fic: Our Lady of Lies and Wide Rivers
Fandom: SPN, Sam, Dean, Sam/Dean
Rating: PG for monsters. Scary ones.
Spoilers: nothing episodic.
A/N: 8737 words makes this my new record. I know, lame, I know. There is a 6000 word first half to this story on my hard drive, but I can't get it to work, you know, artistically, so I am just posting the second part, and hoping the salient points are covered. Maybe one day the first half will work out for me and I'll post it. But until then, you can read Vocation.
DUDE THEY ARE EVACUATING MY BUILDING. SORRY FOR THE CRAP HEADER. GOD.
ETA II: ILLUSTRATED VERSION delighter not only hacks my journal to read my secret poetry, she also makes the most delightful illustrated bookish PDFs that make reading the fic actually enjoyable for the eyes. GO HERE to see the sexiest blindfolded Gentle Sammy you'll ever see.
ETA: This journal has been hacked hard by delighter here to say:
1. subterrain is neither drowned or delimbed yet. Calgary has been flooded, possibly by God, who is no doubt unimpressed with subterrain's premarital intercoursing. She heroically managed to post this (fucking awesome) story mere moments before she was forced from her immersed home and onto a city bus. Then she was going to come chill at my place, where we were going to get high and watch Kung Foo Hustle with my roommates, but then the building management decided to have a heart and put them up in a hotel. She is totally not going into work tomorrow!
2. For serious, this story is a sequel and you need to read Vocation first. I just wanted to make that extra clear so that no one misses out.
3. Pray for subterrain. Pray that she doesn't invoke the wrath of God anymore and that her building doesn't smell like ass for the rest of the summer.
By July, they were back seated in the same booth at the Elvis Lives Diner & Eatery in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. Dean sat fiddling with the same leaky ketchup bottle while Sam kept switching conversational tacks, trying to get him to maybe take this stuff seriously, this time.
“Drowning victims with teeth marks. That doesn't sound familiar to you?” Dean asked, acidic, and peeled off a particularly long, clotted, boogery piece of ketchup from the glass bottle, and flicked it onto Sam's bacon.
“Dude, gross. If you get that crap on me-” Sam couldn't help inspecting his clerical blacks for splatter. He used his teaspoon to airlift the bloody cadaver out. “And it's true this time, I swear. Bess wouldn't lie. She's got a connection at the county who's hiding the bodies from the press.”
Dean made a face at the lawyer's name, sneered a silent Bess, I love you, Bess at his cinnamon bun and fries. “I ran my ass off last time, gathering intel on your made-up lake monster. Not a word of thanks. And it was all a freaking lie to start with. Now you're telling me-”
“That there actually is a lake monster. Yes.” Sam tried for honest and forthright in his tone, even as he knew he was achieving priggish, and only priggish.
“You are so kidding, you are just fucking with me. Why did I even agree to come here, again?” Dean leaned back in his seat, arms spread wide across the purple vinyl. He bobbled his head like an angry duck, “Oh yeah, because you lied to me again. Jackass.”
Sam shook his head, reached a hand across the table, “You know you wouldn't have-” he was cut off by the appearance of the server - and holy hannah, it was the same kid with the wide, sly mouth and the ironic flannel. Although now she was all tanned and tank-topped, and looked half as grim as she had in October, with her belly-button sticking out over the coffee cups. It was hard to take anyone with an outtie seriously.
“Fathers,” she said - Bess had called her the Sellers kid, done good work on her mother's divorce, supposedly. “I know Debbie's got your table, but I just had to come by and say that I am really glad to see that you're still together.” She looked from Sam to Dean, “It must've been a rough year for you both. But the Lord doth provide.”
As she vanished into the chaos of the packed restaurant, Dean looked blank.“Uh, what did she say? What was that?”
“I dunno,” Sam lied, shamelessly. He'd had a brief conversation with her before, right after Dean walked out the last time they were here. He kind of hated the Sellers kid, as much as he could hate anyone who hadn't directly tried to harm him or his brother. Meaning, he'd prayed every night for her for all of November last year. And now he'd have to start again. Her skinny brown arms and little pout of a belly got stuck in his vision, and he squinted at Dean, distracted.
“All I'm sayin',” Dean seized his opportunity, “Is that you are a lying, nasty little bitch. Alright? Let's just acknowledge that before we move on.”
“I'm not acknowledging that-”
“Just say it, and I'll be happy. Just say, nasty little cankersore bitch, who lies like a dead dog, and we can go hunt your lake monster.”
“No, and you aren't even allowed to say it. That's so juvenile, I am not-”
“I, Padre Sam Winchester,” prompted Dean, emphasizing his intent with raised eyebrows.
Sam folded his arms and leaned back.
“Am a nasty, lying, cankersore of a bitch,” Dean had no problem with swearing in his collar anymore, almost like the second they'd stepped past the Blue Earth incorporation line someone had lifted a jinx.
Sam, however, felt as ostentatious as a painted pony with a hooker on top, wearing his collar in a packed diner in a tourist town, and openly arguing with his brother, also collared. And so he kept his mouth sealed tight. One long line, molars grinding.
“Who is a liar,” finished Dean, and waved as if for a liturgical response. “You can say it in Latin, if it makes you feel better.”
“No, it wouldn't make me feel better,” Sam snapped.
“You're such a baby,” Dean informed him. “FYI: you haven't actually apologized, yet, either.”
“For what?” Sam's hands twitched off the table in exasperation. He shoved a forkful of waffle into his mouth.
Dean rolled his eyes to the heavens, and was about to speak to that when he got a particular look in his eye, and a grin snaked upwards to his ears.
Sam felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see a glossy-lipped teenage girl from the next booth over, perched with her hands clasped together, kneeling on her own vinyl seat to face him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. Her five or six friends, hunched and writhing in the booth with her, were silent only by way of their inability to breathe. One collapsed across the first one's calves even as Sam watched, her face frozen in a grin to match Dean's.
The girl, who was maybe fourteen, maybe twenty, peeked at him through her half-closed lashes, and resumed her solemn face.“It's been three months since my last confession.”
Sam looked back to Dean, who was shovelling food into his mouth and smirking through his breakfast with glee. He kept nodding encouragingly. At the both of them, Sam guessed.
“I'm sorry, this isn't exactly the place-” Sam half-muttered, casting a glance around the absolutely swamped conglomeration of formica tabletops and chipped linoleum and 50s kitsch that made up the diner.
“Sure it is,” put in Dean.
She took that as encouragement, “I have been lusting,” she declared. “I have been lusting and lusting and lusting.” She cracked a dark-rimmed eye to catch his reaction.
One of her friends moaned long and loud, which quickly elevated to a howl, and the nearer tables in the restaurant went silent to turn and look.
Sam twisted immediately in his seat and hunched his shoulders, glaring at Dean, whose face was painfully predictable: eyebrows up to the hairline, teeth and mashed food highly visible in the gaping maw. He waved his fork helplessly. “Lusting isn't a sin on its own, Sammy, you gonna tell her what is?”
As the laughter rose behind Sam's back to match the hot rush under his skin, Dean nearly choked himself snickering. Then there was the sudden smell of coconut and tanning oil, and the brush of long hair, and the girl had planted a kiss on his cheek, and the entire herd of them was away, halfway across the street by the time he realized it.
Sam watched them go, doubled-up in laughter and cramping traffic, a half dozen of them in white, grass green and peach-coloured scraps. They were all skin and teeth, bright hair falling over their eyes and writhing drunkenly around their shoulders. Long long legs like newborn foals and just as unsteady on them, skipping across asphalt in their half-hearted heels.
Dean had stopped laughing, was watching him stare. “Dude, you can not oggle those girls.”
“I'm not-” Sam stopped, tried again by tearing his gaze away, “I am not oggling anyone.”
“Sammy, I have never, in my entire life, seen you oggle a woman. Do not start with that one.”
“I- I am completely, seriously, horrified, I am so not-”
“You are leching on pre-teens. And you're embarrassing me. Please stop.'' Dean grimaced a tight little warning, and turned back to his fries.
Sam glared back at him, but couldn't help sending one last glance out the window.
Then Dean pitched a ketchup-drenched fry straight at his chest. It splattered like a bullet wound, and Sam raised his hands in disgust. “What are we, four?”
“You wish. At least then it wouldn't be illegal. Much less a sin in the eyes of God. You're gonna get us arrested, you know that?” Dean shook his head, obviously and seriously pissed.
Sam wiped at himself with a napkin, and went back to his breakfast, eyes down.
--
They paid the bill and walked the dozen blocks to go meet Bess. Straight down the main thoroughfare of upside-down-White-House theme parks and about eight hundred water parks, each one bigger and gaudier than the last.
It was like they'd gone through a time warp. Everything was exactly the same as it had been ten months ago, except crawling with crowds. Before, Wisconsin Dells had been a ghost town, a resort without tourists, a freezing green swamp of silent citizens. Closed-up shops and trickling water slides.
Now, Sam found that walking through the clumps of families as they unfolded crumpled brochures and town maps and counted out entrance coupons, a path was almost cleared for them. Yeah, he was sticky with sweat underneath all the black, but the people would take a look at them, and the crowds would part. Renegade kids yelling and squirting water guns got hooped in by the neck. Nervous or pleasant or guilty smiles manifested. Teenagers eyeballed them. It wasn't as weird as Utah, but it was still a little awkward. Sam cast a sideways glance at Dean, who was meeting all the smiles - the pretty ones, at least - with a beatific grin of his own.
They met Bess down by the river, sitting with her suit jacket and pumps in the grass beside her, her legs dangling in the water. The water moved by with a deceptive, green calm: calm only because it was deep, and deep because it was big, and fast, and ancient.
She stood up to greet them. Over forty, she was skinny as a twelve-year-old, all pointed angles and tan skin under her blouse. She squeezed Sam and turned to face Dean and shake his hand. She glanced him over, face all sharp edges and fine lines. But Dean shook her hand politely as Sam introduced them, eyes flicking from face to face, nervous.
“Sam told me you're a big jerk-off,” Bess said to Dean, smiling.
Dean took a moment to send Sam a glance. “Yeah?” he said. “And you're the double-suicide, right? Tried to drown and hang yourself. Same night, hoo-dog. That's dedication.” Dean gave an appreciative whistle, turning pleasantly from one of them to the other, ignoring Sam's shocked embarrassment.
“Exactly,” said Bess. She practically sounded pleased that he'd remembered. “So good to finally meet you. I really appreciate you kids coming up to see me again. Because even I do not fucking believe this. Pardon my french, Fathers.” She looked at the river and a passing boat tour loaded heavy and low with tourists, undoubtedly trolling up to see the water-carved hoodoos and dells that gave the town its name.
“Yeah, either do I,” Dean muttered.
Sam smacked his arm while Bess was still looking away. He said, “Last year we heard rumours about this kind of thing - drownings and maulings. But we couldn't find anything in the morgue or the papers, so we figured someone had seen a few too many alligator movies.”
“It's still not in the papers,” said Bess, “I don't know how the tourism board is keeping it quiet, but they are. There's six bodies in the county morgue from last week, missing legs and leaking organs. Damn disgusting to look at. I do divorces for a reason. Things like that give me the creeps.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said, ignoring Dean's superior look. “We'll start there.”
“No need,” said Bess, bending to fish around in her briefcase. She produced a manila envelope. “I got you pictures. And I've been keeping track of where they've been finding these things. Actually, Constable Billy's been keeping track for me,” she gave a little smile and rolled her eyes. “He's such a gentleman, knew I was interested. There's a map in there with all twenty-three of them for you.”
“Gosh,” said Sam, “thanks.”
“I do what I can. You boys come over for supper tonight, alright?” Bess picked up her shoes and jacket. “I gotta get back to meet a client, but we'll barbecue up some good Wisconsin beef, see you fed proper.”
She gave Sam a peck on the cheek and started hiking up the grass embankment back to the street.
Dean watched her go, and it was Sam's turn to hiss, “Pervert,” and give him a smack. “She's old enough to be our mother, don't you oggle her.”
“Man, that kind of age isn't something to be proud of in a girlfriend,” said Dean. Sam hit him harder, and then they headed back to the Impala to start picking through the envelope.
--
Basically, the killing pattern boiled down to 'in the river.' And Sam and Dean spent the greater part of their afternoon driving around like tourists, looking at the various places where the bodies were found, which were marked on Constable Billy's map with little pink hearts. The handwriting at the top said, “For my special girl,” like it was some kind of valentine.
“Guess Ms. Wilcox-Carver is heading pretty quick toward being Ms. Wilcox-Constable-Billy,” Dean mused.
“It's just Wilcox now, alright?” said Sam, “Have some respect.”
“Yeah, I bet his holiness over in the Vatican would totally respect you having relations with a divorced divorce lawyer, Brother Sammy.”
“They aren't relations, Dean. She's a friend.”
“Oh yeah? You call Pastor Jim twice a month, too?” Dean made at the road ahead, packed with tent-trailers and canoes, “How 'bout Bobby? You call him to cry after I tell you to stop jerking off in the shower, too?”
Sam stayed silent, knowing he had no decent answer. He'd called her probably a dozen times in the past ten months, just to check up, see how she was doing. She'd always sounded pleasantly surprised, a little lonely, ready to say nice things and invite him and his brother back to visit. It was like having some sort of home again, especially now that Dean had screwed things up with Pastor Jim so nicely, not that he'd admit it.
But mostly he'd kept calling her because he wanted to hear her, alive and healthy after what had happened last fall.
He'd spent months tracking down her nutjob of an estranged son. Pinning him down in Salt Lake City, and talking to him, and almost blowing off his own head 'cause the kid had freaky fucking mind control powers, and then killing him. Not killing him in the biblical sense, but definitely blocking his powers - somehow, in a way that still didn't make any sense - long enough for one of the kid's brainwashed cult slaves to get a hold of herself and nail the bastard to the wall with a load of buckshot and a butter knife.
He'd lied, or at least mis-communicated, telling Dean he was spending the month in Utah to see if the Mormons knew much about yellow-eyed demons. He'd strongly implied he might do some proselytizing while he was at it.
And so Dean had happily spent the month in Las Vegas.
And when they met back up in June, Sam didn't comment on the new hubcaps on the Impala or the rolled-up balls of cash in the glove compartment, and Dean didn't ask about the three hours of solid prayer every night. Neither of them really wanted to know, so instead they took some of Dean's money and spent three days at the Grand Canyon, climbing up and down the cliffs on truculent donkeys named Loco and One-eye.
And after that Sam called Bess, and told her that the reason she'd tried to kill herself was because her son - her twenty-three-year-old son who she hadn't even known about, because his twin had been stillborn and her husband had got rid of the other one faster than quick, the asshole - had reached out across 1400 miles of interstate and told her to kill herself with his goddamned mind.
She'd taken it fine, like maybe she wasn't so surprised. Like she'd already had the kid giving her psychic orders, she had known on some level.
So then, in the same conversation she'd asked if maybe they'd stop by sometime this summer, come check out some strange happenings. And Sam had agreed, of course. And told Dean it was a poltergeist, because he'd already used up the lake monster story last year to get him up there after he'd had the vision of her killing herself.
Dean seriously didn't like the lake monster bit, though, now or then. This afternoon, they'd pretty much exhausted the map without so much as a belly scale by way of evidence. Just dead trees and stinking mud and the odd scrap of police tape. Dean was making faces and queueing up sighs that pretty much cemented in the fact that he thought Sam was lying again.
Sam was always lying - about the visions Dean didn't ever hear about, about the time he spent on his own little hunts; about how he was tracking down the people he saw and either saving them or attending their funerals; about the fact that he had the unholy devil in his head, telling him the future - but this time he was being honest. About the lake monster, anyway.
Around four they ran out of pink heart stickers, and Dean pulled the Impala into the parking lot of one of the bigger water parks. “You know what, Sammy?” he said, snatching the polaroids out of Sam's hands and stuffing them all in the glove box. “I want some fucking cotton candy.”
Dean got out and slammed the door, waving at Sam to follow him up to the entrance gate. Sam sat in the car, stubborn, for the thirty seconds before the sun started to broil him, and then he got out and followed.
“Hey,” Dean said to the kid at the kiosk, “How's it going today?”
She was another teenager in a tank top, keys rubberbanded to her wrist and hair pulled back in a pony tail. Sam couldn't help but notice the strings of the floral bikini top under her shirt. He looked away. “Do you -” she frowned at their collars, their full three layers of baking black. “Do you guys want a day pass?”
“Actually,” said Dean, “I'm looking for my kid sister. She's fifteen, and grounded, and hanging around with some bad-ass college guy.”
“Oh,” said the girl, eyes drifting to the three hundred fifteen year-old girls identical to herself milling around the bases of the water slides. Sam followed her gaze: all of them were wearing bits of triangular polka-dotted lycra, too. Little walking skeletons with tits and lollipop heads.
“I don't suppose you could just let us just wander in, look around for her.”
The girl's eyebrows raised as her training video kicked in. “Brian would fire me if they caught you.”
“Look,” said Dean, “What's your name?”
“Sara,” said Sara.
“Look, Sara. Do we look like we're about to go swimming?” asked Dean. She gave her head a half-hearted shake. “Do we look like con-men to you?”
A blush rose through her cheeks, and she shook her head. “I can't give you the bracelets, though” she said.
“That's alright. You're a good kid.” Dean said, and he winked at her as she buzzed them through the turnstile.
Dean made his way straight for a vendor with a striped umbrella and a whirring tin of neon candy, sacks of pink and blue and both hanging around like alien cocoons. He took one look at the man running the stand - short and shirtless and wearing a red cowboy hat - and didn't even bother chatting him up, just paid for the mix bag and turned away.
“We should wander around a bit,” he said, stuffing a handful of blue floss into his mouth.
Sam shook his head, checked his phone for the time. “Are you kidding me? We have work to do, Dean.”
“Yeah, and we're making real good progress, too.” Dean started walking toward the wave pool, “I'm taking a break.”
Sam stood gaping for all of two seconds, then pressed his lips together and followed. His previous estimate was immediately debunked: there were at least three hundred thousand teenage girls wandering around in bathing suits. And Dean's course seemed to be aimed at a meandering perusal of every long line-up where they stood with hands on hips, gossipping and screeching through the slow progression up wooden stairs.
Sam's face was burning in minutes, and he fished in his pocket for cash. “Dean, we're gonna die of heatstroke out here,” he said over his brother's shoulder. “Can we at least buy some hats?”
“What, you mean those floppy straw things?” Dean pointed at a passing mother, and guffawed. The lady looked over at them, and Sam smacked his hand out of the air, mortified.
“You know, you're on the right track,” Dean regained his somber face, “Let's go buy some swim trunks.”
“What?” Sam's mouth fell open. It had been like this at the Grand Canyon, too. First they were just there at the rest stop and then suddenly Dean was shelling out cash for the donkey rentals and asking about sleeping arrangements at the bottom and slapping his ass when he was getting into the saddle.
Dean patted him on the shoulder, “Don't worry, baby. Sugar daddy will buy you a speedo with his blood money.”
Two minutes later Sam stood with his arms crossed in the men's section of the hula-themed swimsuit kiosk, watching Dean model a pair of silver-and-grey board shorts. “Not bad for all the cinnamon buns, huh?” asked Dean, running a hand over his abs and checking out his ass in the mirror.
Sam eyed his brother's tan lines - demarcating hand from wrist and throat from collarbone. The rest of him was white as a whale. “You look like you just got off the colony. You leave your bonnet in the car, Belinda?”
“Now it's that type of religious intolerance that gives us a bad name, Sammy,” said Dean, turning to browse through the racks again. He tossed over a hanger, and Sam caught it by reflex, holding it up to inspect the tiny yellow thong.
He heard giggling. He looked over his shoulder, and there was a trio of barefoot girls with wet hair and goosebumps huddled in the sunglasses racks. One was blonde and he was pretty damn sure it was the same one from before. She gazed boldly back at him, like she could probably set his skin on fire with her look.
Sam turned and snapped the thing back at Dean, then grabbed a pair of decently sized trunks off the rack and hid in the change room until Dean banged on the door, hollering “This ain't no motel bathroom, buddy.”
He emerged wearing the trunks and his black button-down, the rest of his clothing bundled in his fist, white collar tucked carefully into one polished shoe. Dean gave him a long look. “Seriously?” he asked. “Seriously you're gonna wear that shirt?”
“Yeah,” said Sam, trying to be casual.
“What, are you afraid people will treat you like a normal person if they don't know how morally superior you are?” The words stung, and Dean seemed almost contrite when Sam cast a glance.
“No, I just-” Sam didn't just anything. He brushed by Dean toward the counter. “You gonna buy these or what?”
“Not until you take off that shirt. C'mon, Sammy. It's ridiculous. No one actually expects you to look as good as me. Don't be modest.”
Dean's voice was loud enough to attract curious looks, and Sam took the two steps back to his brother.
“Fine.” He started unbuttoning the top, deliberate and slow, staring straight down at Dean's cocky face. Dean smirked, and looked away, then back, obviously uncomfortable with the aggression. Obviously enjoying it.
Sam's chest was just white - and just as hard, thank you - as Dean's. But when he shrugged out of the shirt it was the tattoo that had Dean hooting and hopping. Sam tried in vain to stop from grinning, but Dean punched him hard enough to hurt in his excitement, and it was too ridiculous to not laugh.
“Shit, that is so cool!” Dean practically gave Sam's bicep a snake bite, twisting it for a better look at the intricate black linework. “That is one gothic mother of a cross, Sammy. You look like a freaking Hell's Angel with that bad boy.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Sam tried to make Pastor Jim's trademark expression of long-suffering patience, but failed when Dean pulled back to look at him.
“When did you get this?” Dean looked genuinely curious.
“Uh,” said Sam, “Salt Lake City last month.”
“You went and got inked without me?” Sam could see Dean trying to make light of it, playing up the hurt and pretending it was all fake, but there was still a twinge of honest whine in his voice, and Sam felt so terrible he couldn't even lie.
“I was drunk,” he said.
And that ended the conversation. Dean's options were fall over dead of shock, or screech like a woman, or say nothing, and he opted to say nothing, which left Sam feeling like a delinquent teenager.
“I was having a tough time,” he tried to say to Dean's turned shoulder.
“Yeah, I bet.”
“It was - remember that time you called?” Dean had left a voicemail after four days apart, half-saccharine with liquor, saying, I'm comin' to pick you up, I can't stand any more of this strippers and gamblin' shit, we need to be out on the road again. I'll be there in five hours. And Sam had had to call back, say No, don't come. I'm not ready. Just another week. And no more explanation than that. What else could he say? Dean had been halfway through Utah. Had turned around. Gone back to his room at the casino. After that it was a month till Sam found Bess' kid in a basement suite, and neither of them had called once. Eventually, Sam caught a bus, and Dean picked him up in Beaver, Utah. And the subject never came up again.
Which was why even now, Dean had nothing to say on the topic. They paid in silence, and went to shove quarters into a pair of lockers to store their clothes, phones and wallets. Dean cast a few sullen looks at the tattoo, which Sam pretended not to notice.
But once Dean had perused a map of the park, he was all business, practically leashing and dragging Sam toward the coolest-looking slide.
“We have dinner plans with Bess, remember?” Sam said, halfway up the stairs to The Plunge, which boasted a thirteen story drop straight down a pair of aquamarine slides.
“Yeah, yeah. We'll just do two or three, alright? An hour. Give me an hour, then we'll get back to your lake monster, alright?”
At the top, a college kid barely any younger than Sam took a look at their bare wrists and started to say something about day passes.
“No, no,” said Dean, putting a hand on the guy's shoulder and pressing Sam to take his place at the rushing mouth of the slide. “We're with Brian,” Dean gave a toothy smile.
Sam was fairly certain he was going to die, sitting at the top of that slide and looking out over miles and miles of technicolour water park, a carpet of distant trees and even the river, winding like a gray-green snake alongside. Thirteen storeys straight down, and only the water's suction to prevent a free fall. He knew he'd hit the concrete and splatter like an egg.
“Yeah, you radio him and check us out,” agreed Dean, and gave Sam a good push that had him screaming out the Lord's name like an orgasmic virgin as he fell.
In the rush of water that caught him at the bottom, Sam got out of the chute just in time to pull Dean by his armpits out of the neighbouring twin slide. “C'mon, Dean,” he said, pointing and grinning despite himself, “Let's do the Black Anaconda.”
They made it down four more slides - end of the afternoon on a Wednesday, the line-ups weren't that bad - before they heard people start screaming.
Standing soaking wet at the bottom of the Jungle Rumble, Sam smacked water out of his ear and stared while red-shirted park staff ushered groups of sobbing girls and blank-eyed boys toward the exit. Some people were running, holding toddlers and shouting the names of vagrant children.
Exchanging a grim glance, Sam and Dean started in the direction that people were stumbling away from. A crowd of silent tourists and park staff had gathered at one of the entry points for the Endless River. The only person left in the water was a very still, very wide-eyed middle-aged man floating with his orange rubber donut under his armpits. A cloud of darkening blood obscured the fact that most of his bottom half and his left hand were torn off and missing. The orange tire bumped gently against the concrete side of the channel, held in place by a pale-faced red-shirt, listening vacantly to the chatter on his radio.
Dean made his way closer to the edge of the channel, scanning the water, and Sam followed him.
“It's a loop. On the map it joins with the river, people float along the edge, then back into the park” Dean muttered.
“You think it just snagged him there?”
“That or it just swam right in. Either way, it can't be that far off.” Dean made the business face. “I think I saw a tackle shop back on the main drag. You ask around, see if anyone actually saw the sucker. I wanna know if we're going after Jaws or the little mermaid or what.”
Sam nodded, “Don't go after it without me.”
Dean nodded and stepped away. Sam caught his arm at the elbow, spun him back. “I'm serious. I don't want to be pulling you around in a wagon for the rest of our natural lives, alright?”
“You got it,” Dean gave a tight little smile, and disappeared into the crowd.
Sam turned, perused the empty faces of the witnesses. It wasn't an effort to look worried and sympathetic, he'd had the grief counselling bit down since they'd done the hospital visits at Seminary. He looked around, picking out the genuinely traumatized from the gawkers, and recognized the girl from the diner, streaky-faced and alone. She had her arms around her knees, her entire body folded in on itself as she stared at the dead man.
She barely looked up as soon as he came close, but turned her face back to the body without seeming to recognize him. She was swaying slightly, perched on her toes, one hand pressed to the concrete to prop herself up.
Sam squatted down beside her, elbows on his knees. “Did you see it happen?” he asked.
She didn't answer, just brought her chin down on her knee, and then raised it to nod once, sharp. Her eyes didn't blink. “He was in front of me in the stream, I didn't even notice him till he started screaming.”
“What did it?”
“I dunno,” she grimaced, and her breath hitched. “It was like a long black shape. Really, really long. I felt it go past me with - with his legs.”
Sam let her take a moment. She'd moved her gaze to the concrete in front of her, holding herself like she needed to keep track of all her limbs. Eventually, she looked up to peer at him. “I saw you earlier at the diner, right?”
“Yeah, that was me,” Sam nodded, let out a brief smile, swallowed it.
“I'm sorry I embarrassed you,” she said to the ground. “Father, I want to tell you - that thing, it was evil. It wasn't like an animal, I could feel-” she choked out a laugh, and tossed her straggles of hair off her face. Looked up at him, anxious. “It saw me, and it was like the Devil saw me and said not yet, but soon.”
Sam put a hand on her shoulder. He could overhear the radios buzzing: the paramedics would be here soon, the cops and the local press. “Come on,” he said, “You should go home.”
--
He called Dean after he'd gotten the girl into a cab, sent her back to her parents' condo. He was standing at his locker, trying to detangle his shirt sleeves as he dialed. Dean answered with a grunt, and Sam said, “You remember the research you did last year? The uh, the ancient snake that carved the river, and all the little snakes that fled from its coming? I think we have ourselves a little snake.”
“How little?” said Dean, “Should I be heading to the pet emporium to pick up a guppie net?”
“Like, thirty foot boa constrictor little. Except if I'm right-”
“Which is seldom,” put in Dean.
“Except I am right, so it's not a snake, it's a water spirit.”
“Awesome,” Dean drawled. “So we can write off both salting and burning.”
“There are ways to kill it. I just need to read up some more. I'll meet you at the hotel.” Sam hung up, and headed for the change rooms.
The hotel was actually a palatial jacuzzi-steam-showered honeymoon cabin. A barbeque on the flagstone patio with stone steps leading down to the river, a dishwasher in the kitchen, granite countertops, crown moulding, for the love of everything holy. It was by far the nicest place they'd ever stayed in - including Seminary school, obviously, with its cardboard-and-toothpick bunk beds - because the bed was bigger than God, and it didn't matter that there was only the one. Sam could've slept widthwise across the foot of it, if he'd wanted to.
And the only reason they'd even got a room in high season was because Dean had made special friends with the desk clerk last year. Sam didn't ask questions but the girl - Amanda - had recognized him immediately, and perused her screen and smiled a thin smile. “I think I have something available,” she said, “The same suite as last time, Fathers?”
This time, when Sam came through the lobby wearing his black shirt untucked and mis-buttoned over his new board shorts, feet dirty and bare, Amanda smiled like a shark. “Will you be requiring a laundry service, Father?”
Sam shook his head, managed a half a smile. “Has Dean made it in yet?” he asked.
“Afraid not.” The phone rang, and she bent to answer it, still smirking.
He jogged through the garden paths to their little suite, shoes in one hand, blacks in the other. His phone rang as he was fumbling through the door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I just passed a sporting goods store. You think we're gonna need anything specific? Like, blessed arrows or silver or iron or oak or what?”
“Dean, I haven't even-” Sam paused. On the island in the kitchen there was a bottle of wine chilling with some glasses, and a bouquet of white roses in a vase. “Dude, you have a hot date tonight, or something?”
“What?” Dean was obviously having trouble dodging pedestrians: he was muttering curses under his breath.
“You forgot to cancel your romantic get-away package. There's like, Pinot Gris on the counter. And candles. They left candles up the stairs to the bedroom. Burning.”
“What? You think I'd order that? I don't need candles to get where I'm going.”
“Someone must have screwed up.” Sam dropped his clothes by the door, and went over to open his computer.
“Yeah, there's probably some baby-face groom next door consoling his wife right now. I'd say you should go comfort her yourself, but we're on the clock, here. I'm in the parking lot: do we need arrows, or buckshot, or a fucking magic envelope opener or what?”
“Give me a minute,” Sam said, checking out his bookmarks, typing in a query. “I'd say, yeah. We'll use the crossbow, get us some iron-tipped quarrels - or any pure metal, none of that composite plastic crap. Bless them in the car on the way over, alright?”
“Alright.” Dean hung up.
Sam kept poking around on the wireless, reading up about the Missouri river snake that flooded the plains out from under the Lakota and got turned to stone for her troubles. Only via the intervention of lightning-throwing thunderbirds, however. There were some variations on the theme, most detailing the horrible magic of the creatures - polluters of the soil, messengers from the underworld, devourers of men - and not so much the best way to kill them, sans divine intervention.
Dean came back with a twenty-foot polymer fish net and three dozen holy iron quarrels.
“I think we can summon her,” said Sam, as Dean unwrapped the crossbow, started winding it up for stringing. “They have an affinity for blind people, because they're sightless themselves.”
“You volunteering to poke out your eyes?”
“No, but it's almost dark, and I'll put on a blindfold.”
“And that'll work. It'll just show up to bitch about how it sucks not seeing the people you eat.” Dean said, flat.
“Yeah, it's symbolic.”
Eventually, Dean stopped bitching long enough for Sam to tear up a dish towel and step out onto the patio. Dusk was already fading into blue night, and the air was still except for the distant sound of heavy bass and drunken conversations echoing downriver from other cabins.
Both of them had found their collars and re-attached them for the task at hand, and Sam bent his head forward so Dean could tie the blindfold securely. “Don't you wanna peek?” he asked.
“She'd be able to tell. I have to be completely helpless.”
“I guess it helps that you're a virgin then, huh,” said Dean, and divested Sam of his wickedly-edged bowie knife even as he slapped his ass. Sam had nothing to say to that.
They followed the stone steps down to the river, Sam knowing by Dean's breathing and the pressure of the palm on his arm where each step would be, how far down to reach with his bare toes. When they reached the water, it was cool and muddy, and Dean released him. Sam waded in to his thighs before pausing.
Dean's sounds - his steps, his breaths as he took up position - were quickly muffled by the rush of the water, and Sam was alone in the sightless black river. He moved forward until he was up to his chest.
Then he waited, barely shifting position as his feet sank in the mud and the water seemed to grow colder around him. The skin of his neck and scalp rose in prickles, and still he waited. A fallen branch snagged against his arm, and he nearly fell backwards, splashing. But the leaves brushed his outstretched hand and floated past, and he waited some more.
When she did come, she was smooth glass against his fingertips. And then a steel noose around his knees, a constriction like cement around his chest. He heard the rasp of her breath and the splash as she raised her head above water to look at him with her sightless eyes, smell his fear and helplessness. He felt her grasp his shoulders with her two front legs, clawed, bony fingers pressing into his flesh. She nudged his cheek with her rhinoceros horn.
It was like the girl had said, she was a devil, and Sam felt her malevolent heart even as she paused with her alligator teeth clicking in his ear.
The first crossbow bolt glanced off her hide with a whine. The second lodged somewhere close to Sam's throat, and she thrashed, pulling him under with her.
Sam spent long moments in the black maelstrom of coiling muscle and churning water. He could not find air. He dared not let out his breath, but the coils tightened and his lungs compressed in one long whoosh of bubbles. And then there were hands, Dean's hands, propelling and maneuvering and prying him free.
Sam tore off his blindfold as he surfaced, and in the dim orange light from the cabins saw his brother wrestling the river spirit: a hundred miles of narrow looping length, each scale tar-black, with tiny, milky eyes slit in rage and flashing deadly as her mouthful of fangs, and the foot-long razor of a horn that topped her head. Her little arms looked like a very, very old woman's, for all their strength, and she'd tucked them away against her hide. Snapped-off quarrel heads stuck out of her like quills, and the plastic net stretched over her, catching in the ridges of her spine, but she had barely slowed.
“I thought you said the quarrels would do the job!” Dean clung to her like a bullrider, shouting through mouthfuls of rushing water.
“They were blessed, they were supposed to immobilize her!” Sam called back, launching himself back in, hoping to get at her head, immobilize the snapping teeth as they twisted toward soft flesh.
“Must've asked the wrong gods for the blessing,” Dean used his bowie knife like an ice pick, stabbing and pulling and stabbing and pulling, like maybe he could filet her.
Every time her loops started to squeeze, anchoring a limb or grating serrated ridges through Sam's skin, Dean was there. Impossible to tell if the knife hurt her or just made her angrier, but Dean swarmed over her body like a parasite. Every time she writhed free of another stab, Dean would be in a new spot, with a new bloodless wound open in her hide.
Sam worked on the master plan: he crawled her length twice over to got a hold around the base of her skull, and then a grip on her horn. “Cut it off!” He shouted, even as they both went under again. And somehow before the next shuddering thrash of tail Dean was there with the knife, sawing at the bone like a demented surgeon while Sam shoved a broken quarrel shaft into her mouth, nearly losing a hand in the process.
The sound she made as Dean hacked away at her was like a band-saw. A terrible, thin keening that rose up into the pines like a siren's wail. But Sam felt her weakening, and when Dean was done Sam dropped his grip on the muzzle for a new position: holding the old crone arms splayed out from her body.
“In the heart, straight in the heart!” he hollered. And Dean's knife was gone, and he had the ivory horn held in both hands instead. He plunged it deep into the glossy scales of her chest. Sam, clinging, felt her spine seized against him and the white limbs curled in on themselves like an insect's.
Dean backpedaled in the current, and the black length of her sank quickly away. Sam found Dean's wrist and pulled him back in from the dropping noose of her coils.
They crawled out onto the bank a long way downstream. In the forest preserve, judging by the lack of housing, and the sandstone hoodoos staked tall in the water around them, each looming column the size of a small building.
Dean rolled onto his back and lay panting for a good long while, holding a spot under his ribs. In the dark, Sam couldn't see anything except the faint reflection of starlight off the water, but he suspected Dean had got a sizable chunk torn out of him. By her fangs or the spiny ridge, whichever. He leaned over, pressed a hand down on cold flesh and got a grunt for his troubles.
“Lemme catch my breath before you start poking me.”
“We'll have to walk back along the river, think you can make it?”
“Sure thing, Sammy.” said Dean. “Just lemme catch my breath.”
Sam lay back on his side, propped his head on his elbow. He felt half-drowned, like he'd never get the water out of his lungs or ears, but he would be alright. A few bruises, a hundred cuts on his hands and arms and a deep ache in his right knee that would have him limping all the way back. He still had his hand though, and he'd stuck it right in her craw. Definitely, he'd be alright.
“Thanks for not shooting me when I was blindfolded,” he said to Dean's mostly-invisible profile.
“Yeah, well thanks for telling me the truth about the lake monster this time,” came the response.
It wasn't funny. Sam looked away, rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky, half-blocked by the blackness of hundreds of wavering treetops.
“I don't want to lie to you anymore,” he told the trees.
No one answered for a long time. Eventually, Dean sat up, groaning and grunting. “Caught my breath. You ready?”
Sam stood up, and bent to help Dean get to his feet. Dean's arm went over his shoulder and his free hand caught in Sam's shirt. Embracing and staggering like that, Dean shook his head into Sam's shoulder, turned his face and said, close enough that his breath was warm on Sam's throat, “Would you tell the truth about everything, Sammy?”
Sam could feel the hitches of Dean's breathing, the warmth of his palms, the brush of his wet hair. But he couldn't see him, couldn't even make out the whites of his eyes.
“Maybe just the important things,” Sam murmured. “I swear I'll be honest when I can, when it's important.”
“I swear I'll never lie to you again,” said Dean.
In the dark, with both of them blind, both of them invisible, the words - and the hands propping each other up, hot and firm - were all that counted.
--
Sam looked it up later, and they'd fought the river spirit down two miles of the Wisconsin River, then stumbled two miles back up in the dark, blind and helpless as naked moles.
When they got back to the cabin, some of the candles placed so carefully by the hotel staff were still guttering in their wax. By their light, Sam helped Dean up the stairs to the sunken bath in the loft. He poured scalding water in there with him, to help with the mild case of hypothermia. Dean squirmed out of his shirt and shorts after he was already chin deep in water, and then Sam went down to the Impala for the first aid kit.
In the kitchen, on the way back up, he grabbed the wine, thinking maybe it would help if they got drunk for the second time in Sam's life, and probably the millionth time in Dean's.
Dean was pretty much comatose in the bath, the water still running and threatening to overflow the tub. Sam cranked it off, and fished Dean's collar out from the bottom of the tub. The little white scrap was sodden and dingy. Sam set it on the windowsill to dry.
Dean's blood was leaking out into the water, a ghostly wisp against white skin and whiter enamel. For all his limping and moaning, he definitely wasn't going to bleed to death. Sam wiped sweat and water off his brother's face with a towel, and let his hand drop into the water. The warmth was delicious. Irresistable, given the fact that his feet were aching with numbness. Stripping off his shirt, finding that somewhere along the line he'd lost his own collar in the river, he slipped into the tub.
The slosh and rock of the water roused Dean, and Sam rested his knees atop his brother's, slid his feet up and over his hips, and settled in against the wall opposite.
“This is awful romantic,” said Dean. “You bring the roses?”
Sam waved at the wine bottle, uncorked and within easy reach. “Naw. And they didn't have any whiskey in the mini-bar.”
Dean smiled, lop-sided and heavy-lidded, for all intents still functionally asleep. He took a pull of the Italian white. One hand rested on Sam's calf, rubbing fingers against the hair there and releasing tiny air bubbles up through the water.
Sam took some of the wine himself, and rested his head against the lip of the tub for a second. He watched as Dean fought off sleep for a good thirty seconds. And then he fell asleep himself.
--
When he woke up, the water wasn't quite cold, but it was cooler, and Dean was breathing loudly through his nose because his mouth was half underwater. Sam had a brief flash - a local news clip, incestuous homo priests found drowned in suicidal love tryst - and got up out of the tub faster than he would've if the black snake were in there with him.
He woke Dean up gently - a hand on the cheek, a murmur in the ear - and then steadied him as he slipped trying to stand up. The water gurgled down the drain, and the wine was warm on the floor. They made it as far as the bed - huge and white and dry - before they fell asleep again, entwined.
--
It was light out, but it was still early, and the sun had yet to burn through the morning grey. Dean was watching him from across the mattress when he opened his eyes.
He'd seen the face of a man, and that man had been near the sea - east coast, he knew, and rural. He'd seen a maple tree with all its leaves burning red in the middle of summer. He'd seen the man strung up to it in pieces.
Sam said, “I think the devil's in me, Dean.”
And Dean said nothing, but he laid his head down to rest, and reached a hand up under the pillows to grasp Sam's where it lay underneath, hidden.
They spent the day like that, asleep and awake.
--
Bess had the barbecue going, as promised. And Sam apologized and apologized for not calling the night before, for worrying her half to death. She waved it off, praising their bravery and offering wine, or there was beer in the fridge, of course.
Her steaks were flat-out beautiful, and Dean got meat juice down his chin and on his t-shirt. Eventually Bess went inside and dug up an apron for him. Sam festooned him in paper towel. Dean kept asking for more brussel sprouts so he could catapult them off the balcony with the silver cutlery. Sam kicked him under the table every time he did it.
“Just give them to me, then” he hissed, finally, and got a half pound of steamed brussel sprouts poured onto his plate, drowning baked potatoes and steak alike. Bess gave them a look from the kitchen window, and shouted a threat to get Constable Billy to pick up some more on his way over.
When Constable Billy did show up, he brought more wine and grocery store cheesecake. He was probably a dozen years younger than Bess, and twice her height, but he gave Dean a run for his money on sheer volume of sour cream ingested, and listened to Sam's in-progress thesis on corporeality in metaphysical beings, and caught Bess in the kitchen when he thought no one was looking and made her shriek in delight.
For his part, Sam managed to catch Dean leaning on the porch railing as twilight was fading and the mosquitoes were coming out. And if neither of them shrieked when Sam's hand went around Dean's belly from behind, and he pressed his mouth to the line that separated collar from sun-brown skin, it was only from years and years of practice at keeping quiet.
Rating: PG for monsters. Scary ones.
Spoilers: nothing episodic.
A/N: 8737 words makes this my new record. I know, lame, I know. There is a 6000 word first half to this story on my hard drive, but I can't get it to work, you know, artistically, so I am just posting the second part, and hoping the salient points are covered. Maybe one day the first half will work out for me and I'll post it. But until then, you can read Vocation.
DUDE THEY ARE EVACUATING MY BUILDING. SORRY FOR THE CRAP HEADER. GOD.
ETA II: ILLUSTRATED VERSION delighter not only hacks my journal to read my secret poetry, she also makes the most delightful illustrated bookish PDFs that make reading the fic actually enjoyable for the eyes. GO HERE to see the sexiest blindfolded Gentle Sammy you'll ever see.
ETA: This journal has been hacked hard by delighter here to say:
1. subterrain is neither drowned or delimbed yet. Calgary has been flooded, possibly by God, who is no doubt unimpressed with subterrain's premarital intercoursing. She heroically managed to post this (fucking awesome) story mere moments before she was forced from her immersed home and onto a city bus. Then she was going to come chill at my place, where we were going to get high and watch Kung Foo Hustle with my roommates, but then the building management decided to have a heart and put them up in a hotel. She is totally not going into work tomorrow!
2. For serious, this story is a sequel and you need to read Vocation first. I just wanted to make that extra clear so that no one misses out.
3. Pray for subterrain. Pray that she doesn't invoke the wrath of God anymore and that her building doesn't smell like ass for the rest of the summer.
By July, they were back seated in the same booth at the Elvis Lives Diner & Eatery in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. Dean sat fiddling with the same leaky ketchup bottle while Sam kept switching conversational tacks, trying to get him to maybe take this stuff seriously, this time.
“Drowning victims with teeth marks. That doesn't sound familiar to you?” Dean asked, acidic, and peeled off a particularly long, clotted, boogery piece of ketchup from the glass bottle, and flicked it onto Sam's bacon.
“Dude, gross. If you get that crap on me-” Sam couldn't help inspecting his clerical blacks for splatter. He used his teaspoon to airlift the bloody cadaver out. “And it's true this time, I swear. Bess wouldn't lie. She's got a connection at the county who's hiding the bodies from the press.”
Dean made a face at the lawyer's name, sneered a silent Bess, I love you, Bess at his cinnamon bun and fries. “I ran my ass off last time, gathering intel on your made-up lake monster. Not a word of thanks. And it was all a freaking lie to start with. Now you're telling me-”
“That there actually is a lake monster. Yes.” Sam tried for honest and forthright in his tone, even as he knew he was achieving priggish, and only priggish.
“You are so kidding, you are just fucking with me. Why did I even agree to come here, again?” Dean leaned back in his seat, arms spread wide across the purple vinyl. He bobbled his head like an angry duck, “Oh yeah, because you lied to me again. Jackass.”
Sam shook his head, reached a hand across the table, “You know you wouldn't have-” he was cut off by the appearance of the server - and holy hannah, it was the same kid with the wide, sly mouth and the ironic flannel. Although now she was all tanned and tank-topped, and looked half as grim as she had in October, with her belly-button sticking out over the coffee cups. It was hard to take anyone with an outtie seriously.
“Fathers,” she said - Bess had called her the Sellers kid, done good work on her mother's divorce, supposedly. “I know Debbie's got your table, but I just had to come by and say that I am really glad to see that you're still together.” She looked from Sam to Dean, “It must've been a rough year for you both. But the Lord doth provide.”
As she vanished into the chaos of the packed restaurant, Dean looked blank.“Uh, what did she say? What was that?”
“I dunno,” Sam lied, shamelessly. He'd had a brief conversation with her before, right after Dean walked out the last time they were here. He kind of hated the Sellers kid, as much as he could hate anyone who hadn't directly tried to harm him or his brother. Meaning, he'd prayed every night for her for all of November last year. And now he'd have to start again. Her skinny brown arms and little pout of a belly got stuck in his vision, and he squinted at Dean, distracted.
“All I'm sayin',” Dean seized his opportunity, “Is that you are a lying, nasty little bitch. Alright? Let's just acknowledge that before we move on.”
“I'm not acknowledging that-”
“Just say it, and I'll be happy. Just say, nasty little cankersore bitch, who lies like a dead dog, and we can go hunt your lake monster.”
“No, and you aren't even allowed to say it. That's so juvenile, I am not-”
“I, Padre Sam Winchester,” prompted Dean, emphasizing his intent with raised eyebrows.
Sam folded his arms and leaned back.
“Am a nasty, lying, cankersore of a bitch,” Dean had no problem with swearing in his collar anymore, almost like the second they'd stepped past the Blue Earth incorporation line someone had lifted a jinx.
Sam, however, felt as ostentatious as a painted pony with a hooker on top, wearing his collar in a packed diner in a tourist town, and openly arguing with his brother, also collared. And so he kept his mouth sealed tight. One long line, molars grinding.
“Who is a liar,” finished Dean, and waved as if for a liturgical response. “You can say it in Latin, if it makes you feel better.”
“No, it wouldn't make me feel better,” Sam snapped.
“You're such a baby,” Dean informed him. “FYI: you haven't actually apologized, yet, either.”
“For what?” Sam's hands twitched off the table in exasperation. He shoved a forkful of waffle into his mouth.
Dean rolled his eyes to the heavens, and was about to speak to that when he got a particular look in his eye, and a grin snaked upwards to his ears.
Sam felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see a glossy-lipped teenage girl from the next booth over, perched with her hands clasped together, kneeling on her own vinyl seat to face him. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. Her five or six friends, hunched and writhing in the booth with her, were silent only by way of their inability to breathe. One collapsed across the first one's calves even as Sam watched, her face frozen in a grin to match Dean's.
The girl, who was maybe fourteen, maybe twenty, peeked at him through her half-closed lashes, and resumed her solemn face.“It's been three months since my last confession.”
Sam looked back to Dean, who was shovelling food into his mouth and smirking through his breakfast with glee. He kept nodding encouragingly. At the both of them, Sam guessed.
“I'm sorry, this isn't exactly the place-” Sam half-muttered, casting a glance around the absolutely swamped conglomeration of formica tabletops and chipped linoleum and 50s kitsch that made up the diner.
“Sure it is,” put in Dean.
She took that as encouragement, “I have been lusting,” she declared. “I have been lusting and lusting and lusting.” She cracked a dark-rimmed eye to catch his reaction.
One of her friends moaned long and loud, which quickly elevated to a howl, and the nearer tables in the restaurant went silent to turn and look.
Sam twisted immediately in his seat and hunched his shoulders, glaring at Dean, whose face was painfully predictable: eyebrows up to the hairline, teeth and mashed food highly visible in the gaping maw. He waved his fork helplessly. “Lusting isn't a sin on its own, Sammy, you gonna tell her what is?”
As the laughter rose behind Sam's back to match the hot rush under his skin, Dean nearly choked himself snickering. Then there was the sudden smell of coconut and tanning oil, and the brush of long hair, and the girl had planted a kiss on his cheek, and the entire herd of them was away, halfway across the street by the time he realized it.
Sam watched them go, doubled-up in laughter and cramping traffic, a half dozen of them in white, grass green and peach-coloured scraps. They were all skin and teeth, bright hair falling over their eyes and writhing drunkenly around their shoulders. Long long legs like newborn foals and just as unsteady on them, skipping across asphalt in their half-hearted heels.
Dean had stopped laughing, was watching him stare. “Dude, you can not oggle those girls.”
“I'm not-” Sam stopped, tried again by tearing his gaze away, “I am not oggling anyone.”
“Sammy, I have never, in my entire life, seen you oggle a woman. Do not start with that one.”
“I- I am completely, seriously, horrified, I am so not-”
“You are leching on pre-teens. And you're embarrassing me. Please stop.'' Dean grimaced a tight little warning, and turned back to his fries.
Sam glared back at him, but couldn't help sending one last glance out the window.
Then Dean pitched a ketchup-drenched fry straight at his chest. It splattered like a bullet wound, and Sam raised his hands in disgust. “What are we, four?”
“You wish. At least then it wouldn't be illegal. Much less a sin in the eyes of God. You're gonna get us arrested, you know that?” Dean shook his head, obviously and seriously pissed.
Sam wiped at himself with a napkin, and went back to his breakfast, eyes down.
--
They paid the bill and walked the dozen blocks to go meet Bess. Straight down the main thoroughfare of upside-down-White-House theme parks and about eight hundred water parks, each one bigger and gaudier than the last.
It was like they'd gone through a time warp. Everything was exactly the same as it had been ten months ago, except crawling with crowds. Before, Wisconsin Dells had been a ghost town, a resort without tourists, a freezing green swamp of silent citizens. Closed-up shops and trickling water slides.
Now, Sam found that walking through the clumps of families as they unfolded crumpled brochures and town maps and counted out entrance coupons, a path was almost cleared for them. Yeah, he was sticky with sweat underneath all the black, but the people would take a look at them, and the crowds would part. Renegade kids yelling and squirting water guns got hooped in by the neck. Nervous or pleasant or guilty smiles manifested. Teenagers eyeballed them. It wasn't as weird as Utah, but it was still a little awkward. Sam cast a sideways glance at Dean, who was meeting all the smiles - the pretty ones, at least - with a beatific grin of his own.
They met Bess down by the river, sitting with her suit jacket and pumps in the grass beside her, her legs dangling in the water. The water moved by with a deceptive, green calm: calm only because it was deep, and deep because it was big, and fast, and ancient.
She stood up to greet them. Over forty, she was skinny as a twelve-year-old, all pointed angles and tan skin under her blouse. She squeezed Sam and turned to face Dean and shake his hand. She glanced him over, face all sharp edges and fine lines. But Dean shook her hand politely as Sam introduced them, eyes flicking from face to face, nervous.
“Sam told me you're a big jerk-off,” Bess said to Dean, smiling.
Dean took a moment to send Sam a glance. “Yeah?” he said. “And you're the double-suicide, right? Tried to drown and hang yourself. Same night, hoo-dog. That's dedication.” Dean gave an appreciative whistle, turning pleasantly from one of them to the other, ignoring Sam's shocked embarrassment.
“Exactly,” said Bess. She practically sounded pleased that he'd remembered. “So good to finally meet you. I really appreciate you kids coming up to see me again. Because even I do not fucking believe this. Pardon my french, Fathers.” She looked at the river and a passing boat tour loaded heavy and low with tourists, undoubtedly trolling up to see the water-carved hoodoos and dells that gave the town its name.
“Yeah, either do I,” Dean muttered.
Sam smacked his arm while Bess was still looking away. He said, “Last year we heard rumours about this kind of thing - drownings and maulings. But we couldn't find anything in the morgue or the papers, so we figured someone had seen a few too many alligator movies.”
“It's still not in the papers,” said Bess, “I don't know how the tourism board is keeping it quiet, but they are. There's six bodies in the county morgue from last week, missing legs and leaking organs. Damn disgusting to look at. I do divorces for a reason. Things like that give me the creeps.”
“Gotcha,” Sam said, ignoring Dean's superior look. “We'll start there.”
“No need,” said Bess, bending to fish around in her briefcase. She produced a manila envelope. “I got you pictures. And I've been keeping track of where they've been finding these things. Actually, Constable Billy's been keeping track for me,” she gave a little smile and rolled her eyes. “He's such a gentleman, knew I was interested. There's a map in there with all twenty-three of them for you.”
“Gosh,” said Sam, “thanks.”
“I do what I can. You boys come over for supper tonight, alright?” Bess picked up her shoes and jacket. “I gotta get back to meet a client, but we'll barbecue up some good Wisconsin beef, see you fed proper.”
She gave Sam a peck on the cheek and started hiking up the grass embankment back to the street.
Dean watched her go, and it was Sam's turn to hiss, “Pervert,” and give him a smack. “She's old enough to be our mother, don't you oggle her.”
“Man, that kind of age isn't something to be proud of in a girlfriend,” said Dean. Sam hit him harder, and then they headed back to the Impala to start picking through the envelope.
--
Basically, the killing pattern boiled down to 'in the river.' And Sam and Dean spent the greater part of their afternoon driving around like tourists, looking at the various places where the bodies were found, which were marked on Constable Billy's map with little pink hearts. The handwriting at the top said, “For my special girl,” like it was some kind of valentine.
“Guess Ms. Wilcox-Carver is heading pretty quick toward being Ms. Wilcox-Constable-Billy,” Dean mused.
“It's just Wilcox now, alright?” said Sam, “Have some respect.”
“Yeah, I bet his holiness over in the Vatican would totally respect you having relations with a divorced divorce lawyer, Brother Sammy.”
“They aren't relations, Dean. She's a friend.”
“Oh yeah? You call Pastor Jim twice a month, too?” Dean made at the road ahead, packed with tent-trailers and canoes, “How 'bout Bobby? You call him to cry after I tell you to stop jerking off in the shower, too?”
Sam stayed silent, knowing he had no decent answer. He'd called her probably a dozen times in the past ten months, just to check up, see how she was doing. She'd always sounded pleasantly surprised, a little lonely, ready to say nice things and invite him and his brother back to visit. It was like having some sort of home again, especially now that Dean had screwed things up with Pastor Jim so nicely, not that he'd admit it.
But mostly he'd kept calling her because he wanted to hear her, alive and healthy after what had happened last fall.
He'd spent months tracking down her nutjob of an estranged son. Pinning him down in Salt Lake City, and talking to him, and almost blowing off his own head 'cause the kid had freaky fucking mind control powers, and then killing him. Not killing him in the biblical sense, but definitely blocking his powers - somehow, in a way that still didn't make any sense - long enough for one of the kid's brainwashed cult slaves to get a hold of herself and nail the bastard to the wall with a load of buckshot and a butter knife.
He'd lied, or at least mis-communicated, telling Dean he was spending the month in Utah to see if the Mormons knew much about yellow-eyed demons. He'd strongly implied he might do some proselytizing while he was at it.
And so Dean had happily spent the month in Las Vegas.
And when they met back up in June, Sam didn't comment on the new hubcaps on the Impala or the rolled-up balls of cash in the glove compartment, and Dean didn't ask about the three hours of solid prayer every night. Neither of them really wanted to know, so instead they took some of Dean's money and spent three days at the Grand Canyon, climbing up and down the cliffs on truculent donkeys named Loco and One-eye.
And after that Sam called Bess, and told her that the reason she'd tried to kill herself was because her son - her twenty-three-year-old son who she hadn't even known about, because his twin had been stillborn and her husband had got rid of the other one faster than quick, the asshole - had reached out across 1400 miles of interstate and told her to kill herself with his goddamned mind.
She'd taken it fine, like maybe she wasn't so surprised. Like she'd already had the kid giving her psychic orders, she had known on some level.
So then, in the same conversation she'd asked if maybe they'd stop by sometime this summer, come check out some strange happenings. And Sam had agreed, of course. And told Dean it was a poltergeist, because he'd already used up the lake monster story last year to get him up there after he'd had the vision of her killing herself.
Dean seriously didn't like the lake monster bit, though, now or then. This afternoon, they'd pretty much exhausted the map without so much as a belly scale by way of evidence. Just dead trees and stinking mud and the odd scrap of police tape. Dean was making faces and queueing up sighs that pretty much cemented in the fact that he thought Sam was lying again.
Sam was always lying - about the visions Dean didn't ever hear about, about the time he spent on his own little hunts; about how he was tracking down the people he saw and either saving them or attending their funerals; about the fact that he had the unholy devil in his head, telling him the future - but this time he was being honest. About the lake monster, anyway.
Around four they ran out of pink heart stickers, and Dean pulled the Impala into the parking lot of one of the bigger water parks. “You know what, Sammy?” he said, snatching the polaroids out of Sam's hands and stuffing them all in the glove box. “I want some fucking cotton candy.”
Dean got out and slammed the door, waving at Sam to follow him up to the entrance gate. Sam sat in the car, stubborn, for the thirty seconds before the sun started to broil him, and then he got out and followed.
“Hey,” Dean said to the kid at the kiosk, “How's it going today?”
She was another teenager in a tank top, keys rubberbanded to her wrist and hair pulled back in a pony tail. Sam couldn't help but notice the strings of the floral bikini top under her shirt. He looked away. “Do you -” she frowned at their collars, their full three layers of baking black. “Do you guys want a day pass?”
“Actually,” said Dean, “I'm looking for my kid sister. She's fifteen, and grounded, and hanging around with some bad-ass college guy.”
“Oh,” said the girl, eyes drifting to the three hundred fifteen year-old girls identical to herself milling around the bases of the water slides. Sam followed her gaze: all of them were wearing bits of triangular polka-dotted lycra, too. Little walking skeletons with tits and lollipop heads.
“I don't suppose you could just let us just wander in, look around for her.”
The girl's eyebrows raised as her training video kicked in. “Brian would fire me if they caught you.”
“Look,” said Dean, “What's your name?”
“Sara,” said Sara.
“Look, Sara. Do we look like we're about to go swimming?” asked Dean. She gave her head a half-hearted shake. “Do we look like con-men to you?”
A blush rose through her cheeks, and she shook her head. “I can't give you the bracelets, though” she said.
“That's alright. You're a good kid.” Dean said, and he winked at her as she buzzed them through the turnstile.
Dean made his way straight for a vendor with a striped umbrella and a whirring tin of neon candy, sacks of pink and blue and both hanging around like alien cocoons. He took one look at the man running the stand - short and shirtless and wearing a red cowboy hat - and didn't even bother chatting him up, just paid for the mix bag and turned away.
“We should wander around a bit,” he said, stuffing a handful of blue floss into his mouth.
Sam shook his head, checked his phone for the time. “Are you kidding me? We have work to do, Dean.”
“Yeah, and we're making real good progress, too.” Dean started walking toward the wave pool, “I'm taking a break.”
Sam stood gaping for all of two seconds, then pressed his lips together and followed. His previous estimate was immediately debunked: there were at least three hundred thousand teenage girls wandering around in bathing suits. And Dean's course seemed to be aimed at a meandering perusal of every long line-up where they stood with hands on hips, gossipping and screeching through the slow progression up wooden stairs.
Sam's face was burning in minutes, and he fished in his pocket for cash. “Dean, we're gonna die of heatstroke out here,” he said over his brother's shoulder. “Can we at least buy some hats?”
“What, you mean those floppy straw things?” Dean pointed at a passing mother, and guffawed. The lady looked over at them, and Sam smacked his hand out of the air, mortified.
“You know, you're on the right track,” Dean regained his somber face, “Let's go buy some swim trunks.”
“What?” Sam's mouth fell open. It had been like this at the Grand Canyon, too. First they were just there at the rest stop and then suddenly Dean was shelling out cash for the donkey rentals and asking about sleeping arrangements at the bottom and slapping his ass when he was getting into the saddle.
Dean patted him on the shoulder, “Don't worry, baby. Sugar daddy will buy you a speedo with his blood money.”
Two minutes later Sam stood with his arms crossed in the men's section of the hula-themed swimsuit kiosk, watching Dean model a pair of silver-and-grey board shorts. “Not bad for all the cinnamon buns, huh?” asked Dean, running a hand over his abs and checking out his ass in the mirror.
Sam eyed his brother's tan lines - demarcating hand from wrist and throat from collarbone. The rest of him was white as a whale. “You look like you just got off the colony. You leave your bonnet in the car, Belinda?”
“Now it's that type of religious intolerance that gives us a bad name, Sammy,” said Dean, turning to browse through the racks again. He tossed over a hanger, and Sam caught it by reflex, holding it up to inspect the tiny yellow thong.
He heard giggling. He looked over his shoulder, and there was a trio of barefoot girls with wet hair and goosebumps huddled in the sunglasses racks. One was blonde and he was pretty damn sure it was the same one from before. She gazed boldly back at him, like she could probably set his skin on fire with her look.
Sam turned and snapped the thing back at Dean, then grabbed a pair of decently sized trunks off the rack and hid in the change room until Dean banged on the door, hollering “This ain't no motel bathroom, buddy.”
He emerged wearing the trunks and his black button-down, the rest of his clothing bundled in his fist, white collar tucked carefully into one polished shoe. Dean gave him a long look. “Seriously?” he asked. “Seriously you're gonna wear that shirt?”
“Yeah,” said Sam, trying to be casual.
“What, are you afraid people will treat you like a normal person if they don't know how morally superior you are?” The words stung, and Dean seemed almost contrite when Sam cast a glance.
“No, I just-” Sam didn't just anything. He brushed by Dean toward the counter. “You gonna buy these or what?”
“Not until you take off that shirt. C'mon, Sammy. It's ridiculous. No one actually expects you to look as good as me. Don't be modest.”
Dean's voice was loud enough to attract curious looks, and Sam took the two steps back to his brother.
“Fine.” He started unbuttoning the top, deliberate and slow, staring straight down at Dean's cocky face. Dean smirked, and looked away, then back, obviously uncomfortable with the aggression. Obviously enjoying it.
Sam's chest was just white - and just as hard, thank you - as Dean's. But when he shrugged out of the shirt it was the tattoo that had Dean hooting and hopping. Sam tried in vain to stop from grinning, but Dean punched him hard enough to hurt in his excitement, and it was too ridiculous to not laugh.
“Shit, that is so cool!” Dean practically gave Sam's bicep a snake bite, twisting it for a better look at the intricate black linework. “That is one gothic mother of a cross, Sammy. You look like a freaking Hell's Angel with that bad boy.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Sam tried to make Pastor Jim's trademark expression of long-suffering patience, but failed when Dean pulled back to look at him.
“When did you get this?” Dean looked genuinely curious.
“Uh,” said Sam, “Salt Lake City last month.”
“You went and got inked without me?” Sam could see Dean trying to make light of it, playing up the hurt and pretending it was all fake, but there was still a twinge of honest whine in his voice, and Sam felt so terrible he couldn't even lie.
“I was drunk,” he said.
And that ended the conversation. Dean's options were fall over dead of shock, or screech like a woman, or say nothing, and he opted to say nothing, which left Sam feeling like a delinquent teenager.
“I was having a tough time,” he tried to say to Dean's turned shoulder.
“Yeah, I bet.”
“It was - remember that time you called?” Dean had left a voicemail after four days apart, half-saccharine with liquor, saying, I'm comin' to pick you up, I can't stand any more of this strippers and gamblin' shit, we need to be out on the road again. I'll be there in five hours. And Sam had had to call back, say No, don't come. I'm not ready. Just another week. And no more explanation than that. What else could he say? Dean had been halfway through Utah. Had turned around. Gone back to his room at the casino. After that it was a month till Sam found Bess' kid in a basement suite, and neither of them had called once. Eventually, Sam caught a bus, and Dean picked him up in Beaver, Utah. And the subject never came up again.
Which was why even now, Dean had nothing to say on the topic. They paid in silence, and went to shove quarters into a pair of lockers to store their clothes, phones and wallets. Dean cast a few sullen looks at the tattoo, which Sam pretended not to notice.
But once Dean had perused a map of the park, he was all business, practically leashing and dragging Sam toward the coolest-looking slide.
“We have dinner plans with Bess, remember?” Sam said, halfway up the stairs to The Plunge, which boasted a thirteen story drop straight down a pair of aquamarine slides.
“Yeah, yeah. We'll just do two or three, alright? An hour. Give me an hour, then we'll get back to your lake monster, alright?”
At the top, a college kid barely any younger than Sam took a look at their bare wrists and started to say something about day passes.
“No, no,” said Dean, putting a hand on the guy's shoulder and pressing Sam to take his place at the rushing mouth of the slide. “We're with Brian,” Dean gave a toothy smile.
Sam was fairly certain he was going to die, sitting at the top of that slide and looking out over miles and miles of technicolour water park, a carpet of distant trees and even the river, winding like a gray-green snake alongside. Thirteen storeys straight down, and only the water's suction to prevent a free fall. He knew he'd hit the concrete and splatter like an egg.
“Yeah, you radio him and check us out,” agreed Dean, and gave Sam a good push that had him screaming out the Lord's name like an orgasmic virgin as he fell.
In the rush of water that caught him at the bottom, Sam got out of the chute just in time to pull Dean by his armpits out of the neighbouring twin slide. “C'mon, Dean,” he said, pointing and grinning despite himself, “Let's do the Black Anaconda.”
They made it down four more slides - end of the afternoon on a Wednesday, the line-ups weren't that bad - before they heard people start screaming.
Standing soaking wet at the bottom of the Jungle Rumble, Sam smacked water out of his ear and stared while red-shirted park staff ushered groups of sobbing girls and blank-eyed boys toward the exit. Some people were running, holding toddlers and shouting the names of vagrant children.
Exchanging a grim glance, Sam and Dean started in the direction that people were stumbling away from. A crowd of silent tourists and park staff had gathered at one of the entry points for the Endless River. The only person left in the water was a very still, very wide-eyed middle-aged man floating with his orange rubber donut under his armpits. A cloud of darkening blood obscured the fact that most of his bottom half and his left hand were torn off and missing. The orange tire bumped gently against the concrete side of the channel, held in place by a pale-faced red-shirt, listening vacantly to the chatter on his radio.
Dean made his way closer to the edge of the channel, scanning the water, and Sam followed him.
“It's a loop. On the map it joins with the river, people float along the edge, then back into the park” Dean muttered.
“You think it just snagged him there?”
“That or it just swam right in. Either way, it can't be that far off.” Dean made the business face. “I think I saw a tackle shop back on the main drag. You ask around, see if anyone actually saw the sucker. I wanna know if we're going after Jaws or the little mermaid or what.”
Sam nodded, “Don't go after it without me.”
Dean nodded and stepped away. Sam caught his arm at the elbow, spun him back. “I'm serious. I don't want to be pulling you around in a wagon for the rest of our natural lives, alright?”
“You got it,” Dean gave a tight little smile, and disappeared into the crowd.
Sam turned, perused the empty faces of the witnesses. It wasn't an effort to look worried and sympathetic, he'd had the grief counselling bit down since they'd done the hospital visits at Seminary. He looked around, picking out the genuinely traumatized from the gawkers, and recognized the girl from the diner, streaky-faced and alone. She had her arms around her knees, her entire body folded in on itself as she stared at the dead man.
She barely looked up as soon as he came close, but turned her face back to the body without seeming to recognize him. She was swaying slightly, perched on her toes, one hand pressed to the concrete to prop herself up.
Sam squatted down beside her, elbows on his knees. “Did you see it happen?” he asked.
She didn't answer, just brought her chin down on her knee, and then raised it to nod once, sharp. Her eyes didn't blink. “He was in front of me in the stream, I didn't even notice him till he started screaming.”
“What did it?”
“I dunno,” she grimaced, and her breath hitched. “It was like a long black shape. Really, really long. I felt it go past me with - with his legs.”
Sam let her take a moment. She'd moved her gaze to the concrete in front of her, holding herself like she needed to keep track of all her limbs. Eventually, she looked up to peer at him. “I saw you earlier at the diner, right?”
“Yeah, that was me,” Sam nodded, let out a brief smile, swallowed it.
“I'm sorry I embarrassed you,” she said to the ground. “Father, I want to tell you - that thing, it was evil. It wasn't like an animal, I could feel-” she choked out a laugh, and tossed her straggles of hair off her face. Looked up at him, anxious. “It saw me, and it was like the Devil saw me and said not yet, but soon.”
Sam put a hand on her shoulder. He could overhear the radios buzzing: the paramedics would be here soon, the cops and the local press. “Come on,” he said, “You should go home.”
--
He called Dean after he'd gotten the girl into a cab, sent her back to her parents' condo. He was standing at his locker, trying to detangle his shirt sleeves as he dialed. Dean answered with a grunt, and Sam said, “You remember the research you did last year? The uh, the ancient snake that carved the river, and all the little snakes that fled from its coming? I think we have ourselves a little snake.”
“How little?” said Dean, “Should I be heading to the pet emporium to pick up a guppie net?”
“Like, thirty foot boa constrictor little. Except if I'm right-”
“Which is seldom,” put in Dean.
“Except I am right, so it's not a snake, it's a water spirit.”
“Awesome,” Dean drawled. “So we can write off both salting and burning.”
“There are ways to kill it. I just need to read up some more. I'll meet you at the hotel.” Sam hung up, and headed for the change rooms.
The hotel was actually a palatial jacuzzi-steam-showered honeymoon cabin. A barbeque on the flagstone patio with stone steps leading down to the river, a dishwasher in the kitchen, granite countertops, crown moulding, for the love of everything holy. It was by far the nicest place they'd ever stayed in - including Seminary school, obviously, with its cardboard-and-toothpick bunk beds - because the bed was bigger than God, and it didn't matter that there was only the one. Sam could've slept widthwise across the foot of it, if he'd wanted to.
And the only reason they'd even got a room in high season was because Dean had made special friends with the desk clerk last year. Sam didn't ask questions but the girl - Amanda - had recognized him immediately, and perused her screen and smiled a thin smile. “I think I have something available,” she said, “The same suite as last time, Fathers?”
This time, when Sam came through the lobby wearing his black shirt untucked and mis-buttoned over his new board shorts, feet dirty and bare, Amanda smiled like a shark. “Will you be requiring a laundry service, Father?”
Sam shook his head, managed a half a smile. “Has Dean made it in yet?” he asked.
“Afraid not.” The phone rang, and she bent to answer it, still smirking.
He jogged through the garden paths to their little suite, shoes in one hand, blacks in the other. His phone rang as he was fumbling through the door.
“Yeah?” he said.
“I just passed a sporting goods store. You think we're gonna need anything specific? Like, blessed arrows or silver or iron or oak or what?”
“Dean, I haven't even-” Sam paused. On the island in the kitchen there was a bottle of wine chilling with some glasses, and a bouquet of white roses in a vase. “Dude, you have a hot date tonight, or something?”
“What?” Dean was obviously having trouble dodging pedestrians: he was muttering curses under his breath.
“You forgot to cancel your romantic get-away package. There's like, Pinot Gris on the counter. And candles. They left candles up the stairs to the bedroom. Burning.”
“What? You think I'd order that? I don't need candles to get where I'm going.”
“Someone must have screwed up.” Sam dropped his clothes by the door, and went over to open his computer.
“Yeah, there's probably some baby-face groom next door consoling his wife right now. I'd say you should go comfort her yourself, but we're on the clock, here. I'm in the parking lot: do we need arrows, or buckshot, or a fucking magic envelope opener or what?”
“Give me a minute,” Sam said, checking out his bookmarks, typing in a query. “I'd say, yeah. We'll use the crossbow, get us some iron-tipped quarrels - or any pure metal, none of that composite plastic crap. Bless them in the car on the way over, alright?”
“Alright.” Dean hung up.
Sam kept poking around on the wireless, reading up about the Missouri river snake that flooded the plains out from under the Lakota and got turned to stone for her troubles. Only via the intervention of lightning-throwing thunderbirds, however. There were some variations on the theme, most detailing the horrible magic of the creatures - polluters of the soil, messengers from the underworld, devourers of men - and not so much the best way to kill them, sans divine intervention.
Dean came back with a twenty-foot polymer fish net and three dozen holy iron quarrels.
“I think we can summon her,” said Sam, as Dean unwrapped the crossbow, started winding it up for stringing. “They have an affinity for blind people, because they're sightless themselves.”
“You volunteering to poke out your eyes?”
“No, but it's almost dark, and I'll put on a blindfold.”
“And that'll work. It'll just show up to bitch about how it sucks not seeing the people you eat.” Dean said, flat.
“Yeah, it's symbolic.”
Eventually, Dean stopped bitching long enough for Sam to tear up a dish towel and step out onto the patio. Dusk was already fading into blue night, and the air was still except for the distant sound of heavy bass and drunken conversations echoing downriver from other cabins.
Both of them had found their collars and re-attached them for the task at hand, and Sam bent his head forward so Dean could tie the blindfold securely. “Don't you wanna peek?” he asked.
“She'd be able to tell. I have to be completely helpless.”
“I guess it helps that you're a virgin then, huh,” said Dean, and divested Sam of his wickedly-edged bowie knife even as he slapped his ass. Sam had nothing to say to that.
They followed the stone steps down to the river, Sam knowing by Dean's breathing and the pressure of the palm on his arm where each step would be, how far down to reach with his bare toes. When they reached the water, it was cool and muddy, and Dean released him. Sam waded in to his thighs before pausing.
Dean's sounds - his steps, his breaths as he took up position - were quickly muffled by the rush of the water, and Sam was alone in the sightless black river. He moved forward until he was up to his chest.
Then he waited, barely shifting position as his feet sank in the mud and the water seemed to grow colder around him. The skin of his neck and scalp rose in prickles, and still he waited. A fallen branch snagged against his arm, and he nearly fell backwards, splashing. But the leaves brushed his outstretched hand and floated past, and he waited some more.
When she did come, she was smooth glass against his fingertips. And then a steel noose around his knees, a constriction like cement around his chest. He heard the rasp of her breath and the splash as she raised her head above water to look at him with her sightless eyes, smell his fear and helplessness. He felt her grasp his shoulders with her two front legs, clawed, bony fingers pressing into his flesh. She nudged his cheek with her rhinoceros horn.
It was like the girl had said, she was a devil, and Sam felt her malevolent heart even as she paused with her alligator teeth clicking in his ear.
The first crossbow bolt glanced off her hide with a whine. The second lodged somewhere close to Sam's throat, and she thrashed, pulling him under with her.
Sam spent long moments in the black maelstrom of coiling muscle and churning water. He could not find air. He dared not let out his breath, but the coils tightened and his lungs compressed in one long whoosh of bubbles. And then there were hands, Dean's hands, propelling and maneuvering and prying him free.
Sam tore off his blindfold as he surfaced, and in the dim orange light from the cabins saw his brother wrestling the river spirit: a hundred miles of narrow looping length, each scale tar-black, with tiny, milky eyes slit in rage and flashing deadly as her mouthful of fangs, and the foot-long razor of a horn that topped her head. Her little arms looked like a very, very old woman's, for all their strength, and she'd tucked them away against her hide. Snapped-off quarrel heads stuck out of her like quills, and the plastic net stretched over her, catching in the ridges of her spine, but she had barely slowed.
“I thought you said the quarrels would do the job!” Dean clung to her like a bullrider, shouting through mouthfuls of rushing water.
“They were blessed, they were supposed to immobilize her!” Sam called back, launching himself back in, hoping to get at her head, immobilize the snapping teeth as they twisted toward soft flesh.
“Must've asked the wrong gods for the blessing,” Dean used his bowie knife like an ice pick, stabbing and pulling and stabbing and pulling, like maybe he could filet her.
Every time her loops started to squeeze, anchoring a limb or grating serrated ridges through Sam's skin, Dean was there. Impossible to tell if the knife hurt her or just made her angrier, but Dean swarmed over her body like a parasite. Every time she writhed free of another stab, Dean would be in a new spot, with a new bloodless wound open in her hide.
Sam worked on the master plan: he crawled her length twice over to got a hold around the base of her skull, and then a grip on her horn. “Cut it off!” He shouted, even as they both went under again. And somehow before the next shuddering thrash of tail Dean was there with the knife, sawing at the bone like a demented surgeon while Sam shoved a broken quarrel shaft into her mouth, nearly losing a hand in the process.
The sound she made as Dean hacked away at her was like a band-saw. A terrible, thin keening that rose up into the pines like a siren's wail. But Sam felt her weakening, and when Dean was done Sam dropped his grip on the muzzle for a new position: holding the old crone arms splayed out from her body.
“In the heart, straight in the heart!” he hollered. And Dean's knife was gone, and he had the ivory horn held in both hands instead. He plunged it deep into the glossy scales of her chest. Sam, clinging, felt her spine seized against him and the white limbs curled in on themselves like an insect's.
Dean backpedaled in the current, and the black length of her sank quickly away. Sam found Dean's wrist and pulled him back in from the dropping noose of her coils.
They crawled out onto the bank a long way downstream. In the forest preserve, judging by the lack of housing, and the sandstone hoodoos staked tall in the water around them, each looming column the size of a small building.
Dean rolled onto his back and lay panting for a good long while, holding a spot under his ribs. In the dark, Sam couldn't see anything except the faint reflection of starlight off the water, but he suspected Dean had got a sizable chunk torn out of him. By her fangs or the spiny ridge, whichever. He leaned over, pressed a hand down on cold flesh and got a grunt for his troubles.
“Lemme catch my breath before you start poking me.”
“We'll have to walk back along the river, think you can make it?”
“Sure thing, Sammy.” said Dean. “Just lemme catch my breath.”
Sam lay back on his side, propped his head on his elbow. He felt half-drowned, like he'd never get the water out of his lungs or ears, but he would be alright. A few bruises, a hundred cuts on his hands and arms and a deep ache in his right knee that would have him limping all the way back. He still had his hand though, and he'd stuck it right in her craw. Definitely, he'd be alright.
“Thanks for not shooting me when I was blindfolded,” he said to Dean's mostly-invisible profile.
“Yeah, well thanks for telling me the truth about the lake monster this time,” came the response.
It wasn't funny. Sam looked away, rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky, half-blocked by the blackness of hundreds of wavering treetops.
“I don't want to lie to you anymore,” he told the trees.
No one answered for a long time. Eventually, Dean sat up, groaning and grunting. “Caught my breath. You ready?”
Sam stood up, and bent to help Dean get to his feet. Dean's arm went over his shoulder and his free hand caught in Sam's shirt. Embracing and staggering like that, Dean shook his head into Sam's shoulder, turned his face and said, close enough that his breath was warm on Sam's throat, “Would you tell the truth about everything, Sammy?”
Sam could feel the hitches of Dean's breathing, the warmth of his palms, the brush of his wet hair. But he couldn't see him, couldn't even make out the whites of his eyes.
“Maybe just the important things,” Sam murmured. “I swear I'll be honest when I can, when it's important.”
“I swear I'll never lie to you again,” said Dean.
In the dark, with both of them blind, both of them invisible, the words - and the hands propping each other up, hot and firm - were all that counted.
--
Sam looked it up later, and they'd fought the river spirit down two miles of the Wisconsin River, then stumbled two miles back up in the dark, blind and helpless as naked moles.
When they got back to the cabin, some of the candles placed so carefully by the hotel staff were still guttering in their wax. By their light, Sam helped Dean up the stairs to the sunken bath in the loft. He poured scalding water in there with him, to help with the mild case of hypothermia. Dean squirmed out of his shirt and shorts after he was already chin deep in water, and then Sam went down to the Impala for the first aid kit.
In the kitchen, on the way back up, he grabbed the wine, thinking maybe it would help if they got drunk for the second time in Sam's life, and probably the millionth time in Dean's.
Dean was pretty much comatose in the bath, the water still running and threatening to overflow the tub. Sam cranked it off, and fished Dean's collar out from the bottom of the tub. The little white scrap was sodden and dingy. Sam set it on the windowsill to dry.
Dean's blood was leaking out into the water, a ghostly wisp against white skin and whiter enamel. For all his limping and moaning, he definitely wasn't going to bleed to death. Sam wiped sweat and water off his brother's face with a towel, and let his hand drop into the water. The warmth was delicious. Irresistable, given the fact that his feet were aching with numbness. Stripping off his shirt, finding that somewhere along the line he'd lost his own collar in the river, he slipped into the tub.
The slosh and rock of the water roused Dean, and Sam rested his knees atop his brother's, slid his feet up and over his hips, and settled in against the wall opposite.
“This is awful romantic,” said Dean. “You bring the roses?”
Sam waved at the wine bottle, uncorked and within easy reach. “Naw. And they didn't have any whiskey in the mini-bar.”
Dean smiled, lop-sided and heavy-lidded, for all intents still functionally asleep. He took a pull of the Italian white. One hand rested on Sam's calf, rubbing fingers against the hair there and releasing tiny air bubbles up through the water.
Sam took some of the wine himself, and rested his head against the lip of the tub for a second. He watched as Dean fought off sleep for a good thirty seconds. And then he fell asleep himself.
--
When he woke up, the water wasn't quite cold, but it was cooler, and Dean was breathing loudly through his nose because his mouth was half underwater. Sam had a brief flash - a local news clip, incestuous homo priests found drowned in suicidal love tryst - and got up out of the tub faster than he would've if the black snake were in there with him.
He woke Dean up gently - a hand on the cheek, a murmur in the ear - and then steadied him as he slipped trying to stand up. The water gurgled down the drain, and the wine was warm on the floor. They made it as far as the bed - huge and white and dry - before they fell asleep again, entwined.
--
It was light out, but it was still early, and the sun had yet to burn through the morning grey. Dean was watching him from across the mattress when he opened his eyes.
He'd seen the face of a man, and that man had been near the sea - east coast, he knew, and rural. He'd seen a maple tree with all its leaves burning red in the middle of summer. He'd seen the man strung up to it in pieces.
Sam said, “I think the devil's in me, Dean.”
And Dean said nothing, but he laid his head down to rest, and reached a hand up under the pillows to grasp Sam's where it lay underneath, hidden.
They spent the day like that, asleep and awake.
--
Bess had the barbecue going, as promised. And Sam apologized and apologized for not calling the night before, for worrying her half to death. She waved it off, praising their bravery and offering wine, or there was beer in the fridge, of course.
Her steaks were flat-out beautiful, and Dean got meat juice down his chin and on his t-shirt. Eventually Bess went inside and dug up an apron for him. Sam festooned him in paper towel. Dean kept asking for more brussel sprouts so he could catapult them off the balcony with the silver cutlery. Sam kicked him under the table every time he did it.
“Just give them to me, then” he hissed, finally, and got a half pound of steamed brussel sprouts poured onto his plate, drowning baked potatoes and steak alike. Bess gave them a look from the kitchen window, and shouted a threat to get Constable Billy to pick up some more on his way over.
When Constable Billy did show up, he brought more wine and grocery store cheesecake. He was probably a dozen years younger than Bess, and twice her height, but he gave Dean a run for his money on sheer volume of sour cream ingested, and listened to Sam's in-progress thesis on corporeality in metaphysical beings, and caught Bess in the kitchen when he thought no one was looking and made her shriek in delight.
For his part, Sam managed to catch Dean leaning on the porch railing as twilight was fading and the mosquitoes were coming out. And if neither of them shrieked when Sam's hand went around Dean's belly from behind, and he pressed his mouth to the line that separated collar from sun-brown skin, it was only from years and years of practice at keeping quiet.