SPN fic: The Open Invitation
Chapter Three
Genre: futurefic
Characters: Kate Doolittle, Ben Braeden, Sam, Dean, OFCs
Rated: R for language
Summary: It's December of 2021, and the children of Cicero once taken by the changeling have come a long way down a strange road since then. Ben Braeden brings his childhood friend the worst Christmas present in the history of Christmas or presents.
Notes: Spoilers for all aired episodes, particularly for 3.02 "The Kids are Alright." Many thanks to
uisgich for looking this over.
Chapter One
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You’ve got to get rid of her,” Ben repeated evenly.
Did he realize how utterly ridiculous that sounded? “Me. I have to do it.” Just repeating the words, I felt like an idiot.
“I’d slice her up myself, but since I can’t touch her-“
This was unreal. “There are three hunters in this house, and you want me to take on the fucking demon?”
“What I want, Kate, is for you to be in Cicero where you belong, but nobody asked me, so-”
“I don’t believe this.” Anger buzzed in my ears until I could barely hear the shrill rise of my own voice. “This is your batshit hobby, not mine. I never wanted any part of it!”
I was going at his patience with wire strippers, and it showed. “I’m real sorry, princess,” he snarled. “But yelling at me won’t do jack, so get over-“
“What the fuck did you think would happen?” I seethed. If there hadn’t been a table between us, I might have slapped him by now. “You’d go after the monsters, and they’d never turn around and bite you in the ass?”
That one hit home. All his anger went cold and quiet. “Drop the harpy routine, Kate.”
“Except they didn’t, in the end. They came after me instead.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Fuck you!”
A fist crashed on the tabletop and made the silverware dance. I snapped my mouth shut so fast that my teeth clicked audibly.
“That’s enough,” Dean growled in the ringing silence. The black look he leveled at us made me want to slide under the table and hide. “If you kids can’t play nice, you can both shut up.”
Ben and I both sat very still, afraid the slightest twitch would draw the tiger’s attention and get our heads bitten off.
“Kate,” Dean barked. Sam and Maria both snorted and then played it off as a coughing fit. I didn’t blame them; my wide, petrified eyes were probably damn funny to anyone who wasn’t me. “Do you want the facts, or don’t you?”
I nodded.
Ben was shaky on the concepts of that’s enough and shut up. “I was trying to explain-”
“Apparently the lady doesn’t take kindly to your explanations,” Dean said with an arch swing of his head in Ben’s direction.
“You are kind of oh-for-two,” Sam added helpfully. Ben cast him the snidest look he could manage, but Sam just shrugged and turned back to me. “All right, listen up.”
Briefly, he cut his eyes over to Dean. Eyebrows rose, shoulders shifted, and mouths twitched minutely. They had a whole conversation right there in front of me, and I didn’t catch a word. I glanced at Ben for a clue, but he looked equally baffled. Finally I tried Maria.
She watched Sam and Dean’s exchange with untroubled patience, but it seemed that theirs was at best a second or third language to her. Privately I wondered what kind of woman signed up to be the eternal third wheel that way.
“Okay, then.” Sam leaned forward, elbows on the table. “The first thing you have to understand,” he said, canting his head toward me intently, “is that as long as the mora haunts you, it’s only flesh and blood to you. Dean, Ben, and I can’t kill it anymore than we can kill…” He fished for an example, then tossed out the most embarrassing one possible: “General Woundwort. Chasing you out of Efrafa.”
I made a face. “How did you-“
“You talk in your sleep,” he said apologetically.
“That movie was fuckin’ scary,” Ben said sagely.
“Quiet, sparky,” Dean and Maria muttered in chorus.
“Mora are cousins of the stryx, boo-hag, cauchemar, what-have-you,” Sam continued. “And they’re all vulnerable to the same thing: consecrated iron. You shoot or stab them with it while they’re feeding, and they’re toast.”
“Feeding,” I repeated, sensing an unpleasant snag. “Don’t I have to be asleep for it to do that?”
“Yeah, that’s the tricky part,” Sam admitted. “You know the pale woman you see in your nightmares?”
“I’ve seen her before,” I said quickly, in case it was important. “At my mother’s Christmas party.”
“She’s a manifestation of the mora. Her real face underneath that is a lot fuglier. But if the pale woman dies in the dream-“
“The actual mora dies?”
Sam’s lips pursed ruefully. “Not exactly.”
“It boots her out of your head,” said Dean. The seriousness in his face mirrored Sam’s, but he was also spinning a butter knife absently between his fingers. “So us batshit hunters can gank her for real.”
“Oh,” I muttered without quite looking at Dean. If Dakota could see this, she’d point and laugh at me for being legal to drink and still afraid of time-out. “So once the nightmares start, all I have to do is…”
“Remember you’re dreaming,” Maria said in what sounded like a quiet and well-worn refrain. “Take control of it.”
The knife stilled in Dean’s hand, and he gave me the half-smirk I usually saw on Ben. “And then dream you’ve got a massive flamethrower and torch that pasty skank.”
“But you should know it goes both ways,” said Maria, catching and holding my gaze. “You can hurt her within the dream, and she can hurt you too. Do you think you can handle that?” It could have been a challenge, and I almost took it that way. But her hazel eyes were soft with sympathy.
Damn it all. If she’d dared me, the blood pounding in my ears would echo in anger instead of abject terror.
I imagined the pale lady’s slender arms wrapped around me, more soothing than anything I’d known in the waking world. She alone stood between me and my demons (Daddy bleeding and needle teeth descending and Mommy lying that the car was stolen), and she laid butterfly kisses on my hairline.
I imagined her graceful fingers sharpening to knives and dragging across my throat.
“Is there any other way?” I whispered.
“Come on,” Ben said plaintively.
“I told you I didn’t want this.” Surely there was some escape clause for the conscientious objector. “I need another way.”
“The other way is to let her have you,” Ben said bluntly. “I vote no.”
“So I’ll have a few bad dreams.” After all, we both knew something about waking in cold sweats. There was comfort in familiarity if I stuck to a devil I knew.
“That’s not how it works,” Sam said soberly. “She’ll drive you out of your mind, just like she did those football players in Lima.”
“You don’t understand.” I shook my head fervently. “In the dreams, she’s good to me. Everything else is scary psychotic, and she’s the only thing that… Even if I tried to kill her-even if I tried, you said she can…” Her eyes would darken inches from my face, and her fading scream would damn me. The image of my own bloody hands had my vision graying out. Dizzy, I murmured: “I’m not a hunter.”
“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Hands caught my upper arms and held me steady. Someone tipped my chin up, and Dean’s face appeared hazily before me. “Just breathe, sweetheart.”
The endearment alone was enough to knock me sober. I blinked the world into focus, and with it came a lot of concerned background noise.
“Did you just faint?”
“Ben. Not helpful.”
“It’ll pass, Kate,” Maria was saying. “Your body’s just not real happy with you right now.”
The feeling’s mutual.
Dean let me go and sat back in his chair, and in the absence of a steadying grip, I tried hard not to sway. He gnawed on his lip, considering something, and then said, “Wall-E is on.”
Oh, crap. Just when I was feeling lucid again. “Huh?”
“You want to go sit with Becky for a while?”
And field questions from a wee Winchester? Not really. But I had the sense to realize he was giving me an out, and I was grateful. “Actually, do you mind if I call home?”
Dean and Sam had another one of those wordless conversations. “I’ll take you to the study,” Dean said at last. “So you can have some quiet.”
He carried me as Sam had, and on the way out of the kitchen voices rose behind us.
“Can’t I dreamwalk in with her and do it myself?” Ben said.
“Sure,” said Maria. “I keep Silene capensis on the shelf next to the cinnamon.”
“How about hypnosis, or some trippy psychic thing? Rosie could maybe-“
“Leave Rosie out of it,” Sam said with chilly finality.
Dean carried me through stretching rectangles of light, filtered through the frosted windows on either side of the front door. He leaned into the living room to check on Becky (who was watching Wall-E raptly) and then crossed the foyer into the study.
I sank a few inches into the sinfully cushy armchair next to a cold fireplace. Shivering, I gave the room a snooping once-over. Up close, it was actually more organized than I’d thought. The random piles of paper fell into a few rough categories: Guns & Ammo, heavily annotated newspapers, files marked AVMA, and Entergy bills. The shelves were packed with creaky old tomes, paperbacks with tattered spines, and bristling manila folders.
Dean pawed through the papers on the desk, his face blue-lit by the screen of a sturdy laptop. He tossed aside a stapler and then pricked his finger on a buried silver letter opener. “Ouch! God damn it, Sam.” Some more burrowing unearthed a slim cell phone. “Here we go.” But instead of just handing it to me, he walked to the front of the desk and sat down on its edge.
“One thing before you call.” His tone and his crossed arms were those of a sergeant briefing his squad. “Say whatever you want to Lisa, but when you’re talking to anyone else… Our name is Harrison, okay? We’re not Muggles, but we are not hunters.”
But Dakota would die of excitement to hear from the Winchesters, and Mom would want to say the thank-you she forgot when she was crying in the driveway fourteen years ago. “I don’t understand.”
“Look, those Winchester psychos kicked it a long time ago. And unless it stays kicked, our little… understanding with the FBI won’t stay understood.”
My mind flashed on the files still tucked in my closet at home and their pages’ worth of blacked-out text. “You guys struck some kind of bargain?”
Dean snorted, but his disdain was for the feds and not me. “Don’t worry about the details. Just stick to the story, huh?”
“My mother can keep her mouth shut, you know.”
“As fluffy and safe as that makes me feel…” His expression said the rest.
I chewed on that for a long moment, thinking of the witness protection program and the ways in which whole new worlds were built on the principle of anonymity. The fact that Ben and I were even here, knowing what we knew, was already breaking the rules of a good cover. It was strange that the Winchesters should risk it.
So, yes, I could lie to my mother for them.
“Okay. Mr. Harrison.”
He nodded and left me alone to make my phone call. Or maybe he listened at the door. Either way, I was free to believe this was a private conversation.
The line rang twice before picking up. “Hello?”
“Mom.”
It was remarkable how fast I could regress to seven years old. There were weepy exclamations and weepier reassurances. I promised that I was perfectly fine, and Mom promised to save the presents.
“Dakota’s been calling. When should I say you’ll be home?”
“Maria might keep me a few days to make sure I’m healed up good.”
Eventually Mom passed the phone to Ms. Braeden.
“Hey, sweetie. They’re taking good care of you?”
All things considered, I wasn’t lying when I said, “Yeah, they are.”
“Say the word and I’ll come get you, you know. And tell Dean I’m sorry for harassing him the other day.”
“I’ll pass it along,” I said, hoping she could hear my smile over the phone. The phone creaked slightly under my fingers’ growing pressure. “Some Christmas, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ms. Braeden said serenely. “We’ll find out when you and Ben get home. Unless, of course, you want me to disown him?”
“No, no. He belongs in the family where we can keep an eye on him.”
Twenty minutes later I hung up, feeling wrung-out as if I’d been running laps. And maybe someone had been listening at the door, because I hadn’t even worked up a good run of self-pity before the door eased open with a squeak of hinges.
“They love you.” I didn’t mean it to sound like such an accusation.
Ben froze, taking cover behind the door. “Are you going to throw something at me?” I shook my head, but he didn’t seem convinced.
“They trust you with their super-secret identities,” I said softly. “They trust me on your say-so. You and Becky have freaking tickle-fights.”
“We tried fist fights,” Ben said, slipping into the room at last. “But Maria got mad.”
“How long have you and your mom known them?”
He leaned back on the door and shut it with his weight. “Let’s see, Becky’s four now-or, if you ask her, she’s four-and-a-half.” He wandered over to the desk and took up the same pose Dean had. It was uncanny, all the shared body language between them. “When I first came here, nobody knew about her yet, and Maria was yarking randomly every few hours.”
“That’s… That was poetic, Ben.”
That one shoulder rose and fell. “Remember you didn’t talk to me for two weeks because I missed your sweet sixteen?”
“I still haven’t forgiven you.”
“Well, I was here,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Damn. This is so bizarre.”
Ben tipped his head curiously. “Why?”
“They’re supposed to be dead,” I said slowly, surprised that this should require explanation. “But instead they’re camped out in an episode of Full House. Except in Kansas, with demons.”
Now Ben was looking at me like I was the only bizarre thing in a hundred miles. “Well, seeing as they’re not dead,” he said pointedly, “what exactly do you think they should they be doing?”
“I guess I thought they’d go…” And now I felt as ridiculous as I must sound to him. I sighed and spit it out. “They’d go wherever it is people go when they ride off into the sunset.”
“Um.” He was fighting the instinct to mock me. “You do realize they’re not fairytales.”
Through the worn cotton of my borrowed T-shirt, I traced the bandage on my chest. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”
Some of the frank ridicule melted from his face, and he uncrossed his arms and leaned toward me. “Kate…”
He was going to say something nice to me, and I didn’t dare let him. I’d cried like a preschooler quite enough for one day. “So I guess this means you’re Robin.”
Ben blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Sam and Dean must have taught you to hunt, right?” He nodded steadily despite his skepticism. “And now you hang out in the Bat-cave, guarding their secret identities and drinking all the beer. And together, you fight crime.”
There was a moment of silent incredulity in which Ben struggled for words. “Let’s back off on the painkillers, okay?”
With a sigh I looked around, imagining a teenaged Ben bent over one of these dusty books. There must be a backyard where Sam and Dean taught him to shoot, taught him to focus the attitude that used to get him so many detentions. I’d never seen him handle a gun before Christmas Eve, and the idea that he learned those steady hands in this place was oddly unsettling.
But that wasn’t the strangest part. I’d gone five years without realizing that mine was not the only family Ben had. “You never even hinted.”
There was no penitence in his expression when he said, “I didn’t have the right.”
I agreed entirely, and still I wanted to pull my hair out over how immovably, arrogantly sure the bastard was. But that had never won me anything except more frustration. “So they took you in like a lost puppy because… you won them over with your charm and persistence?”
Ben’s chin lifted and fell in a rueful gesture. “Actually, Dean called me a dumbass and told me to go live my damn life.”
“And you didn’t listen.” Slowly I shook my head. “Surprise, surprise.”
Ben waved a hand-no big deal. “He and Sam always try to scare them off.”
“Them?”
“I wasn’t the first or the last moron to come around asking how to kill the creepy-crawlies.”
Standing up to Dean’s death glare seemed to me like a fair entrance exam for the world of hunting. And it struck me that if Ben had never gotten past the doorstep, he would have found something equally stupid to get his pulse racing. Skydiving, perhaps. Playing chicken with trains.
His right hand was curled on his knee at a level with my eyes, and with a strange dispassion I studied its pattern of calluses. How many had been earned killing the creepy-crawlies?
“So now it’s my turn.”
With his tightly wound grace, Ben slid from the desk’s edge and knelt next to me. He spread his elbows on the arm of my chair and wordlessly rested his chin on his stacked fists. I was ready to be coddled now, and instead the useless mook was just going to stare at me.
“There’s still time,” I said half-heartedly. “You can admit it was all a bad practical joke, and I won’t even yell at you.”
Ben smiled sadly and swiveled his head on his knuckles.
Time to put on your big girl panties, sweetheart. “I’m a little freaked here.”
“I know.”
I squeezed the white imprints of my fingers into his wrist, waiting for my throat to clear. Blotchy red shapes drifted in the blackness behind my closed eyes.
“So,” he said into the silence. “You want to play Guitar Hero while we wait for sundown?”
Hands tucked close to my body, I aimed a doubtful look at him over my shoulder. “As much as I enjoy losing to you, I think I’d rather sit quietly upstairs and watch my nails grow.”
“There’s Mario Kart. You love Mario Kart.”
“Actually, I was thinking…” I tossed my head toward the door and the foyer beyond. “Isn’t there a little girl around here who’s way overdue for Christmas presents?”
Ben grinned broad and true, and even the drifting dust motes behind him seemed brighter in the white winter light. Vaguely shell-shocked, I realized I hadn’t seen that grin since before the mora showed up. Months before.
I couldn’t have wiped the smile off my face if I’d wanted to. “Give me a lift into the living room?”
“You big sap.” Ben was laughing at me, as usual. “You don’t even like kids.”
“I like them fine when they’re, you know, occupied.”
“Here, hold onto my neck.”
“Ow, ow, ow!”
“Sorry, Your Worshipfulness. This better?”
“Shut up.”
Ben held me gingerly, with none of Sam or Dean’s firm assurance. But I could put up with being handled like nitroglycerin, since at least with Ben I knew where to put my arms.
In the living room, Dean and Sam had pulled the sofa and chairs up close to the coffee table and set up a very worn-looking chess board between them. Sam hunched over his badly outnumbered white pieces, and Dean sprawled with one hand dangling between his spread knees, smirking openly.
“You cheated,” Sam said.
“Nope.” Dean waggled his eyebrows. “You just sucked that hard.”
Neither seemed to mind the perky soundtrack of Wall-E in the background, nor Becky’s bare feet waving under the glass table. She was on her stomach down there with crayons and a coloring book.
They gave me and Ben twin polite nods as Ben shut the door behind us. I curled on the end of the sofa next to Dean, and Ben tumbled to the floor to make faces at Becky.
“Hey, little bit. You want to know what Santa brought you?”
She almost hit her head on the underside of the glass.
“Does she want to what now?” Dean said sharply.
“Well, I’m better,” I said innocently, “So it’s time for presents, right?”
Becky scrambled over and leaned on Sam’s knee, practically bouncing on her heels. “Parrain Parrain Parrain Parrain Pa-“
He clapped a hand over her mouth. Given the size of his hand, it ended up covering most of her face. “Don’t look at me, chickpea. That’s up to your mom.”
Which naturally resulted in a girl-shaped rocket launching itself toward the kitchen. “Mama!”
“Dude, everything’s not up to Maria,” Dean said, taking a swipe at Sam’s shins with his boot.
“Don’t start,” Sam shot back. “You pull that go-ask-Mom crap all the time. Mostly so you’ll never have to tell the kid no.”
On his back and staring at the ceiling, Ben huffed his disdain. “She’s like, three feet tall, and she has you both so whipped, people could dip strawberries in you.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” I said with a frown. “Badly.”
“Point stands.”
“Says the guy who buys her love with Hot Wheels cars,” Dean said, scooting his queen across the board with one finger. “Check.”
“Hey,” Ben said, sidling into a new subject like a cat into a strange alley. “I think we should start prepping Sam’s room after this. Lay down some salt lines, put a broom under the bed, that sort of thing. We don’t want the bitch getting away once Kate evicts her.”
Sam and Dean both glanced my way appraisingly, and I did my best impression of the old Joan of Arc statue that stood in my high school. All faith, stoicism, and martyred courage. Yeah, that’s right, I’m taking on the demon.
But the Winchesters said nothing except, “Brooms only work on cauchemar,” and “We’ll seal it up tight.”
Because this whole saving-my-sanity thing? Totally not a big deal.
Sam frowned and fluttered his fingers over his poor beleaguered king, and on the TV behind him the cuddly robot croaked, “Ee-vah!”
“Don’t move there,” Ben said, peeking over the edge of the table. “His bishop will take you like an altar boy.”
“But if I move over here, his queen-“
“Oh. Yeah,” Ben said with a tilt of his head. “You’re fucked.”
Dean snickered, and he made a point of catching my eye when he did it. Everything’s going to be fine, kiddo.
I smiled back, because for the moment I believed him.
Chapter Four
Genre: futurefic
Characters: Kate Doolittle, Ben Braeden, Sam, Dean, OFCs
Rated: R for language
Summary: It's December of 2021, and the children of Cicero once taken by the changeling have come a long way down a strange road since then. Ben Braeden brings his childhood friend the worst Christmas present in the history of Christmas or presents.
Notes: Spoilers for all aired episodes, particularly for 3.02 "The Kids are Alright." Many thanks to
uisgich for looking this over.
Chapter One
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You’ve got to get rid of her,” Ben repeated evenly.
Did he realize how utterly ridiculous that sounded? “Me. I have to do it.” Just repeating the words, I felt like an idiot.
“I’d slice her up myself, but since I can’t touch her-“
This was unreal. “There are three hunters in this house, and you want me to take on the fucking demon?”
“What I want, Kate, is for you to be in Cicero where you belong, but nobody asked me, so-”
“I don’t believe this.” Anger buzzed in my ears until I could barely hear the shrill rise of my own voice. “This is your batshit hobby, not mine. I never wanted any part of it!”
I was going at his patience with wire strippers, and it showed. “I’m real sorry, princess,” he snarled. “But yelling at me won’t do jack, so get over-“
“What the fuck did you think would happen?” I seethed. If there hadn’t been a table between us, I might have slapped him by now. “You’d go after the monsters, and they’d never turn around and bite you in the ass?”
That one hit home. All his anger went cold and quiet. “Drop the harpy routine, Kate.”
“Except they didn’t, in the end. They came after me instead.”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Fuck you!”
A fist crashed on the tabletop and made the silverware dance. I snapped my mouth shut so fast that my teeth clicked audibly.
“That’s enough,” Dean growled in the ringing silence. The black look he leveled at us made me want to slide under the table and hide. “If you kids can’t play nice, you can both shut up.”
Ben and I both sat very still, afraid the slightest twitch would draw the tiger’s attention and get our heads bitten off.
“Kate,” Dean barked. Sam and Maria both snorted and then played it off as a coughing fit. I didn’t blame them; my wide, petrified eyes were probably damn funny to anyone who wasn’t me. “Do you want the facts, or don’t you?”
I nodded.
Ben was shaky on the concepts of that’s enough and shut up. “I was trying to explain-”
“Apparently the lady doesn’t take kindly to your explanations,” Dean said with an arch swing of his head in Ben’s direction.
“You are kind of oh-for-two,” Sam added helpfully. Ben cast him the snidest look he could manage, but Sam just shrugged and turned back to me. “All right, listen up.”
Briefly, he cut his eyes over to Dean. Eyebrows rose, shoulders shifted, and mouths twitched minutely. They had a whole conversation right there in front of me, and I didn’t catch a word. I glanced at Ben for a clue, but he looked equally baffled. Finally I tried Maria.
She watched Sam and Dean’s exchange with untroubled patience, but it seemed that theirs was at best a second or third language to her. Privately I wondered what kind of woman signed up to be the eternal third wheel that way.
“Okay, then.” Sam leaned forward, elbows on the table. “The first thing you have to understand,” he said, canting his head toward me intently, “is that as long as the mora haunts you, it’s only flesh and blood to you. Dean, Ben, and I can’t kill it anymore than we can kill…” He fished for an example, then tossed out the most embarrassing one possible: “General Woundwort. Chasing you out of Efrafa.”
I made a face. “How did you-“
“You talk in your sleep,” he said apologetically.
“That movie was fuckin’ scary,” Ben said sagely.
“Quiet, sparky,” Dean and Maria muttered in chorus.
“Mora are cousins of the stryx, boo-hag, cauchemar, what-have-you,” Sam continued. “And they’re all vulnerable to the same thing: consecrated iron. You shoot or stab them with it while they’re feeding, and they’re toast.”
“Feeding,” I repeated, sensing an unpleasant snag. “Don’t I have to be asleep for it to do that?”
“Yeah, that’s the tricky part,” Sam admitted. “You know the pale woman you see in your nightmares?”
“I’ve seen her before,” I said quickly, in case it was important. “At my mother’s Christmas party.”
“She’s a manifestation of the mora. Her real face underneath that is a lot fuglier. But if the pale woman dies in the dream-“
“The actual mora dies?”
Sam’s lips pursed ruefully. “Not exactly.”
“It boots her out of your head,” said Dean. The seriousness in his face mirrored Sam’s, but he was also spinning a butter knife absently between his fingers. “So us batshit hunters can gank her for real.”
“Oh,” I muttered without quite looking at Dean. If Dakota could see this, she’d point and laugh at me for being legal to drink and still afraid of time-out. “So once the nightmares start, all I have to do is…”
“Remember you’re dreaming,” Maria said in what sounded like a quiet and well-worn refrain. “Take control of it.”
The knife stilled in Dean’s hand, and he gave me the half-smirk I usually saw on Ben. “And then dream you’ve got a massive flamethrower and torch that pasty skank.”
“But you should know it goes both ways,” said Maria, catching and holding my gaze. “You can hurt her within the dream, and she can hurt you too. Do you think you can handle that?” It could have been a challenge, and I almost took it that way. But her hazel eyes were soft with sympathy.
Damn it all. If she’d dared me, the blood pounding in my ears would echo in anger instead of abject terror.
I imagined the pale lady’s slender arms wrapped around me, more soothing than anything I’d known in the waking world. She alone stood between me and my demons (Daddy bleeding and needle teeth descending and Mommy lying that the car was stolen), and she laid butterfly kisses on my hairline.
I imagined her graceful fingers sharpening to knives and dragging across my throat.
“Is there any other way?” I whispered.
“Come on,” Ben said plaintively.
“I told you I didn’t want this.” Surely there was some escape clause for the conscientious objector. “I need another way.”
“The other way is to let her have you,” Ben said bluntly. “I vote no.”
“So I’ll have a few bad dreams.” After all, we both knew something about waking in cold sweats. There was comfort in familiarity if I stuck to a devil I knew.
“That’s not how it works,” Sam said soberly. “She’ll drive you out of your mind, just like she did those football players in Lima.”
“You don’t understand.” I shook my head fervently. “In the dreams, she’s good to me. Everything else is scary psychotic, and she’s the only thing that… Even if I tried to kill her-even if I tried, you said she can…” Her eyes would darken inches from my face, and her fading scream would damn me. The image of my own bloody hands had my vision graying out. Dizzy, I murmured: “I’m not a hunter.”
“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Hands caught my upper arms and held me steady. Someone tipped my chin up, and Dean’s face appeared hazily before me. “Just breathe, sweetheart.”
The endearment alone was enough to knock me sober. I blinked the world into focus, and with it came a lot of concerned background noise.
“Did you just faint?”
“Ben. Not helpful.”
“It’ll pass, Kate,” Maria was saying. “Your body’s just not real happy with you right now.”
The feeling’s mutual.
Dean let me go and sat back in his chair, and in the absence of a steadying grip, I tried hard not to sway. He gnawed on his lip, considering something, and then said, “Wall-E is on.”
Oh, crap. Just when I was feeling lucid again. “Huh?”
“You want to go sit with Becky for a while?”
And field questions from a wee Winchester? Not really. But I had the sense to realize he was giving me an out, and I was grateful. “Actually, do you mind if I call home?”
Dean and Sam had another one of those wordless conversations. “I’ll take you to the study,” Dean said at last. “So you can have some quiet.”
He carried me as Sam had, and on the way out of the kitchen voices rose behind us.
“Can’t I dreamwalk in with her and do it myself?” Ben said.
“Sure,” said Maria. “I keep Silene capensis on the shelf next to the cinnamon.”
“How about hypnosis, or some trippy psychic thing? Rosie could maybe-“
“Leave Rosie out of it,” Sam said with chilly finality.
Dean carried me through stretching rectangles of light, filtered through the frosted windows on either side of the front door. He leaned into the living room to check on Becky (who was watching Wall-E raptly) and then crossed the foyer into the study.
I sank a few inches into the sinfully cushy armchair next to a cold fireplace. Shivering, I gave the room a snooping once-over. Up close, it was actually more organized than I’d thought. The random piles of paper fell into a few rough categories: Guns & Ammo, heavily annotated newspapers, files marked AVMA, and Entergy bills. The shelves were packed with creaky old tomes, paperbacks with tattered spines, and bristling manila folders.
Dean pawed through the papers on the desk, his face blue-lit by the screen of a sturdy laptop. He tossed aside a stapler and then pricked his finger on a buried silver letter opener. “Ouch! God damn it, Sam.” Some more burrowing unearthed a slim cell phone. “Here we go.” But instead of just handing it to me, he walked to the front of the desk and sat down on its edge.
“One thing before you call.” His tone and his crossed arms were those of a sergeant briefing his squad. “Say whatever you want to Lisa, but when you’re talking to anyone else… Our name is Harrison, okay? We’re not Muggles, but we are not hunters.”
But Dakota would die of excitement to hear from the Winchesters, and Mom would want to say the thank-you she forgot when she was crying in the driveway fourteen years ago. “I don’t understand.”
“Look, those Winchester psychos kicked it a long time ago. And unless it stays kicked, our little… understanding with the FBI won’t stay understood.”
My mind flashed on the files still tucked in my closet at home and their pages’ worth of blacked-out text. “You guys struck some kind of bargain?”
Dean snorted, but his disdain was for the feds and not me. “Don’t worry about the details. Just stick to the story, huh?”
“My mother can keep her mouth shut, you know.”
“As fluffy and safe as that makes me feel…” His expression said the rest.
I chewed on that for a long moment, thinking of the witness protection program and the ways in which whole new worlds were built on the principle of anonymity. The fact that Ben and I were even here, knowing what we knew, was already breaking the rules of a good cover. It was strange that the Winchesters should risk it.
So, yes, I could lie to my mother for them.
“Okay. Mr. Harrison.”
He nodded and left me alone to make my phone call. Or maybe he listened at the door. Either way, I was free to believe this was a private conversation.
The line rang twice before picking up. “Hello?”
“Mom.”
It was remarkable how fast I could regress to seven years old. There were weepy exclamations and weepier reassurances. I promised that I was perfectly fine, and Mom promised to save the presents.
“Dakota’s been calling. When should I say you’ll be home?”
“Maria might keep me a few days to make sure I’m healed up good.”
Eventually Mom passed the phone to Ms. Braeden.
“Hey, sweetie. They’re taking good care of you?”
All things considered, I wasn’t lying when I said, “Yeah, they are.”
“Say the word and I’ll come get you, you know. And tell Dean I’m sorry for harassing him the other day.”
“I’ll pass it along,” I said, hoping she could hear my smile over the phone. The phone creaked slightly under my fingers’ growing pressure. “Some Christmas, huh?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Ms. Braeden said serenely. “We’ll find out when you and Ben get home. Unless, of course, you want me to disown him?”
“No, no. He belongs in the family where we can keep an eye on him.”
Twenty minutes later I hung up, feeling wrung-out as if I’d been running laps. And maybe someone had been listening at the door, because I hadn’t even worked up a good run of self-pity before the door eased open with a squeak of hinges.
“They love you.” I didn’t mean it to sound like such an accusation.
Ben froze, taking cover behind the door. “Are you going to throw something at me?” I shook my head, but he didn’t seem convinced.
“They trust you with their super-secret identities,” I said softly. “They trust me on your say-so. You and Becky have freaking tickle-fights.”
“We tried fist fights,” Ben said, slipping into the room at last. “But Maria got mad.”
“How long have you and your mom known them?”
He leaned back on the door and shut it with his weight. “Let’s see, Becky’s four now-or, if you ask her, she’s four-and-a-half.” He wandered over to the desk and took up the same pose Dean had. It was uncanny, all the shared body language between them. “When I first came here, nobody knew about her yet, and Maria was yarking randomly every few hours.”
“That’s… That was poetic, Ben.”
That one shoulder rose and fell. “Remember you didn’t talk to me for two weeks because I missed your sweet sixteen?”
“I still haven’t forgiven you.”
“Well, I was here,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Damn. This is so bizarre.”
Ben tipped his head curiously. “Why?”
“They’re supposed to be dead,” I said slowly, surprised that this should require explanation. “But instead they’re camped out in an episode of Full House. Except in Kansas, with demons.”
Now Ben was looking at me like I was the only bizarre thing in a hundred miles. “Well, seeing as they’re not dead,” he said pointedly, “what exactly do you think they should they be doing?”
“I guess I thought they’d go…” And now I felt as ridiculous as I must sound to him. I sighed and spit it out. “They’d go wherever it is people go when they ride off into the sunset.”
“Um.” He was fighting the instinct to mock me. “You do realize they’re not fairytales.”
Through the worn cotton of my borrowed T-shirt, I traced the bandage on my chest. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”
Some of the frank ridicule melted from his face, and he uncrossed his arms and leaned toward me. “Kate…”
He was going to say something nice to me, and I didn’t dare let him. I’d cried like a preschooler quite enough for one day. “So I guess this means you’re Robin.”
Ben blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Sam and Dean must have taught you to hunt, right?” He nodded steadily despite his skepticism. “And now you hang out in the Bat-cave, guarding their secret identities and drinking all the beer. And together, you fight crime.”
There was a moment of silent incredulity in which Ben struggled for words. “Let’s back off on the painkillers, okay?”
With a sigh I looked around, imagining a teenaged Ben bent over one of these dusty books. There must be a backyard where Sam and Dean taught him to shoot, taught him to focus the attitude that used to get him so many detentions. I’d never seen him handle a gun before Christmas Eve, and the idea that he learned those steady hands in this place was oddly unsettling.
But that wasn’t the strangest part. I’d gone five years without realizing that mine was not the only family Ben had. “You never even hinted.”
There was no penitence in his expression when he said, “I didn’t have the right.”
I agreed entirely, and still I wanted to pull my hair out over how immovably, arrogantly sure the bastard was. But that had never won me anything except more frustration. “So they took you in like a lost puppy because… you won them over with your charm and persistence?”
Ben’s chin lifted and fell in a rueful gesture. “Actually, Dean called me a dumbass and told me to go live my damn life.”
“And you didn’t listen.” Slowly I shook my head. “Surprise, surprise.”
Ben waved a hand-no big deal. “He and Sam always try to scare them off.”
“Them?”
“I wasn’t the first or the last moron to come around asking how to kill the creepy-crawlies.”
Standing up to Dean’s death glare seemed to me like a fair entrance exam for the world of hunting. And it struck me that if Ben had never gotten past the doorstep, he would have found something equally stupid to get his pulse racing. Skydiving, perhaps. Playing chicken with trains.
His right hand was curled on his knee at a level with my eyes, and with a strange dispassion I studied its pattern of calluses. How many had been earned killing the creepy-crawlies?
“So now it’s my turn.”
With his tightly wound grace, Ben slid from the desk’s edge and knelt next to me. He spread his elbows on the arm of my chair and wordlessly rested his chin on his stacked fists. I was ready to be coddled now, and instead the useless mook was just going to stare at me.
“There’s still time,” I said half-heartedly. “You can admit it was all a bad practical joke, and I won’t even yell at you.”
Ben smiled sadly and swiveled his head on his knuckles.
Time to put on your big girl panties, sweetheart. “I’m a little freaked here.”
“I know.”
I squeezed the white imprints of my fingers into his wrist, waiting for my throat to clear. Blotchy red shapes drifted in the blackness behind my closed eyes.
“So,” he said into the silence. “You want to play Guitar Hero while we wait for sundown?”
Hands tucked close to my body, I aimed a doubtful look at him over my shoulder. “As much as I enjoy losing to you, I think I’d rather sit quietly upstairs and watch my nails grow.”
“There’s Mario Kart. You love Mario Kart.”
“Actually, I was thinking…” I tossed my head toward the door and the foyer beyond. “Isn’t there a little girl around here who’s way overdue for Christmas presents?”
Ben grinned broad and true, and even the drifting dust motes behind him seemed brighter in the white winter light. Vaguely shell-shocked, I realized I hadn’t seen that grin since before the mora showed up. Months before.
I couldn’t have wiped the smile off my face if I’d wanted to. “Give me a lift into the living room?”
“You big sap.” Ben was laughing at me, as usual. “You don’t even like kids.”
“I like them fine when they’re, you know, occupied.”
“Here, hold onto my neck.”
“Ow, ow, ow!”
“Sorry, Your Worshipfulness. This better?”
“Shut up.”
Ben held me gingerly, with none of Sam or Dean’s firm assurance. But I could put up with being handled like nitroglycerin, since at least with Ben I knew where to put my arms.
In the living room, Dean and Sam had pulled the sofa and chairs up close to the coffee table and set up a very worn-looking chess board between them. Sam hunched over his badly outnumbered white pieces, and Dean sprawled with one hand dangling between his spread knees, smirking openly.
“You cheated,” Sam said.
“Nope.” Dean waggled his eyebrows. “You just sucked that hard.”
Neither seemed to mind the perky soundtrack of Wall-E in the background, nor Becky’s bare feet waving under the glass table. She was on her stomach down there with crayons and a coloring book.
They gave me and Ben twin polite nods as Ben shut the door behind us. I curled on the end of the sofa next to Dean, and Ben tumbled to the floor to make faces at Becky.
“Hey, little bit. You want to know what Santa brought you?”
She almost hit her head on the underside of the glass.
“Does she want to what now?” Dean said sharply.
“Well, I’m better,” I said innocently, “So it’s time for presents, right?”
Becky scrambled over and leaned on Sam’s knee, practically bouncing on her heels. “Parrain Parrain Parrain Parrain Pa-“
He clapped a hand over her mouth. Given the size of his hand, it ended up covering most of her face. “Don’t look at me, chickpea. That’s up to your mom.”
Which naturally resulted in a girl-shaped rocket launching itself toward the kitchen. “Mama!”
“Dude, everything’s not up to Maria,” Dean said, taking a swipe at Sam’s shins with his boot.
“Don’t start,” Sam shot back. “You pull that go-ask-Mom crap all the time. Mostly so you’ll never have to tell the kid no.”
On his back and staring at the ceiling, Ben huffed his disdain. “She’s like, three feet tall, and she has you both so whipped, people could dip strawberries in you.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors,” I said with a frown. “Badly.”
“Point stands.”
“Says the guy who buys her love with Hot Wheels cars,” Dean said, scooting his queen across the board with one finger. “Check.”
“Hey,” Ben said, sidling into a new subject like a cat into a strange alley. “I think we should start prepping Sam’s room after this. Lay down some salt lines, put a broom under the bed, that sort of thing. We don’t want the bitch getting away once Kate evicts her.”
Sam and Dean both glanced my way appraisingly, and I did my best impression of the old Joan of Arc statue that stood in my high school. All faith, stoicism, and martyred courage. Yeah, that’s right, I’m taking on the demon.
But the Winchesters said nothing except, “Brooms only work on cauchemar,” and “We’ll seal it up tight.”
Because this whole saving-my-sanity thing? Totally not a big deal.
Sam frowned and fluttered his fingers over his poor beleaguered king, and on the TV behind him the cuddly robot croaked, “Ee-vah!”
“Don’t move there,” Ben said, peeking over the edge of the table. “His bishop will take you like an altar boy.”
“But if I move over here, his queen-“
“Oh. Yeah,” Ben said with a tilt of his head. “You’re fucked.”
Dean snickered, and he made a point of catching my eye when he did it. Everything’s going to be fine, kiddo.
I smiled back, because for the moment I believed him.
Chapter Four