Haunted, for anactoria
Title: Haunted
Recipient: Anactoria
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3,000
Warnings: Canon character death; show-level violence
Author's Notes: Many thanks to both my alpha, the_diggler, and my beta, amber1960. This story is based on a prompt for Hunter!Linda.
Summary: Linda Tran is a hunter on a mission.
The store is cluttered with crystals and black-bound paperbacks promising spells to teenage witches. It reeks of incense and marijuana. It reminds Linda of the head shops she went to in college, but the association doesn’t put her at ease. The people who ran those shops were unreliable, and so is the man behind the counter. She eyes his shoulder-length gray hair and Grateful Dead t-shirt with a mixture of wariness and contempt.
“What do you have in the back?” she insists, her patience rapidly wearing thin.
He shrugs and tugs at his ankh earing, like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “A couple of water pipes,” he says. “Strictly for tobacco, of course.”
Linda sighs. She has no use for his ‘aw shucks, I’m just a dumb hippie’ act, but he shows no sign that he’s inclined to give up the goods without a lot more arm-twisting.
They dance around each other for ten minutes, hinting at their interests without daring to lay them on the table. It’s the same elaborate game that precedes buying weed from a stranger, and part of her wants to laugh. She represses it. The man seems to take his job as gatekeeper very seriously.
Finally she breaks through, and he brings out the goods. “How do I know this is real phoenix ash?” she asks, fingering a vial.
“Try it on any monster you like. Burns them, not us.” It’s a convenient answer.
“I don’t suppose you have a test monster in your show room?” she says. He smiles. Of course he doesn’t.
She stares at the vial of ash. It could be from a phoenix. It could be from a marshmallow roast. This man has a good reputation, but the people who vouch for him are men who’ve hunted all their lives. The quality of product he provides them may not be the same as the quality of product he provides to a matronly-looking MBA from Michigan.
He stands and waits. He knows he doesn’t have to prove himself. Where else would she go?
She pulls the money from her wallet and hands it over. “If this doesn’t work . . .” she says. It’s an empty threat, but she needs to find some scrap of control.
“It’ll work,” he says, and she almost believes him.
***
“Have you heard from the Winchesters?” Kevin says.
Linda looks around from the stir fry she’s making to find her son sprawled in a kitchen chair. Her stomach unknots. Whenever she leaves the house without him she’s afraid she’ll return to find him gone, raptured up to Heaven without the chance to say goodbye.
Kevin’s feet are propped up on the table. There was a time she’d have yelled at him for that, but she doesn’t say anything. It’s not as if he can scuff it up now. His feet burned along with the rest of him at a funeral she didn’t attend.
“They’re still working on opening Heaven,” she tells him. She hasn’t spoken to the Winchesters in more than six weeks. When she’d first brought Kevin home they’d bent over backwards to stay in touch, updating her every few days about their progress. Then around mid-May their phones both started going straight to voicemail.
She lets Kevin believe she’s still talking to them regularly. The longer the charade goes on, the uglier she knows it will be when she has to come clean, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell him his last two friends in the world are almost certainly dead. She’s failed to protect him from so many things; she can at least protect him from this.
Linda spoons the stir fry into a bowl and sits at the table. Goose bumps break out across her arms from the frigid air that surrounds Kevin, but she ignores them. She left her cardigan in the living room, and she’s not going to go get it now. She doesn’t like to remind him of what he is.
“Did you have a good trip?” Kevin says. The tone is polite, but Linda could swear there’s a subtle undertone of sarcasm. She’d told him she was going to a conference in Boston. There was a time her word would have been beyond question, but he came back to her sharp-tongued and paranoid. He’d probably suspect her, even if she were innocent.
“It was nice, but I missed you.” He looks unimpressed. “I’ll be home next weekend,” she adds. “I promise.” Kevin gives her a look that’s somewhere between doubt and gratitude before he flickers out of existence. Linda’s never sure when he’s leaving because he doesn’t want to talk to her anymore, and when he’s leaving because he’s too weak to manifest. Communicating exhausts him. Once in frustration he threw a book against the wall, and he blacked out for a week.
Later that evening she finds him in his room, scrolling through the internet. He’s not physically manifest, but she can see the mouse twitch sporadically. She’s relieved. Every time he disappears she worries it’s the last.
***
The imp is a small creature, little bigger than a cat, and it seems as if it should be a simple matter to grab it and smash it against a rock.
No such luck. The imp may be small, but it’s quick and cunning beyond Linda’s wildest expectations. It scampers through the lush underbrush of the Alaskan wilderness at impossible speed. Occasionally it takes to wing for a short distance, a lithe black missile darting among the tree trunks.
She stalks the elusive figure for sixteen hours without success. Hunting is a miserable business. She was prepared for pain and danger, but the sheer, daily awfulness of countless infected mosquito bites welting up across her legs is worse than any monster. She wants nothing more than to go home and take a hot bath.
She tracks the imp down to a craggy ravine just after sunset. The sky is indigo and the shadows are long among the boulders as she searches for her prey. She stumbles around ineffectually, slipping on the slick moss, until she catches sight of a leathery wing protruding from a crack in the rocks.
She approaches cautiously, careful to keep her footsteps silent. She hesitates for a beat when she’s on top of it, gathering her courage, and then seizes the wing in her hand and pulls it toward her with all her strength.
The imp screeches like a wounded rabbit. It wheels around, flapping its free wing furiously. She tries her best to hold on, but when it sinks its teeth into her arm she lets go and it sails away into the night.
The doctor at the emergency room in Juno studies Linda's bite with suspicion. She says she was bitten by a friend’s dog, but few dogs have two rows of teeth. There’s little he can do but stitch her up though. When he’s done, the white gauze firmly in place, he mentions he pulled a tooth out of the wound.
Linda’s heart soars, and she demands he hand it over. For the lawsuit, she says. He shrugs and gives it to her. It’s small, triangular, and serrated. It looks like one of the shark’s teeth she collected from river beds as a girl. She clutches it in her hand through the entire flight from Alaska to Michigan.
***
Linda promised Kevin she’d be home the next weekend, so she is. She gets back from work early on Friday, puts her husband’s ring on a chain around her neck, and goes to the park. She walks around in the light of late afternoon, past the children on the swings and through the small flower garden with its leggy roses and white hydrangea. She stops to talk to a woman walking a beagle puppy.
Afterward she goes to a movie that has something to do with robots and aliens. It’s not really her thing, but the leading man is handsome and he takes his shirt off a lot. There are worse ways to spend two hours.
She can’t see Kevin, but she knows he’s with her. Or at least she hopes he is-hopes he’s not blacked out or trapped too deep in the Veil to see what she’s doing. It’s always a crap shoot.
Still, the thought of him beside her is comforting. After a year chained up in a storage container, she finds even the most ordinary human contact overwhelming. If she were truly alone she’d probably spend every night curled up in her bedroom shaking. He gives her a reason to hold herself together.
When she gets home he flickers into being just inside the doorway and smiles at her the way he used to, bright and without irony. He chatters about the movie and the park and the puppy. Especially the puppy. He’s always loved animals. She should’ve let him have the dog he wanted when he was twelve.
She can see he truly enjoyed his time outside, but she can also see that he’s trying to act happy for her, to win her approval in whatever way he can. Even at three or four he was like this, hungry-eyed and eager to please. All his life he’s wanted desperately to be good--wanted it so badly that before he was fifteen he’d had to go to kindly Dr. Ender’s office once a week to learn “healthy coping skills” so he didn’t bite his nails until they bled. She wants to hug him, but she can’t, and she wants to cry, but that would only make him feel like he’s failed. She smiles instead, and hopes it looks sincere.
It’s only at the end of the evening, when he’s already watery and half-translucent, that he says cautiously, “So the Winchesters . . .”.
“They say this’ll all be over soon,” she lies. He nods and disappears into the Veil like a stone falling through water.
***
The basilisk’s flesh is cold, and there’s no rhythm of breath under her fingertips. Linda hopes to God it’s dead, but for all she knows it’s poised and ready to strike, watching her with baleful eyes as she gropes her way across its skin. She’s covered her face with a sleep mask. The lore says the sight of even a dead basilisk is lethal. She collects the scales cautiously, prying them up with her fingernails. They’re dry and satiny as she gathers them in her palm.
Linda never wanted to be a hunter. She’s a businesswoman, not a soldier. She’d rather buy than fight. But no one was selling basilisk scales-at least no one foolhardy enough to advertise on the internet-and she’s desperate.
The basilisk proved remarkably easy to catch. She lured it into an abandoned house with the smell of her blood, dripping it on the ground from a gash in her arm, and then ran like hell when she heard the clatter of movement. She led it on a chase through the hallways until she feinted left at the last second and brought it face-to-face with the wall-length mirror she’d set up in the remnants of the bedroom. She’d heard the sudden silence when it came to a stop, and a moment later the thud of a heavy weight falling against the floor. The hardest part of the hunt had been fighting the urge to look behind her.
She feels her way around the corpse-ten feet? Fifteen?-and stumbles out into the hall, clinging to the wall far longer than she probably needs to before she takes off the mask. She feels the scales clutched in her fist, and although everything she’s read says they’re harmless once separated from the beast, she hesitates before she opens her hand. She looks down and doesn’t die. The scales gleam dully against her palm. They’re dark, but there’s an oily rainbow in their depths that refracts the dim light.
She drops a match in the doorway of the house, and the fire spreads along the lines of gasoline she’s laid down. By the time she makes it to the rental car the whole building is in flames. She imagines the fire fighters who might encounter the corpse of the basilisk, and says a silent prayer that the fire consumes it before they arrive.
***
When Linda walks into the house she feels the anxiety in the air, like the drop in pressure before a storm. The kitchen phone is off the hook. It lies on the floor, so long abandoned that the dial tone has gone dead. She hangs it up.
“Kevin?” she calls softly.
The temperature falls, turning her breath to a white mist. But that’s not why she’s shaking.
“Hi, Mom,” Kevin says. He’s pale and almost translucent. She can tell he’s burning through his last scraps of energy to manifest.
“Hello,” she says, and waits.
“I called the Winchesters today.” Linda can only imagine the effort required to accomplish that. Most days it takes all his strength to nudge the mouse on his computer. To lift the phone off the hook, press ten buttons, and hope to generate an audible voice over the phone line? It’s an almost unendurable labor. How desperate he must have been.
“They didn’t answer,” she says. She’s tried them both too many times to hope otherwise.
“No.” Kevin studies her face as if she were a stranger. “You haven’t talked to them in months, have you?” He sounds scared.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. They won’t take my calls either.” His lips move like he’s forming a response, but for a long moment no words come out.
“You put salt down in front of your bedroom door,” he says finally.
“A woman needs a little privacy.” She tries to bend her mouth into a smile, but the muscles won’t twist the right way.
“What happened to your arm?” Kevin asks. Linda looks down and sees that the wound she used to lure the basilisk has bled through her neat white blouse. “What have you done?” he says.
Linda’s hand rises automatically to the blood stain. She feels the precious weight of the scales in her pocket.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. She’s not, but it feels like the right thing to say. “I’m your mother. I have to fix this if I can.” Maybe it would be different if he were truly gone, if his death looked the way a death is supposed to. If her nineteen-year-old son were securely in Heaven, maybe she could let him go, as she had his father. Maybe. But that’s not what happened. She has Kevin constantly in front of her, pale and suffering. How could she not try to save him?
“I found a way . . .” she hesitates. She doesn’t want to get his hopes up. Doesn’t want to get her own hopes up. What she has is less a spell than a rumor.
“I may have found a way raise your body from the ashes. I’ve been looking for the ingredients we need. A couple more and we’ll be ready.”
Kevin looks disappointed. His sad eyes burn into her. No one so young should be so good at disapproval.
“And what, you’re hunting for them?” Kevin says. “I don’t want you here in DMV-land with me. You got hurt and--”
Linda cuts him off. “This?” She gestures to her bloody sleeve. “This is nothing. I have a basilisk’s scales. Soon you’ll be home. Really home.”
“No, no, that’s not what’ll happen,” he says, and he’s not angry now, he’s pleading. “Even if you manage to cram my soul back into a body, I can’t come home. The only reason I’m here now is because I’m dead. Crowley’s out there, and Abaddon, and a whole host of pissed off angels. You bring me back, I have to go hide in the bunker again. Or if the Winchesters are gone, then some other godforsaken hole. No matter what you do, at the end of it you’ll still have to put me in the ground.”
He’s so young. A year or two seems eternal to him. He doesn’t want to go back into hiding, to give up sunlight and human contact. But life is long, and his pain will be temporary. Surely it will be temporary.
“You’ll live again,” she insists. “You must want to live.”
He turns away from her and stalks off toward his bedroom. The door slams with a percussive force that rattles the walls.
She follows him, ready to argue, or reason, or beg, but when she opens his bedroom door there’s no one inside. He shouldn’t have slammed it. The effort probably knocked him unconscious. He could be lost to her for days.
Or maybe he’s only pretending. He might be hidden, watching her invisibly from the corner even now.
“Kevin?” she says. No answer. She waits in silence for a long moment before she leaves him to his coma--or his sulk--and retreats to her own bedroom. Invisible or not, he can’t follow her there.
She turns the gleaming scales over in her hand, and for an instant she’s cut through with grief for her dead child. But then she collects herself and lays them reverently next to the phoenix ash and the imp’s tooth. Soon Kevin will be back, and she’ll hold him, and none of this will matter at all.
The scuttlebutt says there’s a dragon in Pawtucket. If she leaves work early on Friday, she’ll have its heart in the drawer by Sunday night.
Recipient: Anactoria
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3,000
Warnings: Canon character death; show-level violence
Author's Notes: Many thanks to both my alpha, the_diggler, and my beta, amber1960. This story is based on a prompt for Hunter!Linda.
Summary: Linda Tran is a hunter on a mission.
The store is cluttered with crystals and black-bound paperbacks promising spells to teenage witches. It reeks of incense and marijuana. It reminds Linda of the head shops she went to in college, but the association doesn’t put her at ease. The people who ran those shops were unreliable, and so is the man behind the counter. She eyes his shoulder-length gray hair and Grateful Dead t-shirt with a mixture of wariness and contempt.
“What do you have in the back?” she insists, her patience rapidly wearing thin.
He shrugs and tugs at his ankh earing, like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “A couple of water pipes,” he says. “Strictly for tobacco, of course.”
Linda sighs. She has no use for his ‘aw shucks, I’m just a dumb hippie’ act, but he shows no sign that he’s inclined to give up the goods without a lot more arm-twisting.
They dance around each other for ten minutes, hinting at their interests without daring to lay them on the table. It’s the same elaborate game that precedes buying weed from a stranger, and part of her wants to laugh. She represses it. The man seems to take his job as gatekeeper very seriously.
Finally she breaks through, and he brings out the goods. “How do I know this is real phoenix ash?” she asks, fingering a vial.
“Try it on any monster you like. Burns them, not us.” It’s a convenient answer.
“I don’t suppose you have a test monster in your show room?” she says. He smiles. Of course he doesn’t.
She stares at the vial of ash. It could be from a phoenix. It could be from a marshmallow roast. This man has a good reputation, but the people who vouch for him are men who’ve hunted all their lives. The quality of product he provides them may not be the same as the quality of product he provides to a matronly-looking MBA from Michigan.
He stands and waits. He knows he doesn’t have to prove himself. Where else would she go?
She pulls the money from her wallet and hands it over. “If this doesn’t work . . .” she says. It’s an empty threat, but she needs to find some scrap of control.
“It’ll work,” he says, and she almost believes him.
***
“Have you heard from the Winchesters?” Kevin says.
Linda looks around from the stir fry she’s making to find her son sprawled in a kitchen chair. Her stomach unknots. Whenever she leaves the house without him she’s afraid she’ll return to find him gone, raptured up to Heaven without the chance to say goodbye.
Kevin’s feet are propped up on the table. There was a time she’d have yelled at him for that, but she doesn’t say anything. It’s not as if he can scuff it up now. His feet burned along with the rest of him at a funeral she didn’t attend.
“They’re still working on opening Heaven,” she tells him. She hasn’t spoken to the Winchesters in more than six weeks. When she’d first brought Kevin home they’d bent over backwards to stay in touch, updating her every few days about their progress. Then around mid-May their phones both started going straight to voicemail.
She lets Kevin believe she’s still talking to them regularly. The longer the charade goes on, the uglier she knows it will be when she has to come clean, but she doesn’t have the heart to tell him his last two friends in the world are almost certainly dead. She’s failed to protect him from so many things; she can at least protect him from this.
Linda spoons the stir fry into a bowl and sits at the table. Goose bumps break out across her arms from the frigid air that surrounds Kevin, but she ignores them. She left her cardigan in the living room, and she’s not going to go get it now. She doesn’t like to remind him of what he is.
“Did you have a good trip?” Kevin says. The tone is polite, but Linda could swear there’s a subtle undertone of sarcasm. She’d told him she was going to a conference in Boston. There was a time her word would have been beyond question, but he came back to her sharp-tongued and paranoid. He’d probably suspect her, even if she were innocent.
“It was nice, but I missed you.” He looks unimpressed. “I’ll be home next weekend,” she adds. “I promise.” Kevin gives her a look that’s somewhere between doubt and gratitude before he flickers out of existence. Linda’s never sure when he’s leaving because he doesn’t want to talk to her anymore, and when he’s leaving because he’s too weak to manifest. Communicating exhausts him. Once in frustration he threw a book against the wall, and he blacked out for a week.
Later that evening she finds him in his room, scrolling through the internet. He’s not physically manifest, but she can see the mouse twitch sporadically. She’s relieved. Every time he disappears she worries it’s the last.
***
The imp is a small creature, little bigger than a cat, and it seems as if it should be a simple matter to grab it and smash it against a rock.
No such luck. The imp may be small, but it’s quick and cunning beyond Linda’s wildest expectations. It scampers through the lush underbrush of the Alaskan wilderness at impossible speed. Occasionally it takes to wing for a short distance, a lithe black missile darting among the tree trunks.
She stalks the elusive figure for sixteen hours without success. Hunting is a miserable business. She was prepared for pain and danger, but the sheer, daily awfulness of countless infected mosquito bites welting up across her legs is worse than any monster. She wants nothing more than to go home and take a hot bath.
She tracks the imp down to a craggy ravine just after sunset. The sky is indigo and the shadows are long among the boulders as she searches for her prey. She stumbles around ineffectually, slipping on the slick moss, until she catches sight of a leathery wing protruding from a crack in the rocks.
She approaches cautiously, careful to keep her footsteps silent. She hesitates for a beat when she’s on top of it, gathering her courage, and then seizes the wing in her hand and pulls it toward her with all her strength.
The imp screeches like a wounded rabbit. It wheels around, flapping its free wing furiously. She tries her best to hold on, but when it sinks its teeth into her arm she lets go and it sails away into the night.
The doctor at the emergency room in Juno studies Linda's bite with suspicion. She says she was bitten by a friend’s dog, but few dogs have two rows of teeth. There’s little he can do but stitch her up though. When he’s done, the white gauze firmly in place, he mentions he pulled a tooth out of the wound.
Linda’s heart soars, and she demands he hand it over. For the lawsuit, she says. He shrugs and gives it to her. It’s small, triangular, and serrated. It looks like one of the shark’s teeth she collected from river beds as a girl. She clutches it in her hand through the entire flight from Alaska to Michigan.
***
Linda promised Kevin she’d be home the next weekend, so she is. She gets back from work early on Friday, puts her husband’s ring on a chain around her neck, and goes to the park. She walks around in the light of late afternoon, past the children on the swings and through the small flower garden with its leggy roses and white hydrangea. She stops to talk to a woman walking a beagle puppy.
Afterward she goes to a movie that has something to do with robots and aliens. It’s not really her thing, but the leading man is handsome and he takes his shirt off a lot. There are worse ways to spend two hours.
She can’t see Kevin, but she knows he’s with her. Or at least she hopes he is-hopes he’s not blacked out or trapped too deep in the Veil to see what she’s doing. It’s always a crap shoot.
Still, the thought of him beside her is comforting. After a year chained up in a storage container, she finds even the most ordinary human contact overwhelming. If she were truly alone she’d probably spend every night curled up in her bedroom shaking. He gives her a reason to hold herself together.
When she gets home he flickers into being just inside the doorway and smiles at her the way he used to, bright and without irony. He chatters about the movie and the park and the puppy. Especially the puppy. He’s always loved animals. She should’ve let him have the dog he wanted when he was twelve.
She can see he truly enjoyed his time outside, but she can also see that he’s trying to act happy for her, to win her approval in whatever way he can. Even at three or four he was like this, hungry-eyed and eager to please. All his life he’s wanted desperately to be good--wanted it so badly that before he was fifteen he’d had to go to kindly Dr. Ender’s office once a week to learn “healthy coping skills” so he didn’t bite his nails until they bled. She wants to hug him, but she can’t, and she wants to cry, but that would only make him feel like he’s failed. She smiles instead, and hopes it looks sincere.
It’s only at the end of the evening, when he’s already watery and half-translucent, that he says cautiously, “So the Winchesters . . .”.
“They say this’ll all be over soon,” she lies. He nods and disappears into the Veil like a stone falling through water.
***
The basilisk’s flesh is cold, and there’s no rhythm of breath under her fingertips. Linda hopes to God it’s dead, but for all she knows it’s poised and ready to strike, watching her with baleful eyes as she gropes her way across its skin. She’s covered her face with a sleep mask. The lore says the sight of even a dead basilisk is lethal. She collects the scales cautiously, prying them up with her fingernails. They’re dry and satiny as she gathers them in her palm.
Linda never wanted to be a hunter. She’s a businesswoman, not a soldier. She’d rather buy than fight. But no one was selling basilisk scales-at least no one foolhardy enough to advertise on the internet-and she’s desperate.
The basilisk proved remarkably easy to catch. She lured it into an abandoned house with the smell of her blood, dripping it on the ground from a gash in her arm, and then ran like hell when she heard the clatter of movement. She led it on a chase through the hallways until she feinted left at the last second and brought it face-to-face with the wall-length mirror she’d set up in the remnants of the bedroom. She’d heard the sudden silence when it came to a stop, and a moment later the thud of a heavy weight falling against the floor. The hardest part of the hunt had been fighting the urge to look behind her.
She feels her way around the corpse-ten feet? Fifteen?-and stumbles out into the hall, clinging to the wall far longer than she probably needs to before she takes off the mask. She feels the scales clutched in her fist, and although everything she’s read says they’re harmless once separated from the beast, she hesitates before she opens her hand. She looks down and doesn’t die. The scales gleam dully against her palm. They’re dark, but there’s an oily rainbow in their depths that refracts the dim light.
She drops a match in the doorway of the house, and the fire spreads along the lines of gasoline she’s laid down. By the time she makes it to the rental car the whole building is in flames. She imagines the fire fighters who might encounter the corpse of the basilisk, and says a silent prayer that the fire consumes it before they arrive.
***
When Linda walks into the house she feels the anxiety in the air, like the drop in pressure before a storm. The kitchen phone is off the hook. It lies on the floor, so long abandoned that the dial tone has gone dead. She hangs it up.
“Kevin?” she calls softly.
The temperature falls, turning her breath to a white mist. But that’s not why she’s shaking.
“Hi, Mom,” Kevin says. He’s pale and almost translucent. She can tell he’s burning through his last scraps of energy to manifest.
“Hello,” she says, and waits.
“I called the Winchesters today.” Linda can only imagine the effort required to accomplish that. Most days it takes all his strength to nudge the mouse on his computer. To lift the phone off the hook, press ten buttons, and hope to generate an audible voice over the phone line? It’s an almost unendurable labor. How desperate he must have been.
“They didn’t answer,” she says. She’s tried them both too many times to hope otherwise.
“No.” Kevin studies her face as if she were a stranger. “You haven’t talked to them in months, have you?” He sounds scared.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. They won’t take my calls either.” His lips move like he’s forming a response, but for a long moment no words come out.
“You put salt down in front of your bedroom door,” he says finally.
“A woman needs a little privacy.” She tries to bend her mouth into a smile, but the muscles won’t twist the right way.
“What happened to your arm?” Kevin asks. Linda looks down and sees that the wound she used to lure the basilisk has bled through her neat white blouse. “What have you done?” he says.
Linda’s hand rises automatically to the blood stain. She feels the precious weight of the scales in her pocket.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. She’s not, but it feels like the right thing to say. “I’m your mother. I have to fix this if I can.” Maybe it would be different if he were truly gone, if his death looked the way a death is supposed to. If her nineteen-year-old son were securely in Heaven, maybe she could let him go, as she had his father. Maybe. But that’s not what happened. She has Kevin constantly in front of her, pale and suffering. How could she not try to save him?
“I found a way . . .” she hesitates. She doesn’t want to get his hopes up. Doesn’t want to get her own hopes up. What she has is less a spell than a rumor.
“I may have found a way raise your body from the ashes. I’ve been looking for the ingredients we need. A couple more and we’ll be ready.”
Kevin looks disappointed. His sad eyes burn into her. No one so young should be so good at disapproval.
“And what, you’re hunting for them?” Kevin says. “I don’t want you here in DMV-land with me. You got hurt and--”
Linda cuts him off. “This?” She gestures to her bloody sleeve. “This is nothing. I have a basilisk’s scales. Soon you’ll be home. Really home.”
“No, no, that’s not what’ll happen,” he says, and he’s not angry now, he’s pleading. “Even if you manage to cram my soul back into a body, I can’t come home. The only reason I’m here now is because I’m dead. Crowley’s out there, and Abaddon, and a whole host of pissed off angels. You bring me back, I have to go hide in the bunker again. Or if the Winchesters are gone, then some other godforsaken hole. No matter what you do, at the end of it you’ll still have to put me in the ground.”
He’s so young. A year or two seems eternal to him. He doesn’t want to go back into hiding, to give up sunlight and human contact. But life is long, and his pain will be temporary. Surely it will be temporary.
“You’ll live again,” she insists. “You must want to live.”
He turns away from her and stalks off toward his bedroom. The door slams with a percussive force that rattles the walls.
She follows him, ready to argue, or reason, or beg, but when she opens his bedroom door there’s no one inside. He shouldn’t have slammed it. The effort probably knocked him unconscious. He could be lost to her for days.
Or maybe he’s only pretending. He might be hidden, watching her invisibly from the corner even now.
“Kevin?” she says. No answer. She waits in silence for a long moment before she leaves him to his coma--or his sulk--and retreats to her own bedroom. Invisible or not, he can’t follow her there.
She turns the gleaming scales over in her hand, and for an instant she’s cut through with grief for her dead child. But then she collects herself and lays them reverently next to the phoenix ash and the imp’s tooth. Soon Kevin will be back, and she’ll hold him, and none of this will matter at all.
The scuttlebutt says there’s a dragon in Pawtucket. If she leaves work early on Friday, she’ll have its heart in the drawer by Sunday night.