Supernatural: Six of One (6/8)
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Chapter 17: The Weight
Sam picks up chalk and a spare canister of salt at the corner store, nodding at the guy behind the counter. It's getting on towards evening, this late in the fall, so Sam drives the stroller home with the sky purple overhead. It's only a few steps up to the front door, and Betty doesn't wake as he lifts her right into the kitchen. She is six months old minus one day.
He leaves her in the stroller as he paces through the apartment. Jo will not approve. She won't even understand it, and he doesn't want to have to explain it to her. She will totally freak if she finds it in the middle of the night, when she gets home from work. The chalk he bought is white, as are the grease pencils he lifted from work -- he'll make it as invisible as he can without making it ineffective.
Betty creases her brow like a disapproving grandma, but doesn't wake. She's lost a sock somehow, one foot striped purple and the other one naked pink; Sam looks at that foot, its stubby toes, and digs out his wallet. Under the driver's license is the charm he's kept ever since Bobby gave it to him; he still has no idea whether it works or not, but he takes its red thread and ties it around Betty's ankle. Not that true evil would get much out of possessing a critter who can't even walk, but he does it anyway. He pulls a blanket over her and tucks it in.
Head and shoulders under the bed, he draws a Key of Solomon, blowing dust bunnies out of the way. He does the same under the couch, and on the underside of the kitchen table. He pulls the crib out from its place and draws Devil's Traps on the two posts that face the wall: a magic lockbox. The quincunx sigil is smaller and easier to hide -- on a corner of the front door, on all the window frames -- but it's not as powerful, even double-inscribed. Sam spends two hours racking his brains for other pre-emptive measures he can use, that Jo won't find. Protection, silence, invisibility, dead-ball on all forms of hoodoo, hijinks, and unnatural dealings. The grease pencil turns out to be almost imperceptible on the kitchen linoleum.
He dissolves salt in a vinegar solution and washes all the windows with it, then does the same to the threshold of every room. He pours the leftovers down all of the drains. He checks that the shotgun is loaded, rehangs it high on the living room wall. He's got all the tools he needs to put together a home-made flamethrower. He's got the exorcism ritual memorized, and a gallon jug of holy water in the fridge. It is a day early and he has no reason to expect anything at all will happen. He can't decide whether a hotel room two towns over would be safer than home.
The baby makes a little cranky noise and flaps one hand. Sam gathers her up into his arms and sings "Black Betty" to her in a whisper and she settles again. He paces the living room. The couch smells kind of like somebody fried rancid eggs underneath the cushions, but it was cheap and is still comfortable. Between them, Sam and Jo have worn a low spot in the middle cushion, staring blankly at the television at all hours while the baby fusses. The baby fusses a lot, as ready to play at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon.
There has got to be something else he hasn't thought of. He stands there in his warded house and can't think of anything more he can do to keep his family safe. He has exactly one day before she is six months old, and if he doesn't think of everything something disastrous might happen. He is definitely weighing the merits of a hotel room. Jo wouldn't understand. She would just shrug and say "I thought that crap was over" and be done with it. He can't work out how to stay in a hotel room without her knowing about it; you don't exactly go stepping out on your wife with your infant in hand.
He carries Betty into the bedroom and puts her down in her crib. She doesn't stir. Sam sits on the end of the bed and toes off his shoes, staring at her, terrified, trying to think of some other way he can protect her.
He wakes up that way, at some crazy hour of night, still in his jeans and curled up on his side like he just keeled over on the spot. There is a blanket over his shoulders and he is shaking from a nightmare. He must have made a noise; Jo pokes her head in from the kitchen, still half-dressed for bartending. "Bad dream?" she asks. Like it happens often enough she's gotten used to it. Sam doesn't like that; he didn't think it was that common a thing. She comes and sits next to him on the bed.
"Nothing," he mumbles at her. "The past in a blender. What time is it?"
"Two. I got home a few minutes ago."
He chafes his face with both hands, sitting up, and then starts to strip out of his clothes. He is standing in his underwear, giving her his back, while Jo looks him over. He doesn't need to turn around to know that stare, how she takes him all in with one glance. "It wasn't anything," he protests, low, and then crawls onto the bed next to her. "It was Dean fighting with Dad. They never fought, ever. Dean always did what he was told."
"How come?" Jo asks, as if she's really curious. She taps him on his collarbone when he doesn't have an answer.
"Cause he's a pussy? I don't know."
Jo knows how to get his attention. She leans down towards her shoes and grabs him by his right ankle. He startles badly enough that the baby startles in her crib, lets out one wail. "Seriously. I'd like to know."
Sam scratches his head and tries to come up with a serious answer. "Cause he was in charge while Dad was gone. I don't know. He's just like that."
She gives up the third degree and kisses him, rubs a knuckle against his unshaved jaw. "Go back to sleep and dream about me," she tells him, and helps him under the sheet. She pulls up the blanket and tucks him in, just like he tucked Betty in, earlier in the night. He lets her play mom and tidy up and head back into the kitchen, humming to herself as she does whatever she does with her private hour in the middle of the night.
Sam really really hopes that he does not dream about her. He closes his eyes against the open whiteness of the ceiling.
***
The waiting room of Pamela True Sight, All Major Credit Cards Accepted Satisfaction and Honest Answers Guaranteed, was as tacky and dull as a dentist's office. Sam stared at his feet on the pink shag carpet and rested a while, but Randall, his newest find, had energy to spare and a mouth that just wouldn't quit.
"Oh, check out the gold paint on the mirrors," the kid blabbed. "You think this used to be a whorehouse or something?"
Sam thought it used to be a front parlor, in a small town that didn't have much use for parlors any more. From the outside, it was a rangy old white house in La Chance, Mississippi, just up the road from where he'd tracked down Randall, and the sign in the window was the only evidence that hoodoo might be going on inside. Sam didn't say out loud that satisfaction and truthful answers were not actually the same thing. Randall had never been to a psychic in his life. He had probably never been to Memphis in his life, only a hundred miles away.
"We got this broken tool one time, at my uncle's shop," Randall continued, "and I didn't even know what it was, till I held it in my hands. I mean, I fixed it, but, I couldn't talk to that customer ever again, you know? Knowing stuff about her like that." He dug his fingers into his curly black hair and laughed, a forced noise like a balky furnace starting up. Sam looked him over.
"If you don't think you can take it, you can wait in the car. I should be able to find out without you being there." Randall appeared to be thinking about the offer when the door to the rest of the house opened.
Pamela True Sight was a woman of late middle age, heavily lined about the mouth. She wore an Ole Miss t-shirt and jeans, and shook Sam's hand like she was agreeing to cut his hair, not look into the future. Sam liked her instantly, her graying bunned hair and the butt of a cigarette between her lips and the liver spots on her forearms. Sam couldn't think who she reminded him of.
"Here to get your fortune told?" she asked, and Sam shook his head.
"Well, we have a friend, who went missing. We're hoping you can give us some guidance tracking her down." While Randall shook hands, and called her ma'am, Sam watched Pamela's mouth tighten, as if in disapproval or fear.
Pamela led the two young men into her workroom, through a bead curtain. Sam loved the noise of it, even as he stooped ridiculously so as not to hit his head: the wooden beads clinking like an abacus or a rosary -- belatedly he remembered Missouri's place, how he'd ducked through that curtain too, how she'd kept them both off-balance needling Dean and making Sam laugh. Maybe all fortune tellers had wooden bead curtains.
Missouri never had a glass ball set in the middle of a table, but Pamela sure did. This room was subtler, with floor instead of carpet, big stuffed chairs like you'd find in a shrink's office. Except for the glass ball. There was no art on the walls, no windows, just a few discreet lamps in the corners and a powerful sense of focus. Randall settled into a chair as he was told, while Sam stood behind him and watched.
"You want to sit, son," Pamela warned, but Randall looked up at Sam with such a hopeless expression that she grimaced. Sam put his hand on the back of the chair, not touching Randall, but available. He suspected not a lot of people had been available to Randall in his life; he'd grown up with a taciturn uncle, fixing old appliances in the back of a television store. His whole idea of the world seemed to come from the objects he handled and the stories those objects told him. It wasn't a way to learn about life.
"So, where should we look?" Randall asked.
"Her name is Nell," Sam supplied. "I have some things of hers she feels strongly about, if that would help."
Hard fingers hovered over the crystal ball. It was lit with a tiny bulb, small enough it almost disappeared in the base of the thing -- almost. "Okay, dear, now just be still and let old True Sight think, will you?"
Sam watched the crow's feet around her eyes, noted the osteoporosis in how far forward her shoulders slumped. She pursed that mouth, the cigarette gone now and her expression all business, while Randall swallowed and waited. She didn't have much sense of the dramatic, which as these things went might mean there was some real stuff in there somewhere. Certainly, Missouri had flapped her wrists at ceremony like so much claptrap.
"Looking for a girl," she said, eyes still closed. "I don't do dating services, boys; just cause she's pretty don't mean I can find her for you." Randall put his hands on the table, eager, nervous.
They were practical hands, narrow with long, bony fingers. There were clear calluses on the heels of his palms and the edges of his fingertips, from the tools Randall held all day. His skin was very white: an indoors boy. His mouth hanging open, he waited on every word that might guide him. Of course he wouldn't recognize the techniques of cold reading when he saw them.
Pamela whipped her head around suddenly, as if hearing something, but her eyes were blind to the room. "Oh, ohhhh," she moaned, trembling, and Sam had to commend her acting. She drew her hands back from above the crystal ball as if it had burned her, and it winked out. Blank, she mumbled, "That aint no girl."
Sam tensed. "You found her."
She squirmed, dry-washing her palms, and regarded him standing in her living room as if he were a giant cockroach. "I did no such thing," she announced, and stood.
"You didn't? What did you find?" Sam asked, stepping around Randall's chair. She withdrew from him subtly.
"I'm afraid the Sight isn't working today, boys. I'll please you to come back later."
"What did you find." Sam loomed over her, chin nearly touching his chest. Randall looked up at him, terrified. "We won't leave until you tell me."
Pamela True Sight was not used to being played. Stricken, she sank back into her chair. "It's never much, you know?" she muttered, and firmed her jaw at Randall. "I got the sight, that's the Lord's truth, I just don't got enough of it to do nothing about nothing."
Crouching, Sam put his head below her level and raised his chin at her. He let her see him not moving, not approaching any closer, demanding nothing but knowledge. "We've got to save her. Please tell me what you found."
Pamela shielded her eyes as if she stood in full morning glare. "I just felt it, something horrible. Like black gauze all around me, like a cold web." She began to cry. "You boys are in such trouble."
"We are?" asked Randall, and you could see the whites all the way around the pupils of his eyes.
Sam knew the answer to that one. He stood, and gestured to Randall. "We should go now. Miss True Sight wants to be left alone. Let's go get some lunch and we can talk some more."
"Okay," said Randall, like a child. "Whatever you want." Sam led him by the hand toward the door. He pushed Randall out into the waiting room, and turned to see Pamela staring at him balefully from her chair.
"For crying out loud," he asked, "Why do I scare you?"
She turned away from him to say it: "You got an echo, son. You make my head hurt." Sam retreated quickly.
He crossed the parking lot at a jog: Randall was standing next to the Impala, chatting with somebody. Breathless, Sam arrived, and realized belatedly that it was Shaniece, her spirit realer and more solid than ever in the bright daylight.
"You're getting better at that," Sam told her, and she smiled.
"I was trying to teach Melvin how to do it. He is having trouble wrapping his brain around the idea of leaving his body behind voluntarily." She had queued her short hair into twists, and they bounced around her face as she shook her head. "Scientists."
Sam shaded his eyes to see her better. It was a piercingly bright fall day, hot like summer but less humid, and the reflections off storefront windows jabbed at Sam like daggers. They began to swim suddenly, turning to neon, and he had just time to put out a hand towards Randall when he whited out completely.
Sam woke up with his feet in the gravel and his head in Randall's lap. "Oh Dean," Shaniece moaned, standing above them both. She reached out to touch his forehead, and Sam felt something like a feather at his hairline. "Why didn't you say it was that bad?"
Randall was pressing one hand on Sam's breastbone, heavy. "It's not your fault," he repeated, low. "It's not your fault."
Sam stirred. "What isn't?"
Randall snatched his hand away. "Uh, I don't know. Whatever. That's what you told me last night, when I woke up screaming."
There was something important in that. Sam puzzled through the aftershocks of pain for it, but he couldn't drag it forward. "Ngh. Get me into the car. You're driving."
Shaniece protested, "Dean, you're not --"
He groaned as he came upright, fighting nausea. "Call up Melvin. Call him, Randall. No, get me in the car first." Randall was clumsy, afraid. He pushed Sam into the car and then slid in next to him, so Sam was in the driver's seat after all. Shaniece floated through the side door and into the back seat, and he felt her feather-touch on the back of his neck, reassuring.
Randall was sitting there in the passenger seat with Sam's phone in his hand. He didn't know how to work the phone book feature, and was stabbing buttons helplessly. Sam was suddenly really glad Randall did not yet know about the secret trunk in the back. "Shani," he mumbled, "Melvin was onto something. Ohhh what was it." Sam wrapped his own hand around his forehead, like a fence herding an animal onto a train. "Candy has the migraines, just like me, but she sees things. What's the point of my having a vision if I don't have a vision?"
"It's getting worse," Shaniece mourned.
"No it's not," Sam gasped. "It's been like this since I met you."
Shaniece asked, "If you're not having the vision --"
"Who is?" Sam puzzled through his misery, and didn't like the possibilities.
The phone rang in Randall's hand, startling them all. Randall answered it with, "Melvin? Oh." Sam listened, his eyeballs like cooked onions in his head, as Randall said hello to Candy instead. He didn't know Candy at all, just her name and what she could do. There hadn't been time, since finding him, to introduce him to everybody.
"Candy's the other seer," Sam told him flatly.
But Randall wasn't listening to Sam. "Don't cry," he said. "It's okay. It's not your fault." Randall held the phone, listening, as Candy described what she had seen.
***
Usually, Sam takes the lead with clients. It just happened, somehow, during the first months Alvin had him in the shop: people hew to Sam unconsciously, to his glib speech and his looks, as they do not to Alvin's slow gentle shyness. Alvin calls it magic, a word Sam doesn't like, but both of them recognize that it brings in business. So Alvin can tell something is up when Sam begs off talking to the man waiting in the office.
"I just don't like the guy," Sam explains, lame. He can't dredge up a better reason. Alvin rests his forearms on his pot-belly and cocks his head.
"All right," Alvin says, scratching his beard. They are conferring in a corner of the garage, the office door open. The client is standing by the bookshelves, suit jacket open and hands on hips, carrying his body in a way that is naggingly familiar. Sam keeps his head down and his body out of the direct light. Alvin glances at the guy. "You think he's an undercover cop?"
It is the word cop that gives Sam the image at last. They see cops all the time; there is no cop in California that doesn't harbor some kind of CHIPS or Bullitt fantasy as soon as he makes the kind of grade that allows for a second car. That man standing in the office, the way he weights his body to account for something hanging from his left side, something he's not wearing right now or else he wouldn't let his jacket open. That man and his workaday suit, and his white socks and shoes built for running rather than an office. That man and his sense of authority, the way he is snooping despite the owner being able to see everything he does. "Oh, man, he's a federal agent."
Alvin walks them around subtly, so Sam has his back to the office. He asks, very seriously, "You want me to get rid of him?"
"No," Sam says instantly, and then thinks it over. "No. Now I know why he bugs me, it's not -- a big deal. Hide in plain sight, right?" That gets a very shaky chuckle from Alvin. "Go ahead. We need the business." He wants to bullshit his way through this problem, just wing it, and then iron control comes over him from somewhere: he will not gamble with his family's safety.
"You stay out here while I talk to him." Alvin is stalwart, blunt. Sam likes him immensely all over again. He claps Sam on the shoulder and heads back in to deal with Secret Agent Man, as if he still ran the business alone, as if Sam weren't the reason the garage's mortgage is back in good standing and the paint job guys are happy to fit him into their schedules. Sam's got a few ideas about drawing in a younger crowd, guys who might want to learn as well as get the work done, and pay for the lessons. He hasn't planned it all out for Alvin yet, but maybe they'll have to have a talk some time soon.
In the meantime, Sam does as he is told, and hides his face against the wall as he washes brake fluid off his hands.
Jo hates what the rough soap does to his hands; she keeps threatening to make him use some kind of moisturizer, so he smells like a girl. Sam is chuckling to himself at that as he glances at the Wall of Fame over the sink. He's a little flattered to see the Impala up there; he's said a hundred times it was Dean did most of the work. But Alvin says it's good for business: proof that old cars are tougher in a wreck than new ones. Sam explained about reframing the poor old beast, because, with a hit like that it'll never align true; but he doesn't tell Alvin that the new frame is off a '66 Caprice. It was all Bobby had, at the time.
The Wall of Fame has a lot of stuff, dating back to Alvin's own first, a 1970 Cougar. It's just coincidence that two photos are eye level when you're washing your hands: the Impala looking like Godzilla went nose-picking in her, and then the same girl restored in all her glory: fresh shining paint, new chrome, glinting in the late sun, coronas sparking off the side mirror and the windshield. And leaning against the hood like they belong there: Sam and Dean, side by side. Dean in flannel shirt, hands in his pockets and hanging his head like he's shy to get photographed, and Sam beside him, wearing Dean's leather jacket, staring bluntly forward.
Sam forgot that Bobby even took pictures, till they arrived in the mail last year, from Ellen. How she got them he still doesn't know.
While he is looking at the pictures, they seem to grow and move, weird in his vision. He dimly recognizes that his hands are clutching the edges of the sink as he watches Dean stand up off the edge of the Impala. Dean reaches out and is clutching Sam's arms, hard, shaking him, voiceless mouth saying something rough, something like evil bitch, but Sam doesn't know what. There are shining rainbows and coronas around Dean's look of rage, and he looms enormous, more than a foot taller than Sam. He slaps Sam across the face, and Sam feels that impact, a hot handprint and the sting like an afterthought. His head goes flying and around him is not the garage at all, but an apartment -- there's a table in front of him that Sam bangs his face into, a table with bills, there's an address, there's a name. It is a girl's name, a girl's apartment in -- Wisconsin? Sam is hands and knees on the floor and feels long fingers grabbing his shoulders from behind, lifting him, fingernails digging in painfully. Dean is going to kick his ass, and Sam doesn't even know why.
The drawer in Alvin's office bangs shut and Sam snaps out of it. He is standing there, bent over, his weight supported on his hands where they grip the sink. It has been only a moment. His face is less than three inches from the photo of the fixed Impala, and Dean is leaning on it, shy.
Carefully, Sam controls the shaking of his hands and rinses the soap from between his fingers. He pushes the hallucination out of his head by brute force and memorized Led Zep lyrics, and turns off the tap.
Secret Agent Man is still talking with Alvin, holding out his hands like measuring an engine in the air. More engine work -- well, somehow the whole thing stayed afloat before Sam came along. He is pleased to see that Alvin isn't helpless without him. He can be helpful without being responsible for the whole shebang.
On his way home that afternoon, Sam works it over in his head, trying to figure why Dean would kick his ass. Aside from the everyday stuff, that is; this hallucination is way more of an ass-kicking than toothpaste in the shampoo bottle deserves. He walks mostly, or if the leg is bad he takes the bus; he leaves Jo the car in case she wants to do something during the day. And anyway, it's her car.
She's got Betty in the highchair and Cheerios all over the floor when Sam gets home. He chuckles and goes to fetch the broom. "She get fresh with you?"
"Don't even start," Jo snaps, banging a bowl of mashed bananas onto the counter. "I cannot wait to get into work to deal with slobbery drunks all night. At least they pay me, man."
Sam sweeps up Cheerios idly, grinning. "That's my girl," he croons. "Fight the power." Betty brings up both fists above her head like she is declaring victory, and shrieks with glee.
"It is so not my fault if her first word is a swear," Jo grumbles, crossing her arms. After a minute, she can pick the bananas back up and start shoveling them into Betty's mouth again. Betty is hummingly happy to eat bananas, and doesn't throw anything anywhere. Sam puts the broom away and plucks stray Cheerios off her forehead. She kicks rhythmically, banging the underside of the tray, and reaches out for the spoon in her mother's hand.
She is such a little thing, all enthusiasm and no sense, turning her goofy smile towards anybody like a flower towards the sun. Sam lets her grasp his thumb and wave it around and suddenly finds himself shuddering, for no reason.
"Eat up, bunny," Jo chants, feeding bites to Betty. "Grow big, and your daddy and I can go hunting again. Theeeere you go, sweetheart."
Sam extricates his thumb from his daughter's grasp. "We can do what?" he asks, dumbfounded.
"Yes," says Jo, still sing-song, like baby talk. "Mommy spends all day at the library, doesn't she? She's found plenty of interesting things." Betty finishes up the bananas while Sam sits immobile in front of her. Jo gives her a hard cookie, and Betty gums at it, eyes wide.
Sam rubs his face a couple of times. "No," he says. "We're not -- no." He doesn't even know where to start, just a stifling No all through him and over him.
"Not, like, now," Jo tells him, and she's back to an adult voice. She leans against the counter, confident. "But in a couple of months, after her birthday, when she's sleeping through the night, we could strap her into her car seat and park you on the roof with a rifle, just like old times."
"No," he says again, and discovers he is standing up, shaking a little. "Now we've got Betty, that's it, it's over."
"Says who?"
"Says me," Sam snaps at her. "Says your dad getting killed and leaving your mother to raise you alone."
She colors. "That is a hell of a thing for you to say to me."
Sam's hands are fists. He can feel his pulse in his neck, thrumming hard. "No," he tells her, "Not now, not ever. We are safe in this life, Jo. What the hell do you want, to tear it all to pieces?"
"I want to hunt," Jo says, arms crossed. "I'm good at it, and you are too."
"Not ever," he shouts, and watches her flinch. "This family is safe and it is going to stay that way."
Betty busts out a wail, frightened by his voice. He is panting with the anger of it. He suddenly knows what he saw this afternoon at the sink: it's a memory, it must be, from when Sam was possessed and threatened the family and Dean kicked his ass into next week. Sam does not know what he would do if he could not trust that his family is safe. He watches Jo crouch to comfort Betty, blowing on her cheeks and in her eyes, and realizes he has been yelling at his wife like some kind of lunkhead.
He doesn't know what to say, so he busies himself in chores: cleaning up the bananas off the tray, pulling Betty out of the highchair. He clutches her to his chest as if unseen forces might reach out suddenly and rip her away. She claps a moist hand against his face and the acid churns in his stomach and when Jo lifts the baby out of his hands he doesn't resist for fear he might crush Betty in his grip. Jo leaves the room, Betty's babble trailing after her, and after a minute of hard breathing Sam follows. He stands in the doorway to the bedroom watching his wife put down his daughter in the crib, cooing at her.
The muscles in between his ribs twitch and ping, tense. His hands dangle on the ends of his wrists. Jo stands up, leaving Betty with some kind of chew-toy in hand, and faces him again. She is not afraid, not the way he is afraid.
Jo comes up close, puts one hand on his chest. "I love you," she says. "I would never do anything to hurt this family."
They don't talk like that, they never have. Sam scrambles to manufacture something flippant: "Except for your cooking."
She swats him. "Liar." She goes up on tiptoes and kisses him, and that is something he understands. His fingers slide around her waist, dip under the edge of her jeans. Her arms go hard around him, elbows locking on his ribs, and they stand there kissing like teenagers in the doorway of their bedroom. "You love what I got cooking."
This Sam cannot deny. They eyeball the clock and stumble together out towards the living room couch, hurrying before Jo has to leave for work. As he unsnaps her bra, Sam convinces himself that the argument is over.
Chapter 18: Helter Skelter
Afterward, Sam would feel guilty for not thinking of Ava as a person, most of the time. He had stowed her engagement ring in the cigar box in the Impala, and the friction of her inexplicable absence had dulled as things had gotten more complicated. He had only known her for a day, for all that; and he fenced away his responsibility by reasoning that he must not be the only person looking for her. At present, he was too busy sneaking around the back side of her apartment building, hoping that Candy's vision had provided enough intelligence for their plan to work.
It was a rickety thing, the fire escape, and wasn't pleased about taking his weight. But Ava had never met Randall, so Randall got to go in the front, and Sam was the cavalry. He peered in the window, feeling like an idiotic peeping tom, and realized with dismay that Randall had jumped the gun and was already in the apartment. He had a helpless-goof look on his face and a gas can at his feet and Ava had her hand on the door while she frowned.
Time hadn't been kind. It was not much more than two years, and Ava had heavy lines next to her mouth. From slim, she'd shrunk to skeletal. Her hair was brittle and dull, uneven lengths around her face. Randall was so alive by contrast, gesturing expansively with his hands, shoulders hiked up around his ears, gangly and eager.
Making up lost time, Sam climbed out to hang off the edge of the fire escape and get a look in the other window. That room wasn't lit, and from the glow of the main room he could only see rough shapes: a bed, something like a desk, a chair. Someone in the chair. Sam banged his knees hard vaulting back over the railing.
Inside the apartment, Randall was explaining something with eye-rolls and you knows, edging his way around for a good view and to keep Ava with her back to the window. Sam waved to catch his eye and gestured toward the darkened room. Randall flipped the back of his hand at Sam, and kept talking to Ava. Stupid boy.
While he worked at the lock on the window with his mumblety-peg knife, Sam kept an eye on Randall. Ava's face was turning cruel, as if she had twigged to the ruse. Sam freed the lock and began inching up the window sash just as the second person came into the room.
It was Nell Mackey, of course, dishwater hair and round hips. She walked right up to the window Sam was opening and ripped the sash up, out of his fingers, so that it gaped wide. "Why hello Sammy," she said.
Fuck. Randall was not supposed to know that name. He stood there, mouth gaping, while Ava stared bloody murder at Sam.
"Won't you come in?" Nell's body asked, and yanked at Sam's wrist. He came in, tumbling hard on his forearms, and found himself lying flat on the floor in front of Ava. That skinny body was even skinnier-looking seen at such an angle; she looked like a wired-together skeleton like you see in biology classes.
Randall at last remembered the plan, or what was left of it. He grabbed up the gas can and upended it over Ava, soaking her with holy water. She steamed and screamed, flailing. She only needed to connect once to knock Randall over. Sam took the opportunity and scrambled up to dash at Ava. She was all sinew under his hands.
He shook her, snarling, "You evil bitch, you helpless stupid girl," suddenly angry at her for being so nice and ordinary, for letting herself be grabbed away from the safety of her normal life. When he slapped her she sprawled backwards, grunting, and banged her face into a table beside the door. Mail scattered around her. Sam crouched and got his hands on her shoulders from behind, ready to shake the demon right out of her, but he'd forgotten about Nell. Nell had not forgotten about him.
For starters, she kicked him in the ribs. When he didn't stay down, she connected with the long muscles in his thigh, dragging a groan out of him. He inched away, cursing, leg cramped and useless, as the two women regained their feet and approached him.
Ava hung back with distaste and the blood from a split lip all over her features, but Nell was friendly. She sidled up to him, sly, to crouch in front of him and brandish her full breasts in his face. She straddled him, thighs firm against his, and gripped his jaw. The kiss was thorough and vicious and... actually, pretty hot. Sam's hands came up to grab her wrists automatically, but he couldn't pull her face away before she'd drawn blood in his lip. It was definitely Alice in there, or else everybody in the demon's employ was oversexed and bored.
"You have no idea what your brother and I have talked about," she purred into his ear.
Opportunity like an electric current streaked through him. "Yeah I kinda do," he whispered back. "He told me about seeing you in Hell. He said you looked like Laura Ingalls, only your pa wasn't nice."
"Curiouser and curiouser," Nell-Alice mused, and licked his face. "So if I fuck you, will you still be willing to deal?"
"I thought you didn't like giraffes," he needled. "If you go willingly back to Hell now, I can set you free permanently later. You know I have a reason to be working on that."
"Aw," she pouted. "No fucking?"
"I think whoever's in Ava would be jealous," he teased. "She doesn't seem to like Randall much at all." Nell-Alice twisted her head to get a look at Ava, sending her hair flying into Sam's eyes. Sam took the opportunity he was given, and shoved her off.
He struggled to his feet, panting, his thigh a knot of tension. Randall was in the corner, nose bloody, holding the empty gas can like a weapon he might not dare use. Probably he had never hit a woman before. Sam hadn't thought of that.
They stood like that, the four of them, two women with demons behind their eyes and two men preparing to do battle with them. Sam was gathering himself for another assault when the apartment door blew off its hinges and went flying across the room, breaking the windows. Even the demon-women gave yelps of shock, and Sam ducked behind a chair for cover.
The chair leapt away from him and towards Randall, bashing him in the kneecaps before careering away into the other room. Sam's skin crawled and then he was in the familiar position, the back of his head banging hard on the wall as his body was mashed backwards. He breathed hard, feeling the barrier of magic, as a body stepped into the apartment.
It was not an impressive body. It was a stooped, elderly woman with swollen ankles and glasses on a chain around her shoulders. Her hair was thin white wisps waved around her face. Her eyes were yellow with red streaks. Her smile curled, like the still-warm ashes of a burned letter.
"Sammy." That mocking voice, familiar even in a higher register. It could not find those rumbling deep tones of John Winchester, not in that body. "Long time no see. Why am I not surprised you're leading the rescue squad?"
Randall squeaked, pressed like Sam against the far wall. The two demon-women were standing up, dusting off their knees.
The old woman paced around the room, assessing the mayhem they had wrought. The body was obviously stiff and arthritic, and just as obviously the monster within it was forcing it to do things that would be painful, even debilitating, later. Sam remembered the thing in Dad's battered body, how Dad had fought it and fought it and begged Sam to shoot him. Gnarled fingers flexed and stretched, as if the demon were feeling the air.
"I know what you're doing, Sammy my boy," the demon told the room in general. "I know everything you do. Don't think you can hide from me."
Sam held tight to his cold terror. That was three other specials, Ava, Nell, Randall, who had heard his real name, though of course Ava knew it already. That was one mother of a demon, who claimed to know the whole story. Sam mustered in his memory the look on Dean's face when he sassed true evil, tried to mimic that.
The demon was sidelong, insinuating. "I'm sad you aren't acting on the information I give you any more. Well, I mean, you're here, aren't you?" She reached out and caressed his chin, while Sam jerked to get away. "But I had to goose you and Candy both to get you to come, didn't I? What kind of manners did your father teach you, not accepting a gift that's been offered you?"
Tiny victory, like the Pacific upwelling in his chest, but hot, volcanic, a blush of relief. The demon did not know everything. He didn't realize -- or didn't care -- that he'd just explained where the visions came from. He didn't even know Sam wasn't seeing the visions any more. Sam took a breath and plunged in: "Can't you make those things come without migraines? Kind of cramps my style."
"Not convenient for your oh-so-busy social life?"
The grin on Sam's face was pure Dean, pure bravado. "At least you're nice enough to schedule them for when I'm not driving."
The demon's borrowed face made mock-concern. "Don't want you to die, sweetie. Not before your time."
"I don't think you do want me to die," Sam needled. "Every one of us who dies is safe from you. Nestor won, when he killed himself. Even poor crazy Max, he was so unhappy, but he managed to keep you at bay in the end."
The demon raised his elderly chin at Sam, peering. "I can kill you, sweet thing. It just doesn't profit me. So much better if you play by my rules. So much easier."
"I don't feel like playing."
"No, playing is your brother's strong suit, isn't it? I saw him poking around in my back yard. You've been very clever, the two of you, never in the same place at the same time. But I'll break you of him." The demon put an owning hand on Ava's hip while she stared, hateful. "I always end up having to take away my children's toys. They get so attached; it's pitiful, really."
Sam breathed in and out, feeling the unpleasant truthfulness of that statement. And then, a steady, low anger: Dean was not a toy. He knew in himself the ferocious territoriality of the older sibling, how much he hated that demon for laughing at his brother, rightly or wrongly. It was overwhelming, made him shake, and the pictures on the walls rattled in their frames to speak his rage for him.
"Aw," said the demon. "You do have a little power."
The barrier of magic squashed Sam a little harder against the wall, banging his head again. He struggled to drag in a breath against it. But there was something in him unconcerned, confident, free: that thing did not know where Dean was. That thing did not know, and Dean was safe, and Sam could withstand anything with that knowledge. For the first time, the demon's borrowed face showed apprehension. Sam let the rage in him flow freely, and a wooden chair flew into flinders with a look. The demon took two or three slivers of wood in the back, and turned to show him the bloody entrance wounds, grinning.
There's a person in there, he reminded himself.
While the demon's back was turned, Nell-Alice shifted subtly, cocking her hip at Sam. He twitched his mouth at her and she smiled that low, cruel smile. It was the same smile on every mouth she used; Sam wondered if he had looked like that when she had owned his body. "Hey guess what," Nell-Alice said, in that sardonic tone of hers. She began to recite in Latin: the ritual for exorcism.
"What the fuck are you doing?" asked the demon in Ava.
The demon roared at Nell-Alice, a terrifying noise far louder than the weak human body he inhabited could make. She paused, shuddered, and kept reciting. Sam mouthed along with her, and then out loud, and on the far wall Randall chanted along too. Sam realized suddenly that, in a luck-child's body, Alice was as safe from the demon's wrath as she could possibly be. Don't want to kill off your precious children -- the old woman's body grabbed Nell-Alice hard at the upper arms and kicked her in the shins.
"Oh, sweet thing," the demon said, as he collapsed her knee and sent her yowling to the floor, "you are going to pay."
And like that, with the feeble scream of the body it was leaving behind, black smoke leapt out into the room and billowed against the ceiling. It wafted, terrifyingly conscious and malevolent, out the broken windows.
The demon possessing Ava ran at her sister, clawing, but Sam plucked himself off the wall where he had been glued and captured her, kicking and squealing, before she could get to Nell-Alice. "Don't," screamed the creature using Ava's mouth, "you can't, I just got here, this is my body now --"
"You owe me so hard, dude," said Nell-Alice, looking up at Sam through her lashes. She struggled to her knees and recited the last phrase, and out of her mouth came the same foul, mobile smoke that flew out of Ava's body.
Ava flopped in Sam's arms like a bag of sticks. He eased her to the floor, saying her name, but realized after a moment that she was unconscious, as was Nell on the other side of the room. Randall was crouching in the corner, blank and gasping.
Chapter 19: When the Levee Breaks
Sam carries around the rage of it with him all day, slamming tools down and hurling screws into their jars so hard they bounce right out again. Alvin doesn't say anything about it and by late afternoon Sam is feeling stupid and ashamed. He walks home with his hands in his pockets, wondering what to do next. When he gets to the house, he sees that the notebook is still on the table, just as he left it this morning, its pages ripped in half and scattered in a heap. Jo is in the living room, watching TV.
He rattles around the kitchen like a dried pea in a jar, pulling out something instant for dinner and wincing over the dishes. Jo sits in the living room and doesn't look his way, and after about five minutes of the silent treatment, he stomps in to see her, mad all over again.
"Okay, so I kind of went Hulk Hogan on the book," he allows. "Did you have to leave it out for me to find it like that, at six in the morning?"
"I was looking at it, after work," she bites out, still staring at the TV. "I just forgot it. You fucking left it that way for me to find when I got up."
Sam's head is heavy. His whole body is heavy. He thought he wanted to fight and now he just doesn't want to. "Where's Betty?"
"Late nap. I'm off today." Sam goes in and glances at her, and somehow that sets Jo right off. She is up off the couch in his face, asking,
"So, what, are you gonna take all my books away from me? Keep me out of the library so I can't look stuff up? Take away the keys so I won't stash things in the secret space in the car?" She hisses her anger, teeth clashing between her full lips.
Sam puts his hands up, finds himself grasping her forearms. "I am sorry about the goddamned book, okay?" he whispers.
"It's all I have," she gasps, and he's afraid she might bust out crying. "That notebook is everything I have to work with. All the rest of it is locked up in your head and you've thrown away the fucking key."
"Oh," he growls. "This is about the hunt. We talk and talk and you just go and do what you wanted anyway."
Jo drops her head back, exasperated. "I didn't do anything!" She tears her arms out of his grip and paces into the kitchen. She slaps the pages on the table, lifts up a few to drop them, drifting, back down. "This is our whole life together, and you tear it in two."
He follows her closely, hot. "The hunting is the only thing you care about? What about Betty, for Christ's sake?"
"No. Sam," Jo sits down at the table and cradles her chin in her hands. "I can care about more than one thing at a time." She is staring out into nowhere and Sam is trembling. The next thing, he thinks, is that she'll ask for a divorce, but instead she says, "The stories you used to tell. I want to be a part of that. I want to hunt like your family used to hunt."
"That's crazy," he tells her. It is a frightening thing to say, because it's true and because it makes him feel like a traitor. Dad looms huge in his mind, Dad at the end of a hunt, worn out and full of sorrow. "It wasn't safe."
Her yearning is naked, all over her face. She reaches out one hand for him. "You loved it, babe. You used to love it. Why don't you love it any more?" And that only makes Sam feel more rotten. He must have loved it; saying he doesn't is like chopping off his own arm, but it's like cutting out an infection too. His throat closes down over the contradiction, like a burning house collapsing and smothering the flames with its own destroyed roof. He can't make sense of it.
He hardens himself into sarcasm. "Oh sure. Raise Betty like I was raised." She recoils from him as if he had attacked her physically. "Head out on the road, felonies right and left, while the baby crawls around loose in the back seat of a car with no seatbelts."
Jo stands up and walks away. It's not that big a room -- hell, it's not that big an apartment -- and she stops in the living room, by the window. He watches her back from three yards away and burns with helpless anger. Jo sniffles and wrings her fingers, staring at the walls of the neighbors' building. "I didn't --" she begins.
It is the cruellest thing Sam can think of to say: "Maybe you should have married Dean instead of me."
Her shoulders bow and her head drops down and the crying starts in earnest. She just stands there, facing away from him, and sobs quietly, and no Winchester in the history of the universe has ever been able to continue an argument with a woman while she is crying. Sam shakes his head and pads across the room silently and stands behind Jo and touches her shoulders, shy. She shrugs him off, but it's only a token resistance.
"Hey," he says. "I didn't mean that."
Down her forearms go his palms, till her elbows are nestled into his and he can press his chest to her back and his cheek to her temple and be all around her, like a force field. His fingertips tickle her hipbones.
"I just," he says, directly into her ear. "Our job is to be safe for Betty. We got a kid, Jo. No fooling. If you're gonna die, I don't want you dying for anything less than saving your kid."
Jo's face, reflected in the window, is an array of shadows: her mouth hanging open, her eyes deep in their sockets like owls watching from hollow trees. "I'm not gonna die," she says, around a hiccup.
Sam smiles against her hair. "Not if I have anything to say about it." Her body shakes while she works out the last of her sobs and he traces her flank, her thigh, up under her shirt to the edges of her ribcage. She is slim again, a shadow of her luscious pregnant body, active and lithe. He exhales slowly and tucks a thumb under her waistband.
Jo sniffles and doesn't say anything. His thumb slides lower, teasing along the top edge of her pubes. He listens to her breathe and can hear the transition point when it stops being crying and starts being that other thing. Which is his cue for reaching down with his middle finger and finding the spot that makes her gasp -- just like that. She throws her chin up and her shoulders against his and gasps again and digs fingernails into his wrist. Her lips are at his ear, hot mist against his throat and a flicker of tongue. She turns herself around in the circle of his arms and they are ripping off their clothes like shucks off an ear of corn.
***
Lillian told him later that the luck-children had been checking in with her all day, pinging her over email and dropping in with Shaniece's projection spell so often that Lil had to make it a game, to convince Jenny and James Mackey that they weren't going to be kidnapped by ghosts. But Sam didn't know that when he arrived, late, the Impala grumbling as it pulled into the driveway. All he knew was that he'd made it home, to a home, and three more people were safe.
Randall and Ava were asleep in the back seat, leaning on each other. They had taken to each other instantly, as soon as Ava had opened her eyes and been really Ava again. They'd done a lot of crying together; he'd listened to it through thin motel walls. Ava had gained back a little weight, but not much, and Randall was always hovering near her, offering his coat. She wore it now, tucked over her shoulders.
Nell sat in the front seat with Sam, alert and practical. She could organize audio tapes so they never listened to the same one twice in one day, and could marshal takeout orders, shouting them across Sam's body at the drive-through windows. She had gone on the road before, of course, and somehow had guessed that Sam was like her in that respect. It was almost like having Dean in the car with him, or, casting backwards into his childhood, like being on the road with Dad, playing guessing games and learning to spell off the highway signs. He sat with Nell beside him for a quiet minute, just liking her presence.
"Your kids are inside," Sam told her at last. She bit her lip against the tears that swam down her cheeks. "They think Lillian is your sister. James told me that you keep them safe," he added.
Nell laughed a little, and let herself out of the car. "They better be in bed by now," she admonished the sky. She waited, though, while Sam reached back and nudged at Randall, and then gingerly at Ava. The two of them came awake slowly, and then startled together.
"We're here," Sam told them. He got out of the car and faced Nell over the roof of it. It gleamed in the moonlight, like a shield. "They're great kids," he said. "All Jenny could talk about was how awesome you are."
"Wish I was awesome enough not to get possessed and abandon them," she said, and as if surprised at herself she turned away quickly. Sam jogged behind her and they made it to Lillian's door at the same time, Randall and Ava straggling behind.
And it really was like coming home, a warm kitchen against the chilly March night and the burner under the teapot turned off just in time so it wouldn't whistle and wake the children. Nell spent a long time in the bedroom with them, while the rest of them stood around, awkward.
"Shani will be here in a little while," Lillian told them. "She's got a bunch of warding spells on the apartment that she's always dropping in to check on. This many of us together --"
But there had already been four of them together for nearly a week, quiet in the Impala. Well, that had its own kind of ward. Lillian made some kind of hot lemonade, and read off to them the Chinese characters on the side.
"Luck and safety," she said. "But that's hippie brand-name talk, I think. We grew up drinking this stuff, and it didn't keep my sister safe." She shrugged at Randall and Ava. "She was smothered to death. When I was nine."
"Oh hey, that's awful," Randall offered, always polite. "You know, when I was seven, my parents drowned down Tawney Lake. Guess we all got something like that, huh?"
Ava's loss was still fresh, of course. She hid her left hand, engagement diamond winking out like a light.They all had something like that, some pointless death that reshaped each life. Sam had two of them, three if you counted Dad's bargain with evil. Sam was trying to think up a joke that would not be completely inappropriate when Shaniece walked into the kitchen.
"You took your time," she said. "It's one in the morning, on the east coast."
They trooped into the living room and watched Shaniece refresh her warding spell. "That's her thing," Sam whispered to Ava. "She's a natural."
"Bully for her," Ava muttered. Randall touched her on the forearm, cajoling or chiding. Sam let her alone.
They got to watch as people winked in, by ones and twos, arriving for the meeting. Shaniece was the most solid person, almost palpable. Gertie and Therese had appeared hand in hand, unable to project themselves alone. Kira, and Freddy, and Candy, cautious Jeff and Melvin with disapproval all over his face, Doreen still in Vermont and Mike on Long Island: familiar faces all. Andy was last, beer in hand.
"I'd offer you one, dudes," he said. "But they're kinda like back in Oklahoma." Silly as it was, it was the perfect line to get them all laughing, break the tension of what was coming. Sam looked around the room and realized he was the only one who had met everyone in person.
Sam held Dad's journal on his knees, a lifetime of assembled searching and knowledge and fighting spirit. He turned the pages without touching them, just savoring the handwriting on each page, his father's letters sure even when the pen shook with rage or fear. The postcards were pinned into the latter pages, just with paperclips: five dead-drop postcards from Dean, three from Gainesville and two more from California. The message space on each of them was blank; Dean still had sense; but it was -- more comforting than Sam could ever have said out loud. Knowing that Dean was in the world, alive and well, maybe a little irritated with his brother for being a slacker about calling him back.
"So," he said, and they all fell silent. He squirmed a little under all that attention. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nell come in, tidying tears from her face, ready for business. "So we did a thing, and I think we scared the -- bad man. I know you're not all good with my calling him a demon."
Melvin crossed his arms where he sat, on the arm of Lillian's easy chair. (He was translucent, so it was kind of funny.)
"Anyway, after all this time of him chasing us, I think we have a chance to go after him for once. We knocked him off balance, freeing Ava and Nell. I don't think that's happened before and it freaked him out. But we have to act quickly."
Dull muttering, as the bodies and spirits re-settled themselves uneasily. Sam paged through Dad's journal to the later pages. "We have what happened at Spuyten Duyvil to go by, and the prophecy from the Sluice Gate. We've got skills, all of us, and we need to use them. We bring the fight to him, and we might be able to break free."
Doreen spoke up from where she stood in the corner. "I did a tarot the other day. On myself. It had the ten of swords -- that's a nasty card. It's a blindfolded woman walking through a maze of swords stuck in the ground. Kind of describes where I'm at," she added, shy.
Sam hadn't seen her since -- it couldn't have been two years. She blushed and smiled back at him.
"The spring equinox is next week," Kira pointed out. "That's all symbolic and stuff, right?"
Sam nodded. "I have a place in mind. We've got to do this now, or we might lose our chance."
"Okay," interrupted Mike. He was in a t-shirt, so Sam could see a new tattoo on him. It was a Devil's Trap, right on his biceps. That was actually a really good idea, Sam realized. "So we have the where and the when. But I sure as hell don't know how."
"We use the clues Sam has gathered for us." Shaniece rested her hand on Sam's forearm and it felt as real as if her body were there. She touched the journal's page where Sam had written it down: "Dozens of hands."
Unconsciously everyone flexed pale palms, upward or outward.
She continued: "special tears normal eyes, and the blood of one of us, given freely."
"So," said Gertie, blunt as ever. "Who's willing to die?"
Awkward silence. It was not something they had talked about, not as a whole group. Sam met Shaniece's eye and they kept their mouths shut together.
Nell burst into sobs suddenly. They were big, braying, ugly sobs, her whole body wracked. "I'll do it," she said. She stood helpless in the doorway as if expecting the executioner at that moment. "Lil, will you take care of them for me? I know it's a lot to --"
"No," Sam blurted, even as Lillian was falling on Nell, hugging her tight. "Not you," he said to the whole group. "Those kids need you."
With dismay, Sam looked all around the room, at the fourteen other people waiting expectantly on him. Somehow, instantly, they'd selected him leader, and wanted him to decide on their behalf. Of everyone there, he knew them all best. Melvin had his patients. Mike had kid sisters. Freddy was married and Kira had her parents and Randall and Ava sort of had each other and Andy had -- whatever it was that made him happy. Sam's mind leapt away from it, like the emergency signal in your brain when you touch a hot burner -- unreasoning horror at the idea of being the one to choose who would die. That kind of power, over another person's life -- Sam couldn't bear it. As the silence stretched, he saw a dull fear creep into one face after another. If he couldn't choose, they might have to make the decision themselves.
"It doesn't say die," he said at last. "Lots of rituals require token amounts of blood, not all eight pints."
Heads nodded. It was a palatable lie, even to those who had to be able to guess. These sorts of things didn't go down without a major sacrifice. A unit of platelets was not going to fit the bill.
"Okay," said Melvin. "We're going to need tools and we're going to need weapons. Let's do an inventory."
Sam let them get to the practical matters while he stared at the open pages in front of him. In the back of the journal, the pages were all his own handwriting, except for bits by Shaniece and one page of Randall's hasty scrawl. Sam flipped forward, turning the pages by hand. Everything was in the book, or if it wasn't and someone learned it, it went into the book. Sam wrote in it reverently, always had, but some of Dean's notes were of the "microbrew: weird but good" variety. He took after Dad, of course. The early pages were part confessional, part manifesto, part instruction manual, and partly a real journal, with receipts and grocery lists amid the Latin. Sam stopped on the page he'd been looking for: the summoning spell. It was in John's handwriting, of course, or anyway the ingredients list was. It was on hospital letterhead from the place where John had died. Sam had taped it in there, and tracked down the wording of the ritual based on its ingredients.
"Does it seem like that'll work to you?" Randall whispered to him, slow. "Blood, tears and hands? There's got to be a twist."
"It's not twist enough that somebody's got to die?" Ava was sour, rubbing her ring back and forth on her finger.
"No," said Sam, "I guess it's probably not."
***
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8