FIC (Supernatural): Black Velvet
Title: Black Velvet
Author: blue_fjords
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairing: Ellen, Jo
Rating: PG-13
Word length: ~3000
Warnings: Violence, but no more than you could find in an episode.
Prompt: Any fandom, any pairing, a character finds out that his or her partner is something completely different than what they seem; something horrifying. Can be supernatural or not.
Summary: Sometime during Season Four, Ellen and Jo have a run-in with a creature that leaves them a little worse for wear.
Notes: Many thanks to qthelights for beta-ing this madness! Posted as part of dark_fest.
Ellen sighed, and lifted her heavy hair off her damp neck. Wayward tendrils curled around her face in the humidity. She half-heartedly attempted to smooth them back and draw them into a ponytail, but gave it up as a bad job. Her hair swung into her face and she could smell the sweat on it. They really needed to find a place with a decent shower tonight.
“Jo!” She pitched her voice low, though they had seen no one in the remains of the town. Jo lifted her head, then unpeeled the rest of her body from her crouch and stood, shifting from foot to foot.
“Find anything?” Jo asked. Ellen could tell she ran her tongue over her incisor after she asked; a dead giveaway.
“Not a thing, but I know you found something.” She crossed the cracked and pitted asphalt and joined her daughter by the gas pumps. Gas ‘n’ Sip the sign proclaimed, clinging stubbornly to its post, like a soldier who didn’t know the war had been lost years ago.
Jo frowned, but nodded and pinged her finger against the dirty pump. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, almost pear-shaped and with rolodex numbers at the top that had once ticked slowly forward to record gallons and cents. Jo glanced at her from beneath her eyelashes and her own sweaty flyaways. “Um. Hang on.”
She pinged the pump again, and then Ellen could hear it. A rustling, like wings, sounded from the inside of the pump, followed by a screeching sound, like claws on metal. She took an inadvertent step back, hand automatically reaching for the cool comfort of her .45.
“Looks like we’ve found our beastie,” she said. “And conveniently trapped for the time being.” She strode over to the cover of the gas pipe. “We could gas it, knock it out, then try to get it out,” she mused out loud.
“How would we do that?” Jo asked. She was leaning against the pump now, and Ellen had to suppress a sigh. Rust and dirt and God knew what else was getting all over her clothes.
“Joanna Beth, don’t lean against that thing. It’s filthy, and that creature could claw its way out and rip you open.”
“No it couldn’t. It’s trapped.” Ellen swore she saw her daughter’s lower lip tremble a moment before her face slid into its old setting of ‘Stubborn Wannabe Hardass.’ That expression was slowly growing rarer, replaced simply by ‘Stoic Hunter.’
“Be careful anyway. I’m going to get some supplies from the station wagon.”
Ellen left her there, walking as briskly as she could manage through the weight of the air back towards where they had parked the night before.
They’d been tracking the creature for three days, making their way at a crawl through bayou country. More than two years since Katrina and the Louisiana coast still looked ravished. Dead trees formed natural barriers, blocking streams and forming mini-swamps. Rotten vegetation choked new growth and contributed a sickeningly sweet, cloying scent to the moisture-rich air. Ellen would have packed it in despite Jo’s insistence on seeing Bourbon Street, if not for the deaths.
At first it was pets, perhaps the work of a psychopath-in-training, but then a little boy had gone missing. His gnawed-upon skull was found a few days later. A bribe to the county coroner revealed teeth marks too widely spaced to belong to an alligator - teeth marks with odd jagged edges. They left New Orleans an hour later, chasing a rumor of yet more small, gnawed skulls to the west. They’d found the spoor by blind luck, nearabouts, and tracked it to the ghost town of Bayou Plaisant, population zero.
Ellen yanked open the door of the station wagon and hauled out a big plastic tub, full of smaller, steel-lined cases; sigil-carved wooden boxes; nets, ropes and tarps; and an assortment of holstered guns and sheathed knives. Ellen Harvelle, did you ever think this would be your life? Your baby girl’s life?
She flipped open the lid of one of the cases and surveyed the insides. Chloroform? Or rock salt instead of an anesthetic? She discarded that idea. The pumps hadn’t been put to use in so long; who knows if they could handle something that solid. Her fingers skittered over a small tube given her by an old Roadhouse regular; a particularly wild-eyed social outcast. She hesitated but pocketed it, packed the canister of chloroform into her backpack, and left everything else where it was.
She almost tripped on a pile of rags as she made her way back to the gas station. Her feet squelched in the dirt of the road and she paused. Though it was dreadfully wet, it hadn’t rained. The road was dusty. She lifted one foot. The dampness on her boot was much too dark. Her breath quickened, her eyes immediately tracking the location of her daughter. Jo was still across the street and farther down the road, partially bent over the gas pumps. Ellen glanced over her shoulder. The pile of rags.
She walked back and circled it slowly. Flies took wing at her approach, their angry buzzing sounding muffled and distorted in the damp air. She picked up a nearby stick and poked at the mound. It fell open at the gentle pressure.
Blood rushed in her ears and her eyesight dimmed. The world was spinning much too fast and rose up to slam into her knees. She caught herself with the palms of her hands as she pitched forward, her nose perilously close to the blood-soaked shirt.
It was Jo’s shirt; a green button-down of impossibly soft cotton. So soft because it had belonged to her daddy and it’d been washed so very many times since his death. Jo had been wearing it last in New Orleans; had disappeared from her view to change into something clean after their sweaty car ride. Then they’d heard about the kids. Ellen retched. The kids, the kids, were they even gone? Yes of course; she’d seen the teeth marks. She retched again. Teeth marks, and now there was blood on her daughter’s shirt, her daughter’s favorite shirt. She looked up, her arms trembling to keep her upright, and watched Jo walk calmly across the street to her.
“I was going to keep it a surprise for a little longer,” Jo said. “But my Mistress issued a command.” She crouched down and looked Ellen in the eye. “And I always obey my Mistress.”
“Where’s my daughter? What have you done with my daughter?” Ellen could feel tears forming and she squashed them ruthlessly. She needed to see clearly.
“She’s still in here.” Jo tapped her head. “She’s given me lots of information. Did you know that she always resented you for not letting her go to The New Kids on the Block concert?”
“What do you want?” She strained to keep her voice level, her tone dry.
Jo settled back on her heels and chewed on her lower lip. She’d outgrown that habit a few years ago. “I’m sifting through all these memories, Mom. I can call you that, right?” Ellen couldn’t stop the low growl in the back of her throat, and Jo shot her a toothy grin. “You know, each time she gives me a memory and it’s not the information I need, I’m killing it. All those times you cleaned out her scraped knees? Gone. That pie the two of you made for Daddy? You remember, her hair was in pigtails and she had flour across one cheek and cherry juice on the other. Yeah, she’ll never remember that ever again.”
Ellen lunged for her, hands reaching for her daughter’s white throat, when Jo laughed at her. “Oh, brilliant plan, Mom! Strangle the poor girl. She’s already lost a lot of blood this week. Just look at that shirt.”
Ellen froze, and Jo slid away from her, slowly unbuttoning her shirt. Deep claw marks had been gouged across her stomach, healed just enough that they wouldn’t bleed through a shirt, but still inflamed and painful-looking. “You, you…”
“Hey, I’m keeping her alive! Death by mauling is extremely painful, I assure you.”
“What do you want? What do you want?” Panic threatened to cut off her breathing. She forced herself to take a couple of shallow breaths.
Jo leaned forward, the smirk on her face the same one she’d worn at fifteen when she discovered she could aim a shotgun better than Ellen. This close, Ellen could smell the beginnings of infection setting into her daughter’s stomach; pick out the incongruous tiny pink flowers on Jo’s bra where her shirt still gaped open. “I want what I’ve been asking her for. Where are the Winchesters? What are their plans? Give me that, and I will let your baby girl live.”
It’s always those damn boys. Ellen fought down a hysterical giggle, the sound coming out like a high-pitched snarl, and Jo leaned even further, crowding her space until she was flat on her ass. “The Winchesters? Their big plan is to destroy the Harvelles. I can’t believe you haven’t figured that out yet.”
“You used to cut the crusts off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You had to send away for sparkly shoelaces in the mail, so she could have the flashiest Chucks. You declared one day of every winter ‘Fort Day’ and spent all afternoon building an igloo and painting it different colors with food coloring. One year you let Ash draw his self-portrait on the side of the igloo and Jo laughed herself hoarse. I laughed myself hoarse, Mom.”
“Fuck you,” Ellen whispered, unable to fight the tears that streamed down her cheeks. “We don’t know where they are, what they’re doing! Fuck you.”
“Remember that summer that was so very hot, and you without air-conditioning? Remember how the two of you would sing ‘Mississippi, in the middle of a dry spell’? ‘Mama’s dancing with her baby on her shoulder’? Remember how you would dance? ‘Black velvet with that slow Southern style’?”
Jo had broken her ankle at the end of that summer, and she’d never learned to compensate for it. Ellen kicked out, hard, and Jo’s eyes widened as she overbalanced. Ellen was on her in a flash, one hand going for her neck, the other fumbling hurriedly with her backpack’s zipper for the bottle of holy water she kept there. Jo shoved her off before she could quite reach it, and she landed half on her pack with a grunt.
Jo kicked at her, and Ellen grabbed her foot. It was like teaching her daughter hand-to-hand all over again, the demon sluggish in separating its own existence from Jo’s memories. Jo was fast and a good blocker, but she got easily frustrated when her opponent did something unexpected. Something like pulling her off her feet. Jo twisted when she went down, quickly scrambling up again, but in the meantime Ellen’s fingers had closed around the bottle of holy water. Jo knocked it out of her hands with a triumphant “Ha!” Ellen swung her pack at Jo’s face. The heavy canister of chloroform made a loud clink as it connected with her jaw. Ellen didn’t wait for the expression of indignation to bloom across Jo’s face, the way it always did when Ellen got a leg up in a fight. She scrabbled on hands and knees to the bottle, and just reached it when Jo dived at her, forcing her face-first into the ground.
Jo wasn’t particularly heavy, but she was finally starting to assert the strength of a demon, and Ellen’s mouth filled with dirt and blood as her daughter’s iron grip closed around her neck and shoved hard. Ellen’s ankles thumped uselessly against the earth, but her fingers managed to twist the cap off the bottle and with a supreme effort, she tossed it back behind her head. A few drops hit Jo’s wrist and the demon recoiled just enough for Ellen to get her arms underneath herself and shove up. Jo slid off her back, but lunged at her again before Ellen could get up.
She landed on her back once more, the contents of her pack digging uncomfortably into her spine. Jo straddled her hips and seized her throat. Ellen’s vision was starting to black out, her daughter’s beloved face framed by greenery and a scorching bright sun, her daughter’s beloved eyes coal black as the last thing she would ever see. She got the bottle of holy water up again. This time it landed on Jo’s arm and Ellen could distinctly hear the sizzle. Jo howled and leapt off her.
Ellen coughed, gasping and spitting out gritty blood as she watched Jo rock back and forth, cradling her burned arm. Her heart ached and she felt bile rise in her throat.
Then the gas pump exploded and a creature out of nightmares flew up from the remains.
Ellen gaped. It was colored the darkness of a black hole and when it spread its wings, it completely blocked out the light of the bright sun. It rose into the air with a couple of powerful strokes, and Ellen fell from the force of the sudden buffeting wind; a wind so hot and yet still heavy with water. A new religion that'll bring you to your knees, black velvet if you please. Her eyes tried to skitter away from the unholy apparition, but the inky darkness drew her gaze back in.
The creature shrieked; a sound like nails down a chalkboard or a dying cat, magnified by one hundred. Its claws and teeth were outlined by the sun as it turned its long snout and shrieked again. Ellen could feel the blood trickle out of her left ear even as the hunter in her calmly noted the positioning and shape of the teeth. This was what had killed the children.
“Mistress!” Jo yelled, and the thing turned its head to regard her before screeching. Jo scowled. “No. But here, I brought you two bodies to feed on - hunters! Don’t you want to destroy the hunters?”
The thing screamed again, and Jo’s knees stiffened. “Let Lilith run her own errands. Together, we are just as strong.”
Ellen stared at her. Oh, foolish demon, you have absorbed too much of Joanna Beth Harvelle.
The thing’s claws cupped Jo’s face as Ellen held her breath. Jo’s eyes widened, and then black smoke was pouring out of her mouth and into the open snout of the creature. Ellen tensed, her mind supplying a horrifying mental picture of what the beast would do to Jo once the demon was all gone. In her pocket she had the tube from the old hunter - They call me Mr. Wilson, little lady. - and at her hip she had her .45, with regular ammunition. As the last of the black smoke poured from her daughter, Ellen reached into her pocket and ran forward.
“Let her go!” she cried, as countless desperate loved ones had cried throughout time. To her surprise, the creature did, and Jo slumped to the ground. The thing was on her immediately. The heat and stench of its breath made her gag, but as its snout opened wide, she pulled out the vial and threw. It swallowed automatically as the tiny cylinder sailed in, but it still stretched its claws out and cupped Ellen’s chin.
Hunter. The voice sounded in her head, loud and shrieky and dripping menace. You will tell me where the Winchesters are. Pain blossomed in her head, icy cold pain and she would have wept had she not been suddenly frozen. The hardest thing she’d ever done was to draw her gun. She could feel the creature’s amusement as it wrapped its wings around her. Human, that will not have an effect. She pulled the trigger.
She was thrown back, hitting a tree and slumping to the ground. The thing contracted, shrinking, expanding and contorting as green and yellow flames consumed it. Shrieks filled the air and Ellen tried desperately to cover her ears. They reached a crescendo as the beast expanded in size once more and exploded. Each shredded piece of it glittered for a moment in the sunlight before fading, leaving no trace that evil had been there.
Ellen stared at the now-empty road, her body shaking. Jo groaned and Ellen lurched over to her. Every muscle in her body protested the morning’s rough treatment.
“Jo?” she rasped out. “Do you know me, baby?”
Jo rolled onto her back and stared up at her mother. Ellen was relieved to see recognition in those eyes. There was also a lot of pain, but as Jo sat up, her face hardened into the ‘Stoic Hunter’ expression, as if ‘Scared Child’ or ‘Ellen’s Baby Girl’ had never existed.
“Yes. Mom. We need a hospital or we’ll be out of commission for much too long. Come on,” she continued, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”
Ellen’s stomach roiled. “Wait. Do you … do you remember when you were a kid, baking a cherry pie? The igloos? ‘Black Velvet’?” she whispered.
Jo looked at her. “No. Were they important to the mission?”
Ellen’s heart fluttered, stopped, and took up its beat again, broken. She shook her head, unable to answer.
“Then no loss. Come on, Mom. You’re a mess, and I already have one infection. Let’s get going before this burn turns, too.” She turned and led the way unerringly to the station wagon, her foot trampling the old green shirt further into the dirt.
Ellen took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and followed, her face settling into her own version of ‘Stoic Hunter.’ Jo had learned that from her. Ellen would have to remember. But hospital first. Then she needed to call Bobby Singer and see if Danny Wilson had ever given him any unidentified vials.
And she would have to ask him about the sigil for a certain tattoo, though it could never replace what they had lost.
Author: blue_fjords
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairing: Ellen, Jo
Rating: PG-13
Word length: ~3000
Warnings: Violence, but no more than you could find in an episode.
Prompt: Any fandom, any pairing, a character finds out that his or her partner is something completely different than what they seem; something horrifying. Can be supernatural or not.
Summary: Sometime during Season Four, Ellen and Jo have a run-in with a creature that leaves them a little worse for wear.
Notes: Many thanks to qthelights for beta-ing this madness! Posted as part of dark_fest.
Ellen sighed, and lifted her heavy hair off her damp neck. Wayward tendrils curled around her face in the humidity. She half-heartedly attempted to smooth them back and draw them into a ponytail, but gave it up as a bad job. Her hair swung into her face and she could smell the sweat on it. They really needed to find a place with a decent shower tonight.
“Jo!” She pitched her voice low, though they had seen no one in the remains of the town. Jo lifted her head, then unpeeled the rest of her body from her crouch and stood, shifting from foot to foot.
“Find anything?” Jo asked. Ellen could tell she ran her tongue over her incisor after she asked; a dead giveaway.
“Not a thing, but I know you found something.” She crossed the cracked and pitted asphalt and joined her daughter by the gas pumps. Gas ‘n’ Sip the sign proclaimed, clinging stubbornly to its post, like a soldier who didn’t know the war had been lost years ago.
Jo frowned, but nodded and pinged her finger against the dirty pump. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, almost pear-shaped and with rolodex numbers at the top that had once ticked slowly forward to record gallons and cents. Jo glanced at her from beneath her eyelashes and her own sweaty flyaways. “Um. Hang on.”
She pinged the pump again, and then Ellen could hear it. A rustling, like wings, sounded from the inside of the pump, followed by a screeching sound, like claws on metal. She took an inadvertent step back, hand automatically reaching for the cool comfort of her .45.
“Looks like we’ve found our beastie,” she said. “And conveniently trapped for the time being.” She strode over to the cover of the gas pipe. “We could gas it, knock it out, then try to get it out,” she mused out loud.
“How would we do that?” Jo asked. She was leaning against the pump now, and Ellen had to suppress a sigh. Rust and dirt and God knew what else was getting all over her clothes.
“Joanna Beth, don’t lean against that thing. It’s filthy, and that creature could claw its way out and rip you open.”
“No it couldn’t. It’s trapped.” Ellen swore she saw her daughter’s lower lip tremble a moment before her face slid into its old setting of ‘Stubborn Wannabe Hardass.’ That expression was slowly growing rarer, replaced simply by ‘Stoic Hunter.’
“Be careful anyway. I’m going to get some supplies from the station wagon.”
Ellen left her there, walking as briskly as she could manage through the weight of the air back towards where they had parked the night before.
They’d been tracking the creature for three days, making their way at a crawl through bayou country. More than two years since Katrina and the Louisiana coast still looked ravished. Dead trees formed natural barriers, blocking streams and forming mini-swamps. Rotten vegetation choked new growth and contributed a sickeningly sweet, cloying scent to the moisture-rich air. Ellen would have packed it in despite Jo’s insistence on seeing Bourbon Street, if not for the deaths.
At first it was pets, perhaps the work of a psychopath-in-training, but then a little boy had gone missing. His gnawed-upon skull was found a few days later. A bribe to the county coroner revealed teeth marks too widely spaced to belong to an alligator - teeth marks with odd jagged edges. They left New Orleans an hour later, chasing a rumor of yet more small, gnawed skulls to the west. They’d found the spoor by blind luck, nearabouts, and tracked it to the ghost town of Bayou Plaisant, population zero.
Ellen yanked open the door of the station wagon and hauled out a big plastic tub, full of smaller, steel-lined cases; sigil-carved wooden boxes; nets, ropes and tarps; and an assortment of holstered guns and sheathed knives. Ellen Harvelle, did you ever think this would be your life? Your baby girl’s life?
She flipped open the lid of one of the cases and surveyed the insides. Chloroform? Or rock salt instead of an anesthetic? She discarded that idea. The pumps hadn’t been put to use in so long; who knows if they could handle something that solid. Her fingers skittered over a small tube given her by an old Roadhouse regular; a particularly wild-eyed social outcast. She hesitated but pocketed it, packed the canister of chloroform into her backpack, and left everything else where it was.
She almost tripped on a pile of rags as she made her way back to the gas station. Her feet squelched in the dirt of the road and she paused. Though it was dreadfully wet, it hadn’t rained. The road was dusty. She lifted one foot. The dampness on her boot was much too dark. Her breath quickened, her eyes immediately tracking the location of her daughter. Jo was still across the street and farther down the road, partially bent over the gas pumps. Ellen glanced over her shoulder. The pile of rags.
She walked back and circled it slowly. Flies took wing at her approach, their angry buzzing sounding muffled and distorted in the damp air. She picked up a nearby stick and poked at the mound. It fell open at the gentle pressure.
Blood rushed in her ears and her eyesight dimmed. The world was spinning much too fast and rose up to slam into her knees. She caught herself with the palms of her hands as she pitched forward, her nose perilously close to the blood-soaked shirt.
It was Jo’s shirt; a green button-down of impossibly soft cotton. So soft because it had belonged to her daddy and it’d been washed so very many times since his death. Jo had been wearing it last in New Orleans; had disappeared from her view to change into something clean after their sweaty car ride. Then they’d heard about the kids. Ellen retched. The kids, the kids, were they even gone? Yes of course; she’d seen the teeth marks. She retched again. Teeth marks, and now there was blood on her daughter’s shirt, her daughter’s favorite shirt. She looked up, her arms trembling to keep her upright, and watched Jo walk calmly across the street to her.
“I was going to keep it a surprise for a little longer,” Jo said. “But my Mistress issued a command.” She crouched down and looked Ellen in the eye. “And I always obey my Mistress.”
“Where’s my daughter? What have you done with my daughter?” Ellen could feel tears forming and she squashed them ruthlessly. She needed to see clearly.
“She’s still in here.” Jo tapped her head. “She’s given me lots of information. Did you know that she always resented you for not letting her go to The New Kids on the Block concert?”
“What do you want?” She strained to keep her voice level, her tone dry.
Jo settled back on her heels and chewed on her lower lip. She’d outgrown that habit a few years ago. “I’m sifting through all these memories, Mom. I can call you that, right?” Ellen couldn’t stop the low growl in the back of her throat, and Jo shot her a toothy grin. “You know, each time she gives me a memory and it’s not the information I need, I’m killing it. All those times you cleaned out her scraped knees? Gone. That pie the two of you made for Daddy? You remember, her hair was in pigtails and she had flour across one cheek and cherry juice on the other. Yeah, she’ll never remember that ever again.”
Ellen lunged for her, hands reaching for her daughter’s white throat, when Jo laughed at her. “Oh, brilliant plan, Mom! Strangle the poor girl. She’s already lost a lot of blood this week. Just look at that shirt.”
Ellen froze, and Jo slid away from her, slowly unbuttoning her shirt. Deep claw marks had been gouged across her stomach, healed just enough that they wouldn’t bleed through a shirt, but still inflamed and painful-looking. “You, you…”
“Hey, I’m keeping her alive! Death by mauling is extremely painful, I assure you.”
“What do you want? What do you want?” Panic threatened to cut off her breathing. She forced herself to take a couple of shallow breaths.
Jo leaned forward, the smirk on her face the same one she’d worn at fifteen when she discovered she could aim a shotgun better than Ellen. This close, Ellen could smell the beginnings of infection setting into her daughter’s stomach; pick out the incongruous tiny pink flowers on Jo’s bra where her shirt still gaped open. “I want what I’ve been asking her for. Where are the Winchesters? What are their plans? Give me that, and I will let your baby girl live.”
It’s always those damn boys. Ellen fought down a hysterical giggle, the sound coming out like a high-pitched snarl, and Jo leaned even further, crowding her space until she was flat on her ass. “The Winchesters? Their big plan is to destroy the Harvelles. I can’t believe you haven’t figured that out yet.”
“You used to cut the crusts off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You had to send away for sparkly shoelaces in the mail, so she could have the flashiest Chucks. You declared one day of every winter ‘Fort Day’ and spent all afternoon building an igloo and painting it different colors with food coloring. One year you let Ash draw his self-portrait on the side of the igloo and Jo laughed herself hoarse. I laughed myself hoarse, Mom.”
“Fuck you,” Ellen whispered, unable to fight the tears that streamed down her cheeks. “We don’t know where they are, what they’re doing! Fuck you.”
“Remember that summer that was so very hot, and you without air-conditioning? Remember how the two of you would sing ‘Mississippi, in the middle of a dry spell’? ‘Mama’s dancing with her baby on her shoulder’? Remember how you would dance? ‘Black velvet with that slow Southern style’?”
Jo had broken her ankle at the end of that summer, and she’d never learned to compensate for it. Ellen kicked out, hard, and Jo’s eyes widened as she overbalanced. Ellen was on her in a flash, one hand going for her neck, the other fumbling hurriedly with her backpack’s zipper for the bottle of holy water she kept there. Jo shoved her off before she could quite reach it, and she landed half on her pack with a grunt.
Jo kicked at her, and Ellen grabbed her foot. It was like teaching her daughter hand-to-hand all over again, the demon sluggish in separating its own existence from Jo’s memories. Jo was fast and a good blocker, but she got easily frustrated when her opponent did something unexpected. Something like pulling her off her feet. Jo twisted when she went down, quickly scrambling up again, but in the meantime Ellen’s fingers had closed around the bottle of holy water. Jo knocked it out of her hands with a triumphant “Ha!” Ellen swung her pack at Jo’s face. The heavy canister of chloroform made a loud clink as it connected with her jaw. Ellen didn’t wait for the expression of indignation to bloom across Jo’s face, the way it always did when Ellen got a leg up in a fight. She scrabbled on hands and knees to the bottle, and just reached it when Jo dived at her, forcing her face-first into the ground.
Jo wasn’t particularly heavy, but she was finally starting to assert the strength of a demon, and Ellen’s mouth filled with dirt and blood as her daughter’s iron grip closed around her neck and shoved hard. Ellen’s ankles thumped uselessly against the earth, but her fingers managed to twist the cap off the bottle and with a supreme effort, she tossed it back behind her head. A few drops hit Jo’s wrist and the demon recoiled just enough for Ellen to get her arms underneath herself and shove up. Jo slid off her back, but lunged at her again before Ellen could get up.
She landed on her back once more, the contents of her pack digging uncomfortably into her spine. Jo straddled her hips and seized her throat. Ellen’s vision was starting to black out, her daughter’s beloved face framed by greenery and a scorching bright sun, her daughter’s beloved eyes coal black as the last thing she would ever see. She got the bottle of holy water up again. This time it landed on Jo’s arm and Ellen could distinctly hear the sizzle. Jo howled and leapt off her.
Ellen coughed, gasping and spitting out gritty blood as she watched Jo rock back and forth, cradling her burned arm. Her heart ached and she felt bile rise in her throat.
Then the gas pump exploded and a creature out of nightmares flew up from the remains.
Ellen gaped. It was colored the darkness of a black hole and when it spread its wings, it completely blocked out the light of the bright sun. It rose into the air with a couple of powerful strokes, and Ellen fell from the force of the sudden buffeting wind; a wind so hot and yet still heavy with water. A new religion that'll bring you to your knees, black velvet if you please. Her eyes tried to skitter away from the unholy apparition, but the inky darkness drew her gaze back in.
The creature shrieked; a sound like nails down a chalkboard or a dying cat, magnified by one hundred. Its claws and teeth were outlined by the sun as it turned its long snout and shrieked again. Ellen could feel the blood trickle out of her left ear even as the hunter in her calmly noted the positioning and shape of the teeth. This was what had killed the children.
“Mistress!” Jo yelled, and the thing turned its head to regard her before screeching. Jo scowled. “No. But here, I brought you two bodies to feed on - hunters! Don’t you want to destroy the hunters?”
The thing screamed again, and Jo’s knees stiffened. “Let Lilith run her own errands. Together, we are just as strong.”
Ellen stared at her. Oh, foolish demon, you have absorbed too much of Joanna Beth Harvelle.
The thing’s claws cupped Jo’s face as Ellen held her breath. Jo’s eyes widened, and then black smoke was pouring out of her mouth and into the open snout of the creature. Ellen tensed, her mind supplying a horrifying mental picture of what the beast would do to Jo once the demon was all gone. In her pocket she had the tube from the old hunter - They call me Mr. Wilson, little lady. - and at her hip she had her .45, with regular ammunition. As the last of the black smoke poured from her daughter, Ellen reached into her pocket and ran forward.
“Let her go!” she cried, as countless desperate loved ones had cried throughout time. To her surprise, the creature did, and Jo slumped to the ground. The thing was on her immediately. The heat and stench of its breath made her gag, but as its snout opened wide, she pulled out the vial and threw. It swallowed automatically as the tiny cylinder sailed in, but it still stretched its claws out and cupped Ellen’s chin.
Hunter. The voice sounded in her head, loud and shrieky and dripping menace. You will tell me where the Winchesters are. Pain blossomed in her head, icy cold pain and she would have wept had she not been suddenly frozen. The hardest thing she’d ever done was to draw her gun. She could feel the creature’s amusement as it wrapped its wings around her. Human, that will not have an effect. She pulled the trigger.
She was thrown back, hitting a tree and slumping to the ground. The thing contracted, shrinking, expanding and contorting as green and yellow flames consumed it. Shrieks filled the air and Ellen tried desperately to cover her ears. They reached a crescendo as the beast expanded in size once more and exploded. Each shredded piece of it glittered for a moment in the sunlight before fading, leaving no trace that evil had been there.
Ellen stared at the now-empty road, her body shaking. Jo groaned and Ellen lurched over to her. Every muscle in her body protested the morning’s rough treatment.
“Jo?” she rasped out. “Do you know me, baby?”
Jo rolled onto her back and stared up at her mother. Ellen was relieved to see recognition in those eyes. There was also a lot of pain, but as Jo sat up, her face hardened into the ‘Stoic Hunter’ expression, as if ‘Scared Child’ or ‘Ellen’s Baby Girl’ had never existed.
“Yes. Mom. We need a hospital or we’ll be out of commission for much too long. Come on,” she continued, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”
Ellen’s stomach roiled. “Wait. Do you … do you remember when you were a kid, baking a cherry pie? The igloos? ‘Black Velvet’?” she whispered.
Jo looked at her. “No. Were they important to the mission?”
Ellen’s heart fluttered, stopped, and took up its beat again, broken. She shook her head, unable to answer.
“Then no loss. Come on, Mom. You’re a mess, and I already have one infection. Let’s get going before this burn turns, too.” She turned and led the way unerringly to the station wagon, her foot trampling the old green shirt further into the dirt.
Ellen took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and followed, her face settling into her own version of ‘Stoic Hunter.’ Jo had learned that from her. Ellen would have to remember. But hospital first. Then she needed to call Bobby Singer and see if Danny Wilson had ever given him any unidentified vials.
And she would have to ask him about the sigil for a certain tattoo, though it could never replace what they had lost.