Dead Zone Alchemy
Title: Dead Zone Alchemy (1/5)
Fandom: SPN
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Hunting is an accidental occupation.
Notes: For fidgetknickers and valiant.
Dead Zone Alchemy
Jo's boss two states ago gets her another bar job just outside Lompoc, but not before asking if this is what she really wants to do, serve Pabst to the armed and dementedly driven for the rest of her life.
It's never too late, boss said, to enroll in community college or to make amends. Everyone's always asking Jo if she misses her Momma.
It's been seven months since Jo sent a postcard home.
"Well, ain't that stupid?" Carl, one of the regulars, scratches his beard with the mouthpiece of a pipe he's been gumming the last half hour. Prematurely grandfatherly at forty-one, he's one of Jo's favorite personalities at The Well. "You want in on this business where the survival rate ain't hot, but you voluntarily cut off your lines of communication with family - which is a luxury for many of us - because of hurt feelings?"
"Not cutting." Jo regrets saying anything at all. She didn't want to talk about that, she wanted to hear about Carl's incubus story. "Giving each other space."
Carl snorts. "Listen to yourself. You'd think you'd have seen your way to hell an' back. I been on that same path, and lemme tell you how lonely it is."
One of the perks of bartending at a hunter haven is hearing a fair share of many people's personal business. It's different from the Roadhouse, where customers are civil but close-mouthed out of respect of her mom's rules: Stay for as long as you want, but don't you put any ideas in my girl's head.
There are no such rules here at The Well. Jo hungrily encourages the yarns customers part with under the influence of alcohol, flush from surviving to celebrate their latest successes. When they decompress, she learns. This is the education, informal and uneven as it is, that would give her mother migraines: math and literature and science in the geometries and archaic invocations of killing creatures humanity is content to think it imagined into existence.
Occasionally, she gets stories preaching the tragedies that inevitably befall all hunters.
For every lucky son-of-guns like Hector - biggest loss: his ring and pinky fingers, those leathery grimy stubs digested a long time ago by a testy chupacabra - are fifty more Ricardos, whose earthly remains you can put in a shot glass.
She gets it.
"No, you don't," Carl reproves. "I wish you'd get it through that thick head of yours that hunting's an accidental occupation. Nothing good ever comes out of it, not nobility or a special place in heaven. The best you could hope for is to die quickly and to stay dead."
"Right. Because of the incidences of zombie-spawning and demonic possessions."
Carl throws his hands up in the air in a gesture of defeat. "You're gonna remember this conversation when you're getting chomped on by the undead."
***
"If the piece of silver is too big, use a hacksaw to chop it into smaller pieces," Enrique says.
Enrique used to be a SWAT guy for the feds. He's good-looking in that scarred, rugged way, if you can look past the moodiness and the horrible racist jokes. Some speculate that his undoing won't come in the heat of a supernatural confrontation, but in some county jail at the hands of a civvie thug.
"You'll need a crucible. There's books that teach you how to make your own."
Jo nods. "Books. Got it."
"Silver melts at seventeen-hundred degrees, so I recommend a MAPP torch, 'cause you can buy that at any hardware store."
She listens a lot, keeps an ear out for unfinished jobs, who's dead, who's seen whom where and when.
Isaac and Tamara were last seen in Florida. There's a 'vegetarian' vampire coven that's being monitored in the Pacific Northwest in the event they fall off the wagon. Dao and Jonesy lost an honest-to-goodness monkey's paw to a British woman with sticky fingers.
The hunter population is not very big, but it is connected, albeit loosely through an informal network of sanctuaries. If you know where to look, you'll find someone in the unfriendly saloons off the main roads and highways, small antique shops and the random small-town church.
Jo learns about Steve Wandell when his daughter orders her second beer and turns to the woman sitting next to her at the bar, a hard-faced hunter named Eileen, to ask where she could find a Sam Winchester.
"Haven't seen you before," Eileen remarks. "Awful fresh to be a hunter."
The daughter is a couple of years younger than Jo, pretty with the guileless air of someone who obviously doesn't run in these kind of circles. But she presses on. "I'm not from around here. But I need help with my dad, he's a hunter like you." She unclasps one of the snaps of a designer purse and fishes out a wallet-sized photograph. "His name's Steve Wandell?"
There's a near-imperceptible shift of attention to the bar, the subtlest of quieting, as dozens of ears tune into the conversation.
"Yeah?" Eileen flicks a look at the photo. Jo catches a glimpse of a middle-aged man beaming in a green Christmas sweater. "What's your name?"
"Casey."
"Casey, what's you and your daddy have to do with Sam Winchester?"
Ash once said that hunting would be an easy vocation to fall into if it weren't for people's inclination for rational explanations. Most people aren't comfortable considering an existence outside their own. Belief can move and obscure mountains.
"That's what I'm trying to figure out. I mean, it's just me trying to figure out." Casey finally notices the faces turned her way, and that's all it takes for her to discard her attempt to be discreet. She holds her ground with Eileen, but her announcement is pitched to address everyone. "I need to find this Winchester guy. He's involved in my dad's murder."
***
There are disturbing rumors about the Winchesters.
They've made deals with demons. They're working with demons. One of them is a demon. There's a hell gate in Wyoming and one of John's boys blasted it open as part of a deal for immortality. Places friendly to hunters are getting torched.
Harvelle's Roadhouse in Nebraska was charred to the ground, and not a one of the twenty people inside it survived. Everything and everyone, bones and dust.
The Roadhouse number is disconnected. Jo considers calling her Momma's friends only to realize she doesn't know if her Momma had friends who aren't customers. This unknown opens a floodgate of other unknowns for which Jo has no answers: Momma's favorite color or song, any detail of a life outside the Roadhouse, all the silly and sentimental things mothers and daughters ought to know about each other. Jo got to know her Momma by fighting her, not loving her.
For years, Jo has threatened and made good on her promises to run away.
A week after Dad's funeral service, Jo left in the direction she last saw him head toward - northwest along the dirt road that met the I-75, away from the sign informing travelers that the small town of Bennington is twenty miles away.
Jo took the wrong buses and wound up at Crescent, penniless after spending all her money on food and bus transfers. The walk home took hours. It was past midnight when she arrived, defeated and utterly exhausted, to the sight of Harvelle's parking lot illuminated by the whirling red and blue of police patrol lights. The place was crawling with cops and empty of hunters.
"What you did was stupid and selfish," her Momma has said in a quiet, deadly voice that chased out the rebelliousness and unhappiness that for months stewed bitterly in Jo's eight-year-old heart. Her pride balked at the welcome sight of her mother's face. It really wasn't her Momma's fault Dad died, people fight all the time and sometimes there is bad luck, the kind that steals the chance to make up and set things right. "Do you hear me? I was out of my mind with worry..."
Then she'd folded a sullen Jo in a crushing embrace, her body shaking in anger and relief and love. Jo felt the side of her head, where she'd parted her hair to make plaits, get wet. Her Momma's grip around her upper arms was so tight they left bruises. "Don't you ever do that again."
"I know my way home," was all Jo said, and burst into tears because it's just the two of them now.
What took her away - a good-for-nothing boyfriend, a petty disagreement, a hunt for which she'd inevitably be denied a part, community college - always brought her back. It's the push and pull of their seesaw relationship, at the core of which was the inescapable fact that there's just the two of them now.
The stories about Harvelle's are true.
Not much is left in the lot but strips of tattered crime scene tape here and there laying grubby in the scorched soil and the scar-like outline of where home was stood stout and reliable, unmoved by the Midwest's random climatic freakouts and the random freaks Jo secretly admired growing up.
The sky looks bigger when the land is this bare. Once in awhile, the landscape is altered by a big rig, its silhouette lonelier than the ghostly wave of the wild grass stirred by its passage. It's as if Harvelle's never existed, not that it ever meant to or did for the world at large.
Jo sinks into a crouch in the dirt, dropping her head in her hands.
It's so easy to disappear.
The word orphan crosses her mind, and the very idea of is so alarming that she can scarcely breathe.
***
Jo bluffs, lies and sneaks her way into the hospital room where the man sitting at Booth Nineteen of Mel's Diner had been transported for seizures after drinking a medium iced tea spiked with holy water.
"There is," the man gasps.
Jo works faster, closing the circle and connecting the legs of a five-pointed star on the hospital blanket. Countless times she's doodled Devil's Traps to practice for a someday like today. This is something you have to know by heart, more than any of the hundreds of exorcisms hunters use to expel demons, because it's dangerous to make mistakes. One wrong stroke on a sigil, one omitted symbol, and you could be enslaving yourself to the very thing you're trying to bind.
Her fingers are stained blue where the spray can's nozzle had sputtered color. She puts the opposite hand in her pocket, shaking so hard she turns the fabric inside out.
She straightens up. When she locks eyes with the man, his go from bright green to shiny beetle-black. "There is something that's been troubling me for awhile now, Joanna Beth." The demon exhales sulfur fumes out of the man's mouth that stings tears out of Jo's eyes. "You stopped praying for your daddy. It's hurt his feelings, you know."
"Deus, in nómine tuo salvum me fac, et virtúte tua age causam meam." Her fingers can't feel the paper clenched in her hands. Nerves blur the words on the page, thickens her tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. "Deus, audi oratiónem meam Au..áuribus per. Pérci - pérciverba oris mei."
The demon rattles his hosts body against the hospital bed's limb restraints and the strength of the Trap. Both hold.
"Not bad, baby hunter," the demon says in a voice unlike anything Jo's ever heard, a multitude of ancient voices bellowing from hell through their emissary through the pinhole of a human throat. Jo imagines the delicate and complex muscles inside it liquefying. "But how long can you keep me here, reading the longest possible Exorcismus rite? You know what you should be doing? You should be asking me about your mother."
"Because demons are so trust-worthy," Jo splashes holy water from a small flask. The demon bellows in agony and struggles. "Because you tell the straight truth!"
The tiniest, most traitorous flower of hope blossoms in her chest.
"Only humans would look at truths in such a way, as though they are uncomplicated and only hidden, the ways to unlock them esoteric."
The demon inside the man puppets his face into a smile. The effect is chilling and the surrealness of the situation - alone on her first exorcism in a room with a demon - striking a blow of uncertainty to Jo's resolve.
"Your mother's been a bad, bad girl. Ask me how."
The demon begins to barter for its release, tempting with promises of knowledge and threatening with the descriptions of the innumerable demons that roam free, unmolested and assimilated in small-town and big-city America. Jo can feel the whisper of its mind in hers, disturbing sleeping memories and unformed thoughts into a kind of skittering wakefulness, like insects run out of their lightless lair. It invites itself into the darkness of her mind, probing here and there, spidery and methodical.
"Don't talk about her like that," Jo says, one hand clutching the side of her head. It feels tight behind her eyeballs, and it's as if her own voice is coming from a distance, barely heard above the white noise of air and a thousand papery wings.
She notices the blanket has shifted and folded in some places by the insistent wriggling of the demon in the man's body. The Trap is deformed.
"Your mother's with the dead."
That's all it takes to startle Jo into action. She steps close to the bed and with a jerky movement pulls the blanket straight, her mind alert and shut.
"Guess what!" Her voice is thick, agitated with a multitude of fears: of the near-possession, of losing her cool, of maybe getting caught by hospital security for Chrissakes. "Guess what! You're going to hell!"
***
Her sixth job takes the longest to complete.
She's on Week Five, running in the cornfield in rural Illinois with compact mirrors super-glued on the front of her shirt and the backs of her jeans, on the trail of a cockatrice she's hoping to kill with its reflection.
The thing's been ruining the crops and petrifying dogs, people, bugs, birds, anything with eyes it could lock in its stony gaze. For three months, the locals have been scared out of their wits, the pious convinced it's kingdom come and the working poor convinced it's time to move on.
This kind of work requires two people. After she finds this cockatrice, its nest will still need to be exterminated and god knows where she'd find that. Jo doesn't know if she'll have the strength for anything else today.
A partner, Jo reflects, would be nice. She never realized how frustrating, how testing it is to rely on such little practical experience in life-threatening situations, or how deeply the shocks of many terrible days stay with you.
Spinning lies by yourself stops being fun when there's no one to corroborate with. For about a year now, Jo's been fibbing to invade strangers' lives to save them; to get into places she ought not to be; to get out of trouble; to find Mom.
To make this accidental occupation work.
Cockatrice breath wilts plants. She follows the trail of wilted plants for hours until she's convinced that the thing's leading her in circles. Twice she's had to dive between undisturbed stalks to hide when a a low-flying plane flew even lower, its pilot mistaking the scintillation of her mirrors as a distress signal.
There's a squawk behind her, then a soft thump.
"Oh. Oh, no way."
Jo laughs in heaving gasps.
"That actually worked." She marvels over the dead cockatrice, its black rooster body and scaly lizard's tail. She pokes its freak corpse with her father's knife, then beheads it cleanly with the pig-sticker's uncompromising blade.
She rocks back on her heels, her lungs and muscles aflame, and for brief, shining moment is awash with satisfaction.
***
Hunters are not territorial when it comes to locales, but they do get tetchy when you move in on their job. They stay out of each other's way as point of politeness more than dislike.
Jo knows she's doing a discourtesy by seeking them out, not just at places where they likely congregate but on the road.
"I need you to pass along a message for me, please," is how she begins conversations with affronted hunters in no mood for her intrusions, let alone her cause.
In rare moments of optimism, Jo imagines her message spreading across the states.
A Jo Harvelle's looking for her mother, an Ellen Harvelle, Billy Harvelle's widow to those who might remember the couple who ran the old Roadhouse in Nebraska. Her daughter is bound for this state or that. Here's her new cell phone number, please call as soon as you get this, she'll leave a job to find you. Same goes for anyone who's seen her.
She can't afford it, but Jo starts offering money for any scrap of information.
No one calls about her Momma.
She doesn't ask about Sam and Dean, even though others are searching for them, too.
Everything's fucked.
She cracks a rib falling the wrong way on a solo job in Oxford, Mississippi. For four hours she waits in an ER because she hasn't got her fake healthcare paperwork sorted out.
It's been a hard week because she can't make sense of a haunting at the Saint Anthony Hall frat house. It's been an expensive week because most of her funds have gone into repairs for her car, a fifth-hand Tercel bought for cheap after quitting The Well, that heaves more than hauls. It's been a poor week because she's absolutely exhausted and starving. Her last twenty is paying for gas to get out of this godforsaken place.
She has to give up. And that's probably the worst thing of all, to be forced into submission by her weakness, the impenetrable wall of physical limitations and inexperience. Jo squeezes her eyes shut against futile tears, thinking that she's in good company at least. Everyone in the waiting room is miserable.
She's so hungry. Yesterday's breakfast burrito is so long ago.
"What happened to you, honey?" the nurse asks, patting Jo's dirty sleeve.
"I fell," Jo says dully, fighting down a hiccup. "I think something's broken. I have no insurance."
It's two in the morning when she leaves the hospital. As her luck would have it, the car's decided to give up as well in an act of karmic solidarity that convinces Jo that it's time for them to part ways forever.
Her belongings fit in a duffel bag and a backpack. Jo's too tired to ruminate over the kind of statement this makes. Somewhere in this city are homeless and women's shelters, with beds and hot food. Tomorrow will have to wait. There's the warmth of municipally funded charity to be had.
Night is graying into early morning when a muscle car rumbles past. Jo distractedly watches it continue west on Van Buren Avenue, make a U-turn at the light at Fifth Street, then fishtail into an illegal U at the double yellow lines right before La Mar Boulevard.
She used to know someone who owned a car like that.
The car catches up to her, motoring at a snail's speed - her speed - to keep up with her pathetic baby steps. It stops when she stops.
"Hey," Sam Winchester says, leaning over and pushing open the passenger door of his brother's black Impala. "Get in."
Fandom: SPN
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Hunting is an accidental occupation.
Notes: For fidgetknickers and valiant.
Dead Zone Alchemy
Jo's boss two states ago gets her another bar job just outside Lompoc, but not before asking if this is what she really wants to do, serve Pabst to the armed and dementedly driven for the rest of her life.
It's never too late, boss said, to enroll in community college or to make amends. Everyone's always asking Jo if she misses her Momma.
It's been seven months since Jo sent a postcard home.
"Well, ain't that stupid?" Carl, one of the regulars, scratches his beard with the mouthpiece of a pipe he's been gumming the last half hour. Prematurely grandfatherly at forty-one, he's one of Jo's favorite personalities at The Well. "You want in on this business where the survival rate ain't hot, but you voluntarily cut off your lines of communication with family - which is a luxury for many of us - because of hurt feelings?"
"Not cutting." Jo regrets saying anything at all. She didn't want to talk about that, she wanted to hear about Carl's incubus story. "Giving each other space."
Carl snorts. "Listen to yourself. You'd think you'd have seen your way to hell an' back. I been on that same path, and lemme tell you how lonely it is."
One of the perks of bartending at a hunter haven is hearing a fair share of many people's personal business. It's different from the Roadhouse, where customers are civil but close-mouthed out of respect of her mom's rules: Stay for as long as you want, but don't you put any ideas in my girl's head.
There are no such rules here at The Well. Jo hungrily encourages the yarns customers part with under the influence of alcohol, flush from surviving to celebrate their latest successes. When they decompress, she learns. This is the education, informal and uneven as it is, that would give her mother migraines: math and literature and science in the geometries and archaic invocations of killing creatures humanity is content to think it imagined into existence.
Occasionally, she gets stories preaching the tragedies that inevitably befall all hunters.
For every lucky son-of-guns like Hector - biggest loss: his ring and pinky fingers, those leathery grimy stubs digested a long time ago by a testy chupacabra - are fifty more Ricardos, whose earthly remains you can put in a shot glass.
She gets it.
"No, you don't," Carl reproves. "I wish you'd get it through that thick head of yours that hunting's an accidental occupation. Nothing good ever comes out of it, not nobility or a special place in heaven. The best you could hope for is to die quickly and to stay dead."
"Right. Because of the incidences of zombie-spawning and demonic possessions."
Carl throws his hands up in the air in a gesture of defeat. "You're gonna remember this conversation when you're getting chomped on by the undead."
***
"If the piece of silver is too big, use a hacksaw to chop it into smaller pieces," Enrique says.
Enrique used to be a SWAT guy for the feds. He's good-looking in that scarred, rugged way, if you can look past the moodiness and the horrible racist jokes. Some speculate that his undoing won't come in the heat of a supernatural confrontation, but in some county jail at the hands of a civvie thug.
"You'll need a crucible. There's books that teach you how to make your own."
Jo nods. "Books. Got it."
"Silver melts at seventeen-hundred degrees, so I recommend a MAPP torch, 'cause you can buy that at any hardware store."
She listens a lot, keeps an ear out for unfinished jobs, who's dead, who's seen whom where and when.
Isaac and Tamara were last seen in Florida. There's a 'vegetarian' vampire coven that's being monitored in the Pacific Northwest in the event they fall off the wagon. Dao and Jonesy lost an honest-to-goodness monkey's paw to a British woman with sticky fingers.
The hunter population is not very big, but it is connected, albeit loosely through an informal network of sanctuaries. If you know where to look, you'll find someone in the unfriendly saloons off the main roads and highways, small antique shops and the random small-town church.
Jo learns about Steve Wandell when his daughter orders her second beer and turns to the woman sitting next to her at the bar, a hard-faced hunter named Eileen, to ask where she could find a Sam Winchester.
"Haven't seen you before," Eileen remarks. "Awful fresh to be a hunter."
The daughter is a couple of years younger than Jo, pretty with the guileless air of someone who obviously doesn't run in these kind of circles. But she presses on. "I'm not from around here. But I need help with my dad, he's a hunter like you." She unclasps one of the snaps of a designer purse and fishes out a wallet-sized photograph. "His name's Steve Wandell?"
There's a near-imperceptible shift of attention to the bar, the subtlest of quieting, as dozens of ears tune into the conversation.
"Yeah?" Eileen flicks a look at the photo. Jo catches a glimpse of a middle-aged man beaming in a green Christmas sweater. "What's your name?"
"Casey."
"Casey, what's you and your daddy have to do with Sam Winchester?"
Ash once said that hunting would be an easy vocation to fall into if it weren't for people's inclination for rational explanations. Most people aren't comfortable considering an existence outside their own. Belief can move and obscure mountains.
"That's what I'm trying to figure out. I mean, it's just me trying to figure out." Casey finally notices the faces turned her way, and that's all it takes for her to discard her attempt to be discreet. She holds her ground with Eileen, but her announcement is pitched to address everyone. "I need to find this Winchester guy. He's involved in my dad's murder."
***
There are disturbing rumors about the Winchesters.
They've made deals with demons. They're working with demons. One of them is a demon. There's a hell gate in Wyoming and one of John's boys blasted it open as part of a deal for immortality. Places friendly to hunters are getting torched.
Harvelle's Roadhouse in Nebraska was charred to the ground, and not a one of the twenty people inside it survived. Everything and everyone, bones and dust.
The Roadhouse number is disconnected. Jo considers calling her Momma's friends only to realize she doesn't know if her Momma had friends who aren't customers. This unknown opens a floodgate of other unknowns for which Jo has no answers: Momma's favorite color or song, any detail of a life outside the Roadhouse, all the silly and sentimental things mothers and daughters ought to know about each other. Jo got to know her Momma by fighting her, not loving her.
For years, Jo has threatened and made good on her promises to run away.
A week after Dad's funeral service, Jo left in the direction she last saw him head toward - northwest along the dirt road that met the I-75, away from the sign informing travelers that the small town of Bennington is twenty miles away.
Jo took the wrong buses and wound up at Crescent, penniless after spending all her money on food and bus transfers. The walk home took hours. It was past midnight when she arrived, defeated and utterly exhausted, to the sight of Harvelle's parking lot illuminated by the whirling red and blue of police patrol lights. The place was crawling with cops and empty of hunters.
"What you did was stupid and selfish," her Momma has said in a quiet, deadly voice that chased out the rebelliousness and unhappiness that for months stewed bitterly in Jo's eight-year-old heart. Her pride balked at the welcome sight of her mother's face. It really wasn't her Momma's fault Dad died, people fight all the time and sometimes there is bad luck, the kind that steals the chance to make up and set things right. "Do you hear me? I was out of my mind with worry..."
Then she'd folded a sullen Jo in a crushing embrace, her body shaking in anger and relief and love. Jo felt the side of her head, where she'd parted her hair to make plaits, get wet. Her Momma's grip around her upper arms was so tight they left bruises. "Don't you ever do that again."
"I know my way home," was all Jo said, and burst into tears because it's just the two of them now.
What took her away - a good-for-nothing boyfriend, a petty disagreement, a hunt for which she'd inevitably be denied a part, community college - always brought her back. It's the push and pull of their seesaw relationship, at the core of which was the inescapable fact that there's just the two of them now.
The stories about Harvelle's are true.
Not much is left in the lot but strips of tattered crime scene tape here and there laying grubby in the scorched soil and the scar-like outline of where home was stood stout and reliable, unmoved by the Midwest's random climatic freakouts and the random freaks Jo secretly admired growing up.
The sky looks bigger when the land is this bare. Once in awhile, the landscape is altered by a big rig, its silhouette lonelier than the ghostly wave of the wild grass stirred by its passage. It's as if Harvelle's never existed, not that it ever meant to or did for the world at large.
Jo sinks into a crouch in the dirt, dropping her head in her hands.
It's so easy to disappear.
The word orphan crosses her mind, and the very idea of is so alarming that she can scarcely breathe.
***
Jo bluffs, lies and sneaks her way into the hospital room where the man sitting at Booth Nineteen of Mel's Diner had been transported for seizures after drinking a medium iced tea spiked with holy water.
"There is," the man gasps.
Jo works faster, closing the circle and connecting the legs of a five-pointed star on the hospital blanket. Countless times she's doodled Devil's Traps to practice for a someday like today. This is something you have to know by heart, more than any of the hundreds of exorcisms hunters use to expel demons, because it's dangerous to make mistakes. One wrong stroke on a sigil, one omitted symbol, and you could be enslaving yourself to the very thing you're trying to bind.
Her fingers are stained blue where the spray can's nozzle had sputtered color. She puts the opposite hand in her pocket, shaking so hard she turns the fabric inside out.
She straightens up. When she locks eyes with the man, his go from bright green to shiny beetle-black. "There is something that's been troubling me for awhile now, Joanna Beth." The demon exhales sulfur fumes out of the man's mouth that stings tears out of Jo's eyes. "You stopped praying for your daddy. It's hurt his feelings, you know."
"Deus, in nómine tuo salvum me fac, et virtúte tua age causam meam." Her fingers can't feel the paper clenched in her hands. Nerves blur the words on the page, thickens her tongue around the unfamiliar syllables. "Deus, audi oratiónem meam Au..áuribus per. Pérci - pérciverba oris mei."
The demon rattles his hosts body against the hospital bed's limb restraints and the strength of the Trap. Both hold.
"Not bad, baby hunter," the demon says in a voice unlike anything Jo's ever heard, a multitude of ancient voices bellowing from hell through their emissary through the pinhole of a human throat. Jo imagines the delicate and complex muscles inside it liquefying. "But how long can you keep me here, reading the longest possible Exorcismus rite? You know what you should be doing? You should be asking me about your mother."
"Because demons are so trust-worthy," Jo splashes holy water from a small flask. The demon bellows in agony and struggles. "Because you tell the straight truth!"
The tiniest, most traitorous flower of hope blossoms in her chest.
"Only humans would look at truths in such a way, as though they are uncomplicated and only hidden, the ways to unlock them esoteric."
The demon inside the man puppets his face into a smile. The effect is chilling and the surrealness of the situation - alone on her first exorcism in a room with a demon - striking a blow of uncertainty to Jo's resolve.
"Your mother's been a bad, bad girl. Ask me how."
The demon begins to barter for its release, tempting with promises of knowledge and threatening with the descriptions of the innumerable demons that roam free, unmolested and assimilated in small-town and big-city America. Jo can feel the whisper of its mind in hers, disturbing sleeping memories and unformed thoughts into a kind of skittering wakefulness, like insects run out of their lightless lair. It invites itself into the darkness of her mind, probing here and there, spidery and methodical.
"Don't talk about her like that," Jo says, one hand clutching the side of her head. It feels tight behind her eyeballs, and it's as if her own voice is coming from a distance, barely heard above the white noise of air and a thousand papery wings.
She notices the blanket has shifted and folded in some places by the insistent wriggling of the demon in the man's body. The Trap is deformed.
"Your mother's with the dead."
That's all it takes to startle Jo into action. She steps close to the bed and with a jerky movement pulls the blanket straight, her mind alert and shut.
"Guess what!" Her voice is thick, agitated with a multitude of fears: of the near-possession, of losing her cool, of maybe getting caught by hospital security for Chrissakes. "Guess what! You're going to hell!"
***
Her sixth job takes the longest to complete.
She's on Week Five, running in the cornfield in rural Illinois with compact mirrors super-glued on the front of her shirt and the backs of her jeans, on the trail of a cockatrice she's hoping to kill with its reflection.
The thing's been ruining the crops and petrifying dogs, people, bugs, birds, anything with eyes it could lock in its stony gaze. For three months, the locals have been scared out of their wits, the pious convinced it's kingdom come and the working poor convinced it's time to move on.
This kind of work requires two people. After she finds this cockatrice, its nest will still need to be exterminated and god knows where she'd find that. Jo doesn't know if she'll have the strength for anything else today.
A partner, Jo reflects, would be nice. She never realized how frustrating, how testing it is to rely on such little practical experience in life-threatening situations, or how deeply the shocks of many terrible days stay with you.
Spinning lies by yourself stops being fun when there's no one to corroborate with. For about a year now, Jo's been fibbing to invade strangers' lives to save them; to get into places she ought not to be; to get out of trouble; to find Mom.
To make this accidental occupation work.
Cockatrice breath wilts plants. She follows the trail of wilted plants for hours until she's convinced that the thing's leading her in circles. Twice she's had to dive between undisturbed stalks to hide when a a low-flying plane flew even lower, its pilot mistaking the scintillation of her mirrors as a distress signal.
There's a squawk behind her, then a soft thump.
"Oh. Oh, no way."
Jo laughs in heaving gasps.
"That actually worked." She marvels over the dead cockatrice, its black rooster body and scaly lizard's tail. She pokes its freak corpse with her father's knife, then beheads it cleanly with the pig-sticker's uncompromising blade.
She rocks back on her heels, her lungs and muscles aflame, and for brief, shining moment is awash with satisfaction.
***
Hunters are not territorial when it comes to locales, but they do get tetchy when you move in on their job. They stay out of each other's way as point of politeness more than dislike.
Jo knows she's doing a discourtesy by seeking them out, not just at places where they likely congregate but on the road.
"I need you to pass along a message for me, please," is how she begins conversations with affronted hunters in no mood for her intrusions, let alone her cause.
In rare moments of optimism, Jo imagines her message spreading across the states.
A Jo Harvelle's looking for her mother, an Ellen Harvelle, Billy Harvelle's widow to those who might remember the couple who ran the old Roadhouse in Nebraska. Her daughter is bound for this state or that. Here's her new cell phone number, please call as soon as you get this, she'll leave a job to find you. Same goes for anyone who's seen her.
She can't afford it, but Jo starts offering money for any scrap of information.
No one calls about her Momma.
She doesn't ask about Sam and Dean, even though others are searching for them, too.
Everything's fucked.
She cracks a rib falling the wrong way on a solo job in Oxford, Mississippi. For four hours she waits in an ER because she hasn't got her fake healthcare paperwork sorted out.
It's been a hard week because she can't make sense of a haunting at the Saint Anthony Hall frat house. It's been an expensive week because most of her funds have gone into repairs for her car, a fifth-hand Tercel bought for cheap after quitting The Well, that heaves more than hauls. It's been a poor week because she's absolutely exhausted and starving. Her last twenty is paying for gas to get out of this godforsaken place.
She has to give up. And that's probably the worst thing of all, to be forced into submission by her weakness, the impenetrable wall of physical limitations and inexperience. Jo squeezes her eyes shut against futile tears, thinking that she's in good company at least. Everyone in the waiting room is miserable.
She's so hungry. Yesterday's breakfast burrito is so long ago.
"What happened to you, honey?" the nurse asks, patting Jo's dirty sleeve.
"I fell," Jo says dully, fighting down a hiccup. "I think something's broken. I have no insurance."
It's two in the morning when she leaves the hospital. As her luck would have it, the car's decided to give up as well in an act of karmic solidarity that convinces Jo that it's time for them to part ways forever.
Her belongings fit in a duffel bag and a backpack. Jo's too tired to ruminate over the kind of statement this makes. Somewhere in this city are homeless and women's shelters, with beds and hot food. Tomorrow will have to wait. There's the warmth of municipally funded charity to be had.
Night is graying into early morning when a muscle car rumbles past. Jo distractedly watches it continue west on Van Buren Avenue, make a U-turn at the light at Fifth Street, then fishtail into an illegal U at the double yellow lines right before La Mar Boulevard.
She used to know someone who owned a car like that.
The car catches up to her, motoring at a snail's speed - her speed - to keep up with her pathetic baby steps. It stops when she stops.
"Hey," Sam Winchester says, leaning over and pushing open the passenger door of his brother's black Impala. "Get in."