Fortress - Section Seven

[glasslogic]

Chapter Nineteen:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
~First We Take Manhattan, Leonard Cohen

Dean took another sip of his lukewarm coffee and grimaced. He had never really been able to tell any difference between dollar coffee and five-dollar coffee, except that the only thing he had to decide with dollar coffee was decaf or regular, and ordering five-dollar coffee came with more options than his last cell phone plan. Fortunately, Sam had interceded before he felt forced to get violent with the girl at the register, but the entire experience still left him disgruntled. He despised yuppie places like this. But Sam had insisted. It had caffeine and free Internet and that was all Sam needed to settle into a place for weeks at a time. But five hours was four hours and fifty-nine minutes too long for Dean.

“Sam.”

“What?” His brother looked reluctantly up from the laptop screen and raised an eyebrow.

“How much longer?”

“It will take as long as it takes. Why don’t you go… wash the car or something,” he suggested distractedly.

Dean glanced out the tinted front windows at the snow drifting down heavily and starting to pile up against buildings and gutters.

“I’ll get right on that, Sam. Are you at least getting anywhere?”

Sam sighed, irritated, and looked up at the ornate clock on the wall. “Thirty more minutes.”

Dean looked surprised. “Why thirty minutes?”

“David Hill says he will get back to me in about thirty minutes. He had to run over to the library and flip through some of the historical archives. They won’t let him take those books out of the collection room, but he’s pretty sure he knows what he’s looking for. And once we have a name, it should just be a few minutes of Internet searching.”

“Who’s Hill?”

“A professor I did some research with when I was doing consultant work. Are you going to keep talking? Because I need to finish some stuff up before I hear from him, and this is just making it take longer.”

Dean wandered over to a couch to examine some magazines, outdated but still new to him.

Almost an hour later, Sam waved a hand at him and Dean headed back to the table.

“Your professor friend had a poor sense of time.”

“We’re over six months into this and finally making progress, Dean, and you want to whine about an extra half hour?”

“We aren’t six months into this, I am a hell of a lot longer than that into this, and you just jumped on the band wagon practically freaking yesterday.”

“It was thirty minutes, Dean.”

Unmollified, but accepting that part of annoyance was just boredom, Dean slid into the chair next to his brother. “What do you have?”

“So -- I told you about the vision, with the crowd and the rope and the mountains and stuff.”

“Which sounded completely useless, but you seemed excited.”

“Thanks, Dean. Yeah, anyways -- based on the way the ingredient is listed, and the stuff that I saw, Professor Hill and I narrowed it down until we really only had one name that seemed to fit, this guy named Thomas Harris, out in South Dakota, who was apparently some kind of a loner. His brother was a horse thief, and I guess they must have looked somewhat alike, because when someone saw the horse thief plying his trade one night, he managed to convince people it was his brother who was actually the criminal.”

“They killed him? For stealing horses?”

“Horses meant a lot in the Old West.”

“Apparently. How does this help us? We need blood; it sounds like you’re talking a hundred years or so ago. They decide to keep a jar of it hanging around?”

“1877 to be precise, and we need blood, but it doesn’t say liquid anywhere.”

“I love it when you try to be all sneaky, Sam. Now what the hell are you on about?”

“They botched the hanging; like, really botched it. The guy’s head practically came off. Lots in the story about how his blood rained all over the brother that had accused him, and so on.”

“Wait, this guy had the balls to accuse his brother of a crime he committed, then let his brother get sentenced to death and actually showed up to watch him die?”

“Well-- yeah, I guess.”

“Geez,” Dean muttered, “and I thought we were dysfunctional.”

“You mind if I continue?” Sam asked with a raised eyebrow.

Dean made an impatient gesture.

“Right. When they caught the other guy back at his old tricks later in the next town over… well, people said that the guy they hung the first time had reached out to mark his killer. It was apparently quite the sensational story back in its day.”

“The sort of sensational story people like to keep souvenirs of,” Dean mused.

“Exactly. Like the blood-soaked rope. Quite the museum piece.”

“You get a location?”

Sam turned the laptop around to face his brother.

Dean glanced at the map. “Awesome, more snow.”

“Oh,” Sam added as he shut the laptop down, “and grab those magazines. They don’t care if we take one or two.”

“Dude, what the hell is up with your magazine fetish lately? We’ve got more than your body weight sliding around in the backseat already. I mean - I might be understanding if you were suddenly needing the comfort of some Busty Asian Beauties, though weighing in at a metric ton is an awful lot of comfort, Sam, but Cooking Light? Oprah? National Geographic? What the hell?”

“I like to read.”

Dean snorted and randomly grabbed a couple of the magazines scattered across the low table. “Not even you can read that fast. The only thing you ever do is flip through the pages. It’s not like they have anything interesting in them anyways.”

Sam stilled in the act of sliding the laptop into the case. “Have you been reading my magazines?”

“Sometimes.” Dean eyed Sam curiously, picking up on the tension in his voice and body. “The nights get boring and I can only take the whine of the laptop for so long before I need to take a break. Of course, I can take a lot less of that crap you’re collecting.”

“Play Solitaire.” Sam zipped the bag shut with more force than necessary and turned to face Dean directly, meeting his eyes. “Stay out of my stuff.” He grabbed the magazines out of Dean’s hand and slammed out of the cafe into the swirling white.

Dean took a moment to drain the last sip of his coffee, watching thoughtfully through the window of the store as the snow began to settle in Sam’s footprints, then tossed the cup in the trash bin and followed his brother out.

~~~~~~~

The building was ancient; cement between the dusty, pitted bricks was crumbling out, the paving stones uneven and chipped. The only thing new about it was the roof, which had obviously been replaced sometime in the last few years. It was all to the Winchesters’ benefit, however, since the windows had not been dubbed such a high priority. Their wavy, uneven glass and battered, cracked wooden frames were at this point probably supported as much by over a century of repainting as by any structural merit.

They had rolled into town earlier in the day, and spent most of it getting a feel for the local law enforcement and hanging out in the museum, playing tourists. Sam had also insisted they find a commercial recycling bin and had disposed of nearly all the magazines he had accumulated, keeping only the couple grabbed at the coffee shop. His expression had dared Dean to comment and so the demon had held his tongue, still curious about what had his brother so riled about them, but unwilling to start a fight over it.

The item they were looking for at the museum had not been on display. But at least the snow clouds that had blanketed most of the rest of the region seemed to have missed one isolated corner; it saved them having to be overly concerned about footprints. They also didn’t have to worry about alarms. The little building didn’t even pretend to have a security system, and the two cameras mounted inside were obvious fakes. They did have lights with motion detectors outside, but they had been so poorly positioned that half of the windows were easily approachable.

Dean pushed up carefully on the frame until a gap wide enough for the blade of a thin knife appeared, slid one through the gap and across the frame slowly until it caught on metal, then pushed until the metal moved under the pressure and the latch slid away.

Dean grinned at Sam. “They might not be into all the upgrades, but at least they keep things oiled.”

“Yeah,” Sam whispered harshly, “you know what else they aren’t into, Dean? Bushes. So can we please get inside before the cops come back around?”

Dean rolled his eyes, and after a quick look around, pushed the window up and climbed in. Sam followed on his heels. They found themselves in an oak-paneled room with display cases indicating the history of Whitewood, a tiny splinter town a few miles outside of Deadwood, South Dakota. The cases were all polished and illuminated from within, and the wooden floor was glossy in the light from the displays, probably original to the building, judging from the gnarled and uneven look of the planks. A handwritten sign politely apologized for some of the displays having been removed for restoration or on loan. Some casual inquiries during their earlier visit had revealed that restoration was done on site, and the loans were to various places all over the region for some kind of localized history week. Dean hadn’t wanted to link their memory to a particular item by asking about it specifically, so they were doing the search the hard way, starting with the museum itself first.

“Where to?”

“There’s only two rooms that weren’t part of the tour, one is the staff office, so the other...” Sam headed down the main corridor to a heavy door painted the same brick red as the trim with ‘staff only’ neatly centered on it. Sam tried the handle, but it refused to turn. He turned back to Dean, who shrugged, dug out his lock-picks and crouched down in front of it.

The lock opened silently and Dean twisted the handle and pushed the door open.

“Ladies first.”

Sam gave his brother an irritated look but didn’t hesitate. His visions and research had led them to this place, and if he was right, if what they were looking for was here, then they would have the first of a short list of tangible things needed to make sure that Lucifer would stay locked up for a long, long time. It wouldn’t stop Lilith from making his life miserable, but it would go quite a ways towards evening the scales. If they got their hands on the first one, he was sure they could acquire the rest.

The old wooden floor creaked under his weight as he moved slowly through the room. It was lined with shelves and benches, everything cluttered with boxes of all shapes and sizes and piled up apparently at random.

“Crap,” Sam muttered, looking about helplessly.

“Well, that’s accurate.” Dean gave the room a disgusted look.

One of the relatively clear benches held a variety of empty display boxes. Sam moved them aside while reading the content labels and felt a surge of dismay. His brother was riffling through boxes on another bench.

“Dean.”

“What?”

Sam held out one of the empty display boxes. Its aged, green velvet lining was faded on the edges and neatly pinned at the bottom was an aged slip of paper. Written on it in a spidery blue ink:

Rope from the Tom Harris hanging, 1877, Deadwood S.D.

The box was otherwise empty.

“It’s fine, Sam.”

“In what way is this fine? If it’s not in its box, where the hell is it?!”

“Probably in its new box,” Dean offered nonchalantly, then smirked and held out a different case. This one was about the same size as the box in Sam’s hand, but was lined with crushed red velvet and coiled up in the middle, with the noose undone and the rope flat after more than a century as a display piece, the blood-soaked rope from the botched Harris hanging. A new printed tag beneath it gave the same information as the old tag:

Rope from the Tom Harris hanging, 1877, Deadwood S.D.

There wasn’t any blood visible just from looking at it, though, and Sam felt a surge of doubt. “How can we be sure?”

“Sure of what?” Dean gave his brother an impatient look.

“That this is the right rope! I mean, it has been a century. It could have been lost, or misplaced, or stolen as a souvenir and replaced with just any rope. It’s not like this one looks any different.”

“This is only now occurring to you? I thought you were supposed to have the smarts in the family?”

“Dean!”

“What do you want from me, Sam? If it’s the rope we’re looking for, we get to move on to the next ingredient, right? And if it’s the wrong rope, then... we’re screwed and back to square one.” Dean started to open the case.

“Don’t do that.”

Dean paused and raised an eyebrow.

“It’s protected in there; let’s just take both cases.” Sam gestured around at the mess. “It will take them longer to notice it’s gone if they don’t have empty cases laying around, or they will probably just assume it was loaned out if the box is gone.”

“If they notice at all,” Dean added, stacking the new and old cases and tucking them both under and arm. “Any other shopping you want to pick up while we’re here?”

“No. Let’s just try and get out without getting caught, please.”

Dean snorted. “We only get caught when we want to get caught.”

“I think maybe all your memories haven’t quite returned yet,” Sam muttered, as they made their way back through the building to the window they had entered from. He looked carefully around outside through the glass, then pried the window up and slipped back out.

Dean handed the cases to him, then hopped lightly down beside him onto the grass. “You don’t have enough faith in us, Sam.”

“What would your reaction be if we were spotted by the local cops and they tried to arrest us?” Sam asked pointedly.

Dean flashed him an edged smile that promised violence and pain. “Not a chance.”

“Exactly, that’s what I have faith in. So if you don’t mind, can we please go before they drive by again?”

~~~~~~~

“So what now?” Dean asked, when they were safely back on the Interstate. The lights of Whitewood had receded into the distance and they had the road practically to themselves. The whole thing seemed almost anticlimactic now that it was over. All that work and waiting and it was a ten-minute burglary he could have pulled off in his sleep. “Do we wait for you to have another vision?”

“It didn’t say; just that when we had one item, the next would be revealed.”

“Maybe you can just read it, then.”

“It’s in the trunk; you want to pull over at the next rest stop and I can look?”

“No point. I’m sure whatever it is will be annoying and require research and more visions to figure out. Let’s just put another hundred miles or so between us and the museum we just finished robbing, to be on the cautious side, and then we’ll try and find a room with Internet. That way, you can geek out in a less irritating spot than the last place.”

“There isn’t anything wrong with coffee shops, Dean.”

“Sure, if you allow for them being inherently evil, there’s nothing wrong with them at all.”



Chapter Twenty:

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers overflowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.
~Bad Moon Rising, Credence Clearwater Revival

Sam could read the next ingredient, but it didn’t make Dean any happier than the first one had.

“Where on the fucking planet are we supposed find ‘Nephilim Blood’?” he demanded, after Sam read the new required item to him.

“Maybe from a Nephili?”

“Oh, that’s just great help, Sam. No problem there -- I have half a dozen in the trunk; we can just pull over and juice one.”

“Look, last time I heard the term, it was a reference to giants. But since I haven’t seen any of them walking around ever, I’m hoping I can find a somewhat more conventional meaning. But I can’t figure out anything from the passenger seat of the car or standing around in a gas station parking lot!”

“Fine. We’ll find a room.”

~~~~~~~

“So the blood of the offspring of angels and humans?”

“Seems to make the most sense,” Sam sighed, and leaned back in his chair.

“Huh.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say, Sam?”

“I don’t know. Something more… helpful? You’re the one with the angelic buddies.”

Dean shrugged. “If these ‘Nephilim’ are part angel, I can probably feel them.”

“That’s great!” Sam sat up straight again.

“Maybe. Bad news is I’ve never felt anything like that since I got back here.”

“Well, considering the spell and all, it’s probably pretty rare.”

Dean wrinkled his nose. “I don’t even know how it’s possible.”

“Angels and humans having kids together?”

“Yeah.”

Sam shrugged. “The usual way?”

“Angels don’t have bodies.”

“The one I met at the motel had one.”

His brother snorted. “That was a Vessel, Sam. Some poor sap it borrowed to play Michael Landon for you.”

“Maybe that’s your answer. Maybe it’s just… infused.”

Dean stood up and reached for his car keys on the top of the television set that looked like it had been ancient when he was born. “Well, I think this conversation had gone as far as it possibly can. Thanks for that imagery, Sam. You ready to go get dinner?”

“That won’t solve our problem, Dean.”

“I’ll let you know if anyone trips my angel-dar; other than that and research, and hoping that you get some kind of visitation, is there anything we can do?”

“No.”

“Then food it is. Get your jacket.”

~~~~~~~

More than a week later, Sam woke up to insistent shaking and his dead brother’s voice calling his name.

He opened his eyes and a kindly old woman was sitting beside him on the bed. When he blinked at her, she stood up and walked to a counter where she picked up a mixing bowl and a long wooden spoon.

“You looked like you were having a nightmare, dear. Do you want to tell me about it?”

Sam instinctively tried to sit up… and realized he was in a wooden chair at a kitchen table. It looked a little like Bobby’s kitchen, but Bobby’s kitchen had never been so clean, or smelled like fresh bread. Cordite and gun oil maybe, not bread.

“Um… I don’t… I don’t really remember. What are you making?” It seemed terribly important to ask.

The woman gave him a grandmotherly smile and sat down across from him, still stirring the contents of the bowl. “Cookies. My grandchildren always want cookies. So I try to always keep some in the jar; makes them eager to come see me.” She gave him a conspiratorial wink and leaned in a bit. “Store bought ones just can’t hold a candle. They think if they throw enough sugar at the problem, people will gobble them right up. But you feed a child some real homemade cookies, they remember who has the good stuff. A little flour, a little butter…”

Sam half listened while she continued chatting about her recipe; he was looking around, trying to figure out what was going on when something she said drew his attention back. “What?”

She looked up at him and smiled. “Love. I said love is important too.” She tilted the bowl forward and he could see that the handle of the spoon was a blade and blood from her badly lacerated hand was running thickly down into the batter.

Sam looked up at her, horrified, then watched, shocked, as her eyes flared with a brilliant white light and ghostly wings seemed to burn the air over her shoulders. Her voice was the same, though, as she continued.

“It’s in the blood, the legacy you pass to your children, and your children’s children. It remembers where you come from, even when you don’t.” The light in her eyes grew brighter, expanding until Sam couldn’t look at her anymore and he fell back off his chair trying to scramble away. The entire house was shaking and he threw his arms over his head to protect himself.

Strong hands grabbed them and forced them down again. “Sam, damnit! I said wake up!”

Sam’s eyes flew open. “Dean?”

“For fuck’s sake, Sam. That better have been a vision, because if it was a nightmare, you need to be getting more sleep. I’ve been trying to wake you up for ten minutes.”

“Can you turn the light off?”

“Vision then.” Dean reached over and snapped off the switch. “Better?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it the angel?”

“My head doesn’t hurt enough for that, but it was weird.”

“The vision was weird,” Dean repeated, deadpan.

“She said love was important,” Sam mumbled, rubbing at his forehead.

“What, did you get any clues?”

Sam blinked and just looked at him blankly.

“Clues, Sam! Did you get any from the vision?” Dean explained impatiently.

“Oh, no. Well, maybe. I could see trees outside, looked scrubby. Mesquite maybe.”

“South it is then.” Dean sounded pleased. He was sick and tired of snow and it was barely even winter yet.

“Can I sleep some more first?” Sam asked muzzily, twisting away from even the dim light coming through the cheap curtains from the parking lot. He heard a rustle of canvas and then the sound of water running at the sink.

“Take these first or you’re going to be completely worthless when you wake up.”

Sam pushed himself up on an elbow enough to swallow the pills and some water then flopped back down.

“You sure there wasn’t anything else?”

Sam wasn’t sure he replied aloud, but Dean left him alone, anyway, and soon he was asleep for real.

~~~~~~~

“Sam, yo -- you in dreamland over there? This nice lady has asked you three times what you want to eat.” Dean flashed the waitress an inviting smile that broadened as the woman blushed and returned it.

“I think it’s her, Dean.” Sam was staring intently at the local Texas paper.

“That’s not an order, Sam.”

Sam held up the paper and pointed to a figure in the grainy black and white photo on the cover.
“Her, Dean. As in, from the other night, her.”

Dean looked back at the waitress. “Why don’t you just double my order.” Then he waited until she left to grab the paper and scan the page. “What the fuck are the odds of that?”

“Apparently, pretty good.” Sam glanced at the menu, then tossed it aside dismissively. “It’s not like anything about this entire mess has been normal.”

Dean snorted. “Normal for who? Now let’s see...” He unfolded the paper so he could see the caption. “‘June Richards of Southlake, Texas helps with her great granddaughter’s kindergarten class during grandparents’ week.’ Awwww, that’s sweet. So, Southlake then?”

“Unless you have some other lead I should know about.”

~~~~~~~

Texas was flat and arid.

Finding June Richards hadn’t been much of a hardship; she was listed in the phone book. The house was in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, somewhat of a step down from the more posh neighborhoods that Southlake --basically a Dallas suburb-- was known for. But it was also an older neighborhood, and if it was less upscale, the homes also had more of a personal feel about them. Children playing outside, neighbors talking on their porches, and landscaping actually done by the homeowners, and not the aesthetic dictates of someone hired for the job.

It only took about twenty minutes of observation to confirm that the home belonged to the right June Richards.

“So we know she’s the woman from my vision --so what? Now what do we do?” Sam asked.

Dean shrugged, still picking at his cheeseburger. “I guess we confirm she’s one of these Nephilim.”

“How exactly do we do that? Go up and ask?”

“She probably wouldn’t know anyways. You said in your vision she talked about generational bloodlines; I doubt she has any idea what she is. But if she’s got that much angelic blood in her, I can probably tell.”

“She wasn’t even fifty feet away, Dean; you couldn’t tell then.”

“Fifty feet and five feet make a lot of difference when reading things like this, Sam,” Dean said, wounded.

“Well, how do you want to get within five feet, then? Stalk her?”

Dean snorted and finished off the burger. “I thought we would brush off some of our more traditional skills.”

~~~~~~~

“Ms. Richards? I’m Detective Young and this is Detective Shaw. We wanted to know if we could have a few minutes of your time? There have been some reports of unusual people hanging around the neighborhood and we’re just talking to residents, making sure there hasn’t been any problems or anything like that.”

The confused-looking elderly woman opened the door wider. “I’m happy to help out, Detective. But I haven’t seen anything. I’m not outside anymore as much as I’d like to be.” She gave them a rueful smile. “Arthritis in my back and all. The kids next door run around at all hours, though; they would probably be more helpful.”

“Thank you for your time, ma’am.” Dean gave her a professional smile back. “We really appreciate it; you can’t be too careful these days.”

“This has always been a safe neighborhood, but I appreciate you boys checking in. Have a nice day.”

She pulled the door closed and Dean walked quickly back to the car, Sam following on his heels.

Dean turned to Sam in the Impala, a light in his eyes that immediately put Sam on guard. “It’s definitely her.”

Sam nodded. “So we know; what do we do now?”

“What we do now, Sam, is sit back and enjoy some tunes!” Dean turned the volume up and soon the raucous strains of one of Dean’s personal mix tapes was loud enough to make Sam wince. But Dean was singing happily along, so Sam let the matter lie.

The motel they were staying at was a good thirty-minute drive. Dean pulled up in front of the room but didn’t kill the engine.

Sam hesitated. “You’re not coming in?”

“I’m gonna go find a carwash, do a little container shopping, and then grab something to bring back for dinner. I thought you would rather have some Internet time alone. You can come if you want,” Dean added thoughtfully.

“No, thanks.” Sam climbed out, but then leaned back in the open window. “How are we going to get some blood from her, Dean? It’s not like we can really just ask her to open a vein.”

“Did you pay attention to the spell, Sam?”

Sam didn’t bother dignifying that with a response.

“You have to use the Nephilim blood to draw some weird design, and it looks like a pretty big one. We aren’t talking a cupful of blood here, we’re talking more like a bucket.”

“No, she wouldn’t survive that.”

“I didn’t make the spell, Sam, I’m just following the directions.”

“We aren’t going to kill an old lady!”

“We’re going to do whatever we damn well have to!”

“No! Look, Dean. She’s not the only Nephili in the country, she can’t be! We can… figure out something. Maybe a little blood from several of them. We aren’t going to kill any people who aren’t even involved in this!”

“Wake up, Sam. The whole planet is freaking involved. And it was your vision that picked her out, and it’s your vision that we are following here. Suck it up.” He shifted into drive and Sam had to jump back to avoid getting a foot run over. He stood in the parking lot fuming for several minutes before stomping into the room. It damn well wasn’t over yet.

~~~~~~~

When Dean slammed into the motel room a few hours later, Sam was waiting for him, standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the room. No chance to avoid the confrontation.

“You can kill her or you can keep me. You can’t do both.”

“Handing out ultimatums now, Sammy? That just doesn’t seem that bright.” Dean dropped his shopping bag by the door in case it turned into a battle of more than words and let a hint of his inner darkness frost the edge of his voice.

Sam glared at him. “I mean it, Dean. Stop trying to fuck with my head. We had a deal. I cooperate and you don’t kill people. Remember that, Dean? Remember the whole ‘demons have to keep their deals’ speech you gave me when I agreed to come along on this stupid trip?”

Dean gave Sam a surly look. “The whole point of you cooperating is for the spell. And if we can’t get the spell ingredients, then what the hell am I dealing with you for at all?”

“I’m not saying we can’t get the ingredients, I’m saying you can’t kill people to do it,” Sam snapped.

“People who aren’t trying to harm us,” Dean said pointedly.

Sam hesitated, then nodded. “Right. No other people, Dean.”

“What about people trying to harm other people?” Dean asked.

“Stop trying to split hairs, you know what I mean. You kill this woman and I walk.”

Dean threw himself back into one of the motel’s cheap chairs. “Then what exactly do you suggest we do, Sam?” he asked, annoyed. “Go and politely ask her if she will cap herself conveniently near a bucket?”

“I don’t know yet, but we aren’t killing her,” Sam stated flatly.

Dean let the silence stretch, staring balefully. Eventually, Sam got tired of the game and stalked into the bathroom, slamming the door. Without Sam in front of him to annoy, Dean slumped down and tried to think of an alternative that wouldn’t end with his brother handcuffed in the car again.

~~~~~~~

Hours later, Dean was still in more or less in the same position. Sam had eventually emerged from the bathroom, and after some awkward conversation around the subject, they had tacitly agreed to drop the matter for the time being. Dean had indicated a general disinterest in doing anything that involved getting out of the chair, so Sam has settled in for the evening with the computer and whatever food he had dug out of his duffle, since Dean had been too annoyed by the confrontation in the parking lot to remember to bring anything back. The whole room still smelled like peanut butter.

A quiet whimper attracted his attention and Dean looked up sharply. Sam was curled in a knot, tangled with sheets on the bed farthest from the door. The darkness of the room didn’t hide from Dean the pained expression on his brother’s face. He hadn’t thought of a solution to their problem yet, and as much as he would just as soon not have to deal with a conscious Sam anymore for the time being, he also wasn’t willing to let him suffer just to avoid a little awkwardness.

“Sam.” He shook his brother’s shoulder. Unlike the night before, Sam startled awake immediately, sitting bolt upright and gasping for breath. “Sam, you okay?”

“We have to go.”

“Go where?” Dean asked warily, remembering vividly what happened the last time Sam was insistent they had to go somewhere.

“The house, something awful is happening.” He slid out of bed and started pulling on his discarded clothes from earlier.

Dean had never bothered getting undressed so he quickly gathered up their few belongings that weren’t still packed. If they were about to go investigate something Sam described as awful, it was likely they would be wanting to blow town immediately afterwards.

“You have any more details than that?”

“No,” his brother replied, eyes wide and haunted. “We have to go now, Dean!”

“Soon as you get your shoes on. I’ll go toss stuff in the trunk.”

They only delayed long enough to shove the key in the overnight drop box for pre-dawn check-outs, then ghosted the Impala through the nearly deserted streets of Keller and then Southlake. Sam was silent and still beside him.

“You still doing okay there, Sam?”

“I’m fine.” Which was obviously a blatant lie, but if he was together enough to tell it, he probably didn’t need any help at the moment.

Dean parked the Impala at the far end of the block where an overgrown, empty lot hid it from casual view and there was a straight shot back to a main roadway. Sam hadn’t come up with anything more useful than ‘awful’ during the trip as a description of what they were about to walk into, so Dean wanted their bases covered. He shoved a rock-salt loaded shotgun into Sam’s hands and together they crept through backyards and gardens towards June Richards’ house.

They were still two houses down when Dean grabbed Sam’s arm, halting him in his tracks.

“Demons,” he hissed.

Sam sucked in a sharp breath and whispered back, “Still here?”

“Maybe.” Dean kept his grip tight on his brother and sent his sense ranging out, trying to get a better feel for what was happening. It was too dark for Sam to see the black his eyes had turned as he deliberately engaged his demonic abilities for information, but he could make out the distant expression on his face in the waning moonlight.

After a few minutes, Dean seemed to shake himself and let go of Sam’s arm. Sam rubbed at the residual ache. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know. I don’t think any of them are still here.”

“Don’t think?”

Dean gave him an impatient look. “It’s not like it’s a science, and that old lady has a weird presence; it’s made this whole area difficult to read, like a static residue.”

“Ms. Richards?” Sam whispered, concerned.

“I didn’t pick up any humans. Or whatever she is.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Let’s go see what’s left.”

The back door was ajar. Sam reached to pull it open but Dean blocked his way. “Don’t touch anything.”

“What?” Sam hissed back.

“You don’t have gloves on, and I can already smell blood. Don’t touch anything.” Dean pulled the door open and motioned him inside.

“You don’t have gloves on either.”

Dean smirked and held up one hand, fingers spread as if demonstrating something. “I own this body, bitch. I only leave prints if I want to.”

Sam grimaced at the reminder, and crept in cautiously.

It wasn’t a difficult search. The back door opened into a laundry room, that opened into the kitchen from Sam’s dream. The woman herself was still propped gruesomely in one of the polished wooden chairs. She was wearing a long cotton nightgown and seemed to have suffered a few superficial wounds, long slashes to her arms and one across her cheek. None of them bad enough to have caused life-threatening bleeding, but the cause of death was obvious; no human could survive the unnatural angle of her neck.

“I guess it doesn’t matter if you get a bucket now,” Sam mumbled in defeated tones, the confirmation of what he had seen not unexpected, but still depressing. Dean didn’t appear to be listening, though; his eyes were again flat black and his expression intent as he stared at the corpse.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re not alone.”

Sam looked the body over again, but she seemed just as dead as before. “Dean...”

Dean pulled Ruby’s knife from the sheath at his back and reached for the body. “If no one’s home, then this won’t be a problem.”

Before he could make contact, the body jerked upright with an agility it probably hadn’t possessed for at least thirty years and moved back against the wall. The neck straightened before their eyes and the woman’s death mask turned to a cynical and almost predatory smile, her eyes bled to the same black as Dean’s.

“Hello, tasties,” the demon purred. “My, you have been naughty, haven’t you? But never fear, Lilith is willing to let bygones be bygones, if you ask nice and grovel well.”

“What are you doing here?” Sam demanded tightly.

“Nothing much, poking around, asking questions. We’ve been so terribly curious about what you boys have been up to, you see. I couldn’t figure out what was so interesting about this particular slab of meat, and I wanted to talk to her. She didn’t feel very communicative, though.” It traced a finger along one of the slashes on its arm. “And screaming gets so on the neighbors’ nerves. I thought it best to end the discussion before someone noticed and called the cops.”

“She was just an old woman; she doesn’t have anything to do with anything, didn’t know anything!”

“And yet, here you are, darkening her doorstep again in the middle of the night. Why is that again?”

Sam gave Dean a furious look for assistance.

“I think what Sam’s trying to say is, she wasn’t any of your business, and we don’t appreciate your interest in ours. How did you follow us?”

It snorted.

Dean moved faster than Sam could even see. One moment, he was standing beside him, the next, he had the demon pinned back against the wall with the tip of Ruby’s knife digging into its throat.

“That really wasn’t an answer, now was it? And don’t even think of trying to smoke out of this meat-suit; that would make me angry.” Dean gave it a smile that was all edges. “You won’t like me when I’m angry.”

“Doesn’t matter, there isn’t anything you can do to me that will be worse than what Lilith will.”

“Even destroying you completely?” Sam suggested icily from over Dean’s shoulder.

The demon sneered. Dean pressed harder with the knife. “I think you need to take a better look at me, before you feel so sure that Lilith is the worst thing that can happen to you.”

The demon blinked and focused on him. After a moment, its eyes grew huge and it actually seemed to cringe.

Sam was baffled; he couldn’t tell anything different about his brother, but something was scaring the crap out of the demon inhabiting June Richards’ corpse.

“Now that you are feeling more reasonable,” Dean continued, “why don’t we try this again. How are you following us?”

“It’s a locator charm.” The demon glanced meaningfully at Sam.

“Sam?” Dean demanded, looking over at him too.

“I don’t have anything, Dean!”

“More information,” Dean snapped at the demon.

“Someone gave it to him, in some shop in, uh, Kentucky. He carries it with him; he’s carrying it now.”

“That’s how Lilith set that damn compulsion.” Dean swore. “She’s been tracking us all along. Dump your pockets out, Sam.”

“Dean, I swear I don’t... Wait.” He frowned. “Kentucky?” Sam ripped his wallet out of his jeans and pulled a thin stack of business cards out of it. From the bottom, he singled out a pale lavender one with fancy black script and held it up.

“What is that?” Dean asked.

“That cafe, the one outside of Evansville. I was asking the guy at the counter about a rare book store in the area and this woman butted into the conversation. She said her uncle dealt in rare books, and she was sure he could help me out if I really needed to find something. She gave me this card, I… completely forgot about it.”

Dean pressed harder on the knife to make sure the demon didn’t try anything, then held his free hand out impatiently. “Let me see it.”

Sam passed the card over. Dean cursed immediately and let it flutter to the floor. “That’s it.”

“Why couldn’t you tell about it before? It’s been weeks, Dean!”

“It’s faint, really, really faint. And it’s not targeting either one of us, just sending out enough of a signal for anything attuned to it to trace. They probably can’t even feel it more than a few miles away; they’ve been on our fucking heels.”

“Then why only try to grab me the once?”

Dean turned his attention back to the demon. “Well, I guess that answers our question about whether any Seals are left or not, doesn’t it?”

“How?” Sam demanded.

“She was just feeling us out. If she’d gotten you, then great, but just watching after that attempt failed seems to have been okay. Means she isn’t ready for you yet, so she must still have other chores occupying her time. That right?”

“I don’t know her business,” it replied sullenly.

“Wait,” Sam interjected, “why kill this woman? You could have followed us around forever and we wouldn’t have known; why reveal yourself like this?”

It didn’t answer. Dean dug the point in another hair.

The demon flinched. “It was an accident. We just wanted to know why you were talking to her. We knocked on her door, just to talk. But she knew something was… different, about us. She freaked out. We shoved our way in and tied her up. We were hoping you would show up sooner so we could use her as bait, but after a few hours, my associate got a little enthusiastic.” It shrugged a little.

“Where’s your associate now?”

“Do I look like I’m any kind of authority figure? I don’t know where he went; he told me to hang out here and see if I could find anything else out. I was going through her files when I heard you coming in the back door. This seemed like a better meat-suit to eavesdrop from.” It kind of waved off toward the hallway, where --now that he was looking-- Sam could make out a man’s loafer, presumably attached to a body, just barely visible in the light from the kitchen.

“You have any more questions, Sam?” Dean asked casually.

Sam shook his head, so Dean turned his attention back to the demon.

“You know anything else you might like to try and trade for your continued existence?”

“Fuck you.”

“Guess not.” Dean slammed the knife home, but didn’t pull the blade from the corpse.

“Should we burn the card?” Sam asked, not looking at the body his brother was carefully lowering to the ground, at the friendly grandmother he had chatted with that afternoon, now with Ruby’s knife hilt-deep in her chest. Dean hadn’t even blinked when they had walked into the room and found her corpse in the chair -- Sam was sure of this because he’d been watching. Some part of him had already known what they would find, so he had watched Dean instead, watched for some sign that the horrible death of a completely innocent woman touched him at all.

“No. She’ll know we know the second the spell breaks and start trying to tag us some other way while she still knows where we are. We can destroy it when we blow town.”

“That isn’t going to be right now?” Sam asked, trying to keep focused on the immediate problems.

“In a few minutes. I have to go get some stuff out of the car. Go through your wallet and take out anything you don’t absolutely need and we’ll burn it all. We’ll go through your duffel bag too, and anything you’ve added to the Impala.”

“What about your stuff?!”

Dean gave him an impatient look. “Anything I carry on me or wear, I would have noticed by now, even as faint as that spell was. It’s only your stuff that’s risky. Back in a sec.”

When Dean came back a few minutes later carrying his shopping bag from earlier, Sam had a neat pile of receipts and business cards on the table.

“Did you touch anything?”

“Only the top of the table, and I wiped that down already.”

“Great; go wait outside.”

“What? What are you doing?” Sam asked sharply.

“What we came here for. She’s already dead, Sam; neither one of you can complain now.”

Sam paled a bit and didn’t look like he was moving anytime soon.

“One of us has to be mission-oriented, Sam. Now go wait outside.”

“That isn’t fair, Dean.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. But we’ve got things we have to do, and we can’t let anything trip us up. We didn’t kill her, but we still need her blood.” Dean pulled a gallon-sized plastic iced tea pitcher with a screw-on lid from the bag. “You don’t need to watch this, so get out.”

Sam nodded and went to sit in the darkness on the back steps.

About fifteen minutes later, Dean joined him, the jug wrapped up in the bag.

“You sure you got enough?” Sam asked dully.

“The human body only has about a gallon and a half of blood normally. She’d already been injured, and a corpse isn’t the best thing to try and bleed.” Dean shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I think a gallon is about the best we can do.”

Sam didn’t say anything, just stood up and started walking back towards the car.

Dean caught up with him, but held his silence until the gallon was stored in the trunk alongside the rope still in its case, and the Impala was back on the Interstate.

“I can’t coddle you, Sam,” he said finally. “I was completely honest with you about what I was after, and what I was willing to do to see it through. You agreed. I’m not going to go out of my way to rub your face in things you would prefer to ignore, but I’m also not going to jeopardize our success because you’re feeling squeamish. You got lucky this time; if next time I have to handcuff you again, stuff you in the trunk, and use the curse to get information out of you because you shut down on me in some moralistic hissy fit -- don’t think that I won’t. This isn’t about just us, or Lilith, or even that woman back there; this is about this entire fucking reality, and if you can’t be trusted to get my back, then I have to take steps to make sure you also can’t stab it.”

Sam nodded without looking at him. The gulf between them seemed greater than it had since they had forged their deal all those months ago.


Chapter Twenty-One:

Well, I’ve been waiting, I was sure
we’d meet between the trains we’re waiting for
I think it’s time to board another
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter
~The Stranger Song, Leonard Cohen

Things were better the next afternoon. Sam had regained some of his perspective while drowsing against the passenger door of the Impala. Dean hadn’t caused any of this, and it was Sam’s vision that had brought them to June Richards’ house. They hadn’t killed her, or had any idea that they were being tailed by the demons that did.

All of their clothes had been sent through the Laundromat, along with some herbs and a few Latin chants, and if their wardrobe now smelled faintly of rosemary and cedar, they were assured that none of it contained any spellwork. Dean had gone through all of Sam’s things --starting with his wallet-- looking for the faint hints of magic that would indicate more of Lilith’s meddling, then had personally run his hands over every single thing contained in the Impala, front seat, back seat and trunk, and had spent almost two hours out in the rain and cold of a diner parking lot while Sam ate and surfed the web, carefully inspecting every inch of her undercarriage and beneath her hood. People kept giving him strange looks while they went about their business, but Sam could hardly explain to them that Dean was a demon possessing his own body, and as such was hardly vulnerable to things like cold or pneumonia. Sam just pretended not to know him instead.

Then they had to look for a suitably abandoned barn or something where they could lay out the working for another spell, this one for preservation. Bobby had been unimpressed with Sam’s reasons for needing such a spell and had asked several pointed questions about exactly where they had obtained all this blood they wanted preserved. Sam had been sketchy about it, but after insisting what felt like dozens of times that neither he nor Dean had killed the woman, or had anything directly to do with her death, he had emailed Sam the ritual he needed within a few hours. It was fairly simple, but it required burning a circle around the object, so not really the sort of thing that could be handled in a motel room.

Sam wiped ash off his hands onto his pants and stood up.

“All done?” Dean asked, from where he was sitting on a hay bale watching the proceedings.

“Yeah. That should do it. I guess we will know if the spell worked or not if it starts to rot.”

“That’s a charming image, Sammy; thanks for sharing. Dump that ice out in the grass, would you?”

“Don’t call me that,” Sam answered reflexively, as he grabbed the cooler they had kept the blood in and carried it out through the barn door to turn it over.

Dean rolled his eyes and went to grab the jug. “Where to now?”

“Lunch. And then… I don’t know.”

“You look at the spell yet?”

Sam grimaced, Dean knew damn well he hadn’t. “No, but… if it’s like the last two items, we aren’t going to know a damn thing until I have a vision anyways, and that could take anywhere from hours to days. Can I wait until tonight?”

“We didn’t kill her, Sam.”

“I know that, Dean! I’m just asking for a few hours.”

“It’s been almost two days.”

“Just a few more hours. Please.”

“All right, Sam. But it has to be tonight.”

“Tonight,” Sam agreed, “just not… now."


Next Section

Masterpost

Comments

[angeblond.livejournal.com]

Dean should try to regain is lost agreement with Sam.

[hellodean.livejournal.com]

Hi, me again! Sorry to bug you but I am just so loving your stories! I found the site where you were recced since you said you wondered where it was. hhtp://community.livejournal.com/spn_favorites/tag/nc-17
Off to read more!

[glasslogic.livejournal.com]

*grins* I'm glad they are still keeping you entertained! Thanks for the link!