Stranger in Love, part 5/5
MASTER || PROLOGUE || PART 1 || PART 2 || PART 3 || PART 4 || PART 5 || EPILOGUE
PART 5
Over the next week, Dean called five phone numbers from Candy's list. He personally checked on three meeting places.
Sam had been right, just as Dean had been right in the first place; the whole thing was certifiably crazy. Support groups for the victims of demonic possessions meant an altogether fairly hysterical bunch of nutcases with varying degrees of trauma. Dean would admit that it was amusing to watch sometimes, dull more often than not, sometimes even touching.
But it was never of any use. True to form, demons didn't pop out from hell at random, not without ulterior motive. That much proved correct after Dean had questioned the first lot of the former hosts. Alas, for the most part the hosts had been cut off whenever crucial information had been passed or major assignments carried out. None of them had heard a word about the one and only John Winchester. They didn't even remember all the locations they'd been taken, and certainly no names, no ranks. Some detached mentions of yellow eyes recurred now and then at best. None of that boded well for his search for Dad, but Dean had to keep on trying, had to at least exhaust the option. Mostly he was exhausting himself these days however, and the surreal atmosphere of the meetings was somehow adding to that.
Another day, another therapy session. And how those were therapeutic to anyone at all, he would never figure out. Dean found them rather depressing, a spiraling sort of disappointment. Case in point, this time around he turned up late, and while he never was much for introspection, it was obvious that he was simply forestalling the unpleasant.
Hand on a heavy door knob, he hesitated a good minute listening to some whiny voices coming from the other side. Eventually, he pulled the handle like a rusty, unforgiving pump of deep water well. Inside the room he found the usual picture: a flaccid, bleak-colored circle, slightly sloped inward as some people were leaning or stooping in their chairs. Except Dean hardly took notice of all that when he saw, among the small crowd, the distinctive tall form of his brother, complete with unruly mop of hair, crazy long limbs and gleaming eyes. He seemed like the one lively thing in the room.
Dean nearly stumbled at the sight. He drew in a ragged breath and was about to turn on his heels but some middle-aged scruffy man was faster to speak up.
"No, please, stay with us," the man said. "Can you tell us your name?"
"Uh, Dean. It's Dean-" he hesitated. Unable to tell if Sam had used their surname he settled for a different one, just in case. "Dean Smith."
The therapist squinted at him then, like he knew, like from that little stutter he could tell right away that in front of him stood yet another paranoid victim, using a false name. Dean smiled a little at the thought.
"Very well, Dean." The man was unfazed. "Please, come in, take a seat."
Dean hummed dubiously, weighing his options. In the corner of his vision, a flunky guy was already placing an extra chair in the circle, causing a stir on the both ends of a broken rim of people that were fervently huddling up. As Dean's luck would have it, the chair in question was arranged just across from Sam.
"It may seem a little frightening," the therapist drawled apathetically. "But you're perfectly safe here, Dean. This is the most supportive crowd, come and see for yourself.”
Dean took in some half-smiles and awkward hand waves.
“Actually, we have more first timers today," the therapist tried again.
"You don't say."
Nothing good was to come out of this, but then again, he didn't imagine his leaving would improve matters either. Sam would only follow him into those desolate corridors and that seemed even worse. Hesitantly, Dean stepped in to take a seat.
"That's the spirit," the man praised. Dean barely suppressed a pained huff and Sam not quite suppressed the twitch at the corners of his mouth.
The session resumed its course. The therapist turned his attention to a skinny woman in her late forties, dressed up in horrible layers of kerchiefs, brooches and embroidery that Dean doubted any demon would ever choose to wrap itself in. Which quite possibly was the whole point.
"My name is Marcia," the woman moaned more than anything. "and I-" she choked on her own words. A girl seated next to her squeezed Marcia's hand in a supportive gesture. "I had a demon in me."
There was no time to properly marvel over the drama, because the therapist was already comforting her.
"That's very brave of you to speak up like that, Marcia," and the loony circle rioted in applause. Marcia duly shed a tear.
Across the room, Dean noted his brother was casting glances back at him every now and again, a mischievous smile playing on his lips.
"There's this... this dark force inside you," Marcia continued, her eyes theatrically charged. "It's always there. Receding deep in or crawling out unbidden to prickle on the skin from underneath where it spills in sticky flushes of goo, and there's no fighting it! Can't fight, can't run, can't scratch that out -" the woman trailed off and even a clean-shaven, tattooed jock a few seats to Dean's right looked dangerously close to tears.
With all that none-too-faint aroma of crazy wafting about, Dean suddenly felt like the walls were closing in on him. He found himself focusing more and more on Sam, whom Dean's mind insisted on recognizing as the last bastion of sanity. Dean would have to work on that misshapen judgment later.
"It made me do things." The woman stifled another moan. "Shameful, horrid things."
"I feel faint," the jock announced. "Need air."
He sprang to his feet, strode across the room to reach for the window handle. One swift jerk and the panes fell open.
"Jerry, don't jump!" the supportive girl from next to Marcia squeaked at once.
Dean's eyes widened to contain all his incredulity, whereas Sam was watching with detached half-smile as four people led Jerry back to his seat, patting and soothing the big guy with nonsensical words.
"I could feel the reek of damnation on me, taste the wrong and wallow in my own debase abreast with the demon. And yet I couldn't stop," Marcia resumed when the commotion subsided.
Elbows rested on his knees, Sam propped his chin on the knuckles of his hand, leaning in to look at Dean with knowing amusement. Holding Dean's gaze, he punctuated Marcia's words with a perfect small quirk of an eyebrow.
"I couldn't stop my body from doing all those terrible things and -” the woman paused, only to conclude in a muffled whisper: “Some part of me didn't even care."
She sobbed beautifully and a few gasps were heard from the enthralled audience.
Why Dean was even fighting back the burst of laughter that had been begging to come out was beyond him. He felt strongly that he had to, however, and not in the least out of respect for the group. Recurrent amused glances from Sam confirmed Dean's peculiar conviction: he could not laugh it off.
Too bad he was so, so close to losing his composure. Sam watched him through it all discreetly, until he didn't. Standing abruptly, he turned to address the therapist.
"Ah, excuse me, I think I need a break. This is all a lot to take in," Sam said earnestly.
"Of course, son," the therapist nodded, empathy fully on display. "Come back to us whenever you feel ready."
On first instinct, Dean was all too eager to follow his brother out, but he caught himself just in time.
A few minutes passed and the fire alarm set off. It was shrill noise cutting through all the other noises in the room, if only for a moment.
"Why- why did the alarm go off?" someone asked.
"There's no smell of burning."
"But there must have been smoke, right? Otherwise it wouldn't-"
"Smoke!"
“Smoke!!"
"Demons."
People started barracking each other in a rousing turmoil while Dean was mostly busy knitting his brows.
"They know, they must!"
"They came after us!"
Storming the door as one, people very nearly trampled each other. In the end, they all managed to get out reasonably unharmed, somehow. The last noise Dean heard from the dissolving group was the therapist's voice.
"Don't panic!” As ever, the man was aiming to placate. “It's only fire."
Everything quieted as people disappeared. In one of the tremendous corridors, Dean found his brother standing casually under one of the fire sensors, pocketing a lighter.
"You didn't -" Dean watched his brother in awe.
"Oh, I did."
And that was it. Sam was smirking and Dean huffed out a truly unrestrained laugh. Once he had started laughing, he really couldn't stop.
As was to be expected, Sam was empty-handed just like Dean, having covered an impressive mileage of therapy groups on his own. It had been the same story everywhere they'd gone; the hosts remembered nothing crucial, mostly pleading post-traumatic stress that supposedly had been preventing particularly horrid memories from rising to the surface. If that had been the case, going further down that track could have turned out worthwhile. Someone would have showed up eventually with a story that offered less drama and more plot. But the general memory loss was apparently demons' doing rather than the stress alone. The creatures had been covering their tracks and they'd been thorough about it. There was nothing down that path.
Well, at least Sam could count a few lighter moments in his fruitless journey.
“There was that bunch of rogue kids,” he told Dean. “The oldest, Caroline, just turned twelve but most were under ten. Dude, you wouldn't wanna mess with them. A menacing league.“
Leaning against the hood of the Impala, he seemed to be searching out the first stars looming in the darkening sky.
They had driven off well beyond the fringes of town, Dean would never delve deeper into why. The glade around them was wild with scents as the ground beneath was reverberating the heat accumulated through the hot summer day. City lights were nothing more than a faint glow in the distance. Soon, the sky above this wilderness would light up with stars like a Christmas tree.
"They formed their own circle,” Sam resumed. “Kids had suffered enough by the hand of demons. After that, the torment of those group meetings seemed just uncalled-for.”
“Can't argue that.”
“Right? So they met regularly after school, undercover as an art club - they actually drew operational protective symbols.”
“How prudent,” Dean spoke the words like he would say how sweet.
Sam took a sip from his beer bottle before resuming the story.
“Laugh as much as you want, Dean, but this was heavy. Demons presaged real damage and the whiny crowd fixated on darkness and moral issues didn't strike the kids as the response team they needed.”
“I see their point.”
“And they said that adults were too much like demons anyway. Only demons were even worse, taking the adult domain to the extremes. Always putting them to sleep whenever things were getting interesting, choosing what to wear for them on which occasion, making them go places, and once, walk a hellhound. All that misery children put up with every day multiplied ten times over.”
“Yikes,” Dean tried for a wince which proved difficult while chuckling. “Good thing they're arming themselves then.”
Sam nodded but not without hesitation.
“It's not like things always go smoothly in the raising fortress. I stumbled across a boy who was trying to read some spells out loud but stammered so badly that I couldn't even make out what language he was reading. So I walked up to steal a glance over his shoulder and the text -”
“It was English,” Dean made a guess.
“Yeah,” Sam nodded, a lopsided grin playing on his lips.
Through the ceaseless cicada's humming, they heard a distant burst of laughter. A small group of young people was strolling down the nearby path toward the town. Dean absently followed them with his gaze. A staggering old boozer was knocking around behind them, trying to keep up with them like they were his sole sense of direction.
“Dean, you may have picked up on this from the story, but the bravest bunch of all ex-hosts had nothing more to say about demons' schemes than those PTSD victims,” Sam said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“It's a dead end.”
“I know,” Dean said. He cleared his throat and resumed. “Figured that out some time ago. Just needed to have it spelled out plainly, I guess.”
Sam nodded.
“There is a better way,” he said. “It's not pleasant but it is a way.”
Dean's eyes widened. Whatever this idea of Sam's was, looking at him now Dean could tell it had been playing on his mind for awhile. Maybe since before they'd even split up.
“You'd think something like that calls for passing in conversation, Sam.”
“I only take it into consideration now.”
“All right,” Dean said, wary. “What is it?”
“There's an old line of shapeshifters,” Sam began. “They are direct descendants of what hunters call an Alpha. The original shapeshifter.”
He swallowed a gulp of beer and for one ridiculous moment Dean couldn't comprehend how the liquid even went down when everything seemed at a standstill.
“As shifters go, heirs are considerably highly organized. For one, they don't shed skin, just change form instantly whenever they choose to. An heir shifter is able to assume a shape of any person they've ever scanned directly, and that they can do with nothing more than a fleeting look in the eye.”
“Right,” Dean cut off. “That doesn't sound at all like the kind of stories kids tell each other around the campfire.”
“Isn't that the kind we investigate?” Sam said. “Just hear me out.”
“Really, Sam?” Dean huffed irritably. “What, you're saying they could be anybody, any person they've met?”
“Not quite,” Sam opposed. “Looking is one thing, scanning on the other hand, is a conscious effort and one that's not often made. For the time being, the shifter's essence merges completely with a person on the other end of that process. An heir literally becomes that person, sharing their self-consciousness, thoughts and the inmost feelings during that seconds. It's a one-way mirror that flashes out between the two parties. That's how heir shifters chose their incarnations.”
“Uh-huh,” Dean muttered dubiously. “And then what? Once they changed, you telling me there are two people as good as one person?”
“No,” Sam protested. “Yes? I don't know. A telepathic connection, which this whole thing works on, is nothing like the scanning, and at the same time very much like that.”
“Yeah, that clears it up,” Dean snapped. “How does any of this relate to Dad?”
“Dad hunted shapeshifters from the heir line.”
“If he did, they're all dead.”
"Not all."
When Dean looked at him incredulously, Sam spoke up again.
“When dealing with a group of shapeshifters among people, keeping track of the headcount proves difficult.”
“How do you-” Dean's eyes narrowed. “Dad never told me anything about this.”
Sam huffed a laugh.
"I happen to have met him too, you know?”
"Ok, so let's say that there is a shapeshifter out there who scanned Dad and lived,” Dean said. “We seek it out - because for whatever reason that proves easier than finding Dad himself - then what? It's constantly aware of Dad's whereabouts? Just like that?”
“No, but once they've resumed Dad's form and the connection is back on, they would be,” Sam said sternly and the quiet certainty in his voice sent shivers down Dean's spine.
"How do we find them?” he asked dubiously. “If they managed to slip by Dad. Do we even know where to begin?”
“We don't find them,” Sam smiled slightly. “I do.”
"What?" Dean gave an incredulous laugh. "What's that supposed to mean."
"It means,” Sam whirled to look at him. “Have a taste of your own medicine, Dean. I'm not going with you."
"You can't be serious.”
But Sam was. He waded towards the path, knee deep in the dim glade.
“Why would you tell me all this?” Dean shouted after him. “If you didn't want us to go after that thing together.”
Sam walked impassive, accompanied by soft rustle of weed strewn under his stride. Dean was left dumbstruck where he was standing by the car, listening in to the sound fading in a deafening chirp as he watched Sam go. While very determined to go after his brother and talk sense into him, he was clueless on the how.
Nauseating things had an awful habit of repeating themselves on Dean.
Far across the glade, Sam turned to look back at him.
“Come to Stanford,” he called. “You'll be welcome.”
Dean jumped in to the car, turned on the ignition and pulled out, steering for the road in the field where Sam had gone.
Instead, he found a handful of people returning to the town for the night, but no sign of Sam's gigantic silhouette in the whole broad horizon. And no matter how many times Dean drove down the path, Sam was nowhere to be seen.
Rumor had it there was an entire population of shapeshifters in Oregon. No hunter could confirm that but - as trite as the excuse rang after hearing out enough legends - it was only because the creatures were so tricky that they could blend into the crowd, never rousing suspicion.
Dean found Sam four days and two states after he'd last seen him, in a wayside motel near Ontario. Or rather, he found the room Sam had been renting, and then found a pretty if greasy mechanic who claimed that the sasquatch offspring had his minivan checked in her garage before the trip "back to Montana".
Not having a whole lot more to go by, Dean decided to head for Pryor again. On his way, he got a text that was a meticulously copied receipt for a coffee. About a minute later, he got another message in which Candy's mom demanded that Dean settle the aforementioned bill since his brother had refused to order due beverage and overall had been acting improperly. Then Candy called with abundant apologies for revealing Dean's number, but also confirmed that Sam had indeed stopped by briefly to fetch food and while at it, he'd struck her as a little absent-minded too.
Dean was nearing the house after midnight. A storm was creeping in. There was a low thudding as damp gales blew against the body of the car, pushing it to the side in bursts and sharp pulls. Even through all that noise, Dean could hear screams voiced in John Winchester’s timbre, audible from far off, albeit still in the middle of nowhere. Screaming like that never to be heard.
The place was a perfect forge of torture. Dean shivered at the mere thought of all the people dying in this cursed hovel for hours or maybe days.
On conscious level, Dean knew full well that this wasn't his father inside the house. However, he couldn't not have an instinctual reaction to the screams. He stepped on the gas and soon enough reached his destination.
"That all you got?" Dean heard a wheeze wrapped in the familiar voice. "It's like you're not even trying -"
The words were cut short by a heavy punch to the face. Dean drew in a breath where he stood by the window. He was under a covered veranda, didn't step inside, instead choosing to eavesdrop on the scene. There were too many unformed questions knocking about in his skull. Unrealized, yet demanding answers all the same.
"Now that," the shifter grinned, blood dripping from his split lips, "was plain insulting."
"This doesn't have to go like this,” Sam spoke calmly. “You gain nothing by leaving that information out. Tell me what I need to know and you're free to go."
The shapeshifter snorted, ugly.
"Why do I doubt that? How long am I gonna live once I answer your questions? You're a hunter, after all," he grinned and laughed manically only to be cut off again, this time literally, with a knife.
"Then you might not wanna drag it out," Sam spoke through the shifter's screams.
"I don't know, I'm the better hunter now," the shifter said. "Time is on my side.”
Sam clenched his jaw and crouched down beside the creature to check on the ropes. They were holding firm, as far as Dean could tell from his current position, had been spooled on the shifter's waist and ankles, wrists knotted together behind him.
Sam cut into the monster's flesh once again.
"This is pathetic," the thing spoke hoarsely. "Why are you holding back? Is it this body? You hate the man, I can tell. He knows it, too."
"Just tell me where he is," Sam carved into the shapeshifter's face.
"Ah, no," the thing laughed. "No, this is not about him at all, is it? Not about the old man."
"Don't strain yourself thinking, it won't do you any good. Answering questions might."
Sam turned and walked up to a small dresser where he had a set of knives along with an armful of other pointy silver on display, all scattered across the low top. A gun was tucked further to the side. Sam put down the bloodstained knife and picked what looked like a thin, silver drill. He regarded the tool with careful scrutiny under the pale blue light of a vacuum tube, intermittent with blinding flashes of lightning coming from outside. The house shivered and creaked in the storm. Eventually, Sam laid the drill down too, only to pass on to another device.
Seizing the moment when his torturer seemed distracted, the shapeshifter changed swiftly into a thin girl, drowning in suddenly oversized clothes. She proceeded to untangle herself from the ties. Before she could get any far with that, the muzzle of the gun in Sam's firm grip was pointed at her chest even though Sam himself was still busy fumbling in his gruesome pile of weaponry with the other hand.
“Change back,” he said flatly, not sparing her a glance.
The shapeshifter stiffened but didn't attempt to resume its previous form.
“You won't kill me.” She spoke the words carefully, her expression calculating.
“No, but I will pin your feet to the floor with silver bullets,” Sam said. “Now change. Back.”
Grudgingly, the shapeshifter did as told.
“Why didn't you?” John Winchester's voice resounded, inquiring. “By now you should have me bristly with silver nails to pin this body where you want it. These ropes can't hold me for long, sooner or later the opportunity will occur for me to slip out and you know it.”
Sam sunk a forked set of silvery spikes into the shapeshifter's thigh.
“I can dissuade you from running,” he deadpanned. “And don't try me, you may still see those nails.”
“But you won't do anything!” the shapeshifter huffed what was neither a laugh nor a hiss of pain. “Which is inexplicable, just like the whole quest for the brother's beloved Daddy -”
He cut off abruptly, froze dead as another lightning struck down.
The creature spoke up, stunned, after a momentary silence. “You can't hurt your brother. Not really, not like this.”
He was staring into Sam's eyes.
“That's it,” he whispered, incredulous.
And whatever Sam's eyes conveyed, suddenly the shapeshifter dissolved into a manic laughter.
“Shut up!” Sam backhanded the thing which only amplified its outburst.
Dean flinched at the sound. He'd long forgotten that maddening, drunken laugh. Last he'd heard it had been soon after Mum had died.
“Oh, that's rich.” The shapeshifter was on a roll. “Cute brotherly feelings aroused and they got you chasing after Dean's beloved Daddy. But see, the joke is on you, 'cause now you can't carve out of me what you need for him. You got those misshapen cute brotherly feelings to blame for that.“
Sam withdrew a few steps, leaned on the dresser and glared at the shapeshifter in silence.
“It is poetic, I'll give you that. The loop you caught yourself in,” the thing teased, drawling the words like a delicious fudge. “You really did a number on yourself this time, brother.”
Dean couldn't have moved even if he'd had a clue what to do next. Sam - no, Sam-thing - looked almost just as dumbstruck.
"What are you?" the shapeshifter spit out the words, narrowing his eyes.
Sam-thing stood speechless.
"You always have been an abomination,” the words roared out in John Winchester's voice. “But this? This is as sick as it gets.”
Another peal of thunder crashed outside, but it did nothing to shake Sam-thing or Dean from their stupefaction.
“Just give up that farce and let me go. Obviously, you're not gonna do anything and we both know it."
The swish of wind outside, rain lashing against the panes and the occasional groans of the straining walls were the only sounds in the room for a long moment.
“What is wrong with you?” The tied down shapeshifter hissed.
In a flash, Sam-thing snapped out of it. He took the bloodstained knife in a clenched fist. After a swift stride across the room, he sunk the blade deep into the shapeshifter's abdomen. Accompanied by pained moans and blood gargling in the creature's throat, Sam twisted the handle, let go of it as he stood up to violently kick on the protruding stump from below.
Dean was shocked, seeing that not only had the shapeshifter survived the blow but he hadn't even lost consciousness or seemed weaker.
The walls emitted a shrill, ear-splitting sound. When the next thunder struck, the ceiling construction - already strained and wanting in beams after Fiona's doings - was gradually coming unhinged. A single, loose timber dropped out, hitting Sam on his back and dropping him to the floor.
Dean kept watching, detached, as the shapeshifter on the chair changed back into that slender girl, sliding her hands out of the fetters. Having succeeded, she clenched her frail jaw as she covered the knife handle sticking out from her side with her tiny, white palm. She squeezed her eyes shut. Pulled the knife out. Then she shifted back to John Winchester's form to cut the rest of impeding ropes, an old hand at it.
In the meantime, Sam-thing had scrambled back to his feet. Clumsily and in a hurry, he got to the dresser and grabbed the gun, turning back at once to aim it at the creature that was now standing opposite, armed with the knife that once had been the thorn in her side.
Almost absent-mindedly, Dean pointed his own gun at the head of the unsuspecting shapeshifter.
"You're not going anywhere!" Sam shot the creature in the knee, Dad's face twisting in pain. The shifter reeled and hissed horribly. But it didn't fall. 'Tis but a scratch!, flashed through Dean's mind.
"You're the only link to Dad we have left."
Dean looked in his father's eyes, the last words echoing heavily in his head.
"You can't kill me." The shapeshifter levered the knife handle in his grip. "Can't kill your own brother. I'll make sure to thank Dean Winchester for that," he smirked. “He'll be the death of you.”
It threw the knife and a blade grazed Sam's arm, causing him to drop the gun. The creature wearing Dad's face ducked to grab it.
"Arguable," Dean said and fired his gun, shooting straight between his father's eyes.
Sam jumped back as the crimson droplets splashed across his hands and face.
"Dean?" Sam-thing asked, dazed, watching the horrid scene from beneath the curtain of bloody lashes. "What are you- why'd you- " Sam rubbed his shaking hand over his forehead. "He could have led us to Dad, he would have. What do we do now, Dean? How do we-" Sam was mumbling, obviously in shock, and he didn't even register at first that Dean never lowered his gun, only redirecting the muzzle right at Sam-thing's head.
"Oh, we'll find him,” Dean said. “Don't you worry about that."
"Dean," Sam-thing breathed his name in the way Dean knew by heart.
"Where is he?" Dean spoke, stern. "And you better pray that I like the answer."
"You just killed the one creature that knew!"
"Not him."
Sam-thing ducked his head, seemingly unable to watch Dean pointing a gun at him.
"You know where he is," he whispered.
Not lowering the weapon, Dean felt the corpse's pockets for a cell phone. He found nothing, of course Sam wasn't an amateur.
"Your cellphone,” Dean beckoned. “Was it Sam's?"
Sam-thing shook his head no and handed Dean a small cellphone from the pocket of his jacket that laid thrown over a windowsill.
"Number," Dean spoke in a voice that allowed for no argument.
Sam-thing recited the digits and soon Dean heard his brother's voice in the receiver.
"Hello?" There was a pause. And Dean knew, he could tell right there and then that Sam was all right. Sam was fine.
"Hello? Who is this?" Sam asked again before hanging up.
Dean felt weak at the knees and he didn't even notice that he'd crouched on the floor, or that tears were streaming down his face.
Flashes of lightning illuminated the macabre interior, flashing off the array of bloody tools, crimson spilled all over the room from the massacred corpse sprawled in the center. The room lit up like flashflights of crime scene photographers' cameras already at work.
Dean set fire to the house. As he watched flames consume the damned thing, he started planning his way to Stanford and considered where he and Sam would look for clues to search for their father.
epilogue
MASTER