SPN fic: If Ever I Cease to Love
Part Three
Genre: gen casefic
Characters: Dean, Sam, various OCs
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,500
Summary: In February of 2008, a hunt takes the Winchesters to New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras. Dean's plan is to work the job, get elbow-deep in oyster po-boys, and hit the parade route. But what Dean plans and what takes place ain't ever exactly been similar.
[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five]
If Ever I Cease to Love
For the next three hours, Dean stayed within shouting distance of Room 314 and tried not to feel like a guard dog chained to a fence. It helped that Maria had her Mac with her, and he could refresh the local news page every ten minutes in case James did anything in the grand tradition of undead attention whores-like, say, tear someone’s arm off or light drunk tourists on fire.
Finally, Sam called to check in. “Nobody’s seen him.”
“You talked to whatsisface?”
“And a dozen other people. His friends all hang out at the neighborhood bars drinking microbrews in this weird little fraternity. And not one of them has even spoken to James in months.”
“Yeah,” Dean sighed. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and it’s all parades. No word on possessed guys with combat training, but hey-Krewe d’Etat rides tonight.”
“Shame we’ll have to miss that.”
“Find him fast, and we’ll be free for Bacchus tomorrow.”
“Sure we will.” Sam took a long, impatient breath, and Dean half-expected him to hang up. But then he said, “It’s weird. They keep talking about how they haven’t seen James much since the storm. About how he enlisted and shipped out right after the storm. Like it never thundered any other time in the whole history of the world.”
“Heh, yeah,” Dean said, glancing at the Broussard girls. They were both asleep, Emma curled on her side and Maria draped over the loveseat. “They get almost religious around here about coming back.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was kind of a script everybody followed when they were meeting up again afterward. Like, ‘Did your family get out okay?’ and ‘How much water did you get?’” Dean blew air through his teeth, remembering the first person to mistake him for a local and ask him that. You ain’t from here? the man said when Dean set him straight. Well, thank the Lord for volunteers like you, son. Two days afterward, Dean caught him in an abandoned house and held a knife to his throat. “Are you coming back.’”
“That’s why they don’t talk to him?” Sam said, unimpressed. “Because he left?”
Way to take it personally there, Sammy. “No. Maybe. I don’t freaking know,” Dean said, giving up grasping for the right words when there were none. “It’s just a thing, okay?”
“Yeah, all right,” Sam said wearily. “Look, by now the spirit should have long since traded hosts, or at least gone dormant. The more we dig into this, the more I’m thinking it’s not a standard issue ghost.”
Dean had been thinking the same thing, even though it opened up a whole bunch of unsavory possibilities. “I don't usually credit spooks with an imagination,” he admitted, scratching the back of his neck. “They like patterns, they pull the same tricks over and over again. But this thing-”
“It’s attached to a person instead of a particular place. And it improvises.”
“If I hadn’t seen the ectoplasm, I’d still be guessing demon.”
“Seriously pissed off spirit with a demon’s MO,” Sam said. “And Elena said it had no name and no past.”
Then it clicked. Ah, fuck.
“That's what hell is,” Dean echoed bitterly. “Forgetting what you are.”
But Sam had already beaten him there, because there was a lot of resignation and no surprise whatsoever in his quiet, “Yeah. It probably busted out last May.”
Dean’s fix was the satisfaction of a righteous kill; Sam’s was the last puzzle piece slotting into place. But not this time.
“I’m on my way back now,” Sam sighed. “See you in a minute.”
Dean flipped the phone closed and slid it lightly onto the bedside table.
“James?”
Emma lay on her side, knees tucked up and hands curled in front of her mouth. Her eyes were focused intently on a point just left of his head, and the effect was unnerving. Dean shifted uneasily in his chair. “No, I’m sorry. James isn’t here. My name’s Dean, remember?”
“Yeah,” she said with a vague frown. “I remember.”
He glanced around the room for anything that might erase the pained crease between her eyebrows. A stuffed animal, maybe. “Do you need something?”
“I still can’t see,” she said, eyes flickering like she was trying to prove the words wrong as she said them. “The doctor said it would go away.”
Dean had no answer for that other than a lame, “Give it time.”
“Hurts,” she muttered, kneading her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut.
On the sofa, Maria groaned and stretched her way back to consciousness. “You’re awake, ti-bé,” she said to Emma. “How’s your head?”
“Can I have, like, the legal limit of morphine?”
“Nope,” Maria said, adjusting the girl’s pillows. “But you can have another monster dose of acetaminophen.”
Just then, her purse started ringing and faintly vibrating next to her. She rummaged around in its depths, pulled out a sleek iPhone in a leather case, and frowned at the screen. Dean raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to get that?”
She tapped a button. “Hello?”
There was a brief silence, and then all the blood seemed to drain from her face. “James.”
“What’s going on?” Emma said, struggling to sit up in bed.
“Speakerphone,” Dean murmured.
Maria took one look at Emma and shook her head hard.
“We’ll be right back,” Dean told Emma, and he hustled Maria into the hall, shutting the door on the kid calling after them. They ducked into the empty room next door, and Maria stroked the iPhone’s screen a few times and held it out between them.
“Maria? Are you there, sweetheart?” Wow, the endearment sounded obscene.
“What do you want?” said Maria.
With her brother’s voice, the spirit said, “You.”
“Oh, this is going somewhere gross,” Dean muttered.
The door creaked open quietly, and Sam poked his head in just in time to hear: “How does it feel in that body, I wonder? The span of those hips and the weight of those breasts?”
Sam froze in the doorway. Dean motioned him in, and he let the door shut behind him with barely a click. He came close to listen.
“Give it to me,” the thing whispered, “and I'll let your pain in the ass brother go.”
“You want to trade James for me?” said Maria.
“You're prettier than he is,” the spook said. “And I'm hoping the new model will behave itself. You should hear the names he's calling me, trapped here in his head.”
“What makes you think I'd agree to that?”
“Because I grew up with you, Mia.” God, Dean could practically hear the smirk. “I could leave you crying on the floor, and you'd still lie to Dad and Emma and the NOPD to cover my ass. You'll do this for me too.”
Shaken, Maria rasped, “Things change.”
“Family doesn't.”
Dean leaned close to the receiver and said, “Take your crazy elsewhere, you sick son of a bitch.”
The spirit only laughed. “Allow me to rephrase: give me what I want, or I'll make do with baby sister.”
Maria growled, “Don't talk about my sister.”
“That's more like it,” the spirit said on a satisfied sigh. “You have twelve hours to decide. I'll call again.”
And he hung up.
For a long, horrible moment, no one said anything, because what had just happened was way too skeevy for words. Sam and Dean carefully didn’t look at each other, and Maria sank into a chair like it was all she could do to keep her shit together.
Sam shifted his weight, hands in his pockets.
“Well. That was fucked up,” Dean said.
In Maria’s hand, the phone buzzed with a faint dial tone.
“Hey,” Dean said, tapping the back of her hand. “It’s not going to come to that, okay?”
She flinched, ended the call, and pocketed the phone.
“We can use this,” Sam said, pacing a few steps away to give himself room to think. At Maria’s startled look, he said, “If he wants a meeting, he's going to have to give us a time and place. It's an engraved invitation to grab him and work an exorcism.”
Dean knew he was right. He’d been thinking the exact same thing. Hell, a couple years back he asked a twelve-year-old to play bait in pretty much the same way. But that wasn’t Sam. Sam could call hypocrisy and bring up Gordon Walker and dead Voodoo priests all he wanted; he still wasn’t supposed to be the gold-plated bastard coming up with shit like that.
But all Dean said was, “You think you can handle it, Maria?”
Looking nauseated, she raised her head from her hands. “You meet him for dinner and a movie if you want. I’m staying here with my sister.”
Which was, of course, the sane response. But in this situation, sanity wasn’t going to cut it. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to be a deal breaker here,” Dean pointed out. “If you don’t show, he bolts, and we lose him again.”
“Then go after him,” she said, wrapping her arms around her middle. “I won’t do it anymore.”
“I’m not sure you understand,” Sam said, as gently as he could. “This thing will burn James’ life down for shits and giggles, and it might hurt a lot of people doing it.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she whispered, and as a master of self-deception, Dean knew desperate bullshit when he heard it.
He bent down next to her, caught her eyes, and said, “He’s your brother.”
Anger sparked in her expression, and for a second Dean thought he’d pressed the right button. But then she dropped her eyes, tightened her arms around herself, and said quietly, “Look, I’ll take the call. You’ll get your time and place, and you can go after him if you want. But please don’t ask me to do this.”
It was dirty pool, but Dean said it anyway: “And when he comes for Emma, like he threatened?”
She didn’t have an answer to that.
“We can protect you, Maria,” Sam said, stepping in smoothly to play good cop. “If you come with us, I promise we won’t let anything happen to you.” She opened her mouth to answer him, but he shook his head and said, “Just think about it, okay? We’ve got time.”
They turned to leave for Emma’s room. Maria stayed in her chair, slowly drawing her knees up and hugging them to her chest.
= = = = =
It was a long twelve hours. The Winchesters spent the time leafing through every ritual, binding spell, and exorcism in their small, mobile library.
“You think a devil’s trap will hold him?”
“Punch him a couple times and sit on him. It worked before.”
“Foolproof as that plan sounds…”
“Yeah, okay, let’s talk contingencies.”
They also had twelve hours to watch over the Broussard sisters, which meant front row seats as Emma's sight stubbornly failed to return. Nurses wheeled the kid away for an MRI, and then again for a couple of other acronyms, and eventually Maria stopped saying, “It's just the concussion, sweetie. It'll go away soon enough."
But with lucidity came questions: Where’s James? Why were those men talking about exorcisms? Who are they?
And then came memories: He hit you, Maria. He tried to strangle you. His eyes went all weird and there was some kind of black gunk.
“Mia,” she said at last, looking very small and totally betrayed. “He would never hurt me. Other people, sure, but… I thought he would never hurt me.”
There was a long silence. Dean remembered waking up on a motel room carpet after a solid pistol-whipping. Through the headache, he’d thought, No way did that shit just happen. Even on the dock, when he damn well knew better, a childish voice in his head insisted, He won’t shoot. He can’t.
Telling the kid the truth wouldn’t be anything like giving her a get well soon card and a teddy bear with a heart on its tummy. But sometimes “He was possessed” was actually the good news.
“Do you want to explain?” Dean said to Maria. “Or should we?”
“Give us a minute,” she whispered.
“We’ll be outside.”
In the hallway, Sam leaned against the wall and said under his breath, "We don't usually have to watch this part.”
"What, the collateral damage?”
Sam let his head thunk back against the plaque marked ROOM 314. “Rolling out of town before the falling action has its perks.”
Dean blew air through his teeth. “Amen to that.”
= = = = =
Emma had long since cried herself to sleep, and the murky light of an early sunset was shading the room in reds and purples when Dean’s cell phone rang. “Hey, Miss Elena.”
On the floor, Sam looked up from his book, and there was something puppyish in his expression. Older women tended to fuss over him; maybe Elena’s careful distance had hit a nerve.
“You free to talk?” she said.
“Sure. Hang on a minute.” Dean got to his feet and took his call to the empty room across the hall, hoping for some privacy.
Maria was pacing in there. “I need to leave a message for J. T. Broussard,” she said very firmly. “As soon as his feet hit the dock, tell him there’s been an emergency at home. Yes. His daughter. Yes. Here’s the number.”
Dean moved on down the hall before she realized he was there. Room 322 stood open. “All right, Miss Elena,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “What’s going on?”
“I thought you should know,” Elena said slowly, “that people are talking.”
Dean bit back a smartass remark. The lady was a conjurer in her sixties; she could be cryptic if she damn well pleased. “About what, ma’am?”
“It seems like I got every hunter, medium, and occultist in the city ringing me up and asking me what I know about the Winchester boys,” she said.
She wouldn’t appreciate it if he demanded to know what she’d said. Instead he asked, “Do they know we’re in town?”
“Honey, think where you are,” she said patiently.
They were in the most haunted city in the country, he realized. The supernatural capital of the United States. Elena once told Dean that if he wanted to stitch a life together out of the hunter’s world and the daylight world, New Orleans was the place to do it. The freaks waved their flags in the open here.
And they gossiped. Maybe someone recognized the nosy young men with the hotass car and set the wires humming.
“So what’s got everybody’s panties in a twist?” Dean said on a sigh.
“Your brother,” she said flatly. “There’s a lot of folks uneasy about him. Months worth of rumors are following that boy around.”
“Well, you can tell those ignorant assholes that my brother is-”
“Do not raise your voice to me, young man,” she said sharply.
“Sorry,” he groused. “Sorry. Keep going.”
She paused to let him feel the weight of his infraction. Then, regally, she continued, “One little hedgewitch asked me if it was true you had a gun could kill demons.”
He manufactured a scornful laugh.
“Yeah, that’s what I told her.”
“All right,” Dean said, scratching irritably at the nape of his neck. “Thanks for calling.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and seemed to mean it. “Take care of those girls, you hear? And be careful.”
Dean pressed END, tucked the phone in his pocket, and headed back to 314. Sam met him in the hallway, just outside the door.
“What did Elena say?”
“That we’re infamous, and no one likes your face,” Dean said.
Sam blinked, translated, and sighed. “You’d think I traveled with an entourage of imps waving pitchforks,” he muttered. “Anything useful about our guy?”
“No, just the heads-up.”
The puppyish look came back for an encore, and underneath it Dean could practically see Sam mentally weighing the next words out of his mouth. As usual, he decided to damn the torpedoes. “Have you talked to her about your deal at all?”
Dean would be lying if he said it hadn’t occurred to him. But a few other things had occurred to him in quick succession and put paid to the idea. “No,” he said firmly. “And you’re not going to, either.”
Sam skipped right past surprise and went straight to pissy frustration. “Why not?”
Because Dean had already come in from the dark once, and she’d looked at him different.
“We’ve already got people calling her to ask if you’re the Anti-Christ,” Dean said quietly, casting glances up and down the hall. “You want to advertise the unholy resurrection shit?”
Sam stared at him like he’d just single-handedly lowered the average IQ of the whole building by ten points. “Dean. Three months. We are way past that.”
Dean chewed that over, nodding, and came to a conclusion. “Tell her, and I’ll shave your eyebrows off while you sleep.”
He pushed past Sam into the room, and he left him standing out in the hall, fuming.
= = = = =
At one-thirty in the morning, Emma woke up in pain “like the migraine to end all migraines,” and she’d already hit her safe limit of drugs. Maria tried to soothe her and pet her, but the kid rolled away from her touch. Big sister had offered too much empty reassurance lately, Dean figured.
After a few minutes, Emma reached for the bedside table and pawed across it until her fingers closed on a ratty pink paperback. She held it out to Dean, who was sprawled in the chair next to her, and she said, “Distract me?”
He definitely did not freeze like a cornered rabbit, whatever Sam said later. He was just a little surprised.
“I’ve got it,” Sam said when he didn’t reply, sitting forward in his chair.
But Dean thought he understood. You sound like him.
Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all.
“As long as it’s not the freaking Babysitters’ Club,” Dean grumbled, reaching out and taking the book from her. He turned it over in his hands and read, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“My first crush was Jem Finch,” Emma said through a tight smile.
“I’d have thought you’d be an Atticus girl.”
“You’ve read it before?”
“Nah. But Gregory Peck is the man. All right, um.” Pages whispered under his fingers. “From the beginning?”
“Chapter eight, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Sure thing.”
The silence in the room seemed to yawn open suddenly into a great, expectant space Dean had to fill. Sam and Maria were an unwelcome audience, but asking them to leave would be too much like admitting to stage fright. He glared, and they both became very interested in their magazines. So Dean cleared his throat, thumbed through well-loved pages, and settled deeper in the chair. With awkward pauses and no particular grace, he started to read. “For reasons unfathomable to the most esperi-“ he licked his lips, “experienced prophets of Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year.”
Emma’s blank eyes closed, leaking tears that dripped messily and stuck her eyelashes together. She breathed in carefully, breathed out.
The reading got easier. Once he’d caught the rhythm, Dean couldn’t stop himself throwing in the occasional “Ha, the Finch-man is snarky” or “whoa, there, dropping an n-bomb.” But by the time Scout Finch huddled under Jem’s arm and watched a house burn, the words came sure and steady, and Emma breathed in time with them.
“You awake, kiddo?” Dean said hoarsely at the end of a paragraph.
She didn’t reply.
Across the room, Maria mouthed, “Thank you.”
Dean shrugged out from under her thanks, and then he reached out with one foot and prodded Sam’s knee. As a peace offering, he invited his brother to laugh at him. “I think I just read a bedtime story.”
Sam’s expression said, You’re still an idiot. But his eyebrows amended: You’re an idiot with redeeming qualities.
Perched on her knee, Maria’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. “Unfamiliar number,” she said. “I think it’s him.”
It was. She and Sam and Dean huddled together to take the call.
“Decision time,” the spirit said, crackly over the speakerphone.
Off Sam’s steady nod, Maria said: “Where do I meet you?”
“That’s my girl.” He gave her an address on Annunciation Street, close to the river. “Come alone. Leave the hunters with Emma. If I even suspect they’ve followed you, I’ll shoot you on sight.”
Sam gave another nod, and Maria took a deep breath and said, “Before I do this, I want a show of good faith.”
“Such as?”
“Let me talk to my brother. Call it proof of life.”
There was a long silence in which everyone stared intently at the phone. Then they heard a soft choking noise, and a very different tone of voice said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Maria?”
For the first time, Dean halfway understood how Emma could mistake him for James.
“Are you hurt?” Maria said.
“If you go through with this-I swear to God-don’t you fucking dare-”
They heard a scuffling sound, heavy breathing, and the rap of the phone hitting the floor. A moment later, the spirit was panting on the line: “You have half an hour. Then I come for your sister, and I take her skin for a joy ride and sink this town into terror it hasn’t known since-“
Sam pressed End Call, shaking his head irritably. “They always monologue.”
Dean yanked his jacket on and patted his car keys in his pocket. “Let’s get moving.”
“Wait,” Maria said anxiously. “Just wait.” The hand she held up was trembling faintly, and Dean thought that maybe not all of the adrenaline shakes were terror.
“What is it?” Sam said.
“I’m coming with you,” she said, looking queasy. “Just give me two seconds.”
And she ducked into the bathroom. Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Nervous puking was always awkward.
But a moment later she emerged with a fresh coat of red lipstick. “Okay.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Dean angled his are-you-crazy eyebrow at her. “Now we can go?”
She turned her face up to him earnestly, as if to remind him just how much she was trusting him and Sam here. “Now we can go.”
Dean gestured gallantly to the door Sam was holding open. “After you.”
Maria gave her sister a last, worried look, and then she led the way down the hall.
Just before he followed her out, Sam paused and shook his head at Dean. “And you thought you were going to parades tonight.”
= = = = =
They rode downtown through the detritus of Thoth and Bacchus. St. Charles Avenue was littered with plastic bags and beer cans, pressure-washed to the gutters by the city’s cleanup crews. Broken strings of beads crunched under the wheels of Maria’s Chevy Malibu.
“Remember, don’t look for us,” Sam said with his knees hunched up in the passenger seat. “And don’t try to talk to us.”
“If he tries any hostage bullshit,” Dean said, perched on the edge of the backseat and leaning between the front armrests, “go limp like you fainted. It’s really hard to drag a human shield.”
“Keep him talking, and keep him from touching you for as long as possible.”
“And if it all goes to hell, run. Get back to the hospital and call the number we gave you for Bobby Singer.”
Maria nodded along, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel.
Sam gave her a curious, sideways glance. “Why’d you decide to do it?”
“Because he told me not to.”
They parked in the lonely shadows of an old, rusted-out factory near the river. Maria started walking, heading straight for Annunciation, and the Winchesters took a more roundabout route through abandoned buildings and empty streets. This district cleared out at night; shipping cranes and conveyor belts went still, port authority workers went home, and the river rushed by untroubled.
“What do you figure our odds are?” Sam muttered.
“With the whole thing hinging on a civilian? Seventy percent chance of catastrophe,” Dean said. Under Sam’s raised eyebrow, he shrugged. “Dad did the math once.”
They kept pace with Maria from a distance, and they watched her slowly approach a plain, sheet metal-constructed warehouse. After a moment’s hesitation, she shouldered open the small side door. A few head jerks and hand gestures, and Sam and Dean melted apart in the darkness, Dean following Maria, Sam looking for a back way in.
She’d left the door open, as instructed, and he slipped through it without touching anything. Inside, great, pale shapes loomed in the dimness. His eyes adjusted, and he realized what he was looking at.
Floats.
Eighteen feet high, fourteen feet wide, they stood in patient ranks. The closest one was covered in giant, pearly flowers two feet across, each glimmering at the edges with silver leaf. “Krewe of Orpheus” said the painted plywood title card propped nearby. They rode tomorrow night, he remembered.
I’m in a John Woo movie, he thought, allowing himself a quick grin. It’s the end of Hard Target, and I am Van Damme, bitch.
He passed under one float’s prow-a giant, luminous jester’s head grinning manically under its bell cap. Oh, Sam was going to love that.
Shoes scraped on the concrete. Dean peered around the corner of a float made up like a steam engine, and he raised his eyebrows.
A massive, brightly-colored dragon glared down at him with yellow eyes and a forked tongue running out. Holy shit, the thing had to be more than a hundred feet long; you could fit a person in its open mouth. In its shadow, Maria stood ramrod straight, jacket hugged around her in the chill.
Ten yards from her was close enough. Dean readied his sawed-off and stood motionless.
It felt too early to worry; something told him they had a little while until the spirit’s half-hour timetable was up. It was too early to worry that they’d been made, too early to think that any second now he was going to walk up and shoot their bait in the face.
The minutes ticked by, and Dean’s senses tuned to the silence until his every breath sounded like a wind tunnel and his pulse crashed too loud in his ears. He breathed through it, reciting the plan in his head, relishing the thrum of adrenaline in his blood.
Heavy footsteps echoed. Boots. The sound was hard to place in the weird acoustics of a warehouse.
Dean’s pulse spiked, but he didn’t move a muscle.
“Hello, Maria,” said James’ voice, nowhere and everywhere. “You’ve left your white knights behind?”
“They’re with Emma,” she told the empty space around her, looking over both shoulders. “Enforcing visiting hours.”
The urge to go sidling through floats and get a bead on that sick bastard was tugging at Dean’s nerves. All of Dad’s training screamed: Find it and kill it.
But that wasn’t Dean’s role here. He kept Maria in sight, and he held his position.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the spirit said smoothly. For a given value of hurt, it was probably true, Dean thought. Trap you in a little corner of your own damn brain fell under a different claims category on the insurance.
“Where are you?” Maria demanded. From thirty feet away, Dean could see her shaking.
“I’m coming, sweetheart,” the spirit said as though reassuring a child. “I’m coming.”
A shotgun blast echoed to the high ceiling.
Dean took off running, following the sound of the agonized screaming and Sam bellowing, “Stay down! I said stay down!”
At the feet of a hulking Trojan horse, hung with painted shields and wreaths of gilded flowers, James was rolling on the floor, arms raised painfully in surrender. He’d taken a round of rock salt to the chest, and Dean remembered how that could knock you on your ass. Sam stood over him, sawed-off at the ready.
“Nice shot, Sammy,” Dean said, digging in his pocket for the cable ties.
Sam nodded modestly, breathing deep through his nose to quiet the adrenaline rush. “Sorry, James,” he said with a grimace. “I don’t think you’re getting the deposit back on the tux.”
[Part Four]
Genre: gen casefic
Characters: Dean, Sam, various OCs
Rating: R
Word Count: 4,500
Summary: In February of 2008, a hunt takes the Winchesters to New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras. Dean's plan is to work the job, get elbow-deep in oyster po-boys, and hit the parade route. But what Dean plans and what takes place ain't ever exactly been similar.
[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five]
If Ever I Cease to Love
For the next three hours, Dean stayed within shouting distance of Room 314 and tried not to feel like a guard dog chained to a fence. It helped that Maria had her Mac with her, and he could refresh the local news page every ten minutes in case James did anything in the grand tradition of undead attention whores-like, say, tear someone’s arm off or light drunk tourists on fire.
Finally, Sam called to check in. “Nobody’s seen him.”
“You talked to whatsisface?”
“And a dozen other people. His friends all hang out at the neighborhood bars drinking microbrews in this weird little fraternity. And not one of them has even spoken to James in months.”
“Yeah,” Dean sighed. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the news, and it’s all parades. No word on possessed guys with combat training, but hey-Krewe d’Etat rides tonight.”
“Shame we’ll have to miss that.”
“Find him fast, and we’ll be free for Bacchus tomorrow.”
“Sure we will.” Sam took a long, impatient breath, and Dean half-expected him to hang up. But then he said, “It’s weird. They keep talking about how they haven’t seen James much since the storm. About how he enlisted and shipped out right after the storm. Like it never thundered any other time in the whole history of the world.”
“Heh, yeah,” Dean said, glancing at the Broussard girls. They were both asleep, Emma curled on her side and Maria draped over the loveseat. “They get almost religious around here about coming back.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was kind of a script everybody followed when they were meeting up again afterward. Like, ‘Did your family get out okay?’ and ‘How much water did you get?’” Dean blew air through his teeth, remembering the first person to mistake him for a local and ask him that. You ain’t from here? the man said when Dean set him straight. Well, thank the Lord for volunteers like you, son. Two days afterward, Dean caught him in an abandoned house and held a knife to his throat. “Are you coming back.’”
“That’s why they don’t talk to him?” Sam said, unimpressed. “Because he left?”
Way to take it personally there, Sammy. “No. Maybe. I don’t freaking know,” Dean said, giving up grasping for the right words when there were none. “It’s just a thing, okay?”
“Yeah, all right,” Sam said wearily. “Look, by now the spirit should have long since traded hosts, or at least gone dormant. The more we dig into this, the more I’m thinking it’s not a standard issue ghost.”
Dean had been thinking the same thing, even though it opened up a whole bunch of unsavory possibilities. “I don't usually credit spooks with an imagination,” he admitted, scratching the back of his neck. “They like patterns, they pull the same tricks over and over again. But this thing-”
“It’s attached to a person instead of a particular place. And it improvises.”
“If I hadn’t seen the ectoplasm, I’d still be guessing demon.”
“Seriously pissed off spirit with a demon’s MO,” Sam said. “And Elena said it had no name and no past.”
Then it clicked. Ah, fuck.
“That's what hell is,” Dean echoed bitterly. “Forgetting what you are.”
But Sam had already beaten him there, because there was a lot of resignation and no surprise whatsoever in his quiet, “Yeah. It probably busted out last May.”
Dean’s fix was the satisfaction of a righteous kill; Sam’s was the last puzzle piece slotting into place. But not this time.
“I’m on my way back now,” Sam sighed. “See you in a minute.”
Dean flipped the phone closed and slid it lightly onto the bedside table.
“James?”
Emma lay on her side, knees tucked up and hands curled in front of her mouth. Her eyes were focused intently on a point just left of his head, and the effect was unnerving. Dean shifted uneasily in his chair. “No, I’m sorry. James isn’t here. My name’s Dean, remember?”
“Yeah,” she said with a vague frown. “I remember.”
He glanced around the room for anything that might erase the pained crease between her eyebrows. A stuffed animal, maybe. “Do you need something?”
“I still can’t see,” she said, eyes flickering like she was trying to prove the words wrong as she said them. “The doctor said it would go away.”
Dean had no answer for that other than a lame, “Give it time.”
“Hurts,” she muttered, kneading her forehead and squeezing her eyes shut.
On the sofa, Maria groaned and stretched her way back to consciousness. “You’re awake, ti-bé,” she said to Emma. “How’s your head?”
“Can I have, like, the legal limit of morphine?”
“Nope,” Maria said, adjusting the girl’s pillows. “But you can have another monster dose of acetaminophen.”
Just then, her purse started ringing and faintly vibrating next to her. She rummaged around in its depths, pulled out a sleek iPhone in a leather case, and frowned at the screen. Dean raised an eyebrow. “Are you going to get that?”
She tapped a button. “Hello?”
There was a brief silence, and then all the blood seemed to drain from her face. “James.”
“What’s going on?” Emma said, struggling to sit up in bed.
“Speakerphone,” Dean murmured.
Maria took one look at Emma and shook her head hard.
“We’ll be right back,” Dean told Emma, and he hustled Maria into the hall, shutting the door on the kid calling after them. They ducked into the empty room next door, and Maria stroked the iPhone’s screen a few times and held it out between them.
“Maria? Are you there, sweetheart?” Wow, the endearment sounded obscene.
“What do you want?” said Maria.
With her brother’s voice, the spirit said, “You.”
“Oh, this is going somewhere gross,” Dean muttered.
The door creaked open quietly, and Sam poked his head in just in time to hear: “How does it feel in that body, I wonder? The span of those hips and the weight of those breasts?”
Sam froze in the doorway. Dean motioned him in, and he let the door shut behind him with barely a click. He came close to listen.
“Give it to me,” the thing whispered, “and I'll let your pain in the ass brother go.”
“You want to trade James for me?” said Maria.
“You're prettier than he is,” the spook said. “And I'm hoping the new model will behave itself. You should hear the names he's calling me, trapped here in his head.”
“What makes you think I'd agree to that?”
“Because I grew up with you, Mia.” God, Dean could practically hear the smirk. “I could leave you crying on the floor, and you'd still lie to Dad and Emma and the NOPD to cover my ass. You'll do this for me too.”
Shaken, Maria rasped, “Things change.”
“Family doesn't.”
Dean leaned close to the receiver and said, “Take your crazy elsewhere, you sick son of a bitch.”
The spirit only laughed. “Allow me to rephrase: give me what I want, or I'll make do with baby sister.”
Maria growled, “Don't talk about my sister.”
“That's more like it,” the spirit said on a satisfied sigh. “You have twelve hours to decide. I'll call again.”
And he hung up.
For a long, horrible moment, no one said anything, because what had just happened was way too skeevy for words. Sam and Dean carefully didn’t look at each other, and Maria sank into a chair like it was all she could do to keep her shit together.
Sam shifted his weight, hands in his pockets.
“Well. That was fucked up,” Dean said.
In Maria’s hand, the phone buzzed with a faint dial tone.
“Hey,” Dean said, tapping the back of her hand. “It’s not going to come to that, okay?”
She flinched, ended the call, and pocketed the phone.
“We can use this,” Sam said, pacing a few steps away to give himself room to think. At Maria’s startled look, he said, “If he wants a meeting, he's going to have to give us a time and place. It's an engraved invitation to grab him and work an exorcism.”
Dean knew he was right. He’d been thinking the exact same thing. Hell, a couple years back he asked a twelve-year-old to play bait in pretty much the same way. But that wasn’t Sam. Sam could call hypocrisy and bring up Gordon Walker and dead Voodoo priests all he wanted; he still wasn’t supposed to be the gold-plated bastard coming up with shit like that.
But all Dean said was, “You think you can handle it, Maria?”
Looking nauseated, she raised her head from her hands. “You meet him for dinner and a movie if you want. I’m staying here with my sister.”
Which was, of course, the sane response. But in this situation, sanity wasn’t going to cut it. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to be a deal breaker here,” Dean pointed out. “If you don’t show, he bolts, and we lose him again.”
“Then go after him,” she said, wrapping her arms around her middle. “I won’t do it anymore.”
“I’m not sure you understand,” Sam said, as gently as he could. “This thing will burn James’ life down for shits and giggles, and it might hurt a lot of people doing it.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she whispered, and as a master of self-deception, Dean knew desperate bullshit when he heard it.
He bent down next to her, caught her eyes, and said, “He’s your brother.”
Anger sparked in her expression, and for a second Dean thought he’d pressed the right button. But then she dropped her eyes, tightened her arms around herself, and said quietly, “Look, I’ll take the call. You’ll get your time and place, and you can go after him if you want. But please don’t ask me to do this.”
It was dirty pool, but Dean said it anyway: “And when he comes for Emma, like he threatened?”
She didn’t have an answer to that.
“We can protect you, Maria,” Sam said, stepping in smoothly to play good cop. “If you come with us, I promise we won’t let anything happen to you.” She opened her mouth to answer him, but he shook his head and said, “Just think about it, okay? We’ve got time.”
They turned to leave for Emma’s room. Maria stayed in her chair, slowly drawing her knees up and hugging them to her chest.
= = = = =
It was a long twelve hours. The Winchesters spent the time leafing through every ritual, binding spell, and exorcism in their small, mobile library.
“You think a devil’s trap will hold him?”
“Punch him a couple times and sit on him. It worked before.”
“Foolproof as that plan sounds…”
“Yeah, okay, let’s talk contingencies.”
They also had twelve hours to watch over the Broussard sisters, which meant front row seats as Emma's sight stubbornly failed to return. Nurses wheeled the kid away for an MRI, and then again for a couple of other acronyms, and eventually Maria stopped saying, “It's just the concussion, sweetie. It'll go away soon enough."
But with lucidity came questions: Where’s James? Why were those men talking about exorcisms? Who are they?
And then came memories: He hit you, Maria. He tried to strangle you. His eyes went all weird and there was some kind of black gunk.
“Mia,” she said at last, looking very small and totally betrayed. “He would never hurt me. Other people, sure, but… I thought he would never hurt me.”
There was a long silence. Dean remembered waking up on a motel room carpet after a solid pistol-whipping. Through the headache, he’d thought, No way did that shit just happen. Even on the dock, when he damn well knew better, a childish voice in his head insisted, He won’t shoot. He can’t.
Telling the kid the truth wouldn’t be anything like giving her a get well soon card and a teddy bear with a heart on its tummy. But sometimes “He was possessed” was actually the good news.
“Do you want to explain?” Dean said to Maria. “Or should we?”
“Give us a minute,” she whispered.
“We’ll be outside.”
In the hallway, Sam leaned against the wall and said under his breath, "We don't usually have to watch this part.”
"What, the collateral damage?”
Sam let his head thunk back against the plaque marked ROOM 314. “Rolling out of town before the falling action has its perks.”
Dean blew air through his teeth. “Amen to that.”
= = = = =
Emma had long since cried herself to sleep, and the murky light of an early sunset was shading the room in reds and purples when Dean’s cell phone rang. “Hey, Miss Elena.”
On the floor, Sam looked up from his book, and there was something puppyish in his expression. Older women tended to fuss over him; maybe Elena’s careful distance had hit a nerve.
“You free to talk?” she said.
“Sure. Hang on a minute.” Dean got to his feet and took his call to the empty room across the hall, hoping for some privacy.
Maria was pacing in there. “I need to leave a message for J. T. Broussard,” she said very firmly. “As soon as his feet hit the dock, tell him there’s been an emergency at home. Yes. His daughter. Yes. Here’s the number.”
Dean moved on down the hall before she realized he was there. Room 322 stood open. “All right, Miss Elena,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “What’s going on?”
“I thought you should know,” Elena said slowly, “that people are talking.”
Dean bit back a smartass remark. The lady was a conjurer in her sixties; she could be cryptic if she damn well pleased. “About what, ma’am?”
“It seems like I got every hunter, medium, and occultist in the city ringing me up and asking me what I know about the Winchester boys,” she said.
She wouldn’t appreciate it if he demanded to know what she’d said. Instead he asked, “Do they know we’re in town?”
“Honey, think where you are,” she said patiently.
They were in the most haunted city in the country, he realized. The supernatural capital of the United States. Elena once told Dean that if he wanted to stitch a life together out of the hunter’s world and the daylight world, New Orleans was the place to do it. The freaks waved their flags in the open here.
And they gossiped. Maybe someone recognized the nosy young men with the hotass car and set the wires humming.
“So what’s got everybody’s panties in a twist?” Dean said on a sigh.
“Your brother,” she said flatly. “There’s a lot of folks uneasy about him. Months worth of rumors are following that boy around.”
“Well, you can tell those ignorant assholes that my brother is-”
“Do not raise your voice to me, young man,” she said sharply.
“Sorry,” he groused. “Sorry. Keep going.”
She paused to let him feel the weight of his infraction. Then, regally, she continued, “One little hedgewitch asked me if it was true you had a gun could kill demons.”
He manufactured a scornful laugh.
“Yeah, that’s what I told her.”
“All right,” Dean said, scratching irritably at the nape of his neck. “Thanks for calling.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and seemed to mean it. “Take care of those girls, you hear? And be careful.”
Dean pressed END, tucked the phone in his pocket, and headed back to 314. Sam met him in the hallway, just outside the door.
“What did Elena say?”
“That we’re infamous, and no one likes your face,” Dean said.
Sam blinked, translated, and sighed. “You’d think I traveled with an entourage of imps waving pitchforks,” he muttered. “Anything useful about our guy?”
“No, just the heads-up.”
The puppyish look came back for an encore, and underneath it Dean could practically see Sam mentally weighing the next words out of his mouth. As usual, he decided to damn the torpedoes. “Have you talked to her about your deal at all?”
Dean would be lying if he said it hadn’t occurred to him. But a few other things had occurred to him in quick succession and put paid to the idea. “No,” he said firmly. “And you’re not going to, either.”
Sam skipped right past surprise and went straight to pissy frustration. “Why not?”
Because Dean had already come in from the dark once, and she’d looked at him different.
“We’ve already got people calling her to ask if you’re the Anti-Christ,” Dean said quietly, casting glances up and down the hall. “You want to advertise the unholy resurrection shit?”
Sam stared at him like he’d just single-handedly lowered the average IQ of the whole building by ten points. “Dean. Three months. We are way past that.”
Dean chewed that over, nodding, and came to a conclusion. “Tell her, and I’ll shave your eyebrows off while you sleep.”
He pushed past Sam into the room, and he left him standing out in the hall, fuming.
= = = = =
At one-thirty in the morning, Emma woke up in pain “like the migraine to end all migraines,” and she’d already hit her safe limit of drugs. Maria tried to soothe her and pet her, but the kid rolled away from her touch. Big sister had offered too much empty reassurance lately, Dean figured.
After a few minutes, Emma reached for the bedside table and pawed across it until her fingers closed on a ratty pink paperback. She held it out to Dean, who was sprawled in the chair next to her, and she said, “Distract me?”
He definitely did not freeze like a cornered rabbit, whatever Sam said later. He was just a little surprised.
“I’ve got it,” Sam said when he didn’t reply, sitting forward in his chair.
But Dean thought he understood. You sound like him.
Yeah, that wasn’t creepy at all.
“As long as it’s not the freaking Babysitters’ Club,” Dean grumbled, reaching out and taking the book from her. He turned it over in his hands and read, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“My first crush was Jem Finch,” Emma said through a tight smile.
“I’d have thought you’d be an Atticus girl.”
“You’ve read it before?”
“Nah. But Gregory Peck is the man. All right, um.” Pages whispered under his fingers. “From the beginning?”
“Chapter eight, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Sure thing.”
The silence in the room seemed to yawn open suddenly into a great, expectant space Dean had to fill. Sam and Maria were an unwelcome audience, but asking them to leave would be too much like admitting to stage fright. He glared, and they both became very interested in their magazines. So Dean cleared his throat, thumbed through well-loved pages, and settled deeper in the chair. With awkward pauses and no particular grace, he started to read. “For reasons unfathomable to the most esperi-“ he licked his lips, “experienced prophets of Maycomb County, autumn turned to winter that year.”
Emma’s blank eyes closed, leaking tears that dripped messily and stuck her eyelashes together. She breathed in carefully, breathed out.
The reading got easier. Once he’d caught the rhythm, Dean couldn’t stop himself throwing in the occasional “Ha, the Finch-man is snarky” or “whoa, there, dropping an n-bomb.” But by the time Scout Finch huddled under Jem’s arm and watched a house burn, the words came sure and steady, and Emma breathed in time with them.
“You awake, kiddo?” Dean said hoarsely at the end of a paragraph.
She didn’t reply.
Across the room, Maria mouthed, “Thank you.”
Dean shrugged out from under her thanks, and then he reached out with one foot and prodded Sam’s knee. As a peace offering, he invited his brother to laugh at him. “I think I just read a bedtime story.”
Sam’s expression said, You’re still an idiot. But his eyebrows amended: You’re an idiot with redeeming qualities.
Perched on her knee, Maria’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated. “Unfamiliar number,” she said. “I think it’s him.”
It was. She and Sam and Dean huddled together to take the call.
“Decision time,” the spirit said, crackly over the speakerphone.
Off Sam’s steady nod, Maria said: “Where do I meet you?”
“That’s my girl.” He gave her an address on Annunciation Street, close to the river. “Come alone. Leave the hunters with Emma. If I even suspect they’ve followed you, I’ll shoot you on sight.”
Sam gave another nod, and Maria took a deep breath and said, “Before I do this, I want a show of good faith.”
“Such as?”
“Let me talk to my brother. Call it proof of life.”
There was a long silence in which everyone stared intently at the phone. Then they heard a soft choking noise, and a very different tone of voice said, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Maria?”
For the first time, Dean halfway understood how Emma could mistake him for James.
“Are you hurt?” Maria said.
“If you go through with this-I swear to God-don’t you fucking dare-”
They heard a scuffling sound, heavy breathing, and the rap of the phone hitting the floor. A moment later, the spirit was panting on the line: “You have half an hour. Then I come for your sister, and I take her skin for a joy ride and sink this town into terror it hasn’t known since-“
Sam pressed End Call, shaking his head irritably. “They always monologue.”
Dean yanked his jacket on and patted his car keys in his pocket. “Let’s get moving.”
“Wait,” Maria said anxiously. “Just wait.” The hand she held up was trembling faintly, and Dean thought that maybe not all of the adrenaline shakes were terror.
“What is it?” Sam said.
“I’m coming with you,” she said, looking queasy. “Just give me two seconds.”
And she ducked into the bathroom. Sam and Dean exchanged glances. Nervous puking was always awkward.
But a moment later she emerged with a fresh coat of red lipstick. “Okay.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Dean angled his are-you-crazy eyebrow at her. “Now we can go?”
She turned her face up to him earnestly, as if to remind him just how much she was trusting him and Sam here. “Now we can go.”
Dean gestured gallantly to the door Sam was holding open. “After you.”
Maria gave her sister a last, worried look, and then she led the way down the hall.
Just before he followed her out, Sam paused and shook his head at Dean. “And you thought you were going to parades tonight.”
= = = = =
They rode downtown through the detritus of Thoth and Bacchus. St. Charles Avenue was littered with plastic bags and beer cans, pressure-washed to the gutters by the city’s cleanup crews. Broken strings of beads crunched under the wheels of Maria’s Chevy Malibu.
“Remember, don’t look for us,” Sam said with his knees hunched up in the passenger seat. “And don’t try to talk to us.”
“If he tries any hostage bullshit,” Dean said, perched on the edge of the backseat and leaning between the front armrests, “go limp like you fainted. It’s really hard to drag a human shield.”
“Keep him talking, and keep him from touching you for as long as possible.”
“And if it all goes to hell, run. Get back to the hospital and call the number we gave you for Bobby Singer.”
Maria nodded along, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel.
Sam gave her a curious, sideways glance. “Why’d you decide to do it?”
“Because he told me not to.”
They parked in the lonely shadows of an old, rusted-out factory near the river. Maria started walking, heading straight for Annunciation, and the Winchesters took a more roundabout route through abandoned buildings and empty streets. This district cleared out at night; shipping cranes and conveyor belts went still, port authority workers went home, and the river rushed by untroubled.
“What do you figure our odds are?” Sam muttered.
“With the whole thing hinging on a civilian? Seventy percent chance of catastrophe,” Dean said. Under Sam’s raised eyebrow, he shrugged. “Dad did the math once.”
They kept pace with Maria from a distance, and they watched her slowly approach a plain, sheet metal-constructed warehouse. After a moment’s hesitation, she shouldered open the small side door. A few head jerks and hand gestures, and Sam and Dean melted apart in the darkness, Dean following Maria, Sam looking for a back way in.
She’d left the door open, as instructed, and he slipped through it without touching anything. Inside, great, pale shapes loomed in the dimness. His eyes adjusted, and he realized what he was looking at.
Floats.
Eighteen feet high, fourteen feet wide, they stood in patient ranks. The closest one was covered in giant, pearly flowers two feet across, each glimmering at the edges with silver leaf. “Krewe of Orpheus” said the painted plywood title card propped nearby. They rode tomorrow night, he remembered.
I’m in a John Woo movie, he thought, allowing himself a quick grin. It’s the end of Hard Target, and I am Van Damme, bitch.
He passed under one float’s prow-a giant, luminous jester’s head grinning manically under its bell cap. Oh, Sam was going to love that.
Shoes scraped on the concrete. Dean peered around the corner of a float made up like a steam engine, and he raised his eyebrows.
A massive, brightly-colored dragon glared down at him with yellow eyes and a forked tongue running out. Holy shit, the thing had to be more than a hundred feet long; you could fit a person in its open mouth. In its shadow, Maria stood ramrod straight, jacket hugged around her in the chill.
Ten yards from her was close enough. Dean readied his sawed-off and stood motionless.
It felt too early to worry; something told him they had a little while until the spirit’s half-hour timetable was up. It was too early to worry that they’d been made, too early to think that any second now he was going to walk up and shoot their bait in the face.
The minutes ticked by, and Dean’s senses tuned to the silence until his every breath sounded like a wind tunnel and his pulse crashed too loud in his ears. He breathed through it, reciting the plan in his head, relishing the thrum of adrenaline in his blood.
Heavy footsteps echoed. Boots. The sound was hard to place in the weird acoustics of a warehouse.
Dean’s pulse spiked, but he didn’t move a muscle.
“Hello, Maria,” said James’ voice, nowhere and everywhere. “You’ve left your white knights behind?”
“They’re with Emma,” she told the empty space around her, looking over both shoulders. “Enforcing visiting hours.”
The urge to go sidling through floats and get a bead on that sick bastard was tugging at Dean’s nerves. All of Dad’s training screamed: Find it and kill it.
But that wasn’t Dean’s role here. He kept Maria in sight, and he held his position.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the spirit said smoothly. For a given value of hurt, it was probably true, Dean thought. Trap you in a little corner of your own damn brain fell under a different claims category on the insurance.
“Where are you?” Maria demanded. From thirty feet away, Dean could see her shaking.
“I’m coming, sweetheart,” the spirit said as though reassuring a child. “I’m coming.”
A shotgun blast echoed to the high ceiling.
Dean took off running, following the sound of the agonized screaming and Sam bellowing, “Stay down! I said stay down!”
At the feet of a hulking Trojan horse, hung with painted shields and wreaths of gilded flowers, James was rolling on the floor, arms raised painfully in surrender. He’d taken a round of rock salt to the chest, and Dean remembered how that could knock you on your ass. Sam stood over him, sawed-off at the ready.
“Nice shot, Sammy,” Dean said, digging in his pocket for the cable ties.
Sam nodded modestly, breathing deep through his nose to quiet the adrenaline rush. “Sorry, James,” he said with a grimace. “I don’t think you’re getting the deposit back on the tux.”
[Part Four]