Sick Days - Chapter 12
Title: Sick Days
Summary: Dean's obsession with apparently random medical deaths mirrored from his past lands him and Sam in the middle of a deadly epidemic.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Up to and including 'Born Under a Bad Sign'
Word Count: 4,557 for this part
Author's Note: Takes place in 2007 post 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with flashbacks to 1987. Many thanks to Amberdreams for the wonderful editing assistance. Master post can be found here.
~~~
Continued from Chapter 11
“Uh!” Jo groaned as she slammed her hand down on the dusty dictionary. “I need a dictionary for this stupid dictionary, Sam. What’s an ‘immolation’?”
Sam just sent a look to Jo’s apparently random question before he returned his eyes to his own notes that he was trying to keep straight. He needed her to focus on the symbol and not ramble on about every big word in the English portion of the Hausa dictionary. This was as bad as researching with Dean.
His jaw tightened at the thought. What he wouldn’t give to have Dean here annoying the hell out of him right now. If he lost Dean here he didn’t know what he would do. But he couldn’t do what Dean wanted.
There was no out of this. Maybe for Dean, but not for him. He couldn’t go back and live a ‘normal’ life. Pretending that he ever could had been a mistake. There was a responsibility in knowing what they knew. He had tried to ignore that before, but he couldn’t anymore. Not now that he knew what he was.
In truth he was scared out of his mind at the thought of Dean not being here to watch him. Not because he needed Dean to protect him, but he was terrified that soon enough someone was going to have to be saving these people from him.
As he focused back in on the grammar book he heard Jo tapping her fingers impatiently on the table. He looked up to realize that she was staring expectantly at him. She wasn’t just being annoying with her question, like Dean would have been, she was actually waiting for an answer. He straightened in his chair and the knot in his stomach grew tighter.
“Why?” he asked apprehensively. “That’s not what you got from the symbol on Dean’s back, is it?”
“If you don’t like it you look. All these little squiggly marks look the same to me. Check it out.”
Jo turned the dictionary and pushed it back across the table towards Sam along with the sketch he had made. It was the third of three words. They had translated the other two words - ‘first’ and ‘last’ and hadn’t been able to figure out the context. The last word though was painfully clear. This was just getting worse, not better.
“That’s it,” he confirmed. Immolation could mean a lot of things depending on who was saying it, but it was pretty clear what it meant here. “It’s a willing self sacrifice.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like Dean asked for this.”
“Long story,” he replied with a sigh. He looked up from his notes with an even grimmer expression than he had worn even just a moment earlier. “I know what the soul eater is trying to raise.”
“What?”
“Itself.”
“Uh huh...I think you read that book wrong, genius. If it’s already here I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to raise itself.”
“I reworked it twice. I’m right about this. I was just wrong before. That circle Dean found, it’s not for a ritual. It’s a binding circle.”
~~~
“Ellen, you’ve gotta kill me.”
Ellen’s heart shattered at Dean’s helpless plea. He desperately grasped out to her and without hesitation she abandoned the chair she sat in to kneel down beside his bed where she could wrap her arms protectively around his trembling body. She’d never known him as a child, but he looked as vulnerable as a newborn now.
Only a few days earlier she had talked to this spitfire of a young man. He’d been so painfully eager to run into the height of danger and to do what he could to save a bunch of people he would never even meet. She didn’t know or care why he did it. She just wished he didn’t.
It was all good and well for these boys, for their father and her husband to run out and play hero. They did good work and they saved a lot of lives, but they sacrificed absolutely everything to do it. And she was tired of picking up the pieces. She couldn’t bear to watch one more good man be laid down before his time.
“Dean Winchester, you stop talking like that,” she told him firmly in a mom tone that would have frozen him in his tracks if he had any sense about him. “You’re not checking out on me.”
“No choice. Listen...”
“I’ll full well listen once you’re up and about, but I ain’t listening to this. Do you have any idea how many ways your brother would kill me if I let you go? God I could strangle you both.”
She placed a soft kiss on his burning forehead before returning to her chair and wringing out a fresh cool cloth to lay there. He’d been taking ice chips and drinking best he could, but his breathing was so labored and he had lost control over so much of his own body. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much weak he felt and she didn’t blame him one bit for wanting out. Getting well couldn’t be looking terribly likely from his point of view.
While she’d been hoping like hell that he’d drop it and go back to resting, he persisted. “Talked to her...thing doing this. I’m it,” his strained voice continued.
Obviously the only one he’d talked to since Sam had left was her. The boy wasn’t making any sense, but she knew he thought he was and he was struggling so hard to tell her this that she tried her best to listen.
“You’re what, honey?”
“I’m what’s keeping this going. You kill me and this all ends.”
“I know you’re hurting bad, but that’s one damn long term answer to a short term problem. This isn’t it. You’re gonna get better if you just hold on. I promise you that.”
“Don’t matter. I saw ‘em...all the people it’s taking. I screwed this up. I gotta fix it.”
“We are fixing it, but Dean, you ain’t thinking straight.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh like hell you will, boy. You even think of moving off that bed and I will take you down and not in the way you’re hoping.”
But right now she saw something in him that she hadn’t seen since she’d arrived. There was a fire in Dean’s glassy hazel eyes that she didn’t want to see die out again. He might not be willing to fight to save himself, but he was clearly ready to fight to save these people and she’d do anything she could to help him to feel empowered in that. Short of killing him of course.
“I’ll run what you’ve said by Bobby. We’ll see what he’s got to say about it.”
~~~
Sam sat beside Jo back out in the patrol car. He was still in the passenger seat because he was pretty sure that Jo would stab him with her knife if he thought about snatching the keys. It wasn’t as if he blamed her for wanting to be in control here considering the company. He didn’t feel much like driving anyway.
Honestly he wasn’t sure whether what they had gotten from the library was good or bad news. At least they knew something now. He was just hoping that Bobby could make sense of it.
“It fits,” Bobby replied to what Sam had relayed over the phone. “Getting your soul swallowed into oblivion isn’t exactly an incentive to worship. Hell, whoever worked the binding must have known that no one in their right mind would be dumb enough to take that crap deal.”
“Dad wasn’t the one to bind this thing?”
“Oh hell no. This was damn sloppy work and this thing goes back before his time. Your dad had shot into town soon as he put together the pattern, but if he’d had any idea what this really was he wouldn’t have touched it with a ten foot pole. Not with you boys in tow. I tried to warn him, but your old man was stubborn as a mule.”
It didn’t excuse Dad blaming what he didn’t know on Dean, but it was at least something to hear that Dad hadn’t known what he had been dragging Dean into. Sam had thought Dad had known a whole lot more about this than he apparently did. But if Dad had gone in knowing nothing how could he have expected his eight year old son to know what he was doing?
“If she’s bound how is she still killing?” He sent a confused look towards Jo as she nudged him in the side. “Hold on, Bobby...what is it?” he asked her.
“I need to hear this too.”
It wasn’t like he was going to argue with her about that. They needed all the help they could get on this. He was just too distracted to be thinking clearly about anything.
“Bobby, I’m putting you on speaker.” He set the phone on the dashboard between him and Jo. “Okay.”
“I was saying your dad had thought the same as you about the circle. He figured it just didn’t have that much ritual power behind it anymore, what with the maker being dead and all. We thought it was just the remains keeping her there.”
“Did Dad ever find any remains?”
“Never had the chance. He got sick first and after I worked him over he had enough sense not to go back. This soul eater, she was just picking enough to survive until your brother gave her what she needed. In her book it doesn’t get any better than a willing first born sacrifice. With this feeding frenzy, pretty soon she may just have enough power to get back a physical form.”
“Wouldn’t that be something we could fight?” Jo asked hopefully.
“Don’t count on it. In the flesh these things are shape shifters and not like the usual. They can look like cats or whatever inconspicuous thing you can think of. If she gets back to that we won’t see her leave and no one else will see her coming.”
“At least now we have the EMF, but I just don’t know how we can stop her like this,” Sam said. “Dean and I were right there in the basement with her, Bobby. She grabbed him and I didn’t even see it.”
“That’s ‘cause if you forget all this soul eater stuff she’s just a ghost of a witch, right?” Jo asked Sam. “It’s not like she’s actually a witch anymore.”
“Yeah, I caught that, but that doesn’t mean....”
“Listen up, you chuckle head, Jo’s right,” Bobby cut in. “We’re thinking about this all wrong. You wouldn’t go and try to take out a ghost with a baseball bat, would ya?”
“No, but we know this isn’t just a ghost.”
“And it’s not just an old school soul eater either,” Jo threw in.
“Look, you’re both right and that ain’t a good thing. Folklore says these things carry a stone in their body as their source of power, but lucky us, our soul eater dumped her flesh so it’s not like you can just cut the stone out of her and the ghost can’t have the stone on her because she don’t have a damn body.”
“But if she’s a ghost she had to leave a body behind somewhere,” Jo replied.
“And the stone should be with her bones,” Sam said, catching on to where Jo was going with this. “If we find the remains we’ll have everything we need to stop her.”
“At this point, it’s our best shot,” Bobby agreed. “It’s hard to say which is keeping her going, but we’ll cover all our bases with a standard salt and burn on the bones and destroying the stone.”
“That’s great, Bobby, but if we do find it, how are we supposed to destroy it?” Sam asked.
“Call me crazy, but a sledge hammer should do the trick.”
“The stone isn’t mystically protected?”
“As far as I can tell, no reason it should be. In life it’s protected inside the body and they don’t usually need them once they’re dead.”
“So we just hope she was buried and here.” It sounded simple enough, but they were working on a tight deadline here. The longer this took the more people died. The more likely Dean would die. “Bobby, finding her body is going to take longer than Dean’s got.”
“You don’t think I know that? I just got off the phone with Ellen before you called.”
Sam tensed his jaw, half afraid of what Bobby was going to say. His tone didn’t exactly sound like he had good news. “How is he?”
“He asked Ellen to kill him.”
His stomach plummeted as he tried to make some kind of sense out of that. Obviously he hadn’t heard Bobby right. Even with as much as his brother didn’t think he should be alive, there was no way Dean was really trying to off himself just to get out. He looked to Jo who by the expression on her face had heard the exact same thing he had.
“What?” he finally managed to ask.
“You heard me, kid. Your brother says if he dies the sacrificing ends. At least for this round. Simple as that. It matches with what you guys found marked on him. It’s not the first or the last sacrifice. It’s the first and the last. That’s why this thing is playing his death slow motion compared to the rest. She needs him alive until she’s got enough energy to break the binding.”
“Even if that’s true, how could Dean know that?”
“Sam, your brother has been talking to this thing. He must be tapping into the fetch she yanked out of him.”
“So she wants Dean to kill himself, probably as part of the sacrifice. It’s a trick.”
“Not by the way Ellen is telling it. Dean came up with this all his own. I’ve got an idea, but you’re not gonna like it...”
~~~
Ellen brushed her hair aside as she shifted the motel’s phone so that it was pinned between her ear and shoulder. Dean was sprawled out on the bed with his eyes closed but she knew he was awake. The boy was restless and incoherent. It didn’t seem as if he was able to sleep anymore. Either that or he didn’t want to.
Occasionally he mumbled something that sounded useful but there was no way to keep him focused long enough to explain. She wished she could give him something to let him rest, but his hold on life was so tentative that she didn’t dare risk it. As much as she didn’t want him to suffer, if he didn’t slip into a coma he was just as likely to choke on the fluids building in his lungs if she put him under far enough not to feel anything.
“Yeah, I’m still here, Bobby,” she spoke into the phone.
She looked away from Dean and focused her full attention to the book on her lap. Over the phone she could just make out the sound of pages rustling before Bobby settled on a number.
“Page sixty-six,” he told her.
Ellen flipped through the tattered pages of the musty book she held. The old volume didn’t actually have conveniently numbered and index pages so she had to count them out. For a moment she stared at the page she had ended up on. Obviously she had counted wrong, but she got the same result on the second try.
“I don’t think so, Bobby.”
“There isn’t a symbol there? Get your eyes checked. We’re looking at copies of the same damn book.”
“Then you get your eyes checked, old man. There’s a symbol here alright but it’s for some kind of last rite.”
“That’s the one.”
The phone nearly slipped from her ear at the certainty of his reply. She was far from competent on ritual work, but like anyone else she knew enough to know that only the dead and dying needed last rites.
Dean mumbled something to himself that Ellen couldn’t make out in full. He wasn’t making sense anymore and he might look already gone, but she wasn’t even close to ready to give up on John’s boys.
She lowered her voice as she again spoke into the phone. “I thought you said this could save him.”
“You don’t think I’m trying? That kid means the world to me and he’s had a soul eater dining on him for days now. He’s out of time and he’s been marked as the prime sacrifice to this thing.”
“Yeah, I got all that, but what I don’t get is how this is going to help stop it.”
“We gotta be real here. If Dean dies now his soul ain’t floating off to greener pastures. It’s just plain gone. Right now faking a spiritual death is the best I got. Our only other option is to do what Dean is asking for real. We can’t just let this go on. Dean wouldn’t want to come out of this like that.”
Ellen nodded to herself. “I’m with you, Bobby. How’s this work?”
“If I’m right, doing this will make Dean look good as dead to the thing feeding off him and it should put an end to the sickness and the sacrifices long enough for Sam and Jo to end this permanently. If there’s enough of him left...well, we just gotta hope that Dean can pull through.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“He’s still dying, but this really should release his soul and it should still stop the raising...it just won’t save his life.”
Ellen looked down to Dean and blinked away the moisture building in her eyes while pretending to not have heard how hard those last words had been for Bobby to say. Bobby was right. Dean deserved to rest in peace when it was his time, but this wasn’t his time. She reached forward to brush her hand against his sweaty cheek. Surely without even realizing he was doing it, he leaned his head into her touch.
“Mom...I’m sorry...” he whispered to her.
“No, sweetie.” Momentarily forgetting about Bobby she set the phone aside. “You don’t have a damn thing to be sorry for.” She leaned forward to embrace him. Damn John for leaving these boys.
Hearing that Bobby was ranting on about something, she picked up the phone again. “Damn it, Ellen! What’s going on? Who you talking to?”
“We’re okay. Its just Dean.”
“What? He’s awake?”
“You can’t hold a conversation with him if that’s what you’re hoping.”
“But he’s conscious?”
“You could say that...why?”
“Damn it. That kid can’t do anything easy, can he? I figured he’d be out cold.”
“Does he have to be for this to work?”
“Oh it’ll work either way, but it’s gonna hurt like a son of a bitch. This thing is juiced all to hell. It’s not gonna give a rat’s ass about some cute little incantation. This is serious blood magic.”
“Does it have to be his blood?” She’d drain herself here and now if it would bring this boy back. In all honesty she wasn’t sure that Dean had any blood left to give.
“Afraid so. Right now our boy’s got an all you can eat buffet sign carved across his back. Only way to say this one’s off limits is to take down the sign and replace it with another.”
“You saying I gotta cut it off?”
“Not the whole thing. Just three cuts straight through. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes - how big are we talking?”
“Maybe a couple inches tall running the length across his back.”
“Damn.”
“Are you sure about this, Bobby?”
“As sure as I can be with what we got.”
“It’ll have to be good enough.”
This wasn’t going to be pretty. Dean wasn’t enough here anymore for her to explain to him what she was doing. As weak as he was she’d be able to hold him down no problem, but with as little as he had left in him she wasn’t at all confident that his body would be able to cope with the added stress. It wasn’t unlikely that she was killing him either way.
She reached up and moved the phone away from her mouth as all her struggle to keep composed faltered. When Sam had called her out here she hadn’t even considered the possibility that they weren’t going to fix this, but at this point they didn’t honestly know whether or not even killing the bastard thing behind this would be enough to stop the course of the disease for those who were already ill.
“Ellen?”
She took another long moment before answering him. “He’s not going to make it, Bobby.”
“Ellen. You listen to me and you listen good. This ain't over. Damn far from it. Sam and Jo are doing their part. You’ve gotta do yours. I wish like I hell I was there, but I’m not so you gotta do this. Dean is gonna make it. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“We’re just getting warmed up. It’s all there in the book. Let me know how it goes.”
“Sure. Talk to you soon, Bobby.”
Her unsteady hand hung up the phone before rubbing her cheeks dry. There wasn’t anytime for hesitating and no room for doubt. As soon as she gave up Dean would do the same. She went to the bathroom to get some towels and when she returned she carefully began to untangle the damp sheets that had become twisted around him.
“Need to turn you over,” she warned him on the off chance that he really could register what she was saying.
At first he made a token resistance against the unwanted movement but then surrendered. He might not have that large of a frame, but the boy was solid muscle and it was no easy thing to gently roll him without any help from him.
Still, with some effort she managed to get him laying on his stomach and positioned in a way that she hoped wouldn’t impede his already labored breathing too badly. She pulled the sheets back over him enough to give the boy some dignity before checking out the angry raised skin on his back.
He was still mumbling something against the pillow his head laid against but she didn’t try to listen. His words weren’t for her anymore. She watched him for a moment longer before reaching into her bag and pulling out a dagger.
She removed it from its sheath and looked at the glistening blade, but set it to the side and reached out to Dean. His body was likely to go into shock no matter what she did, but she’d feel a hell of a lot better about this if she could get his mind with her for long enough to prepare him.
“Dean? I need you to answer me if you can hear me.”
“Mmhm.”
Just making that sound was enough to make him wince, but even with his eyes closed she could tell by the tensing muscles of his face that he was struggling to follower her. At least he was trying.
“We’ve got something to help you, but it’s going to hurt like hell and I need you to try...”
Her eyes closed for a moment as she bit her lower lip, but her eyes flew open a second later as she felt a touch on her hand. Somehow Dean’s hand had found hers and he gripped it softly. At that moment he was here enough to know how difficult this was for her, but she was afraid about what he thought was coming. As far as she knew he was still expecting her to kill him.
“It’s okay,” he rasped.
The trust he portrayed with those simple words terrified her. Not able to verbally answer him, her other hand set firmly on top of his. He shouldn’t be the one telling her that.
His hand moved away as he coughed weakly and struggled to regain the lost air. She had to get him off his chest.
“I just need you to try to hold still as you can, honey. I’ll do the rest.”
His head nodded stiffly in reply.
“That’s a brave boy.”
She got the impression that he knew his life was in her hands as much as she knew it. The only difference was that one of them received comfort from that fact. It certainly wasn’t her.
She pulled out her medical kit before again lifting the dagger. Hesitation wasn’t going to serve either of them and this boy wasn’t going to be swallowed into oblivion because she’d taken too long to do what was needed.
With a couple of the towels set against both sides of him to catch the blood she put her free hand on the slick skin of his back for a warning as much as anything else. She hated the fact, but she could clearly see from all the faded scars that already adorned his back that this boy had been beaten and cut up enough in his short life to be ready for what was coming.
As she drew the blade firmly across his tender skin his hips pushed down into the mattress in an unconscious attempt to move away. His hands gripped the edges of the bed with all the strength he had left in him and a pained groan escaped him, but he made no further effort to pull away. He hissed as she tried to mop up the blood that was so quickly welling to the surface.
As soon as she could see the area well enough to continue she ran the second cut across the width of his back. Dean’s shoulders arched up. With the third slice he tried burying his head in the pillow either to muffle his cry or maybe just to wish this all away but a moment later he came up frantically gasping for air. And he wasn’t getting any.
“Finish it,” he barely breathed.
“I’m working as fast as I can. I need to get this symbol right.”
But she nearly instantly realized that it wasn’t the pain he was trying to escape. The gasping of his empty attempts to draw in oxygen quickly turned to choking as he began coughing increasingly larger quantities of blood onto the pillow.
“She knows.”
He had barely been able to choke out the words as he gagged on the blood flowing from his mouth. But she’d heard him well enough to driven to instant action.
“No. You’re not taking him, bitch.”
She slammed the book onto the mattress beside Dean’s convulsing body. It took pressing all of her weight onto him to stop him from curling in on himself as she struggled to trace the ritual’s symbol onto his back.
The moment she finished slicing the jagged lines Dean’s body collapsed as still as death beneath her. She removed her weight from him and the dagger slipped from her numb fingers. The blood continued to flow good and strong from his wounds but she could no longer hear him breathing.
Continued to Chapter 13
Summary: Dean's obsession with apparently random medical deaths mirrored from his past lands him and Sam in the middle of a deadly epidemic.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Up to and including 'Born Under a Bad Sign'
Word Count: 4,557 for this part
Author's Note: Takes place in 2007 post 'Born Under a Bad Sign' with flashbacks to 1987. Many thanks to Amberdreams for the wonderful editing assistance. Master post can be found here.
~~~
Continued from Chapter 11
“Uh!” Jo groaned as she slammed her hand down on the dusty dictionary. “I need a dictionary for this stupid dictionary, Sam. What’s an ‘immolation’?”
Sam just sent a look to Jo’s apparently random question before he returned his eyes to his own notes that he was trying to keep straight. He needed her to focus on the symbol and not ramble on about every big word in the English portion of the Hausa dictionary. This was as bad as researching with Dean.
His jaw tightened at the thought. What he wouldn’t give to have Dean here annoying the hell out of him right now. If he lost Dean here he didn’t know what he would do. But he couldn’t do what Dean wanted.
There was no out of this. Maybe for Dean, but not for him. He couldn’t go back and live a ‘normal’ life. Pretending that he ever could had been a mistake. There was a responsibility in knowing what they knew. He had tried to ignore that before, but he couldn’t anymore. Not now that he knew what he was.
In truth he was scared out of his mind at the thought of Dean not being here to watch him. Not because he needed Dean to protect him, but he was terrified that soon enough someone was going to have to be saving these people from him.
As he focused back in on the grammar book he heard Jo tapping her fingers impatiently on the table. He looked up to realize that she was staring expectantly at him. She wasn’t just being annoying with her question, like Dean would have been, she was actually waiting for an answer. He straightened in his chair and the knot in his stomach grew tighter.
“Why?” he asked apprehensively. “That’s not what you got from the symbol on Dean’s back, is it?”
“If you don’t like it you look. All these little squiggly marks look the same to me. Check it out.”
Jo turned the dictionary and pushed it back across the table towards Sam along with the sketch he had made. It was the third of three words. They had translated the other two words - ‘first’ and ‘last’ and hadn’t been able to figure out the context. The last word though was painfully clear. This was just getting worse, not better.
“That’s it,” he confirmed. Immolation could mean a lot of things depending on who was saying it, but it was pretty clear what it meant here. “It’s a willing self sacrifice.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like Dean asked for this.”
“Long story,” he replied with a sigh. He looked up from his notes with an even grimmer expression than he had worn even just a moment earlier. “I know what the soul eater is trying to raise.”
“What?”
“Itself.”
“Uh huh...I think you read that book wrong, genius. If it’s already here I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to raise itself.”
“I reworked it twice. I’m right about this. I was just wrong before. That circle Dean found, it’s not for a ritual. It’s a binding circle.”
~~~
“Ellen, you’ve gotta kill me.”
Ellen’s heart shattered at Dean’s helpless plea. He desperately grasped out to her and without hesitation she abandoned the chair she sat in to kneel down beside his bed where she could wrap her arms protectively around his trembling body. She’d never known him as a child, but he looked as vulnerable as a newborn now.
Only a few days earlier she had talked to this spitfire of a young man. He’d been so painfully eager to run into the height of danger and to do what he could to save a bunch of people he would never even meet. She didn’t know or care why he did it. She just wished he didn’t.
It was all good and well for these boys, for their father and her husband to run out and play hero. They did good work and they saved a lot of lives, but they sacrificed absolutely everything to do it. And she was tired of picking up the pieces. She couldn’t bear to watch one more good man be laid down before his time.
“Dean Winchester, you stop talking like that,” she told him firmly in a mom tone that would have frozen him in his tracks if he had any sense about him. “You’re not checking out on me.”
“No choice. Listen...”
“I’ll full well listen once you’re up and about, but I ain’t listening to this. Do you have any idea how many ways your brother would kill me if I let you go? God I could strangle you both.”
She placed a soft kiss on his burning forehead before returning to her chair and wringing out a fresh cool cloth to lay there. He’d been taking ice chips and drinking best he could, but his breathing was so labored and he had lost control over so much of his own body. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much weak he felt and she didn’t blame him one bit for wanting out. Getting well couldn’t be looking terribly likely from his point of view.
While she’d been hoping like hell that he’d drop it and go back to resting, he persisted. “Talked to her...thing doing this. I’m it,” his strained voice continued.
Obviously the only one he’d talked to since Sam had left was her. The boy wasn’t making any sense, but she knew he thought he was and he was struggling so hard to tell her this that she tried her best to listen.
“You’re what, honey?”
“I’m what’s keeping this going. You kill me and this all ends.”
“I know you’re hurting bad, but that’s one damn long term answer to a short term problem. This isn’t it. You’re gonna get better if you just hold on. I promise you that.”
“Don’t matter. I saw ‘em...all the people it’s taking. I screwed this up. I gotta fix it.”
“We are fixing it, but Dean, you ain’t thinking straight.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“Oh like hell you will, boy. You even think of moving off that bed and I will take you down and not in the way you’re hoping.”
But right now she saw something in him that she hadn’t seen since she’d arrived. There was a fire in Dean’s glassy hazel eyes that she didn’t want to see die out again. He might not be willing to fight to save himself, but he was clearly ready to fight to save these people and she’d do anything she could to help him to feel empowered in that. Short of killing him of course.
“I’ll run what you’ve said by Bobby. We’ll see what he’s got to say about it.”
~~~
Sam sat beside Jo back out in the patrol car. He was still in the passenger seat because he was pretty sure that Jo would stab him with her knife if he thought about snatching the keys. It wasn’t as if he blamed her for wanting to be in control here considering the company. He didn’t feel much like driving anyway.
Honestly he wasn’t sure whether what they had gotten from the library was good or bad news. At least they knew something now. He was just hoping that Bobby could make sense of it.
“It fits,” Bobby replied to what Sam had relayed over the phone. “Getting your soul swallowed into oblivion isn’t exactly an incentive to worship. Hell, whoever worked the binding must have known that no one in their right mind would be dumb enough to take that crap deal.”
“Dad wasn’t the one to bind this thing?”
“Oh hell no. This was damn sloppy work and this thing goes back before his time. Your dad had shot into town soon as he put together the pattern, but if he’d had any idea what this really was he wouldn’t have touched it with a ten foot pole. Not with you boys in tow. I tried to warn him, but your old man was stubborn as a mule.”
It didn’t excuse Dad blaming what he didn’t know on Dean, but it was at least something to hear that Dad hadn’t known what he had been dragging Dean into. Sam had thought Dad had known a whole lot more about this than he apparently did. But if Dad had gone in knowing nothing how could he have expected his eight year old son to know what he was doing?
“If she’s bound how is she still killing?” He sent a confused look towards Jo as she nudged him in the side. “Hold on, Bobby...what is it?” he asked her.
“I need to hear this too.”
It wasn’t like he was going to argue with her about that. They needed all the help they could get on this. He was just too distracted to be thinking clearly about anything.
“Bobby, I’m putting you on speaker.” He set the phone on the dashboard between him and Jo. “Okay.”
“I was saying your dad had thought the same as you about the circle. He figured it just didn’t have that much ritual power behind it anymore, what with the maker being dead and all. We thought it was just the remains keeping her there.”
“Did Dad ever find any remains?”
“Never had the chance. He got sick first and after I worked him over he had enough sense not to go back. This soul eater, she was just picking enough to survive until your brother gave her what she needed. In her book it doesn’t get any better than a willing first born sacrifice. With this feeding frenzy, pretty soon she may just have enough power to get back a physical form.”
“Wouldn’t that be something we could fight?” Jo asked hopefully.
“Don’t count on it. In the flesh these things are shape shifters and not like the usual. They can look like cats or whatever inconspicuous thing you can think of. If she gets back to that we won’t see her leave and no one else will see her coming.”
“At least now we have the EMF, but I just don’t know how we can stop her like this,” Sam said. “Dean and I were right there in the basement with her, Bobby. She grabbed him and I didn’t even see it.”
“That’s ‘cause if you forget all this soul eater stuff she’s just a ghost of a witch, right?” Jo asked Sam. “It’s not like she’s actually a witch anymore.”
“Yeah, I caught that, but that doesn’t mean....”
“Listen up, you chuckle head, Jo’s right,” Bobby cut in. “We’re thinking about this all wrong. You wouldn’t go and try to take out a ghost with a baseball bat, would ya?”
“No, but we know this isn’t just a ghost.”
“And it’s not just an old school soul eater either,” Jo threw in.
“Look, you’re both right and that ain’t a good thing. Folklore says these things carry a stone in their body as their source of power, but lucky us, our soul eater dumped her flesh so it’s not like you can just cut the stone out of her and the ghost can’t have the stone on her because she don’t have a damn body.”
“But if she’s a ghost she had to leave a body behind somewhere,” Jo replied.
“And the stone should be with her bones,” Sam said, catching on to where Jo was going with this. “If we find the remains we’ll have everything we need to stop her.”
“At this point, it’s our best shot,” Bobby agreed. “It’s hard to say which is keeping her going, but we’ll cover all our bases with a standard salt and burn on the bones and destroying the stone.”
“That’s great, Bobby, but if we do find it, how are we supposed to destroy it?” Sam asked.
“Call me crazy, but a sledge hammer should do the trick.”
“The stone isn’t mystically protected?”
“As far as I can tell, no reason it should be. In life it’s protected inside the body and they don’t usually need them once they’re dead.”
“So we just hope she was buried and here.” It sounded simple enough, but they were working on a tight deadline here. The longer this took the more people died. The more likely Dean would die. “Bobby, finding her body is going to take longer than Dean’s got.”
“You don’t think I know that? I just got off the phone with Ellen before you called.”
Sam tensed his jaw, half afraid of what Bobby was going to say. His tone didn’t exactly sound like he had good news. “How is he?”
“He asked Ellen to kill him.”
His stomach plummeted as he tried to make some kind of sense out of that. Obviously he hadn’t heard Bobby right. Even with as much as his brother didn’t think he should be alive, there was no way Dean was really trying to off himself just to get out. He looked to Jo who by the expression on her face had heard the exact same thing he had.
“What?” he finally managed to ask.
“You heard me, kid. Your brother says if he dies the sacrificing ends. At least for this round. Simple as that. It matches with what you guys found marked on him. It’s not the first or the last sacrifice. It’s the first and the last. That’s why this thing is playing his death slow motion compared to the rest. She needs him alive until she’s got enough energy to break the binding.”
“Even if that’s true, how could Dean know that?”
“Sam, your brother has been talking to this thing. He must be tapping into the fetch she yanked out of him.”
“So she wants Dean to kill himself, probably as part of the sacrifice. It’s a trick.”
“Not by the way Ellen is telling it. Dean came up with this all his own. I’ve got an idea, but you’re not gonna like it...”
~~~
Ellen brushed her hair aside as she shifted the motel’s phone so that it was pinned between her ear and shoulder. Dean was sprawled out on the bed with his eyes closed but she knew he was awake. The boy was restless and incoherent. It didn’t seem as if he was able to sleep anymore. Either that or he didn’t want to.
Occasionally he mumbled something that sounded useful but there was no way to keep him focused long enough to explain. She wished she could give him something to let him rest, but his hold on life was so tentative that she didn’t dare risk it. As much as she didn’t want him to suffer, if he didn’t slip into a coma he was just as likely to choke on the fluids building in his lungs if she put him under far enough not to feel anything.
“Yeah, I’m still here, Bobby,” she spoke into the phone.
She looked away from Dean and focused her full attention to the book on her lap. Over the phone she could just make out the sound of pages rustling before Bobby settled on a number.
“Page sixty-six,” he told her.
Ellen flipped through the tattered pages of the musty book she held. The old volume didn’t actually have conveniently numbered and index pages so she had to count them out. For a moment she stared at the page she had ended up on. Obviously she had counted wrong, but she got the same result on the second try.
“I don’t think so, Bobby.”
“There isn’t a symbol there? Get your eyes checked. We’re looking at copies of the same damn book.”
“Then you get your eyes checked, old man. There’s a symbol here alright but it’s for some kind of last rite.”
“That’s the one.”
The phone nearly slipped from her ear at the certainty of his reply. She was far from competent on ritual work, but like anyone else she knew enough to know that only the dead and dying needed last rites.
Dean mumbled something to himself that Ellen couldn’t make out in full. He wasn’t making sense anymore and he might look already gone, but she wasn’t even close to ready to give up on John’s boys.
She lowered her voice as she again spoke into the phone. “I thought you said this could save him.”
“You don’t think I’m trying? That kid means the world to me and he’s had a soul eater dining on him for days now. He’s out of time and he’s been marked as the prime sacrifice to this thing.”
“Yeah, I got all that, but what I don’t get is how this is going to help stop it.”
“We gotta be real here. If Dean dies now his soul ain’t floating off to greener pastures. It’s just plain gone. Right now faking a spiritual death is the best I got. Our only other option is to do what Dean is asking for real. We can’t just let this go on. Dean wouldn’t want to come out of this like that.”
Ellen nodded to herself. “I’m with you, Bobby. How’s this work?”
“If I’m right, doing this will make Dean look good as dead to the thing feeding off him and it should put an end to the sickness and the sacrifices long enough for Sam and Jo to end this permanently. If there’s enough of him left...well, we just gotta hope that Dean can pull through.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“He’s still dying, but this really should release his soul and it should still stop the raising...it just won’t save his life.”
Ellen looked down to Dean and blinked away the moisture building in her eyes while pretending to not have heard how hard those last words had been for Bobby to say. Bobby was right. Dean deserved to rest in peace when it was his time, but this wasn’t his time. She reached forward to brush her hand against his sweaty cheek. Surely without even realizing he was doing it, he leaned his head into her touch.
“Mom...I’m sorry...” he whispered to her.
“No, sweetie.” Momentarily forgetting about Bobby she set the phone aside. “You don’t have a damn thing to be sorry for.” She leaned forward to embrace him. Damn John for leaving these boys.
Hearing that Bobby was ranting on about something, she picked up the phone again. “Damn it, Ellen! What’s going on? Who you talking to?”
“We’re okay. Its just Dean.”
“What? He’s awake?”
“You can’t hold a conversation with him if that’s what you’re hoping.”
“But he’s conscious?”
“You could say that...why?”
“Damn it. That kid can’t do anything easy, can he? I figured he’d be out cold.”
“Does he have to be for this to work?”
“Oh it’ll work either way, but it’s gonna hurt like a son of a bitch. This thing is juiced all to hell. It’s not gonna give a rat’s ass about some cute little incantation. This is serious blood magic.”
“Does it have to be his blood?” She’d drain herself here and now if it would bring this boy back. In all honesty she wasn’t sure that Dean had any blood left to give.
“Afraid so. Right now our boy’s got an all you can eat buffet sign carved across his back. Only way to say this one’s off limits is to take down the sign and replace it with another.”
“You saying I gotta cut it off?”
“Not the whole thing. Just three cuts straight through. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes - how big are we talking?”
“Maybe a couple inches tall running the length across his back.”
“Damn.”
“Are you sure about this, Bobby?”
“As sure as I can be with what we got.”
“It’ll have to be good enough.”
This wasn’t going to be pretty. Dean wasn’t enough here anymore for her to explain to him what she was doing. As weak as he was she’d be able to hold him down no problem, but with as little as he had left in him she wasn’t at all confident that his body would be able to cope with the added stress. It wasn’t unlikely that she was killing him either way.
She reached up and moved the phone away from her mouth as all her struggle to keep composed faltered. When Sam had called her out here she hadn’t even considered the possibility that they weren’t going to fix this, but at this point they didn’t honestly know whether or not even killing the bastard thing behind this would be enough to stop the course of the disease for those who were already ill.
“Ellen?”
She took another long moment before answering him. “He’s not going to make it, Bobby.”
“Ellen. You listen to me and you listen good. This ain't over. Damn far from it. Sam and Jo are doing their part. You’ve gotta do yours. I wish like I hell I was there, but I’m not so you gotta do this. Dean is gonna make it. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“We’re just getting warmed up. It’s all there in the book. Let me know how it goes.”
“Sure. Talk to you soon, Bobby.”
Her unsteady hand hung up the phone before rubbing her cheeks dry. There wasn’t anytime for hesitating and no room for doubt. As soon as she gave up Dean would do the same. She went to the bathroom to get some towels and when she returned she carefully began to untangle the damp sheets that had become twisted around him.
“Need to turn you over,” she warned him on the off chance that he really could register what she was saying.
At first he made a token resistance against the unwanted movement but then surrendered. He might not have that large of a frame, but the boy was solid muscle and it was no easy thing to gently roll him without any help from him.
Still, with some effort she managed to get him laying on his stomach and positioned in a way that she hoped wouldn’t impede his already labored breathing too badly. She pulled the sheets back over him enough to give the boy some dignity before checking out the angry raised skin on his back.
He was still mumbling something against the pillow his head laid against but she didn’t try to listen. His words weren’t for her anymore. She watched him for a moment longer before reaching into her bag and pulling out a dagger.
She removed it from its sheath and looked at the glistening blade, but set it to the side and reached out to Dean. His body was likely to go into shock no matter what she did, but she’d feel a hell of a lot better about this if she could get his mind with her for long enough to prepare him.
“Dean? I need you to answer me if you can hear me.”
“Mmhm.”
Just making that sound was enough to make him wince, but even with his eyes closed she could tell by the tensing muscles of his face that he was struggling to follower her. At least he was trying.
“We’ve got something to help you, but it’s going to hurt like hell and I need you to try...”
Her eyes closed for a moment as she bit her lower lip, but her eyes flew open a second later as she felt a touch on her hand. Somehow Dean’s hand had found hers and he gripped it softly. At that moment he was here enough to know how difficult this was for her, but she was afraid about what he thought was coming. As far as she knew he was still expecting her to kill him.
“It’s okay,” he rasped.
The trust he portrayed with those simple words terrified her. Not able to verbally answer him, her other hand set firmly on top of his. He shouldn’t be the one telling her that.
His hand moved away as he coughed weakly and struggled to regain the lost air. She had to get him off his chest.
“I just need you to try to hold still as you can, honey. I’ll do the rest.”
His head nodded stiffly in reply.
“That’s a brave boy.”
She got the impression that he knew his life was in her hands as much as she knew it. The only difference was that one of them received comfort from that fact. It certainly wasn’t her.
She pulled out her medical kit before again lifting the dagger. Hesitation wasn’t going to serve either of them and this boy wasn’t going to be swallowed into oblivion because she’d taken too long to do what was needed.
With a couple of the towels set against both sides of him to catch the blood she put her free hand on the slick skin of his back for a warning as much as anything else. She hated the fact, but she could clearly see from all the faded scars that already adorned his back that this boy had been beaten and cut up enough in his short life to be ready for what was coming.
As she drew the blade firmly across his tender skin his hips pushed down into the mattress in an unconscious attempt to move away. His hands gripped the edges of the bed with all the strength he had left in him and a pained groan escaped him, but he made no further effort to pull away. He hissed as she tried to mop up the blood that was so quickly welling to the surface.
As soon as she could see the area well enough to continue she ran the second cut across the width of his back. Dean’s shoulders arched up. With the third slice he tried burying his head in the pillow either to muffle his cry or maybe just to wish this all away but a moment later he came up frantically gasping for air. And he wasn’t getting any.
“Finish it,” he barely breathed.
“I’m working as fast as I can. I need to get this symbol right.”
But she nearly instantly realized that it wasn’t the pain he was trying to escape. The gasping of his empty attempts to draw in oxygen quickly turned to choking as he began coughing increasingly larger quantities of blood onto the pillow.
“She knows.”
He had barely been able to choke out the words as he gagged on the blood flowing from his mouth. But she’d heard him well enough to driven to instant action.
“No. You’re not taking him, bitch.”
She slammed the book onto the mattress beside Dean’s convulsing body. It took pressing all of her weight onto him to stop him from curling in on himself as she struggled to trace the ritual’s symbol onto his back.
The moment she finished slicing the jagged lines Dean’s body collapsed as still as death beneath her. She removed her weight from him and the dagger slipped from her numb fingers. The blood continued to flow good and strong from his wounds but she could no longer hear him breathing.
Continued to Chapter 13