Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Looking back, he couldn't help but see the events of that day as foreshadowing, the symbolic markers of a turning point, an axis upon which his fate would spin: the ferry ride across choppy steel grey water, during which Jack had called because he'd finished Clone Wars and had questions about mind-control murder chips which were difficult to answer with Dean sitting next to him in the car, Dean having insisted on driving on despite the walk-on fare being so much cheaper; the long climb to the once proud house on a hill long since forsaken to thickly snarling ivy and black-grimed windows opaque as demon eyes, (and if a thing looks possessed it probably is); climbing three flights of stairs and turning his back on Dean, who had been right behind him until the thirty seconds in which it would have made a difference; going alone into the second attic room where he found the black mass altar, the priest with his eyes vacant and heart plucked out, the blood staining the mirror and slowly fading from sight. Any one of these things could've been part of an ordinary day, an ordinary case, but taken together they spelled, in clichéd storytelling terms, an oncoming storm, and like always he should've known better before he bit into the proverbial fruit.

That is to say, he touched the mirror with his forefinger, tracing the vanishing blood, wondering at how fresh it was, so fresh he could feel the unmistakable blood-warmth tickling his skin, like it had only been a minute at most since someone had excavated the priest's heart with surgical exactitude.

That couldn't be right, he thought, I would've heard him scream--unless, perhaps, they had first cut out his tongue--

And then his thoughts were split between making a note to check for the tongue and a howling horrified incomprehension as he felt himself sliced in two, but not neatly down the middle, oh no, this was an evisceration, skin and muscle and bone flayed back and organs and bowels slopping out, and underneath all that was his second self, excavated like the heart had been, which was the closest and most visceral metaphor; he was removed from himself, he was leaving himself behind, he ached from his own abandonment with fear and shame and bewilderment and just a touch of relief. This was not a new experience, although he could not place the prior one for a while because he could not place anything, and when he did he woke with a scream.

He choked the scream, a thick burning lump like a hot coal, down as he became conscious of how strangely muffled it sounded, belted into cotton, like a gag, no, not a gag, softer and more giving and he could still breathe through his mouth, and Oasis was on the radio, a couple walls removed-- he recognized the lyrics to Wonderwall even though he hadn't listened to it since Stanford, since Jess had introduced him to...

With an effort of will his thoughts looped back, settled on the problem at hand, which was that he was facedown and had been screaming into a pillow like when he was a boy trying to hide the nightmares because even then he knew there was something wrong with them (with him) and he didn't want to wake the brother in the next bed, or god forbid, the father passed out on the sofa because this had been one of the 'bad days.' November 2nd. Right. But he was not a child anymore and he got his hands flat on the mattress through which he could feel the precise placement of the creaky springs, and he pushed himself up to sitting, and in the next scant seconds he had a gun in his hand which should have a witch-killing bullet in the chamber.

There was sunlight on his face and no other living being in the room, and it was a strangely mundane room to be in considering what had just happened to him had felt so like dying: greying plaster and a dusty blue quilt nailed to the wall, the only real furniture the single bed he was sitting on, duflle bags and hiker's backpack on the floor and a crank-operated radio on a camp stool. There was a closed door with no lock that he could see. A dusty haze, reddish gold dust motes blurring in sunlight stronger than he remembered seeing since they'd arrived in the Pacific Northwest. It was warmer too, much too warm to be autumn in this part of the country, humid and sticky and his arms were bare and there was sweat sticking the t-shirt he was now wearing to a body that didn't fit quite right, didn't ache in quite the right places, the places it usually would after passing out and waking so violently. His skull felt strange, too light, his scalp prickling. He picked up on a faint whiff of smoke, a distant fire. He checked the gun he'd drawn from a holster that he now was aware of where it was strapped under his arm, and yet he'd known to reach for it on thoughtless reflex, and it wasn't the same gun, wasn't any gun he'd handled before. He ran a hand over his face to make sure it was the same face. It was. He ran his hand back over his scalp and felt the jaggedly clipped scant inches of hair he'd been left with and his skull felt lighter and lighter like it might blow away like dandelion spores. Nausea quickly followed on the light-headedness. His stomach squirmed like a worm on a hook.

Someone has stolen my body and my sense of time, he thought and the thought was concretely settled even though it was a logical leap when he would usually reason things through step by step. This was, ironically enough, like some bodily instinct. It opened up a full deck of possibilities that he could sort through more methodically. Some were worse than others but he could shut down inhabiting those imaginative realities by scouring his surroundings for evidence, by treating his situation like any other case. One of the iron-clad rules of working a case was not to get ahead of yourself. He just had to remember that. One problem at a time.

The radio had a clock and the clock told him that it was approximately forty-five minutes since he'd last checked the time, when he'd been looking at his phone on the ferry. That seemed about right, calculating how long the drive had been and how long they'd poked around the house before they'd caught on that they wouldn't just be interviewing the last victim's last living family that morning.

He stood up and looked out the window, got a glimpse of trees from another part of the country, many-forked and huge and dripping in moss, and hazy thick reddish gold sunlight streaming from right over a low green hill, and then he heard the click of the doorknob behind him turning and he spun on his heel, raising the unfamiliar Colt with a half-seconds last wish that he'd gotten to raid the packs around him for alternative weapons first.

Then his eyes were blurring and his heart was leaping into his throat, lodging there thick as a knot on a tree, pulse starting to gallop with something more reckless than fear, because the first thing he saw was her hair, falling in her face in golden waves brighter than sunlight and longer than he remembered it, almost as long as in the pictures and when he first got to know her, those surreal glass-bubble first hours, and then she was flicking it back and the illusion shattered only not to something real and sure and solid, no--it was like he was slipping into a second dream, seamlessly interrupting the first, a Schroedinger's dream that in this knife-edge second could be either fantasy or nightmare.

"Didn't mean to spook you, baby," she said. "This stealth thing's a hard habit to switch off." Her voice snapped him like a rubber band, tense and wary under the thin pretense of off-handedness, like he'd never quite heard it before. Hoarser and deeper than he remembered it, too. The way her face sank into a frown was so strange he almost couldn't recognize her for a second, and somehow it was only then that he saw the scars, old and pale and blurry but unmistakably the kiss of fire.

He lowered the gun, more out of helpless resignation than anything like hope. The tense lines of her shoulders and mouth and brow eased, and she leaned against the doorway, black tank top and jeans and gun holster on her hip, the subtle bulge of a knife concealed in her hiking boot, ink on her deeply tanned arms, several sigils that he recognized and one he didn't.

She tilted her head to the side and lifted her eyebrow just slightly in the gently questioning manner he remembered, and she said, "There a reason you're looking at me like I just crawled out of my grave?"

Chapter Text

He didn't have a good answer, an answer that could cover the different possibilities of what this situation could be, if he should even be answering, if he should even accept the reality of it all so far, but luckily she--whatever she was--didn't really seem to be looking for one.

He could see that she was worried about him but not in the way she used to worry, with wide-eyes and a soft hand smoothing back his sweaty hair after a nightmare and sleep-husky voice asking him if maybe he wanted to talk about it this time, carefully concealed frown and carefully steady way she'd call his name when he'd check out of a conversation and turn his head, thinking that he'd heard the growl of an...No, here and now she was pushing her worries down with the same brisk efficiency with which she was grabbing the radio and the knife under the pillow and the hex bags from the corners of the room, stuffing them in the already bulging backpacks.

"Was it another vision?" she asked him, watching him out of the corner of her eye, sunlight glinting on the shiny ridges of her scarred cheek.

"What...? No, I don't think so."

"So nothing's changed then?" She shouldered one of the packs, and she'd always been stronger than she looked but he was definitely seeing new biceps now, new curves to her golden freckled shoulders rippling under the rippling black ink.

"Nothing," he said, thinking that she could be real, this could be another universe, another Jess. Or he was trapped in his own head and this was an illusion, unlikely as the details might seem. He was already weary from having to entertain both possibilities at once.

He grabbed a backpack and two duffle bags and he followed her out of the room and out of a small bare-bones hunting cabin into sunlight that had him squinting even when he looked at the ground, breathing in a rich summery woodsy smell laced with just an acrid itch of smoke, and he saw that the trees were valley oaks and the moss was thick and springy and the drive leading away from the cabin was more dirt than gravel, cutting through scrubland green hills and oak and aspen groves.

She had a truck, a dusty blue Ford pickup and she got behind the wheel with a quick sideways peek at him. They drove with the windows down, the silence swallowed by the rush of air funneling through the cab. A little while and they were curving around a hill and descending through an achingly quiet vineyard, dusty grey grapes withered on the vine, and she said, "You wanna pick the music?" and he startled and looked down and saw the iPod plugged into the dashboard.

He shook his head and she slowed and took one hand off the wheel and let the truck swerve onto the right shoulder while she put on a playlist of songs he hadn't heard in years or could barely recognize from snatches heard in stranger's houses or over public speakers. Music Dean would hate, in other words, because it was pretentious emo girly indie shit that had come out later than when Sam was in elementary school. She didn't talk again after that.

He peered over his shoulder when the truck hit a rough patch of road and he heard a loud rattle behind him. There were three rows of gasoline containers in the back tied down with bungee cords, at least a hundred gallons of it rocking with the truck. There were huge sacks of rock salt, too, and smaller containers of what he thought might be holy water or diesel. Or both.

He snuck quick peeks at her when he thought she wasn't looking, following the burn scars trailing along her cheek and more faintly over her jaw, one thin pinkish line that only ended at her throat. A silver chain around her neck, dangling below her clavicles, tucked under her tanktop. She was still heartbreakingly beautiful and she was now at least half a stranger to him and he had no idea what she was thinking, if she was even thinking at all, if she was even really there. Once he started looking it got harder and harder to stop.

When she finally let on that she noticed him looking at her, she spent a moment watching him study her, then she diverted her eyes, flickering to the distance in front of the truck, nothing but more miles of green hills and aspen and oaks and the occasional farm with fallow fields and hardly any livestock, but one time they did have to slow to a crawl so a bull heifer could cross the road. The farms started coming closer together, a few shabby lanes of houses, a gas station, a strip mall, still no signs of life, all accompanied by the choked dusty silence of a neglected cemetery. He watched Jess' jaw get tighter and tighter and then they came across a band of cars at a crossroads, their headlights smashed, their hoods crumpled from a hard impact, the smoke cleared and the blood dried on the pavement. No use picking through the wreckage for survivors. Those who could get out had gotten out; no one had come running to the scene of emergency. He got the picture.

They stopped outside a small hamlet in what he now recognized as Northern California. The welcome sign was burned down to the wooden stumps that used to hold it up, the grass around it charred and smokey. Jess drove right through the stop signs, not even bothering to look for oncoming traffic.

His heart leaped at that, strangely enough, taking in the clear sign of what kind of world this was. It probably wasn't a fantasy designed to ensnare him, or it wouldn't be post-catastrophe, couldn't be a nightmare designed to torment, or Jess would not be breathing next to him.

Probably. He couldn't really rate this reality until he knew where Dean could be found in it.

There weren't many bodies on the roads, just a handful out near the highway, half-decomposed, torn and bloody, bullet holes or stab wounds and one man severed in two at the waist by what device he couldn't guess. He counted seven of them as Jess guided the truck around them, careful not to hit the sun-bloated corpses, rolling over the dry pools of blood and leaving rust red tire tracks.

Jess picked a respectable two-story house near the edge of town, past a burned down elementary school and a supermarket with a Subaru sticking out of the front windows; when they passed it, Sam could see other cars inside the supermarket, the rear door of a minivan open in what he thought might have once been the bulk foods section, squirrels and crows picking over the last of the nuts and grains that had cascaded over the linoleum.

The doors and windows of the house were still in good shape, which was why she picked it, he supposed. There weren't many houses that could withstand a hoard of demons or people who were infected with the Croatoan virus or had lost their souls or suffered from whatever plagued this world, but a sturdy door and thick-paned glass would at least give them a minute or two to prepare in case they did end up with visitors.

Jess turned on the tap in the kitchen. The water that ran out was clear, but Jess pulled one of the pots out of the cupboards and filled it up before setting it on the stove to boil. She poked around and found some boxes of crackers and gingerbread cookies hidden behind cookbooks stacked above the microwave, probably stale as shit, but she stuffed a handful of crackers into her mouth anyway. Well, she had always taken expiration dates as more of a suggestion, anyway.

He watched Jess while he unpacked a bag on the table. Smith & Wesson. Colt. Bible. Salt. Hex bags. An angel's blade. A few paperbacks--The Yiddish Policeman's Union topping the stack.

"There's some food," Jess said, shoving a cookie into her mouth as she tossed her own pack down on the dusty couch in the living room. She grabbed four hex bags and tossed him a thing of chalk, and he drew all the wards he could think of on the windows for all classes of threat that he could imagine out there and he waited for her to call him out on not knowing what the hell he was doing, on being an obvious impostor, and he was half dreading it and half ready to get it over with, but she didn't.

Maybe just because he collapsed in the grip of a vision before she got the chance.

It wasn't as violent as it could have been, comparatively. It was as if there was a bank in his mind that overflowed, that was all. There wasn't enough room for all the knowledge he suddenly possessed, so some things had to drown in it, his sense of his immediate physical surroundings for one, and with them, his sense of balance. The awareness that he was on his knees in a stranger's abandoned house in a strange new world hung over him like a delicate fog as he passed through the door behind his eyes into another world within that world. It was made of light and the stark absence of light. Light everywhere, pouring onto every surface and bringing all into harsh contrast. It burned at his eyes, a world of only black lines and dazzling, incomprehensible light.

And there was the noise. Rushing, like a waterfall--thunderous. Its momentum raged and gathered, and he chased after an understanding of what he was hearing. He sensed the sounds within that horrible rushing--laughter and clashing cymbals and carousel music tinkling like shards of glass, a deck of cards being strummed and shuffled by almost inhumanly deft fingers, spiderous pale fingers, beringed in silver and opals, dealing the cards, the first card, a woman encirlced by a green wreath, a staff in each hand, watched by four heads, beasts or the true faces of the angels, the final card of the Major Arcana, the World.

A jar with a piece of someone's body, a liver or a spleen, falling on a shabby Persian carpet and soaking it in the pickling solution.

Dark eyes with pentagrams tattooed under them glaring at him from over a pool of red blood spilled on sandy red earth.

Calliope music whistling and a red velvet curtain flamboyantly drawn back and smoke and mirrors in the literal sense, a sharp flash like electric light on the edge of a razor.

A cold and hollow voice saying, "Not what I expected for such a price." The familiar feeling of the point of a knife tickling at the pulse of his throat.

When he came to, there were hands on his shoulders and he was gasping Dean's name, a desperate hope, even though as he opened his eyes he wasn't really expecting to see his brother's face. Jess' small right hand had dropped to just over his breastbone, and then was lifting away. She was pale and her jaw was tight again and there was something pained in her eyes that was deeper than worry for him. She pressed a plastic bottle into his hand. He drank the water, gulped it down his painfully dry and hoarse throat. He didn't remember screaming but it suddenly felt like he had been.

"You were out for twelve minutes," she said, voice shaking. "Shit. It was worse than that time the Druid brought it on..."

"Twelve minutes?" he rasped. He didn't think he'd ever had a vision that had knocked him out that long, before. The house could have been stormed and they both could've been killed twice over in twelve minutes.

"Was it the carnival again?" she asked.

He thought a second about the implications of 'again.'"Yeah," he said.

"No new signs? No faces?"

"None." He didn't know what to tell her, what would give him away, if he dared risk giving himself away. He grabbed the edge of the counter, pulled himself to his feet with a familiar crackling pain in his knee caps and a wrenching ache in his back. She straightened up too, far more fluidly.

Her eyes flickered, skeptical, unless he was imagining that.

"You said your brother's name," she said, very softly, and then bit at her inner lip while her brow creased, pained, like she was wishing she could take the words back.

"Why shouldn't I?" he asked, his heart beating hard and his mouth drying back up.

"Sammy, I'm not the one who staked him out as no-man's land," she said. He had a feeling then that he didn't want to know whatever more she could tell him on the subject of Dean's absence. "You know, when he--"

There was a roaring of blood in his ears. An explosive sound of shattering glass. He spun around, going for his gun with not a clue where to aim, spun around again, and got a look at Jess' stricken face, her wide appalled eyes fixed on him and only him, and it was then he realized whose fault it was that every pane in the kitchen's glass cabinets had shattered.

"Guess that hasn't changed," she said, far steadier than he'd have expected her to sound.

"I'm sorry," he said, small and shaky, panic and shame crawling like beetles over his skin.

She shook her head and turned away from him, saying, "Just try and get some rest."

Later, he slept on the couch, one of the duffle bags tucked under his head. The couch was lumpy, hard, and squeaked if he moved more than an inch, but he passed out quickly, listening to Jess' breathing across the dark living room, solid feet of mandatory physical space between them now, but she was still watching over him.

He dreamed. He didn't remember these dreams upon waking, just the shiny edges of them, little bits and pieces of the background--a sunny grin on the face of a long lost friend, a sunset Jess had started painting on their last trip to the desert and had never finished, the open arms of Joshua trees--all the important things lost to the dark recesses of this foreign brain he was squatting in.

When he woke up, Jess was already packed, sitting across the room near the fireplace, watching him as he sat up, knuckling at his eyes and scrubbing his hands over his face and his shockingly bare scalp. He let his arms rest on his knees, stretched his back to work out the kinks. His mind was disoriented but only in the way it was when he first hit the road again and woke in a motel after staying in the bunker too long, getting too accustomed to the same walls and doors and placement of weapons.

"Say a prayer we don't make any new friends today," Jess said with forced lightness, standing up from the chair while wrapping a hand around her hair and pulling it back into a ponytail. "No offense, babe, but you're still not looking like you could punch in a weight-class much above my grandma."

Inside the cab of the truck, he rested his burning forehead against the cool glass of the window. Outside, the flattening farmland beside the car speeding by in a blur, he could see the movement of bodies in the distance.

Chapter Text

Sam's arm dropped and he stepped back from the mirror, a lightness coming over him that was at first all but unbearable and then was far more than bearable: it was sweet soothing relief; it was checking into a motel after driving twelve hours straight; it was the one painkiller that finally put a stop to the migraine he'd been nursing all day; it was the cessation of hours-- days, weeks, years--of torture and the moments when euphoria flooded the body before the fear and despair of knowing it would start all over again ground it into dust.

He felt so much better now, the kind of better you could only feel when you hadn't known what ailed you until it had been cured and then you were made to wonder how you could have lived for so long in that condition.

The blood had vanished from the mirror. His soul had left his body. It was unmistakable, this time. The first time had been too disorienting, too inexplicable, no landmarks but the immediate familiar/unfamiliar sense that something was wrong inside him, and he couldn't stop picking at it, couldn't stop pushing at the boundaries of it and snapping back even when he encountered no boundaries; he couldn't quite trust his own nature still, couldn't quite trust his own instincts over what others had told him about himself, not until it was too late anyway.

He remembered waking up on wide twilit grey prairie and yelling at the horizon for answers from Cas or God or Dean and then when they weren't forthcoming he went looking for them, first to Dean's doorstep and then to the Campbells, the last family and the last tie to the past he had, and then despite all his quite rational reservations back to Dean again, still hoping to learn something about what he was; so really you could say curiosity had been his first sin, the thirst for too much self-knowledge his downfall.

He didn't want to repeat those mistakes, but still, he could not be grateful for his liberation in peace. It was a side effect of some black magic ritual involving a cursed mirror. Curses could often prove volatile. He had no guarantee it would stick. He had to investigate the curse, the caster. He had to continue working this case.

Dean was calling his name. Dean would find him out and then he would be as good as dead, in a manner of speaking. He had a gun and the element of surprise. He could kill Dean first. He didn't particularly want to anymore than he ever had, but he gave the idea due consideration in the name of self-preservation. Dean was the greatest threat to him in the universe because no one would ever be more dedicated to forcing him back into that miserable psychological straitjacket than Dean. There was no more important key to his freedom than escaping from Dean.

But maybe not yet. He should think it through first, soberly and carefully. He wasn't an animal, after all.

He hadn't gotten to the cons of killing Dean yet when Dean burst into the room and he had to immediately dress his face in the kind of horror and sympathy Dean would expect to see him wearing around a butchered priest. It wasn't that difficult. He only had to think about it and his facial muscles remembered and he only had to put a little added effort into pulling them into place.

"Poor bastard," he said. "This looks really fresh. Must've happened just minutes before we got here."

"Killer could still be in the house," Dean said, sounding pleased about it despite that they had only a very vague theory of what had done the killing. Witches and vindictive hexes and something to do with the unusually lingering fog. They were armed with witch-killing bullets and not much else.

"Not the same killer that scratched up the others victims." He pointed at the excavated heart, lying in a dark red pool on the pale dust-caked floor, so fresh he could almost think he'd see it beat if he leaned close enough.

"Some ritual shit," Dean said, and his eyes flicked to the mirror but didn't linger. "Must've been used for something--probably the witch that cursed the others needed a little extra juice."

"Maybe," he said.

It was a reasonable conclusion, of course, but he wasn't sure he wanted Dean following up on curses pertaining to this room. But then what did he want Dean around for if not to work the case? If not to bounce ideas off of like they always had because it was routine and familiar and he worked best within routines?

It was unforgivable weakness to think of depending on him even for a moment. He had to start planning his exit.

The wallpaper was peeling, paper printed with blood-dark roses and thick thorny vines; at least what little could be seen of it beyond the crates and other furniture stacked against the walls. He swept the floorboards with his eyes and rolled up the one carpet, a frayed hallway runner, then let it roll back into place. No sigils, no lettering of any kind that he could see. Not even any candles. The sole light source was the one window, high and with no latch, not that that would be an obstacle to a fleeing witch with the power to trap souls in mirrors and murder half a dozen people.

He checked out the body again and this time noticed that the priest's hands were soaked in blood, presumably his own as he struggled vainly to keep his heart inside his cracked ribcage. His cassock was neatly fitted and in good condition aside from all the blood, not even missing any buttons, as if it had been all neatly unbuttoned before his heart had been cut out. He noticed stiff peaks in the ripples of the cassock where it spread away from his calves, and he pulled back the hem, which was stiff with blood. Underneath it was a thick puddle and in that puddle were a large pair of pliers and a shining silver knife with a shining white bone handle. Sam picked up the knife, straightened to hold it to the meager grey light.

"Real sloppy," Dean said. "Leavin' that behind. Unless he's lurkin' on the premises, thinkin' he's gonna jump us and come back for it. C'mon."

Sam had nothing better to do with it than slip the blood-soaked magic knife into his innermost jacket pocket. He pulled out his gun. He stared at the back of Dean's head as Dean led the way out of the room. It would be best to have strength in numbers when confronting the witch who had placed a powerful blood curse on the town and stolen the soul right out of his body. He would stick with Dean for another hour or two. Extra muscle. It made sense.

It took longer than he had expected to search the house. It had been built by a timber baron in the 1890s and stayed in the family even generations after the company had gone under and it had become a debt-ridden ball and chain for a legacy. It was not in the best state of repair, a particular problem when it came to turning on the lights. Half the bulbs had burned out, the rest were palely flickering and they hadn't brought flashlights which was stupid, they should have anticipated this. It made poking around a more tedious task; they had to get up close and personal with every corner of every room just in case. They found nothing in room after room except furniture pushing fifty at the least, mildewy and threadbare and motheaten drapes and upholstery, cobwebs and carpets of dust; the rooms to show signs of recent habitation were one bedroom which Sam guessed to have been a guest room, one bathroom, and the kitchen where a toaster oven and a radio at least looked like they'd been purchased in the last decade. It was as if the man had been a squatter in his own old family home.

The only other thing of interest was a utility closet just off the entrance to the cellar, which Sam swung open and would have swung shut within the same breath had Dean not said, "Wait."

He was pointing at the bottom half of the closet door, where a silvery pale sliver of daylight had filtered from the window at the end of the hall, just barely delineating scratch marks in the wood. Sam ran his fingertips over them and found they were shallow and blunt, fingernails not claws, and small, tiny nails belonging to tiny hands, reaching no more than four feet high. A child.

"Oh Jesus," he said, breathy and tense, because he was quite sure this was the sort of thing he was supposed to be shaken by. "What the hell did these people do?"

"C'mon," Dean said, only a little terser than he'd been lately. "It's just gonna get darker and we gotta call this one in. Hope that the autopsy will tell us somethin' about somethin' 'cause otherwise we're right back hittin' the wall where we started."

They got out to the driveway and Dean dug through the glovebox for a spare burner phone, called up park services to report an illegal garbage fire. Let them discover the body and call the cops and they'd be well away from the scene by then.

Then a Subaru came rolling up the drive, so much for not being spotted at the scene of the crime. The man who got out was grey and balding and pale and had deep worry lines around his eyes and mouth that were making him look further along in years than he probably was. He was very thin, papery jowls sagging from his sharp jutting cheek bones. He was wearing jeans and a plaid jacket but underneath was a shirt with a clerical collar. Another priest then.

They walked up to him, flashing fake badges, Dean barking a gruff order at him. "This is a crime scene now, you need to get off the premises.''

"What happened to him?" the priest said shakily, obviously already anticipating the answer, so at least here was someone who knew something about something.

"He's dead," Sam said, enacting all his best sympathetic facial ticks. "We're so terribly sorry. Did you know him well?''

"Oh, Thomas," the man sighed, and it was appropriate degrees of shock and grief for a close friend but there was an undertone to it, a harsher note--recrimination. "How did it happen?"

"Can't say what'll be released to the public yet," Dean said.

"You're in a state of shock," Sam said, deliberately deepening the wrinkles on his forehead. "You should take some time to process. You don't need to hear the details now when so much is still uncertain. Believe me, knowing just enough to get your imagination revving will only cause you more pain. But I can promise that we'll keep in touch. Where can we find you?"

"He was a student of mine at Widdlesworth Seminary. You can find me there. Here--I'll give you my card."

They caught the next ferry back and on the boat Sam got out and was stretching his legs on the top deck, watching the dark smoky fog which had cleared for only a few hours after midday trail the ferry towards the cove, and letting his options turn over and over in his mind like he was making butter out of them, when Jack called again. Automatically, he picked up.

Orphan Black was apparently the next thing in Jack's Netflix queue.

"The clones are completely different people," Jack somehow felt the need to tell him, "even though their genetic makeup is identical."

"All totally fuckable, though, right," he said, hoping to derail any questions about identity or moral philosophy Jack was building towards. "Hey, which combo would you most like to--"

"What? No." Jack sounded mildly puzzled. "I'm not aroused by looking at Tatiana Maslany. I'm only admiring her skill at pretending to be different people. The clones are different people because their experiences have made them who they are and formed different ideals and ethics and relationships. Relationships are very important."

"Good boy," he said. "You get a gold star in Intro To Humans."

"Is something the matter with you? You sound...different."

"God, no. I've never been better than I am at this exact moment."

"Okay, I'm pleased to hear that. But how? Was there magic involved?"

"Was I that much of a sadsack that the only way you could imagine me lightening up is if I huffed some magic dust?"

"Probably," Jack said. "I don't really know you that well. I only know the things you tell me."

"Welcome to the family, kiddo," he said. "Gotta go. Look, you know better than to say anything about magic around Dean right? You know how mad that'd make him? What am I saying. 'Course you do." He hung up.

Their destination was just off the coast, a town with a traditional seaside Americana name, something like Mary or Bethany's Cove. They docked in the evening chill under a cold cobalt sky, and drove off with the fog rolling after them, thin silvery vapors clinging like cobwebs when they would usually burn off by morning. The fog had been like this every day of the week they'd been here. Sam had read everything he had cataloged on unnatural fogs to no avail. They stopped at a gas station on the other side, a quiet highway between two hills, tall thick red cedars creeping in at the edge of the asphalt, old mountain trees contemptuously throwing their shadow over the feeble arclights and neon signs, and Sam had that niggling suspicion that he would turn and see the glint of eyes from within the shadows and mist, something ancient and seldom seen crouched between the roots, so he got out of the car and looked around, but he saw nothing but a passing white van with a crayola bright galaxy spray painted on its side.

"Hey, dude, what," Dean said flatly, and Sam turned and saw him with the nozzle dripping in his hand and one brow lifted and his lips pursed, but his eyes were vacant and disinterested. He had almost forgotten how fucked up Dean had been lately, one of his periodic spells when he was tired and bitter or drunk and insensible over a bad hand of fate or maybe it was life, just life finally penetrating through his bullshit bravado, or whatever.

"Just got spooked, I guess." He shoved his hands in his pockets with an embarrassed hunch. "Hearing noises."

"So you got out of the car 'cause you're goin' for slasher flick bingo? We already did 'split up in a spooky house,' what's next? Dark alley walk of shame?"

He smiled sheepishly, thinking that he could put a bullet through Dean's head right here, stuff his body in the truck, and get away with it for good. Who would come after him? Who really gave that much of a shit about his brother's life other than himself? And why should he care anymore?

"Hey, watch it, you're spillin' gas on your shoes," he said instead, and Dean finally hung up the nozzle.

Haste could be almost as dangerous as curiosity. He would have the whole sleepless night ahead of him to make up his mind.

Chapter Text

The silver lining of the day was, this world wasn't entirely dead aside from them. The figures he spotted walking across fields or occasionally far ahead on the highway were always too blurred by distance for him to make out whether or not they constituted a threat, but as they always got clear of the road before the truck came within hailing distance and Jess said nothing about them Sam surmised these were the lone straggling survivors of whatever had rendered their hometown an open mass grave.

They drove south under clear blue skies and through more of the same golden and green and summery yet still desolate farm country, and by around noon they were in another town, a town papered with tattered missing posters and trash rotting on the curbs since whenever the garbage trucks had stopped picking up, and a lot of the stores had broken windows and a lot of the houses had their windows boarded up and some had barbed-wire barricades cutting across their lawns, but there were still living breathing people driving on the streets or scurrying in and out of stores and while they looked skittish and ragged and smelled sour and sweaty, like probably water wasn't freely available for proper showers and laundering, they hadn't all given over to looting and fire and madness, not that could be immediately perceived anyway.

These people had formed a militia, and that militia pulled them over onto the highway shoulder between the welcome sign and the first gas station with its neon lights on, driving a Jeep Cherokee and packing semi-automatics and holy water and a big wooden cross.

They were spritzed with holy water bottles and chanted at in garbage Latin that Sam itched to correct and given an unhygienic dental and eye examination, but otherwise went unmolested. Sam's eyes never strayed from Jess while this was happening but she was only a fraction more tightly wound than she had been since he'd awoken here, her hand twitching into a fist only once, when the first man stepped within two feet of her.

Afterwards, they had a late lunch in a diner. The smell of sizzling cuts of ham and gooey melted cheese and hot coffee drifting out of the kitchen, background clinking cutlery and lazy conversation and the waitress taking the orders of the people at the next booth, and as long as he ignored the radio chatter beneath that, somebody talking about another natural disaster that nature had nothing to do with, it could feel like he had drifted inside a magic bubble, another world within a world, and if the early afternoon sunlight filtered in just right and blurred Jess' face and hair just enough, this could almost be another beautiful dream of when they were young and had their whole lives ahead of them.

On the radio, the newscaster said, "Ninety-eight hundred presumed dead as Houston continues to burn." The brightside was, there was still a newscaster to tell them the number of dead. The brightside was, Jess wasn't one of them. He wished he could savor that, just for a moment. But he couldn't.

He had to return to Dean. If he had been transported to a parallel universe, as seemed increasingly the only explanation that fit, that left Dean behind in the old one, alone. Alone with Jack, and he couldn't stand to imagine the possible consequences of Dean being alone with Jack, not at length, not right now when he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

He hoped Jody would check in on them soon.

The fried ham was slightly charred and tasted ashy on his tongue. He burned his tongue on his coffee, trying to get the taste out of his mouth.

"You can't tell me a single other thing about that carnival?" Jess asked him. "Or the desert. Y'know any background detail could help, even the tiniest thing has done it enough times..."

"I'm trying," he said. "But the more I try and remember, the more it slips away. Could you--maybe you could jog my memory. Just talk about it. What I told you after the first vision."

"I drew it for you," she said, "don't you remember?" She made the question soft and fervent, like she was really afraid he might not remember. She reached into the pack she'd put under the table and she drew out a sketchbook and her eyes swerved, scoping the room again, and then she flipped the notebook open and laid it on the table in front of him.

The first thing he noticed was that she'd gotten better at the quick sketch when she'd used to be so frustrated with timed drawing sessions, back when they'd been in a live drawing class together. Patience had been one of her weaknesses as an artist. If she didn't like how a project was going and it stubbornly refused her first attempts to correct it, she had a tendency to ditch it.

He was looking at the drawing and she leaned across the table and used her fork to steal a bite of his coleslaw. He didn't remember her even liking coleslaw.

She chewed it slowly, swallowed. He narrowed his eyes at her and she grinned, broad and sunny and causing a painful kick in his gut

On the page he saw Joshua trees and cacti, a finely shaded stretch of scrubland for a backdrop. A curtained booth and several striped tents, an organ grinder's monkey, and a row of cages, which if drawn in anything like proportion to the trees and tents were large enough to hold grown men, but what was within them was sketched in sinuous bands of shadow, except for the bright white lights of their staring eyes. Another tarot card was the thing drawn in the most painstaking detail, the focal point. Beneath a star-spangled canopy, a tall figure in armor riding in a chariot pulled by two crouching sphinxes, one black and one white. The Chariot, seventh in the Major Arcana. A decision to make, a challenge to overcome, a balance to maintain.

He strummed the pages of her sketchbook with his thumb, just a flashing peek to see that the preceding pages were covered in more graphite shadings and bold charcoal lines, and he wasn't sure he wanted her to watch him viewing for the first time what else she had drawn, illustrations of whatever other visions he had had, and so he put that aside for later.

"I saw another card," he said. "from the Major Arcana. The World. I saw a man with tattoos under his eyes. I saw a puddle of blood on desert sand."

He had this creeping sensation that was right next door to déjà vu, one universe over, because in another life he'd had the chance to tell her about his dreams that weren't just dreams and he hadn't taken it and now she was dead.

The newscaster on the radio was saying something about the last of the refugees from the Houston fires being turned away at the Mississippi barricades.

"Symbolism everywhere and still not a fucking highway sign," Jess said, sighing, turning her head out the window and resting her chin on her knuckles, her elbow on the table. He studied her profile, from this angle showing only minuscule differences from how he remembered her. New bright brown freckles on her cheekbone and fine laugh lines at the corner of her eye. Her t-shirt covered her arms to the elbow, he couldn't see her tattoos.

Beneath the table, Jess' boot brushed against his. Guilt squirmed in his stomach at this stolen intimacy but he didn't pull away.

They went to the grocery store, the nearest one that was still open, and it was a small local market and the shelves were about as well stocked as could be expected from a world besieged by apocalyptic forces. They bought bulk bags of nuts and dried fruits and canned beans and vegetables and a big canister of protein powder. The only cashiers were an elderly pair, probably the store's owners, who smiled dimplingly and said, "God bless your hearts," while bagging their groceries.

They found a motel that still had a few red neon letters blinking on the vacancy sign, and Jess insisted they check in even though the price of doing so was bartering away one of their canisters of diesel. The clerk raked his eyes over Jess like he was looking for just one tell of weakness to try and barter getting his meaty red hands on her even with Sam looming right over her shoulder, but Jess' hand hovered obviously by her gun and he didn't try it.

"You need to take the time to get your strength back," Jess said when he said that they could've tried to find another house to squat in or else just slept in the truck. "Otherwise it could be like New Orleans all over again."

"I'm fine," he said, and physically it was mostly true. He had an ache behind his eyes and between his shoulder blades, but that was nothing, really. Didn't bother him nearly as much as the strange lightness of his scalp now that it was short a few inches of hair. She snorted, loud and mocking, flipping her still long and lovely hair off her shoulder, and grabbed his hand to pull him into the room. Familiar slim long fingers curled strong and tight around his, unfamiliar calluses on her palms. Another stolen moment of careless intimacy because she had no way of knowing that he wasn't really himself, that he was a stranger to her, a stranger who had slipped inside this skin and inside her life because of some trick of dubious magic, and such tricks always came at a cost, and this was all a tenuous illusion that could collapse at any moment and all another dangerous secret he was keeping from her just because he couldn't stand having her look at him like he feared she would when she learned the truth.

He knew then that he ought to tell her. Instead, he let her tow him along and he tried to do what she expected him to do a little while longer.

The motel room had a coffee pot. He made some and he made himself choke it down even though it made the cup he'd had in the diner seem full-bodied and fresh, and Jess made him recount his vision again with as much fine detail as he could possibly muster while she sketched the imagery in her book.

He'd always loved watching her draw. It brought him back to the moment he'd first met her, in that contemporary art course Brady had made him enroll in. It was the look of absolute absorbed concentration pulling the beautiful lines of her face taut. It was her teeth pinching at her bottom lip. It was the shape of her thigh as she bent one leg up to prop the sketchbook against her knee. It was the way a thick lock of her hair drifted into her eye and she flicked her head irritably and he itched to smooth it back behind her ear but he didn't.

Afterwards, she handed her sketchbook over to Sam and she turned on the TV and flicked past the news broadcasting on nearly every station to some stupid game show with c-list celebrity contestants doing humiliating stunts for some charity. So some parts of this world were still rolling along well enough to air this, while in other parts rotting corpses were being left to the crows on the streets and thousands of refugees were being turned away and condemned at state-wide barricades.

Stranger by far, he was staying in a motel room with dingy blue checkered wallpaper, a bunny-eared TV, blisteringly bitter coffee and Jess. Last time he'd thought he'd shared a motel room with her, it had been Lucifer wearing her skin. Last time he'd felt the ground shift like this under his feet, he'd been watching his mom get herself set up in a room in the bunker like she'd been there to stay. Which she hadn't been.

He made himself look at the sketchbook.

"Yeah, this is it," he said, and couldn't help but add, "You're amazing." It was true, the images on the page almost as vivid as they'd been in his head. But she'd once drawn the faces of her friends and painted bright morning landscapes and flowers, zinnias and rose cacti her favorites, and now when he flipped the pages of her sketchbook all he could see were his nightmares.

"Flattery won't feed the starving artist," she said, and he looked up and saw she was counting the thin fold of cash left in her blue denim wallet. "Long as we're in a place that still half runs on dough,'' she said, "we should hit a bar and try and hustle."

The words sounded so odd coming out of her mouth he just stared for a minute.

"I don't know," he said. "Seems like a dangerous town, lot of desperate people..."

She raised both brows. "You kidding me? Local militia didn't even charge admission. These people are marshmallows and we could make s'mores out of them. God knows when we'll next have getting this good."

They drove around for half an hour before they found a dive on the edge of the inhabited part of town that was still open, and Jess told him sternly not to hover too much and on no account to give into chivalric impulses before they even crossed the threshold.

Jess was exactly the kind of leggy and curvy and wide-eyed California blonde who only had to giggle and hiccup over a dirty Shirley to get sized up as a ditz, a bimbo, an easy mark, easy prey by a gang of guys who were hungry to buy her a shot or two or three and to tell her they'd go easy on her at the pool table if she'd go easier on them later. Sam just had to be the muscle, the backup when one of them wasn't letting her walk away with her thick wad of winnings, a red meaty hand grabbing her upper right arm, but she twisted and jabbed the heel of her left hand into his throat before Sam could shoulder through the bodies that had pressed between them.

A stunned silent second later Sam saw his first demon in this universe, when a man's eyes flashed crossroad's red across the bar. Jess must've spotted him first because she was pushing Sam down, out of the way, even before he could see the gun. The bullet smashed into the wall behind him, sent a shower of particleboard down over the booth, and he blinked grit from his eyes.

The second shot shattered the leg of a bar stool right in front of his nose, tipped it over, and then Sam was moving without thinking, grabbing Jess by the arms and hauling her in front of him, pushing her towards the door. The bar was clearing out, people scrambling for the door after the first shot was fired, and even had it not been so fucking dark without that one overhead light he didn't know how he was supposed to sort out the rest, make sure he wasn't shooting anything demonic. He didn't have Ruby's knife anyway, didn't think they had anything until he saw the flash of a long silver blade in Jess' hand, an angel's blade.

They were about six feet of clear pavement from the truck when the demon's hiss sliced the air and a sensation like a burning desert wind blew right into Sam's body and then harmlessly passed through him even while Jess was yanked off her feet and tumbled through the air to slam against the truck's door hard enough that a metallic percussive clang rang in Sam's ears. He was frozen long enough to see her get her hands and knees under her, to see that she was still moving, and then he spun to meet the demon, lean and wiry and with, he now saw, a black arrow tattooed under his red right eye.

"You fuckers fuckin' got out of fuckin' New Orleans? Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?"

The demon seemed genuinely astonished and was just a little too slow to raise the gun again, sluggish enough that Sam could grab his wrist and duck behind his arm, and then scuffle at close quarters for a desperate minute in which the demon's skull thwacked into his nose and blood dripped into his mouth, and the demon was smaller and quicker and stronger and he didn't have much hope of holding on for long, didn't have a weapon that could finish this, and he didn't want to try to bring the demon closer to Jess even to get her blade.

Luckily, Jess had no such compunctions. The bright streak of her hair in the corner of his vision as she shouted his name was all the warning he had of what she was about to do, and he got the demon's gun hand pinned and let go of the other arm to get in a hard and hopefully disorienting blow to his head so the demon wasn't looking when Jess sank the blade into his heart. Sam stared into her face, holding the demon through his death throws, saw her snarling bared teeth and her unrecognizably cold blue eyes and the blood dripping from a scrape at her temple and the burn scars on her cheek flashing shiny as new pennies, and he felt the sparks of angelic magic burning away the last lingering life in the demon, colder and cleaner than the magic in the demon knife, and the two together sent a thrill through him that was an exquisite fusion of pleasure and pain.

"Why're you looking at me like that?" Jess said, sharp and just slightly wary, after he let the body drop. "Like you think I'm gonna go black eyed next?"

He shook his head, missing the way his hair should have fallen into his eyes, said, "It's not you. I'm. I just. There's something I gotta talk to you about."

"Yeah, I've been getting that feeling for days, so you'd better nut up and spill already," she said, but her face softened until the only thing pulling at her lips was a worried frown. Her fight-tousled hair shining under the yellow moon and arc lights, long strands whipped across her brow, a gold coronet, a halo. She blinked as a drop of blood trickled into her eye, rubbed it away with her thumb. "But we can take a raincheck till we get the hell out of Dodge. C'mon, Sammy."

They fled the scene.

Chapter Text

Possible avenues he could go down yawned wide in the night and Sam still had to extricate himself from his current situation. He had a case to work and the reasonable suspicion that somewhere a clock was ticking down on his current reprieve from hobbling conscience and unbearable misery. He had a murder weapon, which he suspected was also an immensely powerful boline knife, stashed in his pocket. He and Dean had eaten dinner at a hole-in-the-wall fish fry diner. Afterwards, he had expected Dean to take all the initiative in finding a bar and getting wasted and passing out so that Sam wouldn't have to fake sleep or a reason for insomnia, and would have those precious dark solitary hours ahead to his own devices, but instead Dean said that they should go back to the morgue and check out the second-to-last son and victim of the Huntsman family. Sam couldn't object, not with his recent history of accommodating Dean's whims, pussyfooting around trying not to upset him more than he already was with Jack's continued existence and his inability to align his grief and despair with Dean's, not when he was still following the script of what-would-Dean's-little-brother-Sammy-do, which he was, for reasons he hadn't fully rationalized yet.

Sam rolled the stretcher under the lamp and pulled away the sheet that covered the body.

"Could be a daeva," Dean said. "We're both thinkin' it was Tommy, right? He summoned somethin' to dish some back on his fucked-up family, or maybe he just meant it for the old man and it got outta his control, and daeva's have been known to do that. Whatever it is didn't like bein' leashed. Figure it might've done him in with his own knife."

"You brought us back here so you could air that theory?" Sam tried to modulate his tone to little-brother-peevish, still with an undercurrent of interest in what more Dean might have to say. "If he's summoned and been controlling a daeva up till yesterday, we would've found at least the remnants of his altar and we didn't."

Dean shrugged, an irritating ripple in the corner of Sam's eye.

"House barely looked liked he'd even been squatting in it. Maybe he had himself a manwitch cave he could get away to, God knows, if we'd inherited a place like that I'd be less than enthusiastic about setting up shop on the premises, and that's not even talking about that closet out of A Child Called It."

Eric Huntsman. a fisherman, had been a big man in life: just under six feet but broad, sturdy bones and the thick musculature of someone whose job involved a lot of reeling and hauling. Sandy brown hair and white skin so different from the chapped red of the pre-mortem photos. In other words, the precise opposite of his brother, the maybe magic priest.

Dean's warm breath brushed Sam's face when he leaned in for a closer look. The gash that picked up Dean's attention was the middle one of a set of three across his chest and shoulders, so deep that the white plate of the shoulder blade gleamed through the wound. The body'd been drained and washed and the meat and bones had that inhumanly sterile look, a true empty shell.

Dean rolled the body to its side so he could look at its back. When he let the body roll back to its face-up position, it fell against the metal with a dull thud. Sam glanced at the door, concerned for a second that they were about to be discovered, that someone would be listening in on them, would have overheard too much. He had the feeling that he was being watched, a keen and reasonable instinct that he trusted, but what was to be done about it?

Sam took a step back from the gurney, away from the circle of light the lamp cast. He watched as Dean cupped a hand over his nose and mouth, presumably because the smells of formaldehyde and death were starting to get to him. Sam imitated him, breathing in his own moist breath, which smelled sourly of stale coffee.

"This is a waste of time," Sam said and shrugged at Dean's raised eyebrow. "Okay. Say you're right? The priest summoned one of a thousand different monsters to get revenge for whatever shit his family had it coming for, but his great white slipped the leash and ate his heart out. Poetic justice. But if so we should forget the bodies, practically anything could've shredded them this way. What we need is to find what our black magic priest used in his summoning spell, which means we should be spending all our time tracking down his sanctum sanctorum. We don't need to know another thing about his victims. It's too late for them. If there's another attack, it's gonna be random, it'll only be because when you invite evil into your world it doesn't just slither back down its hole when it's gotten the job done."

Grudgingly, Dean nodded, said, "You could be right." He stepped closer to the gurney, lowered the lamp so that it cast its light right above the guy's chest."C'mere."

They both bent over the body. Sam scrunched up his face, because he still had the muscle-memory of flinching when he got within inches of dead bodies.

"What are you looking for?" Sam asked, and he couldn't keep the challenge out of his tone..

"Just look, would you," Dean said, sharp. Sam let himself roll his eyes in exasperation and perhaps just a little too much disdain, but Dean wasn't looking. He kept looking at the skin, instead, and Sam did the same. Dean calling the shots again, and he had a wary itch at that, a keen awareness of how easily it could become routine and habit and hard to break out of.

The dead man's skin was a bluish hue, maroon with broken vessels where the bruising was, around the pectorals – probably when whatever had attacked him had thrown him against the shore's big rocks or the hull of his boat and he hadn't entirely bled out yet. Broken nails with splintered wood and sand buried underneath, probably in a vain attempt to crawl away from the attacker. Other than the claw marks and the Y incision from the coroner's scalpel, those were the corpse's only distinguishing features.

Dean had rolled the body back over and was inspecting the back again, his gaze travelling lower and lower down its spine, latex finger tracing the indent and Sam was tempted to make a crack about him feeling up a dead guy, but resisted, and then Dean's finger was swirling around a birthmark, no, a cluster of moles, no, a slick black tattoo, no, nothing so natural.

"Here," he said, and Sam bent to look closer. The mark was was made of two mirroring crescent shapes, pointed at the tips. "Usually revenge curses will leave a brand on their victims," he said.

"There was nothing about a brand in the coroner's reports, not for any of the other victims."

"Well, it's real subtle, maybe could've been mistaken for the kinda mole he really should've gotten checked out, maybe didn't really seem worth documenting in detail next to the obvious cause of death. I just had this feeling, y'know, that we might've overlooked something."

Irritation that he had missed this, had missed looking for something like this, swelled in Sam's skull like a blood pustule. That and the unsettling reminder that Dean did have his uses, that there was a concrete practical reason that he had relied on Dean so often and for so long.

"Take a picture," Dean told him.

Sam didn't say anything. He turned to the lamp, arranged it at an angle that pleased him, and took a picture with his cell.

They left the morgue the same way they'd entered: through a small window in the basement. The lock had been ridiculously easy to pick considering the facility was in a government building. Sam went first, crawled through it and onto the sidewalk and then turned to help Dean. But Dean was already halfway out and he ignored Sam's outstretched hand, maybe carelessly, maybe because Sam had pissed him off, hadn't played his part quite well enough. On the way back to the car, Sam paced his steps to Dean's, even more closely than usual.

The fog was thick as ever, driving to the motel, wrapping up the Impala thick and cottony as a cocoon, and it was too white and bright as true pearls for a night with no moon. Soundgarden in the tape deck, singing, "Seize the day, pull the trigger. Drop the blade and watch the rolling heads."

Sam was thinking about his need for a principle around which he could organize his life, because he had no intention of being an animal, a debased thing enslaved to appetite and impulse, as so many people seemed to be when they lost their souls. He had no desire to follow the dictates of what Dean would do or what Fred Rogers would do, or the tenets of Kant or Kierkegaard or Seneca, but he did recognize the need for an interior voice that could act as critic and monitor, the need for a double self.

In their motel room Dean spent maybe fifteen minutes checking on the laptop screen over Sam's shoulder while Sam scrolled through an extensive index of magical killings that had left a signature mark on their victims, and then Dean's mood took an abrupt downturn and he turned on the TV to some stupid game show with celebrity contestants engaged in ritualistic public humiliation for charity or some shit, and he was drinking, finally, but far too slowly; at this rate it could take him till 1:00 am to pass out. Sam's research was also going nowhere fast: the mark at the dip of the man's spine was small and indistinct and easily mistakable for all the other signatures and symbols it almost resembled--a pair of scythes, a pair of crescent moons, open arms. He shut his laptop and dredged up a decent rendition of a weight-of-the-world sigh. He got up and he got Dean's bottle of Jack and he poured himself a finger.

"Man, I just can't stop it racing through my head," he said. "That whole family's been wiped out now. Just gone...in what, a week and a half? We couldn't save even one of 'em. But hell, maybe that's lucky. 'Cause you can imagine what'd it be like for the only one to make it out alive,all that survivor's guilt eating him alive for the rest of his life. Especially if it was their own son--brother, nephew, cousin, whatever--that did 'em all in. Do you really think he could've meant to do it? I dunno. Sick abusive bastards, obviously, what with, y'know, the way so many people we've talked to seem in a hurry to forget them. And whichever of their kids had to claw their nails bloody in that closet. But still. His brothers, his sister. Did he really get satisfaction out of them getting torn apart?"

"Maybe," was all Dean said, his mouth twisting downward, a muscle in his jaw ticking, and then he was drinking with single-minded purpose and satisfaction was burning bright in Sam at how smoothly he'd played his part, had gotten under Dean's skin. Maybe it wouldn't be as difficult to keep Dean in check as he'd thought.

He pulled out the knife and laid it on a newspaper on the kitchenette table, ran a cleaning rag under the tap, washed the blood off the blade. The ivory handle was smooth and cylindrical and unmarked, the blade a shiny silver sickle, the image inscribed on it so finely traced he had to turn the blade at just the right angle from the overhead LED to study it. An angel--no, a woman with butterfly wings. Psyche, he thought, the goddess or personification of the soul. He turned the blade over and read the goddess' name in Greek letters on the other side, ψυχή, which was derived from the verb 'to blow' and could mean soul or breath of life or mind. So there was a goddess involved, potentially, and a Greek one, at that, which was less than welcome news as Greek gifts rather famously were the kind of horse you really ought to look in the mouth.

"Whatcha got there?" Dean said, slurring.

"Nothin,' just a fancy pigsticker," Sam said, shrugging. This was where his real interest lay. He was mildly divertingly curious about the cause of death for the other members of the Huntsman family; he did not like a puzzle to go unsolved but it would have to take a back seat to the far more pressing case he was working, which was about saving his own, well, his psyche he supposed, in the modern usage. That was why he had to find the workshop of whoever had enchanted that mirror and had to learn their secrets concerning how and why and whether it was permanent.

He drew out the second item he had collected that day, the card with the address of the Widdlesworth Seminary printed on it. And on the back, dashed off in smudgy blue ink--

Dear Winchesters,

I am willing to cooperate.

Chapter Text

There was a case to be made for waiting for Dean, so that he could have backup when he confronted what he theorized was most likely a powerful and well-connected witch. He could wait until morning for the extra muscle and the extra set of eyes and the extra set of guns.

The argument against was that he had his own agenda to pursue and an uncertain timetable within which to pursue it. Still, he wasn't rushing in blindly, on impatience and instinct. He would first confront the witch(?) with Dean watching his back so that he could assess how big of a threat he was and then, if necessary, he would return on his own and complete the interrogation on his own terms.

Right now, the advantage was all in the witch(?)'s corner. He had anticipated them, he knew at least some grapevine-translated lore about them. He had the high ground. Sam wasn't even sure he was a witch. He could be a demon, perhaps the demon from which their suspect, the last Huntsman son, had gained the power to cast his curse or summon his monster. Perhaps, considering the inscription on the knife, he might even be a god or the acolyte of a god.

Sam googled Widdlesworth Seminary and found the witch(?) and priest's photo top and center on the faculty page. Father John Notaras, allegedly aged sixty-seven years. Notaras was a Greek surname of some minor historical interest. Further digging uncovered that John Notaras had a facebook page and a bank account and credit-card records and a mortgage on a beach house and car payments. If he was a witch or a god, he was a fiscally responsible one who did his taxes. Or he was possessed. He'd resided in this state and this town and this seminary for seventeen years and there wasn't a shadow of a hint of where he'd been before then. He had no relatives, none that he kept in touch with electronically anyway. His facebook friends were just that.

Widdlesworth Seminary had been around ninety-three years without being the sight of any reported strange phenomena: the only associated fatalities google and the archived town paper could find were among the elderly faculty, aside from the entirely mundane suicides of two students nearly fifty years apart.

Dean was wasted and passed out and snoring and Sam still had four more hours until daybreak. He was restless, physically and mentally. He felt caged and he wasn't supposed to feel this way anymore.

He went out the door, walked along the perimeter of the motel parking lot, long fingers of cottony vapor reaching through the trees, clinging around their trunks and roots. The night sky overhead was surprisingly clear, pristine black showing a sliver of moon but a glittering array of constellations. He set off walking along the exit ramp and then along the shoulder of the highway, past strip malls and fast food chains, rising and falling along the hilly terrain, neon signs and streetlights overshadowed by the still proudly looming trees. You were never entirely out of the woods around Bethany's Cove, even out on the water you still fell under the muddy green shadow of the hills. It was a twenty-minute walk to the Sundown River Casino; there he stalked the densely tree-shadowed edge of the parking lot until he cased out a blue Subaru of sufficient years to have an easily tricked locking mechanism and no alarm.

He went for a drive at just five over the limit, heading towards the shore. The night was fading to a dull gray, a lightening that wasn't light but was more like an absence of darkness. He pulled off the road at a one table picnic area, perched on a cliff overlooking the docks. He walked on the shoulder of the road along the cliffside for a while and then he went inside a diner for breakfast. It was just opening and it smelled like fresh-baked bread and fresh-brewed coffee. The only waitress on duty had a plain and pointed face, dishwater-grey eyes and barely a thing going on below the neck. An open collar and a chunky silver cross hanging from her scrawny neck. She saw him looking.

"That's pretty," he said. It was something he might've said, before, to cover up that he was looking at her small, sagging breasts. If he was being nice. But there was nothing to pretend for, really, he had no interest in fucking her and she'd already served him coffee.

"Oh," she said with a tired smile. She hooked her thumb under the chain and zipped the cross around on the end of it. "Thanks. I've had it forever. Are you a Christian?"

"I guess you could say I'm more spiritual than religious," he said. "Though I do believe in angels."

"So do I!" she said. A genuine smile, her face opening to him like a spring daisy. "I believe that God assigns an angel to watch out for every one of us. I even believe," (she lowered her voice, a shy tremor in it), "some of us have got the second sight and can see 'em. When I was real little, just for a few years, I thought I could see mine."

"What did he look like?"

"She. It was a she and she was beautiful...she looked kinda like a Barbie that was the last thing my mom gave to me before she...She had the big swan wings, y'know, and she had silvery hair all shimmery like tinsel and..." She stopped and stared at him. "You putting me on?"

"No," he said, clasping his hands palm-to-palm. "I swear to God," (he checked her nametag), "Laura, I'm not putting you on."

She grinned and said, "Yes you are. You're yukking it up on the inside, I can always tell. Maybe I've got a bit of that second sight too. Well you just go ahead and laugh, mister, 'cause she was real and she took care of me and I get to keep the memories all to myself. Bet you're just jealous."

"There must've been something very broken in your life," he said, "if a creature from a whole other species had to be the one taking care of you."

He watched her small face close up like a steel trap. It wasn't just what he'd said. It was that he'd let any pretense that he cared about her feelings drop from his voice. Still, he knew all he would have to do to slide under her defenses again was to put on a hangdog frown and tell her he was sorry, it was just that he'd been a lonely kid with a hard home life and a friend nobody else could see, and he'd thought maybe she was the same.

He sat there and looked at Laura. Outside, he heard a car speed into the parking lot and scrape through a u-turn and drive back out. There was no music or radio playing in the place, the only ambiance the cook banging away at the grill as if an army of customers was about to pile in for sweet potato hash browns and fried kale and gluten-free waffles. It was a shame he didn't want to fuck her. It would be so easy. All he'd have to do to get her to spread her legs for him was be nice to her for an hour or so. She'd be so grateful. Candy from a baby.

"Sorry," he said, without pretending to be sorry at all. "That was overly familiar."

He drank his coffee and Laura mumbled something about not minding because she was the one who'd brought it up, so he guessed she was used to guys carelessly trampling over her feelings. He looked out the window for a while. There were still no cars in the parking lot and there were no cars on the access road going past the diner and in the distance the sodium arcs loomed over the empty onramp and the quiet interstate and the quiet coastline.

He dropped the Subaru off at a mini market and then he jogged back to the motel. He got back at seven am. Dean was up, red-eyed and somehow looking more worn-out than the night before, crumpled like a used-up diner napkin, but still faintly thrumming with nervous energy, pacing. He just rolled his eyes at Sam, back from an early morning run. It was a relief almost like pleasure to look at him and feel so little, to not feel he had anything much at stake in Dean's well-being. Sam showed him the card. "Get this," he said.

"What the fuck," Dean said. "Is this guy for real? I mean literally, does he legally exist?"

Sam told him what he'd found on Father Notaras.

"Fine," Dean said. "Let's have words with him."

"We could tail him, try and nab him when he's not expecting us on his home turf."

"It would take a while to stake him out and we've got no idea what he is, what kinda juice he's got anyway. Besides, if he really wanted to ambush us he could've just not let on that he knows who we are. Hell, he could an ex-hunter or a part-timer, another Pastor Jim, just heard about us on the hunter grapevine."

"If that's all there is to him, he could've just introduced himself to us properly the first time around."

"Yeah, guess you're right. We just gotta bet on that he's not expecting all that we'll be packing. Lucky that we already got witch-killing bullets made in bulk."

They drove to the seminary that morning. It was forty minutes of winding interstate inland and at a high elevation; with great billowing sheets of fog floating amidst the mountains, it seemed to be perched half in forest, half in clouds. It was a handsome building of four stories made of shale grey stone and glass, studded with many windows, with a six-gabled roof and three turrets. They went in the front door, stood in the lobby, a floor of glossy tiles that looked like black-and-white checkered marble, white plaster Jesus and angels looking down on them from alcoves in the walls. The woman at the receptionist's desk looked askance at them over her tight-lipped smile (wearing a soft angora cardigan that revealed just enough that Sam decided that, her, he would like to fuck), but when they said they had a meeting with Father Notaras, she directed them to the third story, the corner office to the right.

Dean didn't knock and he turned the doorknob briskly, like it might be wired to explode and he wanted to get it over with. The door swung swiftly inward. Sam knew at a glance that Father Notaras had seen them coming. It was the way he was sitting, not behind his desk but in a chair turned to put his back to a wide curvate window triptych with a wide curvate view of the space between mountains, the fog floating across that space, the shadow of the woods tinging it the color of wet moss.

"A pleasant surprise," he said and his voice was high and thin and soft, like mountain air. "I thought you might try to ambush me somewhere other than on my home turf. Might I hope that you have decided to grant me the benefit of the doubt?"

"I wouldn't bet on it," Dean said.

"Close the door," he said, "if you please. Yes, you will find protective wards on it, but if you study them closely, I'm sure you will be able to tell they are not intended for keeping anyone in."

Sam turned around and recognized the wards, derived from ancient Greek characters and drawn in fresh powdery chalk. He pushed the door closed. Dean was side-eyeing him.

"Nice work," Sam said to Notaras, glancing around the office, finding nothing but tasteful furnishings with a Scandinavian accent and paintings of sparrows and a lake. Books were overflowing their shelves, but no titles jumped out as incongruous with a Presbyterian seminary. On the edge of his desk was a reader of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, its pages stuffed with yellow sticky notes.

Notaras himself was as elderly and frail and kindly in expression as he'd seemed at first sight. Whatever mask he wore, he was not yet ready to peel it off.

"I'm afraid I must take the liberty of the opening inquiry," Notaras said. "Did you discover a boline knife at the sight of...at the crime scene? Is it currently in your possession?"

"It's safe," Sam said.

"I'm afraid it will never be safe," Notaras said. "It's not in the nature of an artifact with so much power to lie dormant.''

"What are you?" Dean said, his stance defensive, hand hovering over his gun. So transparent, Sam thought.

"Your kind and your persistent obsession with labels. You want to know how to kill me, is that it? Labeling and killing: they go together for you, don't they?"

"Oh, don't fucking play the monster-persecution card. I've gotten enough of that lately."

Sam put on a discretely hurt and offended expression, in case Dean looked his way. Dean didn't.

"So you assume I'm a monster, just like that. Just because I seem to know too much." Notaras sounded, if anything, amused by this.

"You sure like to give off the impression that you know a lot," Sam said.

Yeah," Dean said. "We'd like to see if you can back it up already, Deep Throat."

"Sit down," he said. "I'm a storyteller by nature. I can't perform without an engaged audience. And--" he stood and he lifted up the edge of the Turkish rug he'd been sitting on so they could see the devil's trap painted underneath --"I will at least let you rule one possibility out."

A moment's stalemate, one obligatory shared look in which Sam couldn't read what Dean was thinking, and they sat down. The chairs he'd placed for them were very comfortable. A little too comfortable to be trusted, a little too carefully contoured to Sam's body, feeling almost as if he were in his favorite chair back in the bunker.

"I'm a witness," Notaras said, speaking still softly and calmly but now with animating hand gestures. "A witness to a great many things. I'm a confessor, of sorts. You have no reason to believe this and sometimes I doubt it myself, but I do try to be a good person. The boy whose corpse you found yesterday was a student and a friend of mine. His name was Thomas. He was special in more than one sense of the word. He came here at the age of eighteen, seeking refuge. I knew at once that he would require special care because his soul was crying out and I was the only one who could hear it. I speak, as I believe you might already have uncovered, of child abuse. I will not detail too much. I believe even those who are no longer with us deserve the dignity of confidentiality. I will tell you that I labored for all his time here to unshackle him from the loneliness and the hate and the stifling fear that he had learned to wear like armor. I tried to show him that he did not need the armor. He had always been strong. He had to have been, to survive what he had with any part of his heart intact. But there was another layer to this psychological drama. Thomas had a special talent. It was no less powerful for being so latent, in fact, I believe it might've been more so. I was the only one he had ever trusted enough to let his gift manifest. I took that trust very seriously. I became his tutor and I tried to return that trust by trusting him with the potential I saw in him, the raw power, the near-endless possibilities. Well, you already know how that story goes. He was lost to me. I have lost him."

Sam knew a tale like this should strike a deep chord with him, and he was very careful to maintain the rounded shoulders and knitted brow and compressed mouth, the pensive and brooding hunch and frown of someone experiencing empathy. It was tiresome as it meant he couldn't give the facts of Notaras' story his full concentration as they applied to solving this case.

"Could you be a bit more specific," Dean said. "What exactly did boy wonder do?"

"As yet, I cannot tell. Like I said, his potential was large in scope. I don't even know what he intended to do. He never seemed to hold any grudge against Annie--his sister--and yet hers was the third killing and nearly the bloodiest. Perhaps it wasn't all intentional. Perhaps he was only trying to balance the scales, to get justice at last and he found vengeance instead. That can happen. It often does. Whatever it was he channeled or summoned or perhaps even conjured, it was savage and voracious and I cannot believe it is done with this world yet. I know better. And I can feel it, permeating the woods, lurking on the edge of civilized life. Perhaps you can too."

He was looking at Sam when he said those last words, not fully and obviously, but there was still some social instinct in Sam that could sense his scrutiny.

"So what exactly can you offer us besides a sadsack origin story for our dead perp?" Dean's gruffness had a hoarse edge, frustrated but also covering for being unnerved.

"I mean to uncover the truth about these crimes and put their author to rest," he said, "with your assistance."

"Assistance?"

"With all due respect," he said. "Yes."

"What, you think we're gonna have a crossover team up with you, creepy magic man we just met?"

"It might be a little optimistic to think we will become a happy threesome. But come, this is far from the first time you have become reluctant allies with someone of a similar nature to mine."

"It's a selective club, pal."

"Is it? You have an interesting criteria, then."

"It would help," Sam said. "If you could give us a bit better of an idea of what you are. Because right now, you're the one who gets to put a label on us. The ball's in your court."

He sighed lightly, his eyelids drooped half shut, then he said, "I'm a priest. I mean that sincerely. I am a student of theological matters. I seek to be closer to the divine, in all its many forms. I am also a natural-born witch. I have never robbed or bartered for my power. I have never needed to." He looked Sam squarely in the eyes. "I am older than I look, but the face I wear is a real as yours. I am also the author of a series of historical mysteries, published under a pseudonym as I fear certain of my colleagues in the clergy might misunderstand their occult elements."

"We find out you're lying about any of this, we won't ask questions twice before we put a bullet in you," Dean said.

"You put a high premium on honesty in others," Notaras said, "for men who work under a thousand aliases and puts on a false face even to those closest to them." He rose from his chair and walked to the door. Sam and Dean rose too. "Come with me now," he said. "I can imagine you must be wondering where you can find my secret magic lair and I am going to gratify your curiosity so we can move along with our investigation with some baseline of, if not trust, at least understanding of one another."

They exchanged looks behind his back, looks that Sam was pretty sure meant they both thought they would probably regret not shooting him now, and then they followed him out.

Chapter Text

A few days after that first art history class and Brady's oh, so offhanded, ''Hey, this girl, you gotta check her out, man. I know her from way back, my parents rent a summer house next door to hers, she's like a cousin. C'mon, I can introduce you,'' and he had met up with Jess off-campus for the first time, sitting at a cafe in the back of a small novelty bookstore, drinking lattes and talking about Frida Kahlo. About Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird. He didn't remember exactly how it had come up. They'd been talking about Rebecca's new boyfriend and his slightly smothering predilection for big gestures. Jess had told him that she hated roses. She'd been talking about her love of zinnias and cacti, resilient desert plants, and somehow the thorn piercing Frida Kahlo's neck had come into the conversation. The butterflies, she'd said, were symbols of the resurrection. Kahlo's resurrection from the personal hell that was life with her ex-husband and other demons. She told him she wanted to get a butterfly tattoo on her ankle or maybe her shoulder blade. Someplace discreet, so her parents wouldn't be too freaked. This was the first time she'd mentioned her parents. She did so smiling, but there was some subtle tight-lipped tension in her smile that Sam couldn't help but pick up on, with the way he was hanging on her every word and flickering expression and the pink-polished chipped nail she was picking at. Sam had a hard time picturing her as anything other than a California girl--blonde, tan, leggy, perfect as a postcard of sun and sand, smile an unreal flash of white.

"They pretty uptight?" he'd asked, heart juddering a little as it always did whenever anyone around him, friend or acquaintance, talked about their family. Ready to dodge and hedge when the rules of conversational reciprocity batted the subject back at him.

She said they were New England Catholics with old New England money and they liked to think of themselves as like, way more chill than their parent's generation, but the truth was, they were just as image-obsessed, straight backs and brows stretching back to the Mayflower. They might've used 'summer' as a verb. Her dad was a Yale man. He still wasn't totally over her choosing Stanford and telling him she preferred living on the west coast and probably wouldn't be moving back after graduation. She said she wanted to be sure about the butterfly tattoo because she would probably only ever get the one. She didn't actually want her mom to have a stroke.

Jess now had a Celtic sigil curling in glossy blue-black ink around her left shoulder, a world tree encircled in Beith-luis-nin letters. The ink looked fresh. He couldn't see it right now as she was still wearing yesterday's same long-sleeved t-shirt, but he was tracing it in his mind's eye and wondering what protection it offered.

It was midmorning, the sun already hot and high and tinted orange, driving through rolling hills of oaks and foothill pines and big boulders covered in sun-crisped moss, big pluming ferns and bright dots of purple and yellow clover and deer weed, blanketed in a patchwork quilt of fiery sunlight and cool green shade, pools of shadow burrowed deep between tree roots. Jess was driving, her foot heavy on the accelerator since sometime late last night, and Sam was telling her the abridged story of how he'd come to be in her universe. It was very strange to be telling her this side of the truth, spilling (some of) the things he didn't want to ever talk about, finally, after all the years of wondering what would've happened if he had. If she still would have been killed. Living out hypotheticals that always looped back to the same conclusion: he never should've been in her life in the first place.

She scarcely looked his way through his leap-about, rambling, stop-and-start story, only making a few interjections now and again to tersely ask him to clarify a point.

"Do you believe me?" he asked her, finally, after a long silent stretch.

"I think it's possible," she said, tense but level, "that what you're saying could be true. I also think you could be a really nasty impostor who's been toying with me. Or an illusion cooked up by some psychic or druid like the one in New Orleans. Or an angel or a god--it wouldn't be for the first time."

This shook and stumped him. He was caught up for a moment in imagining what it would be like to be an illusion, his only reason for being holding someone else's mind hostage. What if he were only a figment but became conscious of his non-reality? He didn't really think it was possible but the thought disturbed him all the same.

"But I don't believe most of those would be trying to feed me such an incoherent, convoluted, completely ridiculous backstory."

He felt a tightening twinge of what he belatedly recognized as amusement under his breastbone and he risked a glance at her. Her face was unreadable but some of the tension had gone out of her shoulders and her jaw. "You can test me however you want,'' he said. "I'll do whatever you tell me."

"Later," she said. "I guess I'm safe for now. If you were just gonna kill me you would've done it already."

"Really?" he said, confused and concerned that she would be so reckless. It wasn't like her: she was brave, she was adventurous, she'd gone cliff diving in Acapulco on freshman spring break, she'd been planning to hike the Cascadian after graduation, but she was a planner. She calculated the odds and she prepared for all contingencies in both her academic and personal life; she wouldn't gamble her future.

"If you're just something that took Sam's place--if you took him away, if you hurt him...you know what I can do to you."

He didn't know. He didn't know this woman sitting next to him and talking with cold certainty about her own capacity for violence. He didn't know how to begin to reconcile her with the girl he remembered, or if he should even try or if that road was too dangerous to begin to go down. He was holding on to the shards of enough illusive hopes as it was.

He was seeing his mom in his mind's eye now, sad eyes and tired lines around her mouth, nothing like he'd seen in the photos or in those few moments he'd had with her snatched out of linear time, nothing even like her ghost--a more profound wounded weariness. He had blithely told her that just having her back was enough, her mere physical presence somewhere in the world filling up some of the empty spaces he'd always felt inside himself. She'd smiled and hugged him and pulled away and never stopped pulling away. He hadn't wanted to see it then. He hadn't wanted to look too close. The consequences of that, the distance that had yawned and yawned between them--he was sure it was his fault, somehow.

"I'm sorry that I'm not your Sam," he said. "I wish I knew where he is, if he's still in here like I'm possessing him or if he swapped into my body--my real body--back in my universe."

"So you still have Dean, back in your universe?"

"Yeah." He hadn't said anything that would make her doubt it. Him and his brother, that had been the backbone of his tale.

Her jaw tightened and she swallowed, almost as if she were fighting back tears. He turned away from her, looked out the window. There was a fork in the road and a long unkempt gravelly side road marked by a dead end street sign and big plywood board advertising a lumber mill which he could see sprawling across a stretch of scrubland, sudden desolate reminder of human industry gone to waste, the rows of windows in the factory too begrimed to flash in the blazing sun, desolate stacks of rusty redwood timbers and a lot full of abandoned cars, its backdrop the distant silhouette of a mountain that might've been Diablo, putting them already in the East Bay area, somewhere in the Berkeley-Oakland hills. That hint of geography just made him feel more lost, somehow.

"You said a demon killed me. You meant Azazel, right?"

"Yeah, but he--but he had Brady possessed and he sent him to do it, he must've come back to campus that night, I guess, when Dean and I--when I was gone..."

"Brady killed me? So no deal, right?"

"What?"

"Then you never made a deal with Azazel? Or did he find some other Mephistolean fine-print way to welch on it?''

"No, I never made a deal."

"Then my family, they're all still alive?"

"As far as I know, yeah. Why? Did they get mixed up in this, somehow? Did Azazel go after them because of me?"

"Hey, I'm not the inter-dimensional body snatcher in the hot seat, here," she said. He flinched slightly at 'body snatcher.' "So last you left off, Satan's still breathing in your universe, right?"

"The one from my universe, yeah, he is. He's gone right now, to another parallel...but I know he won't stay gone. But he's dead here, then? Michael's winning?"

"Michael's dead too. Seven years gone.''

"They both are? But then what...?"

"Shh," she said and she held up the back of her hand in the trans-universal shut-the-hell-up signal, staring down the highway, tense tick of her jaw as she swallowed. There was another body, slumped inside a ring of blood, blood that had soaked into the pavement and turned to dark rust red stains. Jess eased off the accelerator at last, slowing the truck to a crawl. The blood stains looked at least an hour old but the body was stirring, a man--no, a teenage boy, scrawny and sickly white and bruised and with a head of sandy blond hair--shakily lifting his arm in a pathetic stab at a wave. Sam's heart clenched, reminded of Jack. The boy's right leg was bent at the right angle for a badly fractured femur, too much blood puddled beneath it and splattered up his white t-shirt; there shouldn't be that much blood unless the breaking bone had ruptured the femoral artery, but then he should have bled to death long before any blood could dry. Jess stomped on the breaks, head held stiff but eyes sliding furtively back and forth, peering at the densely wooded hills that bracketed the road for as far as could be seen ahead and behind them, the lumberyard's lane having vanished.

"Fuck," she said softly. "This is an ambush."

"How can you tell?" He knew, of course, and yet he had to ask, wanting to know how much experience she'd had in this kind of situation. How many people she'd tried to help before she'd learned to tell when it was pointless or the cost too high.

"That much blood loss and he's not dead, for one thing. Amateurs. Always overdoing it. But since we're in militia territory, we have to assume they're ready for us to put up a fight. And we've got all these fucking hills so they can come down on us from any direction. Alright. This is what we're gonna do."

"What?"

"They have to think we're falling for it," she said, "So they're not expecting a fight." It wasn't much of a plan. It was hard to call it a plan at all. Reckless, he thought again, heart in his throat. But he couldn't argue with her, couldn't push on this tenuous truce between them. She had no reason to trust him. He had no history with her to presume upon.

She started driving again, a slow steady roll towards the supposedly wounded boy or vampire or ghoul or ghoulpire or whatever he was, until she was within barely a yard of him, and then she started to open the driver's side door. The boy sat up and Sam thought he saw a grin start to stretch his mouth. Jess floored the accelerator. The Ford barreled over him, his body making a sickening crunch under the tires, a big bump from the back rattling the jugs of fuel, grumble of engine and sticky skid of hot rubber on hot pavement.

"And here's the company we were expecting."

In the side-view mirror, Sam saw the rest of the ambush come roaring around the hill that now blocked his view of the lumberyard's side street, five riders on dirt bikes in shiny red leather jackets, bikes shiny and chrome, flashing like comets in the fiery sun.

Jess took her eyes of the road, twisted backwards in her seat and reached into the well behind the seats, coming up with a dart gun, which she handed to Sam. She rolled his window down. He leaned out the window, squinted against the sun's glare, made the shot with a dart which he could only assume was laced with dead-man's blood or some other monster toxin as the stricken biker slid bonelessly off the side of his bike, rolling one way while it skidded out in the opposite direction, like two halves of the same body ripped apart.

"Oh shit," Jess gasped, and Sam whipped his head back around to see two more dirt bikes shoot out between two hills, fanning out to either side of the road, flanking them as they accelerated.

Crack of a gunshot and ringing metal as the bullet ricocheted and Sam had to turn back in his seat, take aim at their tail again. One of the bikers had a handgun and the dexterity to shoot with one hand and steer his bike with the other. His bullets were dinging off the fenders and hubcaps, targeting their tires. Sam tried to line up a shot at him, but he was side-winding in and out of Sam's blind spot. Even if a bullet pierced a tire, it wouldn't deflate right away and the damage would only slow them down. They must be really determined to get live prey if he wasn't shooting at the truck's cab.

The entire body of the truck jolted and rattled like it had been struck by lightning, a minor explosion crackling in Sam's ears and his breath half knocked out by the whiplash, acrid air stinging his lungs when he tried to suck it back in, and a bullet hadn't done that. The truck skidded to a halt and whipped the breath from his lungs again, hot pins-and-needles pain in the back of his neck. The bullets had been a distraction. One of the other bikers must have thrown a small bomb, likely a Molotov, under the truck and he was smelling burning rubber and gasoline and the truck had a full tank and several additional jugs of fuel and it was going to be a huge fucking vesuvian fireball when it ignited and it was a miracle they hadn't been obliterated yet. He met Jess' eyes for one precious second. Her eyes were adrenaline bright and if there was fear in them he couldn't recognize it.

Jess kicked her door open and leaped out. Sam followed her out the same door, watching the men who had leaped off their dirt bikes and were prowling towards them while fanning out into a half-circle formation to box them in against the truck. The truck, which Sam didn't dare glance back at but he could smell the plumes of gasoline fumes and dirty smoke rising.

The bikers still looked human, acid green tattoos of pentagrams under their eyes and interlocking hands circling their necks. Sam was raising the dart gun again, aiming at one who was strolling towards him with the relaxed gate of a predator who has already fatally lamed his prey, a slight smile playing around his thin mouth, lighting up his lean and hungry face. Sam felt his aim hopelessly thrown off in the second he pulled the trigger and in the next he felt his arm refuse to respond to his brain's attempt to direct its movements and in the second after that he registered the familiar pain of a knife sinking in between joint and muscle and ligaments and the warm sticky flow of blood spreading out from his shoulder and under his armpit. One of the men had thrown a knife, the movement faster than his eye could track it. He dropped the dart gun. He reached instinctively to slide his fingers around the blade burrowed in his right shoulder instead of reaching for another gun or a knife. His knees tried to buckle and he wasted brainpower on trying to will them not to. He was useless. He couldn't help Jess.

Jess had a machete in her hands, she had ducked under the grasping hands of one of the men and sliced his thigh open with it, twirled upright again and with a backstroke taken his head off. Side roundhouse kick to the gut of another, doubled him over, hacked his head off from above, executioner-style. Four to go, he thought, but he wasn't sure, he thought he saw more bodies stirring out of the corner of his eye. The biker with the gun had glacial blue eyes and a widening grin and a necklace of thorns tattooed around his neck and a Colt 45 that he was aiming at Jess. Get in front of her, Sam thought to himself and took an unsteady step several seconds too slow towards the bullet's trajectory, crying her name.

A numb blank helpless second in which his body might as well be in someone else's possession again, for all the control he was exercising over it, and he was certain he had failed her again. And then--

Sam felt an unreal heat swell inside him, and the man--no, his eyes were white suddenly, a bright burning white heat like the sun, he was something else--was burning, flames licking his skin and the smell of roasting meat rolling off him in a big wave that overflowed and swamped Sam's senses, a low roar in his ears, smoke and heat stinging his eyes, making them water, making them squeeze shut. Screaming rising over the crackle and pop and roar of fire, one long howl of horror. He'd done this. This should bring back sense-memories of the cage but it didn't, maybe because, oh right, he was the one doing it, he had the power here. But he wanted it to stop and he couldn't make it stop. There was something--oh no, there was someone else inside him and he couldn't stop them from waking up and they couldn't stop him from slipping out of consciousness, which he was rapidly doing. Leaving Jess alone and she still had more enemies to fight, too many to take on alone no matter how good she was, how deadly, how different from the girl he knew. He had blood streaming out of his nose and into his panting mouth, his or someone else's. That someone wanted him to get the fuck out and let him claw his way back to the surface and that someone probably had the right of way here but Sam still fought back out of cornered-animal instinct. He could not bear to be held down again, helpless. He didn't have a choice. They were both going down.

Chapter Text

"We don't trust this guy, right? We're both still on board with that?"

"Of course. He's strange and affected and clearly trying to play us and we don't know why, but we have to stay close to him because he's our only lead. Huntsman didn't have any other friends and he's fresh out of immediate family."

They were driving back towards the cove, following Notaras' Subaru.

"Right," Dean said. "But that doesn't carry over into us not pluggin' him if he starts steering us wrong."

"Why wouldn't we? We only work with dangerous century-old supernatural beings with unknown agendas when it's practical and convenient."

"So you're not, like, projectin' your feelings all over this one then?"

He had to balance the slight whine of exasperation with the deeper current of sympathy in his voice. "Of course I feel for him, Dean, if what he's told us about losing his student to his student's own demons is true. But I can feel for people and still do the job. You know what? Sometimes feeling for people is what makes us good at the job. Being able to put ourselves in other people's shoes is not a bad thing."

"Thanks for the sermon, Atticus Finch," Dean said. Sam almost did a double-take at the reference, not so much that Dean had read the book as that he would glibly admit to it; it was an unsettling reminder that Dean could still surprise him.

The magic safe house Notaras had volunteered to show them turned out to be a cabin perched on the lip of a cliff, the front door leading straight into one big living area with a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows offering a wide view of the harbor. A Pacific wind was driving long spears of thick fog up the cliff, sliding between the jutting rocks, like lances piercing battlements on a medieval wall. The wind whistled through unsealed windows, whining and whooshing and filling the house with a smell almost as briny as the deck of a fishing boat, that ocean smell laced with the herbal and faintly metallic scents of magic. Bookshelves lined every wall and more books were scattered, with cracked spines and drastically dog-eared pages, across nearly every piece of furniture. A teak roll-top desk with a laptop and a printer half-buried under piles of loose printed pages, annotated with red-ink scribbling. Photographs framed on the walls and scattered loose among the books, some with tightly curling corners and barely discernible sepia impressions, dating to the days of heliography. Notaras himself was only visible (wearing his current face, at least) in a few recent Polaroids, shaking hands with graduating seminary students, Thomas Huntsman taking pride of place among them, a broad sunny grin on his face. He looked so different from the photo of him that Sam had first seen among his sister's effects. That had been in the morgue and the boy's eyes had still been the deadest things around, big as headlamps in his lean and hungry face. The only other furnishings were a keyboard and a record collection and a turntable. Spider webs festooned the corners of the ceiling and connected the gaps between bookshelves, silken threads sleek and shiny, no dusty cobwebs but elegantly constructed insect funnel-traps, the big brown house spiders clearly living their best lives.

"Please take care not to crush the spiders," Notaras said. "They're here as my guests, taking care of the pests."

There was a short hallway leading off this living area to a kitchen and a bathroom. He showed them into the kitchen, not really big enough for three men, with cookbooks piled up on every counter, a '60s fridge and chipped enamel oven. He offered to make them coffee in his tin percolater. They declined.

He showed them his spice cabinet where he kept his spell ingredients and Sam made note of which jars were running lowest: adders tongue, boneset, liverwort, hyssop, dog wood.

His kitchen's small fold-out breakfast table was doing double-time as a magical work table, with a grinding bowl and pestle and a set of bronze scales and a bronze knife of a modest and innocuous appearance. You could kill somebody with that knife, but you'd have to put some solid effort into it. A stack of spine-cracked and dog-eared spell books on the table, all of which Sam was familiar with and knew to be as benign in applications as magic ever got: housework, healing, home security. It was all a little too clean for a being that had lived as long as he had and knew as much as he wanted them to think he did. Sam didn't doubt that there was a secret cupboard or a cellar withholding the good stuff: virgin's kidneys, baby's last breath, puppy's skulls, or whatever.

He did have a rack of wine bottles, all of impressive vintage, many imported from the Aegean islands.

Notaras showed them a large empty cigar box with a Cuban label sitting on the kitchen counter. "This is what used to contain that knife I know you took from where he...from the house. Thomas took it from me the day before the killings started. It was the most heavily warded object in my possession. A very versatile tool. It derives its power from the goddess Psyche, as I'm sure you've deduced. The soul knife. You're taking a big risk, keeping it in your custody."

"You're not getting it back," Sam said.

"No. But I suppose the best way to keep an eye on it for now is to keep an eye on you." He looked back and forth between them with heavy-lidded eyes. He was clasping his hands together at his waist, one of his thumbs picking at the crease of his palm.

"You done now?" Dean said. "We get it: you've humanized yourself. You have hobbies, or whatever, and you're not brewin' a baby in the cauldron right this second so we don't have to feel too conflicted about not pluggin' you. You think we've never run into monsters who can keep a clean house?"

"Dean," Sam said, half on an admonishing sigh. He was pretty certain he ought to object to the use of the epithet in regards to a man whose behavior had so far been technically unobjectionable.

"I've shown you in because if I hadn't you would have wasted time nosing about my paltry little business here, and now we can proceed with the next act of this mystery. Where to next? It's your call, gentleman."

Sam looked sidelong at Dean's face, saw his suspicious scowl thawing incrementally and a complicated tussle of annoyance and curiosity rubbing through.

"Morgue," Dean said. "Huntsman should be on the slab by now."

Sam noted a flash of pain on Notaras' face, banked embers in his eyes before he dropped his lids over them again and swallowed, with a painfully tight constriction of throat muscles. He could be faking the emotion. If so, Sam could only hope to emulate his subtle technique.

Notaras followed them out into the driveway where he wrapped his arms tightly around himself, the sharp salty wind tugging at his cassock, showing the stark outline of a frail old body that was probably nothing but an illusion. He had driven his Subaru here but now he invited himself into the backseat of the Impala. Sam looked at Dean to see if he would allow it. Dean unlocked the doors, his face blank, a mask of indifference. Sam didn't like it, any of it.

On the highway, Sam's phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, saw Dean take his eyes off the road and look at the screen too, completely conspicuous. Shit. It was Jack. He had to answer, with Dean watching.

"Jack," he said. "What is it, kiddo?" He could hear voices buzzing and a faint mechanical humming in the background. The kid had left the bunker.

"I'm at the grocery store," Jack said. "In Lebanon."

"We left food in the bunker. Enough for you to get by 'till we get back."

"I didn't like the cereal," Jack said. "I wanted eggs. Should I get the brown or the white eggs? I'm buying them from the farm where the chickens aren't kept in cages. The farm's local so the eggs will be fresh. I checked them all over for cracks. I watched a Netflix documentary on factory farming and a YouTube tutorial on how to buy eggs before I went to the store and I think I--"

"Where'd you get the money?"

"I took the emergency money. I think you should keep more of it, considering how often we have emergencies."

"How'd you even get to the store?"

"I walked to the bus station. But I didn't have money with the right numbers on it so I had to keep walking until I got to the gas station. I gave the cashier money for a single nougat bar and I got the money with the smaller numbers on it back in return. I understand how money works now. It's like a metaphor, a story about the world that everyone tells themselves. If we stopped telling the story then money wouldn't exist anymore and instead people would have to share their possessions freely with each other and people don't want to do that. The eggs from the nicest chicken farm cost $6.99. That's more than double what it costs to get eggs from the bad factory where the chickens are kept in wire cages."

"So?" It took a great act of will to keep the boredom and disdain out of that little word and off his face.

A pause. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see one of Dean's brows arch slightly.

"You shouldn't have to ask me that. You don't sound like yourself anymore. It's not just the things that you say, it's something else..."

"We're all good here, Jack."

"I knew you'd say that. That's why I guess I...I mean--I'm not listening to you anymore. Not until you're yourself again." His voice was small and wound tight and very young; he was clearly scared of not having an authority figure to follow, a surrogate conscience. It was pathetic.

"Good boy," Sam said and hung up. Dean didn't comment on Jack and Sam supposed he had Notaras' presence in the backseat to thank for that.

He pushed Jack from his mind. Jack's suspicions were not an immediate threat. The only threats he needed to be pressingly concerned with right now were the unknowns: what had become of his soul and would it ever be forced on him again, obliterating the better part of his consciousness and his second shot at an unfettered life; and Dean, who if anything was forced on him against his will was one of the two people most likely to do it, next to Lucifer.

They played cops-and-identifying-acquaintance-of-the-victim to get let in the morgue's front door this time. The front desk attendant looked sad on being told that Thomas Huntsman didn't have any closer relations left in the state than his old seminary teacher, which Sam found amusing, considering that it was only because he'd probably killed them all.

Sam found being in the morgue again almost soothing: The morgue's grey world: the steel of the benches, the refrigerators, the sterilized equipment resting in the polished sink. The grey of the mortuary attendant’s clothing, dull and grim. The grey of Thomas Huntsman's skin, tacky and dead. Sam looked at his shriveled blue-grey lips and could almost think he saw the razor-fine curve of a smirk upon them. He'd gotten away with it, whatever he'd done.

The attendant's phone rang and he said he had to leave immediately.

"He won't be back anytime soon," Notaras said. Sam had been watching him nearly this whole time and hadn't seen so much as a murmur from him.

Notaras' eyes had clouded with murky emotion on seeing the body. The refrigerators hummed through their long futile labors, battling off the decay and rot for the bodies within.

Dean just made a sound that was half-grunt, half-sigh and didn't protest further about strange magic being used for their convenience.

The coroner's report said that Huntsman had not put up any struggle as he was being killed. It also claimed that the killer might've been standing behind him and was likely someone he trusted. The only weapon that had been committed into evidence was the pliers, strong enough to crack breast bone and ribs and completely coated in the victim's blood. The report on cause of death surmised that after the careful incisions had been made with the blade, the pliers had peeled apart bone and meat until the heart had been extracted. The blood had poured down and puddled thickly around his feet in a tight circle, as if he'd somehow stayed standing while bleeding out.

"He did it to himself," Notaras said quietly. "He took his own life."

"How in the hell?" Dean said. "He couldn't have stayed conscious through all that pain, let alone the bleeding out."

"Of course, not without help," Notaras said. He got a ziplock bag out of his pocket and slid open the seal and plucked out a pinch of some ashy white powder that he sprinkled over Thomas' corpse. Thomas' veins glowed a cold electric blue through his grey skin and then that glowing network of veins seemed to peel out of his skin and rise into the air, floating over his corpse while leaving it intact beneath. It was like a holographic scan of some sort, showing the entire circulatory system--absent, of course, the heart. The muscles in Dean's cheek and jaw slackened and his eyes were widening with grudging amazement and curiousity. Sam was experiencing something approximating the same sentiment. There were little electric flares of light spaced out across the network, gold and silver and red. Notaras pointed to a bright silver cluster in the region of what Sam thought was the parietal lobe, the lobe that received the input of the five senses and discerned between the physical self and the outside world.

"A spell to numb all physical feeling," Notaras said.

"Would be useful," Sam said. "As a painkiller, I mean, when we have to perform field surgery and...stuff."

"I wouldn't recommend it. It destroys all your senses over a period of torturous hours, until you're locked inside a living corpse." He waved his hand and the image dissipated.

Dean was turning the corpse on its side, tilting a lamp to shine down its spine.

"You know what you're looking for," Notaras said.

"Yeah, this," Sam said, and showed him the picture he'd taken on his phone.

"Oh," Notaras said.

"Nothin' on him," Dean said.

"Do you know what it is?" Sam asked.

"You should've shown it to me sooner."

"That a yes?"

"It's an old curse, very primitive, very strong if somewhat imprecise: it's a target, painting a bullseye on the back of someone you want to attract the attention of a monster or monsters. The form the mark takes depends on the monster in question. This one looks like a thing with wings."

"Yeah, we got that," Dean said. "Really narrows it down to just about a thousand possible perps. "

"We found nothing in the house," Sam said. "Where else could he have cast his curse?"

"You found nothing visible to your eyes. I should like to have a look myself."

Within an hour they were on a ferry. The lines were short; it was not a high-traffic time of the afternoon and the dense fog and number of deaths that had occurred at sea lately were probably putting people off the idea of a recreational trip. He left Dean in the car below deck, keeping an eye on Notaras, so that he could 'stretch his legs' again. He went up to the top deck and he stood behind the glass shelter and then he sat on the cold steel bench. Hardly anyone else up there. It was as cold and lonely as the morgue. The fog blanketing the water was thin enough that he could see patches of dull blue in the sky, the only eyes on him the seagull's with their greedy scavenger's glint. On his way back down, he got sandwiches from the kitchen galley and vending machine coffee for Dean and for Notaras because Dean had asked him to and he had to act like he still cared what Dean wanted. It was a small thing but it was tiring, not even in the physical sense which he was no longer liable to, but in the weight it put on that hollow space inside himself that lurked just behind his consciousness.

The wind was rising, climbing up from the cove through the hills and whistling between the thick tree trunks. The sky was solid grey and the clouds had heavy pewter bellies and the sun was sinking low behind them. The hills were half a mass of dark green shadow and the Huntsman house's grey walls with their drapery of ivy and mossy shingled roof were melting into the sky and the woods. A large flock of darkly silhouetted sparrows or finches took off from their perches on the sharp-peaked gables just as they were pulling up. The house was an active crime scene now. There was one cop on security and a forensics team who were packing up their van. Flash of a fake badge and an authoritative frown and Dean told the cop that Notaras was here because he had a close friendship with the victim and he was the last known visitor to the house and he was going to have a look around and see if he noticed if anything had been moved or gone missing. The cop on duty looked at Notaras kindly and told him to take as long as he needed even though he'd just been named as one of the last people to see the victim alive. Notaras was either well known and liked in the community or he had some mesmeric ability or he just wore the priest's frock so well. Perhaps all of the above.

Notaras led them straight up the stairs to the attic and led them expertly through the maze of moldy, moth-eaten furniture, loose rolls of ragged carpet, broken electronics, piles of clothing and cheap antique knick-knacks, around the L-shaped hall to the door through which Sam had found the mirror and the body. The room still smelled like blood, the heavy metallic scent mingling with the musty attic odor. Notaras paused and looked down at the tape which outlined where the body had been found and the shape of the dark brown stain it had left behind. His eyes swooped straight up to the mirror and Sam thought he saw them widen a fraction, perhaps in surprised recognition. Then he turned on his heel and walked to the corner of the room parallel to the mirror. There had to have been a servant's quarters, Sam realized suddenly. A house of this size and stature would have at least employed a maid-of-all-work when the timber business was flourishing, but they hadn't seen a single bed or washbasin or modest wardrobe that could have belonged to one even though none of the other old furnishing seemed to have been thrown out in the last hundred years. "It's here. A secret door leading to a secret escape. The only reason, I think, that he ever would have returned to this house and its memories. I believe I was the only one he ever told about it." He held both hands out, palms flat, eyes shut, feeling the air a few inches from the peeling floral wallpaper.

"Dammit, no," he said with a shaky sigh. "I can't force my way through. He didn't erect a wall so much as a web, a funnel trap which constricts and sticks to me the more I push in. I can't break it down. I have to unravel it. And my powers are not currently up to snuff."

"Currently?" Sam said, unease like a rat gnawing at his wires.

"Yes," Notaras said. He turned from the wall to them, hands falling to his sides, his face ash-white and his veins pulsing blue in his throat and his eyes burning like blue embers. "You see, like Psyche's knife, I derive my power from the soul. My own, others. Yours."

Dean had his gun aimed at Notaras as soon as he said the word. "You ain't touchin' our souls," he said.

"Well, no," Notaras said. "Only one of you currently has one."

Dean pulled the trigger. The bullet got stuck half-way through its trajectory and so did Sam's hands as they reached for his own gun and so did the air in his lungs and his tongue in his mouth and his legs as he tried to shift his stance. Only Notaras was moving. "I apologize," he said. "I do try to avoid this sort of thing. But given the stakes, I think it's necessary."

He stretched out his hand and Sam watched the familiar procedure with keen interest. He did not plunge his fist into Dean's chest but only submerged the tips of his fingers as if testing the waters. The pulse of light was dimmer than the blinding glare Sam remembered. Sam looked at Notaras' face which had the pinched frown of someone doing something distasteful, and another face growing visible beneath the superimposed image of the old man, like an x-ray of a re-painted canvas: long dark eyes and olive skin and good cheekbones and an age that could've been anything between twenty-two and fourty-five, but other than that an unremarkable face. He looked at the killer's concentration frozen on Dean's face and he found no recollection in himself of what Dean must be feeling even when curiosity made him look for it. He could recall many examples of violations mental and physical but this one was entirely rooted in the soul and had been ripped out of him with it. This made him realize that there were other unsettling memories rooted inside of him still, physical as bullets, no exit wounds, inoperable because of their proximity to vital organs.

Notaras lifted his hand off Dean's chest and with a snap of his fingers Dean disappeared.

Sam could breathe again and he could swallow and he did so with a click of his dry throat. He decided not to go for his gun after all.

"Stand back," Notaras said to Sam.

He stared at the attic wall. He traced the shape of a door with his index finger. A door appeared. He walked through it. Without a second thought, Sam followed him.

"Where did you send Dean?" Sam asked. He became conscious of a faint tremor in his hands and he curled his fingers tight into his palms until it stopped. Maybe he needed to eat more. His blood sugar might be completely out of control.

"He's safe as houses," Notaras said and he said it with perfect sincerity, as if Dean's welfare were actually of importance to either of them.

"Are you an angel?"

"No. I'm a witch and I'm a priest. I don't lie about things like that. I might omit certain background details for good reason, but I don't lie."

Sam decided he liked him less for this than if he'd been an honest liar.

They were in a room of roughly five-by-ten feet with a sloping roof and one narrow window with a heavy shade drawn. A cot bed and a small chest of drawers and a camp stove on the floor and the rest was taken up by spiral notebooks and comics and books, many of them old children's books. His favorites, judging by their dilapidated condition, seemed to have been the Narnia books and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and the Bible. Another favorite was one of the few books Sam dimly remembered having a visceral hatred of because a dog died at the end.

"Oh, Thomas," Notaras said, a catch in the name, a held breath and then a long tremulous sigh. He was picking at the crease of his left palm again. He could still be acting but if so it could not be to win over Sam's sympathy. Perhaps he was fooling himself that he had cared about this student whose potential he had so obviously intended to exploit. It couldn't be genuine. After what he had so easily done to Dean, he was obviously a predator by nature.

Notaras made a circular gesture with his right hand and shut his eyes, lips compressed in intense concentration. The one battery-operated emergency light flickered on and off and the shade over the window dimmed and brightened and the shadows changed. When they settled the shade had been pulled back and the window had been cracked and there was Thomas Huntsman, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a holy old t-shirt and jeans, with hair flopping into his eyes and concealing the expression on his bent head. He had a photograph and a pair of scissors in his hands. Sam bent over to get a closer look. He was cutting out the faces of his mother and father and brothers and feeding them into a fire he'd lit on the stove. The smoke was dimming the room. He left his sister's face intact in the photo. So she had been an unintended victim. One of his notebooks was open and his doodling would've barely been discernible even without the shadows and smoke, but the uncoordinated, jagged lines and the violence with which he'd ground the graphite tip of his pencil into the page were legible enough.

He cut his palm with a carelessly deep swipe of Psyche's knife. He squeezed his hand into a fist and his blood dripped over the burning faces. Smoke rose from the fire, long slender tongues that twined together like cultivated branches and formed solid figures, the legs and torsos and flat faces of women and the wings and talons of a bird of prey with wide-jawed mouths full of sharp teeth and long flickering tongues.

"The kindly ones," Sam said. The Erinyes, the Furies, the three sisters, the cthonic goddesses of vengeance, outraged by broken oaths and spilled family blood.

"Yes," Notaras said. "I suspected as much. He summoned them back from the pocket of hell they were cast into. The last refuge of those who will never see justice done in this world."

"Looks like it worked out great for him," Sam said. "So what is it to you? Did you suspect all along? You got blood in the water and you're worried you might be next on the menu now they're done with the main course?"

Notaras turned to look at him and though his old man's mask was firmly back in place Sam could still see the embers in his eyes. "I'm the one who assembled the gun even if I'm not the one who pulled the trigger. My stake in this drama is clear. What's yours?"

"I want to know what this boy of yours did to my soul. I need to know if it's permanent."

"Do you want it back?"

Sam deigned to answer that only with a derisive snort. Notaras arched his brows a fraction. Sam felt compelled to speak. "Of course not."

"Why ever not? To have a soul is to know the difference between good and evil. It's only by knowing the difference that you can make a free choice."

"I remember what the difference is, I just don't give a damn. Souls blind you with fear and shame and doubt. Maybe you can't see what they're doing to you when you have one, but I know what it's like to live both ways and I know which way is better."

"It seems to me that you're living your life in just the same way you did before."

"If I was, I'd be trying to kill you right now for what you did to my brother."

"No, you wouldn't. You'd still be driven by your need for answers that only I can give, just like you are now."

Sam thought about himself critically. He knew too well how to avoid seeing the whole of what he faced, how to see only out of the corner of his eye and not confront what it meant. He didn’t even realize, most of the time, that he lived that way, saw that way. He had forgotten how to lift his head and see what had engulfed him.

It wasn't like that now, he told himself.

"And what about you?" he said. "What are you really after? What did you want with this boy? Have you got any soul left in you or did you burn it all away for power?"

"I loved him," he said and his voice for the first time dropped its velvety glove, guttural and sharp. "And no insinuations, please, I'm not that kind of priest."

"If you loved him, you might've stopped him from going back to his childhood house of horrors. Gotten him some actual fucking therapy. Taught him not to play with hand grenades."

"You couldn't understand my regrets even if you still had your soul, " Notaras said. He turned his back and he walked back into the room with the mirror and the stain where Thomas had died and Sam saw him swivel his head looking back and forth between the two. He made the same circular gesture with his hand and the dim grey light flickered and blurred and the shadows whirled around them in a staticy blur then solidified, showing Thomas, now and then, standing before the mirror, the look of calm on his face almost blissful. He had felt the need to dress himself as a priest for this last unholy rite. Sam wondered why. He had already unbuttoned and opened his cassock, exposing his chest. He was cutting his own heart out, three incisions of Psyche's knife and then the pliers snapping bones apart, his blood gushing out as if from a hose pipe, splattering across the mirror and draining into a puddle around his feet. The pliers dropped and his hands vanished from sight, the act of tearing out his own heart obscured by the bright light of his soul streaming into the glass, his spine curving like a plucked bow string before snapping back into place and his whole body crumpling in the usual dying manner of a marionette with strings cut. The blood continued seeping into the glass while the images--illusions or rewound time--dissolved from sight.

There was a long silence and Sam studied Notaras' face sideways and thought the horror it was dressed in continued to be well done. But then no reality warper should have too much trouble forcing the blood to drain from his face.

"So my Thomas sent his soul to a world we can only hope is a better one," Notaras said. His voice was arch and affected, as if struggling to put up a cover for his emotions. "And he must have pulled yours along in his wake."

"A better world?" Sam said.

"Perhaps. I doubt he was able to pick exactly which universe happened to be next door at the time."

"My soul could still return then if it's still living over there and he--it could find its way back to me."

"Potentially."

Sam picked up a sturdy footstool by the leg and swung it at the mirror, one big crack bisecting it down the middle and the glass shards crashing down in two directions. He stepped back, brushed himself off.

"It was just a mirror," Notaras said. "You have greater worries in any case, with the kindly ones on the loose."

Notaras continued retracing their steps through the house and Sam dogged his heels.

"Then they'll kill again," Sam said. "Soon?"

"Their appetite is insatiable, but how long they prefer to hound and terrorize their prey before closing in for the kill does vary from victim to victim."

"Since you seem to know so much about me, what do you think about my chances? Do you think they'll come for me?"

"You did just stand idly by while I leached off your brother's soul, but the bar for fratricidal behavior is rather high. You have to spill blood yourself."

Sam gave it some thought while they descended another staircase. "I sort of did," he admitted. "But there were extenuating circumstances. I shot my grandfather in the head, but he was a real son of a bitch."

"If there was no oath--no familial bond--broken along with the act, you might not be at the top of their list yet."

They were in the entrance hall and Notaras turned his back and looked up at the wall where hung a painting depicting logging on the Huntsman's estate, layer after layer of oils and heavy gloss bringing richly textured life to the dark green shadow of the valley and the glistening white of an ice-capped river and a herd of rust red oxen straining to haul a desolated grove's worth of timbers. A proud depiction of former glory.

"What are you hiding from?" Sam said. "You've been trying to bury yourself in the humble life of the good priest and teacher for years and I doubt that it's just for kicks. What's got you so scared?"

"I like the quiet," Notaras said and the tension in his voice spread and thickened the air into a solid barrier between them. They went out the front door in silence.

Sam looked around for the cop and found that she'd gotten into her car and was looking at her phone.

He returned to the Impala and found Dean in the drivers' seat which surprised him and didn't at the same time. His subconscious mind had known all along that it couldn't be that easy to rid himself of his brother. He met Notaras' eyes and Notaras had his head tilted slightly and a quizzical almost-smile on his lips. He was looking to see what Sam would do like Sam was a gerbil in a maze of plastic tubing.

"What took you so long?" Dean said. "This was a bust. There's nothin' here. Another big fucking waste of our time." The sun was now half buried behind the hills but peeking out just far enough to cast strange streaks of red-gold light. It painted the Impala in stripes of light and shadow. It grazed Dean's cheek and jaw like blood spatter.

Sam got back in the passenger seat, adding memory modification to his mental list of Notaras' abilities and Notaras to his list of things he should rationally fear.

Chapter Text

He woke up in pain (manageable) and in a bed, immediately struggling to cast a sensory net out beyond his own discomfort. A bumpy plaster ceiling and mustard yellow walls and daylight. Daylight interrupted by the shadowy impression of bars hovering somewhere above him, maybe the blades of a fan. Bright blonde hair and a blurred outline of a woman, less substantial than a ghost. Jess was sitting beside him and she shouldn’t be. Should she?

Her long hair half hiding her face and her careful touch as her fingers cupped his cheek. Rough fingers to soft hands, nails ragged and palms cool.

He shouldn't be here. The reasons why danced somewhere beyond the fuzz of his grasp, and he decided it was due to the pain, because there was plenty of that, even though it was buffered. Despite the blankets of confusion he could feel heaped on his thoughts, he knew the reason to be morphine. The drug was wearing off, and he was distracted by his premonition of more pain lurking around the next bend. He shifted, and the whole world split and distilled down into his shoulder and pectoralis major. Jess' palm was suddenly against his forehead, and she was saying, "shhhhh, shhhhh." Sam could feel the wet slide of tears into the hair above his ear. Jess' thumb tracked circles near his temple, and Sam concentrated on staying still. After a while – minutes, seconds, hours? – the pain receded, and the morphine lapped back up over his harried senses. Sam had to catch himself from slipping into comfort, from concocting some soothing daydream out of these circumstances.

Jess' fingers were sliding through his hair.

Sam shook his head against the pillow, tried to align the tussling realities inside his mind. He heard his heart beating. Sharp, thudding.

"Don't even think about getting up," Jess said. Her voice was hoarse, reminding him of his mother. He tried not think about that anymore.

"Wasn't," he said. She took her hand away and he had to make himself not lean after it. "Where are we?"

"Infirmary," she said. "If you wanna call it that. This is where the Contra Costa militia's set up camp."

He pulled himself up with one elbow just far enough to look around, to see that there were three other cots in this infirmary, one of them occupied by a middle-aged man in a sweatshirt and jeans with his leg in a brace made of what looked like tent poles and velcro straps. He had an MP3 player with headphones covering his ears and his eyes were closed. The room was about the size of a high school classroom, which he surmised was what it used to be, after a cursory examination of the diagrams pasted to the walls and the best lab equipment that state funding could provide left on a desk that had been pushed into a corner. A former science classroom. There were warding sigils drawn in blue marker on the windows and his vision was still too blurry and his mind too jittery to identify them.

"So they found us?"

"A patrol was in the area, saw the smoke."

"Do they know what I did? What did you tell them?"

"They don't know how we made it out of there alive. Must be some kind of miracle, they think." His vision had cleared enough that he could see the bitterly ironic twist to her lips.

"Right."

"Listen," she said, dropping her voice to a throaty murmur and bending closer to him in what he supposed from the outside would look a loverly manner if anyone was watching them. "You gotta watch what you say around these people. And I don't just mean it's the psychic thing or the Sliding Doors story that you gotta keep to yourself. You're a good Christian soldier, okay? You believe however dark things get, God has a plan for us."

"They some kind of fundie cult?" They'd left the biology posters up, even the obligatory one depicting the evolutionary stages of the homo sapiens.

"Not really, I don't think. But a lot of them have faith in something, some higher power, some destiny, and we need a story that will fit in here. Camouflage. You're still good at that, right?"

"What about my story?" he asked her again.

She hesitated, her eyes downcast and her frown dark and anxious.

"I did all the holy-water-and-silver tests while you were out. I do know that if you were just some shifter wearing Sam's shape, you wouldn't have been able to burn that last bozo to an ash pile."

He shuddered, tasting the grimy film that smoke and ash left on his tongue, the coppery residue of blood at the back of his mouth. "I don't know how I did that. I didn't mean to. It's never...it's almost never happened that way for me before. I panicked and it came out of me like...like a punch. I don't think that was ever a power I had, back in my universe." He didn't think so but he couldn't be sure; his deliberate exploration of his powers had been confined to what would be useful fighting demons, and as far as he knew they had only worked on demons. But there had been Azazel's other children and the things they could do...

And it made sense, didn't it, that a demon who so often killed with fire would pass that power along in his blood? The demon possessing Brady must've had it too because he had--

He swallowed the sour guilt threatening to flood his mouth when Jess met his eyes. Blinked, and unfocused his gaze. He'd felt something struggling against him, deep inside, when he'd accessed that power and he wondered if it could be the other him whose body he was possessing and who he was somehow keeping caged and gagged through subconscious will alone, or if it was something else inside him. Something tied to that terrible power, that vicious thrill that was truthfully more like an icepick than a punch.

"If my Sam is in your universe," she said, obviously following her own train of thought and still making him flinch as if she might've read his mind, "chances are he might not have come clean right away. He can be an idiot like that. And that means he's gonna be in danger, when your brother starts to suspect-- "

The door swung open on loud hinges that made him flinch and a woman came in; she had a bright and kindly face, Hispanic and middle-aged, and she was wearing a floral peasant top and jeans, with a long braid hanging down her back. Jess stood up and said a few quiet words to the woman before she introduced herself to Sam. Her name was Rosa and she was a nurse and she was there to give him a dose of codeine and a glass of water and to insist on helping him to sit up and swallow. He guessed that she had been the school nurse here. From the quick check over he gave himself while sitting up, his bandages had been wrapped and taped with professional neatness and he wondered how neat the stitches were. He didn't like the idea of leaving a permanent scar on someone else's body.

"Thanks," he said. "Thanks for everything. I can't tell you what I..." He looked at Jess, whose face was younger and softer and happier than he'd seen it since he'd crossed over. She was wearing a mask. It made the scars from the fire stand out more starkly. "God bless you," he said, stilted and hoarse.

"We're the ones who're thankful," she said. "Every extra pair of hands. Or hand, even, though I think you've been spared the nerve damage that...well, we'll pray for it. Your fiancé says you've made the crossing from out east and that means a lot of people with family stranded across the country are gonna be desperate for news, so I wouldn't get out of that bed until you're ready to run a gauntlet of questions."

Sam's heart juddered at 'fiancé .' He looked at Jess' left hand, even knowing that he wouldn't see a ring on her finger. Wondered why she hadn't said anything about it, in her brief suggestion of their cover story. Had that just been their default line? Was it ever real?

"I'm sorry but we're gonna be a disappointment," Jess said. "We stuck to back roads and camping on the outskirts of the no-man's lands as much as we could. Only made contact with some old friends who've never been big on keeping up with the outside world anyway."

"Don't feel like you're under any obligation," Rosa said. "We're here to help, no background check needed so long as, 'y'know, we're all just people here."

o

Jess wanted Sam to stay in the infirmary as long as possible, get out of answering questions, rest up while he could. But he couldn't hold still.

It was midmorning when he got out of bed and walked the halls of the high school-cum-militia-run refugee camp with Jess beside him. The place felt huge and empty and echoing to him even though they kept running into people, most of whom wanted to say something friendly, ask only a question or two about if they'd been through this or that city or county, which Jess always answered with a denial. Only maybe one out of three adults had the attire and bearing and weapons that he'd expect of an end-of-days militia. The rest could've been dressed for a shift at Target, if a bit ragged and in need of a shower, and they were skittering about with a soft, timid desperation, trying to keep busy. There were at least as many kids under the age of sixteen as adults and plenty of adults that didn't look old enough to be parents. That meant a lot of orphans. He kept hearing at least one kid crying somewhere in the building but never came across them.

All the windows were warded, sunlight filtering in irregular patches through the thick strokes of marker. He examined the wards and when it came to angels and demons and witchcraft whoever had drawn them seemed to know what they were doing; and then there were some he didn't recognize, except that he thought they were Mesopotamian and perhaps Assyrian and they were definitely old as dirt. He had no books and no laptop and that above all made him feel helpless.

There were posters on the walls advertising the drama club's production of The Crucible--performances starting 10/13/2012. That gave him something to work with, if he was constructing a timeline of this civilization's ongoing collapse.

The plumbing in the restrooms worked. The cafeteria served decent amounts of subpar cafeteria food. There was a garden in the courtyard and a greenhouse growing enough vegetables to supply a decent farmer's market. It could almost have been some kind of a half-successful commune experiment instead of a militia-run camp of apocalypse survivors.

In the cafeteria, eating macaroni and canned string beans, Sam got the known intel about the dirt-bike gang that had ambushed them from three members of the militia, Carl and Annabeth and Adam, all wearing a hodgepodge of army surplus clothing and gear, crosses and other protective charms hanging around their necks.

"They've thrown their lot in with one of the false gods," Annabeth said. "He's a damned lazy sonofabitch, makes them do his dirty work for him."

"Do you know which god?" Jess asked.

"Some horny Babylonian freak, I think. A weather deity who crawled out of the chaos last year with a taste for blood. Weak to stakes dipped in bull's blood, which we'll be packing. All his cult followers need is a bullet in the heart or head. Or a machete chop, which I hear you're pretty good at."

Jess smiled at that, like Annabeth had complimented the chiaroscuro light modelling on her painted zinnias.

"We'll get you suited up," Carl said.

"Yeah," Sam said, turning to Jess. "What's been salvaged of our gear?" She met his eyes for a moment, hers widening incredulously, her mouth parting, faintly mouthing 'no.'

"My fiancé here can't rotate his right shoulder or hold his arm steady," Jess said. "He can't use his gun hand."

"I can shoot with the other," Sam said. "I've managed like this before."

"Yeah, and while you were 'managing' you got hurt even worse."

"We're not exactly giving people physicals before they join up," said Adam. "You can point in the general direction and pull a trigger, you're in."

"But there's no shame if you can't," said Annabeth. "Just, whatever you work out, don't drag the couple's drama into the thick of it." She looked askance at Adam who rolled his shoulders back uncomfortably.

"Can we talk in private for a minute," Jess said, rising swiftly and stiff-backed from the table. Sam trailed her out of the cafeteria, let her pull him into a janitorial supply closet where they stood in darkness for a minute while she fumbled for the light switch. They could be kids brazenly sneaking around so they could hook up. An illusion that shattered when he looked down at her and saw the urgency on her face, the regret, the honest exhaustion.

"You know the arm isn't what I'm worried about."

He knew and he rationally shared her concerns and he was terrified besides. And yet.

"I can't let you go alone. And how will it look to these people, if I just opt out of a fight I kind of started?"

"Better than if they see you light a guy on fire with your mind. I get that these people come across all bay area friendly and open-minded, but you can never bet on who can handle the truth about this psychic stuff. And you're not exactly up to giving them a safe, controlled demonstration, are you?"

There was a history there, of course there was; this other him had done things that he needed to know about, whose consequences he had to face, and this fear throttling the questions he needed to ask was an unforgivable weakness. He had to find his way out of this maze, had to save Jess, had to get home to Dean.

"How did I--he--the other me...How did he learn to control it?"

"Years of training, not something you could lock down in a couple of hours."

"Training from who?"

"Another psychic," she said, "at first. Her name was Missouri and she saved our lives. After her, you learned from who you could when you could. There was never any school for gifted youngsters and it took you years to get as much control over it as you have--had...There were some accidents along the way." That meant that he'd hurt people, probably a lot of people. Maybe that was when Dean had left him.

"What are we doing here? I don't even know what mission we're on, what these visions mean, what's sending them. I'm walking into every situation blind. I'm no good to you like this and I have to...I mean, you need the other guy. You're right, I can't be him." Pain cracked the codeine's shutters and shot through his shoulder, a series of hot needle jabs.

"So don't be. Just sit tight here while I help these people, pay them back for what they did for us, and then we'll figure this Quantum Leap mess out. You said you'd do whatever I asked, remember?"

That hadn't been exactly what he'd said, but he couldn't seem to argue the point. Not after what he'd done, invading her life, impersonating someone she trusted, lying to her again.

He grasped for a practical concern.

"What about that dart gun you gave me? What were the darts laced with, dead-man's blood? Silver tips?"

"No, some spellwork. It'll knock out pretty much anything."

"Who made it?"

"We stole it from a necromancer who was collecting some kind of zoological exhibit of the undead and other supernatural beings. Why?"

"I don't think this biker-gang-cult or whatever they're supposed to be are just humans. I saw one of them--his eyes flashed white for a second."

"You sure?"

"Maybe. It was just a flash."

She shrugged, turned her head sharply aside, curtain of hair swinging across her face. She was looking at the door. He picked up on the faint beat of footsteps pacing outside it.

He followed her back out of the supply closet. He couldn't seem to do anything but follow her, follow her lead. It was shame and confusion and weakness, he thought; he felt so much guilt about what he'd done to her--this Jess and the other--and so much fear of this power inside him and what he could do that he was letting it paralyze him. He noticed this, but it didn't help, anymore than feeling like he was floating outside his body could actually get him out of bed on the bad days.

"We're holding a service," the man who'd been pacing, a young man with a bunch of bright floral tattoos on his arms, told them. He had a girl with him, her hair dyed bubblegum purple and she had the same pinkish baby face as him, maybe a sister. Another boy in a Lone Mountain logo'd sweatshirt had been holding his hand, standing now behind him, watching Sam with big nervous eyes over his shoulder. Had they heard something? "Say a few prayers or just have a moment in silence where we're all together. No pressure or anything; it's non-denominational and you don't have to attend if you don't wanna."

"We'd love to," Jess said, smiling, a little too syrupy. "Wouldn't we?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, honey, it'd be great." He'd never called her honey before and he wasn't sure where it had come from. He ran a hand through his hair, familiar act meeting the unfamiliar sensation of his new haircut. What timeline divergence had led to his other self deciding to go a good three inches shorter?

The service was held in the school gymnasium and Sam counted roughly sixty-five people in attendance. It was hot and claustrophobic and some kid was crying in the crowd and Sam looked for them but couldn't pick them out. Sam bowed his head, went through the motions. Thoughts and prayers. He felt tired, worn and bruised like he’d been awake for a week. Jess looked the same, and he guessed that she was just going through the motions too but couldn't be positive. She'd been raised Catholic and when he'd known her had described her religious status as semi-lapsed-it's-complicated. That had resonated with him, somehow.

Outside, on the broad sweep of cement steps leading from the high school's main doors, the afternoon's boiling sun rebounding hot and heavy off the pavement. A row of Spanish style white stucco houses with broken windows and weedy, withered lawns across the street.

The militia men and women who were going on the raid said their goodbyes, many of them to children who were quietly sniffling, like they were used to this.

Jess brushed her lips against his cheek, fleeting as the flap of a butterfly's wings, and he felt the jarring and poignant rhyme with the last time he'd kissed her goodbye, before leaving with Dean for a few days and he had never again--

She piled with the others into three camo Jeeps with off-road tires and drove off into the dusty golden haze of afternoon sun and what was left of the suburbs, quickly vanishing around a left turn.

Chapter Text

With another dose of codeine in him and his shoulder aching dully, he helped Rosa get the infirmary ready for the influx of wounded when the raid was over. Laying out the tweezers, the scalpels, the spools of thread, the iodine, the gauze, the tape, the Ace bandages and the disposable gloves on a counter that ran along the back wall next to the sink where kids could wash their hands between projects. He took another four fold-able camp beds out of a supply closet and set up the morphine bags by each cot. There was a radio sitting on a desk under the window and they were waiting on it to crackle to life, the voice on the other end, full of panic or grief or triumph or resignation or whatever it would be, giving them the head's up on how many patients they should expect. A big speaker mounted in one corner of the ceiling was fuzzily playing some mellow indie rock that Sam might've liked a dozen years ago and now could only think of as something Dean would hate. Sam was fidgeting with a row of tweezers and a row of scalpels, enough scalpels and tweezers and enough iodine to extract a dozen bullets. His mind was blessedly quiet, absorbed in performing simple arithmetic. It didn't last.

He asked himself which would be worse for Dean: to be alone or to have a Sam who was a stranger taking up his place. He wondered if that other Sam could shatter glass and start fires with his mind and if so, when he came home, would he wake up in chains?

He wasn't on demon blood, he was reasonably certain, and that wasn't as reassuring as it should be. To try and understand what was happening to him he had to exhume and examine things he'd long since interred in one of his mind's dankest cellars. Those first weeks after Dean went to Hell, when he'd made his first conscious effort to use his powers against demons. His pathetic struggles and the sense that he was bashing his head against a wall for the sake of it and the bodies from demons he couldn't exorcise piling up in the fallow field out back of that rotting shell of a house.

When he finally turned the corner it had been an accident, he'd assumed at the time. Biting Ruby's shoulder during sex in retaliation for her nails raking his scalp, and afterwards, an argument that always followed sex like clockwork, this time because she wanted to go to Denny's for breakfast or something ridiculously domestic and inane, and he'd broken every pane of glass in the house without even trying. It had taken him a little while to connect the dots. It had taken him longer to realize that she had likely planned it all: the sex, the biting, the blood, the argument, the broken glass.

There was an empty terrarium left on the desk in the corner, maybe for raising frogs to the slaughter. A few microscopes and glass slides. He could steal the glass, practice on it later. There was a tremor in his hand and a dull ache in his head just thinking about it. Breaking more stuff to try and get it under control--there was a paradox in that. He didn't understand it and he didn't really believe he could control it unless he did.

Maybe Azazel or some other demon had done something differently to him here, something besides just bleeding into his infant mouth and stalking him from the shadows for the next twenty-two years. Maybe Hell had intervened sooner. Maybe that was why Dean was gone.

The boy with the floral tattoos on his arms was also helping prepare the infirmary; he had told Sam his name was Daniel and he'd been pre-med at Lone Mountain which was where he'd met Parker, the boy who'd been holding his hand. He was cheerful, talking to Rosa about movie night. He said he had a big surprise planned and she should get the word out. The man with his leg in a makeshift brace, his name was Bruce, and he was sitting up and talking with Rosa about what they should plant in their greenhouse vegetable garden: spaghetti squash, sugar pumpkin, sprouts. As soon as he had the brace off and was up to squatting he was going out to pick the green tomatoes and fry them. He was wearing a wedding ring around his neck, glinting in the sunlight. Sam glanced at it more than once.

Jess had been pre-med. She was going to be a doctor, of some kind. Compared to some of the pre-med kids he'd known, like Brady as he'd been before the demon, Jess had been vague about her future career. He'd wondered, sometimes, if becoming a doctor was truly what she wanted. Maybe it was what she thought she should want, the solid and brilliant career her parents had envisioned for her. They'd never discussed it openly. The closest he'd come to suggesting another option to her was joking about the fortune the paintings she'd given him would be worth one day when she was the next Georgia O'Keefe. He was aware that he might be projecting his family baggage onto her and that he might be inviting unwanted scrutiny onto himself if he knocked on that door.

It had scared him, those years of medical school and law school and his vague imaginings of the consuming careers that would come after, hours and hours spent apart from each other, and he had no model for how to maintain a functional relationship under those circumstances. He had no model for how to maintain a functional relationship, period. It had been that fear among the more romantic reasons, he could recognize now, that had started him shopping for engagement rings.

"Parker and I are getting married," Daniel said, another accidental echo of Sam's train of thought that made him startle, mouth dry. "Next week, here in the gym so everybody can be sure to make it. We decided we've had enough of waiting."

"What about going out to Point Reyes?" Rosa said with a strained smile. "What about your aunt? And Professor Gibson?"

"They'll understand, like they understood about everything else. Us being together, the way we're meant to be. We just can't put it off anymore," he said with a hardened, determined cheerfulness. "Can't live the rest of our lives holding out for some dream where everything's gonna come together perfectly. Carpe diem, right? Honestly, I just feel bad for Melody. We've been planning our weddings together since we were six. Guess when she gets hitched she'll just have to live the bridal mag dream for the both of us."

Something lurched and jarred in his chest. He looked up at a poster on the wall, a picture of a coral reef with a quote from the marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. The wall it was pasted to was an unpleasant shade of green. There was another poster advertising the school's production of The Crucible, free admission, but all donations would go to construction of a new greenhouse.

Creak of the door swinging open and Sam jerked around, jittery and off-balance, saw a little girl with big swollen red eyes and a tower of red legos gripped in one tiny fist.

"What's up now, honey?" Rosa asked her.

"Sarah took the other blocks that I need to make my bridge."

"You gotta talk to Ellie about that, let her work it out between you," Rosa said. "She's in charge today."

"Miss Ellie says I can't have all the red blocks for myself, but I need them! I can't make my bridge without them. It won't be right."

She had the uncompromising stare of a child who doesn't understand why the world should be absurd and difficult in the way that it is and Sam thought about Jack. Jack, left behind while Dean searched for him.

Maybe Dean would turn to Jack for help getting him back and Jack would master his ability to open doors between universes and when after they saved Sam they could save Mary and it would all work out for the best in the end.

He punctured this ballooning impossible fantasy quickly.

"You can't hang around here today, sweetheart," Rosa said. "It's gonna get real crowded later. And there's gonna be grown-up stuff happening. Doctor stuff."

He thought about the bodies he'd seen piling up on the streets and the number of orphans here that he'd counted and he wondered what point there was in being euphemistic about it.

"Okay," the girl said, sulky, scuffing at the floor with her pink daisy sneaker.

He was blinded by a a bloody light and he had time to think, oh, another vision, before he was engulfed in the smell of sawdust and mud and gunpowder and blood. He saw a mist of red and burning white eyes and raised open hands raised like a preacher's and a flash of Jess' golden hair and Jess crumpling against a wall. Black stormheads building and building, cascading down the mountain and over the valley, a lightning flash illuminating corpses in Army Surplus camo, corpses in civilian clothes. An inhumanly long-fingered hand wrapped around Jess' throat.

When he came to he was on his knees, one hand still gripping the counter, holding himself up from completely sliding to the floor. There was a faint taste of sawdust when he licked his lips, an acrid smell in his nose, and he breathed slow and deep, forcing clean air through his lungs. No one was touching him but he could feel their proximity, their anxious hovering, and he felt a little like a cornered animal. He looked around. The little girl was gone, the classroom door closed.

"Must be an adverse reaction--" Rosa was saying.

He retched weakly and pressed the heels of his hands to his watery eyes. It had been vivid and brief and clear, for a vision.

"In, out, slow, slow," Daniel was saying, and then one of his hands was gripping Sam's bicep and the other cradling the side of Sam's head while he inspected Sam's pupils. "You been taking anything besides the codeine?"

He shook his head, huffed out a short laugh that stuttered against his lips. His temples were weighted with a dragging, dull pain.

"It was a vision," he said, calm and deliberate. "I get them sometimes."

"You--what...You're not saying you're some kind of a prophet?"

"No, I'm no prophet. I just get visions sometimes when people are in danger and I can help them. I'm nothing special, I'm just psychic."

"What did you see?"

"The raid. I'm needed."

"Not in the shape you're in right now, you're not."

"These visions are only sent to me for a reason. So I can help people." He modulated his voice to a level and self-assured sincerity, the half-lie sliding easily off his tongue. He watched Rosa and Daniel struggle, Daniel raising clenched fingers to his mouth and then tugging on the small gold ring piercing his right earlobe, Rosa touching the cross tucked into the collar of her blouse. Bruce was the one to pick up the radio. He asked for a report and crackling static filled a tense few seconds and then came a hard whisper telling them they'd scoped the site and they'd gotten in position and exchanged fire. Some of the hostiles did seem to be using necromancy and wouldn't go down with a regular bullet. They had to get in close range, but they'd come prepared for that.

"Really not much more dangerous than cleaning out a nest of fangs," Bruce said.

"Vampires are predictable," Sam said. "Necromancers usually come with surprises."

Bruce nodded, mouth set in a grim line.

"Wouldn't be much point in a vision if it showed you stuff that was already happening and that you could do nothing about," Daniel said.

"Exactly," he said. "That's why I've gotta go now. I can still do something. I can..." save her, he didn't say.

Jess had been right about these people. They weren't fanatics, blinded by adherence to dogma. They were so desperately normal, still. They wanted to believe that things happened for a reason. They wanted to believe in a higher power, some greater good. The temptation to throw due caution to the wind and grasp after some proof of that was what he was dangling in front of them. He felt faintly sick about it, but he didn't have a choice. He couldn't ignore another vision, Jess in danger, and live with himself.

"Okay," Rosa said. "You can take my car. It's the 98' silver Subaru in the backlot. Here. This one's the key to the fence around the lot and this one's the car key."

"Thank you," he said.

"I'll get you your gun," Daniel said. "And see if we've got a spare machete lying around.

Turned out, they'd confiscated the Colt he'd had on him while he was unconscious and shut it up in a locker and hadn't told him about it. He wondered how much that was a sign of particular distrust on their part. He thought about Parker, watching him warily over Daniel's shoulder. Maybe they had suspected something. They'd been stupid, then, to just take his gun and let him wander around the building. If they suspected what he could do, burn a man alive with a half-conscious thought, it had been insanely dangerous.

Daniel got him a machete from the armory too.

"Congratulations on the wedding," he said to Daniel who blinked at him, big soft eyes, confused and anxious but hopeful.

"Congrats on the vision thing, hope it works out for you," he said with a brittle half-smile, tugging on his earring again.

"Me too," he said.

o

He was driving east, inland, then south along the highway through a stretch of scrub and toyon bushes and manzanita and then through oaks and hills again. It was late in the day and still the sun blazed down on him with a burning heat. He searched the glovebox for sunglasses, didn't find any. He looked at his hands, at someone else's hands gripping the wheel of someone else's car. It was a state of being both foreign and familiar. He took his right hand off the wheel, held it out flat, flexed the fingers, clenched it into a fist. Coordinated enough. He had it under control, the physical problem at least.

By the time he turned down the road where the mill lay dead ahead, it was nearly dusk, but the sun clung tenaciously in the sky.

He got out of the Subaru. Above, the sky darkened, turned an ominous dark grey; the sun slanted sideways against it, everything more vivid under the contrast. The Jeeps parked outside, some of their windshields pock-marked with bullet holes. Bodies in camo on the ground; he counted three, picked off by rifle fire.

The mill's front door had been blown off its hinges and he entered through a still choking thick cloud of pipe bomb smoke. Pulled his jacket up to cover his nose, stooped low to the ground and edged in sideways with his back to the wall. He had to move a couple yards before the air cleared and his eyes stopped watering enough that he could make out his surroundings. The mill was just as big on the inside. Longer than it was wide, support beams made of corrugated steel. The ceiling arced over his head, coming to a point thirty, thirty-five feet up. There was a cat-walk built into the walls, one staircase leading up to it. Sawmills and conveyors and lumber carts were pushed together to form barriers, but the pallets of lumber had been cleared out to make room for a campsite. The kind of camp in an abandoned industrial building typical of monster nests. There were a few tents for privacy but stacks of luggage and camp stoves and radios and a generator were out in the open. He glanced down, saw shoes and bottles and and trash. His throat constricted as he spotted a plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex and a few broken Breyer horses and a box of legos. There were children here, taking cover he knew not where. He came across a woman in a yellow sun dress with a tangle of dirty blonde hair half-hiding her face, her abdomen soaked in blood from a gut wound, lying just outside a tent that a bullet had ripped through. A few more feet and there was a man in a wife beater that showed off his jungle of tattoos with his head chopped off. Erratic pops of gunfire. He crouched down and on the other side of the tent he saw a man stagger past him, a man with tattoos and a blood spattered face and two bullet holes in his chest that he was walking off. He raised his machete defensively, but the man just staggered on by without turning his head. Best as he could tell, there were only a few members of the militia left taking cover, returning fire, behind machinery or up on the catwalk. He had to find Jess. He slunk into the shadows under the catwalk, crept along the wall.

Halfway down the length of the building he found her. Jess was crumpled against the wall with one arm wrapped around her rib cage, her blood-streaked hair hiding her face, two men looming over her, and one of them was raising his gun and over the roaring in his ears he could just hear her shout "Impetus Bestiarum." The man dropped his gun and turned from Jess and leapt at the throat of his fellow, who returned the attack with equal dumb animal ferocity. They snarled and clawed and bit at each other and Sam caught glimpses of the bloody tear marks streaking under their eyes and then he saw Jess collecting the gun from the ground and standing up, flicking her hair back from her face, jaw clenched and mouth pressed flat, eyes glittering eerily in the half-light. She raised the gun and she shot both men in the back. Only then did she see him, standing there, staring. She lowered the gun a few inches, a deep line appearing between her brows, a scrape on her scalp dripping blood down her cheek and through her hair, more blood brightly flecking the grey hoodie and brown jacket and the strap of the canvas bag she was wearing.

"Baby, what're you doing here?" she asked him.

Sam was paralyzed for another dangerous moment, trying to reconcile what he'd just seen, his mind superimposing the images of two women who he couldn't have imagined more different from each other, one golden and kind and normal and one red and terrible and strange, using the same magic, the same cruel power that robbed men of their will and morals and lives.

She took a step forward. Sam jerked back, some involuntary flight response, stepping out from under the shadow of the catwalk over their heads and almost taking a bullet to the foot. He ducked behind a column and out of the corner of his eye saw Jess do the same. Sam took the risk first and peeked his head around for a look. Caught a flash of someone moving on the catwalk across the room, before the man’s head vanished from sight behind one of the roof's metal trusses. Sam bolted, half-sliding across the smooth concrete floor with Jess' cover and retaliatory gunfire popping in his eardrums. He went straight for the stairs on his side of the catwalk, winging around the edge and racing up to the second floor. The whole thing rattled and banged with his footfalls as he ran, keeping low in case this shooter didn’t take the distraction of Jess trying to put a round in his chest.

Sam saw him from a distance once he’d crossed the stretch of catwalk wrapping around the front of the building. The shooter was on one knee, taking aim for Jess’ head.

He spun toward Sam, too slow. He was trying to roll over and raise his shotgun while Sam only had to swing the machete in a downwards arc and it was over.

He was young, maybe late teens and he didn't have the tattoos and he had gone down easy, too easy. Maybe he didn't have any necromantic protection on him, like the woman who'd died from taking a stray bullet to the gut. The realization filled Sam with a confused dread, and he remembered that there were kids somewhere in the building. He had to rescue them. He had to protect Jess. He had to stop this, all of it.

There was a ringing report of gunfire from the first floor and Sam turned around, grabbing the railing. "Jess!”

"I’m fine!” Jess shouted. Sam looked down and saw the crumpled body of another man dead on the ground at Jess' feet, this one biker-leather-wearing and grizzled and tattooed.

Sam tucked the machete up under his arm and jumped the railing, landing on one of the conveyor belts and sliding off onto a pallet beside the foreman's corner office. The codeine was wearing off, the throbbing in his shoulder and his temples only blurred at the edges by adrenaline. Jess joined him, grim and quiet, unzipping the duffle that was strapped across her chest. She started reloading in silence while Sam took a look around, half-wondering if she was packing more hex bags. She touched his arm and he looked down and saw she was holding out a palm-full of bullets to him. "They're the same stuff that was in the dart gun, they'll work on the 'roided up necros. Just don't waste them on anyone who isn't inked up like a deadhead. The rest will die like normal."

He acknowledged her with a tight nod and clamped down on his scattered thoughts. He couldn't afford questions right now. He emptied the chamber of his gun, re-loaded with her bullets.

She turned and started running down a short hall to a back exit. He followed her.

"Something's about to go down," Jess said, pushing through the door to a loading yard and crossing to a hole in its chainlink fence and taking off running across the scrubland. "Saw a big guy who was yelling orders take off this way...He had a hostage and he must have something planned. He wouldn't just check out when his team was winning."

There was a shack on the low edge of the slope of scrubland, a place built out of lumber scraps and leftover nails. It was the kind of place people throw together after the church they grew up in fell victim to fire or flood. There was no cross to mark it, no path to its door, but the walls were whitewashed clean, and it shined bright despite the shadow of the building stormclouds, oily black and silvery smoke piling up and up, blotting out the view of Diablo, dropping like a portcullis walling up a medieval fortification.

They crossed the threshold, guns drawn. There was a man on his knees, his back to them. The power he was radiating smacked into them like a wall, pain screaming up Sam's left arm as it was jerked back at an unnatural angle, his hand spasming, dropping his gun before he could fire. Beyond the kneeling man he saw an altar where one of the militia men was draped upside down, throat slashed to the spinal column, blood streaming down, coalescing and snaking along the floor, slithering into a circle. The man rose from his knees and turned around, his face anointed with stripes of blood, his eyes shining white. Not the cold marble white of the demons Sam had known, not like Lilith or Alastair, thank God, but with an electric shimmer, almost like tiny headlamps. White light so bright it seared the corners of his eyes was rising from the circle of blood on the floor, and it was all horribly familiar, down to the presence of a woman just behind his shoulder.

Quietly, a figure emerged from thin air, standing unnaturally still in the center of the circle. He was an improbably large man, half a foot taller than Sam, his skin a rich shade of brown, a massive pair of bull's horns protruding from his bald scalp, a grimly handsome face sporting an oily curly black beard, hooded black eyes looking down on them. His bare chest and arms were tattooed with hieroglyphs in an intricate pattern that Sam thought might be some kind of astrological chart, in a style that his followers had only facilely imitated with their pentagrams and necklaces of tiny hands.

The necromancer bowed to him with a preacher's florid gesticulation. He said something in what was probably intended to be Akkadian. Sam caught the name Hadad, a Mesoptomanian god of the weather.

"That's not even close to the right pronunciation," Hadad said, his grumble like thunder. "I've been listening to you butcher the tongue of your betters for two years. I've been patient. And look! Now what have you done?"

"Yes, you have. Master, we never would have summoned you if it wasn't an emergency. We were attacked in our own home--"

"You started a petty turf war when you robbed your neighbors after spoiling your own resources. Like all humans, you then had to drag your gods into it. You thought I'd be pleased with this senseless butchery? The occasional small sacrifice, and I was generous. But this..."

"I brought you back from the dead!" His voice was nearing shrill, more panicked than angry. "You were nothing but a goddamn relic! I fucking killed for you and fed you and defended you while you were weak!"

"Who asked you to? You brought me back to this cesspit to fix what others broke. The cycle I was once a part of has been hopelessly corrupted by you and your filthy machinery and your greed. Bah! More greed. You want to leech off my power so that you can continue robbing your neighbors, you small minded thug. You aren't grateful for my blessings! You know nothing of the natural order. It's past time you learned your lesson."

A high wind was screaming against the windows and whistling between the church's bare boards, lightning licking the air, bright enough to banish every shadow and make Sam's eyes screw half-shut against his volition.

The necromancer raised his arms, whether in petition or because he was trying to fight the god with his borrowed power Sam couldn't be sure. But the force that had been holding him back weakened.

Sam dropped to his knees, scrambled for his gun. He collected it and shot the man between the shoulder blades. He went down, the spray of blood and the arc of his fall captured by another lightning flash.

"Necromancer's dirty tricks," Hadad said. "Everybody's using them these days." He looked at Sam, his eyes cut into disdainful slits and his lips curled in a sneer. "What have we here? A stranger in a strange land, as your people now say."

"We didn't mean to bother you," Sam said. "They really did attack us first."

"Even so, you continued the fight. Humans! You never know when enough is enough."

"Oh, we've had enough," Sam said. "Believe me, we'd be happy to just--."

"I believe you have, traveler. This isn't your world and this isn't your fight. Leave, if you can find your way back. But the others still need to be taught a lesson, all of them."

Sam opened his mouth to to continue the argument, cut off by Jess, who must've been creeping cat-silent between the pews while all eyes were briefly off her, racing across his eye line. Jess was rushing the god, drawing a stake from her duffle which was stained dark red with bull's blood. Reckless, he thought again, the word landing with a hard beat of panic. Crazy suicidal recklessness, the kind he had learned to clock as separate from the usual line of on-the-job recklessness, through years of watching Dean. Hadad spun and caught her by the throat and the arm wielding the stake, easily. Sam was slammed across the church and into a pew, which cracked against his back, a crack loud as bone and a wrenching pain that shuddered along every knob of his spine and shocked the air out of his lungs.

It didn't take him long to collect himself, his wits and his will. He'd known since the jump that this was what he'd have to do, even if he couldn't look at it head-on.

Sam stretched the power at his fingertips out into a web, relaxing into the feeling as the interweaving strands began flaring into a net of sorts, a net designed to encompass and trap the straining, quivery mass of black, electric sludge that was a demon, barely giving it seconds to realize what was happening before he wrapped it up completely, severing all ties to its host body. The god wasn't like that, closer in substance to an angel's cold burning grace but more diffuse and complex and more enmeshed in the world around him, part of a web that was so much bigger than what Sam could cast. Sam gave up overcoming him and settled for chipping at the wall that had slammed him down and his vice-grip on Jess. He gave the god a psychic shove and heard a heavy stumble and a grunt and the crash of a body dropping to the floor while he rolled over, got his left hand under him, pushed himself onto his knees and grabbed the edge of the bench and pulled himself to his feet. Hadad had dropped Jess, she had rolled onto her hands and knees and was gasping for breath. The god was touching the blood oozing from the hole in his side, just above his left hipbone, where Jess had stabbed him. He looked over his shoulder at Sam, lightning crackling in the smooth black mirror of his eyes.

"I've had enough of this world," he said. "I just want to rest."

He vanished, possibly to crawl in a hole somewhere and die. But no, they probably weren't so lucky. Sam climbed shakily onto his feet, vice-grip of pain clutching his back and both shoulders and squeezing against his temples. He gulped in air, thick and muggy and electric. He staggered to Jess and squatted, grabbing her upper arm and pulling her up onto her feet. Her throat and cheekbone were bruised red and purple. The wind was still howling, rising in volume. They had to take shelter and this church wasn't gonna cover it. He pulled her towards the doorway where he tried to take a step outside and learned that he couldn't without the wind ripping his unsteady legs out from under him. He dragged the door shut and latched it, for however long that would hold. Dropped to his knees, Jess in his arms, her hair whipping into his face, stinging. They closed their eyes and waited for silence.

Chapter Text

He observed Dean closely on the drive back to the docks, his skin which had a greenish grey tinge that might've been the evening shadow of the forest, his hands which were tight on the wheel, the tensing muscles in his throat as he swallowed. Dean should be feeling weak, after what had happened. He should have at least some niggling suspicion at the back of his mind that he was missing time. How much was Dean aware of? He wouldn't get a straight answer if he asked him outright how he was feeling. He had to try a more subtle, sidelong technique.

"It's been a long day," Sam said. "Frustrating. Covering the exact same ground again, just another bust."

"Yeah," Dean said and turned the radio up. It was 90s grunge, Alice In Chains, belting out grim defiance No, no, no, ya know he ain't gonna die

"I just need it to be over soon. Time seems to be draggin' on and on, y'know?"

He felt Dean's eyes looking askance at him and then Dean looked back at the road and ignored him.

He needed a new plan.

o

Sam tightened his grip on the railing as the ferry roared lowly beneath him. Ahead, the fog was solid, occluding the shoreline and the late evening blue. Under what rising moonlight could filter through the fog, the ocean glinted black as an oil slick. The ferry's lights reflected in needles of fiery orange; the waves breaking against the hull looked like they were crested in snow. He closed his eyes and tried to retreat to the quiet blank place in his mind where he could start drawing his plan on the metaphorical walls.

"If you're gonna hurl, you should probably get closer to the edge," Dean said. Sam opened his eyes, his teeth set on edge by Dean's sudden proximity even though he'd known that Dean had followed him up here. He looked over his shoulder. Dean was standing at his back with his hands shoved into his pockets, the night breeze already stinging his face red, like a slap. He didn't look so good, aside from that. Dark shadows under hollow eyes, tension in the set of his jaw and his mouth pale and tight. He looked sickly, soul sick, literally. "And if you're not, you should wait inside like everybody else instead of freezing your ass off out here."

Sam could feel the cold, same as ever. The briny cut of wind was slipping through the cheap suit and beneath his jacket, through the undershirts he'd layered against the Pacific climate. He shivered slightly.

"I'm not seasick, I'm just takin' in the view."

"You can't see a goddamn thing out here. We're blanketed in fog."

"I like the fog and I like being near the engine. It's relaxing."

"Great, if it's so relaxing why don't you get back in the car and finally take a nap?"

"What?"

"You haven't slept in the past what--twenty-four? thirty-six hours? You thought I wasn't paying any attention? What's going on?"

Sam sighed, the sound a weary admission. He'd been caught out, that was fine. He could work with it. Insomnia was a common symptom of many mental ailments that he'd suffered from at one time or another.

"Seriously, you have to ask?" he said with wounded petulance. "With...everything that's happened lately."

Dean looked at him, forehead furrowed faintly with worry, and then leaned against the railing, his casual posture a lie that couldn't broadcast any louder. Sam swallowed and tried to keep his face little brother sensitive and brooding. He glanced at the seething spitting rumbling dark water below, then back at Dean, keeping his head ducked so that he would be looking up at him.

"With everything that's happened, you were still squeezing in some shut eye at the start of the week. And even with...how I've been acting lately" (slight grimace, apologetic) "you weren't walkin' around on eggshells like you are right now."

Sam pressed his eyes shut, squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. He wiped his hand down his face.

"I'm not-"

"Okay, just for the hell of it, let's pretend we just went through the whole routine where you make up some bullshit excuse, and I see right through it and you say 'seriously, Dean, I'm fine,' and I say 'okay' and don't mention the fact that you're a fuckin' hypocrite about all this talking-out-our-feelings crap, and now we're at the part where you tell me what the hell's going on." Dean paused for breath, which he drew in raggedly, his grimace telling of physical discomfort.

He was feeling weak and he was trying to not let it get to him, trying to cover it over by making a big show of his concern for Sam's well being.

"How am I the hypocrite in this conversation? Look in the mirror, dude. I missed one good night's sleep. You're a wreck."

"Yeah, but I've gotten real good at plowing ahead anyway, so what? We can both be hypocrites." Dean was blithely steamrolling over his defenses and it was starting to raise the hairs on the back of Sam's neck. This wasn't like Dean. Maybe he was starting to suspect something."This about whatever Jack's been callin' you about?"

He'd called the kid by name, which for Dean was an example of trying to tread carefully.

"No, it's nothin' that important. S'just--this case is starting to get under my skin a bit, I guess."

"Okay," Dean said. "You don't have to try and hide it. I'm not gonna blow a fuse at you or ...whatever."

"I'm not worried about that."

"Yeah, if you did a few more push ups every morning, I'm pretty sure you'd've broken the railing in half by now," Dean said. Sam looked down and deliberately loosened his grasp on the metal.

"Thanks for the insight," Sam said. "You're right. I'm gonna go wait in the car." His heart rate was slightly accelerated. That hadn't gone well.

Dean let him walk away.

o

It was nightfall by the time the ferry docked and the vehicles onboard were allowed to drive two by two down the ramp. As the Impala inched out into fresh air, Sam glanced out of the window; the neon shine of the storefronts and the streetlights were tinting the dark fog yellow.

"You wanna get something to eat?" Dean asked. An offer of food to smooth things over. Or a test of some sort. The heaters rattled, pushing warm air out at them, thawing them out and as the mist evaporated off them the smell of salt and brine filled the car.

"I'm good. Unless you're hungry."

"Chowder," Dean said. "You wanna get chowder at the nearest fish fry place? Something warm?"

He rubbed his eyes. "Sure," he said. "Whatever you want."

"C'mon, man, don't do that."

"What are you looking for from me? I'm tired, okay? I'm having a hard time sleeping, I'm barely making any headway on this case, it's been a rough couple of days. Sorry if I'm not articulating my needs clearly enough for you."

"Okay," Dean said. Out of the corner of his eye Sam watched his expression harden almost imperceptibly, turn a shade more remote. He drove them to another fish fry place on the waterfront, the interior decor aping the deck of an old fishing boat with vintage photos and other memorabilia mounted on the walls, hemp fish nets draped from the ceiling, and the tables varnished like sea-weathered wood, faux rustic and tourist-y; the prices weren't cheap. They got chowder. Sam was starting to feel cornered. Before, he'd had the option to kill his brother when it came down to it. But now, with the Furies out for new blood, he was stuck between the frying pan and the fire; between running from Dean or running from a new and largely unknown enemy.

And then there was Notaras, who was both a threat and a possible resource; he had positioned himself so perfectly with his knowledge and his power, manipulating time and memory, which might be exactly what Sam needed. Even without Dean, there was Jody and her girls and there was Jack and all the variables to do with him and there were acquaintances and enemies all across America and beyond, in high and low places, and nowhere he could run to where he wouldn't always be looking over his shoulder.

How many times had he thought this? There is no out.

"You wanna know what's been keeping me up at night? It's you." Sam said it with a weariness intended to convey that he was only being so blunt because he'd been pushed past his limits. "You, running on fumes. It's exhausting to me too."

"You looking for an apology?" Dean said with little emotion in his voice. His face looked drained, sickly, white as the sailcloth curtaining the windows.

"I'm not blaming you. I'm saying if you want to look out for me you should start taking better care of yourself. Please."

He looked at a painting on the wall. The cove, rocky shores drowned in white foam, stormheads piling up stark against the blue still remaining in the sky. In the left top corner, a fishing boat riding the waves off keel. He swallowed, tensing the muscles in his throat, so that it would almost look like he was struggling not to cry.

"Sammy, I--"

The waitress was hovering over their table, having popped out from behind the netting that half-concealed their corner of the restaurant. Her eyes were downcast and her cheeks faintly pink, like she knew she'd interrupted something. Her uniform was made out of a material that resembled a fisherman's weatherproof canvas, ugly, but not a bad body underneath it. Not that he had a shot in hell at getting her out of those clothes anytime soon.

"Sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up," Sam said, hoping his sudden reversal would throw Dean even more off kilter. "It's been a long day."

"Yeah, you keep on sayin' that," Dean said, flat.

"Sorry, I'll just--" the waitress was saying and Dean cut her off.

"Thanks, we'll have the check."

She'd just been about to top off their glasses; their bowls weren't empty and there was still bread stacked on the plate between them. Sam couldn't remember the last time Dean had voluntarily left a meal half eaten. Loss of appetite was a common symptom of a major depressive episode, he reminded himself. And Dean was probably feeling nauseated, sea sick or soul sick or whatever. No reason to let it unsettle him.

o

That night, Sam spent a long time cleaning and polishing and whetting their weapons, putting on a show of compulsive dedication, while Dean was drinking and watching TV and surfing the web and obviously observing Sam. Sam, who had laid down the salt lines and was now handling iron and silver and holy water, obviously not possessed or any kind of shifter. Dean offered intermittent snarky comments on the local news reports and game shows and detective shows that he was watching, breaking up the silence but not making another effort to engage Sam in conversation. He hoped that what he'd said had been enough to make Dean feel guilty, to turn his scrutiny inward. He took some Advil and feigned a few hours of restless sleep. It wasn't so bad; it gave him some much needed quiet time to think about his next step.

In the pre-dawn hours, the police scanner he'd set up crackled to life. In the woods not far from the shore, the body of a young woman had been found by a forest ranger who had at first called it in as a cougar or black bear attack, though he'd been shaken up enough that it had been a little hard at first to tell exactly what he was describing. The only sure thing was that the killing had been savage and strange.

Sam made coffee and smeared cream cheese on cold bagels and woke Dean up. He made sure that his face was dressed in dismay that the killings had continued and in sympathy with Dean's groggy state.

Driving to the scene, in the early morning fog, Sam could only see the outlines of trees and, sometimes, a snatch of the dark hole of the sea, splintered by yellow lamps in the distance – fishing boats and the ferry– and flashes of white foam against the shoreline when Dean took the road parallel to the coast. He and Dean spoke only in clipped professional phrases about where they were going and what they were going to look for when they got there. The silence that settled in between them was placid on the surface and murky in color; Sam couldn't be certain what lurked underneath it.

The forest was little lighter after daybreak, thick fog and dense underbrush filling up the gaps between the spruce and pine trees, knitting the trees together so that the woods might as well be walls, a labyrinth. The smell of salt still covered everything and he could hear the ocean over the bubble of a brook flowing down to the shore. They were on a slope where a stream was overflowing with spring melt. It ran fast, dark gray like the fog and the sky and the sea. It wheezed and foamed against the rocks, carried debris--branches, leaves, blood--all of it swirling fast in the current. Tumbled and tumbled toward the cliff's edge. Right on the bank of the stream, there was a tree and thirty feet up in the branches was a corpse. She had been identified from a student ID card taken from the wallet that had fallen from her pocket. Ellie Brewster. She was draped on her back across the thick branches, her skin torn to ribbons and chunks of flesh carved out, her ribcage cracked open and her abdomen flayed, her intestines spooling out, pieces of her, splashes of blood and chunks of hair and strips of skin, scattered across the forest floor. Removing her from the tree had proved a logistical challenge. The forest rangers had had to bring in a ladder and an electric saw. The branches cradling the body were knotty and dense.

Dean was staring up, his profile pale and tense, while the corpse was being lowered from the tree. Then Dean swallowed thickly, scrubbed a hand down his face and looked away. He wandered a few steps away from Sam, shoulders rounding in what could be reaction to the cold or could be a defensive hunch, retreating into himself. Sam wondered what that was about, as it couldn't be something so routine as the gore or the loss of a young life. Maybe it was her long blond hair and the wide gash across her abdomen, reminding him of their mother.

There was a low roar of background conversation in his ears. There were a lot of people around, a couple of cops and the coroner and forest rangers and firemen and dogs, but everyone who wasn't him or Dean felt insubstantial as a shadow. It was the loss of his soul, of course; if ever he'd felt like a stranger to the rest of humanity before it was nothing like this. It wasn't him, it was them, the sense of their separateness and insubstantiality. How little they mattered.

Dean still felt real, an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of Sam's existence, as real as gravity or inertia or a bad habit he just couldn't kick.

Dean pulled himself together and started walking around, pulling out a flashlight and searching the forest floor for tracks like so many others were doing. Sam got stuck with a forest ranger and a cop both trying to talk to him, both asking questions about why the FBI had been so quick to report to the scene of a rabid animal attack. They shouldn't have come here, they were too conspicuous. Sam put them off, with a blunt disdain that would've been unwise if he had to deal with them again, which he assumed he wouldn't.

Dean circled around him before looking him in the face again, eyes flicking up and down, scanning him like he'd scanned the crime scene. His expression was blank, the kind of blank that could be bored or tired or trying to conceal something without giving away the act of concealing.

"No tracks and a lot of fresh broken branches. Whatever it is, it really has got wings," he said. "So that's...awesome."

Sam shivered and he shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. "Could be a harpy, I guess."

"Let's go," Dean said.

o

They interviewed Ellie's aunt, her father's sister, Amanda Brewster, that very afternoon. Her sitting room with its white carpet and white upholstered furniture and white fireplace was one long rectangle of light, too pale and too bright after the dark day outside. She reclined on her white leather sofa with one leg crossed over the other and a glass of sherry in her hand, the red alcohol and her plum dark nails a splash of color. Her lipstick was clumsily slashed across her mouth and her eyes were tightly strained but other than that you wouldn't know she was recently bereaved.

Ellie was an orphan: her mother had committed suicide when she was fourteen and her father had died in a car crash on New Years Eve her senior year of high school..

Amanda was happy to tell them about her suspicions of foul play where her brother was concerned. He was so brilliant and so successful and so many people were just looking for an opportunity to tear him down. A business rival must've cut his break line, she said, and it could've been proven had his Porsche not gotten crushed like a soda can when he'd gone over the cliffside. They said he'd been drinking but he'd only had a couple glasses of wine at dinner and he'd always been an excellent driver. He was a wonderful man. Poor Ellie. A troubled girl. She seemed to have inherited her mother's instability.

Amanda seemed more torn up over her brother's death three years prior than her niece's savage killing in the last twenty-four hours. A bear must've done it, she said. Dragged her up a tree, did it? She'd warned her about hiking in those woods but that was all the girl wanted to do when she was back in town. She blamed her entirely for the tensions with her father in the year before he died. The girl made up all kinds of terrible things for attention.

Sam didn't have to ask what things. He shared a look with Dean and this time he knew they'd both reached the same conclusion.

They were done with her quickly.

They got back in the car in the grey daylight that was so much more solid than the artificial brightness of the house and for a long moment Dean did nothing but stare straight ahead, unnaturally still.

"MO hasn't changed," Dean said. "It's going after anybody who hurt family."

"That's kind of a leap," Sam said. "What do we really know about the Huntsmans? About these people? Besides a creepy house and what a fake priest told us and now this...awful woman (he shouldn't say bitch, should he?). Besides, even if you're right, it'd mean one guy summoned them to go after his abusive relatives and after they were done with them they went after a girl who might've murdered her scumbag dad."

"Yeah, well, that's revenge for you. Everybody's out for their own pound of flesh for their own reasons and it all makes perfect sense to them somehow."

"So you think it's some kind of vengeance demon?"

"You remember those Greek harpies? The ones that were in those comics--oh, I'm sorry, graphic novels--that you were obsessed with?"

"Pretty sure you read the The Sandman more times than I did."

"You cried at the ending."

"No, that was also you."

"The Fur-"

"Don't say it. Just in case. I mean. If there's a chance in hell that you're right, you shouldn't say their names. The lore says that's the way to draw their eye to you. It's a He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named kind of thing."

He expected Dean to say something even more spectacularly hypocritical about Sam being a nerd, but Dean only shifted the Impala into drive and pulled away from the curb. He switched the radio on and it was Nirvana this time, come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be..

"So you think we got a reason to worry?" Dean said.

"Maybe. But there've been no confirmed sightings of them in centuries, maybe millennia. And they were a big deal, from what little's come down to us. Even the gods were scared to get on the wrong side of them. You really think one psychic boy could summon them out of whatever hole had been holding them for that long and put them on a leash?"

"He had some kind of super special magic knife, didn't he? And he might've had help from whatever serious mojo our fake priest is working."

Sam watched Dean's face closely to see if he could detect any increased repulsion when he mentioned Notaras. He noticed nothing.

"Fine," Sam said. "Guess that's where we're gonna get started on the research."

o

Late that afternoon and it was dark, under heavy clouds that were finally threatening rain and Dean was searching the Men of Letters archives on the laptop, lying on his stomach on the bed, and his expression said he was absorbed in what he was reading if not exactly riveted. Not complaining about doing the reading, even for appearance's sake. His back exposed, vulnerable and unsuspecting. Or he was putting on an act to draw Sam out and Sam was the unsuspecting one--but no, that wasn't so likely, with how raw and volatile Dean's emotional state had been lately. If he suspected that he'd lost Sam on top of everyone else, that he was truly alone, it was difficult to believe that he'd be able to bottle up his reaction so well. Maybe he was just slipping into sullen silence because Sam had hurt his feelings and because he still wasn't feeling well and because he hated being weak.

Sam told him that he was going to the library to look through the microfiche copies of the local paper and search for other suspicious deaths or altercations or contested wills or whatever might count as a blood betrayal to a classical vengeance deity, to see if he could predict who the next victim was likely to be if Dean's theory panned out.

"Yeah, knock yourself out," Dean said in his vaguely half-listening voice, without looking up from the screen. "Pick us up a sixpack and something to microwave on your way back."

He drove to Notaras' cabin. Knocked on the door.

"Please, don't hesitate, it's open." Notaras' high soft professorial voice carried clear as a bell through the door, over the sound of the wind and the sea and the first drops of rain.

Notaras was waiting for him, sitting in an armchair. He was wearing an elegantly tailored double-breasted suit with a royal blue pocket handkerchief, attire that reminded Sam of a Man of Letters. Other users of soul magic, capable of manipulating time with it, and he tucked that thought away for later. He looked younger. His jawline wasn't sagging nearly so much. His hair was thicker, a glossier silver. His eyes were bright under their heavy lids. The living room was the same, dim and dusty and stuffed with books and instruments and cobwebs, the swarm of spiders busy at their work, the lamplight not reaching the corners or the gaps between bookshelves. The wind whooshing against the siding, whistling between the cracks; the rain speckling the window panes. He'd put a jazz record on the turntable and the plinking notes harmonized with the plinking raindrops. On a coffee table, an uncorked bottle of Mandilaria and a wine glass with a few dark red drops clinging to the rim.

"Getting ready to go out?" Sam asked him.

"In a manner of speaking. I can't let Father John Notaras live much longer. I've already laid a trail of heart ailments so that no one will be too shocked when I slip quietly away after I doze off reading The Brothers Karamazov--or perhaps writing my next mystery, to forever go unsolved. A lovely death. More people should be so lucky."

"So you're making a run for it?"

"Oh, no. Not yet, not until I've cleaned up this mess. I know about that poor girl, Ellie. She won't be the last."

"This town must be pretty damned murderous already, if it's gonna keep the kindly ones satisfied."

"The sisters won't limit themselves to one town once they get the scent of juicier meat elsewhere. That's why we've got a ticking clock."

"Gettin' a little ahead of yourself, if you think there's a 'we'-"

"Why else would you be here? You don't know how to kill me, even if one of those cursed bullets would do the trick, and you're not going to risk it. You're scared of me and you're desperate enough to come to me for help because there's something else that scares you more."

"I can't feel fear."

"I don't think that's true. I've dealt with your kind before and you're hardly above such a base animal instinct. It's all fear drive, hunger drive, sex drive; whatever you've been repressing the most, that's the first to boil over."

"I'm not like the others."

"You mean because you can keep a leash on your id? I've met others like that too. A fascinating phenomena, soullessness."

Sam nodded, taking that in a moment. Notaras knew too much about him and that gave him the upper hand, even more than the magical power that he wielded.

"It would only make sense to be afraid of you. I've met others who could tap their own souls for power, but nothing less than an angel that could do what you did to my brother. It was amazing. Did anyone teach you? Were you ever involved with the Men of Letters?"

"I've been a lot of things. Holy man, witch, philosopher, botanist, composer, collector, author, etcetera. Yes, I've been a Man of Letters. The first time was in the mid-seventeenth century, Prague--it was a newly established chapter, charmingly naive; we did little besides imbibe hashish and wine and argue about the cosmic order and our place in it--but we did perform a few successful experiments using the new astrological discoveries. They set their sights so high. I admired that. The whole order--I was around for its founding and I didn't think much of it at the time. Silly little men stumbling across things not dreampt of by their small-minded philosophies and carrying on like they had proprietary rights to the discovery. Typical Western arrogance. But they grew on me, because I've always had a liking for hubris. They had Promethean daring, you know? I'm almost sad to see what's become of them." Notaras arched an eyebrow, his smile quizzical. "Why do you want to know? It's really not anything you could learn, the way you are now. Under different circumstances, I might've been delighted to teach you. You have power in your blood, I can feel it. But it's a base, borrowed thing that can't make up for what you've lost."

"With all your power, you still need me."

"You and your brother." Notaras rose from his chair and ambled a few steps towards Sam. "So what will it take?"

"I need you to do something for me. I need to get out--not just pack up and leave, but erase myself completely--from my old life. That's what you do right? Live a few decades as one person, then you shed that skin and invent a new life, a new identity. It's quite the Houdini act and it's just what I need. If I handle the kindly ones for you, will you help me disappear?"

"This really wasn't what I had in mind," Notaras said, looking pensive and almost downcast. "I was hoping you'd help me out of the goodness of your heart and I wouldn't have to meddle further. But that ship has sailed now, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, it has," Sam said. "So what can my brother and I do that an ancient witch chasing the soul-power dragon can't?"

"That's for you to decide, but I do have a suggestion for you."

Notaras turned on his heel, walked down the short hallway and into the kitchen. Sam followed. Notaras switched on the light. He had a woman tied to a chair, inside a devil's trap drawn in red marker on the linoleum. A demon, black eyed and seething in her bonds, spitting around her gag. Dark hair and nails and heavy eyeliner and leather jacket, reminding him enough of Ruby that he wondered if Notaras had picked her out for that reason. Panicked, she jerked her head towards Sam and then back towards Notaras as he circled around behind her. Notaras picked up a paring knife from the cutting board where he'd been coring an apple, wrapped the length of her hair around his fist, yanked her head back and pressed the blade to her jugular. Her beautiful throat gleamed white under the fluorescent light. Blood throbbed in her carotid artery.

"How would you like to do this?" Notaras asked, his tone light and eager and curious. "It's been a while since I exsanguinated a human. I would prefer to make as little mess as possible--well, damn, now I'm wishing I'd put down a tarp. How long will it take you to drain her?"

Sam hadn't been expecting this, exactly, but it didn't throw him either. This was how Notaras thought he could get a hook into him now that he couldn't appeal to the usual emotional weaknesses. Notaras was again looking at him like he was a rodent in a cage, a lab experiment being made to choose between the food and the pleasure buttons.

It did surprise him just how little tempted he was.

"Don't bother," Sam said. "I'm not gonna do it."

"Really?" Notaras said, crooking one side of his mouth and tilting his head. "I know you are an unusual specimen, but are you really still trying to cling to some ethical code? Don't worry, this poor woman has been possessed since at least a few apocalypses back and the demon riding her is a real piece of work--one of Azazel's old guard, you know--she's taken a lot of internal damage and wouldn't survive an exorcism."

"It's not that. I don't see why it would even work against the kindly ones. I used my powers, back when I had them, to fight demons. The kindly ones aren't really demons, are they?"

"Little is known about their true natures. They were trapped in a pocket of Hell not unlike Lucifer's Cage, as I understand it. Are they demigoddesses or monsters or damned, demented human souls? I've always suspected it might be the last. In any case, it wouldn't hurt for you to try."

"You're wrong," Sam said. "It might hurt a lot. I'm not letting that...thing take me over. I don't want to be dependent on it. I don't want to be dependent on anything or anyone ever again."

"It's hard to gain power without becoming dependent on anything or anyone."

"I'm not interested in power."

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power," he quoted Seneca, smile widening with only a slight curl of mockery. "Very well, if you won't be moved." He set the knife down and Sam reached inside his own jacket on instinct for Ruby's knife so he could kill the demon, but Notaras started reciting the Rituale Romanum and Sam found he didn't have it on him anyway. Dean had it. That wasn't cause for panic, but he didn't like it much. It occurred to him that he still had Psyche's knife and that it meant something that Notaras hadn't made a grab for it yet. He really wanted Sam's cooperation to be at least pseudo-willing.

The demon smoked out around the gag. The body gave a few convulsions and fell limp. Notaras murmured an incantation and the corpse caught fire, was swallowed within seconds by dragonishly long tongues of flame, a bright orange and red glow and a plume of oily dark smoke carving out the sharp planes and deep hollows of Notaras' face, his eyes reflecting the fire. He walked around the flames carelessly, close enough to brush them with his sleeve. The smell of smoke and fresh meat getting flash-charred was filling the kitchen. Sam retreated with Notaras back to the living room where the smoke couldn't seem to penetrate. There must be some kind of containment enchantment on the kitchen where Notaras practiced his magic. Notaras brushed his hand down his sleeve.

"You seem to be pretty up on the stuff me and my brother have gotten mixed up in," Sam said. "Kind of hard to reconcile with this quiet retiring life you've been living."

"I've done my reading on you. Like I said, I'm a witness. You can't live as long as I have without realizing how important it is to be a witness to history--and you, my boy, are a most notable part of history."

"Demonblood wasn't in the books." Or that's what Chuck had told him, I was afraid it would make you look unsympathetic, but then again Chuck had been even less upfront about his nature and his intentions than Notaras was being right now.

"Who said anything about books? I prefer entrails. Messier than tea leaves or the Tarot, but I'm old fashioned like that."

"So what next?" Sam asked, watching the rain now furiously lashing the windowpanes. The wind whistled keenly; the next jazz riff was dominated by a bass saxophone. "Was getting me hopped up on demon blood your only plan?"

Notaras took a moment to answer, refilling his wineglass to the brim, wordlessly offering to pour a glass for Sam, which he again declined.

"Of course not. It was a gamble, an experiment. The plan is to summon a god. The god who banished the sisters in the first place." With one long swallow that made his Adam's apple bob, he drained his glass by a third.

"This god scares you," Sam said. "That's why you want us to do it."

"Even without empathy, you're remarkably astute."

"Do you have history with this god? He pissed at you or something?"

"Or something."

"So which one is it?" He consulted his foggy memories of the Oresteia."Apollo, Athena?"

"Apollo. He's the more...susceptible. He's not impossible to negotiate with. He has wants and weaknesses and he has been known to become attached to humans."

"Like he was attached to you?" A slight flicker of Notaras' eyes told Sam that he'd guessed right.

"We have history."

Sam stared at him for a few more seconds of mute frustration. He still didn't have enough intel to make up for even half the advantage that Notaras had on him.

"What did you do that drove Thomas Huntsman away? That made him finally crack?"

"I would never hurt him."

"But you're blaming yourself for it--or why are you so desperate to clean up your mess and to put everything to do with it in the rearview? So what did you do? It had to have been you. Thomas didn't just put all that pain in a box and carry on with his life for years only to go postal one day out of the blue. Something had to have finally pushed him past the brink and it sounds like you were the only one in his life who had that kind of power. You found him when he was at his lowest, you gave him a place to belong, you were the first person to really care for him, you told him he could do some good with the powers he was so scared of, and you were even masquerading as a friggin' priest--you had God on your side. So how'd you fuck it all up?"

Notaras' eyes hardened and his smile thinned, edges sharpening. "I never would have encouraged him to go chasing revenge, not at the cost of his life, his soul. If I had known he'd needed it so badly I would've given it to him, but not like this."

"So you did all the surrogate daddying right and your protege still rebelled against you, Anakin Skywalker style?"

"What do you care?"

"I want to know who I'm dealing with. The last person you let get close to you, you must've done something to really screw him up while convincing him--and maybe yourself--that you just wanted to help him. I'm soulless, not crazy, and I'd be insane not to have reservations about you."

"Let's have it then." Notaras had drained his glass again but he didn't set it down. He was holding it tightly enough that Sam saw a pale gleam of knucklebone. The glass must be sturdier than it looked. "Who do you think I am? Not what--you'll get no further on that tonight. Who am I, as one person to another?"

Sam only had to pause a few seconds to consult the profile he'd been splitting his focus to put together. "You're intelligent, hyper-focused, moderately compulsive; an addiction-prone escapist who's always running from the past. Like most people who've reached your age and skill-level, you can display narcissistic tendencies. You don't bother with eternal youth because you consider yourself superior for more profound reasons and you like using your age to patronize people. Your ability to care for others is almost as stunted as mine is, but for some reason you insist on clinging to the few attachments you think you still have."

Notaras smiled and ducked his head slightly in what looked like rueful acknowledgement. "Are you certain none of that was projection?"

"Maybe, maybe not. But when you tapped my brother's soul, I saw your true face-"

"There's no such thing."

"And I'm used to monsters who feel the need to hide what they are under bespoke suits and polite diction and some imaginary code of conduct."

Notaras' smile vanished in a blink and his quiet voice was full of ice and vinegar. "If you think I'm a monster and if you still have the sensibility to be scared of me, then maybe you should watch your godsdamned mouth."

Sam smiled, buoyed by a small bubble of triumph, better than he'd felt since those first dizzying moments of relief after his soul had departed. "Let's leave it there tonight, then. My brother will be wondering where I am. He's not at the top of his game after that number you did on him, but I think he's starting to suspect something. I can't do much about that without getting into hot water with the kindly ones, but maybe you--"

"You had better be on your way," Notaras said. Sam must've struck a real nerve. How interesting. "The clock is ticking. You need your brother's willing cooperation, so go get it."

Sam retreated to the door, gave Notaras a last look, saw that his smile had returned but it was crooked and tight, his eyes like ice, his mask patchily painted on.

He went out into the rain.

Chapter Text

He waited for the walls to stop caving in and for the floorboards to stop rippling, for the creaking and cracking timbers and the howling wind and the growling thunder to quiet. When at last there was silence and he dared to raise his face from Jess' shoulder, he was for a few seconds at a loss as to how they had not been pummeled and crushed by the church's collapse. He could look up through a hole in the cave-in and see the solid black clouds; a few cold drops of rain landed in his hair and another lightning flash seared the edges of his vision as he screwed his eyes shut. Then he realized that it might've been him, his telekinesis instinctively shifting back against the walls being torn down around them. He looked at Jess, her face grey and mottled in the shadows, streaked with blood and dried tears, whether from the stinging wind and debris or from emotion. His body ached and throbbed and stung but his mind was numb to it; he couldn't know how bad it was until he started testing his limits. Couldn't be sure either how badly Jess had been hurt by the god choking her and throwing her down. Long fingers of shadow wrapped around her face and neck, blurring the edges of the bruising. He'd failed again to prevent what he'd seen in his vision.

They had to climb out through the hole over their heads and it wasn't deep but it was a precarious business to get a foot or a handhold on the wreckage without injuring themselves on the busted-up timbers and broken glass and long crooked nails. He boosted Jess up first and once she was securely balanced on a sheaf of corrugated roofing she helped him up by guiding him to the boards that would bear his weight. Luckily, close to the door as they'd been and despite the direction the wind had been driving down, they didn't have to crawl over much wreckage but could just slide right off the edge.

Their feet landed on solid earth again and the first thing he did was look Jess over to see if any of her bones had been fractured or her joints had been sprained and she gave him the same brisk pat down. They were back to being hesitant and strained when they made physical contact after their desperate huddling. When he was reassured on that score he turned around and looked out across the land. It took his breath away--the h-bomb testing site scale of the destruction, the oak trees that had been torn up by their roots and the scarred and twisted look of the scrubland after the toyon and manzanita and ferns and rocks had been ripped up and tangled together and snarled in clumps far gone from where their roots had been planted. He turned and looked up at the mountain where the storm clouds had built up in shelves before crashing down like an avalanche and he saw a horizon of calm ashen night. The massive storm clouds had torn themselves to ribbons in their fury and now their smoky remains were scudding away over the hills like robbers fleeing the scene of a stick up. The crescent moon peaking through a shifting chink in the clouds was all they had to see by.

He turned to look towards the lumber mill and his heart sank like a stone as he saw the shape it had shifted into, how the roof had half caved in and the windows had all been blown out into rows of black holes, and he thought about the children he was pretty sure had been in there, children he hadn't even tried to get out.

Then he saw the god and wondered how he could have overlooked him this long, with his striking height and horns and the energy that sizzled around him. Hadad was standing only a few yards outside the church, surveying the damage he had caused, still bleeding from the hole Jess had gored in his side, his blood oozing thick and black like tar under the dim moonlight.

Sam stepped in front of Jess in case she tried to rush him again and flung his arm up, palm open, then clenched his fist, trying to spear that nuclear core of radiating energy that was the god's real self, and with the gesture came a searing splash of memories, seething and spitting like boiling oil in his gut, visceral impressions of killing Alastair and Lilith with the power he held secure in his mind and in his hands. For a second he thought it was working. Then a splintering pain pierced his head and for a second he seemed to be floating outside his body. He came crashing back into himself with another jolt so painful that he lost the hook he'd had in the god and Hadad was turning towards him. Hadad's obsidian eyes were bleakly reflecting the ravaged landscape, mouth drooping in a rueful frown.

"Save your strength," he said. "I'm already dying."

"Could you hurry it up then," Jess snarled. "It's the least you deserve."

He looked away from them and tilted his face up towards the moon's wavery shimmer. "You don't understand. When they brought me back, I really did want to help these people. They thought to bind me, they were stupid and arrogant men, but still, I decided to stay and serve them and the greater good. I forsook the peace and the rest and the empty, and I tried to build them a sanctuary so this one corner of the world would know peace. But the less they had year after year the greedier they became--and not just the ones you were fighting. The ones who cast them out because they feared their magic. I gave them a second chance at life and they wasted it. They deserved to be punished."

So he had enough humanity in his ancient and terrible conscience that he felt the need to justify what he'd done. He had enough humanity and yet he'd done it anyway. Sam wanted to hurt him badly but he still had the sense of something lurking behind a wall at the back of his consciousness, waiting on the rift that yawned opened inside him when he tried to draw on his powers. Borrowed powers. He had to remember that.

"You sonofabitch!" Jess shouted and Sam flung his arm out to block her from charging forward again. He believed that the god was dying but a dying god could still be dangerous, especially considering she no longer had her stake. "There were innocent people--children--babies in there. You--"

"If I couldn't save them no one could," Hadad said. He turned towards them and he sank to his knees, his chin still raised, looking up at Sam almost in supplication. "You need to leave," he said. "This isn't your world. And there's two of you rattling the walls of that cage of meat and bone, trying to keep the reins on a power that only needs your self-control to slip once, like a half-broken horse being made to bear the weight of two riders."

It took Sam's mind a few seconds to digest the meaning of Hadad's words even though he had briefly chewed over the possibility before. So he was still here then, this other him, held prisoner in his own body--somehow Sam was the one holding him under. He didn't mean to do it. He didn't know how to stop doing it. He shuddered, sickened and guilty and afraid.

Hadad collapsed backwards in a gradual and deliberate arc, stretching out his long legs, settling on the cragged earth like it was a funeral pyre, and after a few rattling, chest-heaving breaths he fell utterly still.

o

They walked back to the lumber mill accompanied by the intermittent growl of distant thunder. His breathing was labored, the air still tasting ionized, his expanding lungs making his bruised ribcage feel painfully constricting. This body was a cage of flesh and blood and bone and he was both prisoner and jailor.

Sam was relieved to see one figure standing outside the mill, waving to them. A woman in camo. When they got closer he saw that it was Annabeth and she had a bad bruise on her jaw and a leg she was favoring, that was all. Except that her face was white and stricken and tear-streaked and as she raised her right hand to brush away the hair that had been whipped out of the tight braid she wore he saw the glint of a wedding band and he remembered Adam, who she'd looked at with spousal annoyance.

They asked her about the necromancers and she said the ones left standing, who'd gotten out of the mill before half the roof had been blown off, had fled over the hills on their dirt bikes. When the wind had started howling and the thunder had growled like a wendigo they'd seemed to know what was coming.

Sam and Jess and Annabeth went to the Jeeps, all of which had broken windows and taillights and three of which had their fenders and hubs ripped off, and looked in them for flashlights and med kits. Then they went into the mill through the cave-like mouth where front doors had been torn off their hinges. Annabeth still had a machete and she gave Sam her Taurus for all the good it would do him. Jess had retrieved her gun and still had whatever she carried in the duffle slung across her chest. The air was chokingly thick with smoke and dust and the shadows were barely penetrated by the feeble beams of their flashlights. The walkways had collapsed and broken at odd angles across the machinery and the steel struts and beams had fallen like javellins on a Roman battlefield and the wreckage was still settling and still liable to collapse in on itself even more. He knew that each step in here was another pull of the trigger in Russian Roulette but he also knew that nobody else was coming to look for survivors. Sam stumbled across a man who'd died with machete in hand and retrieved the blade. Heard Annabeth give a short tearful gasp as she recognized whoever's body it had been.

It only took a couple minutes before they heard a child crying. Sam hadn't been so relieved to hear that sound since Dean had been performing CPR on that kid they'd found passed out in a mausoleum coffin last February.

They found the children locked inside the foreman's corner office. Luckily, it had a window looking out on the main floor and once they pushed a pallet over so they could climb over the broken glass they found four kids, alive, huddled in the far corner. They ran the gamut from about two to about seven and from hysterical dry sobbing to nearly catatonic. The eldest put up a fight about being removed but Annabeth and Jess together were able to restrain the girl and eventually got her to quiet down.

They found three members of the militia and two civilian women alive. The women's primary concern was the safety of the children and so long as they got to stay with the children they seemed like they'd be compliant. He thought again about the woman who'd taken a bullet to the stomach. They gave them water and patched them up with the supplies in the med kits: trauma shears, tweezers, safety pins, iodine, irrigation syringe, benzoin swabs, rolls of tape and gauze. They made the walk back out with Annabeth and Jess supporting two men and Sam carrying one of the women whose black-and-blue ankle was twisted at an agonizing angle. They staggered their way back outside and got their patients loaded into two Jeeps. Annabeth took one, Sam and Jess the other, dividing up the survivors between them.

The torn-up trees had the highway barricaded and they had to drive off road for a while across the scrubland, trying to navigate foothills and more fallen trees and deep rents in the earth by the shine of the crescent moon and their Jeep's one intact headlight.

Jess behind the wheel, kids curled up on the seats behind them--aside from the gun resting on his thigh and the blood dripping on the seats and the bruises throbbing regular as a heartbeat with every bump of the rocky landscape this could be a family road trip in some other universe.

"I just don't get it," Sam said. "There's radio, there's national news broadcasting, there's still a society out there...Can't we try and get a chopper from somewhere."

"We're in a quarantined no-fly zone," Jess said. "There's people--private organizations we could get in contact with but it would come at a steep cost that we can't afford right now."

Sam thought about the bodies he'd seen piling up on the roads two towns over and the bodies they'd just left behind.

"Who's really responsible for this? Heaven, Hell? Gods, monsters?"

"A little of column A, a little of columns B through Z. Heaven and Hell had a war with forces lined up nice and neat, black against white, and they both lost. Their prize fighters had their Ali/Foreman showdown and neither was up to snuff. They opened the door to chaos. What you saw back there--that god with his biker gang turned black magic cult--that's pretty typical. A bunch of competing gangs trying to carve out their own Private Idaho."

"So neither Michael nor Lucifer was possessing their true vessel during the war?"

"That's right."

"And they're both dead?"

"Probably. There wasn't exactly a televised broadcast of the showdown and everyone knows someone who claims to have seen it with their own eyes, but rumor has it they're both dead and they haven't been heard from in so long it's probably true."

Probably wasn't good enough for him to have peace of mind on that score, but at least he could rule out one terrible thing that he might've done or that might've happened to this Dean.

"How did you learn that spell?" he asked, doing his best not to sound accusatory. He didn't have the right. It had just freaked him out, that was all.

She swallowed, jaw clenching and the bruises on her face shifting into a new mottled pattern. She did that a lot, clenched her jaw and physically bit back whatever she was thinking or feeling. It was both a deeply familiar attitude to be riding in a car with and still surreal coming from her. He wondered how long he'd have to stay with her before he got used to it and then stomped the imagining that it sparked out. He couldn't entertain thoughts that lead anywhere but how he was going to get home.

"The witch's Grand Coven--we took refuge with them for a while. After Missouri. We both learned some things. Stuff to only use when our backs are against the wall and there's no better option."

"Right," he said. He swallowed hard, with a rasp of his dry throat, and wished he had some water but the only water bottle he'd found in the Jeep he'd passed to the kids and he didn't want to take it back from them.

"I don't like it either," she said. "But the things we've been fighting--necromancers and worse--sometimes it's the only thing that works."

"What did Dean think about that? About us going to the Grand Coven for help, I mean?"

"Dean wasn't around at the time. You should understand, you didn't grow up with him here."

This revelation struck him like a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus. "What? How?"

"Your dad--the cops had something on him that connected him to your mom's death and he had to bail--Had to go completely underground when you were a kid. He took your brother but your great aunt had you at the time and she wouldn't...Well, you grew up with your mom's side of the family."

He felt like he'd been uprooted from his universe all over again. He stared at this other him's hands, resting half-clenched on his knees and then he squeezed his eyes shut, turned his mind as deeply inward as he could go, and asked who are you?

He got no reply.

Chapter Text

"So this great aunt...She was Samuel Campbell's sister?"

He was paging through memories of the list that Ruby, as he'd first known her, blonde and thorny as a goatweed and ensnaring him with the temptation of knowledge that had been withheld his entire life, had given him, a bullet-point overview of his mother's friends and family and the manner of their untimely deaths. He couldn't think of any great aunts.

"Yes. She went looking for you after the fire. She had her suspicions that it was connected to what had been happening to the rest of the Campbell clan, the legion of demons that had been coming for them...She offered to take care of you while your dad went looking for answers."

"What about Dean? Why'd he stay with Dad?"

"I don't know. This is all stuff I heard second hand and years after the fact."

If Dad had learned something sooner about Azazel and the blood and his plans for Sam and god knows what about the endgame then maybe it made sense that he'd want to take Dean away, to separate his one good son from the other.

"Did Dad ever try to get me back?"

"Yeah, when the heat died down from the feds, he tried. He tried several times. But your aunt--and she was the head of the family and the family would always close ranks behind her--she wouldn't give you up. She already knew a lot more than he did--or would for a long time--but she was never big on sharing what she knew with outsiders. Don't think that she just...She loved you. She was scared about Azazel's plans for you and she still....She wanted you to grow up right. She did her best. Helped you get into Stanford. She set herself up in Palo Alto and patrolled the campus along with her network. I got to know her pretty well during that time and after..."

He couldn't imagine it, this other life, this complete stranger he couldn't recall even ever having heard of taking the place of the family he knew. Taking Dean's place.

"And still people got killed. You got hurt. I made a deal with Azazel."

"People would've gotten killed no matter what you did by that point. He was never gonna leave you alone, Sam."

"It was your family, though. Yellow Eyes only went after your family because of me."

"He went after my family because we started hunting him. You and me, together. You didn't drag me down, okay? I jumped in both feet first, after Brady and Rebecca..."

"Why did I make a deal with him?"

"To save my life." She traced the river of melted skin from the knob of her cheekbone to the corner of her jaw. "If it makes you feel better, you didn't exactly take a strictly originalist approach to the terms of the arrangement. You couldn't kill him yourself...That was one non-negotiable stipulation of the contract--but you helped your brother do it. After your dad died and your aunt disappeared and you found each other again."

They were silent for a while. He was thinking about things he couldn't talk about. His body, the body he'd left behind. If he and the other Sam were trapped in here together, then back home his body had been emptied out and was either animated or not animated. He didn't know. He didn't know enough about how it worked, consciousness and all the ways it could be split apart, how it could exist in two places at once. Maybe he'd left behind a corpse for Dean to find. Maybe he'd left behind a monster. Which was worse? Which would be the greater danger to Dean? And what about Jack, who wasn't prepared to handle either?

Moonlight shimmered between the leaves of an oak. They trundled over another rocky hill and swerved back onto the highway, which was clear as far as their headlights and the paling pre-dawn sky could disclose.

"The Grand Coven--are we still in contact with them? Could we go to them for help with this--my situation?"

"We kind of had a falling out with the new head bitch in charge. She's got a big vision and she's taken things in a more... top-down direction. A lot of expecting everyone to play their assigned role in her game plan, pawn to e-4,or else you get the chop."

"She's not a redhead with a Scottish accent is she?"

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

"I know her, the other her. Maybe we can make some kind of a....trade to get her to at least share her books with us. Or maybe...maybe we could get to a Men of Letters bunker. Have we ever...?"

"I've heard of them from the coven." She gnawed on her lip, staring flinty-eyed down the road. "Maybe. I'll try anything to get my Sam back."

Dawn was welling in the sky by the time they'd returned to the paved streets of the suburbs. Big yellow sun burning away the last tattered pearly grey clouds, a peachy yellow shine bathing houses of tan and pastel stucco neatly boxed between greenery; smashed windows and tiles peeled off the roofs, shattered glass and clay scattered across the parched yellowing lawns, along with broken mailbox parts and stripped palm leaves and ferns and the husks of parched flowers and the knapweed and ragweed and spiny thistles the winds had raked from the earth. At least there wasn't the spill of rotting garbage; these houses had been emptied of people on a day when the bins hadn't been taken to the curb.

They pulled up outside the high school, which was in the same condition as the houses: tiles peeled from the roof, leaving jagged scars but no big holes, windows smashed and a rain of glass glittering across the pavement. Scattering of palm fronds and shards of palm trunks and branches from a couple of oaks that had loomed over the parking lot. Snapped electrical wires flying loose from the poles.

"Shit, the wards are down," Jess said. Sam got out of the Jeep and did a quick scope of the area. It was ominously quiet. No one had run out to meet them. He went over to Annabeth's Jeep and asked her if she had a functioning radio. She shook her head, stone faced.

"Somebody has to stay back and guard the kids," he said. "And our passengers...we can't be sure whose side they'll be on."

Annabeth agreed to stay and guard the Jeeps more easily than he'd expected considering that it was her home base that might be under attack. He wondered if Adam had been the only person she had left that she loved. Two other wounded members of the militia argued for coming along but only one of them was able to move agilely enough that they let him. He had a gun and no machete but he wouldn't be dissuaded. His name was Mathew and he looked like he might be a year or so shy of graduating from this school, face chalky white under the sunburn, badly shaken and bad at hiding it but still eager to help.

Sam and Jess and Mathew walked in through the front door, Sam with a machete and Jess and Mathew with guns out, covering him.

In the front entrance they found Carl and one other woman armed with shotguns and dead from bullets to the head, the fresh blood splatter dulled to a coppery sheen in the grey shadows. The lights were out and long rectangles of sunlight and shadow laid a grid. They continued walking through empty hallways, pushing open the unlocked doors to empty classrooms, until they reached the science classroom-cum-infirmary, where they were met by a cocked shotgun.

"Don't shoot!" Sam said both to Jess and to the young man who was staring them down over the barrel of the gun with cold green eyes. It was Daniel's fiance, Parker.

"Oh thank God," Parker said in a voice eerily devoid of emotion. He set the shotgun down on the counter with steady hands. He'd been making a kind of advanced Molotov cocktail out of sulfuric acid, potassium chlorate, a pinch of sugar, glass beakers and paper towels, and he already had two ready to go on the counter.

"Where is everyone?"

"Locked in the basement, the last securely warded place. There's four of them, they're trying to break in." He tapped the rim of a glass beaker. "I slipped away to here 'cause I'm better with chemistry than an ax."

He really was very good, not just at chemistry but at stealth; the softness and the wariness that Sam had seen in his brief glimpse of Parker with Daniel had been shed and he wore an icy calm, zipped up like a hazmat suit. He finished his Molotovs with Sam's assistance and then he led them to the stairwell that descended to the basement. It would all have gone to hell if the necromancers had been able to breach the basement door. They hadn't and they were clustered at the bottom of the stairwell, approximately five of them, who'd escaped the wrath of a god and come here for an abysmally pointless revenge.

Sam helped Parker pitch his Molotovs down the stairwell. They burst into white hot gaseous flames, the roar of the gasoline fire nearly drowned out by the screams. The necromancers fled up the stairs like rats scurrying out of a smoked-out hole. Jess fired her gun, standing a foot from his shoulder, the crack of the shot ringing in his eardrums, ringing for a long time afterwards.

Sam stepped close enough to a man on fire to feel the heat singe him, his arms so hot as he swung that for a second he was sure they had also caught fire. He stumbled back, looked down, saw that he was fine. He swung again in an executioner's down stroke at the last one, who was hunched over, making a noise that wasn't human. When it was over, his stomach heaved. He looked down the hall back at Parker, who looked grimly satisfied by the results of his work, and at Mathew, who was holding a fire extinguisher and looking horrified and so horribly young and so like Jack that Sam felt a fresh stab of guilt. After a few seconds Mathew unfroze and came forward to douse the burning corpses.

Parker walked down the stairs past the bodies, cupping a hand over his nose and mouth, his eyes nonetheless still perfectly calm. He knocked on the door and yelled a password. There was a long pause as the people on the other side of the door no doubt were calculating whether Parker was being coerced. Then the door opened up. Parker came face to face with a flashlight and a rifle. The rifle was lowered and he was pulled into a hug. He led the way back up the stairs with only a few men and women following him, carrying sawed-offs and switch blades and wearing expressions of shock and dread. It was several minutes of hushed conference before more people straggled up. Sam looked for Rosa and waved her over and told her they had wounded in the Jeep. Just past her, he saw that Daniel and Parker had reunited; they had their arms locked around each other and were leaning their foreheads together. Daniel's sister had made it over to them, and they pulled her into the hug. Sam's heart swelled briefly at the sight.

Sam and Jess and Rosa and Daniel and a couple others went out to the Jeeps. Rosa and Annabeth hugged and he finally saw tears spill down Annabeth's face. One of the women who'd been living in the necromancer's camp had been tied up, a bruise spreading like a starfish under her eye. She was glaring at no point in particular. Perhaps she'd tried to get inside. The other woman looked unsettlingly impassive, her eyes blank; she was holding the seven year old who'd started crying again.

They escorted or carried their patients into the infirmary. Sam was relieved to find that the bodies had already been moved out of the entrance hall and only the blood stains remained. He and Jess set broken bones and treated shock and dehydration and irrigated and stitched up wounds that wouldn't knit back together under an Ace bandage.

Watching Jess snapping elastic gloves onto her hands, long fingers as skilled with a scalpel or a needle as with a paintbrush--he could almost see the other Jess, the Jess who had never gotten to exist in this universe or the other, the woman who had lived long enough to find her place in the world, the woman who wasn't dead at twenty-two or condemned to live as a desperate and rootless wanderer, her dreams and her family swept away in the storm he'd carried into her life.
He'd tried to imagine it intermittently over the years. What would Jess think of him if she could see him now. Most of the time it had been a compulsive self-torturing exercise. Occasionally, he had imagined the reverse--picturing, in nebulous flashes, the life Jess should've lived, the life that had been stolen from her.

He didn't know how long it was before he succumbed to exhaustion and Rosa and Daniel's prodding and left the infirmary in search of a place he could get some sleep. He stumbled out to the outhouses that had been installed in anticipation of the plumbing shutting down, as Rosa had told them had been happening with increased frequency over the years, despite the heroic efforts of the DWP skeleton crew. Back inside, he let his feet carry him into one of the restrooms, where the graffiti had been allowed to run riot, covering every wall and stall door and creeping like cobwebs across the ceiling. The sentiments expressed ran the gamut from every conjugation of 'fuck' and 'shit' that had been imprinted into the plaster despite attempts to scrub it off to excerpts from Yeats and T.S Eliot. He could hear a child crying across the barrier of a couple walls. He'd been hearing that noise a lot lately. He looked in the mirror, which was the reason he'd come in here without consciously intending to. He studied the face he was wearing, the strange angularity brought out by the shortened hair, the darker tan, the leanness, the mole under the left eye that was the product of exposure to a different sun.

He had never even tried to imagine what it would be like to possess someone, to invade them and pin down their consciousness and use them like they were just, well, just a suit of meat.

But he still didn't know because it wasn't like that, he hadn't meant to do it. He was trapped in here and he was just trying not to lose what little control he had over the situation.

He wandered down into the basement, fleeing the midday heat and the eyes that tracked him with ever increasing interest as talk about his role in recent events no doubt had started to spread. He found a cot that had been set up, half-barricaded by packs of emergency supplies. He laid down on the cot half-expecting a cruel trick in which sleep would elude him or he'd be immediately yanked out of it.

He dreamed. He was standing on the veranda of a mansion in the LA hills and the Hollywood sign was on fire and the sun smeared a bloody gash across the smoke and smog and a crowd was encircling him, watching with eyes of ruby and indigo and silver shining out of exhausted and somewhat emaciated faces, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning for just a word or two from him to tell them where to go and his heart was full with both pity and power. He raised his hands, palms spread, like a preacher. Blood trickled down his right wrist. The desert sands sprawled around him and he was flanked by rows of Joshua trees like an honor guard and he heard cymbals and carousel music at his back like the band was playing his walk offstage. He was descending a steel ladder into a tunnel of concrete and steel scaffolding and then he was in an underground bunker, a place both strange and familiar, and the sense of the walls pressing too close wound itself like fingers around his throat and his heart and he curled his nails into his palms and bit his tongue bloody until something cracked inside of him and the other took him in hand and by icy bands of will alone stopped him from flying to pieces. He was looking in a pewter-framed rectangle of dingy glass and it took him a moment to recognize that it was a mirror and in the mirror he was seeing a reflection, a face both strange and familiar like so many things seemed to be, a face he recognized, though not so cogently that the name came to him right then.

He woke up and heard a raspy, dry-throated gasp. It took him several seconds for his fuzzy vision to clear after he'd rubbed the grit out of his eyes. Jess was with him. She was sitting on a camp chair by his bedside, lit up eerily from below by the glow of a fluorescent lantern, and he wondered where she'd slept because she'd changed her clothes and she looked like she'd gotten some rest. Her bruises had faded till they were a dull violet with traces of red, no more distinct than her scars.

"How long was I..."

"At least fourteen hours," she said. "We couldn't wake you. It was...it wasn't good."

"Shit, I'm sorry." It didn't feel in his still achingly tired bones like fourteen hours had passed. His head spun a little as he gingerly sat up and his stomach squirmed.

"What did you see?"

A face he recognized from a photo he'd seen among the personal effects of a murder victim, part of the case he'd been working on the other side. A face that belonged to the man who'd been ritualistically butchered in front of the mirror that had yanked him out of his body and into another universe. Powerful magic, blood sacrifice.

"There's a man, where these visions are trying to lead me. I think he knows something that maybe...maybe can get me back home."

Chapter Text

The weather got progressively worse with each passing mile. The rain was a wet, sinuous mass that felt nearly as purposeful as a curse, deliberately making the distorted, amorphous world behind it hard to navigate. Sam's eyes fixed on the road and the nearly indistinguishable yellow line in the middle. He was thinking of how to get rid of Notaras before Notaras could get rid of him, which was what he would do in Notaras' place, just as soon as he no longer had any use for himself.

Pulling into the motel parking lot, the rain was a deluge hitting the windshield straight on until it was like driving into a wall of water. Then he got out of the car and just like that it was over, like turning off the showerhead, only a trickle of water into his shirt and a mist in his hair and the uneven asphalt impossible to walk across without puddles soaking his ankles.

He opened the motel door to silence, strangely enough, as the first thing he saw was Jack's face shining at him from the laptop screen, on Skype. The laptop on the table and Dean standing next to a pulled out chair, like he'd sat down to listen to what Jack had to say and then gotten up to pace. His face, when he turned as Sam walked in, wore a tired scowl, a glint of annoyance in his eyes, nothing more.

"Hi Sam," Jack said, quickly. "It's good to see your face."

"Kid's been tyin' up the line the last half an hour. Wouldn't hang up until you got in," Dean said. His tone was mild, the grimace relaxing around his mouth but there was still a tightness written across his brow and in his eyes and in the curl of his fingers. A Styrofoam cup on the table, the coffeemaker light on. "Tried to tell him it's a quarter past ten in Lebanon, so go the fuck to sleep, and he goes off about time dilation and the theory of relativity. You know he gets that from you, right?"

"Jack, is anything...wrong?" He pushed back the wet hair plastered against his face. Cold water was still sliding into the neck of his shirt, making him shiver.

Jack's eyes looked over-bright, slightly bloodshot. His face was pale as milk. His lips compressed and he dropped his eyes briefly before he spoke. "You've been gone for a long time. I'm...lonely."

"We're real sorry about that, Jack. You know we won't stay a day longer than we have to."

"But then you're just going to leave again, aren't you?" Was it only him projecting or was there something calculating in Jack's forlorn tone, his perfect expression of little-boy-lost?

"Maybe, maybe we'll want you around on the next job." He tried to match Dean's level of weariness, a hoarseness in his voice and a grimace tugging at his mouth. "No promises." Did that sound cold? Did that sound like his father? "But you really need to sleep. It'll all look better in the morning, promise." What else was he supposed to say?

"Okay," Jack said, blinking and swallowing rapidly. "Goodnight, I guess."

Dean logged off Skype, flipped the laptop shut. He wet his lips, a furrow appearing in the center of his forehead. He looked honestly puzzled and he raised one shoulder in a slight shrug as he backed up from the table. So maybe Jack hadn't told him everything and maybe he hadn't put the pieces together yet, but it was only a matter of time.

"Whad'ya got?" Dean asked, spreading his hands with a gingerly roll of his tense shoulders.

"I think you're right," he said. "I got nothin' on the microfiches, I don't think this goes back any earlier than the Huntsmans, at least not in this county. But I think you're right about what's doing it. About the kindly ones. That sigil you showed me, I found a match in the bunker archives, from a case in Castille in the '30s, during the Spanish civil war. A family divided against itself, betrayal, bloodshed, pretty common on the ground at the time, but an American journalist documented the unusual manner of their deaths and recorded interviews with two of their sons in which they talked about being haunted by hissing voices, screeching about guilt and vengeance, dreams of bat-winged, snake-haired women, and neither of them were classics scholars...and our chapter house got wind of it, but couldn't confirm what they they thought was happening because relations with the Spanish Chapter broke down, given the, uh, political climate at the time..." He was relieved to see the wandering look in Dean's eyes and the fidgeting of Dean's hand, picking at the rim of the Styrofoam cup, that told him Dean was skimming past this bullshit as blah blah history, only registering that Sam was agreeing with him and moving on to immediate and practical concerns. "Anyway, if it is what we think we don't have a ton of options," he said. "The best lore we've got was probably employing some dramatic license, but the one thing our sources agree on is that it takes another god to even tag these things. And if we have to turn to a god, I think Apollo would be our best bet. I mean, we kinda did his sister a solid, awakening her dormant conscience or whatever."

"She probably remembers that very differently, considering her daddy and her lover died." Dean dropped his eyes to the side, swallowing thickly, slight shift of his weight onto the ball of his back foot. He looked up at Sam again. "Anyway, he's a douchebag god and even when they're in your corner it's usually with a friggin' monkey's paw, so let's hold off the God of War play until we've hit the wall on better ideas, okay?"

"Yeah, maybe you're right," he said, just as blandly.

There was a strained silence between them in which another car slicked across the rainwashed parking lot and the car door was drunkenly slammed and the coffeemaker gurgled and Dean ripped a strip of Styrofoam off the lip of the cup.

"We blew through all our spare change last night. And we're probably gonna need fuel for another all nighter before this is over. So I'm gonna head over to that casino--"

"I'll go with you."

Flash of his tongue between his teeth as though in thought and then his mouth quirked. "Somebody should be keepin' an ear on the scanner," Dean said.

"Somebody should be watching your back."

"I'll be safe as houses, Sammy." He set the cup down. "If these hags haven't put us down as natural-order violating kin-slaying traitors yet, there's obviously nothin' more we could do 'round here that would put a target on our backs."

"I meant the casino. Cameras covering every inch of you, bouncers packing heat. We try not to do casinos, remember?"

"Yeah, we try not doing a lot of stupid shit, and yet somehow--" His smile was half a grimace, his eyes round and over-bright, and for a moment he had a strange resemblance to Jack. "Don't wait up. You need that beauty sleep more than ever, princess."

Sam listened at the door to the sound of tires slicing through five inches of rainwater, then he pulled his phone out and called Jack. "What did you tell him?" he asked, flat, voice so devoid of intonation it astonished even himself.

"Nothing," Jack said. "I just wanted to see if you're okay, to look at your face because I've been doing some reading and I thought...I wanted to see if you're still...I wanted to check if Dean was okay or if he was different too."

"Wouldn't a different Dean be an improvement?" Sam asked. "Then he might not want you dead."

"Dean doesn't want me dead," Jack said. "He just--"

"He'd be happier if you were never born." He heard shaky breathing on the other end of the line.

"This isn't you," Jack said.

"Kid, you've known me for how many days now? Hell, as of last Tuesday you were convinced I was just using you for your powers."

"No," Jack said. "We talked and you told me you weren't and you weren't lying about it. I'd have known if you were lying. I'm sure about that now...I've been practicing..."

"Is that right? Maybe I was lying to myself. I do that a lot. Or maybe I'm one of those people who suffers from the delusion that they can re-write their own fucked up backstory by having a kid."

Jack was silent. It wasn't quite clear if Sam had put another dent in the battered tin of the kid's hopeless faith and he didn't much care. He had bigger problems that he was choking on, suddenly.

"Goodbye Jack," Sam said and hung up. He ran his hands over his face and through his hair and he paced around the room, thoughts racing. He had to get out, he had to get out now, and fuck Dean and fuck Notaras and fuck the Furies, he was done with over-thinking this, he was going to do what his instincts were screaming at him to do because his instincts could not be wrong, not now, when they were unclouded by irrational childish feelings; he wasn't panicking because he was incapable of panicking. Running was the only sane and logical thing to do.

He got as far as checking out the contents of his wallet when he heard the Impala pull back up. What could Dean have done in ten minutes inside the Impala? Picked up a weapon of some kind? A taser? He faced the door, standing five feet back from it, waiting, loose limbed stance subtly ready for a fight or ready to bolt, mind ping ponging between his shitty options.

"You can put one down in your little black book of 'times I told you you were right'," Dean said. "It was stupid, thinking of going into a casino alone. Like I hadn't learned a damned thing from Reno in '07. That got me thinkin' about Reno and Reno got me thinkin' about, well, check this out." He held up their dad's journal. "Guess what's on page thirty-six." He chucked it across the room and Sam, startled beyond thought to see the journal so cavalierly handled, caught it in both hands. He knew the second he'd done so that it had been a mistake. He was immediately, nauseatingly, incapacitatingly dizzy. He dropped to his knees, journal tumbling out of his hands, spine cracking open and a hex bag rolling out. Cold sweat mingled with the rain water dampening his face. He retched. He felt an immense weakness rushing through all his limbs. His vision blurred, the edges of things dissolving into slippery grey then the grey receding into black. He couldn't sleep but he could be rendered unconscious. He remembered that, Dean beating him unconscious and what an unpleasant surprise that had been.

o

When Sam came around, he was in the backseat of the Impala, lying on his side with his hands cuffed behind his back. He sat up and looked at the clock, neck jerking painfully. About an hour had passed, it was 8:23 PM. That was some powerful mojo. He was impressed. "What did you roofie me with?"

"Hex bag. You're not the only one who can crack a spell book." His voice was not panicky. Frustrated, maybe, but controlled as if Dean was trying hard not to shout.

"Pretty nasty, whatever was in it."

"Not as nasty as a taser so you should count yourself lucky."

"Did Jack narc on me?"

"He didn't have to." In the rearview mirror shadows shifted deep around his eyes.

"Didn't he? You're not usually so quick on the uptake."

Dean didn't rise to this this bait. Sam looked out the window for a little while and noted the road signs.

"You're going after Notaras," he said.

"Damn right I am. He's gonna put you to rights and he's gonna die."

"Solid plan," Sam said. "But he's a lot more powerful than you realize. You can't take him on alone."

"We'll see." Flat, no bravado.

"He's probably already gone," Sam said. "He wants us to summon a god and he doesn't want to be around for it."

"That what he told you? You went to see him?"

"Yeah."

"So he stole your soul so he could use you as his puppet. Typical." So that was the conclusion Dean had jumped to, a logical enough inference. Sam couldn't see any benefit in correcting it, so let it be.

"You should be going after the kindly ones instead. Worry about the state of my immortal soul later, when innocent--when people aren't being killed."

Dean wouldn't respond to Sam's questions or provocations the rest of the way to Notaras' cabin. Upon their arrival, Dean got out of the car, went around to the backseat, opened the door. He now had a taser in his hand.

"Spare me the 'don't make me hurt yous'," Sam said, sliding off the seat. He walked ahead of Dean right up to the front door of Notaras' cabin, windows all dark and no noise but the spitting waves. Dean pushing him first towards the front door of an enemy might make tactical sense but still felt unnatural, not that he cared. He was just a little concerned by Dean's refusal to look at the big picture when it didn't suit him.

"It's not locked," Sam said. Dean reached around him and unlatched the door, opening it to near complete darkness. Dean switched on the light on his phone and looked around. The place had undergone a major decluttering, clearing out photos and memorabilia, cobwebs and spiders. Switching on the lights, they checked out the kitchen and no surprises there, the boline knife, the herbs, all implements that could be used for spellcraft, and all traces of the demon's host Notaras had incinerated had vanished. The bedroom and bathroom and mudroom and storage closets looked likewise lived-in but tidy, recently vacated, but not suspiciously so to any eyes but theirs. No spiders anywhere. They must be some sort of familiar of his.

"Fuck," Dean said, rubbing the heel of his right hand against the socket of his left eye.

"He's gone and faked his death," Sam said. "He was planning on leaving a corpse behind, so he's probably doing it up at the Seminary where he'll be found a lot sooner. I don't know that we have a shot in hell of catching up with him but if we're gonna try we should--"

"No," Dean said, squaring off like Sam hadn't simply made a helpful observation. "Don't you try and make me think that we're on the same side here. I'm not makin' that mistake again."

"I don't wanna get used by him anymore than you do."

"You tried to get me to go along with what he wanted, summoning a god for fuck knows what real reason--"

"I'm the one whose soul is being used as a hostage here."

"Do you want it back?"

He didn't know why it should come as such a surprise, Dean suddenly asking him that.

"No," he replied, too quickly, without first calculating whether it would be worth it to try to lie, whether Dean would just swallow what he wanted to hear.

"You--the real you--wanted it while you had it."

He rolled his eyes and his shoulders, trying to relieve the tension that was building in his rotator cuff. "I wanted to want what I was supposed to want because having a soul made me desperate and pathetic like that."

"You told me it was better at the start of your first go-round and I know that you were scared of the whole Jacob's Ladder trip but you kept grinding through it and--"

"What do you care?" Sam's whole body tensed; his breathing sped up. His fingers curled tightly into his palms. The handcuffs bit into the tendons of his wrists and his radial artery. "What does it matter to you whether I want it or not? You don't care about me--not this me--and you never really have. And don't give me some shit about morals and me being a danger to society. You know I've done a lot more damage with a soul than I've ever done without one. You don't care whether I'm good or bad, big brother, you just need me to need you. Now I don't."

Dean pressed his eyes shut for a second, sucked in a breath. "And what about the other you? You're happy to let your own soul be some psycho manwitch's hostage forever, god knows what he's even doing with it--with him--with you?"

"At least this way one of me gets to be happy."

"You can't be happy. No full spectrum of human emotion for you, buddy, remember?"

"Well, then I won't mind if I'm not happy because I won't think that I'm supposed to be, which is still a leg up over where I was before."

Dean shook his head, tight-lipped and pale, sleep-deprived shadows sinking deeper into his eye sockets. "Fuck this existential shit, this isn't up for debate. We're going home."

o

Dean driving, Sam in the backseats again because Dean must think the passenger seat wasn't secure or that Sam would try and crash the Impala or something. Town lights faded into the dark of the rearview and Sam's thoughts darkened with them, turned uneasily over and over, seethed. Under him the swell and lift, dip and curve of the highway and the spin of the Impala's tires over the roughening wet pavement. On the radio, finally, the night-shift newscaster was breaking the story of another attack, this one a double homicide in the yard of the local penitentiary; the only report coming out was that a feral animal had gotten on the premises, somehow. There was video footage but it wasn't being released. Sam was mildly curious about that fact.

"So our girls have found themselves a prime hunting ground," Sam said. "Really puts things in perspective, doesn't it?"

"I've just gotta get you locked down and then I'll take care of it, I'll take care of all of it." Sam saw Dean's face go dazed and dejected for a split second, before he glowered and canted his head away, checking his sideview for no reason.

"You're more scared of me running away from you then you are of people dying," Sam said.

"I can't do the job when I've gotta keep one eye out for you every goddamned second." Dean navigated the Impala around a pothole filled with water so deep the car oscillated sideways when the right rear tire sank into it. Out of the pothole with a lurch, speeding forward a few feet and then slamming on the brakes, so that Sam was nearly bent in two, pain lashing through his shoulders and neck. He straightened up, looked out the windshield. Dean was slamming the popped open glovebox shut and then he was slamming the car door, getting out, walking with one arm extended, raising a gun. It was Notaras, of course, standing several yards down the highway, beyond the full glare of the Impala's headlights. Just enough light still coming from the pearly clouded bowl of the sky that Sam could see he'd shed his priest's skin; he was tall and dark and curly haired and wearing a royal blue anorak, but Sam had no trouble identifying him and going off his response, neither did Dean.

The yelling started straight off, too muffled and distant to understand what they were saying but it wasn't just Dean raising his voice. Sam climbed into the front seats, banging his knee a couple times, and when he was sitting in the passenger side he banged his knee several more times against the underside of the glove compartment until it popped open and the maps spilled out. He rifled through the maps with his feet until he found one with a paper clip attached. He grabbed it between his feet and he drew up his knees until he could deposit the map on the seats. Then he bent over sideways and rolled onto his back so he could get his hands on it, felt for the strip of metal, plucked it off the map, unbent it and used it to pick the cuffs. In the minute it took him to accomplish this the yelling never faltered. Dean hadn't left the keys in the ignition, but no matter. He got out of the car, popped open the trunk and grabbed a gun, checked the clip to make sure it was loaded with witch-killing bullets.

He slunk towards Notaras and his brother, hovered behind Dean, watching over his shoulder.

Dean fired his gun and it was wide of a kill shot but still a reckless thing to do, and again Notaras froze the bullet in mid air.

Sam's bullet went straight into Notaras' left thigh in that second's window of distraction Dean had provided.

Dean swung around and aimed his gun at Sam. Sam raised both hands, still holding his gun, not the least bit concerned.

"Neither of us is about to risk spilling the blood of our only blood kin," he pointed out, "so could you chill?"

Dean lowered the gun a fraction, looked back towards Notaras, who had fallen to his knees. A pained grimace contorted his darkly olive-complected features, then they smoothed out, and he rose to his feet as smoothly, pulling the anorak aside and Sam could see no blood on his trousers, only a small rip where the bullet had gone in. And now the bullet was sliding out and up, rising to hover in front of Notaras' nose. He pinched it between index finger and thumb. He didn't have a scratch on himself. Sam had the slight satisfaction of having forced him to show his hand in this one respect.

"Who are you?" Sam asked.

"What are you really after?" Dean said at almost the same moment.

Notaras tilted his head slightly towards Dean, answering only him. "I don't like it when people die. It's really not that complicated."

"No," Dean said. "Not you. You--whatever you are--you're Methuselah-grade ancient." (Sam was a little surprised by Dean's making this reference, but maybe he felt that one of them should and if Sam, in his mind, wasn't really here to be the mythology nerd he would have to cover it) "No way you give a damn about this one town. You're an old hat at dying and letting the folks who thought they knew you cry their hearts out. You couldn't do that if you really put down roots, if you had a family. This life was just a pit stop for you." So Dean had been listening to what Sam had had to say about Notaras and had put some things together. Sam was pleased and then wondered why he should be pleased. He was on no one's side here but his own.

Notaras inclined his head ever so slightly, an almost-sad smile curving his mouth, looking up at them from under heavy eyelids. "Fine. You want a story, I'll give you a story. It starts with that knife my Thomas used to cut his own heart out." He ambled towards them as he started blithely monologuing, his arms crossed low over his chest, his head hanging down. "He stole it from me after we had a falling out. It's been stolen many times over. Most notably, for the sake of this narrative, by the Men of Letters--agents of the British Chapter, who, during the Galipolli campaign, seized it from Ottoman possession. A couple decades later on the eve of another war an American liaison was able to persuade the Brits to let him take it back to his chapter house for study. A Mr. Ralph Montgomery Sinclair. If you're not familiar with him, you must at least have some passing acquaintance with his family, I would imagine." He was standing now a few feet from the two of them, vertex of an equilateral triangle. "A long line of gifted individuals who've made their mark since they were able to swindle their way to the King's charter for an outsized parcel of land in the Virginias. The lot of them have remarkable powers of persuasion, even when they're born without the gift. Ralph Montgomery definitely had it. He also had no intention of returning the knife and little interest in using its power to assist the war effort. He might've had some ideas about, ah, putting America first. I hope you can understand why I didn't consider the knife safe in his hands. Or in the keeping of any chapter of the Men of Letters. No offense to your forefathers, but the organization has proven rather weak to infiltration."

"Yeah, by sonsofbitches like you." Dean's glare could peel paint.

Notaras pursed his fleshy lips. "There was nothing truly two-faced about my time with the Men of Letters. I was as good a prescriptor, chronicler and custodian as any. I was fond of them, I admired them for all their faults, but I knew that they would not have welcomed me into their order if they knew my true nature. And I knew that I had gotten in anyway--more than once. So I knew they were vulnerable to outside interests or to corruption from within by men like Sinclair. So I seized the knife for safekeeping. I've been around long enough to be witness to the harm it can do in the hands of the wrong men. The knife offers great power but it requires sacrifice to wield it. Blood sacrifice."

"Blood but also the soul," Sam noted, with a dawning sense of familiarity.

"It's...hungry for what it can get. It only takes a little spilled blood to start getting results, but people seldom seem able to stop once they get a taste for its power." This story was starting to hit a little too close to home and he suspected that Notaras meant it to.

"And once you, ah, confiscated it, you never thought about making a swing by Mount Doom?" Dean asked.

"No, because once again, this world is not as simple as you like to think. Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono. I don't go in for total abstinence. It would be sheer selfish stupidity so long as my enemies are--" Hesitation rippled across his placid features for a second.

"Where's the knife now?" Sam asked, looking at Dean, whose jaw tightened and who wouldn't meet his eyes.

"Safe in your brother's capable hands," Notaras said. "You'll be needing it." And then, like a true thespian, continuing his tale as if no interruption had taken place,

"Last year, the British Men of Letters came to our shores and got a lead on the knife for the first time in seventy years. They didn't quite make it to my front door but their scrying did send several agents to my neck of the woods and one of them made it inside town limits despite my obfuscating wards. I was unsettled not only because of the knife but because of Thomas. He burned so bright he'd skew any amateur's tracking spell. His presence was almost as hard to mask as the knife's. I was afraid of what they might discover about him. Of what they might try to do to him. I'm sure you can appreciate how desperate--"

"Not really." Sam shrugged. "They're just humans."

He saw annoyance flash across Notaras' face before he turned his head aside, tightened his arms around himself, long obsidian eyes looking aslant at Sam. "I was afraid that Thomas' gentle nature and the religious principles that I'd helped to instill in him might make him reluctant to defend himself."

"But what about you? Did you gank just the one man or...?"

"No, I didn't kill him. What would that have solved? Then it would've been a dead certainty that there was something to uncover here and more would've come..."

"Couldn't you have handled whoever they sent after you? Mowed them down until they gave up? It worked like a charm for us."

He tilted his head to the side and raised his eyebrows, incredulous. "I believe in harm reduction. So no, I did not consider mass slaughter my first and best option."

"Then let's have it," Dean growled, making a twitchy gesture with his gun, practically tapping his foot. "What did you do to him?"

"I simply tried to modify his memory so that he'd believe that he had raked this town over inch by inch and had turned up nothing but an interesting intersection of ley lines that were giving off a false positive. Unfortunately, it got a little hairy. His mind had already been tampered with: I found false memories and planted impulses that I had carelessly knocked down in places, creating a jumble of contradictions and doubled consciousness. The effects were...regrettable. I did my best to reconstruct him but you know how it is. You can put a shattered mind back together but you can never put it together the same way twice. I had to knock down more segments before I could build something structurally sound over the ruins. It was time consuming and I had to put everything aside to concentrate on my task, which I hadn't anticipated. And so Thomas came looking for me and found me in the middle of this...surgery. Well, you know how surgery looks so like butchery to the untrained eye. Thomas was shocked and dismayed. I did my best to explain, but when I told him about the knife he leapt to the worst possible conclusion. He thought I was performing a non-consensual lobotomy on an innocent man because I didn't want to give up my stolen power. I tried to tell him I was doing it for him, but, well, he wouldn't speak to me for several months after that. Eventually, he left the Seminary." He raised his head and looked at them directly, his eyes large and liquid and sorrowful. "You can see why I would feel responsible for what he did and why I want to make amends now."

"You've got a damned funny way of going about it," Dean said. "You could start by giving my brother his soul back." So, Sam noted, in all that yelling Notaras really hadn't tried to tell Dean the truth, he was holding on to this illusory leverage.

"No, I can't. I can't simply snatch it back, not where his soul has been cast off to. I simply haven't the power. But I know someone who does. I'll bargain with him if you accompany me." This was the one thing Notaras had wanted to avoid, that he had seemed afraid of, so he must be truly desperate now. Or maybe he'd just worked out how he was going to use the two of them as shields or bargaining chips.

"What happened to the Brit when you were done with him?" Sam asked. Out of the corner of his eye he caught Dean looking askance at him, surprised that Sam would care to ask about that.

Annoyance and impatience rippled across Notaras' features again, twitch of a muscle in his lean cheek and his lips compressed while he swallowed those feelings down, before speaking in a tone of obviously forced patience. "I'm afraid I had to send him away, far away. His compatriots would have recognized the subtle shifts in his personality if he spent too long back in their company. So I made him believe that the Elders had been in touch personally, given him a mission that could only be carried out in secret since none of his fellows could be trusted, and he booked the next flight to Hong Kong. He is investigating that chapter house, the one that was established after the second Opium War and dropped off the map sometime after 1941." His lips twitched for a fraction of a second, perhaps in suppressed amusement. "It's practically another Roanoke."

"And he never came back?"

"He wouldn't dream of it until his mission is completed." That meant never, Sam was certain.

"Then as far as the Brits know he's a deserter," Dean said. "Hell, they probably think he found the knife and did a runner with it."

"Oh, but you decimated their ranks, remember? They have more pressing problems at the moment than one renegade mage with a soupçon of talent. As do you."

Sam felt Dean's sidelong gaze lingering on his face and returned it, and for the moment that their eyes met he knew they were improbably enough on the same page, calculating whether it would be worth it to get close to Notaras, the three of them coming together in yet another unwanted unnatural alliance to find out who was going to stab whom in the back first.

"Alright," Dean said. "We're in."

Chapter Text

The camp had gotten a generator in working order while Sam was unconscious and had gotten the lights switched back on. They had taped plastic sheeting over the broken windows and had spray painted at least the most basic anti-demonic and anti-witchcraft sigils on the sheeting. Sam had gotten access to their small collection of encyclopedias of arcane signs and symbols--coffee table curiosity books, glossy and sterile, without that buzzing Sam felt against his fingertips when he turned the pages of an authentic grimoire--and had gone outside with Parker to paint additional warding on sidewalks and fence posts and on tree stumps. Parker had a knack for this sort of thing just like he had a knack for advanced Molotov cocktails and for keeping almost eerily cool under pressure. He was so young, Sam kept noticing, but then everyone seemed to him to be so young lately.

He told Parker that just as soon as he and Jess could find a working vehicle with a full tank they would be on their way.

"What else have you got going on, besides the precog thing?" Parker asked. He didn't look hostile or suspicious, going off the half of his face that Sam could see under the oversized sunglasses he was wearing and the wavy hair falling across his brow. He sounded like he was tallying up another resource. Considering this community's experiences with necromancers and magic, Sam couldn't count on many others seeing it the same way.

"Nothin', really," he said. "These visions just happen to me sometimes."

"People 'round here shouldn't have been so closed-minded about it--magic," Parker said, idly twirling his paintbrush so that drops of wet acrylic splattered on the sidewalk. He looked away to the horizon, the sun burning brassy orange behind distant smoggy clouds, the light gilding the crests of his blonde hair, hair that was almost as long as Sam's had been--as it still was--as it would be when he went home. "What they did isn't so different from what we're doing. They forced a divide in the community and people turned on each other. This didn't have to happen."

Necromancy and deals with bloodthirsty gods were quite another order from what they were doing, which was simple stenography, but Sam didn't tell him so.

"You should stay with us," Parker said. "I know that you came here for a reason--and you've already done so much, helped us pull through the worst fight we've ever had. We should stick together, all of us, while we still can."

"It wouldn't go the way you think," he said. "I'm sorry, but I'm not what you think I am." He hadn't meant to say that last part, knew he should not have said it. His mind was fuzzy from the broiling heat or addled from the visions that had been hitting him so hard lately or from having another consciousness trapped inside it. Just thinking about it made his focus splinter, pain like broken glass behind his temples.

Parker sighed and shook his head, a bitterness simmering in the set of his jaw and purse of his mouth. It was the kind of bitterness that would eventually boil over the pot, Sam thought, though he barely knew Parker anymore than Parker knew him.

"You might think that, but...It's the end of the world, pal. There's a lot of people who aren't what anybody thought they were. I can guarantee you're not as special as you think." He flashed a crooked, brittle grin at Sam and started painting an Assyrian sigil on a telephone pole, dripping paint staining his thumb indigo. "But I hope you find it, whatever you're looking for."

"Thanks," Sam said.

"Just don't tell anybody what I said about the magic," Parker said, pursed lips twisting in a sour imitation smile. "They've enough to be freaking out over as it is. Even Daniel wouldn't understand, really. You really lucked out with your girl."

"Yeah," he said. Licked his dry lips, swallowed. "But the magic you're talkin' about...necromancy is its own breed. It can't be harnessed for good. It violates peoples' souls by ripping them away from...from where they're supposed to be. It enslaves them. And the hole it punches in the natural order...just look around you. This is the least of the collateral damage."

"You think there's such a thing as a natural order anymore?" Parker asked, voice suddenly dropping deeper, sounding older. "Seems to me the whole world's collectively kicked that hornet's nest."

"Then forget about the cosmic laws and think about how you treat other people."

"I do," Parker said. "I think about them all the time. Other people, they think about their families, their friends, their tribes, and that's gotten funneled down to fewer people every damn year. But I think about everyone. I can't stop thinking about them. I'm stuck like a satellite up in orbit watching the big picture 24/7 and I can't shut it off. It's always been like that, even before we were living in end times. Maybe it comes from being psychic."

"You're psychic?"

"Yeah," he said. "Just in the sense that I can do what any cold-reading charlatan can fake. I'm sure I couldn't hold a candle to you. I've never burned a man alive with nothing but my mind. How does that fit into your natural order, by the way?"

Sam caught his breath, dry throat constricting, a slash going through the Aquarian star of the sigil he had just completed, ruining it, and he glanced down to see a splatter of red drops on his forearm and on the parched browning grass, looking indistinguishable from blood. "It's not something I meant to do...I--I can't control it completely. That's one reason I can't stay."

Parker dropped his chin and shrugged his shoulders, almost apologetic. "Sorry, I wasn't meaning to bring it up." And he didn't mention it up again, he switched to talking to Sam about his and Jess' options for transport, and it was almost as if the conversation had never happened.

Getting a car turned out to be not as big a concern as getting fuel. He and Jess ended up siphoning diesel out of the dirt bikes and into another Chevy with off-road tires. Rosa and Daniel were as generous with food and medical supplies as they could possibly afford to be and they and Daniel's sister hugged Jess and him while Parker hung back, watching, knowing God knows what about him. An I-Pod, still plugged into the Chevy's stereo, started playing Crosby, Stills & Nash's Southern Cross. Jess, behind the wheel for the first leg, seemed in better spirits. He didn't tell her anything of what Parker had told him, not wanting to worry her.

o

They drove five hours in one hard haul from Diablo down I-5 and then a back roads detour to the energy fields outside Bakersfield. There they finally parked behind the concrete outbuildings of an abandoned pumping station, blockaded on the other side by a grasshopper rig which in the shadows did look almost like some monstrous insectoid. He could see gas flares burning in the distance, a faint orange glow reaching them, illuminating the wreckage which was their reason for stopping. An army caravan had ground to a halt here; the corpses were fresh, the stench of them overwhelming even with the night time chill. He only needed to look at them to know that they were probably only a day or two old. They had passed another caravan skirting Fresno; it had been climbing in the direction of Diablo. The caravan hadn't stopped and the Humvees hadn't slowed, rattling the chassis of their Chevy and leaving it quickly in their dust, but the marine on the turret at the end had followed them with the machine gun mounted on the Humvee and waved, a brisk unsmiling wave that looked more like a cautionary hand sign.

There were six vehicles left, most of them toppled over into the shallow ditch beside the grasshopper rig, the rig casting a long spectral black shadow over them. One of the Humvees was burnt, parts of its metal chassis scattered across the field beside the other vehicles like it had exploded.

They stopped to scavenge, primarily for fuel to siphon but also for food and ammo, a decision which was insanely dangerous and somehow didn't feel that way. It was his vision, Sam realized after a little while. The visions had given him a road map to follow and the subconscious sense that he was destined to follow it and that nothing could prevent him from reaching his intended destination, whatever that was. Once he realized it was happening, he couldn't help thinking about what had happened the last time he'd let himself believe in the visions he was receiving, believe they were coming to him for a purpose, that it could mean something good. He thought briefly about what Dean would think about these visions and Sam's decision to adhere to them blindly and then struggled exhaustingly for a while not to think about that anymore.

Sam searched through the armored truck for ammunition while Jess searched the other vehicles. She yelled for him in excitement when she found there were MREs in the supply truck, a couple dozen high protein meals that looked like they were still good. She pulled the crates out, struggling under their significant weight. She was strong, but each crate looked like it held about thirty MREs and Sam knew that they were far heavier than they looked. She and Sam hefted them into the Chevy's trunk and each pulled one out. Sam cut open a tube of peanut butter before squeezing some of it into his mouth. His dry throat felt like it was gummed shut and he poured water down it, water that had a rusty taste that almost reminded him of blood.

There was a rustling in the distance, two vehicles out, he thought. Sam dropped the tube of peanut butter and picked up his rifle. Adrenaline was already speeding through him and he felt a light shake in his hands as he moved towards the sound, his rifle raised and ready to fire, his machete in a make-shift holster slung over his back.

He found the ensign hiding in the last Humvee, laid up against the side. Another kid who looked about Jack's age, maybe a year or two older. Greeley was written on his uniform, the name printed on a strip of fabric above the pocket. There was blood all over it and Sam didn't need to touch him to know that he'd sustained serious chest wounds along with what looked like a broken leg.

"Help me," he pleaded, one hand cupping a wound in his gut, small but pulsing out big bubbles of blood. Sam could see the bleeds starting in his eyes, the first symptom of infection, his cornea distended into the white of his eye surrounded by a ring of red. Croatoan, probably, but there were other infections that showed the same symptoms, and some that could be cured...

"He's gonna go rabid," Jess whispered, canting her head to look at him while stepping back from the ensign. She dressed her face in sympathy, looking at the ensign, and said, "It's gonna be okay. We're gonna go for the first-aid box and we're gonna get you patched up, just don't move." Sam understood what his part to play was. He was supposed to put this man down while Jess distracted him from what was coming.

But then his mind dropped out, plummeting towards the city now below him, and he saw Los Angeles had become like a gutted corpse on a funeral pyre, smoldering, the black smoke rising in little churning tornadoes from the empty buildings. He felt himself moving, twisting and shifting, inside and outside of the visible world; he was trying to escape the viciously constricting pain he felt and he was trying to get a better look at what he was seeing. The heat was unbearable, the sky a sickly swirl of black and orange, but finally, finally, a highway sign materialized out of the desert haze--Black Canyon Road, running through the Mojave, a wide mesa, a circle of waist-high standing stones like a far less impressive Stonehenge. He was woken from the vision by a shot so loud Sam could feel the echo of it ringing in his ears. He looked for the ensign and saw that he wasn't in the place he'd been in last. He looked at Jess and saw her sliding off the roof of the Humvee, scuffed and bruised but not bleeding. Ensign Greeley was dead, draped on his back across the hood of the Humvee, the blown-out back of his skull dripping blood and brain matter and shards of bone down the vehicle's hubcaps. He looked down at himself and saw blood dripping black on the pavement. He put a hand to his forehead and felt a cut running along his hairline. He looked at his forearm and saw a rip in his sleeve and a bite mark. He could smell a great deal of blood on the warm night time breeze and he shivered. It took a moment for his mind to clear enough that he could remember that he was immune.

"Croatoan?" he asked, just to be sure.

"Yeah," she said, and shrugged out of her blue denim over shirt and pulled her plaited hair back from her neck so he could see she was fine, she hadn't been bitten. A possibility he hadn't for a second entertained and didn't think he could've done a damn thing about if he had.

"Why is this the first time we're running across Croats?"

"The barricades," she said. "Not just the army barricades, there's gods and witches putting up magical barriers against them too. Though they won't hold forever."

"Can they continue north? Is there nothing stopping them from reaching--"

"The army will have set up another barricade between here and the next population center and they won't let us cross back." Her voice was hard, her eyes glinting, reflecting the glow of a distant flare. "There's nothing we can do that they can't. Now listen to me, what did you see?"

He told her, struggling to focus and to quiet the voice telling him that the people who'd sheltered them were going to die because he'd abandoned them. Then they got back in their Chevy and drove, stopping again to spend the rest of the night in Baker, in a white ranch house off I-55, with blue trim and a swing on the front porch and flowerbeds under every window, the flowers withered husks. He was awake and alone for four hours, keeping watch. In the deep of the night he formed the thought, I miss my brother, but the thought sounded like a foreign voice, hoarser than his own, a whisper echoing in the back of his skull. A tremor raced through him and he nearly dropped the travel mug he was holding. He set it down on the sideboard and he looked down and there was something wrong with his hand. He held it up to the moonlight and he saw a pool of blood glistening crimson in his palm. It wasn't real. He curled his hand into a fist, digging nails into gun-handling calluses, and told himself it could be a memory of many things. He thought of demon blood and felt a stab of longing; ingesting blood had a structure to it and a relative predictability, he knew where it came from and what he could do with it and that he could eventually purge himself of it. He could even miss the idea of being an addict, that most human and constant of problems. At least he could if he let himself think about it too much, which he wasn't going to...Then he heard blood, dripping, felt it splash on his hand. He looked at Jess, sleeping on the sofa, moonlight limning the smooth crescent of her cheekbone, the scarred half of her face nestled into the pillow, breath fluttering the lacy trim on the pillowcase. He raised his hand to his upper lip, touched his philtrum, and when he held his fingers up to the moonlight again he saw blood that he was almost certain had to be real.

o

The next morning they entered the Mojave National Preserve. Jess kept asking him "Does this look familiar, does this, does this," pointing towards a shimmer in the distance, mountains rising high out of the thin line of the land, even before they'd reached the unpaved Black Canyon road, and he wondered how much of their lives were like this here, his visions making them drive in circles of endless frustration and confusion. He wondered what it had been like when they'd had Dean with them, for however long that had lasted, his brain sliding weirdly around the thought. The inferior-to-the-Impala-in-all-ways Chevy struggled and suffered on the abrasive, eroded, pot-holed roads, and he listed back against the seats, legs and spinal column cramped and shoulders hunched. This car had A/C in excellent condition and still the sweltering heat sank in through the cracks. They passed a tubular aluminum motorhome that had burned until it was crumpled and blackened and cracked, with a campsite grill and a fire circle and some lawn chairs sitting outside. There were no bodies he could see, which could mean either that they'd burned trapped inside their only shelter or they'd escaped somehow.

Not far after that, Sam was staring almost vacantly at the horizon when the silhouette of upright stones atop a mesa caught his eye. He told Jess, "I've seen this place," and the words came out hoarse but with more conviction than he felt. They got out of the car and sweat trickled into new places and his spine cracked aloud. The air smelled clean, dry and empty. They climbed the mesa and walked into the circle of standing stones, six stones standing at six points, equidistant, like the points on the Aquarian star, and nothing happened. Sam laid his hand on one of the stones, feeling the warmth baked into the stone and a buzzing that reminded him of a grimoire, and Jess said,"Hoping you'll get whisked away into the arms of a highlander?" and he smiled, for a second, remembering how she'd talked him into reading Outlander shortly after they'd moved in together, when their books had had to start sharing shelf space. Jess got some herbs out of her bag and lit them on fire and said a short Latin chant, the most basic incantation for revealing things unseen. A haze rose up in front of his eyes and for several seconds he thought it was another vision of things to come, but no, he saw memories flickering like a shower of embers, the faces of Mary and of a woman who looked like Mary but wasn't Mary, Dean in many iterations, so many iterations that he couldn't be sure which he had seen before and which he hadn't, Jess and the other Jess, and a thousand background faces spinning like constellations on a planetarium ceiling, many sporting yellow eyes of different tints and expressions, warm sunshine and cold fire, merriment and cruelty and sadness and confusion, thousands of eyes like angel eyes or insect eyes all belonging to the same mighty face and that face was the face of the heavens. The clouds cleared and he pinched his nose and used his thumb to scrub away the blood that was trickling again. Jess had her hands pressed over her ears and her eyes screwed shut and her jaw clenched, but no nose bleed. He tapped her on the shoulder and got her sidearm pointed in his face before she swung it past his head to aim at someone over his shoulder, her eyes round and halfway wild.

He looked around, heart beating hard. They were standing in the middle of a camp--something like a carnival composed mostly of red and white striped tents, steam organ notes whistling discordantly over the howling of blood in his eardrums. A conical water tower made of cedar planks and steel hoops and stilts and another aluminum camper with a generator hooked up to it. Yuccas, Joshua Trees, and cholla cacti dotting the rocky plains, stretching to a jagged horizon. The sun was low and huge in the brilliantly blue sky.

People came out of their tents to see them and within scarcely a minute they had drawn a crowd of around fifty beings. Some could pass as human, but the exceptions made up more than half the crowd. There were selkies and a kelpie, so far from their native cold rivers. There were dryads and naiads and a few species of yōkai and the xiezhi, which looked like a unicorn-goat, the tubular whintosser with its swiveling joints and its three equidistant sets of legs, the little gnome duende standing beside the seven foot tall kapre, who was smoking a cigar along with the tikbalang, who was also smoking a cigar, a difficult feat with its horse's head. The adlet, a Canadian human hybrid with dog legs and a large visor on his head and sunglasses and a pale chest that had been horribly sunburned, reddened skin cracked and peeling. Reactions to their sudden appearance were mixed. A few applauded while others stamped their hooves or waved. The tikbalang and the kapre just smoked their cigars and stared in a surly manner that was intimidating but not necessarily hostile. Others turned to their neighbors and hissed urgent questions. Most looked some kind of confused. He recognized their eyes, with their many rare jewel colors, from his vision. Jess was putting her back against his. They were surrounded. Sam was mesmerized. He would have loved to be able to take photographs, to have some documentation of this encounter should he ever make it back to the bunker library again.

"No pasa nada, tio, he told us you'd come," said the duende in a gravelly voice, blowing a smoke ring.

"He got a name?" Jess asked, lowering the gun to her midsection, which was still about on the level of the duende's neck.

"We call him Tommy," the duende said. "Cause we're friends." His flinty squint and the way he chomped the end of his cigar implied that he might never be on such terms with them.

"We're hoping he can help us," Sam said. "We'll pay you back in any way we can, if you'll just..."

"We've got everything we need," the adlet said through cracked lips and a flash of fangs, the sunburns on his torso looking painful enough that Sam wished they'd brought some sunblock and some chapstick to trade with. The fur on his legs was a husky's snow and ash pelt, a double coat for insulation against a Canadian winter.

"Tommy says come along, he wants to talk," the duende said, jabbing his cigar over his shoulder.

Sam exchanged a moment of silent communication with Jess, after which she agreed to holster her gun and walk mutely after the duende.

The duende led them through the crowd, which parted to a respectful distance of three feet back, to a striped tent where an old woman was sitting under an awning of red velvet, a stack of tarot card set before her and a whistle of calliope music seeming to announce them as they approached. She looked a delicate little old lady, with Slavic features and with long braids that had been dyed indigo and violet alongside their natural silver. Behind deep brown eyes he could see her power shimmering like a heat mirage, golden, aflame, prismatic.

"Thomas wants to see you alone," she told Sam in a voice clear and youthful as a silver bell. "But I wanted to see you first. He told us about you, about where you come from. And he told me what you really are. I've never met another of your kind before..." Her deck of cards was being strummed and shuffled by almost inhumanly deft fingers, spiderous pale fingers, beringed in silver and opals, dealing the cards, the first card, the Hermit (reversed), the Chariot (upright), the Queen of Swords (upright), the Magician (reversed), the Tower (upright). The music thrummed and hummed and pulsed, in keys and with intonations Sam's thoroughly-American-inducted-with-a sideline-in-Norwegian-metal ear couldn't quite place.

"Who are you reading for?" Sam asked her.

"For Thomas Huntsman," she said. "He's the one who'll decide your fates."

"Then we should speak to him together," Jess said.

"He doesn't trust easy, Thomas," the card-reader said. "But he believes in the fates and the fates say it has to be the Hermit before the Chariot."

Jess looked like she was restraining herself from rolling her eyes by a hair's-breadth.

"He means your boy no harm, guapa," the duende said. "Let's keep straight who pulled their piece on whom, hmm?"

Sam faced her, realizing in that moment, with what felt like a flash of uncharacteristically strong intuition, that he had no desire for her to be privy to this coming meeting either. Jess turned her head and raised her eyes to meet his slowly, with a tussle of contradictory feelings pulling her features into an offkilter frown. She saw the resolution in his gaze and her frown deepened, the ridges of her scars rippled, a strand of solid gold hair swung across her left eye and settled against the bridge of her nose. Her freckles were the color of amber and her eyes mirrored the sky.

"I don't know if this is gonna be..."

"Goodbye?"

"But in case I don't make it back, then I'm sorry I interrupted your lives like this and I..."

She rose onto her boot toes and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He breathed in the sweaty unwashed road smell of her hair as he lowered his face into the crook of her shoulder and tried to remember what it had smelled like when he would embrace her the first time around, but couldn't. No more than he could say goodbye to her, a real goodbye, because she was still a phantom to him, another echo of the woman to whom he would never be able to say it.

The duende cleared his throat, coughing out a perfect mushroom cloud. "Day's gettin' long, tio."

He followed the duende beyond the camp's borders, walking away from Jess without looking back.

The duende showed him the way through grasses and wildflowers, lupine and dandelions and brittelbrush, that carpeted the desert with soft yellow and violet color, until they came to a narrow track between boulders. He felt the same tingling as when he'd touched the stones but it wasn't just in his fingertips now, it was crawling over his skin, prickling and zinging along his nerves, spine and hands and temples. The duende stopped at a certain point. Sam continued walking straight between the boulders and then between the Joshua trees until he came across an iron hatch in the ground. The Aquarian star, seal of the Men of Letters. He pulled it open easily by its ring handle and looked down at the dark drop, the blazing sunlight only faintly gilding the first narrow rungs of the ladder. Feet first, he descended.