The Witches of Salem | Part 3
Title: The Witches of Salem
By: revenant_scribe
Part Three:
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-14 | Word Count: 7,061
“You’ve been pretty quiet,” Sam pointed out, as he pulled into the parking lot of the motel and cut the engine.
Dean twitched an ear but otherwise did not comment.
“Dean?”
“I’ve been a cat for three hundred and seven years,” Dean said. “I guess I just thought…whatever.”
Sam shifted his gaze briefly to the where Dean sat. “What did you think?”
“That when it was over, and they were really gone for good, that maybe I could be too.” Dean thrashed his tail once in agitation, glanced at Sam then away. “I could maybe move on.”
Sam frowned, but there really wasn’t anything he could say to that. The curse on Dean had made him immortal, and Sam couldn’t think of anything lonelier. He looked out the windshield of the car and found himself frowning harder. “They’re still asleep.”
Dean hopped up onto the dash and peered out at the slumped body of the man who had fallen asleep in the motel parking lot. “They probably just need to sleep off the spell.”
Sam considered that. He’d thought that, with the witches gone, the release from the spell would be instantaneous. Then again, maybe it related to the specifications of the spell that was cast. After all, Dean was still a cat, but he’d been cursed to live in that form for eternity. Sam didn’t think the witches had cast such a drastic spell on the townsfolk.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said, nodding. “I think you’re right.” He opened the door and waited for Dean to follow him out into the cold night air. “Come on. We’ll figure this out, alright?”
______________________________
It was late, or early. The television was on, House on Haunted Hill playing at a near-silent volume, though not quiet enough to dull the sinister tones of Vincent Price’s voice. Sam could remember seeing the film when he’d been a kid, staying up late because his dad was on a hunt. -He’d felt so grown-up, taking care of himself while his dad had been gone. It was just one night alone, but Sam had stayed up because there had been no one to tell him to get to bed, and he’d watched the film and been utterly terrified as a result. He’d spent the night curled into a corner of the sofa, every single light in the apartment turned on, huddled beneath a mound of every blanket and pillow he could find. When his dad had come home, he’d scooped Sam up and tucked him under the covers of his bed, and Sam had fallen asleep while his dad’s pen scratched across the pages of his journal.
He hadn’t thought about it much, reveling in the freedom of being on his own, but Sam realized that he’d also been feeling lonely. He couldn’t imagine feeling that way for three hundred years, but, for all that Dean knew people like Susannah, who gave him cream and petted him, no one but Sam knew who Dean was. He had no one to talk with.
On the bed, Dean lay in a coiled ball, curled up in the gap between two pillows, his nose tucked beneath his fluffy tail. Sam watched him for a bit, his mind offering images of what it might be like to travel with a cat, interspersed with what it must have been like for Dean to have lived through so many years. There had to be a way to reverse the spell, some way to undo what had been done.
Sam glanced over to the book, which was once again wrapped up in one of his flannel button-downs. With the Sanderson sisters dead, there couldn’t be any harm in glancing through it. Even if all he could find was the name of the spell Winifred had used to turn Dean into a cat, it would give him a place to start searching for a way to undo the magic. Carefully, Sam peeled back the folds of the shirt, making certain that the eye of the book was shut before he flipped it open.
There was no helpful table of contents, he noted with some sense of disappointment, but it did not take many pages for him to learn that the book’s contents were not only nasty and sinister, but often sadistic as well. Sam spared most of the spells only a quick glance before moving on, but with each page he felt a little bit queasier. Turning past a potion recipe that seemed to permanently enslave the drinker to the brewer’s desires and, among other disturbing ingredients, called for a rabbit’s heart to be plucked, still beating, and stuffed with sugar cane, Sam winced but persisted.
From his spot on the bed, Dean’s furry body jerked in one sharp twitchy spasm before his eyes blinked open and he raised his head, green eyes glaring.
“What did I tell you about that damned book, Sam?”
“I’m sorry!” Sam closed the book, somewhat guiltily. “I just thought, with the witches dead, it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I could help you.”
Dean hopped neatly from the bed onto the cover of the book, curling his tail neatly over the eye, which Sam noted was still closed.
“Nothing good can come of it.”
“All I need to know is what curse Winifred used to turn you,” Sam insisted. “That’s all I was looking for.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Dean glared long enough for Sam to give-up on his plan to read the spell book, before he stepped off it. Stretching out his left back leg and fanning his impressive claws in a wide spread that made his foot more closely resemble a bird’s talons, he began to groom himself. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Sam sighed as he re-wrapped the book. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I couldn’t settle, I guess.” He set the book on top of his duffel and perched on the edge of the bed, toeing off his socks before he glared at the quietly purring shadow that, while his back was turned, had relocated to the bed and lay in an eloquent sprawl directly in the center of the bed. “Shove over.”
“You shove over,” Dean mumbled petulantly as Sam began jostling the pillows that were bracketing him. Sam ended up precariously balancing on the edge of the mattress because Dean was only willing to adjust so much. He sank almost immediately into sleep despite the awkwardness of his position and his certainty that he wouldn’t be able to get any rest.
______________________________
Sam’s eyes jerked open sometime later. The sky was still dark and he estimated he couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour, maybe two. For a moment, Sam had no idea what woke him, until there is a gentle rapping at the motel door.
“Hello?” a little voice called, sounding so small, so helpless. “Is someone there? Please? Please, can you help me?”
Sitting up in bed, Sam flashed a quick look and found Dean awake, standing on the mattress and twitching his tail.
“Don’t go near the window,” Sam whispered, because Dean was clearly considering hopping over to the ledge to see who was at the door. For all Sam knew, it really was a little kid, scared out of her mind and searching for help, but he didn’t believe in coincidences and he also didn’t believe in taking senseless risks.
With his gun in hand, Sam staggered over to the door, still groggy as he glanced back at Dean, who had positioned himself ready to spring in case it really wasn’t just a little girl. Nodding once, Sam twisted the knob.
He didn’t have a chance to react because as soon as the door was opened he was hit with streaks of unnaturally green lightning.
“Step aside!” Winifred Sanderson said imperiously, dropping her hands back to her side to lift her dress carefully as she stepped over Sam’s prone body.
“Pretty kitty,” Sarah Sanderson crooned as she hopped over Sam and into the room, reaching to stroke Dean who hissed and swatted.
Mary caught him before he could launch an attack: the youngest witch scooped him up awkwardly and stuffed him into a burlap sack. Sam watched as Dean writhed inside the bag, making the burlap spasm and dance as Mary hefted it high above her head and giggled in girlish amusement.
“My book!” Winifred said, pinching Sam’s flannel shirt between her thumb and forefinger, as if it was filthy and unpleasant and she had no desire to touch it. She gathered up her book and spun around, her cloak swirling out behind her. “Sisters! We have it.”
Sarah clapped and jumped, and Mary lowered the sack to her side, smiling brightly, and stepped back over Sam and through the door.
“Sarah,” Winifred ordered as she marched back into the night. “We’ve not much time. The candle is almost spent and dawn is swiftly coming. Fly now and summon the children. Fly!”
Sam was still sprawled on the floor, groaning and aching, incapable of bringing own body under control. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered. “It was a spell. Of course it was a spell.”
Just like the Black Flame Candle the Sanderson sisters themselves were protected, and they could not be damaged until the magic of their spell wore-off. Of course the fire could not have destroyed them. He struggled to sit up, fighting off the pain and the shivering aftershocks of the stinging energy Winifred had hit him with.
“One night,” he muttered, as Winifred’s parting remark to her sister echoed in his head. It was like a final piece of a puzzle slotted into place and he was suddenly able to see the picture. “One night,” he repeated to himself again, with more confidence.
Whatever the spell was that the sisters had cast before their deaths, it wasn’t a ‘get out of death free’ card. It was conditional. When the candle was spent, the magic would be undone, and Winifred’s comment strongly suggested that it was good for only a single night. Only for one night on Halloween, because that was when the veil between the living and the dead was weakest.
“So what’s the point?” Sam wondered. It didn’t make sense; why would the sisters return? Surely it was not just for one night of havoc before they retired to the grave. That seemed pointless.
With his head beginning to clear, Sam felt that he was missing something glaringly obvious. A moment later, a soft lilting song drifted in through the open window. It felt gentle and soothing and tantalizing and Sam sighed, drifting closer to the door without even realizing he had stood.
“Come little children,” the voice sang. “I’ll take you away, into a land of enchantment…”
Beyond the motel, Sam could see a mass of children and teenagers, all staggering with oddly synchronized steps down the road. Above them, drifting on her broom and singing sweetly, Sarah Sanderson flew.
Sam jerked backward, slamming his door shut and trying to overcome his urge to stagger out into the street. He lunged to his duffel bag, routing through his things until he drew out his bathroom kit and fumbled for his set of earplugs, stuffed in a side pocket. He’d bought them because his dad always insisted on sharing a room: it was cheaper. John Winchester, however, was one hell of a snorer.
Shoving the earplugs into his ears, Sam slumped down onto the edge of the mattress. The glaringly obvious thing he had been overlooking before the witches attacked, was the potion. The potion that had been used on Dean’s little sister, which had made the witches younger. If they could brew the potion again and steal a child’s life force, they would no longer be relying on the spell to keep them alive, the spell that made them impervious to harm until sunrise.
Sam, idiot that he was, had led them right to the one thing they had been missing. “Stupid book.”
______________________________
Crafting an elaborate plan, a particular skill of Sam’s, was not something that he had time for. The sisters now had everything they needed to get precisely what they wanted. Watching them massacre all the children of Salem by way of an elaborate potion, just so they could remain young and immortal, was absolutely out of the question.
With the streets clogged by a long line of slowly shuffling children, not unlike any number of zombie apocalypse films he had seen through the years, Sam was forced to maneuver the Impala mostly through side-streets, or risk being delayed to the point of inevitable failure. Time was of the essence.
It was four o’clock in the morning and Sam was navigating the Impala through the unnatural mist, around sprawled sleeping bodies of adults and through swarms of kids in a trance. The windows were rolled down and he was blaring an old tape of his dad’s, Black Sabbath ‘Fairies Wear Boots’, a surprisingly efficient way to knock a bunch of kids out a witch-induced trance, apparently. Sam gunned the engine and kept on.
Progress became impossibly slow, once he hit the usually deserted dark stretch of road off which the Sanderson Mill House was located. The music was working quite well, jolting the kids out of their hypnosis, but once they were no longer being compelled toward the house, the kids began to panic. Even more irritatingly, some took the pressing mass of their peers, and the music Sam was readily providing, as their cue to begin a spontaneous party, and promptly began to dance and cheer and generally make utter nuisances of themselves.
“This is the best Halloween ever!” one kid shouted with glee, staggering passed Sam’s car.
Sam was not at all comfortable leaving the Impala in the road near a bunch of kids who were clearly idiots. Switching off the music, he pulled into the dark parking lot and locked the doors before running the rest of the way to the house.
Crouching down by the window to the left of the mill wheel, Sam cautiously peered inside. Two children were suspended from the ceiling by looped chains, rusty and aged but nonetheless strong. Sam’s music had obviously broken them free of Sarah’s trance, as their eyes were wide as they followed the witches moving about beneath them. Both of the captives, however, were tightly bound and could not move or even speak.
Over the fireplace Sam noted the burlap sack in which Mary had captured Dean; it was writhing steadily, which was both a relief and a horror. In the center of the room, the large black cauldron sat atop a red-orange fire, a bubbling, frothing mass of disturbing turquoise colored liquid filling it near to the brim. Mary Sanderson was stirring it with a giant wooden spoon, an apron tied over her orange dress.
“It’s no matter,” Winifred was saying, as Sam pulled himself through the upstairs window and belly-crawled across the floor. “All we need is one child. It will be nothing at all to recapture the little brats, after all, we’ll have all the time in the world!” She chuckled to herself, a raspy hiccupping sound that managed to emulate a cackle despite its low volume.
Sarah pouted and kicked her foot petulantly at the ground. “Nothing at all,” she repeated, somewhat bitterly. “I’d like to see you summon all those children here.”
Winifred narrowed her eyes, spinning sharply around to face her youngest sister. “Suck in that lip, Sarah. Sniveling doesn’t suit you,” she scolded.
Sarah’s budding retort was cut-off as Mary leaned the wooden spoon against the rim of the cauldron and announced: “It is done!” with a giddy bob that made her dark braids jump.
“Bring the child!” Winifred gestured absently toward the ceiling as she stepped quickly to the cauldron, peering into its depths as if to assess her sister’s brewing abilities.
Sarah glanced between the two dangling bodies. “Which one.”
“Pick one!” Winifred snarled, flailing one arm behind her at Sarah in a dismissive motion.
“Take that one,” Sarah said, as Mary moved to help her. Sarah was stroking the leg of a scrawny dark-haired boy with bright blue eyes and a snubbed nose, who clung to the chains that supported him and looked with trepidation at his unwanted admirer. “This one’s pretty. I want to keep him for a while.”
The other hostage, a gawky youth in the grip of the most awkward stage of puberty, hissed and grunted frantically and thrashed admirably in his chains at Sarah’s pronunciation of his fate.
Sam waited until the two younger witches had their backs turned, and, when Winifred was fully focused on pouring a ladleful of potion into a phial, he cocked his shotgun and fired a shot through the roof, which echoed loudly in the small space. As intended, the witches screamed and panicked. Mary dropped immediately to her knees, whimpering as Sarah spun and shrieked a terrible sound like a banshee’s wail, her rash movements sending her toward the cauldron, which she bumped and set to swinging. Winifred, shielding her ears with her hands, made no sound beyond her first startled cry and instead turned with startled and glaring eyes to seek out the cause of the disturbance.
Sam took full advantage of their distraction. He leapt down from the upper floor and lunged forward, upturning the cauldron as Winifred snarled and dropped her hands from her ears. Sam was moving before the first bolts of lightning flowed from her fingers, and he found himself thinking, in a rush of giddy nerves, that he felt a bit like Luke on the Death Star, facing off against the Emperor. He staggered forward, ripping the burlap sack from the hook on which it hung, and jerked it away from the fire. He managed to release the first knot and then had to drop the bag as his attempt to dodge another streak of Winifred’s lightning made him stumble directly into the press of Sarah’s body.
“Hello,” she purred, a hot gust of air against his ear. His body convulsed and he tried to convince his feet to move, but she brought up one long arm and wrapped it across his front as she pressed her body flush to his back. “Shush, I’ll take care of you, lovely boy.” It was suddenly very difficult to remember why he disliked Sarah Sanderson; she was charming, after all, and sweet and beautiful.
In the next moment, however, there was a blur of spitting black fur that lunged up from the ground and anchored its back claws into Sam’s right shoulder blade as its front paws swatted threateningly at Sarah.
“Vicious beast!” she screamed. “You’ve scratched my face!”
It was pandemonium. While Sarah raced up the stairs to survey the damage that had been done to her face, Mary snatched Dean from Sam’s shoulder, pitching him across the room, and grabbed her broom as a weapon to defend herself. Sam ignored his initial instinct to retrieve Dean when he noticed Winifred had the phial of potion in her grasp and was turning a winch, lowering one of the kids down from the ceiling.
Launching himself at Winifred, Sam sent her stumbling backward, where she knocked into the Black Flame Candle, which, though impossible to destroy, was still, after all, a lit candle burning in a wooden home. Winifred’s dress caught fire, and the orange flames licked up her left leg and swallowed the fabric of her dress as she floundered and shrieked for her sisters to help her. While Mary rushed to Winifred’s aid, Sam freed the two boys suspended from the ceiling, neither of whom needed to be told to run; they pelted toward the door without a backward glance.
“Get the potion!” Dean ordered as he bounded up to Sam, his whiskers singed from where the fire had caused them to curl.
Sanderson Mill was burning, and there were no firemen to put it out. The blaze, spurred by magic, was not dowsed by the sprinklers the museum had installed. Sam tucked the potion into his jacket pocket, before following Dean out the front door, racing toward the parking lot, as, behind them, the blaze continued, burning strong.
“You will suffer for what you have done this night!” a shrill voice promised him as he ran.
He didn’t need to look behind him to know that the Sanderson sisters had escaped their home and were in pursuit.
“Friggin’ witches,” Dean muttered.
Sam silently agreed, focused on pulling the keys from his pocket and sliding behind the wheel of the Impala. He was moving so fast that Dean ended up having to jump across his lap to the passenger seat. Sam pulled the door closed with one hand as the other started the ignition, his foot pressing down on the gas. The Impala tore down the road, wheels sending up a spray of gravel.
“Where are we going?” Dean asked, his claws anchored into the vinyl of the seat, standing with his legs apart and his tail straight in the air. With his back arched and his eyes wide, he reminded Sam of a Halloween decoration again.
“Graveyard,” Sam said, remembering something Dean had mentioned about the Sanderson sisters. “They can’t set foot there, right?”
He’d never heard of that being true before, but any witches he’d come across had been mostly happy and well adjusted. Bobby had once spoken about a hunt where the witches had made a deal with a demon in exchange for magical powers, which sounded a bit like the Sanderson sisters, but he was pretty sure even those witches hadn’t carried about a book made out of flesh that had an eyeball on the cover. A working eyeball. He was willing to believe that the Sandersons’ might be breaking a lot of new ground.
“They’ll turn to stone if they step on hallowed ground,” Dean confirmed.
Sam didn’t ask how he knew, he figured if you were alive for over three hundred years, you probably picked-up a thing or two. It wasn’t like they had a lot of options, either way.
He pulled the car up onto the sidewalk, stumbling out and lunging for the gate to the graveyard as the three witches rounded the corner, just behind them.
“That was close,” Sam gasped as he staggered passed a row of tombstones, his momentum carrying him forward.
“Well, don’t get too comfortable,” Dean muttered, just as the Sanderson sisters came to a halt, hovering above their heads.
“Impudent whelp,” Winifred hissed. “Come here so I can rip you to shreds!”
“That’s not really much incentive for me,” Sam said, and then had to duck as Winifred swooped down toward him. He sprawled himself flat across the ground as she passed, rolling quickly onto his back to make sure she had moved on. “You can’t touch me!” he shouted, not intending to taunt her, only surprised and relieved that it was true.
Apparently, however, he had given her inspiration, because she drifted over to a crumbling grave marker, peppered with clinging moss and came to a stop.
“Unfaithful lover, long since dead…”
“What is she doing?” Sam whispered, as Winifred continued.
“ …Deep asleep in thy wormy bed...”
Dean flicked a nervous glance at him. “Raising the dead.”
“What?”
“…Wiggle thy toes, open thine eyes, twist thy fingers toward the sky...”
“Billy Butcherson was her old beau,” Dean explained in a rush. “Until he cheated on her, and she poisoned him to teach him a lesson.”
“She what?”
“… Life is sweet, be not too shy, on thy feet, so saith I.”
“No, wait,” Sam said, overcoming his momentary panic with common sense. “That’s not how you raise a zombie.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dean said. “Run!”
Sam was prepared to brush off Dean’s advice. Raising zombies required more than a cheap rhyme, or else anyone would be doing it. A hilarious prank, fun for the whole family - if it were that easy, hunters would never have a day’s rest, and the zombie apocalypse would have happened decades ago.
Of course, when the ground below Winifred rumbled and pitched, Sam staggered back, his eyes wide. “What the hell?”
“I don’t know, dude,” Dean said, from his perch on the bowed head of a stone angel. “What do we do?”
“Well,” Sam looked around, and wished that he’d had the forethought to grab his bag from the trunk of Impala, into which he had stuffed salt and weapons. Of course, there hadn’t been any time to stop and raid his trunk, but it would have come in handy. Next time he was being chased by seventh century evil witches, Sam made a mental note to drive the Impala through the gate and right into the graveyard. “I don’t have a silver stake.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “So we can’t kill the zombie.”
The grass above the old grave was slowly being covered by loamy earth, Sam saw a grey, putrefied hand pressing up above the soil and spared a moment for the oddly hysterical thought that Winifred hadn’t just animated a corpse, she had made what should have been nothing more than rotted bones into a fleshy, albeit decaying, zombie.
“What do you think?” Dean continued. “ Kill the witches to break the spell?”
“You think that will work?”
The cat’s tail twitched and, Sam thought, if he had been human, Dean would have probably shrugged.
“Do we have another choice?” Dean asked.
Sam was forced to admit, “Not so much.”
Billy Butcherson pulled himself free of his grave in a shuddering, strained movement that Sam figured was the result of three centuries of slow rotting, followed by a partial regeneration. His clothes were tattered and they exposed more of the green-grey puckered and flaky flesh than Sam would have preferred, but he had a vague idea that the natural fabrics around in the seventeenth century probably wouldn’t have stood-up well to the test of three centuries worth of time, so he figured it could have been a lot worse.
“Okay,” he said to himself, then tossed himself to the ground as Sarah swooped toward him.
Sarah hovered just above him, her cloak billowing around her as she said, “Beautiful virgin who lit the candle and woke me from my sleep. I will be your friend.”
Sam cringed, but was distracted by Dean’s shout of “Mary!” and twisted around in his sprawled position, looking to where Mary Sanderson hovered, a little girl clutched in her arms like a rag doll. The witch was crooning and stroking the girl’s cheek, smudging the tears that glistened there. She looked to be about four years old.
“Let her go!”
“Never, never,” Mary crooned. “Mine forever.”
Winifred cackled and swooped over. “Perfect, sister!” She turned her head in Sam’s direction. “Sarah, the potion!”
“Here, Winifred!” Sarah shouted in triumph, and Sam jerked around to realize that as his attention had been focused elsewhere, she had snagged the phial from his jacket pocket. Apparently being on a broomstick meant she technically wasn’t touching hallowed ground, even if she had slipped her hand into the pocket of someone who was.
“No!” his shout was echoed by Dean’s, as Sarah swooped to where Mary was holding the quietly sobbing little girl.
Sam leapt back onto his feet, racing to where the witches hovered, only to be tackled by the remains of Billy Butcherson. Up close, Sam realized the walking corpse’s lips had been sown sloppily shut; his eyes were misted over so that Sam could not tell what color they had been. Rough wriggling fingers pressed into Sam’s skin with bruising force. Billy Butcherson was regenerating even as they struggled.
Out of the corner of his eye Sam saw Dean racing along a branch of a tree and then he was distracted again. As Sam kicked up, viciously, he managed to knock Billy away. Spinning around, he was in time to watch Dean complete his leap and land squarely on Winifred Sanderson’s shoulder, swiping the phial out of her hands. Sam raced forward and caught it before it hit the ground, even as Winifred pried Dean from her shoulder and whipped him away.
“Let the girl go, or I’ll destroy the potion!” Sam yelled.
Winifred turned and grinned a twisted little smile. “Give me the potion or the girl dies.”
It wasn’t much of a choice, really. Maybe it would have been heroic to say he did it to save the little girl, or that he was thinking about how it was his fault it all was happening and that he was accepting responsibility. Sam was a hunter, though, and he had more pragmatic motivations for tipping the phial into his own mouth: he was playing for time.
“Now you don’t have a choice!” Sam called, spreading his arms wide. “Come and get me,” he murmured to himself. Winifred snarled and swooped low, her arm reaching out to snatch him up. Sam was faster.
Grabbing her outstretched arm, he pulled once, hard, and she launched with surprising ease off of her broom, toppling onto the ground.
“Winnie!” Mary shrieked, clutching the little girl closer to her, as Sarah cried out and raced forward.
Sam blinked startled eyes as Winifred Sanderson pulled herself to her feet, flipping her cloak behind her in agitation as she glared at him.
“I would tear you to pieces,” she said. “If you weren’t glowing so perfectly.”
Sam stood his ground and had faith, trusting absolutely in Dean’s previous assurances.
Winifred took two staggering steps and then glanced down at her feet, her brows pinching in confusion. “What…” she wondered; and then nothing more. Her red hair, her green dress and dark cloak, the color that the chill wind had brought to her cheeks, were swallowed up by grey. From one instant to the next, Winifred Sanderson had been turned to stone.
“No,” Sarah sobbed, flinging herself at Sam. She dragged him up into the air with her, but her upward momentum slowed and she, too frowned. “No,” she whispered, low and sad and helpless as she turned her face into the rising sun. A moment later, Sam fell to the ground as Sarah Sanderson dissolved into a cloud of dust that sparkled in the climbing light.
“I’ve got you,” Sam said, catching the girl who had dropped when Mary Sanderson disappeared as well, into nothing but a shower of glittering dust that scattered in the breeze as it fell. “You’re safe.”
“They’re gone?” the girl questioned, casting a mistrustful glance from Sam up to the sky, and wiping at her face.
“Yeah,” Sam assured her. She nodded once and then bolted toward the gate of the cemetery. “Hey, wait!” He saw her careen full-tilt into one of the confused teenagers still making their way home, and from the way the surprised boy gathered her up and patted her back reassuringly, Sam knew that she would be fine.
“Dean?” he called, turning around, grimacing at the sight of the sprawled and quickly withering corpse of Billy Butcherson. At some point the zombie had lost its head; Sam wondered if that was the cat’s doing. “Dean?” he shouted, louder, as he moved forward, his eyes searching for any sign of the little shadow.
There was a little girl in a white nightgown crouched low, and Sam came to a stop, watching as she reached out a careful hand, before stopping suddenly and twisting her head around to look at him with sad grey eyes. Her long brown hair hung straight and full down her back, shielded by a white nightcap that brought Sam up short. Little girls didn’t wear nightcaps like that to bed.
She smiled, a dejected, sorrowful little upturn of her lips, before turning back to whatever lay before her on the ground. Sam knew, even before he stepped forward enough to see, that he would find Dean.
The cat lay still, his front paws stretched out and his body twisted awkwardly, as if he had tried to land on his feet but hadn’t had the time to manage it.
“Is he…” but Sam couldn’t finish the statement. He hadn’t known Dean Thackeray very long, but in those few hours when they had thought the witches were dead, Sam had allowed himself to entertain thoughts of Dean on the road with him, picturing his life with a companion and a friend, sarcastic and rude and ever-present. It was ridiculous to miss something that had never happened, and Sam couldn’t help feeling that it was all horribly unfair.
“Is it?” the little girl asked, her voice soft and light, bringing Sam up from his thoughts as she watched him. “Unfair?” she clarified. She smiled then, amusement that was too wise for her young face making her pale eyes shine.
“You’re his sister,” Sam said, realization striking him like a freight train. “You’re Emily.” She tipped her head in acknowledgement. “You’re a ghost?” It was wholly and completely unfair, then, if she had been around all this time and Dean had never known, or if she had been prevented from resting peacefully because of what the witches had done to her. Sam feared for a horrible moment that he would have to salt and burn her bones, but she giggled at him and interrupted his racing thoughts.
“The witches are dead,” she said. “Their magic is undone.” She paused, like there was something significant about this that Sam was still failing to comprehend. “All of it.”
Sam glanced out toward the front gate and realized for the first time that the eerie mist was gone, that there was the sound of quiet chatter drifting in the damp dawn air and signs of movement. The adults of Salem were waking up.
“I had to come,” she explained, a little urgently. “I had to, for him.” She turned back to Dean’s unmoving body. “And it turns out he’s just as lazy as ever!” she suddenly shouted, jerking herself to her feet and bracing her hands on her hips. “Dean Thackeray, wake up this instant!”
Sam felt momentarily confused, then wondered if he would have to explain about going to a better place to this little ghost girl. Before he could get his mouth to work, the body of the black cat began to glow. At first, Sam was convinced it was sunlight, but there were no beams of sun reaching past the tree that was shading them. The glow was only around Dean, and a second later, Sam had to blink as another image was taking shape over that of the cat.
One moment it was Dean, lying still with his paws sprawled awkwardly, and the next it was a young man, still glowing and utterly beautiful. He wore tattered brown pants and a loose linen shirt and his hair was tied back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck.
“What?” Sam found himself asking. Emily flashed a bright grin at him.
“All their magic!” she reiterated. “Dean was never killed. They changed him, but they didn’t kill him.”
“But he died!” Sam cried. “He was dead, just now!”
“He was immortal,” she corrected. “How can you kill an immortal cat?” She had a point.
Sam turned, flabbergasted, back to the guy to Dean, who had dirty blond hair and a slender nose and freckles and Sam swallowed thickly and looked away because he was having inappropriate thoughts about a three hundred and twenty four year old cat, who was a boy.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Sam heard Emily’s sing-song as she tipped forward on the balls of her feet and leaned over Dean, her brown hair sweeping his lightly freckled cheek.
“Y’er such a brat,” Dean muttered. A moment later, his body jerked and his eyes snapped open. “Emily?”
She laughed brightly at his astonishment.
“Am I dreaming?”
“Nope!” she trilled.
He blinked; his eyes still glued to the smiling face of his little sister. “Am I dead?”
“Not yet,” she said, her smile a little softer, her eyes bright and warm as she looked at her brother.
“I’ll just…” Sam said, gestured awkwardly behind him and began moving off, giving the siblings their privacy. Dean’s whispered, “I should be dead,” drifted after him. He could hear Emily’s soft voice, but couldn’t make out her words.
“All Souls Day,” Sam thought to himself, remembering what the witches had said and what his own research had revealed. The veil between the living and the dead was weakest, and Emily had stepped through so she could speak with her big brother: the brother who had risked everything to save her, the brother who had been living with the guilt of his failure for three centuries.
“Hey,” Dean said, his voice a little gruff as he walked slowly through the front gate of the cemetery some time later.
“Hey,” Sam greeted. He was leaning against the hood of the Impala, facing into the slowly rising sun and nursing a growing sense of relief. It had only been one night. It felt like at least eight. “You okay?”
“I’m human,” Dean said with a shrug, joining Sam in his perch. “Which, y’know, a little awkward. Em says I might be coughing up hairballs for the next few days but I suspect she was just being a brat.”
Sam grinned. “I like her.”
Dean’s wistful grin spread wide, and his pride and devotion to his little sister shone on his face. “Yeah, she’s not so bad.” He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, and shrugged. “I didn’t think it’d end like this. I thought … y’know, just being able to move on would be good. I never thought…”
“Must be weird.”
Dean snorted. “Dude, three centuries of climbing trees and drinking milk and licking my damned tail and then suddenly I’m seventeen again!”
Sam shrugged.
Dean huffed. “No one is going to take me seriously!”
Sam snorted, which turned into a snicker, and then quickly spiraled into a loud guffawing laugh spurred, undoubtedly, by the adrenaline of the evening and the relief of it all being over with such a clear and definite victory.
Beside him, Dean was laughing, quieter, dry and rough, his head tipped back and a hand braced loosely across his middle. It felt easy, oddly right and entirely natural to sit together like that, and Sam started to think of an entirely different future with Dean. No longer a feline companion, but a real partner: facing down ghosts and vampires and whatever else was waiting in the darkness, always together no matter what. Suddenly a future of hunting no longer seemed so stiflingly lonely to Sam.
Bumping his shoulder lightly against Dean’s, Sam smiled. “I’ll take you seriously.”
Dean raised an eyebrow, turned to face Sam as he asked, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Sam affirmed. They were silent for a moment, then Sam cleared his throat, glancing back at the other boy a little nervously as he said, “The offer stands. If you’re still interested.”
“Offer?”
Sam shrugged, glanced away and tried to wrangle his sudden roiling nerves into submission. “To come with me,” he said. It came out lower than he was expecting, breathy and hushed. He realized somewhat belatedly that he was tipping his head down, moving into Dean’s space.
Dean wasn’t moving away.
“Dude,” Dean said, his voice equally soft. “I have, like, three hundred year old cat breath. This is probably not a good idea.”
Sam considered that fleetingly as he continued to dip his head forward. Dismissed the notion quickly. “I don’t care.” He pressed his lips against Dean’s; felt his eyes dropping closed on a sudden sense of possibility.
Dean tasted like cream, which Sam remembered seeing Susannah setting out for him after she had closed up the museum. Jesus, that was just last night. It was crazy and happening fast, but he didn’t stop. Sam flicked his tongue along the bottom curve of Dean’s mouth, pressed in, his hand cupping the back of Dean’s head, and felt the loose leather tie that was holding Dean’s hair back. With a gentle tug, Sam loosed it; he let his fingers twist into the soft hair and down the smooth skin along the back of Dean’s neck.
When they separated, breath a little short and heavy, Sam smiled shyly. “How’s that?”
Dean licked his lips, his green eyes flickering away and then back, alight with a teasing glint as he said, “Not bad, for a virgin.”
“Oh right,” Sam said, huffing in feigned offense. “Says mister experience. Got a lot of tail when you had a tail?”
“Dude, I got play when I was human!”
“Sure.”
“Chicks loved me!”
Sam smacked his lips thoughtfully, waited until he had Dean’s full attention before he said, “Tastes like tuna.”
“Hey!” Dean swatted at Sam. “I do not! I haven’t have fish in…”
Sam didn’t bother to wait and hear how long it had been since Dean had eaten fish. He pulled Dean in again and pressed their mouths together, and Dean gave up his rant in favor of groaning appreciatively.
After, when there was color in their cheeks and heat zinging through them, when Dean couldn’t stop smiling and Sam couldn’t help flashing shy happy glances at the other man, sitting side-by-side on the hood of the car, Sam bumped his shoulder against Dean’s and said, “So, how about it?”
“What?”
Sam snorted a laugh and raised his eyebrows, receiving nothing but an innocent stare for his trouble. Sam shook his head, taking a deep breath and keeping a tight hold on his hope as he said, “Come hunting with me.”
Dean tipped his head to the side, observing Sam with quiet consideration, his gaze solemn and his expression still. Sam felt his breath catch in his throat, nerves bubbling back inside him, but then Dean smirked at him, that light back in his too-green eyes as he said, “Sure, Sammy. I’ll be a witch with you.”
Sam eyes narrowed as he assessed Dean’s face. After a moment, he met Dean’s mischievous look with one of his own, finding it difficult to contain his smile as he said, “I’m a hunter, flea-brain.” Beside him, Dean tipped his head back and laughed, the sound full and light and utterly delighted. It made Sam grin.
___________________________________________________
|<< END PART THREE ||
MASTERPOST
By: revenant_scribe
Part Three:
Pairing: Sam/Dean
Rating: PG-14 | Word Count: 7,061
“You’ve been pretty quiet,” Sam pointed out, as he pulled into the parking lot of the motel and cut the engine.
Dean twitched an ear but otherwise did not comment.
“Dean?”
“I’ve been a cat for three hundred and seven years,” Dean said. “I guess I just thought…whatever.”
Sam shifted his gaze briefly to the where Dean sat. “What did you think?”
“That when it was over, and they were really gone for good, that maybe I could be too.” Dean thrashed his tail once in agitation, glanced at Sam then away. “I could maybe move on.”
Sam frowned, but there really wasn’t anything he could say to that. The curse on Dean had made him immortal, and Sam couldn’t think of anything lonelier. He looked out the windshield of the car and found himself frowning harder. “They’re still asleep.”
Dean hopped up onto the dash and peered out at the slumped body of the man who had fallen asleep in the motel parking lot. “They probably just need to sleep off the spell.”
Sam considered that. He’d thought that, with the witches gone, the release from the spell would be instantaneous. Then again, maybe it related to the specifications of the spell that was cast. After all, Dean was still a cat, but he’d been cursed to live in that form for eternity. Sam didn’t think the witches had cast such a drastic spell on the townsfolk.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said, nodding. “I think you’re right.” He opened the door and waited for Dean to follow him out into the cold night air. “Come on. We’ll figure this out, alright?”
______________________________
It was late, or early. The television was on, House on Haunted Hill playing at a near-silent volume, though not quiet enough to dull the sinister tones of Vincent Price’s voice. Sam could remember seeing the film when he’d been a kid, staying up late because his dad was on a hunt. -He’d felt so grown-up, taking care of himself while his dad had been gone. It was just one night alone, but Sam had stayed up because there had been no one to tell him to get to bed, and he’d watched the film and been utterly terrified as a result. He’d spent the night curled into a corner of the sofa, every single light in the apartment turned on, huddled beneath a mound of every blanket and pillow he could find. When his dad had come home, he’d scooped Sam up and tucked him under the covers of his bed, and Sam had fallen asleep while his dad’s pen scratched across the pages of his journal.
He hadn’t thought about it much, reveling in the freedom of being on his own, but Sam realized that he’d also been feeling lonely. He couldn’t imagine feeling that way for three hundred years, but, for all that Dean knew people like Susannah, who gave him cream and petted him, no one but Sam knew who Dean was. He had no one to talk with.
On the bed, Dean lay in a coiled ball, curled up in the gap between two pillows, his nose tucked beneath his fluffy tail. Sam watched him for a bit, his mind offering images of what it might be like to travel with a cat, interspersed with what it must have been like for Dean to have lived through so many years. There had to be a way to reverse the spell, some way to undo what had been done.
Sam glanced over to the book, which was once again wrapped up in one of his flannel button-downs. With the Sanderson sisters dead, there couldn’t be any harm in glancing through it. Even if all he could find was the name of the spell Winifred had used to turn Dean into a cat, it would give him a place to start searching for a way to undo the magic. Carefully, Sam peeled back the folds of the shirt, making certain that the eye of the book was shut before he flipped it open.
There was no helpful table of contents, he noted with some sense of disappointment, but it did not take many pages for him to learn that the book’s contents were not only nasty and sinister, but often sadistic as well. Sam spared most of the spells only a quick glance before moving on, but with each page he felt a little bit queasier. Turning past a potion recipe that seemed to permanently enslave the drinker to the brewer’s desires and, among other disturbing ingredients, called for a rabbit’s heart to be plucked, still beating, and stuffed with sugar cane, Sam winced but persisted.
From his spot on the bed, Dean’s furry body jerked in one sharp twitchy spasm before his eyes blinked open and he raised his head, green eyes glaring.
“What did I tell you about that damned book, Sam?”
“I’m sorry!” Sam closed the book, somewhat guiltily. “I just thought, with the witches dead, it wouldn’t hurt. Maybe I could help you.”
Dean hopped neatly from the bed onto the cover of the book, curling his tail neatly over the eye, which Sam noted was still closed.
“Nothing good can come of it.”
“All I need to know is what curse Winifred used to turn you,” Sam insisted. “That’s all I was looking for.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Dean glared long enough for Sam to give-up on his plan to read the spell book, before he stepped off it. Stretching out his left back leg and fanning his impressive claws in a wide spread that made his foot more closely resemble a bird’s talons, he began to groom himself. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
Sam sighed as he re-wrapped the book. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I couldn’t settle, I guess.” He set the book on top of his duffel and perched on the edge of the bed, toeing off his socks before he glared at the quietly purring shadow that, while his back was turned, had relocated to the bed and lay in an eloquent sprawl directly in the center of the bed. “Shove over.”
“You shove over,” Dean mumbled petulantly as Sam began jostling the pillows that were bracketing him. Sam ended up precariously balancing on the edge of the mattress because Dean was only willing to adjust so much. He sank almost immediately into sleep despite the awkwardness of his position and his certainty that he wouldn’t be able to get any rest.
______________________________
Sam’s eyes jerked open sometime later. The sky was still dark and he estimated he couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour, maybe two. For a moment, Sam had no idea what woke him, until there is a gentle rapping at the motel door.
“Hello?” a little voice called, sounding so small, so helpless. “Is someone there? Please? Please, can you help me?”
Sitting up in bed, Sam flashed a quick look and found Dean awake, standing on the mattress and twitching his tail.
“Don’t go near the window,” Sam whispered, because Dean was clearly considering hopping over to the ledge to see who was at the door. For all Sam knew, it really was a little kid, scared out of her mind and searching for help, but he didn’t believe in coincidences and he also didn’t believe in taking senseless risks.
With his gun in hand, Sam staggered over to the door, still groggy as he glanced back at Dean, who had positioned himself ready to spring in case it really wasn’t just a little girl. Nodding once, Sam twisted the knob.
He didn’t have a chance to react because as soon as the door was opened he was hit with streaks of unnaturally green lightning.
“Step aside!” Winifred Sanderson said imperiously, dropping her hands back to her side to lift her dress carefully as she stepped over Sam’s prone body.
“Pretty kitty,” Sarah Sanderson crooned as she hopped over Sam and into the room, reaching to stroke Dean who hissed and swatted.
Mary caught him before he could launch an attack: the youngest witch scooped him up awkwardly and stuffed him into a burlap sack. Sam watched as Dean writhed inside the bag, making the burlap spasm and dance as Mary hefted it high above her head and giggled in girlish amusement.
“My book!” Winifred said, pinching Sam’s flannel shirt between her thumb and forefinger, as if it was filthy and unpleasant and she had no desire to touch it. She gathered up her book and spun around, her cloak swirling out behind her. “Sisters! We have it.”
Sarah clapped and jumped, and Mary lowered the sack to her side, smiling brightly, and stepped back over Sam and through the door.
“Sarah,” Winifred ordered as she marched back into the night. “We’ve not much time. The candle is almost spent and dawn is swiftly coming. Fly now and summon the children. Fly!”
Sam was still sprawled on the floor, groaning and aching, incapable of bringing own body under control. “I’m an idiot,” he muttered. “It was a spell. Of course it was a spell.”
Just like the Black Flame Candle the Sanderson sisters themselves were protected, and they could not be damaged until the magic of their spell wore-off. Of course the fire could not have destroyed them. He struggled to sit up, fighting off the pain and the shivering aftershocks of the stinging energy Winifred had hit him with.
“One night,” he muttered, as Winifred’s parting remark to her sister echoed in his head. It was like a final piece of a puzzle slotted into place and he was suddenly able to see the picture. “One night,” he repeated to himself again, with more confidence.
Whatever the spell was that the sisters had cast before their deaths, it wasn’t a ‘get out of death free’ card. It was conditional. When the candle was spent, the magic would be undone, and Winifred’s comment strongly suggested that it was good for only a single night. Only for one night on Halloween, because that was when the veil between the living and the dead was weakest.
“So what’s the point?” Sam wondered. It didn’t make sense; why would the sisters return? Surely it was not just for one night of havoc before they retired to the grave. That seemed pointless.
With his head beginning to clear, Sam felt that he was missing something glaringly obvious. A moment later, a soft lilting song drifted in through the open window. It felt gentle and soothing and tantalizing and Sam sighed, drifting closer to the door without even realizing he had stood.
“Come little children,” the voice sang. “I’ll take you away, into a land of enchantment…”
Beyond the motel, Sam could see a mass of children and teenagers, all staggering with oddly synchronized steps down the road. Above them, drifting on her broom and singing sweetly, Sarah Sanderson flew.
Sam jerked backward, slamming his door shut and trying to overcome his urge to stagger out into the street. He lunged to his duffel bag, routing through his things until he drew out his bathroom kit and fumbled for his set of earplugs, stuffed in a side pocket. He’d bought them because his dad always insisted on sharing a room: it was cheaper. John Winchester, however, was one hell of a snorer.
Shoving the earplugs into his ears, Sam slumped down onto the edge of the mattress. The glaringly obvious thing he had been overlooking before the witches attacked, was the potion. The potion that had been used on Dean’s little sister, which had made the witches younger. If they could brew the potion again and steal a child’s life force, they would no longer be relying on the spell to keep them alive, the spell that made them impervious to harm until sunrise.
Sam, idiot that he was, had led them right to the one thing they had been missing. “Stupid book.”
______________________________
Crafting an elaborate plan, a particular skill of Sam’s, was not something that he had time for. The sisters now had everything they needed to get precisely what they wanted. Watching them massacre all the children of Salem by way of an elaborate potion, just so they could remain young and immortal, was absolutely out of the question.
With the streets clogged by a long line of slowly shuffling children, not unlike any number of zombie apocalypse films he had seen through the years, Sam was forced to maneuver the Impala mostly through side-streets, or risk being delayed to the point of inevitable failure. Time was of the essence.
It was four o’clock in the morning and Sam was navigating the Impala through the unnatural mist, around sprawled sleeping bodies of adults and through swarms of kids in a trance. The windows were rolled down and he was blaring an old tape of his dad’s, Black Sabbath ‘Fairies Wear Boots’, a surprisingly efficient way to knock a bunch of kids out a witch-induced trance, apparently. Sam gunned the engine and kept on.
Progress became impossibly slow, once he hit the usually deserted dark stretch of road off which the Sanderson Mill House was located. The music was working quite well, jolting the kids out of their hypnosis, but once they were no longer being compelled toward the house, the kids began to panic. Even more irritatingly, some took the pressing mass of their peers, and the music Sam was readily providing, as their cue to begin a spontaneous party, and promptly began to dance and cheer and generally make utter nuisances of themselves.
“This is the best Halloween ever!” one kid shouted with glee, staggering passed Sam’s car.
Sam was not at all comfortable leaving the Impala in the road near a bunch of kids who were clearly idiots. Switching off the music, he pulled into the dark parking lot and locked the doors before running the rest of the way to the house.
Crouching down by the window to the left of the mill wheel, Sam cautiously peered inside. Two children were suspended from the ceiling by looped chains, rusty and aged but nonetheless strong. Sam’s music had obviously broken them free of Sarah’s trance, as their eyes were wide as they followed the witches moving about beneath them. Both of the captives, however, were tightly bound and could not move or even speak.
Over the fireplace Sam noted the burlap sack in which Mary had captured Dean; it was writhing steadily, which was both a relief and a horror. In the center of the room, the large black cauldron sat atop a red-orange fire, a bubbling, frothing mass of disturbing turquoise colored liquid filling it near to the brim. Mary Sanderson was stirring it with a giant wooden spoon, an apron tied over her orange dress.
“It’s no matter,” Winifred was saying, as Sam pulled himself through the upstairs window and belly-crawled across the floor. “All we need is one child. It will be nothing at all to recapture the little brats, after all, we’ll have all the time in the world!” She chuckled to herself, a raspy hiccupping sound that managed to emulate a cackle despite its low volume.
Sarah pouted and kicked her foot petulantly at the ground. “Nothing at all,” she repeated, somewhat bitterly. “I’d like to see you summon all those children here.”
Winifred narrowed her eyes, spinning sharply around to face her youngest sister. “Suck in that lip, Sarah. Sniveling doesn’t suit you,” she scolded.
Sarah’s budding retort was cut-off as Mary leaned the wooden spoon against the rim of the cauldron and announced: “It is done!” with a giddy bob that made her dark braids jump.
“Bring the child!” Winifred gestured absently toward the ceiling as she stepped quickly to the cauldron, peering into its depths as if to assess her sister’s brewing abilities.
Sarah glanced between the two dangling bodies. “Which one.”
“Pick one!” Winifred snarled, flailing one arm behind her at Sarah in a dismissive motion.
“Take that one,” Sarah said, as Mary moved to help her. Sarah was stroking the leg of a scrawny dark-haired boy with bright blue eyes and a snubbed nose, who clung to the chains that supported him and looked with trepidation at his unwanted admirer. “This one’s pretty. I want to keep him for a while.”
The other hostage, a gawky youth in the grip of the most awkward stage of puberty, hissed and grunted frantically and thrashed admirably in his chains at Sarah’s pronunciation of his fate.
Sam waited until the two younger witches had their backs turned, and, when Winifred was fully focused on pouring a ladleful of potion into a phial, he cocked his shotgun and fired a shot through the roof, which echoed loudly in the small space. As intended, the witches screamed and panicked. Mary dropped immediately to her knees, whimpering as Sarah spun and shrieked a terrible sound like a banshee’s wail, her rash movements sending her toward the cauldron, which she bumped and set to swinging. Winifred, shielding her ears with her hands, made no sound beyond her first startled cry and instead turned with startled and glaring eyes to seek out the cause of the disturbance.
Sam took full advantage of their distraction. He leapt down from the upper floor and lunged forward, upturning the cauldron as Winifred snarled and dropped her hands from her ears. Sam was moving before the first bolts of lightning flowed from her fingers, and he found himself thinking, in a rush of giddy nerves, that he felt a bit like Luke on the Death Star, facing off against the Emperor. He staggered forward, ripping the burlap sack from the hook on which it hung, and jerked it away from the fire. He managed to release the first knot and then had to drop the bag as his attempt to dodge another streak of Winifred’s lightning made him stumble directly into the press of Sarah’s body.
“Hello,” she purred, a hot gust of air against his ear. His body convulsed and he tried to convince his feet to move, but she brought up one long arm and wrapped it across his front as she pressed her body flush to his back. “Shush, I’ll take care of you, lovely boy.” It was suddenly very difficult to remember why he disliked Sarah Sanderson; she was charming, after all, and sweet and beautiful.
In the next moment, however, there was a blur of spitting black fur that lunged up from the ground and anchored its back claws into Sam’s right shoulder blade as its front paws swatted threateningly at Sarah.
“Vicious beast!” she screamed. “You’ve scratched my face!”
It was pandemonium. While Sarah raced up the stairs to survey the damage that had been done to her face, Mary snatched Dean from Sam’s shoulder, pitching him across the room, and grabbed her broom as a weapon to defend herself. Sam ignored his initial instinct to retrieve Dean when he noticed Winifred had the phial of potion in her grasp and was turning a winch, lowering one of the kids down from the ceiling.
Launching himself at Winifred, Sam sent her stumbling backward, where she knocked into the Black Flame Candle, which, though impossible to destroy, was still, after all, a lit candle burning in a wooden home. Winifred’s dress caught fire, and the orange flames licked up her left leg and swallowed the fabric of her dress as she floundered and shrieked for her sisters to help her. While Mary rushed to Winifred’s aid, Sam freed the two boys suspended from the ceiling, neither of whom needed to be told to run; they pelted toward the door without a backward glance.
“Get the potion!” Dean ordered as he bounded up to Sam, his whiskers singed from where the fire had caused them to curl.
Sanderson Mill was burning, and there were no firemen to put it out. The blaze, spurred by magic, was not dowsed by the sprinklers the museum had installed. Sam tucked the potion into his jacket pocket, before following Dean out the front door, racing toward the parking lot, as, behind them, the blaze continued, burning strong.
“You will suffer for what you have done this night!” a shrill voice promised him as he ran.
He didn’t need to look behind him to know that the Sanderson sisters had escaped their home and were in pursuit.
“Friggin’ witches,” Dean muttered.
Sam silently agreed, focused on pulling the keys from his pocket and sliding behind the wheel of the Impala. He was moving so fast that Dean ended up having to jump across his lap to the passenger seat. Sam pulled the door closed with one hand as the other started the ignition, his foot pressing down on the gas. The Impala tore down the road, wheels sending up a spray of gravel.
“Where are we going?” Dean asked, his claws anchored into the vinyl of the seat, standing with his legs apart and his tail straight in the air. With his back arched and his eyes wide, he reminded Sam of a Halloween decoration again.
“Graveyard,” Sam said, remembering something Dean had mentioned about the Sanderson sisters. “They can’t set foot there, right?”
He’d never heard of that being true before, but any witches he’d come across had been mostly happy and well adjusted. Bobby had once spoken about a hunt where the witches had made a deal with a demon in exchange for magical powers, which sounded a bit like the Sanderson sisters, but he was pretty sure even those witches hadn’t carried about a book made out of flesh that had an eyeball on the cover. A working eyeball. He was willing to believe that the Sandersons’ might be breaking a lot of new ground.
“They’ll turn to stone if they step on hallowed ground,” Dean confirmed.
Sam didn’t ask how he knew, he figured if you were alive for over three hundred years, you probably picked-up a thing or two. It wasn’t like they had a lot of options, either way.
He pulled the car up onto the sidewalk, stumbling out and lunging for the gate to the graveyard as the three witches rounded the corner, just behind them.
“That was close,” Sam gasped as he staggered passed a row of tombstones, his momentum carrying him forward.
“Well, don’t get too comfortable,” Dean muttered, just as the Sanderson sisters came to a halt, hovering above their heads.
“Impudent whelp,” Winifred hissed. “Come here so I can rip you to shreds!”
“That’s not really much incentive for me,” Sam said, and then had to duck as Winifred swooped down toward him. He sprawled himself flat across the ground as she passed, rolling quickly onto his back to make sure she had moved on. “You can’t touch me!” he shouted, not intending to taunt her, only surprised and relieved that it was true.
Apparently, however, he had given her inspiration, because she drifted over to a crumbling grave marker, peppered with clinging moss and came to a stop.
“Unfaithful lover, long since dead…”
“What is she doing?” Sam whispered, as Winifred continued.
“ …Deep asleep in thy wormy bed...”
Dean flicked a nervous glance at him. “Raising the dead.”
“What?”
“…Wiggle thy toes, open thine eyes, twist thy fingers toward the sky...”
“Billy Butcherson was her old beau,” Dean explained in a rush. “Until he cheated on her, and she poisoned him to teach him a lesson.”
“She what?”
“… Life is sweet, be not too shy, on thy feet, so saith I.”
“No, wait,” Sam said, overcoming his momentary panic with common sense. “That’s not how you raise a zombie.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Dean said. “Run!”
Sam was prepared to brush off Dean’s advice. Raising zombies required more than a cheap rhyme, or else anyone would be doing it. A hilarious prank, fun for the whole family - if it were that easy, hunters would never have a day’s rest, and the zombie apocalypse would have happened decades ago.
Of course, when the ground below Winifred rumbled and pitched, Sam staggered back, his eyes wide. “What the hell?”
“I don’t know, dude,” Dean said, from his perch on the bowed head of a stone angel. “What do we do?”
“Well,” Sam looked around, and wished that he’d had the forethought to grab his bag from the trunk of Impala, into which he had stuffed salt and weapons. Of course, there hadn’t been any time to stop and raid his trunk, but it would have come in handy. Next time he was being chased by seventh century evil witches, Sam made a mental note to drive the Impala through the gate and right into the graveyard. “I don’t have a silver stake.”
“Okay,” Dean said. “So we can’t kill the zombie.”
The grass above the old grave was slowly being covered by loamy earth, Sam saw a grey, putrefied hand pressing up above the soil and spared a moment for the oddly hysterical thought that Winifred hadn’t just animated a corpse, she had made what should have been nothing more than rotted bones into a fleshy, albeit decaying, zombie.
“What do you think?” Dean continued. “ Kill the witches to break the spell?”
“You think that will work?”
The cat’s tail twitched and, Sam thought, if he had been human, Dean would have probably shrugged.
“Do we have another choice?” Dean asked.
Sam was forced to admit, “Not so much.”
Billy Butcherson pulled himself free of his grave in a shuddering, strained movement that Sam figured was the result of three centuries of slow rotting, followed by a partial regeneration. His clothes were tattered and they exposed more of the green-grey puckered and flaky flesh than Sam would have preferred, but he had a vague idea that the natural fabrics around in the seventeenth century probably wouldn’t have stood-up well to the test of three centuries worth of time, so he figured it could have been a lot worse.
“Okay,” he said to himself, then tossed himself to the ground as Sarah swooped toward him.
Sarah hovered just above him, her cloak billowing around her as she said, “Beautiful virgin who lit the candle and woke me from my sleep. I will be your friend.”
Sam cringed, but was distracted by Dean’s shout of “Mary!” and twisted around in his sprawled position, looking to where Mary Sanderson hovered, a little girl clutched in her arms like a rag doll. The witch was crooning and stroking the girl’s cheek, smudging the tears that glistened there. She looked to be about four years old.
“Let her go!”
“Never, never,” Mary crooned. “Mine forever.”
Winifred cackled and swooped over. “Perfect, sister!” She turned her head in Sam’s direction. “Sarah, the potion!”
“Here, Winifred!” Sarah shouted in triumph, and Sam jerked around to realize that as his attention had been focused elsewhere, she had snagged the phial from his jacket pocket. Apparently being on a broomstick meant she technically wasn’t touching hallowed ground, even if she had slipped her hand into the pocket of someone who was.
“No!” his shout was echoed by Dean’s, as Sarah swooped to where Mary was holding the quietly sobbing little girl.
Sam leapt back onto his feet, racing to where the witches hovered, only to be tackled by the remains of Billy Butcherson. Up close, Sam realized the walking corpse’s lips had been sown sloppily shut; his eyes were misted over so that Sam could not tell what color they had been. Rough wriggling fingers pressed into Sam’s skin with bruising force. Billy Butcherson was regenerating even as they struggled.
Out of the corner of his eye Sam saw Dean racing along a branch of a tree and then he was distracted again. As Sam kicked up, viciously, he managed to knock Billy away. Spinning around, he was in time to watch Dean complete his leap and land squarely on Winifred Sanderson’s shoulder, swiping the phial out of her hands. Sam raced forward and caught it before it hit the ground, even as Winifred pried Dean from her shoulder and whipped him away.
“Let the girl go, or I’ll destroy the potion!” Sam yelled.
Winifred turned and grinned a twisted little smile. “Give me the potion or the girl dies.”
It wasn’t much of a choice, really. Maybe it would have been heroic to say he did it to save the little girl, or that he was thinking about how it was his fault it all was happening and that he was accepting responsibility. Sam was a hunter, though, and he had more pragmatic motivations for tipping the phial into his own mouth: he was playing for time.
“Now you don’t have a choice!” Sam called, spreading his arms wide. “Come and get me,” he murmured to himself. Winifred snarled and swooped low, her arm reaching out to snatch him up. Sam was faster.
Grabbing her outstretched arm, he pulled once, hard, and she launched with surprising ease off of her broom, toppling onto the ground.
“Winnie!” Mary shrieked, clutching the little girl closer to her, as Sarah cried out and raced forward.
Sam blinked startled eyes as Winifred Sanderson pulled herself to her feet, flipping her cloak behind her in agitation as she glared at him.
“I would tear you to pieces,” she said. “If you weren’t glowing so perfectly.”
Sam stood his ground and had faith, trusting absolutely in Dean’s previous assurances.
Winifred took two staggering steps and then glanced down at her feet, her brows pinching in confusion. “What…” she wondered; and then nothing more. Her red hair, her green dress and dark cloak, the color that the chill wind had brought to her cheeks, were swallowed up by grey. From one instant to the next, Winifred Sanderson had been turned to stone.
“No,” Sarah sobbed, flinging herself at Sam. She dragged him up into the air with her, but her upward momentum slowed and she, too frowned. “No,” she whispered, low and sad and helpless as she turned her face into the rising sun. A moment later, Sam fell to the ground as Sarah Sanderson dissolved into a cloud of dust that sparkled in the climbing light.
“I’ve got you,” Sam said, catching the girl who had dropped when Mary Sanderson disappeared as well, into nothing but a shower of glittering dust that scattered in the breeze as it fell. “You’re safe.”
“They’re gone?” the girl questioned, casting a mistrustful glance from Sam up to the sky, and wiping at her face.
“Yeah,” Sam assured her. She nodded once and then bolted toward the gate of the cemetery. “Hey, wait!” He saw her careen full-tilt into one of the confused teenagers still making their way home, and from the way the surprised boy gathered her up and patted her back reassuringly, Sam knew that she would be fine.
“Dean?” he called, turning around, grimacing at the sight of the sprawled and quickly withering corpse of Billy Butcherson. At some point the zombie had lost its head; Sam wondered if that was the cat’s doing. “Dean?” he shouted, louder, as he moved forward, his eyes searching for any sign of the little shadow.
There was a little girl in a white nightgown crouched low, and Sam came to a stop, watching as she reached out a careful hand, before stopping suddenly and twisting her head around to look at him with sad grey eyes. Her long brown hair hung straight and full down her back, shielded by a white nightcap that brought Sam up short. Little girls didn’t wear nightcaps like that to bed.
She smiled, a dejected, sorrowful little upturn of her lips, before turning back to whatever lay before her on the ground. Sam knew, even before he stepped forward enough to see, that he would find Dean.
The cat lay still, his front paws stretched out and his body twisted awkwardly, as if he had tried to land on his feet but hadn’t had the time to manage it.
“Is he…” but Sam couldn’t finish the statement. He hadn’t known Dean Thackeray very long, but in those few hours when they had thought the witches were dead, Sam had allowed himself to entertain thoughts of Dean on the road with him, picturing his life with a companion and a friend, sarcastic and rude and ever-present. It was ridiculous to miss something that had never happened, and Sam couldn’t help feeling that it was all horribly unfair.
“Is it?” the little girl asked, her voice soft and light, bringing Sam up from his thoughts as she watched him. “Unfair?” she clarified. She smiled then, amusement that was too wise for her young face making her pale eyes shine.
“You’re his sister,” Sam said, realization striking him like a freight train. “You’re Emily.” She tipped her head in acknowledgement. “You’re a ghost?” It was wholly and completely unfair, then, if she had been around all this time and Dean had never known, or if she had been prevented from resting peacefully because of what the witches had done to her. Sam feared for a horrible moment that he would have to salt and burn her bones, but she giggled at him and interrupted his racing thoughts.
“The witches are dead,” she said. “Their magic is undone.” She paused, like there was something significant about this that Sam was still failing to comprehend. “All of it.”
Sam glanced out toward the front gate and realized for the first time that the eerie mist was gone, that there was the sound of quiet chatter drifting in the damp dawn air and signs of movement. The adults of Salem were waking up.
“I had to come,” she explained, a little urgently. “I had to, for him.” She turned back to Dean’s unmoving body. “And it turns out he’s just as lazy as ever!” she suddenly shouted, jerking herself to her feet and bracing her hands on her hips. “Dean Thackeray, wake up this instant!”
Sam felt momentarily confused, then wondered if he would have to explain about going to a better place to this little ghost girl. Before he could get his mouth to work, the body of the black cat began to glow. At first, Sam was convinced it was sunlight, but there were no beams of sun reaching past the tree that was shading them. The glow was only around Dean, and a second later, Sam had to blink as another image was taking shape over that of the cat.
One moment it was Dean, lying still with his paws sprawled awkwardly, and the next it was a young man, still glowing and utterly beautiful. He wore tattered brown pants and a loose linen shirt and his hair was tied back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck.
“What?” Sam found himself asking. Emily flashed a bright grin at him.
“All their magic!” she reiterated. “Dean was never killed. They changed him, but they didn’t kill him.”
“But he died!” Sam cried. “He was dead, just now!”
“He was immortal,” she corrected. “How can you kill an immortal cat?” She had a point.
Sam turned, flabbergasted, back to the guy to Dean, who had dirty blond hair and a slender nose and freckles and Sam swallowed thickly and looked away because he was having inappropriate thoughts about a three hundred and twenty four year old cat, who was a boy.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Sam heard Emily’s sing-song as she tipped forward on the balls of her feet and leaned over Dean, her brown hair sweeping his lightly freckled cheek.
“Y’er such a brat,” Dean muttered. A moment later, his body jerked and his eyes snapped open. “Emily?”
She laughed brightly at his astonishment.
“Am I dreaming?”
“Nope!” she trilled.
He blinked; his eyes still glued to the smiling face of his little sister. “Am I dead?”
“Not yet,” she said, her smile a little softer, her eyes bright and warm as she looked at her brother.
“I’ll just…” Sam said, gestured awkwardly behind him and began moving off, giving the siblings their privacy. Dean’s whispered, “I should be dead,” drifted after him. He could hear Emily’s soft voice, but couldn’t make out her words.
“All Souls Day,” Sam thought to himself, remembering what the witches had said and what his own research had revealed. The veil between the living and the dead was weakest, and Emily had stepped through so she could speak with her big brother: the brother who had risked everything to save her, the brother who had been living with the guilt of his failure for three centuries.
“Hey,” Dean said, his voice a little gruff as he walked slowly through the front gate of the cemetery some time later.
“Hey,” Sam greeted. He was leaning against the hood of the Impala, facing into the slowly rising sun and nursing a growing sense of relief. It had only been one night. It felt like at least eight. “You okay?”
“I’m human,” Dean said with a shrug, joining Sam in his perch. “Which, y’know, a little awkward. Em says I might be coughing up hairballs for the next few days but I suspect she was just being a brat.”
Sam grinned. “I like her.”
Dean’s wistful grin spread wide, and his pride and devotion to his little sister shone on his face. “Yeah, she’s not so bad.” He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly, and shrugged. “I didn’t think it’d end like this. I thought … y’know, just being able to move on would be good. I never thought…”
“Must be weird.”
Dean snorted. “Dude, three centuries of climbing trees and drinking milk and licking my damned tail and then suddenly I’m seventeen again!”
Sam shrugged.
Dean huffed. “No one is going to take me seriously!”
Sam snorted, which turned into a snicker, and then quickly spiraled into a loud guffawing laugh spurred, undoubtedly, by the adrenaline of the evening and the relief of it all being over with such a clear and definite victory.
Beside him, Dean was laughing, quieter, dry and rough, his head tipped back and a hand braced loosely across his middle. It felt easy, oddly right and entirely natural to sit together like that, and Sam started to think of an entirely different future with Dean. No longer a feline companion, but a real partner: facing down ghosts and vampires and whatever else was waiting in the darkness, always together no matter what. Suddenly a future of hunting no longer seemed so stiflingly lonely to Sam.
Bumping his shoulder lightly against Dean’s, Sam smiled. “I’ll take you seriously.”
Dean raised an eyebrow, turned to face Sam as he asked, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” Sam affirmed. They were silent for a moment, then Sam cleared his throat, glancing back at the other boy a little nervously as he said, “The offer stands. If you’re still interested.”
“Offer?”
Sam shrugged, glanced away and tried to wrangle his sudden roiling nerves into submission. “To come with me,” he said. It came out lower than he was expecting, breathy and hushed. He realized somewhat belatedly that he was tipping his head down, moving into Dean’s space.
Dean wasn’t moving away.
“Dude,” Dean said, his voice equally soft. “I have, like, three hundred year old cat breath. This is probably not a good idea.”
Sam considered that fleetingly as he continued to dip his head forward. Dismissed the notion quickly. “I don’t care.” He pressed his lips against Dean’s; felt his eyes dropping closed on a sudden sense of possibility.
Dean tasted like cream, which Sam remembered seeing Susannah setting out for him after she had closed up the museum. Jesus, that was just last night. It was crazy and happening fast, but he didn’t stop. Sam flicked his tongue along the bottom curve of Dean’s mouth, pressed in, his hand cupping the back of Dean’s head, and felt the loose leather tie that was holding Dean’s hair back. With a gentle tug, Sam loosed it; he let his fingers twist into the soft hair and down the smooth skin along the back of Dean’s neck.
When they separated, breath a little short and heavy, Sam smiled shyly. “How’s that?”
Dean licked his lips, his green eyes flickering away and then back, alight with a teasing glint as he said, “Not bad, for a virgin.”
“Oh right,” Sam said, huffing in feigned offense. “Says mister experience. Got a lot of tail when you had a tail?”
“Dude, I got play when I was human!”
“Sure.”
“Chicks loved me!”
Sam smacked his lips thoughtfully, waited until he had Dean’s full attention before he said, “Tastes like tuna.”
“Hey!” Dean swatted at Sam. “I do not! I haven’t have fish in…”
Sam didn’t bother to wait and hear how long it had been since Dean had eaten fish. He pulled Dean in again and pressed their mouths together, and Dean gave up his rant in favor of groaning appreciatively.
After, when there was color in their cheeks and heat zinging through them, when Dean couldn’t stop smiling and Sam couldn’t help flashing shy happy glances at the other man, sitting side-by-side on the hood of the car, Sam bumped his shoulder against Dean’s and said, “So, how about it?”
“What?”
Sam snorted a laugh and raised his eyebrows, receiving nothing but an innocent stare for his trouble. Sam shook his head, taking a deep breath and keeping a tight hold on his hope as he said, “Come hunting with me.”
Dean tipped his head to the side, observing Sam with quiet consideration, his gaze solemn and his expression still. Sam felt his breath catch in his throat, nerves bubbling back inside him, but then Dean smirked at him, that light back in his too-green eyes as he said, “Sure, Sammy. I’ll be a witch with you.”
Sam eyes narrowed as he assessed Dean’s face. After a moment, he met Dean’s mischievous look with one of his own, finding it difficult to contain his smile as he said, “I’m a hunter, flea-brain.” Beside him, Dean tipped his head back and laughed, the sound full and light and utterly delighted. It made Sam grin.
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|<< END PART THREE ||
MASTERPOST