All the words that are fit to print

By Minim Calibre

Notes: Spoilers through All Hell Breaks Loose Part II. Novella-length WIP (hiatus fic). Expect some demi-explicit het sex without a single ‘ship as I’d define it, some whumpage, and the occasional graphic description of dead things. Probably 7-9 parts in all when finished. Thanks, as always, to the Squad, who all voted that I might as well post as a WIP, so blame them for that. Special thanks to cupcake_goth for being my demonology consult, and for not rolling her eyes TOO much.

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The adrenaline crash hit soon after they got to Bobby’s, before Dean even made it up the narrow stairs to the room Bobby’d made up in a hurry for him and Sam. It hit like a sucker punch, leaving him feeling like death warmed over, which he guessed he kind of was. The bitch of it was, even though every trace of exhilaration and energy had gone, leaving nothing behind but bone-deep exhaustion, even though he’d had maybe one or two hours’ rest tops since Sam went missing, he couldn’t sleep.

Sam on the other hand, had fallen asleep in no time flat, fully clothed on top of the mattress, which was maybe not the whole problem, but a large enough part. Impossible to see him like that and not see him cold and grey on that other mattress, and it made every pause and hitch in Sammy’s breathing slow torture. A couple of times over the past hour, Dean had come close to drifting off, only to jerk back to alert the second he couldn’t hear Sam.

He gave it fifteen more minutes. Fifteen more, and if he still wasn’t asleep, he was getting up. Five minutes in, and he caught himself holding his breath so he could be sure his little brother was still breathing. To hell with that. He knew where Bobby kept his liquor, and even if it took most of what Bobby kept on hand to knock him out, the hangover couldn’t be any worse than the way he was going to feel if he didn’t get some rest. Dean stood up, only realizing that he was shaking when he had to brace himself to keep from falling on his ass, and made his way down to the kitchen. It was slow going, his bare feet having to feel out each step for stray piles of books on the way down, one hand in a death grip on the railing, the other pressed against the wall for balance.

The dim illumination of the range light wasn’t a surprise: Bobby left it on more often than he remembered to turn it off. What was a surprise was that someone else had had the same idea as him. Maybe it shouldn’t have been, considering, but he hadn’t expected to find Ellen sitting there on the kitchen floor, both hands clasped knuckle-white around a tumbler of whiskey, thousand yard stare blanking out her face. It vanished as soon as she saw him, turned into something assessing and professional he’d seen on any number of bartenders through the years.

Without a word, she got up and came back with a second tumbler. She looked up at him again, then back at the tumbler. “Better make it a double,” she said, as much to herself as anything, and poured.

He took the whiskey and sat down across the floor from her, reasonably comfortable despite the assortment of prehistoric crumbs that poked into his ass through his boxer shorts. Bobby was a lot of things, but Martha Stewart sure as hell wasn’t one of them. The kitchen floor, like every other surface in the damn house, was dusty with tracked-in dirt and general neglect, no telling the last time it saw a mop or what color it would be if it did. The glass felt reassuringly cool and solid beneath his still-shaking hand; he wondered if the whiskey would even put a dent in the chill he was feeling.

“You call Jo? Let her know you’re all right?” His voice sounded hoarse, strained even, even to his own ears.

Ellen nodded, and when she spoke, she sounded just as bad as he did, maybe worse. “I called her before I even got back to the Roadhouse. Told her to be careful and to stay away from wherever you boys were, no offense.”

“Can’t argue with good advice.” The contents of the tumbler vanished in two swallows, only to be refilled about two seconds after he set it down.

“Dean, honey, can I ask you a question?” Ellen’s tone was light, all things considered, and her face wasn’t giving away a damn thing, which didn’t stop Dean from knowing what it was she was going to ask about. She was going to ask the same damn things as Bobby, and as Sam, and like the both of them, wasn’t going to like the answers she got

As sick as he was of answering questions no one really wanted to hear an honest answer to, he didn’t say no. Just shrugged and took another slug of whiskey.

“What’d he mean when he talked about Sam being dead?”

She didn’t say which he. Didn’t have to. Jake. Sam said his name was Jake. “What’d Bobby say?”

“He said to ask you.”

No sense bothering with a lie, not now that the cat was out of the bag with Sam. He emptied the tumbler again, letting the liquid slide down his throat and hit the knot in his gut before answering.

“Sam was dead. I made a deal. Gets him a life, gives me a year.” A fair deal, more than fair, even if nobody else saw it that way.

To her credit, she didn’t blow up at him like Bobby had. Just said his name like she was disappointed in him, which was bad enough.

“Damn it, Ellen. Don’t you do this, not you, too. What would you have done? If it had been Jo and you were in my shoes?” He was hitting below the belt, knew it even before Ellen looked at him with her dark eyes full of reproach.

“Dean…”

“You look me in the eye, tell me you wouldn’t do whatever it took to get her back.”

“You don’t go messing with things like that, Dean. You just don’t.” But her gaze slid away from his when she said it, which said enough.

“Yeah, well.” He rubbed his hand absently across the back of his neck, wondering if he should refill his glass or just grab the bottle and start swigging. “I did.”

Ellen grabbed the bottle for herself before he could make up his mind, throat moving in greedy swallows.

“Hell of a couple of days,” she said after a bit, passing the bottle his way. “Hell of a couple of days.”

“Ellen, I’m sorry. About everyone. Didn’t know any of ’em but Ash, but I’m sorry.”

The thousand yard stare was back. “Smell’s the worst part. Wasn’t in there more than the time it took me to get to the basement and get that map, but a smell like that, it sticks to you.”

He passed the bottle back. “Bobby got anything you can wear?” The charred wood smell wouldn’t come out of what she was wearing now, no matter how many times she washed it. Might not come out of her nostrils, either; it never had his.

“I’ve got a couple of ratty shirts and an old pair of sweats of his waiting for when I get a chance to shower. They’ll do until I can hit Wal-Mart.”

Probably the same ones he had borrowed after Dad, grease stained and held together by a thread. Without thinking, he pulled off the fairly clean shirt he’d put on earlier, back when he still thought sleep was in the cards, and offered it to her.

Ellen took it, setting it in her lap before shrugging out of her jacket. She hesitated for a moment, then her fingers scrambled at the buttons of her blue denim shirt like she couldn’t get it off fast enough. She balled it up and threw it, the movement revealing an angry-looking scratch on her right side, going from the bottom of her ribs to the bottom of her plain black cotton bra.

“That’s a nasty scratch. You have Bobby take a look at it?”

Ellen looked down, surprised. “I’d forgotten all about that. Got caught on some debris trying to get the storm cellar door open.”

“Bobby’s got some disinfectant under the sink. Just a sec.” His arm brushed across her shoulder as he reached out and opened the cabinet next to her so he could dig out the Bactine and cotton balls Bobby kept tucked in there next to the Electrosol and the holy water.

There was a sharp intake of breath as he irrigated the cut, then the sound of her shallow breathing as he scrubbed at the wound the best he could, though the damage had gone untended for a bit too long for his efforts to do much good.

“If you haven’t, you should get a tetanus booster. And even if you have, get Bobby to patch you up in the morning.”

He tossed the used cotton balls in the trash and put the rest of the supplies back where they belonged, then leaned back again. The cabinet doors were as old as the house, and stuck nine times out of ten when you tried to open them, but the solid wood felt good against a back he knew he’d notice was aching as soon as the whiskey wore off. Across from him, Ellen shifted, slouching down further against the battered avocado green dishwasher, his shirt still in her lap.

He was half dressed, half drunk, with a half naked woman in front of him, which was normal enough for him. Only on a normal night, the next move would be getting the rest of the way naked and the rest of the way drunk, and somehow, he didn’t think Ellen would appreciate that. He could picture it, though, which surprised a small laugh out of him.

She sat up a little straighter, and raised her brows. “Mind telling me what’s so hilarious all of a sudden?”

Yeah, and there was no way to explain that one without sounding like a total ass.

“Nothin’,” he said. “Just feeling a few rounds past punchy.”

“Not so sure I see the humor in that.” The brows stayed up, and she looked almost worried, like she thought he might have cracked.

And she was probably right to think it, considering the next thing he did was lean across the narrow hallway of a kitchen and kiss her.

Or maybe not, because Ellen sure as hell didn’t seem to be objecting and that was enough to send the situation well on its way to normal. Maybe a week or two ago this would’ve ranked up there with the stupidest things he’d ever done, because it was Ellen and no matter what he said to Sam, he still wasn’t sure about her history with Dad, but it wasn’t a week or two ago and she smelled like smoke, but her mouth tasted like whiskey not sulfur, and it wasn’t even close to making the list. Not even when he found himself fumbling around at the front of her jeans, or when her hands shoved down his boxers to touch skin, or even a few minutes later, when they were tangled up bare-assed on Bobby’s grimy kitchen floor.

There wasn’t anywhere near enough room for what they were trying to do, and after the second collision between elbow and cabinet, he groaned and sat up. “Maybe we should find somewhere a little more comfortable before the kitchen kicks my ass.”

He half expected her to come to her senses, but instead, she gave him a small, slightly dazed smile. “Okay.”

Ellen was staying on the pull-out couch in Bobby’s office. Dean’d slept on it a time or two before, remembered it as being rock-hard and probably less comfortable even than the kitchen floor, but it was cleaner and a little wider, and even with the creaking springs and the faint musty smell, a hell of a lot more suited for sex. He was even able to grab a couple hours of sleep before Ellen prodded him in the ribs, telling him to get back to his room before Sam woke up and noticed Dean was gone.

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?” he asked, smothering a yawn.

Gently, Ellen pushed him until he was upright. “Something like that, hon.”

Getting upstairs was a little bit easier than getting downstairs had been, the pre-dawn glow coming through the window at the landing meant he could see the books to avoid them. He could hear movement in Bobby’s room, and hurried on quietly to his and Sam’s borrowed one.

Sam was still flat on his back, snoring softly. When the snores subsided, Dean knelt down next to him, just intending to reassure himself that Sam was still breathing. He fell asleep with his left side pressed against the bed, arm up on the mattress, fingers resting against Sam’s chest and woke up some time later, head and mouth both feeling like someone stuffed him with cotton, to Sam’s voice saying, “God, Dean, you look like hell.”

“You should see the other guy,” he muttered, untwisting himself from the floor. He hadn’t even felt Sam get up, though his brother was already dressed and his hair was damp at the ends like he’d showered. The clock on the far wall said 9:04, ticking over to 9:05 as he watched. “What the hell, Sammy?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Breakfast, Dean.”

The smell of cooking sausage filtered up from the kitchen and assaulted him at the top of the stairs. His stomach twisted and growled at the aroma, letting him know in no uncertain terms that he was hungry enough to eat the whole pig raw. Bobby knew him well, had at least half a hog’s worth of links piled up on the table, next to a plate full of greasy scrambled eggs and stack of pancakes. He glanced into the kitchen before sitting down and saw Ellen manning the stove. She was in his shirt and Bobby’s sweats, with her hair pulled tightly back and dark circles under eyes that wouldn’t meet his.

Bobby gave him a sharp look, but didn’t say anything beyond, “Hope you slept well, Dean.”

“Like a baby,” he lied, and loaded up his plate.

Across the table, Sam did that thing where he raised his brows and pulled his lips into Marcel Marceau for Bitch, please, but, like Bobby, didn’t call him on it outright. Dean ignored him and started eating, though not before covering everything on his plate with a thick layer of Log Cabin.

“Dude, that’s disgusting.” Dean didn’t look up, but thought he could hear Sammy shudder while he said it.

“One man’s disgusting is another’s delicious.”

“I swear, you were either born without taste buds, or a life spent eating at truck stops killed them off. Even your eggs are half-syrup.”

“When you boys are through with the morning comedy hour,” Bobby interrupted, “we need to talk about the game plan.”

Dean put a forkful of egg on one of the pancakes, popped a sausage on top of that, rolled the whole thing up, and took a bite. “What is there to talk about? Sam and I get back on the road, start hunting down each and every one of those sons of bitches.”

There was no immediate answer, so he looked over at Bobby, who looked over at Sam.

“Actually, Bobby and I talked about this before you got up. We need to do our homework, Dean, and Bobby’s library’s as good a place as any to start. I’m going to start going through his books this morning, make sure we’re not going in blind.”

“Yeah? Well, how long you think that’s going to take?”

“A week, maybe two. I have to make sure I’m not overlooking anything.” And suddenly, Dean was pretty certain that most of the research Sam was planning on doing had nothing to do with Wyoming and a sudden rise in the demon population, and everything to do with Dean, a crossroads, and a ticking clock.

Great.

“You sure about that, Sam? You said it looked like what? A hundred, maybe two hundred? You have any idea what kind of damage they can do left unchecked for a week, maybe two?”

Steady eyes and a stubborn set to Sam’s jaw met him head on. “Yeah, I do. But we’re not the only hunters out there, and I need to do this, Dean.” He pushed away from the table. “You know I do.”

Dean watched Sam’s retreating back as he left the table and headed out to the living room and the bulk of the books. He was moving easily, no sign of injury or pain. “Bobby, can I talk to you a sec?” he said quietly, and got up and walked outside, not bothering to wait and see if Bobby would follow.

Bobby did, as Dean had figured he would, and stood on the front step watching Dean pace with a placid inscrutable expression. “When you’re done wearing a groove in my front yard, you let me know.”

Dean stopped, stood with his hands flat on the hood of the Impala and breathed in. “Damn it, Bobby, you know damn well he’s not going to find anything, so why the hell are you encouraging him?”

“I’m not encouraging him, Dean, just not discouraging him.” Sympathy, sorrow, maybe even a bit of regret–all the things you hated to see on Bobby Singer’s face, because any one of them meant you were screwed. “You and I know Sam’s not going to find anything, but Sam doesn’t, and he wouldn’t believe it even if the voice of God came down and told him so flat-out.”

“So, what? This is for his own good?”

“The sooner Sam figures it out on his own, the less time he’s going to waste on false hope.”

“Time he could be spending wasting demon ass.”

And this time, when Bobby looked at him, he looked old, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Dean’s and his mouth tight and small with distress. When he finally spoke, it was quiet and slow, like he was talking to an idiot, and maybe he was. “Time he could be spending with you.” He paused, then changed the subject. “You look like crap, Dean. You sleep at all last night? And for God’s sake, tell me the damn truth.”

“Some.”

“Not nearly enough, by the looks of you.”

“Could have used a little more, I guess. I’ll be fine. Not like we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”

Another assessing stare, and Bobby gave a small nod. “I promised Sam I’d help him out. You be careful, Dean.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Who said that’s who I’m worried about?” With that, he went back into the house, leaving Dean standing there.

Lunch was a repeat of breakfast, with Ellen still not quite looking at him and Bobby looking and seeing a bit too much for Dean’s comfort. Dean polished off two sandwiches, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now. He tapped his fingers against the table, looked around for an idea, and offered to fix the cracked ceiling in Bobby’s living room, which was kind of his fault in the first place. If he hadn’t sent Sam off alone, if he’d just been paying attention…

Bobby gave him a steady glance. “Working plaster’s a damn sight different than working Bondo, but you’re welcome to go clean the weapons if it’ll make you feel useful.”

How that wound up turning into him and Ellen, pressed up against the inside of the office door, clothes still mostly on and her hand clamped over his mouth to keep him quiet, he wasn’t not sure. But Bobby’d gone off to talk to Sam, if the weapons got any cleaner, they’d disappear, and Ellen was there, and it just kind of happened.

He turned in before Sam, only to find the room too quiet for sleep. Tossed and turned for as long as he could stand it, then gave up and turned the light back on and grabbed one of Bobby’s guest room stack of true crime paperbacks for distraction. For some reason, the things almost always had pictures, snapshots of the victims, usually smiling in their Sunday best, pre-crime pictures of the human monsters, grainy black and whites of the crime scenes, and the inevitable mug shots and courtroom illustrations. He wondered how many of those victims had come back, angry and irrational, or how many of the killers really had been possessed by something else, wondered if Bobby wondered the same thing, if that’s why he kept buying the books.

Sam came to bed when Dean was midway through reading about yet another guy who slit his family’s throats and blamed it on intruders, at least till the weapon turned up with dried blood and the guy’s prints all over it.

“Read any good books lately, Sammy?” Dean set the one he was reading aside without marking the page where he had stopped. Stories like that all ended the same way, more or less.

His brother yawned, stepping out of his jeans and hanging them up over the back of a chair. “So far? Just a lot of nothing useful. There was one that promised a mystical cure for ingrown toenails, but no, nothing yet that would help.”

Dean grunted in response and rolled over onto his stomach to go to sleep. Getting there wasn’t a problem, but staying asleep turned out to be one. Just like the night before, his body seemed to be on some kind of high Sam alert, where every hitch or pause in his breathing woke Dean up.

A few more days and a few more nights like that, and Dean was feeling restless, and worse than that, useless, and there was no way in hell he was going to last through Sam’s week or two estimate. Sneaking around with Ellen took a bit of the edge off, but couldn’t be trusted to fill up all the hours. So he tuned up the Impala, then detailed her for good measure, which killed most of an afternoon. Read another couple of true crime books, which killed the rest of it.

Sam was as stubborn as Dad, and Dean was starting to suspect that, no matter how much the evidence told him otherwise, Sam wasn’t going to admit that nothing could be done until five minutes after Dean was dead and gone, and maybe not even then. When the first week was up, from the way Bobby was looking at Sam on the few occasions where Sam could be pried away from the books long enough to eat, Dean got the feeling that Bobby suspected it, too.

***

“Sam, I hate to tell you this, but you’re not going to find what you’re looking for in any of the stuff I’ve got here.”

Sam looked up from a page of Latin he’d been struggling with for half an hour to find Bobby standing in the doorway. “I’ve learned more about demon lore in the last week than in I have in the last twenty years. Whatever got out, we’ll have it covered.”

“It’s not what got out that has you poring over everything I’ve got on summoning and making deals with demons.”

“There has to be something. Some kind of escape clause.”

“In all your years and all your reading, you ever hear about someone getting out of a crossroads deal without someone else making one?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean it’s never happened.”

“And if it hasn’t, what are you going to do then? Summon her yourself and make another deal?”

“If it comes to that.”

Bobby’s lips thinned to a tight line, and he ran a hand over his head, getting motor oil and god knew what else on his baseball cap before saying with barely-contained frustration, “Isn’t two of you lost to this enough? I expected stupid, bullheaded self-sacrifice from John, hell, I expect it from Dean, but Jesus, Sam, you’re supposed to be the smart one. There’s always a price, and you go trying to change that, you’ll just make it a higher one.”

“Dean’s not lost. Not yet.”

Bobby didn’t even try to hide the look of pity that crossed his face. “Lunch is ready, if you’re ready to come down.”

Sam looked down at the book in front of him, staring at the faded lettering, so close to understanding the nuances. “I’ll grab something later.”

Bobby thought he understood, but he didn’t. Neither, for that matter, did Dean, not really, because he was never the one who turned his back, never the one who walked away from it all. Dad would have understood. He wouldn’t have been happy about it, no sir, but he would have understood.

Bobby was right: there was always a price. But Bobby was a hunter and a conman, not someone who’d spent his college years focused on interpretations of the law. There was always a price, but there was usually a way out of having to pay it.

Unfortunately, Bobby was also right that about the books not having what Sam needed. Whatever escape clauses people had found through the years, if they’d found any, they sure as hell didn’t seem to have bothered them writing down. The more he read, the more it seemed like there weren’t any options but the one he shouldn’t be thinking about: making a crossroads deal of his very own.

Of course, even that option wasn’t really an option, not unless he was willing to break pretty much every animal cruelty law ever, or could through some miracle find a hoodoo supplier who sold something other than mislabeled chicken bones for the key item. The third day here, when his certainty that he could get Dean out of the deal had been chipped away, book by book, he’d gone over every square inch that made up Impala’s trunk, just in case and to no avail. The rusty metal box with its black cat bone and bottle of graveyard dirt that had been rattling around in there for months was gone, left buried at a crossroads Sam hadn’t been around to see.

Instead of lunch, he took a walk to clear his head. Half a mile up the road from Singer Salvage, a too-familiar carrion smell hit him unexpectedly, bringing with it sudden nausea and a score of unpleasant memories, and bringing him up short in front of the carcass. Bloat and rot had left it an almost unidentifiable mass of meat, black fur, and bone. Careful to breathe through his mouth, he knelt down for a closer look. It was, or at least had been, feline, with a heart-shaped brass tag nestled in the mess that read Shadow, and gave a number to call if found.

It was no worse than some of the things he’d seen, and a damn sight better than a lot of others, but he still found himself shuddering and turning around to go back, fully intending to call that number or call Animal Control back at the house, so Shadow’s owner or owners could find some peace. A half mile was an easy distance to walk. It was also just long enough for his brain to connect the dots.

When he got back to Bobby’s, he didn’t reach for the phone. Instead, Sam headed straight for the books and his notes.

It took him a full day to gather everything he needed, and another to set things up. When he was done, he had a neat fire pit with a small iron grill and a large pot of water boiling over it, with a few gallons of water and a kettle outside the pit, kept in reserve. It looked kind of like he’d always thought a Boy Scout campsite would, except there probably wasn’t a merit badge given out for what he was attempting to do.

Sam wasn’t sure it would work: all the hoodoo tradition he’d read up on said to boil the cat alive, stewing it until the flesh came off the bone. The week Sam learned about that was the week he stopped being able to eat brisket and pulled pork without gagging. But the grimoire magic it was said to be rooted in just called for a black cat’s body. The translations he’d read didn’t say how old, or in what condition.

So Shadow, or what was left of him at least, was worth a shot. Repurposed roadkill was probably even more ghetto than a SpongeBob altar cloth, a new Winchester low, but nowhere near as low as boiling a living cat would have been.

Boiling didn’t improve the smell of week-old dead cat any. In fact, he was pretty sure it made it worse. The steam from the pot hung around in a rank fog, permeating his hair and clothes, even though he was trying to stay as far away as he could while still staying close enough to keep an eye on the water level. When what was in the pot finally looked like something Dean would eat without a second thought, he picked the bones out with tongs and set them on a Salvation Army linen tablecloth to strain. Everything else got dumped and the pot got refilled with water, willow twigs, white beans, and bones, and left to boil dry while Sam sat a few feet away in a folding chair, close enough to tend the fire, far enough to safely doze.

When he was sure the pot was dry, Sam tugged on a pair of suede work gloves, Bobby’s size and still too small, the fingers only coming three-quarters of the way down his own. He lifted the pot slowly, careful not to jar the bones, taking out the topmost bone and wrapping it in the shirt he was wearing when he was killed. Then he scattered the rest at random before extinguishing the fire, dousing the remaining coals with the last of the water and shoveling dirt on top of the steaming ash.

Dean wasn’t in their room when Sam got back, even though it was too late for him to still be awake, and still too early for him to have gotten up. This wasn’t anything new: twice already since Wyoming, Sam’d woken up to an empty room and gone out to find Dean asleep on the back seat of the Impala. Sam realized with a guilty start that he wasn’t sure what Dean was doing with his time, other than sharpening knives and cleaning guns and staying out of Sam’s way.

He tucked the bundle of shirt and bone into his bag, reminding himself that it was for just in case; just in case he couldn’t find anything else, just in case time started to run out.

***

The back corner of the salvage yard was pretty much a no man’s land, just a bunch of stripped autos, none of them more than one or two good parts away from selling the metal for scrap. Bobby’d let the trees grow up around it, a natural cemetery fence of sorts for old Fords and Chevys. It was quiet, far enough from the house and the main part of the yard that someone could go there and be fairly certain of his privacy. Dean had spent a lot of time out here, after Sam left and again after Dad died. With the latter, he probably spent more nights out in the yard than he did in the house. Sam’s earnest grief and equally earnest desire to get Dean to share his made a threadbare blanket and the worn yellow pine bed of a rusted out truck a more comfortable place to be than cooped up in a room with Sam, breathing the same air.

He was spending a lot of time out here, now; only this time, he wasn’t spending it alone. The hot blue sky was without a single wisp of white, and the air was still enough that all he heard was Ellen breathing next to him and the occasional distant cry of a hawk or rumble of a truck from out on the highway. The blanket was different, but the truck still the same, a three-quarter ton 1963 Fleetside Chevy that started out life nearly the same blue as the sky before age and neglect turned most of the painted steel into raised, blistered flakes of muddy red.

From the length of the shadows, he guessed it was coming up on three o’clock. Their clothes were long since gone, taken off and stacked in a haphazard pile on the tailgate at least an hour before, after lunch. She’d be wanting to get back soon, would make some excuse like how she had to get dinner started or something. Dean squinted against the light, shifted closer to Ellen and traced one of the thin silvery marks that radiated out over her lower belly and across her hips. The hair between her legs was thick and curly, a shade darker than what was on her head. She looked smaller when she was naked, younger, maybe. And she’d probably rip him a new one if he said that out loud. In no particular hurry, his fingers drifted down her hip and over her thigh, while he listened for the changes in her breathing that would tell him what to do next.

A half-dozen or so of these kind of encounters over the course of a week, and he’d figured a few things out. Like she was probably a screamer when she wasn’t trying to sneak around, and he could always tell when she was about to come, because she’d kiss him, hard, so she didn’t make a sound. She liked to be on top, didn’t really like a lot of tongue, and if you touched her just right, she had a damn filthy mouth, and he really, really liked the way she said fuck.

Dean pretty much had a similar list for every woman he’d been with for longer than just a night, and for some of the latter, too, depending on how long a night it was. Sam could tell you anything you wanted to know about this ritual or that, or all the ways people used to mark graves; Dean could tell you that a waitress named Leigh down in Tampa was ticklish under her left breast, but not her right, or that Cassie’d go wild if you rubbed an ice cube down the small of her back, just keep it the hell away from her neck. It was one of those things he had a knack for, like poker and fighting. Not the most practical skill in the world, but he put it to good use.

Her breath hitched when she exhaled, somewhere between a groan and whimper, so he slid his hand up her thigh again until he hit where she was still wet from the quick fuck that’d followed right on the heels of taking off their clothes. They’d fallen into a haphazard pattern: rough and quick at first, then a more leisurely repeat, if they had time. He ran his thumb over a knotted pucker in her flesh that he’d noticed before, but not commented on, and raised his brow this time.

“Episiotomy scar,” she explained. “Jo’s been hard-headed since the day she was born, and I tore all to hell.”

“Huh,” he said, because ‘ouch’ didn’t quite seem right. He considered going down on her, eating her out until she came, but they were out somewhere bright and open for once, and he didn’t want to lose the chance to watch her face. Best to tease, then. Slide the pad of his thumb across her clit while he worked a finger or two inside.

He liked the way she said fuck, and he liked it when her eyes would go wide. He curled his fingers slightly, pressed down just so, and hit jackpot. Ellen’s eyes flashed white all the way around as she said it, a shotgun blast from the back of her throat that hit him right in the groin.

Then it was the easiest thing to just roll her on top of him, slide his fingers out and his dick inside. Soon enough, she had her thighs gripped tight around his, with her setting the rhythm and him just along for the ride. She could be as loud as she liked out here. The sound wouldn’t carry back to the house. He figured she wouldn’t, though. And he was right, she didn’t. Pulled him up till he was nearly sitting instead, her mouth clamped over his as her whole body went tense. He came a few thrusts later to the feel of her nails digging quarter moons in his shoulders, forgetting for a minute everything that wasn’t hot and wet and right there. Came back to himself with her blanketed over him, and him not sure how their hands wound up entwined.

“I should get back,” she lifted her head and said, matter of fact. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair sticking damp to her neck and forehead.

Out in the stand of trees, he could hear a couple of crows screeching at each other, whatever tussle they were getting into disturbing branches and knocking twigs to the ground. The air around them was heavy with the smell of sweat and dirt and rust, and her weight was comfortable against his chest. “Bobby’s not back till 6:00.” The shadows might have been a little longer, but not by enough for him to bother reaching for his watch. “It’s not even 4:00.”

The smile she gave him was kind of crooked, and she settled her head back on his chest. “Okay, sweetie. Guess I’ve got time for one more.”

Ellen didn’t leave for the house until nearly 6:30. Dean didn’t leave at all, just stayed there in the truck bed, thinking, listening to the voice in the back of his head telling him he couldn’t go on like this, that there was work that needed to be done. Bobby’d cautioned them that what was out there now was worse than most of what they’d faced in the past. Bigger, badder-ass demons, and more of them, like evil got a fucking upgrade. There was that other voice warring with it, the one that kept asking him, hadn’t they earned just a little comfort and a chance to rest by now? Bigger and badder-ass meant more chance of dying in the line of duty. Meant more chance of Sam getting hurt or dying in the line of duty, and he’d lived through that once. He couldn’t–wouldn’t–live with it again.

But then, he couldn’t live with himself if he just stopped hunting now, either, not even for the three hundred and fifty plus days he had left. Dad had made sure of that, and Dean was damned any way he looked at it. Too much down time, too much time to think, not enough time left.

Hell, maybe all he needed was something to do other than fuss over the car or fool around with Ellen. Maybe find a hunt, something simple to remind himself how much he liked what he did, get his nerve back. The next morning, he drove to the library and started looking through newspapers online and off, seeking patterns in crime reports and funeral notices like they were crosswords.

He found a few possibles, and not long after that, everything kind of snowballed.

The thing with Ellen ended as suddenly it started up. They were in the far tool shed this time, warm afternoon sun filtering through the dirty window. Both of them were fresh out of breath and still a little shaky. Dean had his head buried in the crook of her neck, breathing in the warm-sweat scent of it when Ellen pulled her head back slightly and said, “Dean, honey, this has got to stop, before it turns into something it’s not.”

“Okay,” he agreed, though he waited until their sweat at least cooled before stepping back and letting go.

Sam finished with the books two days later, his face tight with frustration when he got through the last one with nothing to show for it but a bunch of notes on what he thought might have escaped that night. Dean took the notes and the wheel, mentioned rumors of a haunting out in Ohio, and cranked the music as loud as it would go to drown out the noise inside his own head.

***

The country was lousy with demons, but the first thing they did after leaving Bobby’s was go and investigate reports of a haunting in Cleveland, Ohio. Because that made so much sense.

“Seriously, Dean? A few hundred demons on the loose, and the best you can come up with is that we look into a haunted house?”

A long beat where the only sound was AC/DC and the rattle of the road, then, “Yep.”

“You sure you wouldn’t rather just go to Disneyland and see the Haunted Mansion, Dean? Aren’t you the one who was just saying we couldn’t even take two weeks off to research things?”

Dean glanced over at Sam. “Yeah, well, that was then, this is now.” He turned his gaze back to the road, left hand steady on the wheel as he accelerated, right hand reaching out and cranking the volume to signal that the conversation was over as far as he was concerned.

Sam didn’t get it: on the way back from Wyoming, Dean had acted like a kid on Christmas morning, practically bouncing out of his seat at the thought of hunting down a few hundred demons. Something had changed while they were at Bobby’s, it was just that Sam had no idea what. And Dean, being Dean, wouldn’t tell him. He’d just retreat into silence and cheap jokes, walling himself in and Sam out.

Not exactly the recipe for a great drive. There was only so much staring out the window or solitaire license plate bingo you could do before you started to lose it, and once the sun went down, you didn’t even have that. It was a relief when they hit Aurora, Illinois, and Dean finally pulled into a motel parking lot, at least an hour after he should have called it a night.

Sam got out and stretched while Dean got the room. His muscles were cramping up, and his bladder had been making its demands known for about a hundred miles. He should have just ignored the out of order sign on the bathroom that last time they’d gassed up, and he definitely shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee when they’d stopped for dinner.

At least they were somewhere with a working bathroom now, and a bed. A bright pink working bathroom, as it turned out. Pink sink, pink tub, pink toilet, pink walls. Even the floor. It felt like he was pissing into a Pepto Bismol bottle.

When he came out, Dean was sitting by the window, aimlessly twisting the tilt wand on the blinds with one hand while holding a beer he’d pulled out from god knows where with the other. Sam waited for him to say something. He didn’t, so Sam sat down on his bed, figuring this was as good a time as any to organize the last few weeks’ worth of research.

Sam looked through the stack of notes, almost thick enough to count as a book. His research hadn’t helped him at all with helping Dean get out of the deal, but the stay at Bobby’s hadn’t been a total wash. Names, likes, dislikes: he had nearly enough information to start up a demonic Match.com. “I think Amduscias got out and is living in your car, Dean.”

Dean stopped fiddling with the blinds long enough to throw a blank look that bordered on irritated territory in Sam’s direction.

“He’s a Grand Duke of Hell,” Sam explained. “He’s also some kind of patron demon of disturbing music.”

“Real funny, Sam.”

“Dude, you won’t even let me pick the music when I’m the one driving, so I figure there has to be something wrong.”

“Yeah there is. Your music sucks.”

Sam yawned. Maybe it was time to give up on the sorting in favor of getting some sleep. “Whatever, man. I think the Amduscias theory’s more plausible.”

He shucked off his pants and crawled beneath the covers, snapping the light on his side off, and was out pretty much as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Sound, either the lack of it or the wrong kind, pulled him out of a dream about football of all things, and woke him. He glanced over at the other bed, just checking to see if whatever it was had woken Dean up, and saw him sitting on the edge of it, face turned towards him. Watching him.

Sam looked from Dean to the sickly green glow of the clock. 3:57. They hadn’t even checked in until close to midnight. “Dude, go back to bed.” No answer, not even a grunt of acknowledgement. He fumbled for the lamp switch, and pushed himself up to a sit, his body protesting the interruption to a much-needed night’s rest.

Startled by the sudden illumination, Dean blinked. Scratch the part about back to bed, because his brother was still wearing last night’s clothes, and the industrial folds of the bedding hadn’t even been cracked. “Sorry,” he muttered.

“Dean, what the hell are you doing up?”

Dean blinked again, looking like he was slowly surfacing from underwater. “Just thinking. Guess I lost track of time.” He smiled, but it seemed forced, half a beat off. “I ruin your beauty sleep, princess?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just go to bed, okay?”

And Dean shrugged by way of answer, doing what he was told.

Something clicked into place during the long minute before Dean kicked off his boots and crawled under the sheets. Sam couldn’t say how he knew; he just did. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this was the third time since Wyoming that he’d woken up in the middle of the night to find Dean sitting in a chair or on the edge of a mattress, wide awake in the near-dark and watching him, or maybe it some lingering psychic hangover, but he knew with absolute certainty that what Dean wasn’t saying was that he was scared shitless. Not for himself, god forbid, but for Sam.

Sam waited until two days later to bring it up. They were sitting in a diner, eating and going over everything they’d found out about the job. Sam set down his burger and regarded Dean with a fixed stare. “Dean, I can take on more than your run-of-the-mill haunting. You don’t need to protect me from my job.”

Dean looked down and concentrated on dumping half a bottle of Heinz 57 on his fries. “Who said anything about protecting you? People still get hurt by hauntings, Sam. You saw the reports.”

And that was another thing, one that had been bugging him since about half an hour into the research part of the hunt. “Dean, I’m not even sure what we’re dealing with here is a haunting. The evidence is sketchy, the reports contradict themselves, and I haven’t been able to find a single record of a violent death anywhere near the place.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not a hunt. Maybe some miserable bastard was just that pissed off about dying in his sleep. I say we talk to the girl, what’s her name?”

“Julia Cowen, age 24, ran into the emergency room three weeks ago, claiming some unseen force had pushed her down the stairs at her boyfriend’s rental during a party. Works at a record store on Coventry. Her shift ends in an hour.”

Dean grinned, broad and open, almost normal except for the slight strain around the eyes. “That’s my boy.”

Julia Cowen was thin and sharp, with a ski-jump nose, a few too many piercings, and a lurid tattoo on her right arm that proclaimed her status as Daddy’s Girl. She was also way too eager to talk to anyone and everyone about her experience, even if (or maybe especially if), they were claiming affiliation with the Weekly World News.

“So, you notice anything weird before the stairwell? You know, any hot or cold spots, flickering lights, that sort of thing?” Dean asked, a ballpoint pen poised over his notepad, the expression on his face the one he got when he was trying to look like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.

Raccoon-ringed eyes widened, and she nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Totally. It was like, this miasma of evil or something.” The word miasma was drawn out and enunciated with care. Dean clearly noticed, making a show of writing it down and concealing his grimace with a smile.

“This miasma, it have any physical sensation to it?”

A headshake this time instead of a nod. “No, not really. It was just, you know. Creepy.”

“Yeah. We know. Creepy. Thanks that was real…” He cleared his throat, and Sam had to stifle a laugh. “Real informative. Your boyfriend, he notice anything weird that night?”

Another headshake. “No, he was pretty blitzed. But he said last night that the place was starting to creep him out, like–get this–he felt someone was watching him. Like, all the time.”

“You think he’d be willing to talk to us, maybe tell us in his own words? Give us the inside scoop, so to speak?”

“Oh, yeah! Totally! Here,” she grabbed Dean’s notepad and pen without asking. “Let me give you his number.”

“Thanks.” Dean gave a salesman smile and took back the pad. “You’ve been a great help.”

“No problem. I’m totally psyched about the article. When’s it coming out?”

“We’ll call,” Sam said, hurrying them out the door before Dean could make something up, “just as soon as we know the date. Thank you for your time.”

“Miasma of evil,” Dean muttered when they were back in the car. “Who the hell talks like that?”

“Julia Cowen, apparently. You still think this is a hunt?”

“You dig up anything on the other victims yet?”

“Carla Fisher. Works part-time in the library, took the landlord to court two years ago over slipshod maintenance after she fell through the porch railing. The landlord had receipts proving he’d had the entire porch overhauled the year before. After Carla, we have Nadia Porter, who reported at least two break-ins. Nothing was stolen, no suspects were ever named, and the worst that seems to have happened was that someone reshelved her books and left her sink running.”

“You go talk to Carla and Nadia; I’m going to pay Julia’s boyfriend a call.”

Sam, in the guise of a tenant’s rights activist, had been listening to Carla’s increasingly strident litany of complaints for a good half-hour when Dean called. “Ms. Fisher? I have to take this. I’ll be right back.”

He stepped out into the hall, looking around to make sure he was alone before answering. “Dude, you’d better have something, or be calling to tell me that this is a wash and we can leave town.”

“Carla Fisher that bad?”

“Worse. What did you find?”

“EMF, cold spots: the works. We have got ourselves a haunting.” On the other side of the phone, Dean sounded pleased and more than a little smug.

Sam, on the other hand, was more cranky than he probably should have been about the hunt panning out. All told, he’d been kind of hoping for a wash, on the theory that being wrong for once might kick start some sense into Dean. “That’s great. Now we just have to figure out who it is.”

“Well, that’s what you’re here for, research boy. Anyhow, I’m on my way over. You ready?”

Sam looked back toward Carla Fisher’s door. “You have no idea.”

He started by looking through all the information they’d already gathered on the house. Built in 1893, it stayed in the Smith family until 1929, then changed owners an average of once every three years until 1997, when the current owner purchased it for use as a rental. No murders, no suicides, no horrific accidents, none of the various owners or owners’ family members died in anything more violent than a car crash, and even that happened a good dozen years after the deceased in question sold the house to his brother-in-law.

Which meant back to the obituaries, searching for something he’d missed the first time through. While Dean settled in cross-legged on the bed to clean and polish a gun that didn’t really need cleaning or polishing, Sam popped open the laptop and loaded up the Cleveland library system’s online necrology site, so he could get a head start on searching for needles in haystacks.

“Anything yet?” Dean asked when he was done with the gun and had moved on to sharpening knives.

“Some of the Smiths were prolific. The first one had nine kids, and the last one who died still owning the place had six sons–hang on.” There it was, his needle. Harold Smith II inherited the house in 1923, and died two years later in 1925. He looked up the obituary of Harold Smith the first again: survived by his only child, Harold II, and seven grandsons. He scanned the names, and hopped back to Harold Smith II. James Smith was missing. There were no death records or obituaries for anyone by that name between 1923 and 1925. There was one, however, for 1927. “I think I have an idea. It’s kind of a hunch. We’re going to need to check the county probate records in the morning.”

The hunch paid off. Harold Smith II changed his will three months before he died, cutting off his eldest son James completely. Dean’s crack about their ghost being someone pissed about dying peacefully in his sleep turned out to be close to the truth: James, still furious about being disinherited, had a stroke and died in bed.

“Wonder what old Jimmy here did to piss Dad off,” Dean said, lighting a match and tossing it onto the bones. “Must have been bad to cut him off like that.”

Sam thought back to holiday breaks spent alone in his dorm room, no word or even a phone call. “Must have.”

Hunts that went well tended to have an almost euphoric effect on Dean, and this one was no exception. They did a final check on the Smith house, Dean holding a camera and claiming they needed a picture of the stairs because “Our readers like to be able to really visualize this kind of thing.” The place was totally clean, no sign anything supernatural had ever been there, so Dean set the car in motion, relaxed, genuinely pleased instead of just acting like everything was okay.

It would have been so easy to just leave it at that. God knew, he hadn’t seen Dean this happy in what felt like forever. He couldn’t, though. Couldn’t just leave well enough alone, but when had he ever? Sam watched the road signs fly by, waiting half a state before he finally said, “You know, the demons are still out there, Dean. I even think I’ve tracked one of them down. I’m ready. I was ready yesterday; I was ready the week before that, and the week before that. Hell, I was ready three weeks ago.”

The shift in mood was sudden, a pressure system moving in and washing away any lingering traces of Dean’s good mood. “Three weeks ago?” Dean was quiet for a minute, then ground out, fingers tight around the steering wheel, “You were dead three weeks ago.”

“Believe me, Dean,” Sam said, as gently as he could, “I know.”

***

The alarm went off at 4:37 in the afternoon.

Jo slapped at it every couple of minutes until 4:43, when she pulled herself off of the camp-style cot in the corner of the room. She swiped at her eyes until she felt ready to open them all the way, then padded over to the bathroom, where she filled a pan of water from the faucet in the tub while she did her business. Then she washed her hands with a sliver of soap stolen from a motel in Piedmont, dried them on a towel from one in Bend, Oregon, and took the pan over to the hotplate she had set up in the corner opposite the cot.

While she waited for it to boil, she unscrewed the lid on the store-brand instant, carefully measured out a spoonful of crystals into a mug with the same provenance as the soap, and sat down to take stock. This was her life in a nutshell: one 9’x13′ room with its own bath, furnished and rented out by someone none too keen on asking questions and happy enough with cash in hand; one duffle’s worth of clothing, some of it suitable for work , the rest of it for hunting; Ash’s old laptop; a handful of books and notebooks, all of them thick with post-its and crammed full of folded photocopies; one manila folder for whatever case she was focused on this day, or week, or month; another duffle’s worth of iron blades, assorted herbs, rock salt, holy water, and her handgun. The rest of the weapons, her first aid kit, and the remaining bags of salt were locked up tight in a steel case welded to the covered bed of a rusty diesel truck a few years older than she was.

It wasn’t that much different from dorm life, only she didn’t have to share her space with an uptight psych major who kept threatening to report her to the administration as a mental case. Jo hadn’t told Mom about that part. Bad enough that everyone thought she was a freak, worse if her mom knew they’d tried to do something about it.

She hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since she’d rolled into town three weeks back, on the trail of a shape-shifter and needing another bar job to pick up some cash. Her first night, she found the shifter and put a couple silver bullets in its heart, her second, the feelers she’d had Ash put out found her a job. Her third, Ash was dead, along with most of the other people she knew, and her mother was only around because of pretzels.

So maybe going to sleep hadn’t been high on her list of favorite things to do, but she was hitting the point of exhaustion that she remembered from finals week, just before she dropped out and moved back home, the one where you started to see double, couldn’t form words, and worked the beep of your alarm clock into your dreams for an hour instead of waking up. She swiped at her eyes again and choked down the instant in two gulps.

At least it was her night off. About the only plans she had revolved around a low-stakes poker game, and she was willing to give those up if the coffee doesn’t work.

“Shout at the Devil” coming from her phone alerted her that she had a call. The tinny Muzak version of the song was funny for about ten seconds when she set it, then it settled into annoying and kind of embarrassing, but it was distinctive and you never knew when someone was going to have to track your body down by your ring tone.

She stared at the number for another repeat of the chorus before answering. “Hi, Mom.”

“Jo, baby, where’re you at? Still in Tenino working at Dave and Betsy’s?”

Dave used to be a hunter, Betsy too, till a run in with a nasty poltergeist cost Dave an eye. Their clientele was way more mixed than the Roadhouse’s ever was, but it was still pretty firmly hunter turf, and hunters talked. “Please. You’d have heard if I moved, Mom.”

“Don’t count on it. Only hunters I’ve seen in weeks outside of Bobby are Sam and Dean.”

Jo shifted the phone from one ear to the other and stifled a sigh. “Yes, Mom, I’m still in Tenino.”

“Good. Bobby got wind of what sounds like a possession outside of Tumwater. You want the hunt, I can fax the information he’s got over to Betsy.”

That was new. “Thought you were still against me hunting.”

“You’re an adult, honey, you have to make your own choices. ‘Sides, I hear you’ve made quite a name for yourself dealing with possessions. You know Ash could never keep his big mouth shut.” Her mom’s voice broke a little before going all business again. “Anyhow, it’s yours if you want it. If not, I’m sure there’s a hunter or twelve who’ll take it off your hands.”

A spoon didn’t spin in your hands as comfortably as a knife, especially not a spoon that looked like had it lost a tussle with a garbage disposal, but the motion was soothing nonetheless. Jo flipped it back and forth without looking, tiny droplets of coffee landing on the backs of her fingers. “Mom?” She wanted to say, ‘I miss you.’ and ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ but the words wouldn’t make it past the lump in her throat.

“Yeah, baby?”

“Thanks.”

The fax was waiting as promised at Dave and Betsy’s, all nine pages of it. She read through the reports of a teenager flipping out violently just a few days before the start of a rash of church vandalisms that looked more ritual than random, as well as the cover letter admonishing her to be careful in her mom’s neat handwriting while Betsy plied her with cup after cup of real coffee and a dinner that didn’t come from a can with Chef Boyardee on it, and filled her in on the gossip. The South Sound area was small enough that on the outskirts, chances were good that someone had heard something helpful through the grapevine.

Betsy didn’t know the kid’s family, but she knew someone who might, and better still, knew one of the pastors.

“He says you’re welcome to drive over and take a look at the markings.” Betsy told her, hanging up the phone.

It was demonic possession, all right. Either that or a high school student with straight Cs in history and English and straight As in auto shop had an expert’s command of demonic markings. Jo only recognized about a third of the symbols, and she’d spent the last several months of her life studying the stuff.

She tracked the demon to a wrecking yard off Old Highway 99. The teenage boy it had hold of must have frequented the place, because it made a beeline for the southwest corner, where every inch that wasn’t clogged with the rusting hulks of freakish old cars was choked with weeds and slick with moss. The exorcism gave her less trouble than the blackberry vines, some of them thicker than her wrist, which she had to wade through on her way in and out.

She dropped the shell-shocked kid back at his house, cautioning him to not say too much about what happened, even if it meant he might be looking at jail time for the church vandalism.

“You on any medications?”

He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he nodded and went back to staring at his hands.

“Good. If you’re lucky, might be able to get away with claiming you reacted bad.”

She didn’t lecture him on how much worse things could have been, how at least nobody died at his hands. What it was, was bad enough, and anyhow, it wasn’t his fault a demon took his body for a joy ride.

For all that it was her specialty, Jo hated possessions. She hated knowing so much about them, hated the look of blind panic and nausea the unwitting hosts had after an exorcism, hated the way facing them still tied her stomach up in knots and left her wanting to go fetal. She really hated that she was so good at dealing with them, and most of all, she hated the part where she felt like, maybe, she should have been better months ago at spotting the signs.

***

Things were improving, they were. For starters, he’d gotten his nerve back after Cleveland. Sammy was right, he knew that. Just took him a while to feel it in his bones. Man, if you had told him back when they were working Jerry’s gig that he’d know more about warding off demons than he did about hitting on chicks, he’d have laughed. Not just exorcisms and holy water, but weird-ass shit like iron pins and burning some truly rank incense (which as Sam pointed out, was probably better than ‘a mysterious fish, only known to angels’, considering Dean still wasn’t sure he believed in them). He almost missed the days when he thought the fuckers were all about destruction, instead of planning world domination or playing let’s make a deal.

They’d gone through so much holy water in the last couple of weeks, they damn near needed to get a priest on retainer. Kept the salt bills down, though. And speaking of… he licked the back of his hand, set down his now empty shot glass, and turned his attention back to the girl next to him.

Mariana was a real artist, with a real artist’s hands, strong and sinewy, a little calloused at the tips. Her curly black hair, faded to dark rust at the ends, was twisted up and held in place with a couple of thick paint brushes. Dean wasn’t sure what her last name was: Ramirez; Rodriguez. Something with an R and an ez, at any rate. The bar was pretty loud.

She was 27, single, and unfortunately preferred Hagar to Roth, but her lips made up for it. He watched them appreciatively as she told him about the difficulty of working with encaustics and how hard it was to find a cheap studio with decent ventilation, even though he had no clue what the hell encaustics were. He nodded, bought her another drink, said, “Hey, my brother over there knows a lot about art. You two should talk,” and introduced her to Sam.

He thought it went well, but Sam batted him on the back of the head on their way to the car and not in the playful kind of way, either. “Dude. What the hell were you thinking?”

“Gee, Sam, I dunno, maybe that it might be good for you to meet a girl, relax a little? I mean, when was the last time you–”

A pained look flashed across Sam’s face. “San Francisco, Dean. Remember? And that ended so well.”

Yeah, he remembered. Remembered wiping down anything that might still have their prints and hurrying the fuck out of town, practically dragging Sam from the apartment. Remembered the three days it took before Sam ate or gave more than a monosyllabic response to anything. “Sam–”

Sam cut him off again. “Dean, don’t. Just don’t. Not right now. I know you mean well, but don’t.”

Most things were improving, but some things, well, some things weren’t.

***

Right after Wyoming, before even starting to go through Bobby’s books, Sam’d had this stupid pipe dream that anything he’d learned while prepping for law school could be of some use getting Dean out of his contract, like a crossroads deal was somehow not all that different from a bad cell phone contract. But the more he learned, the more it became clear that demonic law was nothing like human law, and that even if he could find something that looked like a loophole to his human eyes, it almost certainly wouldn’t apply.

Dean, meanwhile, was acting like nothing’d changed, like he wasn’t walking around with an invisible best-by date tattooed on his person. Sam watched his brother bend low over a pool table, totally focused on the layout of the balls and the weight of the cue. He sank two balls in rapid succession before he missed one, just as deliberately: it was only the second game of the night, and it didn’t pay to look too good, too soon, after all.

As fruitless as it had been thus far, Sam would rather have been researching–hell, he’d have rather been hunting–but they were trying to avoid using credit cards, and they needed the cash, so pool it was. It went well, like it usually did. Dean had a way of coming across as smarter than he looked, but dumber than he thought he was, a plum ripe for the picking and just begging to be taken down a notch or two. It made him a natural at hustling pool, among other things, and he was good enough at it, wore that face so often, that there’d been a time when Sam, young enough to think he knew everything and just old enough to have realized for the first time that Dean didn’t, didn’t even know enough to recognize it for a facade.

He leaned back and sipped his beer, eyes on Dean as he reeled them in, hook, line, and sinker.

They left at the end of the night a couple hundred dollars richer. Back at the motel, Sam hit the shower, scrubbing off the stale cigarette smell with the world’s smallest bar of complementary soap and drying off with towels that felt more like mislabeled washcloths. His jeans, socks, and shirt went in the laundry bag with the muddy clothes from the last hunt; his underwear went back on his person, along with a fresh shirt.

When he came out of the bathroom, Dean was already relaxing on top of the bed, back up against the padded headboard, booted legs crossed at the ankles, eyes fixed on the TV screen. One hand was holding the remote, the other digging into a bag of Chili Cheese Fritos.

“Hey, Sammy,” he said from around a mouthful of them, “who do you think’s hotter: Gina Gershon or Jennifer Tilly?”

Sam glanced at the screen, where a cable channel was showing Bound. “I guess I’ve never really thought about it, Dean.” He could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on already. They needed to be talking about research, or about where and what to hunt next, not about the relative hotness of movie stars.

“I mean, Gina looks like she could kick your ass and make you like it, but Jennifer, man, she’s just smokin’.” Dean licked the thick coating of Frito residue from his fingers, wiped them absently on his jeans, and crammed another handful into his mouth. Smooth. Occasionally, when Sam was just hitting puberty and Dean was just hitting on anything that moved with an alarming degree of success, Sam would examine his brother closely, trying to figure out what, exactly, girls saw in him. It sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with his table manners. “Tough choice.”

“And such a likely one for either of us to have to make.” It came out bitchier than it should have, and, seeing as Sam had seen firsthand that Hollywood was every bit as weird as Dean and in most of the same ways, was probably only true for Sam’s half of the equation.

“Not the point, Sam.”

Bitchy, as it turned out, was the order of the evening for Sam. It wasn’t Dean’s fault that he was, well, Dean. “Then please, by all means, tell me what is. Share your hard-won wisdom.”

“That sarcasm right there? Totally uncalled for.” Dean gave him a bland smile. “You, Sammy, need to learn to relax.”

Relax. That was funny. As if he could. “Do you even care that you’re going to die in less than a year, Dean? You haven’t helped at all with the research, you won’t talk about it, I bring it up, and you just change the subject. You keep acting like everything’s normal, but it’s not.”

There was silence, thick and heavy. At some point, Dean had hit the mute button, and was now staring stone-faced at Sam. “I so much as lift a finger to try getting out of this, and she takes it all back. You know that. Means I can’t help you, and hell, as far as I know, it means I shouldn’t even be talking to you about it. So tell me, Sam, just what it is you think I should I be doing with my time, given all that?”

“Dean–”

“Look, Sam, I don’t want to die, any more than the next guy, and you want to help and I appreciate that, but I knew what I was getting into when I went to that crossroads. Are we through? Because if we are, I’ve got a movie to watch.”

***

It was Susan Sarandon’s fault, or maybe Julia Roberts was to blame.

Hell, maybe it was the fault of checking into a motel in the middle of nowhere, Northern California edition, with no pay-per-view and just basic cable.

Sam was sleeping off the headache he got when a demon had slapped him upside the head and into a fence, and Dean was bored, restless, and the only thing on TV other than infomercials was Stepmom. It wasn’t even a full step up from Lifetime, but it got him thinking.

Barring a miracle, nine months from now, his bill was going to come due, and the crossroads bitch would send her dogs out to collect on it. Didn’t matter what Sam thought; it wasn’t his debt to pay. Dean was okay with dying. Sam was here, he was healthy, had a full life ahead of him. Only thing was, once Dean was gone, Sam was going to be alone. Sure, he’d have Bobby, maybe Ellen, but Bobby was getting to be too old to keep up on a full-on hunt, and Ellen knew her way around a gun and around hunters, but she was still a civilian.

What had Gordon said? You know how hunters talk? And he hadn’t, still didn’t, but he knew they were out there, the ones who survived the Roadhouse, at least. Sam couldn’t go back to normal, and that one was Dean’s fault, but he thought he’d feel a lot better about that and about those hellhounds if he knew Sam had someone who could watch his back.

In the harsh light of morning, the notion was still there, and Sam was in the shower, so Dean got Bobby on the phone and asked.

Bobby groused about it–hell, Dean could see the frown through the wireless signal–but came through with a short list of names never the less. “I’m not saying they’ll agree help you, but they’re good hunters and good people, and that doesn’t always go hand in hand, so it’s worth talking to them.” Dean jotted the names and numbers down, and slipped the paper into his wallet before Sam got back from the bathroom.

The plan in his head was half-baked at best. He’d managed to get as far as thinking they could find a hunt near someone on Bobby’s list, and they could meet up, maybe move on to playing matchmaker if it went well enough. But hunts, by and large, tended not to happen where hunters lived. He didn’t really want to tell Sam about the plan just yet, so in the end, he went through the area codes, trying to find something that looked like a plausible hunt in it.

Carson City, Nevada looked like his best bet. A lot of Old West legends and ghost tales, as well as a big casino project that kept on failing to finish. Didn’t even have to stretch the truth all that much to make it sound like something they should be interested in.

“A poltergeist in Carson City, Dean? That doesn’t exactly seem like urgent business. Unlike the demon in Winslow. You know, the one that was next on our seemingly-endless list?” Sam transferred another armload of clothes from the washer to the dryer, shut the door, and stuck the quarters into the slot.

“You forgot the dryer sheets.”

“No, Dean, I didn’t forget them. They make me itch. You can deal with a little bit of static cling. Anyhow, you were going to explain to me this burning need to get to Carson City?”

“Hey, it’s your choice, Sam, but it’s on our way to Winslow from here, so we might as well take a couple minutes to check it out. Besides, Bobby’s got a friend near there. I said we’d check in. We can split up when we get there: you take the library, I go talk to the guy.”

***

Daniel Alvarado was a good-looking man of about 50, an inch or two shorter than Dean and a hell of a lot broader, his plain black shirt pulled snug across his barrel chest. He sized Dean up with a glance, gave him a polite smile as he slid into the booth across from him, and said, “So you say Singer sent you?”

“Yes, sir.” Something about Alvarado reminded him of Dad, and Dean found himself sitting damn near at attention. Annoyed, he tried to force himself to relax. “He said you’re one of the hunters he trusts.”

“Singer says a lot of things.” Polite slid into easy with a flash of straight white teeth. “What can I do for you?”

Dean didn’t answer right away, because the waitress came by to fill their coffee cups and take their orders. She called Alvarado by his first name and knew how he took his coffee. Asked him about his dogs and how his garden did this year, like he was some regular Joe.

And Dean had had the whole spiel planned, the one where he sold Sam like he was a set of encyclopedias, a research partner any hunter’d be glad to have at his side, only when push came to shove, he couldn’t do it, and god only knew why. Maybe it was just that he couldn’t see bringing a regular Joe, even a regular Joe who Bobby said once took out a chupacabra in his fucking sleep, into their mess. Instead, he asked about the case, if there was anything to the rumors that the renovations at a once-popular casino in town keep getting delayed due to a poltergeist.

Alvarado raised one of his glossy crow-wing eyebrows. “Son,” he said gently, “no offense, but that’s complete bullshit, and you know it. Bobby Singer didn’t send you here on some bogus claim about poltergeists, so I’ll ask you again, what is it you think I can do for you?”

Dean slumped back against the booth and ran a hand through his hair. “You know, forget it. It’d just be a waste of your time.”

“Can’t say as I can agree with you, seeing as I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Seriously. It’s not…” saying it’s not important would have been a lie, so he paused, searching for the words. “It’s something I have to take care of myself.” Which was the crux of the issue, because in nine months’ time, he wasn’t going to be around to do that, but whatever the answer was, wasn’t here in Carson City.

Alvarado watched him, dark eyes steady and serious. He gave a short nod, took a sip of his heavily-sweetened coffee, and turned the conversation to hunting in general, and hunters in particular. “Your dad was one hell of a hunter,” he said, the first indication that he knew John Winchester at all. “Almost made up for what a pig headed son of a bitch he could be.”

“So you knew my dad.” Maybe one of these days, he’d stop being shocked by that. Probably die before it happened, though.

“Yeah. I knew John. Knew him for years. If a more stubborn man ever was born, I sure haven’t met him.”

“You remind me of him, a little, if you don’t mind me saying. Got the same kind of air of command. You ex-military maybe?”

“Nope. Ex-high school math teacher.”

“How the hell’d a math teacher wind up a hunter?”

“Try inverting that, son. Hunting was never the weird part about me. My abuela hunted. She taught my father, and my father taught me. I went off to college, planned on majoring in folklore and mythology, and wound up having an extended love affair with calculus instead. Thought they’d disown me for it when I dropped out of the life.”

“How’d you get back in?”

“Summer vacations sitting on my ass turned out to be a lot more boring than I had planned.”

Dean tore open another packet of sugar, more for something to do with his hands than because the coffee needed it. Then he cleared his throat, smiled and said, “So I hear you once took out a chupacabra in your sleep. That’s seriously bad-ass.”

***

“Well, my research turned up nothing. What’d Bobby’s friend have to say about it?” Sam reported, closing the passenger door with a little more force than was strictly speaking necessary.

“That it was a bunch of BS. Said it was the stuff of mismanaged investments, not vengeful spirits.”

Sam’s face had ‘I could have told you that’ written all over it, not exactly pleased about the time they’d wasted. Good thing they hadn’t checked into a hotel yet. Meant they could burn rubber all the way to Winslow. Enjoy a fun seven hundred and fifty miles of Sam being a pissy bitch.

It was more like three hundred miles. Sam’s mood lifted right around the time the tank hit E and they had to stop for gas, so at least they weren’t fighting when they got to Winslow and the shit hit the fan.

Even later, he wasn’t sure how it happened. One minute, he was right beside Sam, holy water at the ready, the next they were separated, the demon between them. “Dean.” And man, he was so fucking tired of demons sounding that happy to see him. “I saw you there. You were so happy when you fired that shot, thinking it was all at an end.” It laughed, sidestepped the holy water thrown at it like it was Fred Astaire. “Bet you didn’t think to ask Sam about that.”

The laughter echoed, thin and reedy, and the half-second Dean took to shake it off was a half second too long, meant when it snapped back around, Dean was too close. He jumped back, but it was already too late, the thing’s arm catching him and sending him flying, all his weight landing hard on his left palm. There was the laugh again, needle-like claws digging into his wrist, lifting him up by an arm already throbbing from the impact.

“I dare you, Dean.” Pulling him so close that Dean could feel the stinking heat of its breath against his ear. “Ask him.” Then it tossed him aside, and was gone, leaving just pain and confusion and Sam.

***

“Jesus, Sammy, would you quit hovering? It’s not that bad.” So claimed the man who’d just spent the half hour drive back to the motel wincing and swearing every time the car hit so much as a pebble on the pavement. “Just a sprain.”

Just a sprain didn’t account for the noise he’d made when he hit the ground, nor for the fact that, not only had he made Sam drive them back, he’d had Sam fish the keys out of his pocket, because he physically couldn’t.

“Dean, if it was just a sprain, I think you’d be able to undress yourself so we could check it out. Hold still while I get your arm free.” Sam pushed at the sleeve, and Dean’s face went from flushed to ashen. “I take it that hurts?”

“No,” Dean gritted out from between bloodless lips, “it feels fucking fantastic. Son of a–” The last was cut off by a hiss that Sam would almost classify as a whimper. Dean looked like he was about to puke.

Five or six profanity and groan filled minutes later, Sam finally had Dean’s flannel off so that he could get a handle on the damage. As he expected, it was worse than Dean was claiming. He looked at the lobster-red skin that stretched tight across the swollen, misshapen elbow joint. A lot worse.

Dean looked down and his face lost its color again. “Get ice.”

The ice machine was all the way down at the other end of the motel, near the lobby and the laundry room. Sam got there, realized he needed something that could hold a hell of a lot more ice than the room’s bucket could, and had to walk all the way back to the Impala, hoping they had something suitable there. They did, kind of, by way of two crumpled-up plastic grocery bags, one of which they’d been using to hold burger wrappers and Coke cans. He rinsed out the ketchup smears and sticky bits of leftover soda in the laundry room sink, then stuffed both bags full of ice.

The arm wasn’t looking any better.

“Dean, if it’s dislocated, we have to take you to a hospital.” Sam wrapped their room towels around the ice-stuffed bags and set them as carefully as possible around the joint. He could handle first aid, probably better than a lot of paramedics, but that didn’t mean he liked it. He’d planned on law school instead of med school for a reason.

“No hospital.”

Nerve and blood vessel damage was the biggest risk in an elbow dislocation. He didn’t think Dean’s looked quite that bad, but he wasn’t sure he trusted his scale of what made an injury bad anymore than he trusted Dean’s claims about the severity of the thing. The hand didn’t look abnormally pale, and there was no tinge of blue at the nails. Carefully, Sam put two fingers on the underside of Dean’s wrist. The pulse there felt strong, if rapid. “Can you feel your fingers?”

There was a nod from Dean.

“Can you move them?”

Dean folded down all but the middle one in response.

Sam was still trying to figure out how to convince Dean that going to the ER was in his best interests when Dean spoke again. “You’re going to have to pop it back.”

“What? Dude! No! I’m not popping your elbow back into place.”

“Can’t risk the hospital, not with the Feds still looking for us. I did it for Dad, once. I’ll talk you through it. It’s not that hard.”

Efforts to talk Sam through it stopped when it became clear that, if Dean opened his mouth at all during the process, the only thing he was going to be doing was screaming. Sam removed his belt, folded it in half, and stuck the thick wad of leather between Dean’s teeth. Then he tried not to hear the muffled sounds as he braced and pulled; slowly, awkwardly slipping the joint back into place as best he could, hoping the whole time that he wasn’t doing more harm than good.

They were down to just drugstore painkillers, so when Sam finished wrapping the emergency splint around the arm and repositioning the ice bags, he rummaged through the pockets of Dean’s jacket until he found a flask. “Whiskey or holy water?” he asked, holding it up.

Dean frowned, trying to focus on it, and spit out the belt. “Whiskey, I think. Right pocket or left?”

“Inside right.”

“Whiskey.”

Sam put one hand behind Dean’s head and cradled it, tilting it up enough for Dean to drink without choking. The angle wasn’t right for drinking neatly, and whiskey dribbled down Dean’s chin before dropping down to his collar and disappearing inside the spreading circle of sweat there. “Sorry.” He pulled the flask back, balancing it in his lap while he wiped the remaining drops of liquid from Dean’s face, his thumb rasping over the end-of-day stubble there.

Grunting, Dean lowered himself with the help of his good arm until he was flat on his back on the maroon and green bedspread. He closed his eyes with a groan. “This sucks out loud.”

The whiskey tasted awful, like rubbing alcohol with caramel coloring, or maybe lighter fluid. After the first sip, Sam poured it straight down the back of his throat, trying to keep it from touching his tongue. “You’re probably out of action for at least a month, you know that?”

Dean grunted again and motioned with his good hand for the flask. “Yeah. I know.”

“On the bright side, if we were looking for some down time, I hear this is the place for it.”

He more than half expected some return crack from Dean about how he didn’t think this was what “Take It Easy” really meant. He got a blank look instead, which meant as far as the pain went, the whiskey had barely made a dent.

The night wasn’t exactly improved when Sam discovered that the room’s AC unit was broken. Which explained why it hadn’t been on when they’d checked in. The lack left the space hot and close, like bunking down in an oven. Dean’s face was still paper-white, his jaw tight as his breath hissed in and out from between clenched teeth. And to think, this was going to be the easiest part of the next few weeks. Dean wasn’t any good at being laid up at the best of times. Give him a deadline and a backlog of work, and Sam didn’t really want to think about the days ahead.

Didn’t want to, however, wasn’t the same as didn’t have to, and Sam considered their options while Dean fell into a restless sleep. Getting off the road was a must, at least until Dean was healed enough for a sling. They could go back to Bobby’s, but the drive would be hell on Dean’s arm, and it wasn’t exactly fair to Bobby to burden him with Dean. They could stay in the motel, which would save them a prolonged drive, but was probably out of the realm of affordability unless they broke out the credit cards, which they shouldn’t do because of the Feds.

He checked the cash on hand, just in case. Aside from the $32.00 in his money clip, they had $57.34 in the emergency gas fund they kept in their shaving kit, which left however much Dean had in his wallet as the deciding factor. Carefully, so as not to wake him, Sam extracted it from Dean’s back pocket. He stared at the leather, scuffed along the edges and distorted into a permanent curve from use, and reminded himself that he was violating Dean’s privacy for his own good.

There wasn’t anything really shocking in there: a halftone picture on newsprint, clearly of Cassie, yellowed and faded, probably dating back to her college days; a few pieces of ID, all of them fake, various scraps of paper containing various phone numbers and names, no doubt shoved in one minute and forgotten before dawn the next day. Sam set them into a pile, and pulled out the wad of bills Dean had jammed haphazardly in.

He found a little over $200 and a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper, motel stationary from a few towns back, was stuck between a twenty and a ten and folded into clumsy thirds, the blue ballpoint scrawl visible over the top fold clearly recognizable as Dean’s. Curious now, Sam picked it up and took a closer look. Names and phone numbers, a list of them. One of them struck through in black, a Carson City area code, none of them familiar except the one at the bottom.

If they stayed here, the money would last, at most, a couple of days. Not nearly long enough. That meant finding someplace close, cheap, and safe.

The AC wasn’t working, but at least the WiFi did. Between Google Maps and Dad’s journal, Sam’s narrowed down their options until there was just the one, a cheap private campground a fairly easy day’s drive away. He remembered the cabins as being cramped, but he was all of fourteen the last time they stayed there, and there were three of them sharing the space, not two. It wasn’t ideal, but it would serve to keep them off the radar and give Dean time to heal.

The ice around Dean’s elbow had melted quickly in the heat, soaking the towels and leaking onto the bedding. Sam emptied what was left of it into the sink and wrung out the towels as best he could. They’d be dry well before morning, and anyhow, more ice would have to wait until they had something waterproof to put it in.

When it didn’t look like Dean was going to wake up anytime soon, Sam checked the salt lines and went off in search of the nearest grocery store. If they were going to camp, then they were going to need food that wouldn’t perish quickly, potable water, as well as toilet paper and all the other things motels usually provided, but campgrounds didn’t.

It was unpleasantly familiar, going through the aisles picking up the cheapest house label canned soups and peanut butter, loaves of Wonder Bread, gallons of distilled water, and some soft drinks for variety, Shasta this time, because it was on sale.

All it was missing was the bags of cereal and him and Dean squabbling over something stupid for it to be every childhood summer shopping trip they ever went on with Dad.

Dean was awake when he got back, sitting on the bed with one of the wet towels draped around his neck and the flask, unscrewed and obviously empty, next to his thigh. He’d wet his head at some point, leaving his hair a damp-dark mess.

“You should be sleeping.” He set down the grocery bag he was carrying, the one that held the frozen peas he’d picked up as emergency ice packs and a couple of bottles of Dr. Pepper, still cold from the cooler. The rest were stashed safely in the trunk.

“Couldn’t. Tried it and had nightmares. When’s the last time you had a nightmare, Sam? Those are done, right?”

“Yeah, Dean. You know they are. If they weren’t, you would have noticed. They were kinda hard to miss.”

Dean nodded, almost absently. “Yeah, I guess they were.”

“What made you ask?”

“It’s nothing, Sam. Just another damn demon screwing with my head.” Dean gave a forced smile. “That’s all it is.”

“Screwing with your head how? I mean, what did it say?”

Dean fixed bloodshot eyes on him. “That it wasn’t over. That you’d know why.”

Syrup-thick blood falling drop by drop into a baby’s open mouth; a mother’s startled gasp, recognizing the figure next to the baby’s crib. His mother’s startled gasp. His open mouth. He looked at Dean and tried to gauge what he saw there. Fear, maybe. Worry, definitely. “Well, that was cryptic of it.” Sam knelt down and pulled out one of the Dr. Peppers, twisting off the lid and tossing it into the trash. It hit his mouth, cold and sweet, and he couldn’t really taste it. He threw the bag of peas onto the bed, pulled out the other bottle and held it up as an offering. “I dunno, man. You want something to drink, or are you going to get your ass back in bed?”

Demons lie. Sam just skirted around the truth. He wasn’t sure what that made him.

***

It would have been a fair assessment to say that Dean wasn’t a huge fan of cabins. Even before a demon wearing his dad ripped him apart from the inside out in one, he wasn’t overly fond of the things. Forget TV or Magic Fingers, with the kind of cabins they tended to stay in, you were lucky if you got electricity and indoor plumbing.

This one had electricity and a sink, at least, though the toilets and showers were a quarter-mile hike up to the community area. Next to the sink, there was a stovetop and a mini-fridge, with two twin beds and a fold-out table off on the other side of the structure. No sheets or pillow on the beds, just mattresses, the kind where you could see the outline of the springs through the dingy blue and white striped ticking.

As kids, they’d had sleeping bags for places like this, and a couple of battered pillows that barely made a dent in the discomfort. This time, Sam had lifted a bunch of flat sheets and a pillow each from the motel, so at least they wouldn’t have to resort to huddling under their coats with their heads resting on a pile of balled-up laundry.

Course, it wasn’t all bad. Sam had to do all the heavy lifting. Dean just had to stay out of his way. His arm still hurt like a motherfucker, and he was a little worried that maybe there was a fracture there as well, not that he was going to let Sam know about that. He claimed the bed closest to the window, mostly because Sam had set both of the pillows on it when he brought in the bedding, and watched Sam carry their bags in from the car, fussing around and arranging things like they were going to be here for months instead of just a few days.

A few minutes of watching Sam unpack proved that the idea was way more entertaining than the reality, so Dean turned his attention to his surroundings instead. The inside cabin walls were the same worn grey wood as the ones on the outside, broken up by one small window and a door on the south wall, and an even smaller window high up on the wall to the east. The floorboards were wide, made of some kind of unfinished knot-filled wood, dingy with years of tracked-in dirt and worn smooth in some spots, to splinters in others.

It was familiar, in the anonymous way that cheap camping cabins always were, and Dean was pretty sure this was the same campground they stayed at the summer after his aborted senior year. He was pretty sure it wasn’t the same cabin, though. That one was a full bed larger, even if it felt smaller.

He wondered how much Sam remembered about that time, if he remembered much at all about Dad bailing Dean out of jail after he’d managed to get his ass kicked and get said ass blamed for it to boot. Eight against one had proved pretty quickly that no matter what he might have thought or said in the heat of the moment, he really wasn’t a better fighter than all of Todd Dorsey’s friends combined.

“Hey, Sam, is this where we stayed–”

Sam didn’t even pause from unpacking, kept lining up cans of food on the cabin’s only shelf as he cut Dean off with a clipped, “After you dropped out? Yeah.”

Dropped out, pushed out. When it came right down to it, there wasn’t really a difference, except with the first, you didn’t have someone threatening you with assault charges or restraining orders if you ever showed your face back at school. Yeah, Sam remembered, all right. Of course he did. Dean hadn’t seen it at the time, couldn’t see much of anything out of two black eyes and would have chalked it up to Sam being fourteen and moody as hell, but that had marked the beginning of the end. Every step Sam took from there until the day he left was just another step closer to the door.

“What were we hunting that summer, anyhow?”

This time, Sam paused. He pushed the duffle he’d just set down off of the nearest chair and took a seat, kicking his feet out in front of him. “Rumors, mostly.”

“Huh. Thought it was some kinda haunted silver mine or something.”

Sam looked at him, looked like he was searching for clues or answers, only Dean wasn’t sure what the question was. After a while, Sam shifted his gaze, scratched the nape of his neck and said, “Yeah. That too.”

***

The criteria Sam had used for choosing the campground were simple: cheap, off the radar, and no more than a day’s drive from Winslow. He was starting to think he should have added unfamiliar and neutral ground to the list, even though he kind of doubted that such a place existed, not if your last name was Winchester.

They’d been down this road before, he thought as he steered Dean’s car down the winding dirt road to the cabin. Literally and figuratively both.

Not that it started here. Here’s just where they had ended up. Where it started was a small town in South Carolina with more than its fair share of ghosts, when it started was three weeks before the end of the school year. Dean was supposed to pick Sam up after school and didn’t show, leaving Sam stuck walking the mile and a half back to their apartment. The Impala was there, Dean wasn’t.

Dean had still been AWOL when Dad got back, tired and dirty from a day spent changing oil filters and vacuuming wheel wells for barely more than minimum wage. That was when Sam should have been worried, or scared, or anything other than spitefully glad it would be Dean getting into trouble with Dad for once.

The cabin’s doorway and windowsills still showed traces of salt, tiny white grains trapped in the wood, leftovers from other hunters. Here and there, crudely carved markings to the sills and threshold.

He could hear Dean shuffling restlessly on the bed, and wondered for the millionth time how long it was going to take before the forced confinement drove them both batshit crazy. Without a remote control or cable to distract Dean, before the day was up was probably a safe bet.

Or maybe that was being generous. Before the hour was up was starting to look more and more like a likely candidate. He was just starting to unpack the groceries when the restless shuffle stopped, replaced by a question. “Hey, Sam, is this where we stayed–”

Sam interrupted before Dean went any further. “After you dropped out? Yeah.”

There was a narrow shelf mounted above the sink, and Sam lined the cans of soup and spaghetti across it. It wasn’t deep enough for the peanut butter jars, so they went on the counter, along with the Wonder Bread and a jar of strawberry jam.

Dad had been livid, and that was before the call from jail. After the call, Sam wasn’t sure he even knew the word for what Dad was.

He could practically hear the gears turning in Dean’s head, generating some sort of warped nostalgia field: ‘Hey, Sam, remember that time I almost got myself killed and prosecuted for assault and Dad dragged our asses out to the middle of nowhere for three months as a result? Man, that was awesome.’ To be fair, Dean didn’t actually say that, but Sam wouldn’t have put it past him. He was actually surprised when all Dean did was ask about the hunt.

People talk. People like Todd Dorsey’s kid brother Ray talked a lot. People like Sam found themselves stuck with detention for the remainder of the school year when Ray’s talking led to Sam throwing the first punch the next day after lunch.

Sam had detention; Ray Dorsey had detention and a split lip; Dean had two black eyes, some cracked ribs, and finger-shaped bruises on his jaw and around his wrists. Dad had yelled at Dean, and Dean had yelled at Dad, and Sam had learned to be careful what he wished for, because he got stuck in the middle of it.

***

Two days in, Dean declared cabin fever an actual physical ailment when he woke up in the middle of the night, shivering with chills in a puddle of sweat, his temperature up by about four degrees from normal according to the thermometer Sam blearily jammed between Dean’s lips.

“Dean, that’s not cabin fever, that’s a fever fever. You’ve picked up a cold from god knows where.” Sam rolled his eyes, but even feeling like ass, Dean didn’t miss the tightness at the corners of Sam’s lips while Sam was helping him into his clothes and back into bed.

The next morning, his temperature felt like it was still up, he had less than no appetite, and his throat felt like he’d been swallowing hot swords. At least it took the edge off the pain from his elbow, but the damn cold hadn’t seen fit to stuff up his nose and he reeked like a three day old corpse. He closed his eyes, buried his head under the pillow in an effort at avoiding the morning light, but the stale sweat stench of his own body kept him from going back to sleep.

Dean gave up, sat up, and weighed his options. He had to take a leak anyway, and instead of pissing out the front door, might as well trek up the hill and shower while he was at it. The splint, though, that was going to make it harder to get undressed, and he figured he probably shouldn’t get it wet.

Sam had helped him with it last time, but Sam was still sleeping, so Dean carefully unwound the ace bandage from the splint and dropped it onto his mattress before heading up the hill to the showers.

The path was steeper than he remembered, uneven and rocky. It was warm out, not sweltering the way Winslow had been, but hot enough that, even this early in the morning, the air was thick with the pungent smell of conifers. A wave of dizziness hit him halfway up, bad enough that he had to find the nearest tree trunk and stop until it passed, sucking in air and wincing with each breath. Maybe heading for the showers hadn’t been such a hot idea.

Just a few more steps. He could do that. Be better than breathing in his own stink, which was getting worse by the minute, seeing as the combination of illness and hot weather had him breaking out in a sweat. By the time he made it to the showers, he was already drenched. Getting undressed one-handed was a struggle, sweat gluing his shirt to his skin, jeans not wanting to unbutton or unzip. It wasn’t until he was finally standing under the icy spray that it occurred to Dean that he should have brought a bar of soap and a change of clothes, or hell, a towel. Stupid cold must have infiltrated his brain.

When the cold water became unbearable, Dean twisted the tap shut, shook as much of the water as he could from his hair, and pulled on his jeans and boots, skipping the boxers, shirt, and socks. He gave his pits an experimental sniff: not exactly daisy fresh, but a damn sight better then they had been. He could live with that. He gathered up his dirty clothes, dropping the socks twice before finally managing to get them wedged under his arm.

Suddenly, the cabin seemed a long way off. He sat on a fallen log ten paces from the showers. Maybe if he sat there long enough, Sam would wake up and come looking for him, maybe help him back down. Or maybe rip him a new one and carry his ass back. That’d be nice.

Water dripped from his hair onto his nose; he couldn’t wipe it off without dropping his clothes, so he rubbed it on his bare shoulder instead. Birds twittered and chirped out in the trees. Wasn’t quite how he’d pictured spending the last weeks of his last summer on Earth, sick and miserable in an empty campground in the middle of nowhere. He’d been thinking along the lines of something with a few more bikini babes, a few less mosquitoes, and a lot more beer.

Man, this sucked. Might as well get back to being sick and miserable in a bed before the mosquitoes ate him alive. He wobbled his way back down the trail.

He was staring at the cabin door, trying to figure out a way to open it without having to drop his clothes, when it swung open to reveal a bleary-eyed, angry Sam.

“Damn it, Dean. Are you trying to make yourself worse?”

He figured Sammy probably wouldn’t appreciate knowing how much he sounded like Dad right about then. Hell, even the look on his face was all Dad. “By worse, you mean able to stand my own smell? ‘Cause if that’s the case, then yes.”

“Sit.” And Sam’s huge paws were on his shoulders, pushing him down on the bed. He put the splint back in place and wrapped it up with a shake of his head. Then he wrinkled his nose. “Next time, maybe you might want to think about using soap.”

“No shit, Sherlock, but I only had the one hand.” Dean leaned back on the mattress, grateful to have a solid surface holding him up, even if he could feel every one of the springs. “This doesn’t just suck out loud. It sucks out loud in stereo.”

“You know, Dean, I’m not sure what that even means.” Sam rested his palm against Dean’s forehead for a minute, frowned, went over to the table and came back with the thermometer, shoving it under Dean’s tongue. “You’re burning up.”

“Your bedside manner could use some work, Florence,” Dean groused from around the thermometer. It was the old-fashioned kind, thick and glass and slow as molasses. Dad never saw any need to upgrade to digital, and Dean’d never thought about it much before now, but next time he was in a drug store, he was going to replace it with one that doesn’t feel like someone was sticking a finger in his mouth.

It stayed in his mouth for what felt like forever until Sam pulled it out, tilted it this way and that to get a read and said, “102.3.” Then he headed over to the kitchenette.

“102.3, huh? That was Jenny Carlson’s favorite radio station.”

Sam’s back, handing Dean two Tylenol caplets and a water glass. “Who’s Jenny Carlson?”

Dean swallowed the pills and half the water before answering. “Todd Dorsey’s girlfriend.”

The temperature in the room dropped a little. Too bad it didn’t leave him feeling any more comfortable. Sam reached out and took away the glass. After a pause, he asked, “Was she worth it?”

He had to think about that for a full minute. Not worth getting his ass thrown in jail for, but it wasn’t her fault Todd’s dad was the county sheriff. Anyhow, the honest answer was that he didn’t know. Most they ever did was make out a couple times after class. He shrugged. Sam didn’t press the issue.

***

The fever broke in due course, and everything would have been fine, if it wasn’t for the same old nightmare. Sam ragdoll limp in his arms and Sam’s blood sticky on his hands, and nothing he could do to bring him back, stomach a mess of vipers, each one hissing that it was all Dean’s fault, that he’d failed again. His body responded violently enough that Dean rolled off the bed, most of his weight landing smack on his bad arm. For a second, he was almost grateful for the pain. Then he woke the rest of the way up.

Sam was there, Sam was everywhere, hovering over him and poking and prodding and asking questions until Dean brought up his good hand to push him away. “Sam, I’m fine.”

It was met with a snort. “Seriously, Dean? You’re fine?” Sam touched the splint lightly, just below Dean’s elbow, and smiled a grim I told you so when Dean winced and jerked away.

“Would you quit that? Jesus.” Dean shoved at Sam again, stood up and maneuvered the damn bed until it was parallel with and right up against the wall. He gritted his teeth and got back into bed, carefully propping his left arm on the pillow. “I’ll be fine,” he muttered. “Just stop poking me, all right?”

The arm felt like it was on fire again. In the bed next to him, Sam snored softly, and Dean closed his eyes, focused on that.

***

Sam woke up early, wrote a note for Dean, which he left on the pillow next to his brother’s sleep-rumpled head, and drove an hour to the nearest mid-sized town, where he used a sling, a forged prescription, and an earnest smile to get a bottle of Percocet. He then spent another hour and a half driving in the opposite direction, repeating the process in a different mid-sized town, and so on until he had a scary assortment of illegally obtained pharmaceuticals. Just like old times.

By the time he got back to the cabin, it was nearly dark, the late summer light starting to thin. He found Dean eating a peanut butter sandwich and apparently going out of his mind from boredom, because in between bites, he was doing the Jumble in the week-old newspaper Sam had brought along with them, the one with the small blurb about a suspicious death in Farmington. He was absorbed enough in his one-handed juggling of the sandwich and the ballpoint pen that he barely acknowledged Sam. Instead of saying hello, or even looking up from the page, he grunted and stuffed the sandwich in his mouth, holding it between his lips while he shifted the pen out from beneath his pinkie and back into writing position, nearly knocking over his glass of water in the process.

Sam cocked his head and raised his brow, trying not to laugh. Trying and failing not to laugh. Dean finally looked up at Sam’s snort, setting down the pen and removing the sandwich from his mouth. The bread was compressed around the edges to the point where it was nearly flat.

“What?” he said.

“Dean, I know we don’t have any plates, but you could have grabbed a napkin or a paper towel or something. Here.” Sam pulled one of the bottles out of his pocket. He made sure it was Percocet, not one of the emergency courses of antibiotics, unscrewed the cap, and set it down on the table. “I restocked the medicine cabinet.”

Dean shrugged, a slight wince belying his, “It’s not that bad.” He looked from the bottle to the sandwich, finally deciding on setting the sandwich next to the pen and fishing out one of the pills, which he washed down with the rest of the water in his glass. “How’d you get these?”

“Sling and one of the many stolen prescription pads in the trunk.”

Dean leaned back with a grin. He looked better today, even though the dark circles under his eyes could’ve used their own zip code. “Sam, Sam, Sam. The law profession would have been a waste of your natural skills.”

“Because petty criminal is such a good use of them, Dean?”

Half an hour later, and Dean was clearly feeling no pain, sprawled on top of his bed, good hand behind his head, one leg drawn up, foot waving absently in the air. “You know what this reminds me of?” he said, studying his toes.

“What, Dean?”

“Montana. That poltergeist. Remember that?”

Sam remembered Montana mostly as a lesson in how much bleeding occurred with even a minor head wound, and in how to deal with mild concussions when there was no hospital within a hundred miles. They didn’t realize Dean’s high-speed collision with the wall had broken his collarbone as well until halfway to Idaho. Labor Day weekend 1997, about a week after they’d left here. So what the hell was reminding Dean of Montana now?

Oh, right. That’s when they’d discovered that Dean’s fairly amazing pain tolerance was paired with a fairly amazing lack of tolerance for certain types of painkillers. Like, say, Percocet.

“Dean?”

“Hmm?”

“You’re totally stoned right now, aren’t you?”

Dean frowned, wiggled his toes, and then nodded his head firmly. Twice. “Yep.” He blinked and frowned again. “Forgot about that.” If the noise coming out of his mouth had been coming from anyone else but Dean, Sam would have called it a giggle. It was disconcerting, to say the least.

“Hey, Dean?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

Sam hesitated: what he was thinking about doing was dirty pool. Then he stuffed down his conscience and pressed ahead. “What was it like after I left?”

That pulled Dean’s attention away from his feet. He stared at Sam, brow slightly furrowed, looking as if he was trying to translate the sentence in his head without so much as a guidebook. “Different,” he said at last, like that said everything.

“Different how?” Not for the better, Sam was sure of that. Dean’d hinted around it before, in unexpected verbal bombshells dropped in anger when they were looking for Dad, but never anything more, never anything specific. And Sam found he wanted to, needed to know, before it was too late, before there was no one left to tell him.

“It was–” The crease between Dean’s eyebrows reappeared, and he shook his head. “I dunno. Rough.”

“Rough?” He keep his voice soft and trusting, trying to coax more information from his brother’s lips.

“You know, not easy.” Dean laughed, soft and hollow. “Rough. Hard. Kinda like getting fucked, only not in the good way. You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, Dean. I do.”

Even Dad’s journal gave him just the bare outline of that time. What they hunted, where, how they killed it. Cryptic notes that never added up to much more than an accounting of salt spilled and money burned, no matter how many times Sam looked between the lines, trying to see the shape of his family there.

“The first month,” Dean said, “Dad didn’t even say your name. Not once. When I said it, he got this look on his face, like he’d been punched. After a while, I guess I stopped saying it, too.” He paused, staring up at the ceiling, not looking at Sam. “It was like you’d died. He had this picture, the one of the three of us, and I’d get back and he’d just be staring at it, like he could will you back home.

“We were out in Antelope–you know the place? Used to be some kinda cult town back when we were kids with some crazy ass name before they changed it back. Anyhow, we’re out there ’cause some guy’s going to sell Dad some of his arsenal, and the deal goes bad. Turns out, dude’d killed his whole family–wife, kids, all of them–and was trying to unload the guns. Dad, he senses something’s off. Maybe he could smell the blood or something. I dunno, I mean, you know Dad.”

The mattress creaked and groaned as Dean redistributed his weight. “So he starts asking questions. Smiling at the guy, real friendly-like. ‘Those your boys? I’ve got two myself. My youngest’s out in California.’ Asks where the guy’s kids are at. Just looking at him like he knows, man.” Dean gave another mirthless laugh. “Keeps pressing until he cracks. And I’m sitting there, and once I figure out Dad’s not just making small talk, all I can think is it figures: the first time he mentions you, and the shit hits the fan.”

“What happened?”

“Wanna hear something funny? Nothing. Not a damn thing, not then, at any rate. Guy starts crying, says he woke up two days earlier covered in blood, house still locked up tight. Wife’s in the kitchen, gunshot wound to the head. Kids are in the bed, same thing. No memory of any of it, just a week-long blank. So he panics, buries them out the back. Decides to call Dad, ’cause he’d heard that he was in the market.”

“Possession?”

“Possession, maybe some kinda spirit like in Rockwell.” Dean was quiet for a second, finally looking over at Sam. “Doesn’t matter in the end. Dude goes quiet. Stops crying, gets this look on his face, tells us we should go.

“A couple days later, Dad finds it in the paper. Murder suicide. Nothing we could have done, and hell, the poor son of a bitch is probably better off, considering, but Dad doesn’t see it that way. Starts trying to figure out how we coulda stopped it. Steps everything up a notch. Research. Training.”

Sam tried to picture it and couldn’t. “Seriously? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Yeah, well, me neither, but it turns out it was. Guess Dad really went to eleven. I mean, he’d always been focused on the job, but this was different, like that’s all there was. Made him a scary son of a bitch to be around, and you didn’t question it, no sir. Something about what happened in Antelope, it just set him off. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know what he already knew, or what he suspected. Couldn’t have been too much, or he’d have marched right in there and hauled your ass out of Palo Alto

“After a while, I guess I kinda snapped. Got sick of always being the good son. Fucked off on my own for a few days. Wasn’t there when he needed me, and it almost got him killed.”

Something inside him lurched, snapping roughly into place. “Dean–”

“Jim finally got through to me, gave me the hospital information. Dad was pretty messed up. But he wasn’t angry, you know that? Angry I could have handled. He was just quiet. Disappointed. He’d trusted me to do the job, and I’d let him down.”

‘You can’t blame yourself just because Dad went off alone and got into trouble’ died unspoken on the tip of Sam’s tongue, because it didn’t matter what he said, he knew damn well that Dean could blame himself. Could and would and always did, no matter what you told him. That Sam was around to even think of saying it was partial testament to that.

Dean had stopped by Palo Alto once, without warning, without Dad, without any reason that Sam could see. Sam had been studying, sitting in a coffee shop and nursing his third triple latte. He looked up and Dean was there, his presence bright and smothering before he’d even uttered a word. The impromptu visit didn’t last for more than an hour. At the time, it felt to Sam like days.

When he’d looked up from his textbook to find Dean sitting across from him, as brash and glib as ever, Sam had assumed that he was the only one of them who’d changed. That Dean, somehow, was static, a cautionary tale trapped in amber. Even when Dean showed up again two years later to press-gang Sam into finding Dad, he hadn’t seemed that different. Sometimes, Sam wondered how it took him so long to realize that change with Dean was never such an obvious thing. The cautionary tale part might still be right, just not the static part of it. Dean’s obsessions were different from Dad’s, and from what would become Sam’s, but that didn’t make them any healthier. See also: Cold Oak and a crossroads.

Hell, there were differences in Dean before Cold Oak and Dean now, not obvious, but still there if you stopped to think about it. He was more reckless with himself, more careful with Sam. They had slipped, Sam thought, back into roles they’d assumed years ago, ones he had thought they’d both outgrown. He understood it, realized that Dean thought he had nothing left to lose and nothing left to barter as a result if anything were to happen, but he didn’t like it.

Dean was quiet, his eyes closed. Not asleep, Sam could tell that much from the sound of his breathing. Then Dean said, almost too quietly to be heard, “I told you, you didn’t want to know.”

Sam didn’t answer, just watched as Dean slipped slowly into sleep, twitching slightly as his body and breathing relaxed, even while Sam’s tightened and tensed. It was too late now to wish things had gone differently. And where would he even start? Things had been going wrong for them since before Sam could remember. Mom, Jess, Dad: all of them gone, and Dean stepping up to make sure he was the next in line, like there was some perverse honor in damnation. Maybe he was right. Maybe there was.

Sam leaned forward, hand brushing across the rough fabric of the sheets as he grabbed hold of Dean’s wrist. It was hot beneath his fingers, not the fever heat of earlier, just the normal heat from Dean being like a radiator when he slept. Sam lifted Dean’s arm a few inches above the mattress and let it drop. There was no reaction beyond a soft snore.

Just in case. He’d boiled the bones just in case. Had carried one around in his bag this whole time, just in case, occasionally worrying it through the bloodstained fabric of the shirt whenever his research hit a new dead end.

He went to his duffel and pulled it out, spreading the shirt open, and dropping in the rest of the needed items one by one: a motel shampoo bottle, emptied out and half-filled with graveyard dirt; his money clip; and his own picture, torn from the Stanford student ID that was the last real link to the life he thought he’d have. Then he tied it all up with a shoe lace, threw a last glimpse at Dean, and left before he could change his mind or chicken out.

Crossroads were everywhere if you know where to look for them, or where and who to ask. Sam’s was an hour away, at the center of where a new subdivision would’ve been, if an injunction hadn’t stopped construction before the roads could be paved. Each corner was marked by a clump of yarrow. Sam pinched a few of the leaves between his fingers, and the night air filled for a moment with their sharp herbal scent. Then he buried the bag dead center and waited.

The distinctive click of high heeled shoes was muffled by the hard packed dirt of the road, but it was loud enough for him to know that someone or something had answered his summons. He turned and found himself facing a slim woman in a knee-length black dress.

Her hair was dark, sleek and shining even in the dim moonlight. Strong dark brows arched over huge dark eyes, luminous in her pale face. Her smile was inviting, almost conspiratorial, and far too familiar. It was almost identical to the one that Madison wore when they were alone. If he saw that face and smile from the corner of his eye, he’d have almost sworn it was her.

The voice, though, wasn’t the same at all. It was low and throaty, patronizing and smug. “Well, isn’t this a surprise. You Winchesters just don’t know when to give up and accept fate, do you? Not Daddy, not big brother Dean, and certainly not little Sam.”

“I guess not.”

“Why don’t I save you the shame of begging, sugar? It’s so good of you to think of me–don’t think I’m not flattered–but if you’ve come here for Dean, you’re wasting your time.”

“You haven’t even heard what I’m asking.”

She smiled, knife-sharp and cool. “And yet somehow, I already know I won’t give it to you. What did you think, that you could just waltz in here and undo a good faith deal? You should feel lucky I don’t just take back what I gave.”

“Not undo. Renegotiate. Your terms weren’t fair. You only gave him a year.”

“Wrong. My terms were more than fair. Bringing your precious little body back from the cold, stiff dead wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, even for me. You can’t even begin to imagine the kind of red tape something like that entails. Dean got a better offer than he should have. Way, way below dealer invoice. But go ahead, give it your best shot.”

“Okay, here it is: I could send you to hell, but we both know you’d just climb back out and take us both sooner or later. So make a deal with me, and you get two souls for the price of one with no trouble at all. You’re not giving him some talent he didn’t have before, or bringing him back from the dead. All you’re doing is holding off on collecting for a few years. Give Dean ten years, and when that decade’s up, you get both of us.”

The sharp bark of laughter echoed through the empty streets. “Try again. This isn’t some heartwarming O. Henry story; Sam and Dean, each one giving up his soul for the other and dying happy together in ripe middle age. We play by my rules, and it doesn’t work that way.”

“Then what will it take, for you to let him go?”

“Sam, Sam, Sam. There’s not a thing you could possibly offer that would make me want to do that. You want some free advice?”

“What’s that?”

She leaned in close, and he could feel her against his skin. “Enjoy your year. It’s a lot more than either of you should have had.”

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