SPN Fic: The Art of Pulling Pie from Thin Air One
When Sam ends up in the same bar as Dean, it's a complete accident. Sam’s never been there before in his life- pretty sure, anyway- and he chooses it based on the fact it’s close and he’s so tired that he’s willing to indulge in something familiar for comfort.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
He’s not paying attention, either. He blames that on the exhaustion; every bone in his body aches, his head feels full and he just wants a beer, to kick back and relax in the company of humans for a while, even if he never says anything but, “Another beer, thanks,” to the bartender. He just wants to feel connected again; it’s been so long since he let himself have that.
The place is full enough that Sam has to weave between people just to get to the bar. Alcohol, smoke, sweat and Johnny Cash hang in the air. The clack of pool cues soothes his nerves and the cold beer- the cheapest they have- cools his insides.
He hasn’t been somewhere like this in a long time; he’s almost forgotten how much it makes him feel at home.
He’s been there a couple hours-- warming the barstool, nursing his beers-- when someone sidles up beside him. He doesn’t open his eyes at first. There’s plenty of people moving around, brushing up against him, so he doesn’t think anything of it.
Once, a long time ago, he would have been concerned. With a gun at the small of his back and numerous knives on his person, he would have been watching for anyone or anything getting close as potential threats.
It’s so nice not to have that particular worry, at least not on the scale it used to be. There’s not much that can harm him anymore that he knows of; the things that can usually stick to a different dimension all together. Anything here, well, he’s pretty hidden and doesn’t leave a trail.
“Can I get a beer over here?”
Sam startles and stops breathing.
It’s so surreal; Sam can’t even think about reacting, just stares openly. Dean is here in the flesh, leather jacket, amulet, hidden weapons, charming smile and all. He’s a few years older, Sam can see new faint scars on his neck and deeper crows feet around his eyes, but otherwise it’s hard to believe it’s been four years. Earth time, anyway, he thinks.
Sam is still staring, still not breathing when Dean notices and turns his way.
He can see the thoughts flicker across his brother’s face. Dean’s always been so expressive that way. He frowns slightly, eyebrows pinched, wondering what the hell this guy’s problem is. Then the wait, he looks familiar. Then his eyes go wide as it all clicks into place.
Sam isn’t even in disguise; he shed all the illusion when he came in, too drained to hold up a different face for strangers that would never see him again anyway. He doesn’t look that much older than he did when he left Stanford, he knows, though his hair is longer and messier, and his face seems permanently thin.
He really should have known better.
Dean straightens, eyes locked on Sam’s, and Sam- Sam doesn’t move. He’s spent so long running it’s almost like he forgot why.
Dean’s reaching out for Sam when the bartender sets the beer down on the bar. “Dollar fifty, son.”
Dean’s eyes cut to the right for a split second, but that’s all Sam needs. He’s out of his chair and slipping into the crowd.
“Wait- Sammy!” Dean shouts over the noise, but it barely cuts through the pounding in Sam’s head.
He reaches the door and throws himself out it, mind scattering away as the cold air punches him in the gut with its intensity. A hand grabs a fistful of his shirt, and he doesn’t think twice before spinning in the loose gravel, left hand shooting out, palm open, and pushing Dean back so hard he stumbles into the wall.
There’s a moment there where he looks back at his brother, and thoughts race through his mind. Thoughts like, he could stay; he could say something, say anything.
Sam twists around and vanishes like a magician’s scarf, no noise, nothing flashy. He’s perfected that move over time, and he doesn’t have a choice anymore, if he ever did.
Sam reappears two hundred miles away on top of a water tower, Home of the Knights written on the side in cracked blue paint. He’s shaking from head to toe, knees threatening to buckle. He grips the rail in front of him so hard his bones crack. There will be permanent markings on the metal from his fingers when he lets go, but he can’t yet.
Most of his mind is screaming at him to keep running, telling him not to stop until he gets to the Shadowlands and not poke his head back out until a hundred earth years pass.
He doesn’t, though.
Sam stays on the tower until the sun starts to rise, until his heart settles and he can let go of the rails. He runs numb fingers over the new dips and creases in the metal. He wonders how the next person up here will explain that.
Sam twists and comes out in Chicago. Another thought and his hair goes blonde and shrinks. His face ages ten years with wrinkles, his chin sprouts a goatee, his frame shortens five inches, and his clothes ripple out and then smooth into an Armani suit. When it’s done, he slips out onto the sidewalk and melts into the crowd.
He ignores the small voice inside screaming to go back to that bar. He knows by now that no one ever gets what they want, and he could end the world by trying.
Sam woke up bare-chested and barefoot in a desert. Miles of saguaro, yucca, sage, and twisted mesquite trees dotted the rocky landscape. Bright stars formed constellations he’d never seen before in a sky streaked with red and purple, a sky somehow big enough for midnight and sunset both-- or sunrise, he couldn’t tell. A ritualistic circle of painted rocks, animal bones, shells and feathers encircled him.
This wasn’t normal.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember what might actually be normal, but he thought it was safe to say that this wasn’t a normal occurrence for him. He hoped so, anyway.
Time passed and stood still in that place, a weird sensation of moving at the speed of light and sitting still all at once. When he concentrated, he felt like at any moment his body would dissolve like sugar in water, drift away into the desert and become part of it.
The woman materialized out of the air minutes, hours, or years after he woke up. She was a few years older; mid twenties, he thought. She had one hand resting on her hip, the other holding a bottle of water.
“Drink,” she said, and tossed it to him.
Sam drank, even though he wasn’t thirsty, or he thought he wasn’t, until the first drop touched his tongue. He couldn’t get enough of it then, and the bottle never seemed to empty. The woman just watched him, studied him, and he watched her back. She looked like someone he could pass on a street and never look twice at. But here, now, clad in jeans, hiking shoes, and a 3 Doors Down t-shirt, she looked sharper, like she’d been cut out of someplace else and pasted here by amateur hands.
He wondered if he looked the same.
“Come on.”
Sam clutched at the bottle and followed her from the circle out into the desert. She didn’t talk, though she glanced at him as they walked, curious, maybe a little disappointed by the way she kept a slight frown on her face. The sand felt cool under his bare feet. A star fell from the sky, burned in a wide arc and disappeared behind a cliff jutting out from the earth like a giant’s head.
A closer look told him it was a giant’s head. He made out hollowed eyes looking toward the sky, the mouth a gaping cave, caught mid-roar or plea. The shoulders sloped gently into the ground where the rest of it remained buried.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The Shadowlands.”
“Are we dead?”
She laughed. “Far from it, Sam.”
Sam is good at staying busy. Keeping his mind occupied to stave off prickly thoughts was a skill he learned fast as a child and honed as an adult in the Shadowlands, where time is in abundance and thoughts left on their own can become monsters of titan proportions. Still, this is not the Shadowlands, and the same tricks don’t always work.
Sam never slept in the Shadowlands. Here he can, and does, indulges in it like he does in candy bars that will never make him fat and alcohol that will never make him drunk.
Dreams come with sleep, and that is one area of himself he cannot change or influence.
The dreams start out peaceful, he assumes; he doesn’t really remember the beginnings, only the middles and endings where things go from bad to horrible and eventually wake him with his heart pounding and sweat drenching him.
They never get any easier to deal with. He kind of expects them to because, hey, eventually he kinda, sorta, mostly got over the clown dreams after Dean insisted he watch Stephen King’s It to desensitize himself. It took years and he still can’t bring himself to go into a carnival, but he doesn’t start crying when they pop up unexpectedly anymore.
Sam wishes the clown dreams would come back after all this. At least they don’t leave him shivering in a puddle of fear and self-loathing.
Sam wakes from his fourth nightmare in a row and hops from the Alaskan coast to North Carolina, where he walks the beach until the sun turns his neck red. He stops at a diner called Etta’s for lunch, eats a fish sandwich and drinks mediocre coffee.
The waitress is nice to him. A single mother of two, barely older than Sam, working double shifts because there’s no one else to bring in money, and she’s got more determination and fire in her than life can ever hope to beat out. She keeps going because giving up and settling is not in her blood. He reads all this as she passes the bill, their hands brushing for the barest instant.
Sam leaves a forty-dollar tip and smiles when she wishes him a good day on his way out the door. Sam gives her a wave, she rewards him with a tired smile. She’ll find the winning lottery ticket in her apron when she goes on break.
He stays in North Carolina for a couple days, enjoying the chilly mornings and the fresh seafood. When the dreams keep him tossing and turning he goes to Georgia, hitching down the highway eating fresh picked peaches, enjoying the sweet juice making his hands and chin sticky in the heat and not thinking about anything other than the present.
The highway is like a security blanket beneath his feet, the bubbling asphalt at three in the afternoon under the relentless sun. He tosses peach and apple seeds over his shoulder and into pastures, laughing at himself, a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. Behind him, green shoots push through the soil and reach for the sky.
Sometimes it’s almost easy enough to forget he hasn’t always been this way.
Nathan Cooly picks him up between two farms and gives him a ride to the next gas station. Nathan is gruff and thinks Sam is off in the head for hitching at all, much less in the height of summer. Sam knows the heat will not kill him, nor will thirst or hunger or a trolling serial killer, but he takes Nathan’s advice to get somewhere cool and earn himself a car with a nod and a smile.
They talk about idle things for a while, the radio crackling with static and the Top 40 country songs of the moment, everything from baseball to weather to commenting on conversations that come in over the CB.
“Why are you out here, son? Shouldn’t you be in college?” Nathan asks as the orchards whiz by them, the scent of apples heavy on the breeze.
“Should be,” he agrees. “Didn’t really work out.”
It twists his heart inside out, thinking of pencils, California sun, book bags that cut marks into his shoulders, midnight coffee shops with papers spread around him, new maybe-friends laughing and throwing back shots, celebrating whatever, whenever.
His biggest dream--it could have been his best achievement. Stanford was like a bright star on the horizon of his life, his chance to become his own person, to do things the way he wanted. For all of six months he lived his dream, enjoyed even the hard parts, even the parts that made him think he might not be cut out for it.
“Smart kid like you, should take advantage of an education,” says Nathan. “You don’t wanna be a bum all your life. It gets you nowhere fast.”
Nathan knows this first hand. In and out of juvie and rehab through most of his teens and twenties, he whiled away his younger years in an alcoholic haze, willing the pain inside away one shot of Jim and Jack at a time. By the time he hit thirty he was washed up, broke, and barely alive when his liver decided enough was enough.
Nathan says nothing of this, but the conversation brings so much of it to the surface that Sam has no chance of escaping the facts.
Nathan is forty-five now, but looks sixty. He cleaned up after his near-death experience, got a trucking license, and drove all over the states delivering loads of food to distributing companies. It’s not a lot but it keeps him moving forward. Nathan hadn’t had much to live for when he started, but he hadn’t wanted to die.
Now, pinned to the sun visor above him, there’s a picture of a little boy smiling as he swings on a red plastic swing. Nathan’s eyes drift up to it every five to ten miles, making sure it’s still there.
“I don’t plan to be,” Sam murmurs over the rumble of the motor. “Just have to get where I’m going.”
Nathan nods. He knows how that is.
Sam wishes he did.
Nathan drops him at a Conoco three hours later with assurances that Sam has money for food and an extracted promise that he’ll get off the road soon and take advantage of his life.
Sam watches the eighteen-wheeler shudder and pull away. Down the road, Nathan’s going to get a phone call, the first in ten years since that picture was taken. Sam doesn’t know what will be said--Nathan is a very private man, and just because he can doesn’t mean he likes to pry, but he knows it will keep Nathan going for a few more years until his liver finally gets the best of him.
Sam’s heart hurts for Nathan, but he lets him go. Even for Sam, there are certain rules he has to follow. It has to be enough that the rest of Nathan’s short time will be better than all the years before it.
Sam buys a Gatorade and a couple sandwiches with bills Nathan somehow managed to slip into his pocket and enjoys his lunch sitting on top of the Conoco awning. He feeds bits of his bread to the pigeons eyeing him, smiling as they dive after the crumbs, stirring up dirt and leaves trapped in the grooves of the metal with their frantic wing beats.
That night Sam sleeps beneath a bridge spanning a creek. He watches the stars above, naming off constellations he knows. They look strange to him now. They were backwards in the Shadowlands, as a lot of things were. He used to lie out in the desert for hours, watching the sky, relearning what he already knew from a different perspective.
Sometimes, when he was still enough, he could almost feel the Earth shifting just out of his reach. Sometimes he imagined he could almost feel people on the other side of the veil, going about their daily routines, imagined he could feel their dreams slip through and flutter over his skin like transparent butterflies.
Sam turns on his side and curls his knees up. He felt out of place in the Shadowlands, and he feels that way now, even though he’s back in the world he was born in. Fred warned him about it. Not in so many words--she never was one for long personal conversations, but he got the gist of it.
He didn’t belong back there, and now he doesn’t fit right here either. He’s homeless, in almost every sense of the word.
Sam closes his eyes and ignores the voice that says he chose to be. There wasn’t any choice, not really.
“You have to learn to control your mind, Sam. It’s more than imagination now; it’s a tool. Tools have to be used the right way. Otherwise, you hurt yourself and people around you.”
Sam clenched his jaw and concentrated on the pile of stones before him. He’d already demolished the first pile. Apparently, too much imagination could be a bad thing.
“What do you want the rocks to become?”
He wanted to quit and get shitfaced drunk, but he bit his tongue. There was no alcohol in the Shadowland, and even if there was, Fred would have drank it all herself, she said. Sam sighed, collected his thoughts, and tried to concentrate.
“What do you want it to be?”
Fred was behind him, out of the blast zone. He didn’t like her there, but it was the safest place so far. He decided not to make the rocks float again. All the accomplished was flaming missiles that exploded on contact. It wouldn’t take long for his hair to grow back on the right side, of course, but he didn’t want to risk singeing the rest off.
Apparently, his brand of powers weren’t bent toward telekinesis, so Fred insisted they try external transformation.
“Relax your body. This isn’t a battle. This is you, doing something natural.”
“This crap has never been natural before,” he snapped.
“It is now.”
Sam breathed out hard. “Easy for you to say.”
“No, actually. I had a much harder time of it than you. No one was here to guide my dumb ass and show me where I was going wrong.”
Sam closed his eyes and hung his head. “Sorry,” he said after a few minutes.
“Dude, it’s fine, but you still have to practice. You want to go back home, right? Can’t do that if you’re a loose cannon.”
Sam nodded.
“I just want to go home.”
He left out the part about how he still couldn’t remember much of what happened before he woke up in the desert of the Shadowlands, how sometimes he got indistinct impressions of people and situations, but nothing concrete to hang a hope on. Nothing in the cabin he and Fred rested in or anything out in the desert helped trigger any memories.
Sometimes he was scared he’d never remember. Others, he feared there was nothing to remember. He felt incredibly empty with nothing to tell him who he was, other than his name.
“Then think of home,” Fred squeezed his shoulder. “Close your eyes and let your mind take you there. Maybe you won’t get anything today, but if you settle down, your mind might throw something your way that you can use.”
It was a long shot, he knew. He’d been there almost three months, Shadowlands time, and so far he had a few flashes that left him with faint impressions of some place that smelled like leather and oil, and once sitting somewhere with someone in front of him.
That was it, all he had to go on for who he used to be and who he left behind.
“Relax, Sam. I don’t want to dodge any more flaming rocks today.”
Sam breathed in and out, deep breaths that pushed his ribs as far as they would go. He let the air out slow, and tried to picture all his tension leaving with it.
He kept his eyes closed and thought back on those flashes, let them fill up his mind: the smell of oil and leather, the feeling of warmth spreading through him. He took a breath and smelled exhaust, heated asphalt.
Sam breathed in, breathed out, felt his mind go deeper. The ghost of a breeze threaded through his hair, caressed his skin. He thought he heard something faint, something with a melody and a beat.
The stillness of the Shadowlands fell away without him noticing. Sunlight- real sunlight, bright and sharp- pierced his eyelids and turned everything golden red. He was in a car, the highway passing beneath him. Something heavy and sweet filled his mouth- apple pie. It tasted like summer and happiness.
“Good stuff, isn’t it, Sammy?”
A loud crack brought him abruptly back to the present. Sam opened his eyes.
The pile of rocks weren’t rocks anymore. Instead, there sat an oven-fresh apple pie, steam still rising from the two small cuts in the center of the crust.
“Well, not what I was expecting, but awesome job,” Fred patted his shoulder and smiled.
Minnesota isn’t a good experience. He meets a jackass in a red Ford F-150 that tries to drug his drink and take him into the woods. Said jackass is very surprised when Sam turns him into a donkey and leaves him on the side of the road. Since he has a truck and doesn’t want a pissed off donkey following and braying at him for the next ten miles, he takes it and enjoys fiddling with the radio and rolling the windows down.
If he reshapes the truck to kinda maybe resemble the Impala just a bit, well, it’s not like there’s anyone there to call him on it. Besides, the ‘pala was his home since he was six months old and it feels good to drive something like her again.
He stops in a place called The Shack about twenty miles away for a beer, makes sure he looks like a middle aged blue collar man just interested in unwinding from the long day.
He’s on the alert for Dean, which is why he notices the hunters first-off when they come in on silent feet, sharing calculating glances. He doesn’t know the pair, knows they never crossed paths with Dad when he was younger. Sam’s not that concerned for himself, per se, but it never hurts to be careful. Word tends to spread fast in the hunting community. They may not be able to kill him, but dodging hunters until they grow tired or smart isn’t how he wants to spend the next few decades.
They take up a table on the right with the best view of both the front and rear exits and order a round of beers. Sam takes a pull on his and keeps his eyes on the dart game quickly gathering spectators as money is laid down.
Sam kind of smiles; he has a lot of good memories centered around darts. He was always better at them than pool as a child. A handful of times he even beat Dean, which was the epitome of awesome when he was nine. Of course, Dean could still give him wedgies and play keep away with his books, but he couldn’t keep his undefeated streak.
The noise level rises when the guy in the blue trucker hat finally wins by a handful of points and springs for a round for the loser. They collectively move toward the bar and close him in. Sam doesn’t feel bad about it until someone brushes up behind him and he feels the edge of a knife- silver, if he’s not mistaken- press against his spine.
“How about you come outside for a chat, buddy boy?” a voice whispers in his ear.
Sam opens his mouth and the knife presses harder.
“No talking, come on.”
Sam complies, dropping a couple newly imagined dollars on the bar and gets up. The hunters usher him out into the cold night.
“What do you want?”
Sam’s a good liar, but it grates on his nerves to act scared out of his wits when he’s simply tired and annoyed. The hunter on the right gives him a shove, touches his neck for just a split second.
His name is Merle Nivens, new to hunting by a year and a half after a shapeshifter took out most of the drilling unit he’d been on down in South Texas. Shapeshifter watched too many horror movies, and Nivens was one of two survivors. The other checked into a mental institution before hanging himself.
Sam turned around, raised his hands as Nivens trained a gun with silver bullets on his heart.
“Saw your work back there on the side of the road, buddy. That was a real stupid move to pull on that poor bastard. So what are you? Witch? Sorcerer? Or are you something non-human?”
Sam felt like rolling his eyes. “That 'poor bastard' tried to drug and kill me, in case you were too far away to catch that bit.”
“And you used demonic powers to corrupt his God given form.”
Sam suppressed a laugh. Oh, what he’d give to have these sons of bitches say that to the creature that made him this way.
“He was a jackass,” Sam says with a shrug.
“And you’re a dead monster,” says the other hunter.
Nivens pulls the trigger and the silver bullet punches through Sam’s heart.
“Are we the only ones?”
“No, there’s one more I know of, Thomas. He’s a good friend, pretty much family.”
They were sitting on the cabin’s porch, just watching the desert and the sky. Sam stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle. He’d figured out how long he’d been there. Shadowlands time, it was about five months. Earth time, almost four years.
He wondered who was missing him back there, if they were still looking for him, or if they even knew he was gone. Sometimes he got the feeling no one knew anything had happened, and he didn’t know why. The thought made him incredibly sad, and he usually tried to keep busy instead of thinking about it.
It was kind of hard to now, though. Neither of them slept in the Shadowlands even though Sam, for one, felt exhausted. He couldn’t remember ever being well rested.
“Where is he?”
“Tahiti, I think. His brother convinced him to take a vacation and try to lose his virginity. It’s an ongoing process last I heard,” she chuckled.
Sam smiled, but his heart wasn’t in it. The flashes sometimes got more detailed when he pushed hard enough, but he had yet to remember who was in them calling him Sammy, or Sam. The first was a man, that much detail he did have. He thought the latter might have been a woman, but the flashes had them both surrounded by too much light to make sure.
He wasn’t sure what to make of the light.
Fred didn’t talk much about the family and friends she had on the other side, but it was enough to make his chest hurt with want. Sam fixed his eyes on a distant mountain range, pretty sure it was a giant sleeping woman. She had a thick crop of sagebrush where her hair would be.
“Who made me like this?”
It took courage to bring it up, but he didn’t know why. So much felt taboo to ask about, unspoken secrets hanging like oppressive fog and he wasn’t worthy to know yet. Sometimes, in the moments when Fred was gone, walking alone in the desert, or Sam reached a place of perfect silence in his head, he forgot for a moment that he hadn’t always been there, that he belonged somewhere else.
It scared him when he forgot. He never said anything, but the Shadowlands felt almost like a prison, and sometimes he wondered if it might actually be Hell and it was his punishment for some horrendous wrong.
“He wants to tell you himself.” She shrugged. She looked annoyed, but then, that seemed to be her default face, so he didn’t take it personally. “He’s kind of a bastard like that.”
“Why did he do it to you?”
“I made a deal without reading the fine print.”
Her tone didn’t invite any more questions, but he had one more to ask, need bubbling up in his chest. If he’d done the same, he had to know.
“Do you regret it?”
Fred picked at a hole in her jeans. In the distance, Sam heard the growls and yips of creatures that made his skin crawl. They never came within sight of the cabin. Fred told him they knew better, those things: part animal, part human, their minds a dangerous mix of both. He hated their noises, but Fred never worried.
“No,” she said sometime later, after she was silent so long Sam thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Not when I think about the alternative.”
“Son of a bitch.”
Sam rubs at his chest, tries to sooth the sharp sting clawing at his muscles in the wake of the bullet drawing itself out. He looks down at it cupped in his palm, bloodstained silver so small for how much pain it’s causing him.
So, that’s good to know at least. Silver won’t kill him, nor bullets themselves. Sam drops the bullet with disgust.
Nivens is staring up at him in shock, a banana in his hand where the offending gun had been. The other hunter- Jonah Crete- is too busy munching grass in his new rabbit form to really care what’s going on.
“What the hell are you?” Nivens asks.
“Someone that doesn’t like being shot at.” He kicks the silver knife Crete tried throwing at him away from Nivens. Once, it would have been a good weapon to take and add to the growing collection in the Impala’s trunk. Never could have enough silver, after all, but, well, Sam didn’t really have need of it anymore. “Seriously, what happened to common courtesy? You could have just talked to me.”
“You’re a monster,” Nivens bites out.
Sam sneers and drops his hand. His whole chest hurts, throbs actually, but it’s healing. It feels weird.
“I’m not doing anything but trying to pass through peacefully. You’re the ones that opened fire first.”
Nivens curls his lip, and Sam can hear and see his thoughts even though they aren’t touching. He’s thinking of a case he worked, before he and Crete teamed up, a girl of twelve bitten by a werewolf out in Nebraska. Nivens waited until the lunar cycle ended and strangled her when she changed back to human form, then put a silver bullet in her heart.
The next morning he smiled and nodded at her parents as they came into the coffee shop, missing flyers in hand to plaster on the message board.
“All monsters go bad, son,” he says. “Doesn’t matter how good they wanna be. All that evil gets to you eventually.”
Sam’s stomach feels sick. He shakes his head and counts, willing himself to calm down before he does something he’ll regret, something that will prove Nivens right.
“Evil does get to you eventually,” Sam agrees. He meets Nivens’ eyes, feels his own go hard. “Thing is, I’m not the one it’s gotten to.”
Nivens looks confused for a moment. Sam doesn’t give him a chance to move, his mind so strong and fast now, reaching out and shifting as soon as the thought is formed. Nivens lets out a scream that silences halfway. Then it’s over and Nivens is looking up at him with large brown eyes and is so still he’s not breathing. Then he snorts, shakes his head. Sam counts seven tines on his antlers.
“I would get going if I were you,” Sam tells him. “Hunting season is just getting into swing around here.”
Nivens bolts for the safety of the woods to their right, startling Crete who streaks off as well, diving for the thick underbrush, disappearing in a flash.
Sam shuffles to the knife and picks it up, turning it over in his hands. It’s a solid weapon, well-crafted and blessed by three different religious leaders: two priests, one priestess. Faint symbols cover the blade, invisible to the naked human eye. Either Crete didn’t know what he really had or he banked on something made for pure intent to do the job.
Sam hesitates. This weapon needs a home, preferably with someone that knows what it is and can put it to use. He chews his lip, squints up at the sky. Finally, he nods to himself and twists, steps out in West Virginia and into a UPS building, the knife concealed and protected in a box as he steps up to the counter.
“Where is it going, sir?” the clerk asks, snapping her gum as she sets it on the scale.
“Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Can you use your fastest delivery? It’s kind of urgent.”
“Sure thing.”
She rings up the amount and Sam conjures a fifty to take care of it. He waves his hand over the box--the girl doesn’t notice--and a letter appears inside, folded neatly below the blade.
Hope this is useful. S.
It’s a precarious choice, sending this to Bobby. He wasn’t on good terms with John before Sam left, and if his dad is still the same as he ever was, they’re still probably not on speaking terms. Sam isn’t sure that animosity extends to him and Dean, but even if it doesn’t, Bobby will have a use for the knife. After he tests the box and the knife for supernatural booby traps six ways from Sunday, of course, but Sam understands that.
He walks away before he can second-guess himself. Chances are Bobby will never contact Dean. Chances are, signing it simply with 'S.' isn’t going to tell Bobby it was Sam that send the box. Bobby probably knows lots of people with S. as an initial.
Sam stops hitching and just pops in and out of where he wants to be. He's the first to admit he's being paranoid, but he's got that itchy feeling under his skin like someone somewhere is watching him, and after Dean and the other hunters he doesn't want to take any more chances.
After all, there are other things out there as powerful or more so than Sam, and they’ve been alive and active a hell of a lot longer.
Florida is nice, if really creepy. The state is crawling with supernatural activity, most of it centered, strangely enough, in Disneyland. Sam watches that one from a distance, loses count at around three hundred when he tried to pinpoint how many demons, ghosts, various monsters, and just plain weird creatures are lurking there.
There is a network of hunters systematically hitting that one, so he doesn’t feel the need to lend a hand and leaves them to it. He does manage to grab a postcard before he leaves, on a whim. He’s not sure what to do with it, but he also snatches a bag and puts it inside, where it’s joined by another postcard from Des Moines and a tacky glowing snow globe few days later from Hell, Michigan.
He feels antsy in Colorado and decides tequila and Mexican sun are in order, so he heads beyond the border for three weeks. He walks around the pyramids one day, stays in a pink and turquoise room above a small cantina on the coast the next. He collects some more post cards, finds a black marker, and somewhere between Tijuana and Tamaulipas, he starts writing to Dean on them.
They start out simple and short, the swipe and drag of the marker a comfort when his mind lets too much guilt in, too much doubt. This way, he can pretend that things aren’t permanent.
‘Wish you’d been here.’
‘You were right. Mickey and Donald are possessed.’
‘The giant ball of twine reminds me of Indiana Jones marathons.’
‘This place smells like old cheese. Literally.’
It helps, some. Dean will never read them, but Sam can pretend. He's just on a solo road trip, just out seeing the world. He might be able to go home one day.
Then he spends a night in a little Mexican village with no name and it changes. These people are poor and living in one of the harshest environments he’s ever seen, but they’re happy. He watches the women work and laugh together preparing dinner, washing clothes, chiding children for playing too rough. He sees the men go about their work tending animals and cars, recounting stories while making bullets and skinning rattlesnakes and rabbits.
He watches them, feels oddly unsettled and lonely. As night falls, several families come together for dinner and eat around an open fire. One of the women sits down with a bag of wool and proceeds to twist it with a spindle, spinning the fluffy wool into fine thread.
She has a small notebook in her bag, every page blank and slightly yellow because it’s a gift from her daughter but the old woman doesn’t need something to keep notes and measurements in, not as long as she’s been doing this craft. Sam snags it on impulse, realizing how much he’s missed writing more than a few lines to fill the square of a postcard.
He used to write all the time. Homework, school schedules, directions, incantations, exorcisms, games of hangman played in the car as it rumbled on empty highways through empty lands. He wrote so much at Stanford; took so many notes that his hand cramped up the first three days of school.
Sam realizes he misses the simple act of writing. It makes him wonder how much of himself he hasn’t let come back, even if he can remember it all now.
Sam pushes thoughts of college away and runs his fingers over the stiff pages, smoothes out the curls at the edges. That’s when he notices the ghost watching him from beyond the ring of firelight.
“Hello,” he says.
“You’re not human,” she says, and she’s speaking Spanish, but Sam understands her without trying. “You’re not dead either.”
“No,” he agrees with a flinch. He needs to get used to the truth, but it’s still hard.
She looks at him, dark eyes dull like fish scales, and her blue dress hanging in tatters off what’s left of her bony shoulders. Bruised-looking bites cover her skin; he sees white bone peeking through where flesh and muscle were torn away.
“What happened to you?”
She nods toward the darkening desert, long shadows swallowing the land, turning it into a void beneath the sheltering stars.
“I walked out there and they got me,” she says, pointing. Most of her finger is a ragged stump. “Hungry little things, little beasts I never saw before. Coyotes weren’t coming up anymore. I thought my father and the others finally drove them away, so I wanted to walk farther into the desert. I heard…heard singing. I couldn’t stop listening and following. Then they were everywhere and they got me.”
She looks back to the fire, wistful regret plain on her face, the flames casting light into the jagged hollows and holes in her features.
“I want to go home.”
Sam’s hands tighten on the notebook. His chest aches, and whatever he feels from her, it’s nothing compared to the same hole he feels in himself.
“I can’t bring you back to life,” he says as the fire grows dim and people filter back to their own houses, carrying chairs and full, sleepy children in their arms. “But I can send you on.”
The girl blinks at him, expression tight, unhappy. Eventually, she nods.
Sam puts the notebook in his bag and holds out his hand.
“Will you make sure those things don’t get anyone else?” she asks. “They’re already coming closer. They’re always so hungry.”
She’s thinking about her little sister, a girl with a sunny smile and a mildly autistic mind, a child that likes to dance and often forgets she isn’t supposed to let her feet take her further than the old junkers behind their house.
“I’ll take care of them,” he promises.
She gives him a decayed smile. Sam breathes in and feels for the fabric separating the worlds. He tugs it, pulls the threads open just a bit, and sends her through. Her form fades like a Polaroid left out in the sun, the details scrubbed white until he puts the threads back in place and she disappears altogether.
Sam gives the village one last look as he hitches his pack over his shoulder, then walks out into the desert with the moon at his back and sure feet picking through the rocky open landscape.
His heart still beats like an open wound, and he wonders how long he can live with it that way.
Then he remembers he can’t really die, and wonders if that isn’t the biggest joke of all.
The hungry things are chupacabra, a pack of twenty-two living in the hills, using the dens the coyote pack left abandoned. They laze around in the sun, gray, hairless bodies soaking up the heat, red tongues lolling out of fanged mouths, teeth stained brown. They look like mindless animals.
They’re not.
Sam closes his eyes and can feel them miles before he reaches the dens. He can hear the faint echoes of people on the wind, their voices trapped around the chupacabra where they keep them until they need to lure another victim into their sights. It’s some kind of ancient magic perverted by lower minds that can’t get enough of the hunt, the kill, and the energy dying screams give them.
The place reeks of death. He sees young pups chewing on the last scraps of a human ribcage, high-pitched growls and yips rising as they scuffle and shove at each other, vying for the best strips of dried meat curling off the bone. Scraps of blue cloth sway in the breeze a few feet away, caught in a sage bush, the edges stained. On the other side of the hill, an old beat up truck sits silent with the doors open, the keys still in the ignition, a rifle half buried in the sand four feet away, a man’s decayed hand still clutching the stock.
It’s not long until Sam realizes what they remind him of. The way they sound, the way they move, the tracks, it fits. He doesn’t know how these things escaped the Shadowlands, or how they came to work that kind of magic here. It doesn’t matter.
Sam sits in the sun and lets the heat boil his blood, his anger rising with the temperature. He tells himself he’s doing this for the girl, tells himself it’s perfectly rational when he steps into the den area and takes out the entire pack with thoughts snapping through his fingers like thunder, with lightning flashing in his mind.
When it’s over and the red haze lifts from his eyes, Sam surveys the damage in the sudden silence. He realizes it didn’t solve anything. The hole in his chest is still weeping steadily, and no band-aid is big enough to stretch over it.
Sam brings in wind and sand to cover what’s left of the dens. When it’s done he’s the only one that can sense the death and blood beneath the earth, can feel the bones beneath his hands when he runs his hand through the grainy dirt, fingers tracing symbols he no longer needs to know or use.
It hits him harder this time, knowing he can’t die. Sam has the sinking feeling he’ll be like the bones under the sand one day, decades, millennia from now. He’ll remember things that have passed out of history, remember things like cassette players and classic cars and roadside fruit stands that still work on the honor system, leaving a cigar box out for the money. He’ll still remember shared watermelon and spitting black seeds at his brother while Dad scoured a local paper, the gray pages spread over the hood of the car as fluffy clouds dotted the sharp blue sky.
He’s the only one that will remember, a million different things no longer important, no longer existing, the last one to carry them inside. No one will remember him.
Sam throws up and the heat bakes his skin right through. He keeps on until he’s as empty as the sky inside, until he thinks he could swallow a rock, like tossing it into a bottomless well, imagines the rock would never hit bottom.
Later that night, Sam washes the sour taste of vomit down with the sour bite of cheap tequila. He finds the notebook again when he rummages though his pack. The blank pages sit there, full of possibility and tempting, waiting. Sam takes the marker, turns it into a ballpoint pen, and writes his first letter to Dean.
Chapter Two