SPN Fic: Skin Deep (Pt 5 of 8ish, Gen, R, Pre-Series)
Heh, heh.
Title: Skin Deep (5 of 8ish)
Author: Dodger Winslow
Genre: Gen, Pre-series
Rating: R for language, mature subject matter
Spoilers: Something Wicked, Skin
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys, I'm just stalking them for a while ...
Summary: John's jaw tightened. He didn’t like lying to Dean-at least not about the details of a hunt-but he didn’t want to tell him what was going on either. Not the truth of it. This was out of his range. It was out of John’s range. There were so many forms of evil they both knew how to deal with. So many atrocities his fourteen-year-old considered part of the day-to-day reality of doing what they did, of fighting the good fight, of walking the front lines in a war between dark and light. Or if not between dark and light, at least between wrong and right. Between brutality and mercy. Between evil and something else. Something less than evil. If not good, at least not bad. Not wrong. Not indistinguishable from the things they hunted, from the things that hunted them. It would be easier for Dean to think the choice his dad was facing walked a clearer line in the darkness than it did. Better that he consider the prospect of inarguable evil than find himself confronted with the prospect of deadly innocence.
Skin Deep (Part 5)
The shifter slipped through the sewers like a shadow slipping through night. He moved quickly, knowing his boy had been alone long enough now that he’d be frightened. Perhaps even terrified.
Fear would make Cain vulnerable. Perhaps even desperate.
And desperation could be dangerous. His boy knew the rules, followed them well; but hunger, if not fear, would eventually drive even an obedient son to venture beyond the safety of the nest.
He didn’t want that to happen. He didn’t want to lose his boy to someone else.
He’d hoped to be back sooner than this-to have retrieved his boy and been gone long before Cain was frightened enough to put himself in a compromising position-but Winchester turned out to be more dangerous than he’d anticipated. He’d thought the stories about the hunter were exaggerations; it hadn’t occurred to him they might fall short of the actual reality.
So few boogie men lived up to their reputations, let alone exceeding them. But Winchester was an exception, to that rule of thumb and several others. Enough of an exception that the shifter felt it necessary to stay away from the den (and consequently, his boy) far longer than he would have liked. He couldn’t risk being followed, couldn’t risk leading Winchester right to his own front door.
So far, the hunter had proven not only dangerous, but also seasoned enough to stay out of the sewers, to resist the urge to follow any of them into the comfort zone of their own territory. But that would change now. An attack so close to his own nest made it a new game for everyone. Winchester had boys of his own to protect. He had no choice but to become more aggressive, escalate his methodical genocide to a wholesale slaughter.
He’d put his every waking moment into neutralizing the threat as quickly as possible. That’s what the shifter would do in his place, and he was confident Winchester would do no less.
The shifter smiled. Facing a worthy adversary for a change filled him with a sense of the hunt he hadn’t experienced in some time. It was almost worth the risk to both his own life, and that of his boy’s, to play with a man who didn’t see the world with the eyes of a trusting fool. Most of them were such easy marks. Winchester was the first he’d run across in decades who was proving out to be worth the time it took to kill him.
The shifter reached the den, slipped through the door. The place appeared undisturbed. There was no blood, no overt sign of a struggle. That was good. Winchester wouldn’t take his boy, he’d slaughter him, so the state of the nest was a good indication he hadn’t been able to find it on his own.
The shifter was depending on that. He’d bet heavily that Winchester’s only access to his boy was by trailing him. It was the only reason he’d stayed away as long as he had; the only reason he’d been willing to leave his boy alone for the extra time it took to clear his backtrack with one hundred percent certainty.
He’d kill Winchester in his own time: hunt him the way Winchester had hunted them. But for right now, it was more important to get his boy away from here, spend some time with him before stashing him someplace safe, coming back to do the things that had to be done.
Time with his boy was what he needed. Killing Winchester would just be fun.
"Cain," the shifter hissed. "It’s me. Where are you, son?"
No one answered. Nothing moved. The shifter cursed under his breath. If Cain was here, he’d have been on him in a heartbeat. The boy lived in constant fear of losing his father. That fear was Cain’s greatest vulnerability … something the shifter knew all too well.
He searched the nest anyway, just to be sure. It wasn’t hard to find where Winchester caught him, read the signs of what small struggle Cain had mounted before he surrendered; gave in and left of his own volition with a man who had slaughtered more of their kind than his boy had ever even met.
The shifter cursed again.
It was an unexpected turn of events. Never, in a million years, would he have thought Winchester might take his boy rather than killing him outright. He’d hand-picked this hunter for a reason: because the man killed without question, slaughtered without compunction or mercy. Being a shifter was all the cause Winchester required. It was the only thing he considered when targeting and tracking prey, the only thing that mattered.
That level of dogmatic consistency made him easy to predict. It made him easy to manipulate, easy to position and aim to any agenda the shifter chose.
But yet he’d spared Cain.
It didn’t make sense, didn’t track from everything he’d ever heard of this particular hunter, if not others. The shifter turned it over in his mind, considered the new behavior from every conceivable angle. The only answer he could find in it was an answer that actually scared him.
He felt a tickle under his skin. He felt the thrill of fear skating his bones, and he relished it.
Winchester was smarter than he’d taken him for. The hunter understood what drove a shifter, had a sense for how much he’d sacrifice to get his hands on this particular boy.
His boy
The shifter’s eyes glinted in the dark, reflecting even the low light in his excitement, his agitation. His fear. It tasted like nothing else. Anger was satisfying. Lust was intoxicating. But Fear.
Fear was something else altogether. Fear was Nirvana, Fear was the holy grail.
After so many years of shifting, he could control his own biological responses to virtually any flux of stress hormones. Any flux but fear. Fear was such a rare stressor: such an intense trigger, but one so quickly lost once you realized you could do anything, become anyone, have anything … all without repercussion.
But this. This was different.
It scared him to realize a hunter as dangerous as Winchester understood him well enough to take his boy and use that boy as bait. It was the only answer that made any sense: the only reason Winchester wouldn’t have killed Cain here, wouldn’t have gutted him the way he’d gutted every other member of the shifter’s pack.
Because he knew the shifter wanted this boy. Knew he needed him.
Somehow, Winchester had figured out that the only way to ever get close to the pack’s alpha was by using his boy. He understood the only way to get to him was to take Cain, use the threat of losing his boy against him. It was the only bait that would work, the only lure strong enough to drive him to risk his own slaughter to get back what he wanted, what he needed, what he’d have at any cost.
Fear tickled through him again, shifting nerves, threatening protein adhesions. His skin slipped against his bones: not much, but enough. Enough to feel it. Enough to know this time, the response of it was beyond his control.
The shifter closed his eyes, lived in the moment in a way he hadn’t since he was Cain’s age; since shifting was new and every hormone that triggered it was something to fear rather than something to seek.
Fear.
Once his nerves settled and his body went static again, the shifter opened his eyes and left the nest. There was nothing there for him any more. His only interest was Cain, and Winchester had Cain.
*
The phone only rang once before Dean picked up. His voice was anxious over the line when he demanded, "Dad?"
"Yeah," John agreed. "It’s me."
"Where in the hell are you?"
"Good to hear your voice, too, son," John said with a small smile.
The echo of Dean’s outrage hadn’t even finished fading from the connection before he was apologizing. "Sorry. I was just … I got worried is all. You missed your check-in calls twice."
"I know," John conceded. "I got tied up. Sorry."
He could almost hear Dean swallowing the urge to rip him a new one. "That’s okay," he said instead. "No problem. I just was … I was a little worried. So … you’re okay, then? Everything went according to plan?"
"More or less."
"Tied up literally or figuratively?" Dean asked.
John chuckled. "Figuratively. Ran into something I didn’t anticipate. How are you and Sammy?"
"Sammy’s a pain-in-the-ass, and I’m awesome. But you already know that, so quit trying to change the subject and tell me what got broken this time."
"Nothing broken," John assured him. "Nothing even bent."
"Bruised?"
"I got a hangnail. Does that count?"
This time it was Dean who chuckled. The tension in his voice eased, settling back to a more normal timber. "I don’t know. You plan on painting your nails any time soon?"
"Soon as I decided between Passion Pink and Watch-Your-Mouth Watermelon. So you and Sammy are good then," he surmised. "Nothing I need to know about."
"We’re fine."
"Good. I can’t talk long, I’ve got something working that I need to keep on top of; but I wanted to check in, make sure you weren’t missing too much beauty sleep on account of your old man."
"I don’t need no freakin beauty sleep," Dean quipped. "Sammy, on the other hand, is two steps short of having to be flushed down the crapper, he looks so bad. I think that’s more just the way he looks than anything to do with losing sleep; but if I’m wrong, you called just in time to save me from permanent eyeball damage."
"Ha, ha," John heard Sammy say in the background. "You’re so funny I almost forgot to laugh."
"Sammy says I’m an awesome brother, and you should raise my allowance," Dean translated.
"I’ll take that under advisement, if I ever decided to pay you an allowance," John assured him.
"Not what I said," Sammy yelled from the background.
"So …" Dean hesitated "… any details you can share? Or do we have to wait to hear the good stuff until you get home?"
"Wouldn’t want to ruin the suspense for you," John said.
He could almost hear Dean nod his acceptance, his understanding. He could just as clearly imagine Sammy rolling his eyes at Dean’s failure to challenge their old man’s lack of good explanation for missing two check-in calls. No excuse he could offer would be good enough to suit Sammy, but if it at least involved blood or broken bones, he probably wouldn’t roll his eyes at it.
"Tell your brother not to roll his eyes at you," John said.
Dean laughed. "Hey, you’re pretty good at that."
"Psychic," John told him.
"Not psychic enough to see he’s not rolling them at me," Dean quipped.
"Half psychic," John agreed.
"Ask him if he’s ever coming home, or if we should just finish growing up without him," Sammy said. The dig was quiet enough to make John pretty sure he wasn’t intended to actually hear it.
"Any idea when we can expect you?" Dean asked him instead.
"Soon. Probably tomorrow."
"Excellent. So … you going to check in on schedule this time, or should we just not worry about it until we see the whites of your eyes?"
That was as close as calling him on the carpet as Dean was going to get. John smiled, said, "I’ll call if I’m going to be late."
"What constitutes late?"
"Do I have a curfew now?" John asked. He meant it as a joke, but Dean didn’t laugh.
"Sorry," he muttered instead.
"Dark," John told him. "If I’m going to miss that, I’ll call. I promise."
"So I should worry if you don’t?" Dean asked.
"Why not," John agreed. "Not like you’re not going to worry anyway, right?"
Dean sighed. It was a defeated sound.
"I’m just kidding," John told him. "I’ll call, or I’ll be there."
"Okay," Dean agreed.
"And it’s kind of nice to be worried about," he added. "Kind of girly, but nice. Better than getting eyes rolled at me at least."
"That’s his way of worrying," Dean said.
"That’s his way of making me want to kick his ass when he knows I’m too far away to actually do it," John counted. "But whatever." He smiled a little, pleased to have found a productive way to use that word against Dean for a change.
"Whatever?" Dean challenged. "Dude. How disrespectful."
John chuckled again. "Tit for tat, boy. I’ll see you tomorrow."
"What did you say about tits?" Dean asked.
"Dad said something about tits?!?" Sammy demanded almost immediately.
"Be careful how you answer that if you ever want to see the light of day again before you turn thirty," John warned.
"I’ll be creative," Dean assured him.
"Be too creative, and I’ll make it forty."
"Prude," Dean said.
"Amateur," John returned.
"Yeah, big talk, but I sure don’t see much play for someone who reps himself a pro." Before John could answer that one, he said, "Catch you tomorrow, Dad. Before dark. And be careful. In, you know, a non-girly way."
"Dean …" John started. Then he stopped.
Dean gave him a couple of seconds before he said, "Yeah?"
John shook his head. "Nothing. Sorry I worried you, that I missed my schedule."
"That’s okay," Dean said automatically.
"No. It’s not. I should have called."
Dean hesitated, then asked, "You okay?"
"Yeah. I’m just tired."
"You want to talk?"
"No. I need to get back."
"So … you’re still hunting then?"
"Hunt’s over," John said. "I’m just cleaning up. Nothing dangerous, but I have a couple of choices to make, and I’m not a hundred percent sure what they should be."
"You need me to research anything?"
"Uncharted waters. I’ll have to play this one by ear and hope for the best."
"You want to talk it through?" Dean asked.
For just a moment, John considered it. "No," he said finally. "Gotta be my call."
"That mean you can’t even talk about it?"
It was a good question. A relevant one. He did need to talk about it. He needed to discuss this with someone, needed to get another perspective to counterbalance his own.
John closed his eyes, breathed through the stench of rot that surrounded him, that had become almost a part of him. There’s a reason doctors don’t work on their own kids. There’s no way to be objective when it’s your own kid on the live-or-die line. No way to do what has to be done when every time a knife comes close, all you can hear is the sound of your own kid’s voice, all you can remember is another moment in all the moments of your own kids’ lives.
That kind of pressure is enough to kill a man. It’s enough to drive him into making the wrong choices just because he starts second guessing every choice he does make.
"Yeah," John said finally. He opened his eyes, stared into the wet dark around him, seeing nothing. "That’s what it means."
Dean sighed. "Okay. You change your mind, I’ll be up all night, having a wild party."
John smiled a little. His eyes focused in, found something to see. "Dancing with yourself does not a party make, boy," he said.
Dean guffawed. "Does if you do it right," he said, still laughing.
"Won’t argue with you on that, I suppose. You being the pro on that subject these days and all."
Dean laughed harder. "Dude!" he said. "Fine line. As in, you’re on the wrong side of."
"Everybody’s got to be an expert on something, son. Tell your brother not to grow up too much without me."
"Yeah. Don’t think you were supposed to hear that."
"Didn’t figure I was," he said. Then, on impulse, he added, "Hey. Do me a favor, will you?"
"Sure."
"Pack a couple of duffels, just in case."
"In case …?" Dean left the question dangling, asking without cornering him by actually asking.
John started to pace. He walked the lot slowly, not paying much attention to where he was going. "We might be travelling when I get back," John allowed vaguely. "Maybe."
"Any place in particular?"
"Not sure. Might not even be an option. I’ll have to do some calling, test the waters."
"Anybody I can call for you?"
"I’ll do it," John said. He hesitated. Dean waited. "I might have a kid in tow when I show up," he added. "Civilian. Collateral damage who needs a roof and a warm bed. A safe bed."
"Oh," Dean said, surprised. "Okay."
"Not sure yet," John added. "Just a possibility."
"Okay."
"More head’s up in the maybe column than any kind of real likelihood."
"Okay."
John stopped walking, ran a hand through his hair. He was standing by the Impala. He didn’t remember walking here, didn’t remember leaving the door to the motel room behind to seek out the familiar warmth of a car he’d always loved, but he loved more now that it was Dean’s girl, rather than his own.
It had stopped raining several minutes ago. The overhang of leaves had protected the car from the worst of the brief cloudburst, but the finish was still wet, drops of water beaded on the high-wax surface. He laid a hand on the hood, felt the cool of metal against his palm as he listened to the echo of his son’s breathing across the miles stretched between them. He was soaked through, too stupid to come in out of the rain and squishy in his shoes when he walked for it. But the Impala looked beautiful. She was clean, fresh: black ice set free from the thin grit of road grime that had dulled her flawless finish when he left the city in his rearview hours ago.
They’d spent most of the day Saturday working on her. He’d greased her up a bit getting the points changed out, so Dean buffed himself to exhaustion to get back the slick gloss he craved. She was glowing like a black gemstone in the sun’s fading light when he walked out of the apartment building and found Dean standing in the middle of a gravel lot while the sun went down, arms crossed over his chest and tee-shirt stiff with dried sweat even in the cool of an autumn dusk. He was just looking at her. Just standing there, watching her glow, seeing beauty in something they’d accomplished together, something important, something he loved doing as much as his old man ever had.
John walked over, stood beside him. They didn’t say word, just watched the light fade until it was gone. Until the Impala became a shadow in the night, dark against dark waiting for the rise of a harvest moon to turn her warm gemstone glow to an indifferent icy cool.
"You hungry?" he’d asked finally.
Dean glanced at him, stirred out of his reverie, and grinned in a way that was a rare moment of pure joy for the kid. He hadn’t answered because he didn’t have to. The answer was in his eyes. He wasn’t hungry. At that moment in time, he wasn’t hungry at all. He was full. He was happy. He was whole.
When they turned to go inside, John caught a glimpse of Sammy standing at the foot of a flight stairs that stretched up seven floors to their crappy, two-bedroom apartment. He was watching them through the open door, his expression obscured by shadows but the resentment in his posture clear to any read.
"Hey, Geekboy," Dean had called to him. "You hungry?"
Sammy hadn’t answered. He didn’t have to. The answer was in the way he turned and walked away.
"Dad?" Dean said quietly, talking over a non-existent phone line, but speaking directly into his ear.
John pulled himself out of the past, twisted free of what it felt like to lift his hand off Dean’s shoulder in response to Sammy’s wordless retreat; what it felt like to fail one son even as he made the kind of connection that kept him alive with the other, failing them both by not being able to find a better balance between them.
"I need to get back to it," John said, lifting his hand off the Impala’s sleek, rain-beaded finish.
"Okay." Dean wanted to ask him something. He could hear it in his son’s voice.
"What?" John prompted.
"What, what?" Dean countered.
"Don’t think so loud if you’re not going to elaborate when I ask."
Dean sighed. "I guess I just didn’t realize there’d be any kids involved in this one," he said. "I thought you said you were hunting shifters."
"Shapeshifters have kids?" Sammy asked in the background.
Dean snorted derisively. "Shut up, Sam," he said. "And don’t ask stupid questions."
"You talking to him or me?" John chided.
"Sorry. You."
"I was hunting shifters," John verified. "But it looks like one of them …." He stopped, considered what to say, and how to say it.
"Like one of them what?" Dean pressed when he didn’t finish.
"Like one of them had a toy," John finished finally.
"A toy?" Dean repeated quietly.
"Yeah." His jaw tightened a little on the word. He didn’t like lying to Dean-at least not about the details of a hunt-but he didn’t want to tell him what was going on either. Not the truth of it. This was out of his range. It was out of John’s range.
There were so many forms of evil they both knew how to deal with. So many atrocities his fourteen-year-old considered part of the day-to-day reality of doing what they did, of fighting the good fight, of walking the front lines in a war between dark and light.
Or if not between dark and light, at least between wrong and right. Between brutality and mercy. Between evil and something else. Something less than evil. If not good, at least not bad. Not wrong. Not indistinguishable from the things they hunted, from the things that hunted them.
It would be easier for Dean to think the choice his dad was facing walked a clearer line in the darkness than it did. Better that he consider the prospect of inarguable evil than find himself confronted with the prospect of dangerous innocence.
Deadly innocence.
But still innocence.
"Yeah," John said again. "A toy. If I can find his family, I will. But if I can’t, we might need to travel to place him."
Dean didn’t say anything for a long moment. When he did speak, it was to mutter, "Fucking shifters."
"That’s why I didn’t call," John said. "I’m still trying to figure the kid out. Trying to see where his loyalties lie. Whether or not he’s been … if he’s still salvageable or not."
"Salvageable?" Dean repeated. "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean."
Dean’s voice was grim with understanding when he surmised, "Stockholm Syndrome."
It wasn’t strictly the truth, but it was a fair representation of the shades of grey inherent to the dynamics in play. Trauma begs relief, even if the form that relief takes is the form of the predator made manifest in the prey. Hostages broken to empathy for their own captors; victims re-made in the image of their own victimizers.
It wasn’t their fault; but in the end, the results were no less deadly to those who might seek to save the lost after a point of no return had been not only met, but exceeded.
"Yeah," John agreed. "Which puts me on tricky ground. Until I know where he stands, I’m not quite sure where I stand."
"That’s fucked up," Dean said.
"Screwed up," John corrected without thinking.
"Yeah. That’s what I meant. Screwed up."
John put his hand back on the car; took some small comfort in the cool of it, the clean of it, the safe of it. "Life sucks sometimes," he said.
"Yeah," Dean agreed. "It does. So that’s what you’re dealing with, then?"
"More or less."
"So the choice you have to make is a matter of trust?" Dean pressed. "Whether you can trust him or not?"
"He was a toy for a long time," John said.
"Yeah, but he didn’t ask for that," Dean pointed out. "It’s not his fault some freak has him so turned around he doesn’t know which way is up any more."
"Not be his fault," John agreed quietly. "But still dangerous."
"Dangerous to who?" When John didn’t answer him, Dean pressed, "To you? Or to us? To me and Sam."
His son read him too well sometimes; understood the subtext of their conversations more clearly than he could afford.
John was still trying to figure out how to answer that question when Dean went on, saying, "Because if that’s the stumbling block, it shouldn’t be. As long as we know he’s screwed up in the head from the get-go, we’d keep our eyes open, make sure we didn’t turn our backs on him when we shouldn’t."
"That’s not your call," John said.
"Guy beats a dog mean, you don’t put the dog down, Dad. You put the guy down."
"Beats it mean enough, you put the dog down, too," John countered.
"He’s not going to kill a dog, is he?" Sammy was outraged. His voice was loud enough over the line he had to be practically standing in Dean’s back pocket. "Tell him not to do that," he ordered. "Tell him I’ll take care of it. Tell him I can fix it if somebody broke it. I know a lot about dogs. Tell him I can fix it. Tell him, Dean."
"Shut up, Sam," Dean said again. Then to John, he said, "Maybe a dog."
He made his point by not saying anything more than just that.
"I’m serious, Dean," Sammy was still arguing. "Tell him I can fix it. I really can."
"I don’t know," John said, speaking to Dean. "We’ll see."
"What’s he saying?" Sammy demanded. "Is he saying ‘we’ll see’ to me?"
"Back off, Sam." John heard the quiet grunt of a fourteen-year-old elbow digging into a ten-year-old gut. "I mean it." Then to John, he said, "I can take care of Sammy and me so you can take him wherever by yourself. If that’s the problem, Dad, I can do that. I would want to do that, if it helps him out. If that’s what’s tripping you up, I mean. Thinking you couldn’t leave us long enough to get him wherever it is you need to take him. Because you could. I can handle things for however long it would take."
"I’m not going to turn him lose on somebody else’s kids if I can’t trust him with my own," John said.
"Tell him I want a dog, Dean," Sammy insisted. "Tell him I’ve read all sorts of books on dogs, and I know exactly how to fix one that’s been broken. Tell him I read all about pack dynamics, and that no dog is ever born bad, it’s just been hurt enough that it gets afraid. Not bad, Dean. Just afraid. And dogs are really resilient. They forgive way better than people, and it isn’t fair to kill a dog just because somebody was a fuckhead to it. Tell him it’s his job to help hurt things, even if they’re just dogs. Tell him that, Dean. I mean it. Tell him."
"You get all that?" Dean asked.
John snorted. "Yeah. I got it."
"Any return message?"
"Yeah. Tell him if I ever hear my ten-year-old say ‘fuckhead’ again, he’s grounded for the rest of the millennium."
He could hear the grin in Dean’s tone when he said, "Millennium? You sure you want me to toss that word around so he can throw it back at you sometime when you least expect it?"
"Like he doesn’t already have that word at his beck and call," John returned. "Locked and loaded and ready to shove up my ass on a moment’s notice. Besides which, with Sammy, I always expect it. Part of the package. Always has been, always will be."
"I know what millennium means," Sammy announced, insulted even though he wasn’t sure exactly what had been said.
"Not my fault," Dean told John. "I raised him to be cool, it just didn’t take."
"You blaming that one on me?" John asked.
Dean laughed again. "I blame it on Star Trek," he said.
John grinned. "You might be onto something there."
"You blame what on Star Trek?" Sammy demanded as John glanced at his watch, calculated in his head how long he’d left Cain alone.
"You being a geek," Dean answer.
"I hope you’re talking to Sammy, not me," John said. Then, "I really do need to get back, though. The dog’s been alone long enough. I’ll see you tomorrow. Or I’ll call."
"Dad-"
"I know," John said. "And I’ll think about it. I can’t promise any more than that, but I will think about it."
Dean sighed. "Okay," he agreed.
"I’m going to go now. But Dean?"
"Yeah."
John hesitated, studied the Impala as he considered how much to say to his son, and how much to left unsaid. "Thanks," he said finally. "It helps talking to you. Sometimes I’m not sure you realize how much."
"I’m just thinking if it was … you know … our dog or something. What we’d want somebody else to do for him, if that happened and made him a little dangerous, but it wasn’t his fault, and he didn’t do anything to deserve it. How we’d think it was only fair if they took a little bit of risk on him. Maybe even a big risk to try and save him if they could. Because it wasn’t his fault, what happened to him. He didn’t do anything wrong."
"I’ve got it," John said. "I understand what you’re saying."
"Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow then."
"Yeah. Tomorrow."
He started to hang up the phone, but stopped when Dean said, "Oh, and Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"You’re a real girl sometimes."
John smiled a little. "Oh I am, am I?"
"Yeah. ‘Sometimes I’m not sure you realize how much.’ Pffft. What a girl."
John chuckled. "I’ll keep that in mind, try to keep a better muzzle on my bitch tendencies in future conversations."
"Eh. I don’t know. It’s kind of cute on you. Like pigtails or something."
"The king of dancing with himself finding anything about me cute is troublesome, son," John said. Dean was still laughing when he hung up the phone and slipped it back in his pocket.
He looked up at the sky again, studied the clouds and tried to predict whether they were looking to dump out again, or if they were done squalling for the night and ready to move along. He couldn’t tell for sure; it could still go either way.
The smell of rot from the pool full of refuse had eased a bit though. It still hung thick in the air, but it wasn’t as overpowering now, wasn’t acrid enough to burn a grown man’s eyes to tears in protest.
Across the parking lot, the door to room forty-seven glowed a sickly yellow-green in the tainted cast of the bug bulb burning above it. There hadn’t been a peep from the room since he left it. It could have been empty for all the sign of life it showed. Abandoned. Dark inside. Black as sin and cold as hell.
From where he was standing, he couldn’t tell if there was a kid in there, or a monster.
Or nothing at all.
Three rooms down the walk from forty-seven, another door opened. A man stepped through it, pulled it closed behind him. He hunched his face down into the collar of the coat he wore, hiding his features like he was taking refuge from a bitter wind that wasn’t blowing, that didn’t exist.
Walking fast toward the SUV parked near the office, he unlocked the vehicle by remote so he could get in and drive away as soon as he arrived. Exposure was the enemy of secrets and lies. Walking through the darkness in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere was a pretty small risk, even for a man who drove an SUV and wore shoes that cost more than most men made in a week.
But it was a risk.
You never knew who was watching from the shadows, who might be standing in the rain, counting sins and keeping a running tally.
John waited until the man was gone before he turned to make his way back to room forty-seven. The risk of exposure was minimal, but the dangers of his secrets and lies were incalculable. He took them with him as he walked, holding them close and keeping them dry, hoping he could find a way to save a child who trusted someone they didn’t know without getting himself killed by a monster he couldn’t see.
A monster who might not exist at all, or who might be the only thing that did exist.
From where he was standing, he couldn’t tell. So he moved closer to take a better look.
*
Winchester was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough. He’d taken the shifter’s boy and understood how to use that boy; but he’d left himself vulnerable in the doing. His own boys were alone now: unprotected, unguarded.
They were vulnerable the same way Cain had been vulnerable, and the shifter knew how to use them the same way Winchester had known how to use Cain.
He wound his through the tunnels with an unerring sense of direction. It was instinct more than skill, an internal map that created itself in the shifter’s subconscious as he moved through any environment. It was one more advantage he had over Winchester; one more way he was superior to a man confined by the limitations of his own biology.
One more reason he’d win this game in the end.
The apartment building was half way across town; but he’d been there before, knew exactly where it was and how to find it without ever needing to go topside to get his bearings. He’d seen Winchester’s boys leave it and come home again twice since the first night he was there, standing in a dark alley, watching from a safe distance as their father slaughtered Seth, cut his throat with a silver blade and left him to bleed out behind a dumpster like so much worthless trash.
Seth was worthless; but still. It was insulting to watch him dominate and discard another shifter so easily. Insulting, but not enough so to draw him away from his vantage point to take a shot at Winchester himself. It probably would have been a good time to do so: Seth did some damage … broke Winchester’s wrist, perhaps. Maybe a rib as well.
The injuries would have slowed Winchester down, but they also put him on guard. He was vigilant after Seth’s attack, haunting the shadows behind the building for almost half an hour before he felt it was safe to go inside, retreat his lines of defense to the apartment itself. It was an opportunity he let pass for exactly that reason: because Winchester would see him coming. It was too much risk for too little reward, so he let it pass, waited for another time.
Another time that was now. He’d been watching Winchester’s sons since that night, but he’d left the boys as he found them because he’d had no real reason to do otherwise.
He had a reason now. He had the only reason that mattered.
The shifter took a left at a tee-juncture, then a right at the next split of the tunnels. He was close now, knew exactly where the sewer met up with the apartment building in such a way it would be easy to get inside without being seen. They lived on the seventh floor, in a two-bedroom rathole with curtains. There was a neighbor across the hall who lived alone and would be easy to mimic.
She was an old woman, someone the Winchester boys wouldn’t fear.
He’d watched them long enough to see the older one’s need to protect, and he knew how to use that instinct against the boy. It would be easy to feign some need to draw him into the privacy of her apartment, deal with him there so he could take his place and get his hands on the younger one.
If there wasn’t such a significant difference in mass between his body and the boy’s, he’d just take the boy’s place and lie in wait until the time was right. It would be more satisfying to slaughter Winchester and his other son in their sleep before he took his boy back-more gratifying just to know how easy it had been, how much even a boogie man like John Winchester couldn’t keep him from doing anything he wanted and getting by with it.
But it would also be riskier. Winchester might notice the difference in mass; might spot inconsistencies in height and density that others would dismiss or overlook. And if he noticed them, he’d know what they meant, and how to defend himself.
That wasn’t a risk the shifter was willing to take. Not when he knew Winchester’s reputation the way he did; not when he’d seen enough of the man in action to realize that reputation was a pale shadow compared to what he would do to someone who killed either one of his sons.
The shifter felt his skin tingling again, felt the exhilarating rush of fear sparking through his senses. His hands trembled with excitement as he found the building’s basement access and forced the old, rusted lock with an equally rusted piece of rebar he’d picked up along the way. He felt alive in a way he hadn’t for years. He wasn’t sure whether or not Winchester had come home again; or if he was out there in the city somewhere, driving around in his muscle car with Cain tied up in the trunk, or sitting huddled in the seat beside him, frozen with terror, afraid to breathe for fear of what a monster like Winchester would do to him.
But it didn’t matter. Wherever Winchester was, he was feeling superior, feeling invincible as he plotted a way to lure a shifter to the slaughter with the scent of the only thing that really mattered to him. The only thing he needed: his boy.
Cain.
But Winchester wasn’t invincible, and he wasn’t superior. He was vulnerable the same way any man was vulnerable. And because he was, no matter where he might be right now, at this moment; sooner or later, he’d come back to this apartment and the boys he’d left here.
And when he did, the shifter would be waiting.
*