The Sticking Point, 7/12
Title: The Sticking Point, 7/12
Author: sowell
Genre: Angst, action, slash
Characters/Pairing: Sam/Dean, secondary Dean/Cas, and Meg/Cas if you squint
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Word count: This part 3,096
Warnings: Language, Wincest, see spoiler warnings
Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of all aired episodes. Very general S8 spoilers:
[here there be spoilers]
Dean gets himself out of Purgatory and Sam has gotten out of the hunting game
Disclaimer: Sooooo not mine
Summary: Dean comes back from Purgatory, but there are consequences attached to his return. Sam and Dean try to reconnect to keep each other safe.
A/N: 1) Unbeta’d - all mistakes are my own. 2) Watson, AR is a real place, but I’ve never been there and thus all details are one hundred percent made up. 3) Beware some nonsensical appropriation of biblical mythology. 4) Comments and concrit are always welcome.
Masterpost
Chapter 7
Sunday
Sam was thirteen when Dean jerked him off for the first time. It had been a stupid thing, but Sam was so awkward and inept and desperate that Dean couldn’t help but tease him.
They had a code about jerking off; it was done quickly and with no fuss and the other person shut their trap and pretended it wasn’t happening. But Dean had been drunk that night, stumbling home from some stupid high school party while their dad was away on a hunt, and he’d walked into their dingy little motel just in time to catch Sam in the act, erection tenting the sheets.
And because he was drunk, Dean had stumbled over and dropped himself over Sam’s frozen body, grinning down and pushing Sam’s mop of hair back off his eyes.
“Nice,” he had slurred. “Atta boy, Sammy.” And Sam had looked up at him, shocky and horny and enthralled in that way that only teenagers could be, and what had begun as a joke turned into something dangerous and permanent and disabling. Dean had put a hand on him, and Sam’s back had bowed violently, panting hotly into Dean’s neck. He jerked Sam off into the rumpled sheets, then kept him pinned while he finished himself.
Other teenagers had girlfriends and makeout points and prom night. Sam and Dean only had each other to struggle through the rough years. Sam had learned when he was still a kid that the thing to do was not feel up a girl in the back of the movie theater but crawl under the sheets with his brother and brush their scabbed knees together. Even Dean knew it was fucked up, but the word incest never seemed to fit quite right. He was constantly, guiltily aware of what he had done to Sam, but he wasn’t in love with Sam. They jerked each other off out of necessity and isolation and, for Dean, out of the shuddery comfort of Sam’s tipped eyes and big hands and almost constant adolescent indignation. Sam and Dad were the only people in the world that could be trusted, and that meant body, mind, and soul.
Sam put a stop to it when he turned fifteen and got a girlfriend, and Dean couldn’t begrudge him. Dean didn’t have girlfriends, only a series of random chicks, so it was easy to let Sam crowd him against the counter whenever they had to move on and Sam was once again without an outlet. Sam was skittish and lanky and almost always hostile during those years, and Dean never got over the way his face would go slack and his fingers would dig into Dean’s skin when he came.
And then Sam went to Stanford and ripped away a layer of Dean like it had never been.
*****Dean was up an hour before Sam, just as the sun was beginning to chase away the darkness. Sam still slept like a teenager at times, and his year and a half away from the life had softened him. He couldn’t go for days anymore, and when he crashed, he crashed good.
Castiel had shown another bizarre bout of humanity by fluttering off somewhere and bringing them back donuts and coffee. Real coffee with cream, not just the instant stuff they kept in the glove compartment.
“Meg tells me it’s what humans do on Sunday mornings,” Cas said.
Dean shoved two powered donuts down his throat and saved the jelly-filled one for Sam. Sam would bitch, and Dean found he was actually sort of looking forward to that.
He woke Sam up by waving the steaming cup under his nose. Sam moaned, long and wanting in his sleep, and Dean’s stomach clenched in a completely ill-timed burst of lust. Fucking Sam and his fucking hands and his deep fucking voice.
“Up and at ‘em,” Dean said. “Big day.”
Sam opened his eyes, and Dean read the way his emotions flipped from sleep to confusion to awareness to panic and then finally landed on resolve. Good.
They packed the car and armed themselves, which took all of ten minutes. Dean stretched in the sun, feeling the way it warmed his skin. He’d never get enough sun, as long as he lived.
“Dean,” Sam said behind him, and Dean turned. Sam had his hands shoved in his pockets, and he had that look on his face that said he was thirty seconds from giving one of his “Just in case we die today” speeches.
“Don’t,” Dean said. “I see where this is going, and just - don’t.”
“I didn’t even say anything,” Sam said, but there was a smile playing around the corner of his mouth.
“You don’t have to,” Dean said. “You’re an open book, buddy.”
“I guess,” Sam said. “But I don’t think you know what I was going to say.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re going to win today. That’s all.”
*****They went at midmorning so the sun would provide some coverage. They left the Impala buried in the woods, as close as they could get without the rumbling engine giving them away. The nest was either very confident or had grown very complacent over the last two years, because there were no guards posted at any of the doors. The whole clearing was silent.
It was going to be a bright, hot day. They had driven seventy miles to the nearest funeral home to stock up on dead man’s blood, and they each carried two full syringes and a coated knife. Sam had two guns and a serrated blade on him, and he’d seen Dean carefully strapping a machete to his thigh and holstering another at his back. Dean had even reluctantly given Meg one of the smaller hatchets. Sam and Dean both carried two grenades, hooked onto belt loops and waiting to be thrown. Only Cas was unarmed; Sam had seen him burn a vampire from the inside out.
“I’ll do what I can,” Castiel said. “But I’m still weak. You’ll have to be quick, and very, very quiet.”
The entire nest was fast asleep. With forty vampires, they could afford a night watch, but Sam figured they’d lived so long without challenge that they’d ditched the precaution. It was what he and Dean were counting on.
The door creaked the tiniest bit when they opened it, but the nearest sleeping vampire was halfway across the warehouse, and it didn’t even stir. There were at least a dozen of them on the first floor, strewn out across the open space in various states of undress. Some were pressed together - mates, Sam assumed. Others were curled up on beds of dried grass or even fluffed piles of cotton that looked like it had been ripped from a mattress. Sam counted two dead bodies. The girl from several nights ago had been discarded in the corner, slumped over with dead, staring eyes, and the other was barely a body anymore. Its flesh had been nearly ripped from the bones, leaving a mangled mash of graying tissue and white skin.
He ached to use the machete in his hand, but that’s not what they were there for. He forced his eyes away from the bodies and kept moving. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Dean pull his gaze away from the dead girl and follow suit. Sam located the stairs and nodded his head. As planned, he and Dean slid their way silently to the second floor, while Meg and Castiel stayed to search the bottom level.
The upper level was more complicated; instead of one open space, it had a central hallway and six rooms lining each side. Dean hitched his head to left - a silent order.
They picked their way through their respective sides of the hallway, soundlessly casing the rooms. Sam noted thick curtains draping every window, so no light filtered in. Flashlights were out of the question.
He looked for closets, secret wall compartments, locked boxes with weird symbols - anything. There were three to five vampires per room, every one of them sprawled on the floor. Sam gave them a wide berth and had to hope none of them were hiding the stone under their makeshift mattresses. He couldn’t hear Dean on the other side of the hallway, but he could feel his presence. They were moving down the rooms at roughly the same pace.
Sam stopped when he entered the third room, because there it was, plain as day. One of four vampires was curled on his side, clutching a wooden box like its life depended on it. It was roughly shoe-box sized and sealed shut with a brass padlock. Sam’s eyes went to it with laser focus.
He took a deep breath and began to ease the object away, praying for luck and silence and possibly a miracle. The vampire’s hands clutched on the box, and he started to pull it back unconsciously. Sam’s foot slipped from his crouch, and he accidentally jabbed the vampire in the side.
Fuck. So much for luck.
Clear brown eyes snapped open, but Sam was already moving. A blood-soaked rag stuffed down the creature’s throat, a syringe in the softest part of his neck. The vampire relaxed back, eyes dizzy and agonized, and the box slipped out of his hands. Sam grabbed it, then hauled up the vampire in his other arm, dragging it out of the room. The struggle it put up was weak at best - the dead man’s blood left him almost paralyzed. The other vampires slept on, and Sam pulled the door closed behind him without a sound.
Dean met him in the hallway, and they worked with the perfunctory ease of an assembly line. They couldn’t seem to make it an hour without arguing, but they’d always been able to fight perfectly in sync. John had trained them well. Sam shoved the vampire to the ground, one hand in its hair to stretch out its neck, one foot on its back, holding it on hands and knees. Dean swung the machete, and the flesh separated into two clean hunks.
Sam let the thing crumple in its own blood, then held out the box to Dean. Dean’s eyes lit on it, then met his. One jam of the machete’s handle, and the lock broke. Dean tipped up the lid and…
Cash. There was nothing but stacks of cash inside. The dead vampire had been the damn treasurer.
Dean shot him an impatient look, and Sam mouthed “sorry.” They pocketed as much of the cash as they could fit, then moved on.
Three more rooms to search. The first and second turned up nothing. Sam had blood on his clothes, now, and the vampires were starting to shift when he walked into the rooms, smelling it even in their sleep. They were running out of time.
The last room raised the hairs on the back of his neck. First, there were only two vampires in the whole place. The other rooms had been packed like sardines. Second, there was an actual bed and side table. The curtains over the windows were a dark, rich velvet , not the ragged cloth of the other bedrooms.
The couple on the bed slept like lovers, wrapped around each other. The guy was dark and lean with a widow’s peak, and the woman had blonde hair that was more butter than gold. Jeffries had described these two as the leaders. If the stone were here, it would be with them.
Sam checked the bedside table first. Nothing. He felt around the edge of the mattress, looking for a sewn-up tear that said the mattress had been ripped open at some juncture. The walls were as flimsy and rough as the rest of the warehouse, but Sam walked the perimeter anyway, feeling for anything that might be a hidden compartment.
Nothing.
He turned in a circle, frustrated, when something glinted in the corner of his eye. The woman’s piled over her shoulder, but beneath its thin curtain, Sam could see a golden chain. A jagged stone hung at the end of it, pillowed against the white mattress.
Sam stared for a minute, caught. The stone was a dull gray, oblong and cloudy, and something seemed to shift in the middle of it when Sam looked. It was just a thing, laying perfectly still, but its insides looked alive and threatening. He didn’t want to touch it, and that alone told him that it was the stone he’d been looking for. He’d have to be quick. He lifted the stone between two fingers, ready to jerk the chain free.
A hand caught his wrist, and when he looked, the vampire’s eyes were open, cold blue in the darkness. Sam tried to yank the necklace free, but she flung him off with barely a flick of her wrist. He hit the wall and slid down, winded.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, long legs swinging out of bed.
Sam let her get close enough, and then he reached for his second syringe, aiming for her neck. She deflected it, lightning-quick, but the needle glanced off her arm and drew blood. She jerked back, hissing, and Sam saw his chance. He grabbed wildly for the swinging stone, and somehow he caught it. Her mate was up now, staring at them fighting with deadly intent, and Sam could hear movement in the rooms behind him.
Sam pulled and he felt the chain snap free. He caught her with a punch across the jaw that probably hurt his knuckles more than it hurt her, and then he was scrambling for the door. He tossed one of the grenades behind him, and the explosion knocked him flat on his face.
“Dean!” he bellowed through the dust. “Come on!”
Dean was already in the hallway, hacking his way through two very confused vampires. Sam sprinted for the stairs at the far end, hearing footsteps pound behind him. He had to hope they were Dean’s and not the woman’s.
They’d kicked the nest awake, and Sam had to dodge another vampire as he headed for the stairs. He looked back frantically, waiting for Dean to break free so he could launch his second explosive. His shoe slipped in something sticky and red, and he stumbled, only to be caught up by a hand around his neck.
It was her, blue eyes blazing. She lifted him against the wall, cutting off his air until he was writhing, hands pulling at her wrists. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “Walking into this place is suicide.”
Sam couldn’t answer. He thought he caught a flash of white light and heard Meg’s voice from below. A slim hand reached down into his pocket, fishing for the stone. Sam kicked uselessly. She was way too strong, and his throat was going to collapse under her fingers. Everything started to white out, the whole scene going fuzzy around the edges. She was still speaking, and Sam could smell the blood on her breath. Her fangs had come down and were inches from him, stretching…
And then the vice around his throat disappeared, and Dean was there, savage and blood-lit beyond the flash of the machete.
The vampire’s head hit the floorboards and rolled crazily, cheek over cheek, until it stopped to rest against the wall. Sam slid to the ground, pulling at his neck and trying to breathe deeply enough to clear the careening stars from his vision. He felt the second grenade snagged from his belt loop, and then a faraway explosion as it hit its mark. Sam sagged against the wall and breathed.
“Hey, look at me. You good? Sam.” Dean’s hands were on his face, tipping his head to check for lumps, pressing two fingers against his neck to search for his pulse.
The familiarity of it was comforting, and Sam let Dean cup both his cheeks before he put a hand on Dean’s wrist and hoarsely said, “I’m fine.”
“Jesus,” Dean breathed, pulling him to his feet. Sam’s vision went dotted from pain. The hallway beyond had lost its shape. Sunlight was pouring in from the hole one of the grenades had punched in the wall. The roof was coming down, and the floor was starting to sag. Dust swirled in the sunlight, drifting past the blood-splashed walls. Sam’s swimming vision caught hold of an arm, a shoe, a chunk of scalp. Dean’s face was black with blood, his hands coated in it.
“Come on, we gotta go,” Dean said. “This whole place is coming down.” Below them, the roar of fighting continued. He pulled at Sam’s arm, and Sam held fast.
“I got it,” Sam said. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the stone. “Dean, I got it.”
Dean blinked him, then looked down at the stone. Sam watched his mouth part the slightest bit. He started to reach for it, then drew his hand back instead and rubbed at the blood crusting on his face. Sam took his hand and lowered the amulet into it, golden chain and hazy stone piling into his palm. Dean stared, and Sam could see him registering the same wrongness of the thing that he himself had felt. It slithered inside itself.
“Dean,” he said, light and joyful, unable to stop the smile pulling at him. “We did it. I can’t believe it, we - “
Dean stared for another few seconds, then shook himself out of it and slid the stone into his own pocket. “Right,” he said, “look at the pretty necklace later. Let’s get out of here.” He started moving forward the through the gloom, and Sam put a hand on his shoulder, bone-crushing hope and relief bursting out of him.
“We really got it,” Sam said again. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Dean turned back, and Sam knew he was fighting the same elation with all his might, because he was Dean and he would never believe that anything good could happen without coming coated in his own sacrifice.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Sam said, choked up. “You’re not going back to Purgatory. I’ve got it, we can do the ritual, we can - “
Dean’s face changed, and it took an instant too long for Sam to recognize the shift. Dean’s mouth twisted in warning, his eyes opening wide.
Sam heard, “Sam look out!” before something slammed into his skull, and everything went dark.
Chapter 8
Author: sowell
Genre: Angst, action, slash
Characters/Pairing: Sam/Dean, secondary Dean/Cas, and Meg/Cas if you squint
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Word count: This part 3,096
Warnings: Language, Wincest, see spoiler warnings
Spoilers: Assumes knowledge of all aired episodes. Very general S8 spoilers:
[here there be spoilers]
Dean gets himself out of Purgatory and Sam has gotten out of the hunting game
Disclaimer: Sooooo not mine
Summary: Dean comes back from Purgatory, but there are consequences attached to his return. Sam and Dean try to reconnect to keep each other safe.
A/N: 1) Unbeta’d - all mistakes are my own. 2) Watson, AR is a real place, but I’ve never been there and thus all details are one hundred percent made up. 3) Beware some nonsensical appropriation of biblical mythology. 4) Comments and concrit are always welcome.
Masterpost
Chapter 7
Sunday
Sam was thirteen when Dean jerked him off for the first time. It had been a stupid thing, but Sam was so awkward and inept and desperate that Dean couldn’t help but tease him.
They had a code about jerking off; it was done quickly and with no fuss and the other person shut their trap and pretended it wasn’t happening. But Dean had been drunk that night, stumbling home from some stupid high school party while their dad was away on a hunt, and he’d walked into their dingy little motel just in time to catch Sam in the act, erection tenting the sheets.
And because he was drunk, Dean had stumbled over and dropped himself over Sam’s frozen body, grinning down and pushing Sam’s mop of hair back off his eyes.
“Nice,” he had slurred. “Atta boy, Sammy.” And Sam had looked up at him, shocky and horny and enthralled in that way that only teenagers could be, and what had begun as a joke turned into something dangerous and permanent and disabling. Dean had put a hand on him, and Sam’s back had bowed violently, panting hotly into Dean’s neck. He jerked Sam off into the rumpled sheets, then kept him pinned while he finished himself.
Other teenagers had girlfriends and makeout points and prom night. Sam and Dean only had each other to struggle through the rough years. Sam had learned when he was still a kid that the thing to do was not feel up a girl in the back of the movie theater but crawl under the sheets with his brother and brush their scabbed knees together. Even Dean knew it was fucked up, but the word incest never seemed to fit quite right. He was constantly, guiltily aware of what he had done to Sam, but he wasn’t in love with Sam. They jerked each other off out of necessity and isolation and, for Dean, out of the shuddery comfort of Sam’s tipped eyes and big hands and almost constant adolescent indignation. Sam and Dad were the only people in the world that could be trusted, and that meant body, mind, and soul.
Sam put a stop to it when he turned fifteen and got a girlfriend, and Dean couldn’t begrudge him. Dean didn’t have girlfriends, only a series of random chicks, so it was easy to let Sam crowd him against the counter whenever they had to move on and Sam was once again without an outlet. Sam was skittish and lanky and almost always hostile during those years, and Dean never got over the way his face would go slack and his fingers would dig into Dean’s skin when he came.
And then Sam went to Stanford and ripped away a layer of Dean like it had never been.
*****Dean was up an hour before Sam, just as the sun was beginning to chase away the darkness. Sam still slept like a teenager at times, and his year and a half away from the life had softened him. He couldn’t go for days anymore, and when he crashed, he crashed good.
Castiel had shown another bizarre bout of humanity by fluttering off somewhere and bringing them back donuts and coffee. Real coffee with cream, not just the instant stuff they kept in the glove compartment.
“Meg tells me it’s what humans do on Sunday mornings,” Cas said.
Dean shoved two powered donuts down his throat and saved the jelly-filled one for Sam. Sam would bitch, and Dean found he was actually sort of looking forward to that.
He woke Sam up by waving the steaming cup under his nose. Sam moaned, long and wanting in his sleep, and Dean’s stomach clenched in a completely ill-timed burst of lust. Fucking Sam and his fucking hands and his deep fucking voice.
“Up and at ‘em,” Dean said. “Big day.”
Sam opened his eyes, and Dean read the way his emotions flipped from sleep to confusion to awareness to panic and then finally landed on resolve. Good.
They packed the car and armed themselves, which took all of ten minutes. Dean stretched in the sun, feeling the way it warmed his skin. He’d never get enough sun, as long as he lived.
“Dean,” Sam said behind him, and Dean turned. Sam had his hands shoved in his pockets, and he had that look on his face that said he was thirty seconds from giving one of his “Just in case we die today” speeches.
“Don’t,” Dean said. “I see where this is going, and just - don’t.”
“I didn’t even say anything,” Sam said, but there was a smile playing around the corner of his mouth.
“You don’t have to,” Dean said. “You’re an open book, buddy.”
“I guess,” Sam said. “But I don’t think you know what I was going to say.”
Dean raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re going to win today. That’s all.”
*****They went at midmorning so the sun would provide some coverage. They left the Impala buried in the woods, as close as they could get without the rumbling engine giving them away. The nest was either very confident or had grown very complacent over the last two years, because there were no guards posted at any of the doors. The whole clearing was silent.
It was going to be a bright, hot day. They had driven seventy miles to the nearest funeral home to stock up on dead man’s blood, and they each carried two full syringes and a coated knife. Sam had two guns and a serrated blade on him, and he’d seen Dean carefully strapping a machete to his thigh and holstering another at his back. Dean had even reluctantly given Meg one of the smaller hatchets. Sam and Dean both carried two grenades, hooked onto belt loops and waiting to be thrown. Only Cas was unarmed; Sam had seen him burn a vampire from the inside out.
“I’ll do what I can,” Castiel said. “But I’m still weak. You’ll have to be quick, and very, very quiet.”
The entire nest was fast asleep. With forty vampires, they could afford a night watch, but Sam figured they’d lived so long without challenge that they’d ditched the precaution. It was what he and Dean were counting on.
The door creaked the tiniest bit when they opened it, but the nearest sleeping vampire was halfway across the warehouse, and it didn’t even stir. There were at least a dozen of them on the first floor, strewn out across the open space in various states of undress. Some were pressed together - mates, Sam assumed. Others were curled up on beds of dried grass or even fluffed piles of cotton that looked like it had been ripped from a mattress. Sam counted two dead bodies. The girl from several nights ago had been discarded in the corner, slumped over with dead, staring eyes, and the other was barely a body anymore. Its flesh had been nearly ripped from the bones, leaving a mangled mash of graying tissue and white skin.
He ached to use the machete in his hand, but that’s not what they were there for. He forced his eyes away from the bodies and kept moving. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Dean pull his gaze away from the dead girl and follow suit. Sam located the stairs and nodded his head. As planned, he and Dean slid their way silently to the second floor, while Meg and Castiel stayed to search the bottom level.
The upper level was more complicated; instead of one open space, it had a central hallway and six rooms lining each side. Dean hitched his head to left - a silent order.
They picked their way through their respective sides of the hallway, soundlessly casing the rooms. Sam noted thick curtains draping every window, so no light filtered in. Flashlights were out of the question.
He looked for closets, secret wall compartments, locked boxes with weird symbols - anything. There were three to five vampires per room, every one of them sprawled on the floor. Sam gave them a wide berth and had to hope none of them were hiding the stone under their makeshift mattresses. He couldn’t hear Dean on the other side of the hallway, but he could feel his presence. They were moving down the rooms at roughly the same pace.
Sam stopped when he entered the third room, because there it was, plain as day. One of four vampires was curled on his side, clutching a wooden box like its life depended on it. It was roughly shoe-box sized and sealed shut with a brass padlock. Sam’s eyes went to it with laser focus.
He took a deep breath and began to ease the object away, praying for luck and silence and possibly a miracle. The vampire’s hands clutched on the box, and he started to pull it back unconsciously. Sam’s foot slipped from his crouch, and he accidentally jabbed the vampire in the side.
Fuck. So much for luck.
Clear brown eyes snapped open, but Sam was already moving. A blood-soaked rag stuffed down the creature’s throat, a syringe in the softest part of his neck. The vampire relaxed back, eyes dizzy and agonized, and the box slipped out of his hands. Sam grabbed it, then hauled up the vampire in his other arm, dragging it out of the room. The struggle it put up was weak at best - the dead man’s blood left him almost paralyzed. The other vampires slept on, and Sam pulled the door closed behind him without a sound.
Dean met him in the hallway, and they worked with the perfunctory ease of an assembly line. They couldn’t seem to make it an hour without arguing, but they’d always been able to fight perfectly in sync. John had trained them well. Sam shoved the vampire to the ground, one hand in its hair to stretch out its neck, one foot on its back, holding it on hands and knees. Dean swung the machete, and the flesh separated into two clean hunks.
Sam let the thing crumple in its own blood, then held out the box to Dean. Dean’s eyes lit on it, then met his. One jam of the machete’s handle, and the lock broke. Dean tipped up the lid and…
Cash. There was nothing but stacks of cash inside. The dead vampire had been the damn treasurer.
Dean shot him an impatient look, and Sam mouthed “sorry.” They pocketed as much of the cash as they could fit, then moved on.
Three more rooms to search. The first and second turned up nothing. Sam had blood on his clothes, now, and the vampires were starting to shift when he walked into the rooms, smelling it even in their sleep. They were running out of time.
The last room raised the hairs on the back of his neck. First, there were only two vampires in the whole place. The other rooms had been packed like sardines. Second, there was an actual bed and side table. The curtains over the windows were a dark, rich velvet , not the ragged cloth of the other bedrooms.
The couple on the bed slept like lovers, wrapped around each other. The guy was dark and lean with a widow’s peak, and the woman had blonde hair that was more butter than gold. Jeffries had described these two as the leaders. If the stone were here, it would be with them.
Sam checked the bedside table first. Nothing. He felt around the edge of the mattress, looking for a sewn-up tear that said the mattress had been ripped open at some juncture. The walls were as flimsy and rough as the rest of the warehouse, but Sam walked the perimeter anyway, feeling for anything that might be a hidden compartment.
Nothing.
He turned in a circle, frustrated, when something glinted in the corner of his eye. The woman’s piled over her shoulder, but beneath its thin curtain, Sam could see a golden chain. A jagged stone hung at the end of it, pillowed against the white mattress.
Sam stared for a minute, caught. The stone was a dull gray, oblong and cloudy, and something seemed to shift in the middle of it when Sam looked. It was just a thing, laying perfectly still, but its insides looked alive and threatening. He didn’t want to touch it, and that alone told him that it was the stone he’d been looking for. He’d have to be quick. He lifted the stone between two fingers, ready to jerk the chain free.
A hand caught his wrist, and when he looked, the vampire’s eyes were open, cold blue in the darkness. Sam tried to yank the necklace free, but she flung him off with barely a flick of her wrist. He hit the wall and slid down, winded.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, long legs swinging out of bed.
Sam let her get close enough, and then he reached for his second syringe, aiming for her neck. She deflected it, lightning-quick, but the needle glanced off her arm and drew blood. She jerked back, hissing, and Sam saw his chance. He grabbed wildly for the swinging stone, and somehow he caught it. Her mate was up now, staring at them fighting with deadly intent, and Sam could hear movement in the rooms behind him.
Sam pulled and he felt the chain snap free. He caught her with a punch across the jaw that probably hurt his knuckles more than it hurt her, and then he was scrambling for the door. He tossed one of the grenades behind him, and the explosion knocked him flat on his face.
“Dean!” he bellowed through the dust. “Come on!”
Dean was already in the hallway, hacking his way through two very confused vampires. Sam sprinted for the stairs at the far end, hearing footsteps pound behind him. He had to hope they were Dean’s and not the woman’s.
They’d kicked the nest awake, and Sam had to dodge another vampire as he headed for the stairs. He looked back frantically, waiting for Dean to break free so he could launch his second explosive. His shoe slipped in something sticky and red, and he stumbled, only to be caught up by a hand around his neck.
It was her, blue eyes blazing. She lifted him against the wall, cutting off his air until he was writhing, hands pulling at her wrists. “I don’t care who you are,” she said. “Walking into this place is suicide.”
Sam couldn’t answer. He thought he caught a flash of white light and heard Meg’s voice from below. A slim hand reached down into his pocket, fishing for the stone. Sam kicked uselessly. She was way too strong, and his throat was going to collapse under her fingers. Everything started to white out, the whole scene going fuzzy around the edges. She was still speaking, and Sam could smell the blood on her breath. Her fangs had come down and were inches from him, stretching…
And then the vice around his throat disappeared, and Dean was there, savage and blood-lit beyond the flash of the machete.
The vampire’s head hit the floorboards and rolled crazily, cheek over cheek, until it stopped to rest against the wall. Sam slid to the ground, pulling at his neck and trying to breathe deeply enough to clear the careening stars from his vision. He felt the second grenade snagged from his belt loop, and then a faraway explosion as it hit its mark. Sam sagged against the wall and breathed.
“Hey, look at me. You good? Sam.” Dean’s hands were on his face, tipping his head to check for lumps, pressing two fingers against his neck to search for his pulse.
The familiarity of it was comforting, and Sam let Dean cup both his cheeks before he put a hand on Dean’s wrist and hoarsely said, “I’m fine.”
“Jesus,” Dean breathed, pulling him to his feet. Sam’s vision went dotted from pain. The hallway beyond had lost its shape. Sunlight was pouring in from the hole one of the grenades had punched in the wall. The roof was coming down, and the floor was starting to sag. Dust swirled in the sunlight, drifting past the blood-splashed walls. Sam’s swimming vision caught hold of an arm, a shoe, a chunk of scalp. Dean’s face was black with blood, his hands coated in it.
“Come on, we gotta go,” Dean said. “This whole place is coming down.” Below them, the roar of fighting continued. He pulled at Sam’s arm, and Sam held fast.
“I got it,” Sam said. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the stone. “Dean, I got it.”
Dean blinked him, then looked down at the stone. Sam watched his mouth part the slightest bit. He started to reach for it, then drew his hand back instead and rubbed at the blood crusting on his face. Sam took his hand and lowered the amulet into it, golden chain and hazy stone piling into his palm. Dean stared, and Sam could see him registering the same wrongness of the thing that he himself had felt. It slithered inside itself.
“Dean,” he said, light and joyful, unable to stop the smile pulling at him. “We did it. I can’t believe it, we - “
Dean stared for another few seconds, then shook himself out of it and slid the stone into his own pocket. “Right,” he said, “look at the pretty necklace later. Let’s get out of here.” He started moving forward the through the gloom, and Sam put a hand on his shoulder, bone-crushing hope and relief bursting out of him.
“We really got it,” Sam said again. “It’s gonna be okay.”
Dean turned back, and Sam knew he was fighting the same elation with all his might, because he was Dean and he would never believe that anything good could happen without coming coated in his own sacrifice.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Sam said, choked up. “You’re not going back to Purgatory. I’ve got it, we can do the ritual, we can - “
Dean’s face changed, and it took an instant too long for Sam to recognize the shift. Dean’s mouth twisted in warning, his eyes opening wide.
Sam heard, “Sam look out!” before something slammed into his skull, and everything went dark.
Chapter 8