Criminal Minds/Supernatural Fic: When You Are Done 4/6
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Morgan had started debriefing JJ and Reid when Officer Gabert stuck his head into the conference room. “I’ve got some visitors for you if you have a moment to spare.”
They had time, Hotch thought. Rossi was still scanning the names Garcia had sent earlier. The list was too large to be useful until Garcia could narrow the list further, but it was either go over the scarce case details once more with JJ and Reid or try to gleam something new from the basic files Garcia had sent with names. It wasn’t exactly a difficult choice, it was what Hotch had chosen to do as well; leadership had its perks sometimes.
Hotch nodded at Officer Gabert, who let two men into the room. Sam Winchester, now dressed in jeans and heavy jacket, was obviously upset, but his companion seemed perfectly at ease, looking around the room curiously. If anything, Winchester’s companion looked the part of a federal agent much more than Winchester; maybe it was the trench coat combined with a loose tie, or perhaps the shorter haircut.
“I see you brought a friend,” he said when it became obvious that Officer Gabert wasn’t planning on sticking around. He gave the police chief a curt nod as he exited.
The stranger rummaged through the inside pockets of his trench coat. “FBI,” he said as he carefully displayed his credentials. “Eddie Moscone.”
Sam Winchester frowned, but closed the door before he spoke. “Sorry, this is Castiel,” he said to Hotch. He turned to his companion. “Where did you get that?” he asked, gesturing to the credentials the man was still displaying.
The name stirred a memory in the far recesses of Hotch’s brain. “Castiel, as in the angel your brother was looking for?” he asked Winchester.
Sam ignored him.
Castiel was admiring his credentials. “I displayed them correctly,” he said to Winchester. “I have practiced since the last time.”
“Last time?” Winchester and Hotch both asked. Hotch knew that the Winchester brothers had a history of impersonating federal officers, but he would have thought they’d use that particular cover less given their increased notoriety over the past few years. Of course, he reflected, both brothers were currently impersonating federal officers and had apparently continued to do so in the face of their wanted posters still decorating police stations across the country. It was how they’d been caught last time.
Why wouldn’t they drag an Angel of the Lord into committing felonies? Well, Hotch amended mentally, Dean Winchester convinced an angel to commit a felony judging by the surprise naked on Sam Winchester’s face. Somehow, Hotch couldn’t bring himself to feel the same shock.
Morgan, Rossi, Reid, and JJ looked up at the three men, blatantly ignoring their work in favor of watching the newcomers.
“Dean gave them to me when we were looking for Raphael in Maine,” Castiel replied solemnly. “Because humans prefer to hear falsehoods so that they may become presidents.”
Hotch didn’t even want to try to detangle that logic. Judging from Winchester’s snort neither did he.
“Have you found your brother?” Morgan asked curiously, obviously finding the current spectacle more interesting than briefing JJ and Reid. Reid had grabbed the updated case file and was scanning it; Hotch wasn’t too worried about him falling behind in the investigation and made a mental note to brief JJ when he had a spare moment.
“Not yet,” Winchester replied. “But I think I have an idea what happened to him.” He looked around the room. “And I think he might be with your missing agent. Agent Prentiss.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Dean heard the man before he saw him, not entirely unsurprising given his current location. The man was muttering to himself, cursing the government, pigs, and bleeders, whoever the hell they were. Dean could hear him huffing in between complaints, obviously struggling in the deep snow and cold.
Great, Dean had been beaten up by an out-of-shape old guy.
Suddenly, light streamed in, forcing Dean to shield his eyes. The roof opened slowly, heavy metal dragging across concrete to expose the hole to muted light from above. In some ways, the light made everything worse.
He wasn’t sure which jerk first described dying as going towards the light, but he was itching to punch the dude a couple times. The light just made everything more surreal, ghastly, and horrifying all at the same time. In the dark, Dean could pretend the femur he had been playing with was just another stick - the kind he used to pick up from the nearby creek and poke Sammy with until he cried that summer he was eight and Sam four. The light revealed two nearby skulls, tilted towards each other as if passing gossip like high school girls, and the femur in his hands was covered in blood, probably from his hands and wrists.
His hands were covered in blood. He might not be a geek like Sam, but even he could appreciate the irony in the situation.
His literary ponderings were cut short when something landed on him. There had been no warning, just a dead weight dropped suddenly from the sky. His vision blown from the sudden light, he couldn’t tell what it was. Blacking out for a few minutes hadn’t helped much either in figuring out what the hell it was either. Where the hell did his bone go?
He was still stunned when the roof started to pull close.
“What the hell?” Dean tried to yell. It would have been a lot more effective if he could breathe properly. Whatever the hell had been dropped into the hole had certainly done a number on his ribs. He supposed it wouldn’t have mattered even if he could yell as loud as he wanted, the man didn’t say a word to him, he simply continued his strange rant from before. He simply pulled the roof back, plunging Dean back into a world of darkness.
He explored the best he could. The twine that bound his hands had stubbornly refused to yield to teeth and invective, making it difficult for him to navigate by touch alone.
He found the femur finally. The wind picked up again. “I’m looking, I’m looking,” he said softly, hoping to appease the wind. He started feeling around the hole again to figure out what had squashed him Wicked Witch of the East style.
A groan to his left interrupted his negotiations. “You ok?” he asked curiously. Apparently the heavy thing had been a person. He made his way towards the voice slowly.
Another groan, shorter and slightly more aware. “Yeah,” a feminine voice finally replied. Heavy thing had been a woman, he corrected mentally.
“Listen,” his new roommate continued, “My name is Emily Prentiss. I’m an FBI agent. Can you tell me where I am?”
“We got to stop meeting like this, Agent Prentiss,” Dean replied, grinning wildly in the dark. Agent Prentiss was a hell of a woman-meet demons, angels, and thunderbirds in the same day and was fit to fight Godzilla-lite later that evening. He had a feeling she would have loved Jo and Ellen. “Creepy dude get you with the shovel too?”
“Crowbar,” Prentiss corrected, sounding more alert. “Wait a minute, who are you?”
“Dean Winchester,” he said. “And here I thought you’d never forget me. I’m keeping my fingers crossed you didn’t forget my advice at least. Please tell me you got the tattoo at least.”
“Got the tattoo,” she confirmed. “Gets some interesting looks from dates, but I got it. Your brother came into the station early this morning, he was looking for you. Guess I’ve figured out where you disappeared to.”
“First prize to you,” Dean replied automatically. “Wait, what time is it now?” The dark was messing with his perception of time-he would have bet his favorite Metallica tape that he’d only been gone a few hours.
Prentiss didn’t reply immediately. “I’m not really sure. It was a little after two when I interviewed Flynn Carsen, but I blacked out. And to top it all off, my watch is missing.”
“Do you have your shoes?” Dean asked curiously, wondering if the shoe (and knife his mind reminded him) theft was a special treat just for him.
“No,” Prentiss replied in a low, dangerous voice. “My gun’s missing too. Damn it.”
“Are your hands free?”
“Bound,” she replied tightly. “Feels like some sort of twine. Yours?”
“Oh yeah,” Dean replied. “And here I was feeling all special too. Thought I was the only one to get this special treatment.”
The wind whipped through the air again, sending chills down his spine. “Sorry,” he muttered, his hands tightening around the femur reflexively. “Prentiss, you’re supposed to figure out what makes dudes like this tick right? So what’s his deal?”
“Without a body it’s hard to tell,” Prentiss admitted after a long silence. “We’ve been operating under the assumption that the unsub, though it’s probably safe to say Carsen given the circumstances, is a preferential predator-he likes to take a certain type of woman. He’s organized, he’s been careful to space out his abductions across towns and counties to avoid detection. Given the age range of the victims and the fact that no bodies were ever recovered, it’s understandable that the cops assumed the victims were runaways and not victims. But without bodies, we really don’t know what drives him.”
“Give me a monster any day of the week,” Dean replied. “I don’t get humans sometimes.”
Prentiss had nothing to say in response, though Dean wondered, belatedly, if reminding the woman that her job sucked major balls and bringing up her possession by Meg was rude. Sam would know, probably would say something to smooth it over, maybe get a laugh or smile out of the woman by the end. Oh well, too late now.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Any ideas?”
“Well, my team should have figured out I’ve gone missing by now,” Prentiss said. “I didn’t tell Morgan where I was going though.”
“I’d say that was stupid,” Dean replied, “But considering I did the same thing this morning…,” he trailed off.
“Guess we’ll have to focus on getting our asses out of here instead.”
Yeah, Jo and Ellen would have loved Prentiss. “Sounds like a plan,” He said finally.
“What have you tried?”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Sam had been planning on going to law school until Jess had been killed by the yellow-eyed demon. He knew and often respected the legal system. When he was twenty-one and sitting at the bar with Jess and Hunter, each trying to figure out what exactly they were going to do when they graduated, law made sense. He’d spent too much time saving people growing up to stop-he’d just wanted to do it in his own way. Not living week to week in shitty motel after shitty motel, not needing to lie to every man, woman, and child he met in order to keep a low profile, and certainly not fearing every phone call as the one to tell him he’d lost another family member. He and Jess had had it all figured out; he’d be a lawyer and she’d be an elementary school teacher. It had all seemed so simple and perfect.
But as he waited in the suddenly too small conference room in the Crivitz Police Station, he was almost glad that his life hadn’t worked out as planned. Almost. While he’d always prided himself as being the more patient Winchester, the idea of waiting for a piece of paper to go rescue someone was galling.
Agent Rossi had tried to comfort him earlier, saying that as neither his brother nor Agent Prentiss fit the unsub’s exacting standards there was reason to hold out hope. The introduction of Dean and Agent Prentiss, both strong personalities likely to put up more of a fight than any of his previous victims, might throw the unsub off his game. Sam had looked at him. If the Winchester’s had a patron saint, he’d said, it would be Murphy. Rossi refused to answer him when he’d asked what the worse case scenario was.
Sam was pretty sure he could figure that out for himself. If not, he had years of extremely vivid nightmares to draw from.
Sam knew that he was taking his frustration out on the other in the room, and that wasn’t making him any friends among the BAU team, but he couldn’t stop himself. Agent Hotchner had threatened to expose him and Dean to the Crivitz PD if he left without them. He’d added, as Sam started to calculate how long it would take him to slip the cuffs and escape from lockup, that while he and the rest of the BAU were investigating Carsen, the entirety of Crivitz’s police force would be charged with making sure Sam couldn’t escape.
While Sam pouted, Agent Reid finally worked up the courage to start peppering Castiel with questions. “Castiel, you’re the same kind of angel as the other one we met - Anna, right?”
Castiel nodded gravely from his perch on the conference table.
Agent Reid apparently had an idea. He was sitting up straight and waving his hands emphatically. “Anna just appeared at the police station, she didn’t need Dean to summon her or anything. She just knew where to find Dean. Can’t you do that now? Find Dean and Prentiss that same way.”
“It is impossible,” Castiel replied. “The runes I placed on Dean and Sam make it impossible for any angel to locate them.”
Reid frowned. “Runes?”
Sam jumped in before Castiel could answer. “We found Castiel pretty much right after meeting you guys last time. He gave us Enochian sigils to hide us from view.” He really hoped that was enough to deflect the younger man’s curiosity.
“Could Dean have lost the sigil?” Reid wondered.
At the same time, Agent Hotchner asked, “Why would you need to be hidden from angels?”
“Dean and Sam cannot lose the Enochian sigils,” Castiel replied before Sam could. “I carved it into their ribs. And they need to be hidden from both demons and angels now that the Morningstar walks the Earth.”
Everyone looked sick. Sam broke the silence. “Couldn’t you find Agent Prentiss though?”
Castiel considered the request for a moment. “I am unable to. The sigil protects an area, not simply the body. It is likely your missing agent is in close quarters to Dean.”
“Not exactly new information there, Cas,” Sam said testily.
Castiel frowned. “We are wasting time,” he said to the room at large.
It sounded rather ominous to Sam’s ears.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Rossi swore if Sam Winchester checked his watch one more time, he was going to handcuff the kid to the table. It wasn’t like he was unsympathetic, he wanted nothing more than to storm Flynn Carsen’s house, arrest the bastard, and find Prentiss. But until Officer Gabert could find a judge - the local judge was apparently on vacation and his replacement was in session for another two hours - they couldn’t move. Not without jeopardizing any future case against Carsen.
Winchester’s eyes narrowed across the room. Rossi had seen that expression once before, just before a giant mythical bird had destroyed his SUV. “Reid,” Winchester said slowly, “have you ever heard of an author named Carver Edlund?”
Rossi looked on incredulously as Reid blushed deep red and refused to look anyone in the eye. Winchester nodded once, as if a great question had been answered, and sat back in the chair he had been perching on for the last half hour. The angel Castiel seemed unruffled, though it was hard to tell with the man - he was infuriatingly opaque. After announcing he couldn’t find Prentiss, he’d resolutely kept his mouth shut unless directly addressed.
Father Davidson would have his balls for dinner if he knew Rossi had been entertaining such impure thoughts about God’s first children. Hotch, Prentiss, and Reid had told Rossi a bit about the encounter with Anna, but for all of his beliefs that had been shattered that day, Rossi had been slow to believe an angel had appeared and cast a demon out of Prentiss.
Prentiss had changed that day to be sure, but it was still a large leap from giant monsters roaming the earth to accepting that the biblical battles he had always assumed were figurative were actually literal. He never breathed a word to Prentiss, but he had a feeling she knew. Probably something to do with his steadfast refusal to pour salt around his hotel room or join her and Reid at the tattoo parlor. He tried to pass it off as simply being too old, too set in his ways, but it was hard to fool a profiler, particularly one on this team.
There was no way JJ and Morgan would let the youngest member of their team off so easily, especially with such a deep blush. “Who’s Carver Edlund?” JJ finally asked.
“An author,” Reid replied warily. “Wrote a series about a family fighting supernatural creatures.”
Morgan and JJ looked to Sam for confirmation, which he gave readily enough but didn’t expand on Reid’s explanation.
“Is this about not knowing the Twilight series?” JJ asked. “I get that you hadn’t heard of it…,” she said when she was interrupted by a loud groan.
“Those books are a menace to society,” Sam said vehemently. “Vampires are not cuddly, they do not sparkle, and they tend to think of people as tasty, not beautiful.”
“Vampires are real, I take it?” Morgan said drily. Rossi forced himself not to be appalled by how casually the Winchester brothers brought life-changing revelations into his worldview.
Sam nodded. “You should hear Dean go on about it sometime, if you think I’m bad.” He chuckled morosely and eyed his watch again.
Rossi felt his eye twitch. He checked his pockets for a spare pair of cuffs.
Hotch’s phone rang. “Hang on Garcia, I’m putting you on speaker,” he said immediately. “What do you have for me?”
“Flynn Carsen, age forty-eight, has lived in Crivitz the last ten years,” she replied immediately. “He’s educated, he has a Masters in library science from the University of Illinois. He’s apparently a pretty terrible driver-he’s gotten five speeding tickets in the last four years and three parking citations. Interestingly, all the speeding tickets were on Highway 141-another check in the “he’s your guy” column. Here’s where it gets interesting-he has no history prior to 1996.”
“He changed his name?” Morgan asked.
“Most likely,” Garcia said. “He did a decent job though. It’ll take me another hour at least to get his previous history. I’ll update you when I know more.”
Hotch thanked the tech before hanging up. “JJ,” he asked, “Can you go check on the progress of the search warrants?”
Rossi found himself checking his own watch. It had been too damn long.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
They waited until there were no sounds from above to test their options. Prentiss wasn’t sure what kind of shape Dean was in; at times he seemed perfectly lucid, at others he seemed to be talking to the wind. He was mumbled these conversations, almost as if he was trying to keep her from overhearing. How he thought he’d accomplish that in an eight by ten pit, she couldn’t fathom, but he was attempting it.
At first she had thought he was trying to summon help, perhaps from Anna or the missing Castiel he’d mentioned the last time they met. When she voiced this idea, he had shot the option down fairly quickly, however, with an explanation that still boggled the mind. Runes carved into his bones?
Dean had laughed hollowly at her surprise and told her to remind him to tell her the story about when one angel gave him stomach cancer and removed his brother’s lungs. Prentiss was really hoping the serious concussion the man was suffering from had scrambled his brains some. She had finally come to terms with the fact that demons, monsters, and all the things that gave her nightmares as a child walked the earth far more regularly than she would have ever suspected. She didn’t think she was ready to hear that all angels weren’t the creatures of virtue as she had been taught for so many years in CCD classes.
Prentiss had paced the small cell several times. Dean’s assessment of the situation had been pretty accurate for a guy who was suffering from, if she wasn’t mistake, at least a Grade Two concussion.
The twine binding her hands severely limited her movement, but at least Carsen had bound her hands in front of her body rather than behind as he originally had with Dean. A part of his signature or simply a result of backwards thinking, that she couldn’t be as dangerous as a man without her gun?
“My toes are cold,” Dean complained as Prentiss made a fourth loop, hands carefully spread in front of her for guidance. The dirt floor solid and relatively level, Carsen must have used some type of heavy machinery to dig out the pit. They were probably in a fairly remote location, or one where the neighbors weren’t going to ask a lot of questions.
“A lot of unsubs like to take trophies,” she eventually replied.
Dean snorted. “They take shoes? Not much of a trophy.”
“You never really know what’s important to a serial killer’s specific delusion,” she said falling into the lecture automatically. “We’ve found serial killers who take wedding bands, eyes, drivers’ licenses-you name it, pretty much.”
“He could just be an asshole,” Dean suggested. “A shoe-stealing asshole.”
Prentiss grinned in the dark. “Could be. Not having shoes does make it harder to run. But some unsubs just like to have a physical reminder of their victims, so they can revisit their kills over and over again.” She thought of Charles Holcombe and George Turner with their endless rows of shoes and repressed a shiver.
“I don’t get humans some times,” Dean grumbled. “Monsters, they’re usually just hungry. Demons are evil. Ghosts and poltergeists,” he paused. Prentiss noticed the longer he talked the more he slurred. “They just couldn’t move on. Sometimes it’s ‘cause they were freaks in life and stayed freaky in death, but other times it’s ‘cause there’s something holding ‘em here.”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes they don’t realize they’re dead,” Dean replied. “But most of the time it’s a strong emotion that keeps ‘em from passing on-they’re too angry to be dead. Stick around to get revenge on their killer, that kind of thing.”
Prentiss thought of the hundreds of victims she’d seen over the years. The women, and the occasional man, who had been brutally beaten down, violated, and killed. “That can’t be right,” she protested. “I investigate serial killers. No way all those victims wouldn’t have wanted revenge! I would have seen something.”
She could hear Dean shifting next to her. “Not everyone who dies violently becomes a ghost,” he finally offered. Prentiss wished for the thousandth time that it wasn’t so dark; she was positive he was hiding something but she couldn’t tell what from his voice alone. Dean continued, “And sometimes it can take a while for the spirit to figure out what’s going on, might not get enough power to do anything for years.”
Prentiss made a mental note to revisit her earliest cases for suspicious events when she had some free time. She shook her head, free time-what was she thinking? Maybe she could have Dean pass the names along, it sounded like Hunters didn’t mind trading jobs from what Sam had been telling her earlier.
Besides her Dean had stilled and started to mumble again.
“Hey, you know what would be pretty useful right about now?” She asked in an effort to break the tension that had settled over them, as dark and all encompassing as their cell. “A big demon killing sword. That’d be helpful. At least we’d have the stupid twine off.”
“Wow. Why didn’t I think of that? Hold on, let me just get it now before I summon a flying unicorn to get us out of here,” he replied sarcastically.
“No need for the attitude,” Prentiss snapped. She frowned. “Wait, are unicorns real?”
“I’ve been stuck in this hole for hours and my toes are freezing. I think there’s plenty of need for attitude,” Dean replied. “And unicorns aren’t real, no matter what Sam may try to tell you.”
After a pause he continued, “Besides, the sword really isn’t that useful most of the time. Bullets work just as well in a lot of cases and give you some distance. I usually just leave the sword in the trunk. Besides, you think the dude would have taken our shoes, your gun, and my knife but left me with access to a sword? If only.”
“You got the sword from an angel,” Prentiss replied exasperatedly. “How am I supposed to know what it can do?”
The burgeoning argument stopped abruptly when they heard footsteps crunching through the snow. Carsen was back.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The entire conference room was on edge. JJ had only been gone for a minute when Castiel turned to Winchester and said, “I am done wasting time. Where is our destination?”
Winchester stood quickly and indicated Carsen’s property on the local map tacked to the corkboard below the victim profiles. The man had a small house near Lake Noquebay and the state’s public hunting grounds. Morgan stood as well. Winchester was wearing the same expression he had when Morgan first met him-grim, determined, and strangely calm. Morgan saw the same expression on Hotch’s face as the older man steeled himself for doing something nasty but necessary.
Castiel placed a hand on Winchester’s shoulder. “Be still,” he instructed. Winchester screwed up his face nervously.
Hotch realized at the same time Morgan did that something was off; they lunged simultaneously.
Morgan wasn’t really sure how to explain what happened next. It was dark for a second, and then he was elsewhere, but that second was one of the longest of his life. The dark hadn’t been like turning off a light or walking down an alley with no lights; it was primordial, as if the very concept of light had yet to exist. But then it ended and he was outside.
He was outside of Flynn Carsen’s house with no winter gear. He checked his pants nervously, searching frantically before relaxing. Whatever Castiel had done, at least Morgan still had his gun. He noticed Hotch doing the same out of the corner of his eye.
Winchester had his gun drawn and Castiel was storming purposefully towards the front door. Morgan couldn’t believe his own nerve, but he grabbed the smaller man (‘Creature?’ his mind wondered) by the shoulder. “What the hell are you doing?” He demanded. “You can’t just go in there!”
Castiel stared at him flatly. “Your ways are too slow.” He shrugged off Morgan’s hand with a small glare.
He looked to Winchester for support. “You really think I’m going to wait to rescue my brother?” He asked incredulously as he followed Castiel down the long dirt driveway towards the house.
Morgan could only look on in shock as Hotch started to follow the others down the path. “Hotch man, I want to poke around there just as much as you do…”
Hotch interrupted. “Morgan, you can stand there or you can aid me in the pursuit of two suspects.”
Hotch could be a real sneaky guy sometimes, Morgan thought with admiration. He only wished he and the rest of the team hadn’t wasted so much time keeping Winchester at the station-they could have used this excuse hours ago.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Officer Gabert ran into the conference room waving a blue piece of paper. “I’ve got the warrant!”
At any other time, JJ would be thrilled by the man’s obvious enthusiasm. He had, in fact, been one of the easiest LEOs to work with in her time at the BAU. Gabert had given them space, physically and mentally, to get to work and figure out the unsub. He hadn’t fought any of the suggestions they made, he made regular check-ups on their progress, and was unfailingly polite. He had even brought them a homemade lunch (though JJ still was on the fence on whether he was trying to be kind in gifting the team with herring casserole or it was his subtle way of threatening them - close the case or risk more casseroles. Even Reid, who normally inhaled anything set in front of him, had only taken enough to be polite.).
But she had bigger things to worry about right now. Specifically, what the hell had just happened?
Gabert noticed her teammates’ absence as well. “Where’d the rest of your team go?”
“Long story,” Rossi deflected as he barreled out of the room headed for the parking lot. “We’ll meet up with them there. Officer Gabert, can you round up any extra help and send them to meet us there? JJ, Reid-let’s go.”
As Rossi sped down Henriette Avenue, JJ did not think about what she might find at Carsen’s house. She didn’t worry about what had happened last time she had met a Winchester brother while separated from Hotch and Prentiss. She didn’t worry where Castiel might have taken her team. And she certainly didn’t worry about what new nightmares would form when she finally found Prentiss.
It only took a few minutes of desperate driving down the dark roads, the moon providing anemic light through the naked branches creating odd shadows, to reach Flynn Carsen’s house. Rossi killed the car at the base of Carsen’s driveway and signaled for them to follow him up the gravel path.
She got into position behind Rossi, ready to move into the house at his signal.
She was too busy to worry, she thought as she checked the safety on her gun. She had a job to do.
On to Part Five