Double Cross 2/6
Summary and warnings in part 1.
Sam’s laptop battery was nearly dead by the time his phone buzzed. He picked up, too mad to be the first to talk.
“When you get dinner, grab some beer. And some condoms.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he snapped. “And there’s most of a box-”
“Condoms, Sammy,” Dean repeated smugly, which was an obvious attempt to taunt him, as if Dean’s refractory period were at all the problem here. He heard Dee’s voice in the background. “And Diet Coke. In cans.”
If he’d been anything like Dean, now would be the time to use the word ‘pussy-whipped.’ Sam inhaled and stuffed down the impulse. “You’d better have all your clothes on when I get back,” he warned.
“You really know how to spoil a party,” Dean chided.
See, the most annoying thing--among the annoying things about this situation was that Dean would undoubtedly freak out if Sam made any sort of move on Dee, but he was still casting Sam as the prude.
Sam nodded to himself, shut the computer down, and headed towards the car.
He got Thai food, just because he could.
****
It wasn’t even that she was also a Winchester, he decided. Technically, it was closer to masturbation than to anything else, and if Dean had magically been turned into a woman he would have gotten his new body naked in a minute or two, so experimentation was no surprise.
But Dee was a complication, not a one-night stand. She might be necessary to keep the last seals closed, or there might even be some way to trade her world for theirs. Sam wasn’t a fan of that idea by any means, but he could only try to save one world at a time, and theirs had the virtue of familiarity. Anyway, some of the theories suggested that parallel realities collapsed all the time, which meant that using hers up wouldn’t defy the natural order or anything like that.
Point was, Dee’s wild-card status made her just about the stupidest choice of a fuck in Dean’s extensive and intemperate history of hook-ups. Dean lied to girls with no hesitation and not a little glee, but underneath that was a definite tendency to ride to their rescue when they seemed endangered.
And also: Like called to like. Sam needed to ensure that Dean would jump the right way if it came time for their interests to diverge with Dee’s. Before Dean went to Hell, it wouldn’t have been a worry, but angels guarded Dean while he slept now, and that combined with Dee being a Winchester might just be enough to fuck things up completely.
****
After dinner, Sam returned to his reading. The room smelled like Panang Curry, overriding the scents of sweat and sex and Dean’s salon shampoo that had greeted him on his return. While they’d shoved food into their mouths, Dean and Dee had been forced to listen to his summary of what he’d figured out thus far, which wasn’t all that much. But as soon as the last noodle had been fought over and then slurped, they’d headed outside again, into the pleasant early evening, the sky a tender blue behind Dean where he was framed in the open door. Dean had promised no more fighting (“but you gotta see her roundhouse, it is sweet”) and Sam couldn’t make himself ask why they needed to get out so badly.
It didn’t take much longer for Sam to run out of useful sources. He had a couple of ideas that would require Dee’s presence. Also, he wanted Dean back inside.
He went to find them.
They were sitting together on the edge of the walkway, shoulders brushing as they looked out at the parking lot. Dean was talking, inaudible to Sam. By the time Sam was in range, he’d finished whatever he’d been saying. As Sam watched, Dee leaned over and elbowed Dean, gently. “I ended up doin’ the same thing,” she said, and there was a short pause before they both burst into laughter.
“Jesus, what an asshole,” Dean said contemplatively.
Dee shrugged. “World’s full of ‘em.” They raised their drinks-Dean’s beer, Dee’s can of Diet Coke-and swigged, decisive and relaxed at the same time.
There was a fiery, disconnected feeling in his stomach, so intense that he wasn’t sure he could breathe through it.
She needed to go back, or something very bad was going to happen.
He cleared his throat. They swiveled towards him, perfectly in sync, each raising one eyebrow. “I think we can get a message to your sister,” he said.
Dee smiled, sweet and open, like it had never even been in question.
****
The spell Sam had invented had no demon magic in it at all, which was what had delayed him so much. He’d been so convinced that his new knowledge would give him an extra edge that he’d ignored the basics. But then he’d thought about the fortune-teller, who’d had nothing demon-scented about her (plenty of other kinds of evil in the world, no need to go running for demons to explain each cruelty, after all).
What he had was a demented hybrid of scrying, veil-piercing, and witchery that took a ritual designed to reach into the Pit and turned it sideways. He’d spent a few weeks tinkering with the basic form as a way to rescue Dean, but he’d never tried it because he hadn’t figured out how to use it to extract a person. Also, using the spell to contact Hell would have required a human sacrifice, because that was the coin Hell recognized. If he could have done more than look in, if he could have reached through and grabbed Dean, he would have made it happen-plenty of people were wastes of calories-but he couldn’t do that just to see, without the capacity to help. Communication was what they needed now, though, and since he was making a different kind of long-distance call he no longer needed a full death.
He drew a great wheel on the floor, and gestured them both to step inside. Technically he didn’t need Dean, but he had the feeling that Dean wouldn’t react all that well to even the appearance of exclusion.
“I need some of your blood,” he told Dee. Hair might have done it, but blood was the go-to substance, and there was no sense in starting weakfooted.
Dee shrugged out of her jacket and held out her arm without hesitation. Sam almost wanted to chasten her for being too trusting that this wasn’t some sort of demonic ritual. He and Dean had stopped having the ‘I’m worried about your dark path’ fight these last few months, but only because each of them could recite the other’s part by now.
Sam picked up his knife and took Dee’s wrist. It was smaller than he’d expected somehow, warm against his fingers as he turned it for the right angle. There used to be a faint white scar on Dean’s arm at just that point, from hunting that vampire.
“Scar’s gone,” Dee reminded him, following his stare. “Guess it’s time to start again.”
The vampire had been followed by worse: by Gordon. Gordon’s blood had been thick on Sam’s fingers, inhuman already, distorted by the alchemy of the supernatural. Sam’s blood wasn’t like that. Whatever taint Azazel had given him was powerful enough to protect him from demonic viruses, vampirism infections, and ghost fever, but it wasn’t visible. Sam’s blood looked just like Dean’s.
Before Dee or Dean decided to prod him, Sam brought the knife down, right where the scar had been. The knife was so sharp that only years of training let him feel when it parted skin and when he needed to pull back. He guided Dee’s arm over the chalked outline he’d drawn, making sure a drop hit every symbol. He could feel Dean’s eyes on them both, watching and worrying.
Smoke began to curl up from the blood, white and thick. It smelled, for some reason, like lavender.
Like that, the floor disappeared, and was replaced by what seemed like a sheet of glass. Sam’s stomach pitched and yawed. He was looking down, but down was up, so that he saw boots and beyond the boots, a popcorn-rough cheap motel ceiling: the same ceiling, he knew without checking, that was above them.
Possibly he should have attempted to cut his window in a vertical wall.
“Hey!” Dee yelled. “Sam?”
He glanced at her, but the owner of the boots jumped, twisted, and finally looked down, her eyes showing white all the way around. Sam saw dark, messy hair and not much else. “Dee!”
“’m okay,” Dee said quickly.
Samantha dropped to her knees and her outstretched hands slammed into the barrier that separated them. Sam winced on her behalf as Dee knelt in response, pressing her palms up against Samantha’s. “It’s okay, Sam,” she said. “I’m kinda stuck here right now, but it’s not-I’m fine.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Samantha demanded.
Dee opened her mouth, then turned to Sam. “Uh, this’d go faster Brainiac-to-Brainiac.”
Sam obediently knelt, because that seemed likely to be a little less stomach-turning than standing while staring down into the reversed room, and started in on the Cliffs Notes version, examining Samantha as he talked. It was impossible to tell how tall she was from this angle, and her wavy hair probably looked better when it wasn’t hanging down around her face as she knelt on the floor. She was wearing black jeans and a zipped gray sweatshirt that billowed around her. Her hazel eyes had a foxlike slant, narrowed in thought now that she wasn’t panicking any more. If her nose was a little prominent, her moles were dead sexy. If he did say so himself.
He got Samantha up to speed and pointed her at the right references, but their problem was obvious: Sam’s adapted scrying spell could allow communication, but not transport. And neither of them had any immediate ideas for changing that.
There was so much he’d have liked to have asked her, but there was no time for that. There was never any time.
They agreed to check in every twenty-four hours. Sam was impressed that Samantha thought she could go that long, but he didn’t know how to say that without sounding both pathetic and dickish.
Dean cleared his throat. Sam looked over at him and Dean tilted his head: step back, let Dee talk.
Sam flushed and got to his feet, careful not to smudge the lines as he backed away to give them the illusion of privacy. He stood side by side with Dean as Dee made a couple of bad jokes about how stupid Samantha looked, and Samantha just stared at Dee, her hands still pressed against the floor. Sam could feel the ache in his own palms.
“We’ll fix it,” Dean said to him, as confident as if he were talking about a poltergeist hunt.
But when Sam broke the connection, he was careful not to watch Samantha’s face.
****
Dee decided to get a room of her own next door, which Dean went to help her christen. With his headphones on, Sam couldn’t hear much from them, and maybe he was imagining even the faint thumps.
Sam worked aimlessly on the protocol for opening a portal between realities. He hoped Samantha was doing better than he was. The difference between transmitting information and transmitting people was substantial. The fortune-teller, or whatever she was, had significant mojo.
Anyway, he was really just fucking around waiting for Dean. Dean never spent the night. Except that one time with Cassie. And maybe he thought that being next door counted as coming back.
No matter how dysfunctional you were, and no matter how likely the girl was to understand your damage, you didn’t go knocking on her door to ask for your brother back. Sam was pretty clear on that concept.
He’d known he was alone in this. He just had thought, maybe, that Dean was too.
Near midnight, he heard Dee’s door swing closed, and then-after a lot longer than it should have taken to walk six feet-Dean turned the key and came into their room. He looked fucked-out, his hair as mussed as it could manage for how short it was, his eyes half-closed and his lips swollen pink, his gait even more rolling than usual as he headed towards the nearest bed. He threw himself down on his stomach, pulling the pillow down so that he could mash his face into it.
At least someone’s enjoying himself, Sam thought.
Dean didn’t bother to ask for a status update. No matter what barriers had grown between them, he knew Sam would have told him if there’d been news.
“What were you talking about, in the parking lot earlier?” Sam asked. It came out sounding exactly not as casual as he meant it, and he compounded the error by flushing.
Dean picked his head up off of the pillow and looked at him curiously, but then shrugged, the movement pushing his body further down the bed. “Nothin’, just comparing notes. You know, hunts, where we lived, what we did to get out of trouble.”
“You’re getting along better than I would have expected,” he said, and there was still too much in his voice.
“Yeah, well,” Dean said and ducked his head. “She understands me.”
“I could understand you,” he said involuntarily, feeling about twelve years old.
“Sammy-” Dean began, indulgent and dismissive all at once.
“I could try,” he said, and Dean must have heard how close Sam was to the edge, because he stopped and stared.
After a moment, Dean nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That-yeah, okay.”
Dean didn’t offer anything else. Sam didn’t push. But Sam shut down his computer, turned off the lights, and got into the other bed, taking the opportunity to listen to Dean’s breathing switch to the slow rhythms of sleep. At least Dean was worn out enough to lie down voluntarily. He’d improved some in the past few months, but he still acted as if sleep hid an ambush.
Then Sam imagined Dee, curling herself around a pillow of her own in her empty, mussed bed. She’d probably put her boots back on with the rest of her clothes, just like Dean did now.
Sam would have gone to her if he thought it might have helped. But his presence didn’t seem to do much for Dean, and he’d just be reminding her of what she didn’t have at the moment.
****
The next morning, Dee collected Dean for a breakfast run. Sam forced himself out of bed and over to his computer. The morning news was bad: floods, locusts, a strange sickness killing cattle on three continents. He scrubbed at his forehead and did the usual searches. These days, he could sense a demon’s presence, but only within a very short range. To find hunts, they still needed to collect data.
He found strange deaths and strange weather correlating, very near to their present location. Another demon making a run at them, most likely. At Dean, anyway. Among the things that Sam and Dean didn’t talk about was Sam’s immunity to Lilith’s and Samhain’s powers.
So far, Sam had only one hypothesis that fit the data, and it was a worrisome one. He was sure-about as sure as he was that the sun would come up tomorrow; which was to say, ninety percent sure-that he was one of the seven seals. According to Castiel via Dean, Lilith had chewed through fifty-six seals in total. The oldest text he’d found said that fifty-nine seals could be opened in any order, but seven could only be reached after the others were gone.
He didn’t quite know what ‘opening’ would mean in his case, but he was guessing it wasn’t from the fun side of the eschaton. Suckier still, he wasn’t even invulnerable. Jake had been able to kill him just fine with an ordinary knife. He was just-demon-resistant, or something like. The only reassuring tidbit was that Lilith obviously hadn’t understood his status either, or she wouldn’t have been so surprised when she’d failed to kill him. But if she was sharp enough to open fifty-six seals, her ignorance wouldn’t have lasted.
He’d made no further progress on the Many Worlds problem by the time Dean and Dee returned, though he had a message out to a guy at CalTech who might have some insights.
They rolled through the door like an entire pack of puppies, jostling each other and smiling, full of light and warmth and energy that made him feel like the older brother. He rubbed his hands across his eyes before throwing his shoulders back and stretching.
Dean’s easy smile flickered into concern as he held out Sam’s coffee. Sam twitched his lips, the best he could do, and took the cup with a grateful nod. The coffee was hot through the thin cardboard, painful to hold. Dean never bothered with the cupholders; Sam always did. He remembered what it had been like, four months of never endangering his palms, and managed a happier face.
Dee was perched on the side of Dean’s bed, already deep into her egg and cheese biscuit, ignoring them or pretending to.
“Signs are that a major demon’s near,” he informed them.
“Signs,” Dean repeated, swallowing a too-big mouthful.
He sighed. “I haven’t been talking to Ruby, if that’s what you mean.”
That earned him a wounded look-two of them, big green eyes blinking slowly as if he’d just insulted Dad. What did they expect him to say? He spun the laptop around, showing them his map of unusual activity, not that either of them would be able to read it without an explanation. “Look, these are the signs, okay?”
“Guess we’re going demon-hunting,” Dean said. He was clearly a little relieved, itching to kill something familiar. Dee nodded and crumpled up her biscuit wrapper, leaving it in the center of Dean’s bed.
“You didn’t happen to be holding Ruby’s knife when you came over?” Sam asked her.
She shook her head. Sam hadn’t held out much hope of that. Dean had been making him carry the knife for a while now. Before Dean had showed off his super-exorcism trick, Sam had just thought it was a reminder not to use his demon powers.
Oh, he was being dumb, or in denial. Dee didn’t need the knife either. In fact, it was probably safer to send the two of them out alone. Safer for the possessed victim, at least.
Dean swallowed the last of his breakfast (he’d had three biscuits to Dee’s two, plus bacon) and tossed his wrapper so that it nudged up against Dee’s, grinning at his own marksmanship. “So, let’s go send this sonofabitch back to Hell.”
****
There was a brief squabble over who was going to drive that nearly turned into another sparring and/or fucking session, resolved when Sam suggested that he could do the honors and they both turned on him. Dee agreed that she’d drive on the way back, and Sam was relegated to the back seat, again.
“Oh, hey,” Dean said as they pulled out of the motel lot, “tell Sammy how wrong he is: when you got back from Hell, you were totally a virgin again, right?”
“God!” Sam said, wincing and looking out the window, squinting against the morning sun.
Dee gave an aggrieved sigh. “Yeah, that sucked hardcore. Not like I could tell the dude-hey, I’m a miraculous lay, but there’s just this one thing-no way.” She twisted in her seat to chuckle at Sam’s cringing. “Right, so afterwards, I’m thinking maybe I can get the condom off before he sees the blood, but you know some guys are real sensitive about the little man right after, and turns out he’s one of ‘em, and of course I like to see what I’m doing so the lights were on, and he looks down and he says-”
“Could I pay you to stop?” Sam asked, pitifully enough that they both started laughing, which at least had the virtue of changing the subject, if only to their first first times, which turned out to be roughly contemporaneous. Sam tried to be progressive enough to be okay with that, but really he thought they both should have waited a lot longer. Sure, sex was beautiful and all that, but Dean used it like a competition, and also like junk food, never looking for a connection.
Sam guessed he’d made a connection now.
He hoped matters would improve when Dee started rummaging in the tape collection. But then they started performing an impromptu-and, worse luck, not at all bad-duet singing along with “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back.” Sam sat and stared at his reflection in the window, trying not to sulk or seethe and bouncing between the two.
If Samantha had been the one to cross over, he wouldn’t-
He couldn’t wish that Dee had been left all alone. At least Samantha was on the case now, and she wasn’t distracted by Dean-squared.
“It’s defective!” they chorused with glee. Sam shoved his hair out of his eyes and thought that this was better than being alone in the car. But not by as much as he wanted it to be.
****
They found a half-built shopping center, presumably abandoned due to current economic conditions, and chose one of the anchors at the ends as the right place to catch a demon. The floor was cold concrete, indifferently evened. Sam smelled dust and mouse droppings. The construction workers had left a bunch of takeout cups and bags crumpled in the corners, and the only color in the place was the spray-painted directions on the floor showing where all the pipes were supposed to go.
Sam borrowed a discarded ladder, took his purple chalk-Dean and Dee were too caught up in some discussion to make fun, fine-and started to draw the Devil’s Trap. Making it big enough to cover most of the room took a long time, and he had to reposition the ladder a lot. He told himself that it was the uncomfortable vibration of chalk on ceiling tiles that made his fingers sting as he got closer to finishing the design. When he joined the last line, it felt like someone had shoved a spike through his skull, right above his left ear, and two drops of blood splashed down onto the top step of the ladder, blurring into the dirt there.
He wiped his nose quickly, checking to make sure neither Dean nor Dee had been watching, but they were busy snapping at each other. Sam could hear the exasperation in Dean’s tone even though he couldn’t make out the words.
“Hey,” he called out, and they both whipped around to face him, guilty and a little relieved. “You’d better be ready with your part.”
They folded their arms across their chests and pouted at him. But he could see that the rest of the spell prep had been completed.
He had to jump off the ladder, because the steps down went under the trap. He thought about how no one loved a traitor, not even those who used him.
They didn’t have to wait long after triggering the spell, but it was one of the longest half hours Sam had ever spent. Dean and Dee had stopped fighting, though they refused to explain its content-“You gonna be the judge, Sam?”-and they paced two parallel lines across the scuffed floor, their pissed-off silences emanating from them like two clouds of ash.
Get Dean angry over something familiar, and when his mood improved he’d have forgotten whatever was between him and Dee. Sam had an evergreen topic for that purpose. “I still don’t understand why the angels demand I give up using the powers. I need a better explanation than ‘they’re demonic’ when I’ve seen them save lives, rescue people from possession. How can that be wrong?”
Dee looked over at Dean, raising an eyebrow dubiously. “You didn’t make ‘em tell you?”
“You made Castiel tell you something?” Dean asked, equally incredulous. “What, you put out for him?”
She flipped him off. “Like you wouldn’t. Nah, after Samhain my Sam said obviously we have some sorta leverage, and it shouldn’t cost ‘em anything to answer a basic question.”
Sam didn’t look at Dean. He preferred to feel stupid while staring at nothing in particular.
Dee cleared her throat. “Turns out it’s one of those ‘we’re not all-knowing’ things. He said they had a sorta sacred text about you, but light on the details.” She closed her eyes and recited. “‘The demon grapples with the human. If the demon strikes, the last seal will break.’ The way they see it, each time you use the powers might be the wrong time.”
Now, Sam checked for Dean’s reaction, which was muted. Dee’s story was bad, but not much worse than other things they knew already.
The angels had been proceeding as if this supposed struggle were internal. True, there was human and demon inside him, and he could see that as a battle for control of himself. But what if he was supposed to ‘grapple’ with someone else? Someone like Dean?
Sam was almost relieved when a figure slammed the door open. He felt the buzz of a demonic presence and prepared himself for battle. The demon was wearing the body of a teenaged boy. His face was spotty and twisted with fury, but it marched into the center of the room without hesitating. Sam really, really wished that Castiel or one of the many other angels listed in the books had bothered to write this spell down a couple of centuries back instead of waiting to unload it on Dean. Better late than never, he guessed.
There was a moment of uncertainty, where it wasn’t clear who was going to start the exorcism, and then Dee nodded to Dean-your world, your turn-and Dean began.
“Why don’t you use your Voice, Dean Winchester?” it taunted, turning to focus only on Dean. Its host had curly blond hair, so light that the pink of the boy’s scalp showed through.
Sam clenched his jaw. His fingers ached with the need to raise his hand and squeeze. His head hurt like someone had slammed a door on it, and the ache only worsened as Dean continued to spew out Latin.
The demon’s face screwed up in pain, but it advanced to the very edge of the Devil’s Trap, as close to Dean as it could get. “You think you can get rid of me like that before I can kill this body? Talk fast, angelface.” Dean faltered, looking over at Sam, and the demon brought its hands up, fingers jabbing at the boy’s light blue eyes-it was going to blind its host.
“Dean!” Sam yelled, warning and permission.
“Depart,” Dean said, the word rolling out of him like a wave from the ocean. His face was a painted icon’s, stiff and beautiful and not of this world. Sam felt it hit him in the chest, pushing the air out of his lungs. Distantly, over the roar of pain falling on him like a hailstorm, he heard the demon’s scream, higher than his own but with the same pitch.
When he came to, his head was cushioned on a warm body-Dean, he thought, then realized that Dean was larger. He blinked, his eyelashes sticking together as if they didn’t want him to see, and looked up into Dee’s worried face. He felt as if he’d been shoved into an iron maiden, spikes of agony through every limb. Last time hadn’t been this bad, he didn’t think. But at least he hadn’t pissed himself.
“Dean’s callin’ an ambulance,” Dee said, fast and rough, before he could formulate the question. “Kid’ll probably be fine.”
“How long?”
She shrugged. “Couple of minutes. You, uh.” She pressed her lips together and a muscle twitched in her jaw. Sam was fascinated by it: so alike, and so different. Staring into those eyes, green with little flashes of brown like a forest in summer, was much nicer than thinking about his own problems. She was even petting his forehead. She bit her lip. “You bounced off the Devil’s Trap when you fell.”
Well, there went all his effort in disguising that particular revolting development. He nodded, and felt a trickle of blood down his neck. He hoped that it wasn’t from his eyes.
“Demon blood,” he reminded Dee. She didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken, except with a little quiver of her lips. But he needed to let them know. “That’s new, the-problem with the Devil’s Trap. Now that Lilith’s close to the final seals, it’s gonna get harder for me.”
“What in-the fuck are you talking about?” Dee demanded, exasperation in her voice like Sam was just making up problems. Her hands were still gentle on him, warm and comforting. He wanted to close his eyes and curl into her, press his face into her neck and breathe her in.
Instead, Sam struggled to push himself up, and she shifted so that she could help him sit, despite the nuclear explosion that went off behind his temple. She kept her arm around his shoulder, kneeling behind him, even when he was mostly upright.
“What does Samantha think her role is in all this?” he asked, instead of answering.
Dee was silent as a newly torched grave behind him.
Yeah, that’s what he’d thought. Dean always hated the theological stuff, the rationales, even when they didn’t involve family. Sam had carried it on his own. Except that Dean now blasted demons with a word-make that a Word-so it was arguable that he had as much of a need to know as Sam.
“We should-”
“Sam!” Dean called. Sam managed to swivel and saw Dean, breathing hard, at the entrance. He looked Sam up and down, then jogged over to them, getting down on one knee so that he could cup Sam’s jaw in one hand and examine him close up.
“I’m fine, Dean,” he said patiently. Dean rolled his eyes. Sam would have liked him to do more, maybe yell, but apparently they were beyond that. “Let’s get-”
Dean went flying backwards, like a fish hooked on a line. Sam’s head snapped up and just as Dean crashed into the side wall, he saw the figure standing in the door.
“I’m sorry,” the demon said, “am I interrupting?”
The fucking summoning spell. They hadn’t counted on two, and Sam hadn’t been paying attention, what with his head twanging like a guitar. This one was in a woman’s body, mid-thirties, brunette and plump. Dean was twisting on the wall, his face screwed up as if he were trying to speak. Evidently this demon had given Dean some thought. Even if it wasn’t working for Lilith, it was likely to kill him quickly.
Sam couldn’t have exorcised it now even if he’d had the strength to raise his hand, not with the football game going on in his head. Behind him, he could feel Dee vibrating like an engine in neutral.
The demon strolled closer, smiling at them. “Now that we’ve clipped those wings, I think I might want to take my time with you two.”
Sam pushed himself to his feet, and the demon allowed him to do it. He felt his lips twitch into a sneer. “True, you’ve got us in a bad position. But a situation like this one can change pretty fast. If I were you, I’d run.”
The demon grinned, showing even white teeth. “Sam Winchester, you only wish you were me.” It punched him with demon-enhanced strength, slamming him backwards into the wall so hard that he thought he’d cracked a rib. His head felt like it had been the ball in a World Cup match.
“And look,” the demon continued when it saw that Sam wasn’t quite unconscious, “you brought an appetizer.” It examined Dee, who was in a fighting stance.
If she used Dean’s power now, the extra damage really might kill Sam, and she had to know that. But it would save her, and Dean, and Sam might survive. He could only hope she thought that the demon was definitely going to kill him.
“Dee-” he tried, and the demon punched him again, sending his head bouncing against the wall again-contre-coup, he thought muzzily. His vision grayed out as he slumped against the cold uneven wall. When he blinked through the black-and-white sparkles, the demon was pressing its host’s body up against Dean’s, whispering something that made Dean go even blanker and more furious. Its hands were invisible from Sam’s line of sight, doing something between their bodies. Dean flinched, and his hands clenched, scrabbling against the wall, but the demon had his mouth held so firmly shut that only a faint sound, almost a whine, escaped.
Please, he thought at Dee, who cast a despairing look at him as if she’d heard.
She swallowed. “Depart,” she said.
Sam flinched, reflexively.
Then he blinked.
The demon’s eyebrows rose as it turned away from Dean to stare at her. “Are you deficient? That’s for angels, little girl.” It raised its hand towards her, casual as a restaurant patron waving for the check.
For the second time, nothing happened.
Sam couldn’t see Dee’s face, but he guessed it was as shocked as Dean’s. Sam remembered himself and managed to twist against the wall enough to grab the killing knife, tossing it so that it headed hilt-first at Dee. Dee caught it without even looking, then darted forward as fast as anyone Sam had ever seen, swiping it across the demon’s stomach.
There was the traditional flare of sick-orange light edging the wound, and the body collapsed, just Dean came unstuck from the wall like a zapped bug.
Dean strode over to the body, moving in a way that suggested he was hurting but functional, and knelt down to check it. He looked up and shook his head.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sam said, and nobody fought him.
On to Part 3.
Sam’s laptop battery was nearly dead by the time his phone buzzed. He picked up, too mad to be the first to talk.
“When you get dinner, grab some beer. And some condoms.”
“You’re unbelievable,” he snapped. “And there’s most of a box-”
“Condoms, Sammy,” Dean repeated smugly, which was an obvious attempt to taunt him, as if Dean’s refractory period were at all the problem here. He heard Dee’s voice in the background. “And Diet Coke. In cans.”
If he’d been anything like Dean, now would be the time to use the word ‘pussy-whipped.’ Sam inhaled and stuffed down the impulse. “You’d better have all your clothes on when I get back,” he warned.
“You really know how to spoil a party,” Dean chided.
See, the most annoying thing--among the annoying things about this situation was that Dean would undoubtedly freak out if Sam made any sort of move on Dee, but he was still casting Sam as the prude.
Sam nodded to himself, shut the computer down, and headed towards the car.
He got Thai food, just because he could.
****
It wasn’t even that she was also a Winchester, he decided. Technically, it was closer to masturbation than to anything else, and if Dean had magically been turned into a woman he would have gotten his new body naked in a minute or two, so experimentation was no surprise.
But Dee was a complication, not a one-night stand. She might be necessary to keep the last seals closed, or there might even be some way to trade her world for theirs. Sam wasn’t a fan of that idea by any means, but he could only try to save one world at a time, and theirs had the virtue of familiarity. Anyway, some of the theories suggested that parallel realities collapsed all the time, which meant that using hers up wouldn’t defy the natural order or anything like that.
Point was, Dee’s wild-card status made her just about the stupidest choice of a fuck in Dean’s extensive and intemperate history of hook-ups. Dean lied to girls with no hesitation and not a little glee, but underneath that was a definite tendency to ride to their rescue when they seemed endangered.
And also: Like called to like. Sam needed to ensure that Dean would jump the right way if it came time for their interests to diverge with Dee’s. Before Dean went to Hell, it wouldn’t have been a worry, but angels guarded Dean while he slept now, and that combined with Dee being a Winchester might just be enough to fuck things up completely.
****
After dinner, Sam returned to his reading. The room smelled like Panang Curry, overriding the scents of sweat and sex and Dean’s salon shampoo that had greeted him on his return. While they’d shoved food into their mouths, Dean and Dee had been forced to listen to his summary of what he’d figured out thus far, which wasn’t all that much. But as soon as the last noodle had been fought over and then slurped, they’d headed outside again, into the pleasant early evening, the sky a tender blue behind Dean where he was framed in the open door. Dean had promised no more fighting (“but you gotta see her roundhouse, it is sweet”) and Sam couldn’t make himself ask why they needed to get out so badly.
It didn’t take much longer for Sam to run out of useful sources. He had a couple of ideas that would require Dee’s presence. Also, he wanted Dean back inside.
He went to find them.
They were sitting together on the edge of the walkway, shoulders brushing as they looked out at the parking lot. Dean was talking, inaudible to Sam. By the time Sam was in range, he’d finished whatever he’d been saying. As Sam watched, Dee leaned over and elbowed Dean, gently. “I ended up doin’ the same thing,” she said, and there was a short pause before they both burst into laughter.
“Jesus, what an asshole,” Dean said contemplatively.
Dee shrugged. “World’s full of ‘em.” They raised their drinks-Dean’s beer, Dee’s can of Diet Coke-and swigged, decisive and relaxed at the same time.
There was a fiery, disconnected feeling in his stomach, so intense that he wasn’t sure he could breathe through it.
She needed to go back, or something very bad was going to happen.
He cleared his throat. They swiveled towards him, perfectly in sync, each raising one eyebrow. “I think we can get a message to your sister,” he said.
Dee smiled, sweet and open, like it had never even been in question.
****
The spell Sam had invented had no demon magic in it at all, which was what had delayed him so much. He’d been so convinced that his new knowledge would give him an extra edge that he’d ignored the basics. But then he’d thought about the fortune-teller, who’d had nothing demon-scented about her (plenty of other kinds of evil in the world, no need to go running for demons to explain each cruelty, after all).
What he had was a demented hybrid of scrying, veil-piercing, and witchery that took a ritual designed to reach into the Pit and turned it sideways. He’d spent a few weeks tinkering with the basic form as a way to rescue Dean, but he’d never tried it because he hadn’t figured out how to use it to extract a person. Also, using the spell to contact Hell would have required a human sacrifice, because that was the coin Hell recognized. If he could have done more than look in, if he could have reached through and grabbed Dean, he would have made it happen-plenty of people were wastes of calories-but he couldn’t do that just to see, without the capacity to help. Communication was what they needed now, though, and since he was making a different kind of long-distance call he no longer needed a full death.
He drew a great wheel on the floor, and gestured them both to step inside. Technically he didn’t need Dean, but he had the feeling that Dean wouldn’t react all that well to even the appearance of exclusion.
“I need some of your blood,” he told Dee. Hair might have done it, but blood was the go-to substance, and there was no sense in starting weakfooted.
Dee shrugged out of her jacket and held out her arm without hesitation. Sam almost wanted to chasten her for being too trusting that this wasn’t some sort of demonic ritual. He and Dean had stopped having the ‘I’m worried about your dark path’ fight these last few months, but only because each of them could recite the other’s part by now.
Sam picked up his knife and took Dee’s wrist. It was smaller than he’d expected somehow, warm against his fingers as he turned it for the right angle. There used to be a faint white scar on Dean’s arm at just that point, from hunting that vampire.
“Scar’s gone,” Dee reminded him, following his stare. “Guess it’s time to start again.”
The vampire had been followed by worse: by Gordon. Gordon’s blood had been thick on Sam’s fingers, inhuman already, distorted by the alchemy of the supernatural. Sam’s blood wasn’t like that. Whatever taint Azazel had given him was powerful enough to protect him from demonic viruses, vampirism infections, and ghost fever, but it wasn’t visible. Sam’s blood looked just like Dean’s.
Before Dee or Dean decided to prod him, Sam brought the knife down, right where the scar had been. The knife was so sharp that only years of training let him feel when it parted skin and when he needed to pull back. He guided Dee’s arm over the chalked outline he’d drawn, making sure a drop hit every symbol. He could feel Dean’s eyes on them both, watching and worrying.
Smoke began to curl up from the blood, white and thick. It smelled, for some reason, like lavender.
Like that, the floor disappeared, and was replaced by what seemed like a sheet of glass. Sam’s stomach pitched and yawed. He was looking down, but down was up, so that he saw boots and beyond the boots, a popcorn-rough cheap motel ceiling: the same ceiling, he knew without checking, that was above them.
Possibly he should have attempted to cut his window in a vertical wall.
“Hey!” Dee yelled. “Sam?”
He glanced at her, but the owner of the boots jumped, twisted, and finally looked down, her eyes showing white all the way around. Sam saw dark, messy hair and not much else. “Dee!”
“’m okay,” Dee said quickly.
Samantha dropped to her knees and her outstretched hands slammed into the barrier that separated them. Sam winced on her behalf as Dee knelt in response, pressing her palms up against Samantha’s. “It’s okay, Sam,” she said. “I’m kinda stuck here right now, but it’s not-I’m fine.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Samantha demanded.
Dee opened her mouth, then turned to Sam. “Uh, this’d go faster Brainiac-to-Brainiac.”
Sam obediently knelt, because that seemed likely to be a little less stomach-turning than standing while staring down into the reversed room, and started in on the Cliffs Notes version, examining Samantha as he talked. It was impossible to tell how tall she was from this angle, and her wavy hair probably looked better when it wasn’t hanging down around her face as she knelt on the floor. She was wearing black jeans and a zipped gray sweatshirt that billowed around her. Her hazel eyes had a foxlike slant, narrowed in thought now that she wasn’t panicking any more. If her nose was a little prominent, her moles were dead sexy. If he did say so himself.
He got Samantha up to speed and pointed her at the right references, but their problem was obvious: Sam’s adapted scrying spell could allow communication, but not transport. And neither of them had any immediate ideas for changing that.
There was so much he’d have liked to have asked her, but there was no time for that. There was never any time.
They agreed to check in every twenty-four hours. Sam was impressed that Samantha thought she could go that long, but he didn’t know how to say that without sounding both pathetic and dickish.
Dean cleared his throat. Sam looked over at him and Dean tilted his head: step back, let Dee talk.
Sam flushed and got to his feet, careful not to smudge the lines as he backed away to give them the illusion of privacy. He stood side by side with Dean as Dee made a couple of bad jokes about how stupid Samantha looked, and Samantha just stared at Dee, her hands still pressed against the floor. Sam could feel the ache in his own palms.
“We’ll fix it,” Dean said to him, as confident as if he were talking about a poltergeist hunt.
But when Sam broke the connection, he was careful not to watch Samantha’s face.
****
Dee decided to get a room of her own next door, which Dean went to help her christen. With his headphones on, Sam couldn’t hear much from them, and maybe he was imagining even the faint thumps.
Sam worked aimlessly on the protocol for opening a portal between realities. He hoped Samantha was doing better than he was. The difference between transmitting information and transmitting people was substantial. The fortune-teller, or whatever she was, had significant mojo.
Anyway, he was really just fucking around waiting for Dean. Dean never spent the night. Except that one time with Cassie. And maybe he thought that being next door counted as coming back.
No matter how dysfunctional you were, and no matter how likely the girl was to understand your damage, you didn’t go knocking on her door to ask for your brother back. Sam was pretty clear on that concept.
He’d known he was alone in this. He just had thought, maybe, that Dean was too.
Near midnight, he heard Dee’s door swing closed, and then-after a lot longer than it should have taken to walk six feet-Dean turned the key and came into their room. He looked fucked-out, his hair as mussed as it could manage for how short it was, his eyes half-closed and his lips swollen pink, his gait even more rolling than usual as he headed towards the nearest bed. He threw himself down on his stomach, pulling the pillow down so that he could mash his face into it.
At least someone’s enjoying himself, Sam thought.
Dean didn’t bother to ask for a status update. No matter what barriers had grown between them, he knew Sam would have told him if there’d been news.
“What were you talking about, in the parking lot earlier?” Sam asked. It came out sounding exactly not as casual as he meant it, and he compounded the error by flushing.
Dean picked his head up off of the pillow and looked at him curiously, but then shrugged, the movement pushing his body further down the bed. “Nothin’, just comparing notes. You know, hunts, where we lived, what we did to get out of trouble.”
“You’re getting along better than I would have expected,” he said, and there was still too much in his voice.
“Yeah, well,” Dean said and ducked his head. “She understands me.”
“I could understand you,” he said involuntarily, feeling about twelve years old.
“Sammy-” Dean began, indulgent and dismissive all at once.
“I could try,” he said, and Dean must have heard how close Sam was to the edge, because he stopped and stared.
After a moment, Dean nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “That-yeah, okay.”
Dean didn’t offer anything else. Sam didn’t push. But Sam shut down his computer, turned off the lights, and got into the other bed, taking the opportunity to listen to Dean’s breathing switch to the slow rhythms of sleep. At least Dean was worn out enough to lie down voluntarily. He’d improved some in the past few months, but he still acted as if sleep hid an ambush.
Then Sam imagined Dee, curling herself around a pillow of her own in her empty, mussed bed. She’d probably put her boots back on with the rest of her clothes, just like Dean did now.
Sam would have gone to her if he thought it might have helped. But his presence didn’t seem to do much for Dean, and he’d just be reminding her of what she didn’t have at the moment.
****
The next morning, Dee collected Dean for a breakfast run. Sam forced himself out of bed and over to his computer. The morning news was bad: floods, locusts, a strange sickness killing cattle on three continents. He scrubbed at his forehead and did the usual searches. These days, he could sense a demon’s presence, but only within a very short range. To find hunts, they still needed to collect data.
He found strange deaths and strange weather correlating, very near to their present location. Another demon making a run at them, most likely. At Dean, anyway. Among the things that Sam and Dean didn’t talk about was Sam’s immunity to Lilith’s and Samhain’s powers.
So far, Sam had only one hypothesis that fit the data, and it was a worrisome one. He was sure-about as sure as he was that the sun would come up tomorrow; which was to say, ninety percent sure-that he was one of the seven seals. According to Castiel via Dean, Lilith had chewed through fifty-six seals in total. The oldest text he’d found said that fifty-nine seals could be opened in any order, but seven could only be reached after the others were gone.
He didn’t quite know what ‘opening’ would mean in his case, but he was guessing it wasn’t from the fun side of the eschaton. Suckier still, he wasn’t even invulnerable. Jake had been able to kill him just fine with an ordinary knife. He was just-demon-resistant, or something like. The only reassuring tidbit was that Lilith obviously hadn’t understood his status either, or she wouldn’t have been so surprised when she’d failed to kill him. But if she was sharp enough to open fifty-six seals, her ignorance wouldn’t have lasted.
He’d made no further progress on the Many Worlds problem by the time Dean and Dee returned, though he had a message out to a guy at CalTech who might have some insights.
They rolled through the door like an entire pack of puppies, jostling each other and smiling, full of light and warmth and energy that made him feel like the older brother. He rubbed his hands across his eyes before throwing his shoulders back and stretching.
Dean’s easy smile flickered into concern as he held out Sam’s coffee. Sam twitched his lips, the best he could do, and took the cup with a grateful nod. The coffee was hot through the thin cardboard, painful to hold. Dean never bothered with the cupholders; Sam always did. He remembered what it had been like, four months of never endangering his palms, and managed a happier face.
Dee was perched on the side of Dean’s bed, already deep into her egg and cheese biscuit, ignoring them or pretending to.
“Signs are that a major demon’s near,” he informed them.
“Signs,” Dean repeated, swallowing a too-big mouthful.
He sighed. “I haven’t been talking to Ruby, if that’s what you mean.”
That earned him a wounded look-two of them, big green eyes blinking slowly as if he’d just insulted Dad. What did they expect him to say? He spun the laptop around, showing them his map of unusual activity, not that either of them would be able to read it without an explanation. “Look, these are the signs, okay?”
“Guess we’re going demon-hunting,” Dean said. He was clearly a little relieved, itching to kill something familiar. Dee nodded and crumpled up her biscuit wrapper, leaving it in the center of Dean’s bed.
“You didn’t happen to be holding Ruby’s knife when you came over?” Sam asked her.
She shook her head. Sam hadn’t held out much hope of that. Dean had been making him carry the knife for a while now. Before Dean had showed off his super-exorcism trick, Sam had just thought it was a reminder not to use his demon powers.
Oh, he was being dumb, or in denial. Dee didn’t need the knife either. In fact, it was probably safer to send the two of them out alone. Safer for the possessed victim, at least.
Dean swallowed the last of his breakfast (he’d had three biscuits to Dee’s two, plus bacon) and tossed his wrapper so that it nudged up against Dee’s, grinning at his own marksmanship. “So, let’s go send this sonofabitch back to Hell.”
****
There was a brief squabble over who was going to drive that nearly turned into another sparring and/or fucking session, resolved when Sam suggested that he could do the honors and they both turned on him. Dee agreed that she’d drive on the way back, and Sam was relegated to the back seat, again.
“Oh, hey,” Dean said as they pulled out of the motel lot, “tell Sammy how wrong he is: when you got back from Hell, you were totally a virgin again, right?”
“God!” Sam said, wincing and looking out the window, squinting against the morning sun.
Dee gave an aggrieved sigh. “Yeah, that sucked hardcore. Not like I could tell the dude-hey, I’m a miraculous lay, but there’s just this one thing-no way.” She twisted in her seat to chuckle at Sam’s cringing. “Right, so afterwards, I’m thinking maybe I can get the condom off before he sees the blood, but you know some guys are real sensitive about the little man right after, and turns out he’s one of ‘em, and of course I like to see what I’m doing so the lights were on, and he looks down and he says-”
“Could I pay you to stop?” Sam asked, pitifully enough that they both started laughing, which at least had the virtue of changing the subject, if only to their first first times, which turned out to be roughly contemporaneous. Sam tried to be progressive enough to be okay with that, but really he thought they both should have waited a lot longer. Sure, sex was beautiful and all that, but Dean used it like a competition, and also like junk food, never looking for a connection.
Sam guessed he’d made a connection now.
He hoped matters would improve when Dee started rummaging in the tape collection. But then they started performing an impromptu-and, worse luck, not at all bad-duet singing along with “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back.” Sam sat and stared at his reflection in the window, trying not to sulk or seethe and bouncing between the two.
If Samantha had been the one to cross over, he wouldn’t-
He couldn’t wish that Dee had been left all alone. At least Samantha was on the case now, and she wasn’t distracted by Dean-squared.
“It’s defective!” they chorused with glee. Sam shoved his hair out of his eyes and thought that this was better than being alone in the car. But not by as much as he wanted it to be.
****
They found a half-built shopping center, presumably abandoned due to current economic conditions, and chose one of the anchors at the ends as the right place to catch a demon. The floor was cold concrete, indifferently evened. Sam smelled dust and mouse droppings. The construction workers had left a bunch of takeout cups and bags crumpled in the corners, and the only color in the place was the spray-painted directions on the floor showing where all the pipes were supposed to go.
Sam borrowed a discarded ladder, took his purple chalk-Dean and Dee were too caught up in some discussion to make fun, fine-and started to draw the Devil’s Trap. Making it big enough to cover most of the room took a long time, and he had to reposition the ladder a lot. He told himself that it was the uncomfortable vibration of chalk on ceiling tiles that made his fingers sting as he got closer to finishing the design. When he joined the last line, it felt like someone had shoved a spike through his skull, right above his left ear, and two drops of blood splashed down onto the top step of the ladder, blurring into the dirt there.
He wiped his nose quickly, checking to make sure neither Dean nor Dee had been watching, but they were busy snapping at each other. Sam could hear the exasperation in Dean’s tone even though he couldn’t make out the words.
“Hey,” he called out, and they both whipped around to face him, guilty and a little relieved. “You’d better be ready with your part.”
They folded their arms across their chests and pouted at him. But he could see that the rest of the spell prep had been completed.
He had to jump off the ladder, because the steps down went under the trap. He thought about how no one loved a traitor, not even those who used him.
They didn’t have to wait long after triggering the spell, but it was one of the longest half hours Sam had ever spent. Dean and Dee had stopped fighting, though they refused to explain its content-“You gonna be the judge, Sam?”-and they paced two parallel lines across the scuffed floor, their pissed-off silences emanating from them like two clouds of ash.
Get Dean angry over something familiar, and when his mood improved he’d have forgotten whatever was between him and Dee. Sam had an evergreen topic for that purpose. “I still don’t understand why the angels demand I give up using the powers. I need a better explanation than ‘they’re demonic’ when I’ve seen them save lives, rescue people from possession. How can that be wrong?”
Dee looked over at Dean, raising an eyebrow dubiously. “You didn’t make ‘em tell you?”
“You made Castiel tell you something?” Dean asked, equally incredulous. “What, you put out for him?”
She flipped him off. “Like you wouldn’t. Nah, after Samhain my Sam said obviously we have some sorta leverage, and it shouldn’t cost ‘em anything to answer a basic question.”
Sam didn’t look at Dean. He preferred to feel stupid while staring at nothing in particular.
Dee cleared her throat. “Turns out it’s one of those ‘we’re not all-knowing’ things. He said they had a sorta sacred text about you, but light on the details.” She closed her eyes and recited. “‘The demon grapples with the human. If the demon strikes, the last seal will break.’ The way they see it, each time you use the powers might be the wrong time.”
Now, Sam checked for Dean’s reaction, which was muted. Dee’s story was bad, but not much worse than other things they knew already.
The angels had been proceeding as if this supposed struggle were internal. True, there was human and demon inside him, and he could see that as a battle for control of himself. But what if he was supposed to ‘grapple’ with someone else? Someone like Dean?
Sam was almost relieved when a figure slammed the door open. He felt the buzz of a demonic presence and prepared himself for battle. The demon was wearing the body of a teenaged boy. His face was spotty and twisted with fury, but it marched into the center of the room without hesitating. Sam really, really wished that Castiel or one of the many other angels listed in the books had bothered to write this spell down a couple of centuries back instead of waiting to unload it on Dean. Better late than never, he guessed.
There was a moment of uncertainty, where it wasn’t clear who was going to start the exorcism, and then Dee nodded to Dean-your world, your turn-and Dean began.
“Why don’t you use your Voice, Dean Winchester?” it taunted, turning to focus only on Dean. Its host had curly blond hair, so light that the pink of the boy’s scalp showed through.
Sam clenched his jaw. His fingers ached with the need to raise his hand and squeeze. His head hurt like someone had slammed a door on it, and the ache only worsened as Dean continued to spew out Latin.
The demon’s face screwed up in pain, but it advanced to the very edge of the Devil’s Trap, as close to Dean as it could get. “You think you can get rid of me like that before I can kill this body? Talk fast, angelface.” Dean faltered, looking over at Sam, and the demon brought its hands up, fingers jabbing at the boy’s light blue eyes-it was going to blind its host.
“Dean!” Sam yelled, warning and permission.
“Depart,” Dean said, the word rolling out of him like a wave from the ocean. His face was a painted icon’s, stiff and beautiful and not of this world. Sam felt it hit him in the chest, pushing the air out of his lungs. Distantly, over the roar of pain falling on him like a hailstorm, he heard the demon’s scream, higher than his own but with the same pitch.
When he came to, his head was cushioned on a warm body-Dean, he thought, then realized that Dean was larger. He blinked, his eyelashes sticking together as if they didn’t want him to see, and looked up into Dee’s worried face. He felt as if he’d been shoved into an iron maiden, spikes of agony through every limb. Last time hadn’t been this bad, he didn’t think. But at least he hadn’t pissed himself.
“Dean’s callin’ an ambulance,” Dee said, fast and rough, before he could formulate the question. “Kid’ll probably be fine.”
“How long?”
She shrugged. “Couple of minutes. You, uh.” She pressed her lips together and a muscle twitched in her jaw. Sam was fascinated by it: so alike, and so different. Staring into those eyes, green with little flashes of brown like a forest in summer, was much nicer than thinking about his own problems. She was even petting his forehead. She bit her lip. “You bounced off the Devil’s Trap when you fell.”
Well, there went all his effort in disguising that particular revolting development. He nodded, and felt a trickle of blood down his neck. He hoped that it wasn’t from his eyes.
“Demon blood,” he reminded Dee. She didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken, except with a little quiver of her lips. But he needed to let them know. “That’s new, the-problem with the Devil’s Trap. Now that Lilith’s close to the final seals, it’s gonna get harder for me.”
“What in-the fuck are you talking about?” Dee demanded, exasperation in her voice like Sam was just making up problems. Her hands were still gentle on him, warm and comforting. He wanted to close his eyes and curl into her, press his face into her neck and breathe her in.
Instead, Sam struggled to push himself up, and she shifted so that she could help him sit, despite the nuclear explosion that went off behind his temple. She kept her arm around his shoulder, kneeling behind him, even when he was mostly upright.
“What does Samantha think her role is in all this?” he asked, instead of answering.
Dee was silent as a newly torched grave behind him.
Yeah, that’s what he’d thought. Dean always hated the theological stuff, the rationales, even when they didn’t involve family. Sam had carried it on his own. Except that Dean now blasted demons with a word-make that a Word-so it was arguable that he had as much of a need to know as Sam.
“We should-”
“Sam!” Dean called. Sam managed to swivel and saw Dean, breathing hard, at the entrance. He looked Sam up and down, then jogged over to them, getting down on one knee so that he could cup Sam’s jaw in one hand and examine him close up.
“I’m fine, Dean,” he said patiently. Dean rolled his eyes. Sam would have liked him to do more, maybe yell, but apparently they were beyond that. “Let’s get-”
Dean went flying backwards, like a fish hooked on a line. Sam’s head snapped up and just as Dean crashed into the side wall, he saw the figure standing in the door.
“I’m sorry,” the demon said, “am I interrupting?”
The fucking summoning spell. They hadn’t counted on two, and Sam hadn’t been paying attention, what with his head twanging like a guitar. This one was in a woman’s body, mid-thirties, brunette and plump. Dean was twisting on the wall, his face screwed up as if he were trying to speak. Evidently this demon had given Dean some thought. Even if it wasn’t working for Lilith, it was likely to kill him quickly.
Sam couldn’t have exorcised it now even if he’d had the strength to raise his hand, not with the football game going on in his head. Behind him, he could feel Dee vibrating like an engine in neutral.
The demon strolled closer, smiling at them. “Now that we’ve clipped those wings, I think I might want to take my time with you two.”
Sam pushed himself to his feet, and the demon allowed him to do it. He felt his lips twitch into a sneer. “True, you’ve got us in a bad position. But a situation like this one can change pretty fast. If I were you, I’d run.”
The demon grinned, showing even white teeth. “Sam Winchester, you only wish you were me.” It punched him with demon-enhanced strength, slamming him backwards into the wall so hard that he thought he’d cracked a rib. His head felt like it had been the ball in a World Cup match.
“And look,” the demon continued when it saw that Sam wasn’t quite unconscious, “you brought an appetizer.” It examined Dee, who was in a fighting stance.
If she used Dean’s power now, the extra damage really might kill Sam, and she had to know that. But it would save her, and Dean, and Sam might survive. He could only hope she thought that the demon was definitely going to kill him.
“Dee-” he tried, and the demon punched him again, sending his head bouncing against the wall again-contre-coup, he thought muzzily. His vision grayed out as he slumped against the cold uneven wall. When he blinked through the black-and-white sparkles, the demon was pressing its host’s body up against Dean’s, whispering something that made Dean go even blanker and more furious. Its hands were invisible from Sam’s line of sight, doing something between their bodies. Dean flinched, and his hands clenched, scrabbling against the wall, but the demon had his mouth held so firmly shut that only a faint sound, almost a whine, escaped.
Please, he thought at Dee, who cast a despairing look at him as if she’d heard.
She swallowed. “Depart,” she said.
Sam flinched, reflexively.
Then he blinked.
The demon’s eyebrows rose as it turned away from Dean to stare at her. “Are you deficient? That’s for angels, little girl.” It raised its hand towards her, casual as a restaurant patron waving for the check.
For the second time, nothing happened.
Sam couldn’t see Dee’s face, but he guessed it was as shocked as Dean’s. Sam remembered himself and managed to twist against the wall enough to grab the killing knife, tossing it so that it headed hilt-first at Dee. Dee caught it without even looking, then darted forward as fast as anyone Sam had ever seen, swiping it across the demon’s stomach.
There was the traditional flare of sick-orange light edging the wound, and the body collapsed, just Dean came unstuck from the wall like a zapped bug.
Dean strode over to the body, moving in a way that suggested he was hurting but functional, and knelt down to check it. He looked up and shook his head.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sam said, and nobody fought him.
On to Part 3.