He hadn't meant to say that.
She presses her lips together. "You used to be so close."
Sam says nothing, keeping the hurt at arm's reach. She stacks up ten packages of red Jello, like Jello is something exotic and difficult he wouldn't think to buy himself after she goes home to Nebraska. The quiet stretches out, uncomfortable. He tells her at last, "Last time, it was almost three years."
That shuts her up good. Sam paces up and down the kitchen, soothing Betty on his shoulder, while he thinks over that three-year gap. Dean had asked, Would you have taken my calls? and Sam thinks the answer would probably have been no, but he doesn't remember why. Maybe it was just some kind of teenaged resentment. He is not a teenager any more. But there are only so many phone messages and dead-drop postcards you can send before you get the hint. If Dean doesn't want to be found, he won't be. Sam is pretty sure he would have heard, if he'd turned up dead or in federal custody. Ellen would have heard, and wouldn't be asking.
Betty is getting into a cranky whine, her hungry noise. If he hurries, Sam can get her settled in next to Jo and nursing without Jo even waking up all the way. He lets himself into the bedroom and sits on the bed just as she is opening her eyes.
"Damn," he mumbles, but Jo is smiling as she sits up.
"It's okay." Betty smacks and suckles hungrily at her mother. "I'm just surprised you didn't kill my mother in the grocery store."
"Is that any way to talk about a grandma?" Sam asks, waggling his eyebrows at her. He thumbs sleep out of her eyes. "Oh, hey, I got you something." He slips out of the room and hunts around in the groceries till he finds it. Jo just stares as he shows her the box; probably it's the wrong kind. There are an awful lot of shades of blonde, it turns out, and Sam has no idea which kind of hair dye Jo uses. He has picked the box with the girl that looks the most like her: serious eyes, dark eyebrows, a secret smile on her face. "I figure, we pawn the critter off on grandma for the evening, have a hot boy-on-girl night of bleach and chemicals."
The crazy grin he's putting on can make Jo laugh, and that's good enough. "Your kinks are so predictable. Please tell me you bought a box for yourself."
"What?" he squawks. "You are not messing with my hair."
"Oh, it would be so cute," she warbles.
"I am not cute. There will be no cute." Somehow, his outrage does not make the mark it is supposed to make.
After dinner he leaves the washing-up to Ellen and Betty conked out in her crib. He puts on plastic gloves like out of some kind of doctor's office porn and sits Jo down on the closed toilet seat and works noxious substances into her long yellow-and-brown hair. She makes these awesome noises of satisfaction, despite all the warnings on the bottle that this stuff can burn your skin and leave you bald. Dye splatters all over the bathroom sink. Sam plays stylist, giving Jo a mohawk, and she laughs hysterically when she sees herself in the mirror. Sam sets the kitchen timer for the coloring and closes the bathroom door and makes out with his wife while she clutches him, fierce, and tries not to mark the wall with the gunk on her head.
"You bastard," she whispers to him, pulling away as the timer dings. "My mother is in the next room."
"If she doesn't know where babies come from by now," Sam teases her. He runs his hands up Jo's flanks and gets a shiver in return. Her body is rubbery, still working itself back from being all bent out of shape. It's a good look on her, more padding in the butt and excellent thighs and those heavy breasts under her tank top. She is all noodly, hand on the edge of the sink (and smudged with dye), relaxed and easy like she hasn't been since -- well certainly not since Ellen came to visit, but maybe not since the first trimester.
"Strip," she commands.
"What??"
Jo turns on the shower. "The timer dinged. I have to rinse this out. You don't want to wear your clothes in the shower, do you?"
Sam's job is always to make her happy. "I guess not," he laughs.
***
"You don't sing very good," the little girl Jenny said, from the back seat. Sam glanced in the rearview at her, opening his mouth to deny singing at all, which was how he realized his mouth was already open, shaping words.
"...live like a refugee," he concluded lamely, and Tom Petty continued singing without any help. "Sorry."
"My mom can sing. She was in a choir at church." Jenny nodded to herself, her French braids hitching up and down on her shoulders.
The children were in the back seat, to keep them inconspicuous and to keep them from accidentally opening the glove box and finding the .45 Sam had stashed there. "What's your brother doing?" he asked, to distract Jenny from thinking about her mother.
"I gotta pee," said James, from where he sat in the footwell.
James had had to pee a lot, Jenny too. Sam had no idea how his father had managed it, being on the road with two children -- how had he gotten anywhere, stopping every hour for bathroom breaks? And yet Sam couldn't remember any other way of being except on the road, or arriving someplace new, or planning a departure.
"We're almost to Aunt Lillian's house, so you got to hold it, okay?"
"Okay," said James.
Jenny said, "How come my mom never told us about Aunt Lillian?"
Sam winced to himself and cast about for a suitable lie. "Well, you talked to her on the phone. I guess -- maybe they had a fight once? How come your mom moved you away from Olympia?"
There was a little gasp from the footwell and Jenny turned her head down, lips tight, telling James to shut up without saying anything. Sam had been on the receiving end of that kind of look so many times he couldn't help but chuckle to himself.
"I grew up moving around a lot," he told her. She caught his eye in the rearview, her black curly eyelashes flapping. She didn't ask the logical question. "My dad wanted to keep us safe. He taught us a lot of stuff, like how to take care of yourself if nobody comes home one night. How to tell grownups what they want to hear."
Jenny said nothing. James climbed up out of the footwell and slid onto the seat next to his sister. They didn't look alike, much; James was fair, with a bow-mouth, while his sister was dark and wide-eyed. Probably they had different fathers -- but Sam didn't want to pry. It was not like their mother could answer any questions even if she wanted to. "My dad died. Mom keeps us safe," he said, while his sister clutched at him to stop him talking. She pinched him on the upper arm, hard, and James let out a shout.
"Hey, hey --" Sam called, trying to legislate from the front seat. "Quit hurting your brother. It doesn't matter what he tells me, I am not telling anybody else."
"He always tells!" said Jenny, in the agony of her being two years older.
Sam told her, heartfelt: "He'll learn."
This was not satisfaction to an eight-year-old sister. She crossed her arms and looked out the window, while James muttered her horrible death and crawled to the far end of the bench seat. Sam had had his fair number of fights on that seat, and the bench, while enormous, was not wide enough to maintain the illusion that one's opponent would be or had already been eaten by sharks.
They exited off the highway and navigated the streets of Tacoma toward Lillian's house in silence. Lillian didn't actually know a thing about children, but Sam realized, neither did his father, when he was saddled with a toddler and an infant and no wife to take care of them. You learned, somehow.
Lillian was standing in the front yard of her building, waiting for them, when they arrived. She was in a gigantic yellow raincoat, holding Biff by his collar. That was a good move, using the dog to make friends with. Biff was a genial, clueless mongrel almost big enough for James to ride. As they pulled into her driveway, Jenny came out of her funk long enough to squeal, "Oh, is that her? Is that her? James, she has a dog!"
The children piled out of the car and introduced themselves to Biff while Sam parked. He was pocketing the keys while Lillian crouched down to their level and said, magic in her voice, "I've missed you two so much." Jenny and James instantly folded into her arms as if they had known her all their lives.
"Lillian is going to keep you safe," said Sam, and she looked up over James's shoulder and winked.
"Lillian is going to have a lot of work to do, no thanks to your Uncle Dean."
He stuffed his hands in his back pockets and squinted through the drizzle. "Uncle Dean is going to be busy finding Nell."
It was low enough the children didn't hear, or didn't notice. Lillian looked over her shoulder as she led them inside out of the rain. She had let go of Biff, who was busily sniffing at Sam's knees. "Come on in out of the rain. We'll make cookies," she called. "So you won't be hungry on the road."
Chapter 16: Proud Mary
It was the junction of great rivers, because that's a place of power. It was underground, because like seeks like. It was in Pittsburgh, because the three rivers turning into the Ohio River were the second-biggest river junction Sam had ever heard of, and because the city was old enough to have a decrepit sewer system. That it was an old center of trade and industry, a union city, home of give-and-take, that helped too.
Sam walked along the dim culvert, listening to the dripping. It was raining up above, in the real world, and so it rained, more slowly, down here. Somewhere far, the water gathered and rushed and escaped at last into the river. Sam headed in that direction, parcel in hand. He shuddered at the chill -- it was colder below-ground than the midsummer air would lead one to expect. He shouldn't have worn a t-shirt.
The Sluice Gate was deep under the city, someplace even the city workers didn't know about or remember or avoided as if it didn't exist. Because he was looking for it, Sam knew he would find it. People had been finding their way there for a very long time. The low concrete ceiling opened up above him, into a cavern of city engineering, rusting old iron grates on all sides. Through the middle of the room ran a channel of water, full of green leaves and candy wrappers and the detritus of the real world. At one end of the channel the Sluice Gate sat in its post.
Contrary to the implications of all the local folk tales, it was not an object or a location at all: it was a creature. It was a creature that cast a great holey cape into the surging waters and stopped it up, just long enough to fish an orange peel out of the stream. It pulled back its fabric plug and the water leapt onward, down and out, someplace back into daylight. The creature was hideous, dressed in cast-off rags, elderly, gnarled and browned and stinking like shit. It was shaped like a human, and turned to face Sam where he stood in the doorway. It had brown eyes and a smirk and one hand on its hip like it had been waiting.
It took a bite of the peel and Sam saw its pointed teeth. They were yellow. He kept himself still, trying not to act afraid, while the Sluice Gate spoke with its mouth full: "What'dja brung me?" Sam's skin attempted to leap off his body and run away, that voice was so -- unpleasant.
Sam set down the box carefully on the humid stone and stepped back from it, ginger in this creature's domain. "Pies. One apple and one raspberry-rhubarb." He nudged the box with his foot, pushed it toward the creature.
"Oh, hm, oh," muttered the Sluice Gate to itself. It tossed away the orange peel. "Pie, I spy pie. Home made, mom and yins together?" It stalked the box on freakishly long and wrong-jointed legs, hunching forward, inhaling a scent though the pies were hours cold. Sam tucked his hands behind his back and stood still.
"I didn't say," said Sam. "But yes, I made it. My own hands." He had made them himself in the paltry kitchen of his rental, and in the process finally found out what Crisco was for. He had sugared the berries and rolled the crusts with a wax-paper-covered soda bottle, thinking with a pang of the cake he'd had on his tenth birthday. Dad and Dean had bought it unfrosted, and had frosted it with grape jelly because they didn't know how to make frosting. They had not been the kind to look up frosting in a cookbook (if they'd ever owned a cookbook, which they probably hadn't), but Sam used Julia Child from out of the library. He'd gotten flour in his hair and berry juice all over his jeans, while he had turned the pages of the book with telekinesis. Those pies were as much made of him as any finger-painting he'd brought home from kindergarten.
The Sluice Gate had long, fine fingers, like comb-teeth, but bent and with tapping long nails. It carefully untied the string on the box. Sam stood there, hands behind him, and realized that for two hundred years scared housewives had stood squirming in his stead, asking after intelligence on the crop or a missing husband or the health of an unborn child. It was one thing to leave an offering and go home safe and dream the answer to your question; it was another to have to stand there and know what kind of beast knew the inside of your business. He was probably the first man to stand here since the city's founding; this was women's magic, and he was an interloper.
The protocol was pretty clear: set down the offering, wait, and then ask. Sam stood still, watching the Sluice Gate as it pulled out the pie on top, and then the standing divider to get at the pie below. It straightened with a pie in either hand -- the cape straggling behind, tucked into a belt or a pocket or whatever -- and Sam deemed it time and he squared his shoulders. "Two pies, two questions."
The Sluice Gate took a bite of the apple pie, tin bottom and all. The juices ran down its chin and dripped.
He had rehearsed it with Shaniece, and phrased it carefully. "First question: How may the yellow-eyed demon be destroyed?"
Two more bites, in rapid succession. The Sluice Gate chuckled to itself, chewing mouth-open, glints of the pie tin amid the mass of crust and fruit. It turned its head, closed one eye as it swallowed, sighed. "Delightful. An amateur's hand -- such care! Such foolishness!" That appeared to be a smile. "First answer: three things is how: dozens of hands, special tears out from normal eyes, and the loving blood of a luck-child, given freely."
Sam mouthed the words to himself, uncomprehending: hands, tears, and a luck-child. Whatever that was. It sounded like Grimm, not like real everyday magic. The Sluice Gate stood before him, berry pie in hand, impatient.
"Second question, second question!" it remonstrated, and caught Sam's attention.
"Yeah, right. Sorry. Um, okay." The Sluice Gate took a bite. Raspberry juice ran down its throat like blood. "Second question: A dead soul trapped in a deal with a demon. By what method may it be freed?"
The Sluice Gate munched on berries for a long time, feeding itself all but one last bite of the pie before answering. "Second answer: mayn't. A deal is not for breaking, not with a demon. They have power and the dead do not. When the demon ends, the deal lives on, until the word of unbinding. Even then, there is no free for the dead. That is reaper-talk, and you ain't reaper, luck-child."
"I aint reaper," Sam echoed sadly, and then the words broke over his head like a wave of dirty river water. "I am a luck-child?"
"Third pie, third question," crooned the Sluice Gate, peering one way and the other as if Sam might have another parcel.
Trembling, Sam shook his head. "No more questions. I, um, I have to go now. Thank you, thanks for the answers." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and realized he didn't want to give this creature his back. But the Sluice Gate only sniffed and turned back to its work, peering into the gloomy waters in the channel, waiting to pounce on garbage that took its fancy. It paused, watching, and raised its cape high. Sam ducked back into the tunnel and got the hell out of there.
It wasn't too hard to retrace his steps back to the manhole he'd come in by, and slip out into daylight again. The rain was down to a drizzle, the contented trailing ends of a summer cloudburst. If he looked up, Sam was sure he would see rainbows. Instead he let himself into the rental apartment and showered until his skin was raw. The smell of sewage would not go away.
***
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8