SPN/VM Fic: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Title: The Better Angels of Our Nature
Author: kajikia
Fandom: Supernatural/Veronica Mars crossover
Pairing/Rating: Sam Winchester/Veronica Mars, Teen
Length: 4,800 words
Summary: We're going to play a game now, you'll like it. It's called 'Tell me where your brother took my dad and you won't find out what a taser to the balls feels like.'
Written for spn_holidays, for nil_nyx who requested a Supernatural/Veronica Mars crossover.
"Dean, I swear to God, you better be in custody, or-" Sam cut the rest of that sentence off. "Just call me when you get this." He hung up, then checked his missed calls log again. Just in case.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered, and someone behind him said, soft and tentative, "Um, excuse me?"
He turned around, and the girl, a tiny, nervous-looking blonde, took a step back. Sam forced himself to smile.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm having car trouble, and I was kind of hoping you could take a look at it."
Sam hung onto the smile, exhaled through his nose. "I'm not really-"
"Please?" She bit her lip, and Sam pushed his irritation away. It was late; he'd stayed at the Hearst library until it closed, and the parking lot was almost deserted. He'd feel bad about leaving her there by herself.
"All right, but I'm not guaranteeing anything."
She smiled, bright and relieved.
He followed her to the car and she popped the hood. "This happened last week and my dad just jiggled something, and it was fine," she said as he leaned forward.
"Well-" he said, and there was a snap-fizzle and a surprising amount of pain, then everything went black.
***
When he woke up, he was handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel room.
"Good morning, sunshine," the blonde said, and she didn't look nervous or helpless anymore. "We're going to play a game now, you'll like it. It's called 'Tell me where your brother took my dad and you won't find out what a taser to the balls feels like.' "
"What?" Sam said. This was not what he'd been expecting.
"Where is my father?" the blonde said, slow and precise, in the voice of someone who was making an effort not to shout.
"I don't know what you're talking about! I don't even know who your dad is!"
"What, you guys have kidnapped so many people it's hard to keep them all straight?"
"No! We didn't kidnap anybody!" Sam jerked on the handcuffs, but they didn't budge. "Look, this is all some kind of misunderstanding. I don't know why you think-"
"Your brother's prints were all over my dad's office, which, by the way: pretty sloppy, Winchester." She picked up a stack of papers and threw them at him with a sharp flick of her wrist. They slipped and settled around him, and he saw Dean's mugshot on one. "I've read his FBI file. Yours, too. What else am I going to think?"
"Um, that was a misunderstanding, too," Sam said weakly, trying to think of offices that Dean would have been in lately.
"The prison break was a 'misunderstanding.' " Her voice was completely flat.
"Well, no, but the murder charges, yes!" Then, "Wait, is your dad Keith Mars? The private detective? Used to be the sheriff?"
She leaned forward, eyes sharp and intent. "Yes."
Shit. "My brother was supposed to meet with him, did meet with him, I guess, but I haven't seen him since then. That was the day before yesterday. I thought your dad had arrested him or something." He'd hoped her dad had arrested him; that was better than the alternative. "You must have heard me leaving that message for Dean- I swear, I don't know where they are."
She looked at him for a long moment, then stood up and turned on the stungun.
"No, hey," Sam said, trying to get his knees up. "I don't know anything!"
Snap fizzle pain.
Darkness.
***
When he woke up again, he wasn't handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel room.
He was just lying on it. He sat up. His wallet, keys, and cell phone were piled on the nightstand. Everything seemed to be there, and he checked the call log and voicemail again. Nothing.
He turned the cell phone over in his hands. He didn't even know the name of the crazy blonde girl. Well, her last name was probably Mars, and he could figure the rest out if he wanted to, but...In the grand scheme of things, this was not the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him.
He decided to let it go.
***
As soon as he stepped off the road, Sam knew he'd made a mistake. They flickered into visibility around him, half a dozen women in white, more than he was expecting. He had salt in his jacket pocket, but his weapons had disappeared with Dean and the Impala.
They were angry spirits, the marks of violent death fresh and bloody on them, nothing rational left.
"Hi," he said, "listen, I-"
He took a step back and they were on him, hands as cold as death itself, slamming him into the ground, pinning him down. The one straddling him dug her nails into his chest like she was trying to claw his heart out. He wasn't sure she couldn't.
He gasped in pain, struggling to get his hand on the salt, and then a familiar voice shouted, "Hey!"
The one on his chest disappeared, and a couple more followed her, and it was enough. He pulled a handful of salt from his pocket and threw it at the spirits that still held him. They vanished with hissing screams.
He scrambled up. They had the Mars girl surrounded. She looked freaked out but steady, taser out. There was a dog at her heels with his hackles up, growling loud and angry. One of the ghosts reached out and Sam was already moving forward.
The ghost touched her chest and she screamed, and Sam threw another handful of salt.
"Come on," he snarled, as the spirits reformed a few feet away, and they stumbled back up to the road.
"What the fuck?" she gasped out. "What the fuck was that?"
On the asphalt, Sam could only see the spirits out of the corner of his eye. Still. "I think we should talk somewhere else," he said.
***
"Ghosts," she said, and her voice was flat but not disbelieving. People could tell themselves all the lies they wanted about how it was dark and they were confused and they didn't really see what they thought they saw, but the ghosts had touched her, and nothing mundane felt like that.
"Yeah."
She dropped her gaze, blotting the claw-marks on her chest with an alcohol wipe from her first-aid kit.
"Two of...them were missing people cases my dad was working on." She met his eyes.
"Oh." He hadn't noticed that, but he wasn't surprised.
"Does this have anything to do with what happened to my dad?"
"Maybe," he said carefully. "My brother and I heard about the missing women, and about people seeing ghosts around here, so we came to check it out. Dean was supposed to get information from your dad about the case."
She looked down again, taping a piece of gauze over the wound, and buttoning the rest of her shirt up. She was thinking, but he couldn't read her expression.
Finally she said, "I want to see that journal thing you have."
He froze. "What?"
"That scrapbook of weird shit you have. I thought you were just crazy when I looked at it the first time."
She'd tasered him, kidnapped him, and left him in a strange motel, but he was suddenly, irrationally pissed that she'd read his dad's journal. He glared at her, and she just glared back.
"Fine," he said stiffly, and got it out of his bag, tossing it to her like it didn't mean anything.
She scootched back up on the bed, leaning back against the headboard, and her dog jumped up and lay down next to her.
He bandaged his own claw-marks while she read.
"So all this is real?" she asked, turning another page. "All those things that go bump in the night?"
"Yeah."
"What do you think happened to them?"
"I don't know," he said, which was true. He had a good guess, though. "Was there any sulfur residue at your dad's office?"
Her hand went still on the page. "Yes. Why? What does that mean?"
"It could mean a lot of things."
She gave him a frustrated look.
"This is what we do, me and my brother. I'm going to take care of this, okay? I'm going to find them both."
"Hmm," she said, and went back to reading.
She fell asleep with the journal open on her lap. Sam gave her twenty minutes, then carefully pulled the book from her grasp.
The dog lifted his head and growled almost inaudibly low in his throat, and Sam backed up in a hurry, holding onto the journal.
He grabbed his bag, and slipped out of the room.
***
He was sitting in a bar and grill just off the Pacific Coast Highway, near where the ghosts had been, when she found him again.
She kissed his cheek before he even realized it and dropped into the chair next to him. "Hi, baby!" she said with a brilliant smile. "Sorry I'm running late-I know you're in a hurry."
He stared at her. "What the-"
"I'll have a cheeseburger, medium-rare, and fries, and a large Coke," she said to the waitress who'd ambled over.
"Detecting is hard work," she said when the waitress had gone. "I really worked up an appetite." She was still smiling, but it had a hard edge to it now. "I guess you haven't been keeping up with the police scanner. Or maybe you just don't have the resources I do."
"What do you want?"
She shoved a piece of paper across the table at him. "Yesterday morning, there was a school shooting in Oregon. Two men walked into St. Christopher's elementary and shot the preschool teacher, Mr. Daniels, in the head in front of his class."
"Yeah, it was on the radio." He felt a curl of dread in his gut.
"Well, this part hasn't been released to the public yet. The partial prints on the casings recovered at the scene match your brother's. They drove away in a black muscle car." She passed over another piece of paper. "These are the sketches from the eye-witness descriptions."
He looked down, and one of the faces was Dean. Shit.
"That's my dad," she said, and she wasn't smiling anymore. "Why is my dad helping your brother execute preschool teachers?"
"How did you get this information?" he asked, still staring at the sketches.
"My dad's not the only P.I. in the family. But you didn't answer my question."
"It's probably not your dad. They're probably possessed."
She gave a shaky, unamused laugh. "I don't actually know if that's good news or not."
"Look-"
"Shut up," she said, low and fierce. "He is the only family I have, and I am going to find him. I don't know anything about this supernatural stuff, but you'd be at least a day behind by the time you got this information on your own. We can help each other, but don't think for a second that you're leaving me out of this."
"Here you go, sweetie," the waitress said, and they both leaned back, a little startled.
"Um, I'm sorry," she said, trying for that bright smile, "could I get this to go?"
The waitress looked at their faces, and said, "Sure thing."
"I don't even know your name," Sam said.
"Veronica. Veronica Mars."
Sam tried to stare her down, but he already knew how this was going to end. "Fine," he said. "We're working together on this."
She nodded, and something in the set of her shoulders eased a little.
On the way out the door, something else occurred to him. "How did you find me?"
She grinned at him, bright and cocky just for a second. "This ain't my first time at the rodeo," she said, and wouldn't tell him anything else.
***
They took her car. "Because it's not actually stolen," she said dryly, and Sam shrugged and conceded the point.
They took her dog, too. "Because my dad always told me to bring Backup."
"Really," he said, and eyed the dog suspiciously. He could swear it grinned at him.
***
"Huh," Sam said from the passenger seat (and that was something he was never going to tell Dean, that he took shotgun automatically now). "The ballistics report says Daniels was shot with a silver bullet."
"So?"
"We don't keep silver bullets in the guns usually. It means they had to swap out the clips before they shot him."
She huffed out a breath. "So what does that mean?"
"I don't know."
There was no sign of Dean or Mars in Corvallis.
"At least they haven't been arrested," Veronica said.
They were sitting at a table in the library, laptops open and books scattered around them. She was searching the law enforcement sites, and Sam was going through back-issues of the local papers.
He made a noncommittal noise. "Okay, this is going to sound a little weird," he started, and she gave him a look. "Right. Daniels might have been a werewolf. I mean, if some of these deaths had gotten more press, we would have checked this out."
"A werewolf. Right, right, of course." She sat back and made a frustrated, inarticulate gesture with her hands. "I-oh."
"What?"
She leaned forward, frowning at the computer screen. "They just IDed a body that washed up near Neptune. Richard Freymond."
It was Sam's turn to make the And? face.
"It's just, the name is familiar..." Her hands moved over the keyboard. "Yeah, here. He was a 'person of interest' in a missing person case about five years ago. My dad has a file on that case; he thought it was related to the disappearances he was working on. Oh, and here's the best part: Freymond's time of death is the night our guys went missing."
"A serial killer and a werewolf. I don't get it."
They looked at each other over their pile of research and Sam tried to push away the feeling that they were running out of time.
***
A little after dawn, Veronica poked him in the ribs.
"Hnph!" he said, startling awake, and she shoved the laptop at him.
"Ritual murder in Boise," she said. "No prints or witnesses, but..."
Sam looked at the crime scene photos and felt like he'd been punched in the gut. "It's a Devil's Trap. The writing on the ceiling over the body. It's for exorcisms."
The woman had died of internal injuries, tied to a chair under the Devil's Trap, a sick flash of déjà vu.
"So, Boise?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Why are you freaking out about this?" Veronica asked in the car.
"I didn't think demons could do that. And even if they could, I didn't think they would."
"So, what-it's not demons? They're not possessed?"
"I don't know," he snapped. "I just don't know, okay?"
They drove in silence for awhile, then she said quietly, "My dad might leave without saying anything, if he thought he was protecting me."
Sam flinched a little at that, because he was thinking the same thing about Dean.
"He'd be more likely to lie to me, but okay, maybe there'd be a situation where he just wouldn't tell me. But here's the thing: there's no way he'd kill a man in front of a bunch of preschoolers, in broad daylight, and leave shell casings with fingerprints behind. If my dad wanted someone dead, they'd just disappear."
"Oh," Sam said, and was bizarrely comforted.
***
There was no sign of them in Boise.
With a soft, wide-eyed expression and a few calculated knee pats, Veronica got the dead woman's brother to admit that his sister had changed a week or so before her death, going strange and cold and distant. "Like another person," he said, and she made sympathetic noises.
"You're really good at that," Sam said, outside the funeral parlor.
"You gotta go with your strengths," she said, "and my strengths are small, cute, and good with a taser."
They let Backup out of the car to run in joyful circles in the dog park, and Sam said, "We need to stop reacting to what they're doing and start trying to anticipate them. They're hunting things; we just have to figure out what they'll go after next."
Veronica nodded. "I'll flip you for the microfilm," she said.
***
They picked an angry spirit at American Falls, but it was just a drowned child, nothing corporeal or demonic to hunt.
They did the salt and burn anyway, because it had to be done.
Afterwards, Veronica sat with her arms around Backup for a long while, pale and quiet.
"Kids are always the worst," Sam said awkwardly, and then sat in the car until she was ready to go.
Somewhere on the way to Utah, the road rolling up from the darkness to meet them, she asked, "Are all ghosts like that?"
Sam flicked her a quick glance. "A lot of them are. Some don't know they're dead. Some are just a, a set of actions, like a skipping CD."
"But they're not really-" She stopped. "My best friend died, was murdered, when we were in high school. I saw her a couple of times, after. I told myself I was dreaming, imagining things, but I wanted to believe she was, I don't know, not gone completely. But..."
Sam hesitated, then said, "I saw my mom once, after she died. I...it was really her. Not angry or unaware. It was her."
Veronica kept her face turned to the window, but after a long minute she said, "Thank you."
***
In Salt Lake City, there were six decapitated bodies and a break-in at a morgue.
"Probably vampires," Sam said. "But I'd have to see the heads to be sure."
"Are you shitting me?" Veronica said. "No, you know what, for the next twenty-four hours, I'm just going to pretend we're dealing with serial killers. It's all serial killers."
In Salt Lake City, Bobby called to tell him about a possible possession near Cheyenne. "Andy and Maggie Walker. I left a message on your brother's phone, but it went straight to voicemail, so I thought I'd try you, too," he said.
"When was this?" Sam asked.
"Five, ten minutes ago, I guess."
"Thanks, Bobby. We'll look into it." Sam had to force the next sentence out. "Listen, if Dean tries to get in touch with you before I talk to you again, just, um, be careful, okay? Like, holy-water-in-the-whiskey careful."
"Jesus Christ, Sam, what have you-"
"I'm taking care of it, Bobby," Sam said, and hung up. He ignored the rest of Bobby's calls.
Veronica was watching him. "So," he said. "You should probably read the section on exorcisms."
***
They found Dean and Mars in a suburb of Cheyenne, in front of the Walker house.
They were facing down two teenagers in the gathering twilight, looking like something out of a spaghetti Western.
Sam's heart gave an irrational little leap in his chest when he saw Dean's silhouette.
"Dad!" Veronica shouted as they scrambled out of the car.
The two men turned in unison and regarded them with the exact same remote, slightly amused expression, and Sam knew without a doubt it wasn't Dean Winchester and Keith Mars looking at them.
Veronica sucked in a hard breath, and Sam went for the flask of holy water.
The men lifted their hands, and it was like the air had turned into a strait-jacket. He couldn't move, could barely breathe.
"Humans," Dean's body said.
"No fun at all," Mars agreed. "No challenge."
They smirked.
Backup hit Dean like a ton of bricks.
Sam felt the demon's control slip just for a second, and he could move. He threw himself sideways, tackling Veronica, trying to get them out of the line of fire.
Dean shrieked with what sounded like pain, and flung the dog away from him. The teenagers turned and ran.
Dean and Mars were after them in a heartbeat, like wolves chasing down deer.
Sam and Veronica scrambled up and followed them, Backup bouncing to his feet at their heels.
The teenagers split up, and Dean and Mars went after the girl, disappearing into a maze of backyards.
Sam and Veronica went after the boy.
"Backup!" Veronica shouted and pointed, and the dog bounded past them to slam into the boy's back.
He rolled when he went down and tried to get his hands up to shove the dog off, but jerked them back, hissing, from-
"Is that a rosary on his collar?" Sam asked as they got closer.
"Yes."
"Huh."
Veronica had her flask of holy water out and splashed it on the boy, keeping the demon in pain and off-balance as Sam duct-taped his wrists and ankles and mouth, and wrestled him into the body-bag they'd brought. The lines of the Devil's Trap on the front of the bag, drawn in silver Sharpie, gleamed faintly in the last of the daylight.
The demon gave one muffled, despairing scream when they zipped it closed, and then everything was quiet.
Sam and Veronica stared at each other, panting and bruised, and then looked around. They were at the end of a cul-de-sac, out of the range of streetlights, but still.
"Let's go," Sam said, and they dragged the bag back to the car.
No one stopped them, and they pulled away quietly, but Veronica kept one eye on her mirrors all the way back to the motel.
They dragged the bag inside and dumped it in the bathtub. They salted the doors and the window, and double-checked all their preparations for the next day. Daylight wouldn't actually make the demons less powerful, but it would take away some of the advantage of their night-vision. But Sam was realizing the downside to that plan was that they had to wait until daylight.
"They probably won't be able to sense the other demon as long as he's inside the body-bag," Sam said, for the third or fourth time.
"Mmm-hmm," Veronica said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was standing between his legs. He held an ice-pack over her black eye while she poked at the bruises that covered his ribcage. "Does it hurt when you breathe?"
"Only a little. Seriously, I don't think anything's broken, or even cracked."
She looked at her fingers on his bruises for a moment longer, then met his eyes. "They're going to try to kill us tomorrow."
"Yes."
"And they have freaky mind-powers and invincibility, and we have...salt."
"Yes."
"Cool," she said, and smiled crookedly. "I always bet on the underdog."
He smiled back at her for one heartbeat, two, his hand cupped around the ice-pack and her cheek, and then they were kissing, fierce and deliberate and a little bit desperate.
He let her push him back onto the bed, rolled their hips together. Skin on skin and wet-hot mouths and it was comfort and friendship and that desire that came from the knife-edge of fear and adrenaline.
And in the end it was sleep, curled up around each other's bruises.
***
They loaded the body-bag and the demon into the car before dawn in an attempt at discretion.
They drove to the field they had chosen as the sun was rising.
"So," Sam said, when the sky was a thin, pale blue.
"So," Veronica said, and they cut the body-bag open.
The demon writhed and kicked when the Devil's Trap was broken, but they were ready with the holy water and the chains and the rosaries.
Then it was just a matter of waiting.
Sam could hear the Impala coming a mile off.
He stood a little behind Veronica, the demon at her feet, and they watched Dean and Mars walk towards them.
Dean kept walking fast, but Mars was slowing down, hanging back, which was not good.
Dean walked right up and stopped with his toes almost on the line of the Devil's Trap they'd drawn in salt in the high grass.
"C'mon," he said, Dean's smirk with nothing but malice behind it. "How stupid do you think we are?"
"Pretty stupid, obviously," Veronica said.
Behind his back, Sam's cupped hand was filling with blood from the cut on his wrist.
"I'd say we'd let you go if you give us the kid, but he's all tied up and helpless. There's no fun in it. I guess we'll just have to make do with you."
Dean held his hand out and made a fist, and Veronica choked.
Sam grabbed her shoulder with his other hand and she shook her head. Mars was still too far out, but Veronica was turning a really bad shade of red.
Sam finally just cursed under his breath and uncupped his hand, letting the blood drip down and close the larger trap they'd cut into the earth with blood and iron.
The demon's power snapped, and Veronica dragged in a huge breath.
She laughed, hoarse and rusty. "And, hey, we weren't wrong, either."
Dean's face was blank with anger, and he lunged towards Sam. Sam skipped out of his way, let him catch himself on the power of the circle.
They had the prayer books out by the time he turned around.
At the first phrases of Latin, Dean stopped. His face twisted with pain, and he dropped to his knees, snarling curses, then moaning, as they continued. Through it all, Mars watched silently from just outside the circle.
They finished it, textbook steady and even, and the demons burst out of Dean and the kid's bodies like a cloud of animate soot, pouring out of Dean's mouth and the kid's nose and eyes.
When it was over, Mars was kneeling outside the circle. He lifted his head weakly and said in a completely different voice, "Veronica?"
She froze. "Dad?"
"What's going on, baby? Where am I?"
She looked at Sam, eyes wide, and he mouthed back, No, no.
"Baby, please," he said, and held out a shaking hand.
Veronica stepped out of the circle and flung herself into his arms.
He embraced her, and over her shoulder, his eyes went oil-black and he smiled like the edge of a knife.
Then he convulsed and fell over backwards.
"C'mon," Veronica said, clicking off the taser. "Help me get him into the circle."
Sam shut his mouth and did as she asked.
Mars was already starting to come around when they lifted him over the edge.
Veronica read the Latin, her voice hard and fast and precise, and she looked grimly satisfied when the demon screamed and poured out of her father's body.
Dean stirred weakly in the grass, and Sam whirled around. He felt something hot and painful crack open in his chest when Dean sat up and blinked at him, and before he made a conscious decision, he had his arms wrapped around Dean.
"Shit, Dean, shit," he mumbled against his brother's shoulder, and Dean gripped his arm tightly and didn't say anything.
He pulled back after awhile, and met Dean's eyes.
"Yeah?" he said.
"Yeah," Dean said, and Sam pressed their foreheads together for just a moment.
"So," he said. "I guess we should untie the kid."
Veronica let go of her father and swiped her palms over her face quickly. "Yeah, he'd probably appreciate that."
It was hard to tell if he did or not; his face was blank and shocky. Sam winced, looking at him. "How's his sister?"
Dean looked away. "Hard to say for sure, but I think she'll live."
Sam and Veronica led him to the her car and got him settled in the passenger seat.
Sam got his bag and his laptop out of her car, and then stood there feeling awkward and uncertain.
"I guess we better get going before your dad arrests my brother for the reward money."
"Hm, yes, practically Shakespearean," she said. "I think you have a few minutes, though."
He glanced back and saw Dean and Mars standing close together, Mars's hand on Dean's shoulder, Dean's head bowed and nodding a little. Sam looked away.
"Well, say good-bye to Backup for me. I know he's sorry he had to stay at the motel for our epic showdown." He hesitated. He wanted a little to kiss her, but in the end, he just held out his hand.
She gave him a wry smile and shook it, strong and firm. "Take care of yourselves," she said.
"Yeah, you, too."
He let go of her hand and turned away, and she called after him, "Hey, Winchester, don't think this means I'll go easy on you when I'm in the FBI."
He laughed as he turned back around. "Yeah?" he said. "Bring it."
They were both grinning when they walked away.
Author: kajikia
Fandom: Supernatural/Veronica Mars crossover
Pairing/Rating: Sam Winchester/Veronica Mars, Teen
Length: 4,800 words
Summary: We're going to play a game now, you'll like it. It's called 'Tell me where your brother took my dad and you won't find out what a taser to the balls feels like.'
Written for spn_holidays, for nil_nyx who requested a Supernatural/Veronica Mars crossover.
"Dean, I swear to God, you better be in custody, or-" Sam cut the rest of that sentence off. "Just call me when you get this." He hung up, then checked his missed calls log again. Just in case.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered, and someone behind him said, soft and tentative, "Um, excuse me?"
He turned around, and the girl, a tiny, nervous-looking blonde, took a step back. Sam forced himself to smile.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm having car trouble, and I was kind of hoping you could take a look at it."
Sam hung onto the smile, exhaled through his nose. "I'm not really-"
"Please?" She bit her lip, and Sam pushed his irritation away. It was late; he'd stayed at the Hearst library until it closed, and the parking lot was almost deserted. He'd feel bad about leaving her there by herself.
"All right, but I'm not guaranteeing anything."
She smiled, bright and relieved.
He followed her to the car and she popped the hood. "This happened last week and my dad just jiggled something, and it was fine," she said as he leaned forward.
"Well-" he said, and there was a snap-fizzle and a surprising amount of pain, then everything went black.
***
When he woke up, he was handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel room.
"Good morning, sunshine," the blonde said, and she didn't look nervous or helpless anymore. "We're going to play a game now, you'll like it. It's called 'Tell me where your brother took my dad and you won't find out what a taser to the balls feels like.' "
"What?" Sam said. This was not what he'd been expecting.
"Where is my father?" the blonde said, slow and precise, in the voice of someone who was making an effort not to shout.
"I don't know what you're talking about! I don't even know who your dad is!"
"What, you guys have kidnapped so many people it's hard to keep them all straight?"
"No! We didn't kidnap anybody!" Sam jerked on the handcuffs, but they didn't budge. "Look, this is all some kind of misunderstanding. I don't know why you think-"
"Your brother's prints were all over my dad's office, which, by the way: pretty sloppy, Winchester." She picked up a stack of papers and threw them at him with a sharp flick of her wrist. They slipped and settled around him, and he saw Dean's mugshot on one. "I've read his FBI file. Yours, too. What else am I going to think?"
"Um, that was a misunderstanding, too," Sam said weakly, trying to think of offices that Dean would have been in lately.
"The prison break was a 'misunderstanding.' " Her voice was completely flat.
"Well, no, but the murder charges, yes!" Then, "Wait, is your dad Keith Mars? The private detective? Used to be the sheriff?"
She leaned forward, eyes sharp and intent. "Yes."
Shit. "My brother was supposed to meet with him, did meet with him, I guess, but I haven't seen him since then. That was the day before yesterday. I thought your dad had arrested him or something." He'd hoped her dad had arrested him; that was better than the alternative. "You must have heard me leaving that message for Dean- I swear, I don't know where they are."
She looked at him for a long moment, then stood up and turned on the stungun.
"No, hey," Sam said, trying to get his knees up. "I don't know anything!"
Snap fizzle pain.
Darkness.
***
When he woke up again, he wasn't handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel room.
He was just lying on it. He sat up. His wallet, keys, and cell phone were piled on the nightstand. Everything seemed to be there, and he checked the call log and voicemail again. Nothing.
He turned the cell phone over in his hands. He didn't even know the name of the crazy blonde girl. Well, her last name was probably Mars, and he could figure the rest out if he wanted to, but...In the grand scheme of things, this was not the weirdest thing that had ever happened to him.
He decided to let it go.
***
As soon as he stepped off the road, Sam knew he'd made a mistake. They flickered into visibility around him, half a dozen women in white, more than he was expecting. He had salt in his jacket pocket, but his weapons had disappeared with Dean and the Impala.
They were angry spirits, the marks of violent death fresh and bloody on them, nothing rational left.
"Hi," he said, "listen, I-"
He took a step back and they were on him, hands as cold as death itself, slamming him into the ground, pinning him down. The one straddling him dug her nails into his chest like she was trying to claw his heart out. He wasn't sure she couldn't.
He gasped in pain, struggling to get his hand on the salt, and then a familiar voice shouted, "Hey!"
The one on his chest disappeared, and a couple more followed her, and it was enough. He pulled a handful of salt from his pocket and threw it at the spirits that still held him. They vanished with hissing screams.
He scrambled up. They had the Mars girl surrounded. She looked freaked out but steady, taser out. There was a dog at her heels with his hackles up, growling loud and angry. One of the ghosts reached out and Sam was already moving forward.
The ghost touched her chest and she screamed, and Sam threw another handful of salt.
"Come on," he snarled, as the spirits reformed a few feet away, and they stumbled back up to the road.
"What the fuck?" she gasped out. "What the fuck was that?"
On the asphalt, Sam could only see the spirits out of the corner of his eye. Still. "I think we should talk somewhere else," he said.
***
"Ghosts," she said, and her voice was flat but not disbelieving. People could tell themselves all the lies they wanted about how it was dark and they were confused and they didn't really see what they thought they saw, but the ghosts had touched her, and nothing mundane felt like that.
"Yeah."
She dropped her gaze, blotting the claw-marks on her chest with an alcohol wipe from her first-aid kit.
"Two of...them were missing people cases my dad was working on." She met his eyes.
"Oh." He hadn't noticed that, but he wasn't surprised.
"Does this have anything to do with what happened to my dad?"
"Maybe," he said carefully. "My brother and I heard about the missing women, and about people seeing ghosts around here, so we came to check it out. Dean was supposed to get information from your dad about the case."
She looked down again, taping a piece of gauze over the wound, and buttoning the rest of her shirt up. She was thinking, but he couldn't read her expression.
Finally she said, "I want to see that journal thing you have."
He froze. "What?"
"That scrapbook of weird shit you have. I thought you were just crazy when I looked at it the first time."
She'd tasered him, kidnapped him, and left him in a strange motel, but he was suddenly, irrationally pissed that she'd read his dad's journal. He glared at her, and she just glared back.
"Fine," he said stiffly, and got it out of his bag, tossing it to her like it didn't mean anything.
She scootched back up on the bed, leaning back against the headboard, and her dog jumped up and lay down next to her.
He bandaged his own claw-marks while she read.
"So all this is real?" she asked, turning another page. "All those things that go bump in the night?"
"Yeah."
"What do you think happened to them?"
"I don't know," he said, which was true. He had a good guess, though. "Was there any sulfur residue at your dad's office?"
Her hand went still on the page. "Yes. Why? What does that mean?"
"It could mean a lot of things."
She gave him a frustrated look.
"This is what we do, me and my brother. I'm going to take care of this, okay? I'm going to find them both."
"Hmm," she said, and went back to reading.
She fell asleep with the journal open on her lap. Sam gave her twenty minutes, then carefully pulled the book from her grasp.
The dog lifted his head and growled almost inaudibly low in his throat, and Sam backed up in a hurry, holding onto the journal.
He grabbed his bag, and slipped out of the room.
***
He was sitting in a bar and grill just off the Pacific Coast Highway, near where the ghosts had been, when she found him again.
She kissed his cheek before he even realized it and dropped into the chair next to him. "Hi, baby!" she said with a brilliant smile. "Sorry I'm running late-I know you're in a hurry."
He stared at her. "What the-"
"I'll have a cheeseburger, medium-rare, and fries, and a large Coke," she said to the waitress who'd ambled over.
"Detecting is hard work," she said when the waitress had gone. "I really worked up an appetite." She was still smiling, but it had a hard edge to it now. "I guess you haven't been keeping up with the police scanner. Or maybe you just don't have the resources I do."
"What do you want?"
She shoved a piece of paper across the table at him. "Yesterday morning, there was a school shooting in Oregon. Two men walked into St. Christopher's elementary and shot the preschool teacher, Mr. Daniels, in the head in front of his class."
"Yeah, it was on the radio." He felt a curl of dread in his gut.
"Well, this part hasn't been released to the public yet. The partial prints on the casings recovered at the scene match your brother's. They drove away in a black muscle car." She passed over another piece of paper. "These are the sketches from the eye-witness descriptions."
He looked down, and one of the faces was Dean. Shit.
"That's my dad," she said, and she wasn't smiling anymore. "Why is my dad helping your brother execute preschool teachers?"
"How did you get this information?" he asked, still staring at the sketches.
"My dad's not the only P.I. in the family. But you didn't answer my question."
"It's probably not your dad. They're probably possessed."
She gave a shaky, unamused laugh. "I don't actually know if that's good news or not."
"Look-"
"Shut up," she said, low and fierce. "He is the only family I have, and I am going to find him. I don't know anything about this supernatural stuff, but you'd be at least a day behind by the time you got this information on your own. We can help each other, but don't think for a second that you're leaving me out of this."
"Here you go, sweetie," the waitress said, and they both leaned back, a little startled.
"Um, I'm sorry," she said, trying for that bright smile, "could I get this to go?"
The waitress looked at their faces, and said, "Sure thing."
"I don't even know your name," Sam said.
"Veronica. Veronica Mars."
Sam tried to stare her down, but he already knew how this was going to end. "Fine," he said. "We're working together on this."
She nodded, and something in the set of her shoulders eased a little.
On the way out the door, something else occurred to him. "How did you find me?"
She grinned at him, bright and cocky just for a second. "This ain't my first time at the rodeo," she said, and wouldn't tell him anything else.
***
They took her car. "Because it's not actually stolen," she said dryly, and Sam shrugged and conceded the point.
They took her dog, too. "Because my dad always told me to bring Backup."
"Really," he said, and eyed the dog suspiciously. He could swear it grinned at him.
***
"Huh," Sam said from the passenger seat (and that was something he was never going to tell Dean, that he took shotgun automatically now). "The ballistics report says Daniels was shot with a silver bullet."
"So?"
"We don't keep silver bullets in the guns usually. It means they had to swap out the clips before they shot him."
She huffed out a breath. "So what does that mean?"
"I don't know."
There was no sign of Dean or Mars in Corvallis.
"At least they haven't been arrested," Veronica said.
They were sitting at a table in the library, laptops open and books scattered around them. She was searching the law enforcement sites, and Sam was going through back-issues of the local papers.
He made a noncommittal noise. "Okay, this is going to sound a little weird," he started, and she gave him a look. "Right. Daniels might have been a werewolf. I mean, if some of these deaths had gotten more press, we would have checked this out."
"A werewolf. Right, right, of course." She sat back and made a frustrated, inarticulate gesture with her hands. "I-oh."
"What?"
She leaned forward, frowning at the computer screen. "They just IDed a body that washed up near Neptune. Richard Freymond."
It was Sam's turn to make the And? face.
"It's just, the name is familiar..." Her hands moved over the keyboard. "Yeah, here. He was a 'person of interest' in a missing person case about five years ago. My dad has a file on that case; he thought it was related to the disappearances he was working on. Oh, and here's the best part: Freymond's time of death is the night our guys went missing."
"A serial killer and a werewolf. I don't get it."
They looked at each other over their pile of research and Sam tried to push away the feeling that they were running out of time.
***
A little after dawn, Veronica poked him in the ribs.
"Hnph!" he said, startling awake, and she shoved the laptop at him.
"Ritual murder in Boise," she said. "No prints or witnesses, but..."
Sam looked at the crime scene photos and felt like he'd been punched in the gut. "It's a Devil's Trap. The writing on the ceiling over the body. It's for exorcisms."
The woman had died of internal injuries, tied to a chair under the Devil's Trap, a sick flash of déjà vu.
"So, Boise?"
"Yeah. Yeah."
"Why are you freaking out about this?" Veronica asked in the car.
"I didn't think demons could do that. And even if they could, I didn't think they would."
"So, what-it's not demons? They're not possessed?"
"I don't know," he snapped. "I just don't know, okay?"
They drove in silence for awhile, then she said quietly, "My dad might leave without saying anything, if he thought he was protecting me."
Sam flinched a little at that, because he was thinking the same thing about Dean.
"He'd be more likely to lie to me, but okay, maybe there'd be a situation where he just wouldn't tell me. But here's the thing: there's no way he'd kill a man in front of a bunch of preschoolers, in broad daylight, and leave shell casings with fingerprints behind. If my dad wanted someone dead, they'd just disappear."
"Oh," Sam said, and was bizarrely comforted.
***
There was no sign of them in Boise.
With a soft, wide-eyed expression and a few calculated knee pats, Veronica got the dead woman's brother to admit that his sister had changed a week or so before her death, going strange and cold and distant. "Like another person," he said, and she made sympathetic noises.
"You're really good at that," Sam said, outside the funeral parlor.
"You gotta go with your strengths," she said, "and my strengths are small, cute, and good with a taser."
They let Backup out of the car to run in joyful circles in the dog park, and Sam said, "We need to stop reacting to what they're doing and start trying to anticipate them. They're hunting things; we just have to figure out what they'll go after next."
Veronica nodded. "I'll flip you for the microfilm," she said.
***
They picked an angry spirit at American Falls, but it was just a drowned child, nothing corporeal or demonic to hunt.
They did the salt and burn anyway, because it had to be done.
Afterwards, Veronica sat with her arms around Backup for a long while, pale and quiet.
"Kids are always the worst," Sam said awkwardly, and then sat in the car until she was ready to go.
Somewhere on the way to Utah, the road rolling up from the darkness to meet them, she asked, "Are all ghosts like that?"
Sam flicked her a quick glance. "A lot of them are. Some don't know they're dead. Some are just a, a set of actions, like a skipping CD."
"But they're not really-" She stopped. "My best friend died, was murdered, when we were in high school. I saw her a couple of times, after. I told myself I was dreaming, imagining things, but I wanted to believe she was, I don't know, not gone completely. But..."
Sam hesitated, then said, "I saw my mom once, after she died. I...it was really her. Not angry or unaware. It was her."
Veronica kept her face turned to the window, but after a long minute she said, "Thank you."
***
In Salt Lake City, there were six decapitated bodies and a break-in at a morgue.
"Probably vampires," Sam said. "But I'd have to see the heads to be sure."
"Are you shitting me?" Veronica said. "No, you know what, for the next twenty-four hours, I'm just going to pretend we're dealing with serial killers. It's all serial killers."
In Salt Lake City, Bobby called to tell him about a possible possession near Cheyenne. "Andy and Maggie Walker. I left a message on your brother's phone, but it went straight to voicemail, so I thought I'd try you, too," he said.
"When was this?" Sam asked.
"Five, ten minutes ago, I guess."
"Thanks, Bobby. We'll look into it." Sam had to force the next sentence out. "Listen, if Dean tries to get in touch with you before I talk to you again, just, um, be careful, okay? Like, holy-water-in-the-whiskey careful."
"Jesus Christ, Sam, what have you-"
"I'm taking care of it, Bobby," Sam said, and hung up. He ignored the rest of Bobby's calls.
Veronica was watching him. "So," he said. "You should probably read the section on exorcisms."
***
They found Dean and Mars in a suburb of Cheyenne, in front of the Walker house.
They were facing down two teenagers in the gathering twilight, looking like something out of a spaghetti Western.
Sam's heart gave an irrational little leap in his chest when he saw Dean's silhouette.
"Dad!" Veronica shouted as they scrambled out of the car.
The two men turned in unison and regarded them with the exact same remote, slightly amused expression, and Sam knew without a doubt it wasn't Dean Winchester and Keith Mars looking at them.
Veronica sucked in a hard breath, and Sam went for the flask of holy water.
The men lifted their hands, and it was like the air had turned into a strait-jacket. He couldn't move, could barely breathe.
"Humans," Dean's body said.
"No fun at all," Mars agreed. "No challenge."
They smirked.
Backup hit Dean like a ton of bricks.
Sam felt the demon's control slip just for a second, and he could move. He threw himself sideways, tackling Veronica, trying to get them out of the line of fire.
Dean shrieked with what sounded like pain, and flung the dog away from him. The teenagers turned and ran.
Dean and Mars were after them in a heartbeat, like wolves chasing down deer.
Sam and Veronica scrambled up and followed them, Backup bouncing to his feet at their heels.
The teenagers split up, and Dean and Mars went after the girl, disappearing into a maze of backyards.
Sam and Veronica went after the boy.
"Backup!" Veronica shouted and pointed, and the dog bounded past them to slam into the boy's back.
He rolled when he went down and tried to get his hands up to shove the dog off, but jerked them back, hissing, from-
"Is that a rosary on his collar?" Sam asked as they got closer.
"Yes."
"Huh."
Veronica had her flask of holy water out and splashed it on the boy, keeping the demon in pain and off-balance as Sam duct-taped his wrists and ankles and mouth, and wrestled him into the body-bag they'd brought. The lines of the Devil's Trap on the front of the bag, drawn in silver Sharpie, gleamed faintly in the last of the daylight.
The demon gave one muffled, despairing scream when they zipped it closed, and then everything was quiet.
Sam and Veronica stared at each other, panting and bruised, and then looked around. They were at the end of a cul-de-sac, out of the range of streetlights, but still.
"Let's go," Sam said, and they dragged the bag back to the car.
No one stopped them, and they pulled away quietly, but Veronica kept one eye on her mirrors all the way back to the motel.
They dragged the bag inside and dumped it in the bathtub. They salted the doors and the window, and double-checked all their preparations for the next day. Daylight wouldn't actually make the demons less powerful, but it would take away some of the advantage of their night-vision. But Sam was realizing the downside to that plan was that they had to wait until daylight.
"They probably won't be able to sense the other demon as long as he's inside the body-bag," Sam said, for the third or fourth time.
"Mmm-hmm," Veronica said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and she was standing between his legs. He held an ice-pack over her black eye while she poked at the bruises that covered his ribcage. "Does it hurt when you breathe?"
"Only a little. Seriously, I don't think anything's broken, or even cracked."
She looked at her fingers on his bruises for a moment longer, then met his eyes. "They're going to try to kill us tomorrow."
"Yes."
"And they have freaky mind-powers and invincibility, and we have...salt."
"Yes."
"Cool," she said, and smiled crookedly. "I always bet on the underdog."
He smiled back at her for one heartbeat, two, his hand cupped around the ice-pack and her cheek, and then they were kissing, fierce and deliberate and a little bit desperate.
He let her push him back onto the bed, rolled their hips together. Skin on skin and wet-hot mouths and it was comfort and friendship and that desire that came from the knife-edge of fear and adrenaline.
And in the end it was sleep, curled up around each other's bruises.
***
They loaded the body-bag and the demon into the car before dawn in an attempt at discretion.
They drove to the field they had chosen as the sun was rising.
"So," Sam said, when the sky was a thin, pale blue.
"So," Veronica said, and they cut the body-bag open.
The demon writhed and kicked when the Devil's Trap was broken, but they were ready with the holy water and the chains and the rosaries.
Then it was just a matter of waiting.
Sam could hear the Impala coming a mile off.
He stood a little behind Veronica, the demon at her feet, and they watched Dean and Mars walk towards them.
Dean kept walking fast, but Mars was slowing down, hanging back, which was not good.
Dean walked right up and stopped with his toes almost on the line of the Devil's Trap they'd drawn in salt in the high grass.
"C'mon," he said, Dean's smirk with nothing but malice behind it. "How stupid do you think we are?"
"Pretty stupid, obviously," Veronica said.
Behind his back, Sam's cupped hand was filling with blood from the cut on his wrist.
"I'd say we'd let you go if you give us the kid, but he's all tied up and helpless. There's no fun in it. I guess we'll just have to make do with you."
Dean held his hand out and made a fist, and Veronica choked.
Sam grabbed her shoulder with his other hand and she shook her head. Mars was still too far out, but Veronica was turning a really bad shade of red.
Sam finally just cursed under his breath and uncupped his hand, letting the blood drip down and close the larger trap they'd cut into the earth with blood and iron.
The demon's power snapped, and Veronica dragged in a huge breath.
She laughed, hoarse and rusty. "And, hey, we weren't wrong, either."
Dean's face was blank with anger, and he lunged towards Sam. Sam skipped out of his way, let him catch himself on the power of the circle.
They had the prayer books out by the time he turned around.
At the first phrases of Latin, Dean stopped. His face twisted with pain, and he dropped to his knees, snarling curses, then moaning, as they continued. Through it all, Mars watched silently from just outside the circle.
They finished it, textbook steady and even, and the demons burst out of Dean and the kid's bodies like a cloud of animate soot, pouring out of Dean's mouth and the kid's nose and eyes.
When it was over, Mars was kneeling outside the circle. He lifted his head weakly and said in a completely different voice, "Veronica?"
She froze. "Dad?"
"What's going on, baby? Where am I?"
She looked at Sam, eyes wide, and he mouthed back, No, no.
"Baby, please," he said, and held out a shaking hand.
Veronica stepped out of the circle and flung herself into his arms.
He embraced her, and over her shoulder, his eyes went oil-black and he smiled like the edge of a knife.
Then he convulsed and fell over backwards.
"C'mon," Veronica said, clicking off the taser. "Help me get him into the circle."
Sam shut his mouth and did as she asked.
Mars was already starting to come around when they lifted him over the edge.
Veronica read the Latin, her voice hard and fast and precise, and she looked grimly satisfied when the demon screamed and poured out of her father's body.
Dean stirred weakly in the grass, and Sam whirled around. He felt something hot and painful crack open in his chest when Dean sat up and blinked at him, and before he made a conscious decision, he had his arms wrapped around Dean.
"Shit, Dean, shit," he mumbled against his brother's shoulder, and Dean gripped his arm tightly and didn't say anything.
He pulled back after awhile, and met Dean's eyes.
"Yeah?" he said.
"Yeah," Dean said, and Sam pressed their foreheads together for just a moment.
"So," he said. "I guess we should untie the kid."
Veronica let go of her father and swiped her palms over her face quickly. "Yeah, he'd probably appreciate that."
It was hard to tell if he did or not; his face was blank and shocky. Sam winced, looking at him. "How's his sister?"
Dean looked away. "Hard to say for sure, but I think she'll live."
Sam and Veronica led him to the her car and got him settled in the passenger seat.
Sam got his bag and his laptop out of her car, and then stood there feeling awkward and uncertain.
"I guess we better get going before your dad arrests my brother for the reward money."
"Hm, yes, practically Shakespearean," she said. "I think you have a few minutes, though."
He glanced back and saw Dean and Mars standing close together, Mars's hand on Dean's shoulder, Dean's head bowed and nodding a little. Sam looked away.
"Well, say good-bye to Backup for me. I know he's sorry he had to stay at the motel for our epic showdown." He hesitated. He wanted a little to kiss her, but in the end, he just held out his hand.
She gave him a wry smile and shook it, strong and firm. "Take care of yourselves," she said.
"Yeah, you, too."
He let go of her hand and turned away, and she called after him, "Hey, Winchester, don't think this means I'll go easy on you when I'm in the FBI."
He laughed as he turned back around. "Yeah?" he said. "Bring it."
They were both grinning when they walked away.