Falling Slow, for Lennelle, 3/5
Aug. 22nd, 2020 02:40 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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spn_summergenPART THREE
The process of getting to the hunt didn’t help him feel any less crazy. Eileen hadn’t left any paper clues, or electronic ones, in the common areas, so Sam poked his head in her room to see if she’d left anything obvious—a quickly jotted note, a newspaper article, an open laptop—forgotten phone with a GPS marker.
Nothing like that existed, and Sam wasn’t so far gone that he could convince himself searching her desk or dresser wasn’t anything except a gross violation of her trust and privacy (a line which he’d already crossed by opening the door to look in her room, but he might have done that much just looking for her if he hadn’t run into Cas), so he backed out quickly.
And slammed into the closed door when he thought he saw Dean behind him, bathed in red light, lunging grim-faced with the First Blade arcing to slip past his lungs and pierce his heart.
He stayed against the cool wood while his heart-rate settled to something normal. At least Castiel was too far away to have heard the commotion and come running. Dean—he jolted. Dean should’ve heard. The bedrooms were all in the same section, and he had a vague memory of Dean stopping by the Library a few hours ago, talking about taking a shower and getting some research done.
He hadn’t been in the Library; he wasn’t in the kitchen. If he’d finished in the garage, he should’ve—
Sam shoved open Dean’s door without knocking. The calm, rational voice in the back of his head reminded him sotto voce that barging in on his brother was a good way to get shot, especially if Dean had been sleeping. But Dean wasn’t. He had his back propped against the headboard with his cadre of pillows, ankles crossed, headphones on and a book open in front of him. He tipped his head up to see Sam, then pulled his headphones off his ears.
Sam could make out AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap from across the room.
“Hey, man,” he greeted. “Everything okay? You ready to eat?”
“What? No, Cas—”
Dean sighed heavily, dropping the book off beside him and sliding one foot to the floor to sit forward. “Sam, you can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Not eating.”
“I ate,” he argued defensively, annoyed at the accusation when Dean had been hiding in his room to avoid having to interact with Castiel. “Cas—”
“—made you a sandwich. Yeah, man, I know. But that’s not what you need. The sooner you accept reality, the better. Or do you really want to lose control and go psycho on some innocent on our next hunt?”
Sam stared. Had he really given Dean reason to believe he’d lose it on a hunt? His hand drifted up to hold onto the wall, needing the grounding. “I—”
“Look, Sam, I get it,” Dean said when it became clear Sam wasn’t going to finish that sentence. “It’s a hard transition. I’ve been there, remember? But when you’re ready, I’ve got you. Went and picked up a child molester. Caught him in the act and everything. Guy deserves it, right?”
“What?”
“I said, you just gonna stand in the doorway or what? Seriously, Sam, creeper is not a good look on anyone.”
Sam blinked, twice—double-tap, because Dean stared back at him from the bed, ankles crossed, headphones pulled down to dangle from his neck, book still cradled in his lap.
“Sam?” Dean prodded, part annoyed, part concerned—concern creeping higher the longer Sam stood in his doorway without talking. “Did you need something?”
He nodded quickly, then shook his head, and scrubbed a hand over his face in defeat. “Yea-no, not really. Just wanted to check on you. What’re you doing?”
“Research,” he answered with the precise, drawn-out diction that indicated he thought Sam was slow. As proof, he turned the book around so Sam could see. Since Sam was still standing in the doorway and the print was tiny, all Sam could really see was that he didn’t have Busty Asian Beauties hidden between the pages.
“Right. Okay.”
“You sure you didn’t need anything?”
“Yep. Just checking in before I head out.”
“Head out?”
“Yeah, I just—” He waved a hand vaguely. “—need to clear my head.”
Which didn’t do anything to clear the sharp, pinched look from Dean’s face, but his brother nodded slowly. They’d promised to be upfront with each other when they had a problem, after all, and to respect each other’s decisions. “Call me if you need me.”
Sam smiled at the echo of their previous conversation, their rolls reversed. “Always do,” he agreed. He closed Dean’s door behind him. And determinedly did not think about what had just happened—or not happened. His head throbbed faintly.
It was the work of a few minutes to activate the GPS on Eileen’s phone, get her location, and grab his go-bag and the weapons duffel from under his bed, then head out to the garage. He couldn’t take the Impala, but the Men of Letters had plenty of other cars—most of which Dean had gotten back in working order. He’d driven the Crown Vic last, though, so those keys were still on the peg and easy to grab.
He pulled out of the garage and set a sedate pace until he hit Lebanon city limits, then he hit the gas, racing to the little blue dot pulsing on his phone screen.
*
He’d been driving for half an hour when the dot stopped moving. He glanced at it once, twice, three times, to be sure. He’d made up some time, but he was still over an hour out. There wasn’t much chance that he’d get there before Eileen finished the hunt.
He kept driving, anyway. If he saw her start coming back his way, he could turn around and head back. Until then, he’d just assume he was backup—a fail-safe, in case things went south.
Sam just wished driving didn’t leave so much time alone with the road noise and his thoughts. He’d had enough of the latter before he left the Bunker. Having Dean along would’ve been better—Dean was pretty good at distraction. But he’d have known something was wrong, more wrong, and brotherly leeway would only have gone so far. He’d have wanted to know what was going on, and Sam had promised no more secrets.
He scrubbed his hand over his forehead, then cranked down the window until the wind snatched his hair and boxed his ears, lashed at his eyes. He could breathe, then. He could breathe better still when he cranked the window the rest of the way down and hung his arm over the ledge. He’d have probably hung his whole body out, except then he wouldn’t have been able to drive.
No, ok. He gripped the steering wheel tight in both hands and took a deep breath, so deep his shirt strained at the seams and his lungs ached, held it until he thought he would burst, then exhaled deliberately through pursed lips. He was ok. Eileen was ok. There was no reason to be freaking out. They would figure out a way to trap Chuck, and then whatever was wrong with Sam would stop. He just had to deal with this until then, until they figured this out. He’d held on for months through Lucifer-vision. This was cake compared to that. He just needed to figure out how to manage this. A cheat. There had to be a cheat. He didn’t think pain would do it, this time.
He raked his hair back out of his face for the dozenth time and cranked the window back up.
“How long are we going to do this, Sam?”
Sam turned to look at the driver’s seat. Dean had tilted his head back, braced it with his left hand on the window ledge while he steered one-handed. His eyes flashed in the headlights like a cat’s. “Do what?”
“This.” His hand-wave meant there was no hand on the wheel and took in them and the car. “You won’t eat. You can’t stand to look at me. If you want my blood, Sam, just say so.”
The idea of taking Dean’s head off, even if he knew that wasn’t necessary for the spell, locked up Sam’s body. He’d had a dream—vision—nightmare (who could tell)—where that happened. Where he’d done that. Dean’s head had rolled into the corner and fixed hazel eyes had stared at him, scared and betrayed. Sam’d barely made it out of bed before voiding his dinner. “I don’t want your blood, Dean.”
“Yeah? Then how do you see this going, huh? You gonna starve yourself until you snap? Maybe then you’ll grab a kid, a little blonde-haired girl or goofy-looking boy. Is that the plan? Starve yourself until you do something horrible and then make me kill you? Because that’s a sucky plan, Sam. I won’t do it.”
“No!” Sam scrubbed both hands over his eyes, his face, trying to get the blood under his skin moving so he’d feel less dead. “No, that’s not the plan.”
Dean glanced over, paying more attention to Sam than the road as he tried to judge if his brother was lying. Sam tipped his head that way so Dean would stop threatening to total Baby. Some of the anger bled away as Dean refocused on the road. “Then what?”
“There is no plan. I haven’t—I just can’t believe this is it.”
“What?” Dean quirked an eyebrow at him. “You think we’re gonna retire to a beach, now? Sit on the sand in the sun and sip Coronas?”
“Since when do we drink Coronas?” Sam interjected inanely.
“Because news flash, Sam: we might not fry extra crispy, but it’s not going to be the relaxing adventure you’re looking for.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Dean’s head whipped his way, fingers flexing on the wheel. “Do you also know Jody and Bobby are gonna come after us? Because they will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for months or years, until we’ve had time to lose touch with our humanity, but they will. How are you looking to go out, huh?”
Sam didn’t have an answer. He’d been defiantly not thinking about that. He’d been not doing a lot of things.
“Because, me?” Dean continued when Sam didn’t. “I say we kill as many evil sons of bitches as we can before we go bottom up.”
Sam’s lips twisted against his will. “The Family Business?”
Dean’s grin was all teeth. All vampire teeth.
Sam looked away, his chest aching.
“What’d you say, Sam? You ready to eat?”
The idea turned his stomach. He made a face and scrubbed at his forehead. “Dean. . . .”
“No, Sam. You gotta make a choice, man, now. Before you’re not the one making it anymore. The monster is. All in or all out. And if you say ‘all out,’ I’m right behind you.” Dean held eye contact as best he could while they kept driving, not that he needed to for Sam to know he was serious.
So what was Sam more afraid of: becoming a monster or killing his brother? Making Dean kill him. Chuck had been so sure that was how they were going to go out. How the story always had to end.
He took a deep breath, let it out in a rush. Really, there’d only ever been one answer, with them. “All in.”
“Alright!” Dean crowed. He looked around, peering at their surroundings. There wasn’t much—trees, what might have been a farm or field coming up, no lights or headlights on the road as far as the eye could see. With two quick spins of the wheel, Dean pulled them off onto the shoulder. He put Baby in park and killed the engine, then threw open his door with a an oddly jubilant, “Come on!”
Sam followed him around to the trunk.
Dean opened it with a flourish. “Ta-da!”
Inside, a man—early forties, receding hairline, buggy eyes, and a look Sam recognized—curled in a fetal position facing them, hands and feet bound, gag muffling his ability to scream.
“Dean!” he hissed. “How long have we had a body in the trunk?”
“Since the rest stop. And he’s not a body, dude. Not yet.” Dean looked at him, then rolled his eyes at the expression on Sam’s face. “What, Sam? You were asleep. I was bored.”
“So you kidnapped some guy?”
“Some pervert,” Dean corrected. “Ole dickface, here, thought it would be cool to corner the kid in the Men’s room while mom was outside, none the wiser. Guess he didn’t see me, thought they were alone. Ain’t that right, dickface?”
The guy shook his head, quickly nodded when Dean’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t do it again,” he garbled around the gag. “I swear. I won’t touch ‘em. I won’t. I won’t do it again, just let me go.”
Dean considered him, then turned expectant eyes on Sam. He didn’t say the words, but Sam knew this was his call. He could say the word, and they’d either dump the guy out of the trunk right here or drive him to the nearest rest stop, but he’d live. Probably. Maybe he’d get picked up by the police, do time in prison. Maybe.
But he wouldn’t stop. Child molesters didn’t stop, they just got better at covering their tracks or they got caught. He inhales the scent of the man’s blood. “We gotta start somewhere, right?”
A smile grew on Dean’s face. “That’s right. You want me to go first?”
The sight and smell of the blood would make this first step easier, draw the monster forward. But just the idea was enough, Sam able to hear the guy’s pulse rabbiting as he cottoned on to the fact that this wasn’t swinging his way. It called to Sam, in a voice as familiar as the rage that had attracted Lucifer, as the one who’d called him to revenge.
His fangs popped. Turned out the first bite was easy.
*
When the hunger was satisfied, that just left the blood, the thick, coppery taste of it in his mouth, and the memory of the last time he’d bent over the edge of a trunk to drink someone dry.
Sam’s stomach turned over before he realized he was going to be sick. He just missed the trunk, one hand braced against Baby’s taillight, but if Dean complained he couldn’t hear it over the rush of blood in his ears as his stomach violently turned itself inside-out.
He felt more than a little shaky by the time his body decided he’d purged all the poison. He spit a couple times, trying to clear the taste from his mouth. He expected the scrape of Dean’s shoes through the gravel any second, the weight of his hand on his shoulder, an open bottle of water thrust under his nose so he could rinse out his mouth and start rehydrating.
None of that happened, though. He swiped his tongue over his teeth, gathering every bit of sick he could find, and spit again, twice, before straightening to search for his brother. If Dean had run off to escape the smell and sound, after years of bragging about his cast iron stomach, Sam would never let him hear the end of it.
But there was no sign of Dean—not on the side of the road, not across the street, not amid the sparse foliage further off the road. He turned to see if he’d gotten back in the car, distracted from helping Sam by something on his phone, maybe, and felt a chill down his spine, because the car he’d been leaning against wasn’t the Impala. The paint was too light to be black. And he wasn’t a car nut who could identify the make, model and year of any car made in the last fifty years in the dark, but he could pick out the Impala blindfolded, and he knew the body shape of this car was wrong.
Which meant everything was wrong. Because if this wasn’t the Impala, Dean had never been here. They’d never talked, and Dean had never—
He’d wandered away from the trunk while looking for Dean, but now he lunged for the gaping, black hole, heart in his throat, because if Dean hadn’t grabbed the guy at the rest stop, and there was a guy in the trunk, Sam had—
He couldn’t tell. There was something back there, something dark taking up an unknown amount of space, no pale splotches of hands or face to betray a person, but he might’ve covered him. If he was grabbing people while hallucinating or sleepwalking or—then he might’ve done anything.
His hands shook as he dug his phone out of his pocket, almost fumbling it to break on the ground before he got a solid hold. It took three tries to swipe and tap at the correct icons to turn on the flashlight. Then he aimed the beam at the trunk.
He sagged when the only things in there were the duffels he’d packed, exactly as he’d left them. His knees threatened to give out so he sank onto the bumper. Then covered his face with his hands and bent at the waist, and breathed.
This isn’t like before, he reminded himself. There wasn’t anything broken in his mind. Castiel had checked. This was a side-effect of being linked to God by the Equalizer. As soon as they locked God away, this would be over.
But until then? How was he supposed to help Dean and Castiel when he couldn’t trust what he was seeing? How did he think he was supposed to help Eileen?
Eileen.
With a curse, Sam searched for the phone and pulled up the map. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see—Eileen headed away, back toward the Bunker; Sam way off track in a different state—but their blue dots were right next to each other.
He pushed off the bumper, looking, this time, for another car, and spotted a dark gleam about a quarter mile on. Walking would’ve been quieter, but he climbed back in the car and drove until he could pull in behind Eileen’s red coupe. A quick search of the interior didn’t turn up anything, so he picked the lock on the trunk. It looked like she’d packed something for everything. He studied the array, but he didn’t know how she organized her stash and couldn’t begin to guess what was missing.
He picked up a box of ammo that looked like it might have been moved recently. When he opened it, he discovered silver bullets, fifteen rounds missing. Silver could mean werewolves, or shapeshifters. Or about a dozen other things, but probably werewolves. He closed the box and put it back where he found it, then closed the trunk.
Sam didn’t trust his perceptions enough to carry a gun, so he grabbed a couple silver knives, tucked one into the waist of his pants and the other into his jacket. Then he headed for the manufacturing plant that held the only signs of civilization as far as human eyes could see.
The plant was blocked off from the general public by a chain-link fence. Sam didn’t know how Eileen had gotten in, but he picked a spot and scaled it, dropping easily to his feet on the other side. He held there, knees bent in a crouch, waiting to see if anyone had noticed him, but no one called out, no flicker of movement betrayed a stealthy approach.
There were lights on further inside the complex, though their exact location was was difficult to tell with how close the pipes, scaffolding, cylinders (silos?), and buildings stood to each other. Still, he was at the edge of the complex. The only way to go was further in.
Sam kept his eyes peeled and his steps light, his pace varied, but he was starting to think there wasn’t any point by the time he’d worked his way to the center of the compound. He hadn’t seen any sign of Eileen or whatever she’d been hunting. He was starting to think she’d met someone here and the hunt was somewhere else.
Then he heard a clatter, scuffling, the sound of something impacting metal.
He hurried towards the sounds. When they stopped, he had no way to know what that meant. If Eileen was okay, or if the monster had knocked her out, killed her. Calling out would only give her opponent his location. His heart lodged in his throat.
Even on alert, Sam wasn’t prepared when Eileen lunged from the blind side of the silo, silver knife poised to plunge through his heart. He blocked on instinct.
“Sam?”
He didn’t hear the werewolf coming up behind him. And Eileen didn’t see Dean.
*
The hallways of the Bunker were empty when Dean came back, as were the War Room, the Library, the kitchen, the showers, the garage (not that he’d expected to find Sam there, but he did know there were no cars missing, so Sam had to be here, just not in), his bedroom, Dean’s bedroom, Mary’s old room, Jack’s old room, Eileen’s old room, the laundry room. He checked the archives last, all umpteen rooms of them, because neither he nor Sam ever went in them anymore unless they were stumped on a hunt or looking for something specific, but he wasn’t surprised Sam wasn’t there, either.
If he were honest, he’d known he wouldn’t find Sam just doing his thing around the Bunker. He’d seen the missing persons reports, looked at the dump sites, read the coroners’ reports. He knew his brother’s handiwork when he saw it. He just hadn’t thought it could’ve really been Sam, his Sam, who’d always felt for the victims, the families, who’d wanted to save lives, who’d balked at any unnecessary death, even among the supernatural.
That wasn’t the Sam he saw when he slipped through the Dungeon’s doors. This Sam didn’t have a problem grabbing random men off the street. This Sam didn’t shy away from causing pain. This Sam was even less the brother he hadn’t recognized when he’d been running around with Ruby way back before the end of the world, drinking demon blood, and conspiring to kill Lilith. This Sam hadn’t been eating regularly. This Sam had been consumed by his grief and rage.
It broke Dean’s heart, but he couldn’t let that stop him. He closed the Dungeon door behind him, let his own grief carve his face from stone. “What are you doing, Sam?”
Sam’s head came up. But while he’d taken pains to keep this from Dean’s attention, he didn’t try to hide his work, now. Based on the number of cuts, some shallow, some deep, criss-crossing the man’s body, his ragged whimpers and feeble struggles, the blood on the table, Sam had been busy for a while, maybe even since Dean had left.
If he’d driven around the block and come back, would he have been in time to stop this? Would saving this man’s life have been enough to save his brother’s?
Could it have changed how this had to end?
“What do you think I’m doing, Dean?” Sam’s eyes burned hot, intense, dark holes of flame that would consume him from the inside—if they hadn’t already. “He has to pay for what he did to her.”
“Who is he, Sam? Hm? Who is he?” Dean eased closer, sparing a look at the man’s face now he could see him better. He wasn’t one of the one’s Dean had known about. The police hadn’t found that one yet. It was possible Sam hadn’t dumped the other body yet.
“He’s the one who killed her!”
“Killed who, Sam?” he demanded, stalking closer still. “Eileen? The thing that did that is dead, man. We kill it. Mom? That was Jack, or old Yellow-Eyes, and it doesn’t matter because they’re both already dead, Sam. Or are you talking about Jess? Huh, Sam?” His brother’s eyes had turned a little frantic, his breathing fast and shallow. “Because that was Brady, man. You got him. So who are you talking about, Sam?”
“Her!” he bellowed, knife tip pointing past Dean at someone who wasn’t there.
Dean swallowed the fresh swelling of grief and tried again. “Do you even know who he is, Sam? Do you know who you have? Look at his face, man. Look at him!” Sam looked. “What’s his name, Sam? Do you even know his name?”
Sam’s brow furrowed, uncertainty penetrating the crazy furor for the first time. For a moment, he looked like the Sam Dean remembered. But it didn’t last. Sam shook his head, the knife moving restlessly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course, it matters, Sam. This man hasn’t hurt anyone.”
“No! He needs to pay for what he did to her.”
“You need to let him go, Sam.”
“No! He—”
“He’s human, Sam! We don’t hunt humans, remember?”
“Human?” Sam seemed to sway at the idea. He looked back at the man’s face, searching it. But any hope Dean had that Sam might have been coming to his senses disappeared when he realized, whatever Sam was looking at, he wasn’t seeing what was right in front of him. “No,” Sam abruptly decided. “Maybe he was human, but the demon did something to him. He hasn’t been human for a long time. It’s his fault. He has to pay for what he did to her.” Sam lifted the knife to his shoulder.
Dean swallowed his tears, the grief that would’ve shaken his voice. “I can’t let you do that, Sam.”
“You have to.” Looking away from him, Sam raised the knife above his head, gripped it with both hands.
Dean might’ve been able to get around the table before the knife came down. He almost certainly could have gone over top of it to tackle Sam, could probably even have done so without the knife ending up in his back, or Sam’s, but then what? Lock his brother in the looney-bin? Tie him to the bed upstairs?
No. Slow or fast, this only ended when Sam was dead. He was too far gone for anything else.
Dean’s hands were steady when he pulled his gun. His vision blurred, but it wouldn’t matter, not this close. He squeezed the trigger.
His tears fell with Sam.
*
Sam jerked awake, disoriented. He wasn’t in his bed. It was too soft, the comforter stifling. The lights were off, but the TV on. He smelled popcorn. He looked to his right, where Dean should have been, and found the door. He rolled over.
Eileen glanced at him over the popcorn in her hand. “Ok?”
He looked passed her to the open bathroom door, then rolled onto his back, getting a glimpse of stained ceiling, and covered his eyes. His head felt heavy, his eyes gummy with sleep, but he remembered following Eileen, interrupting her hunt only to need her to save him, seeing Dean lunging at him right behind the wolf, and them getting a room together when the motel proved unexpectedly busy. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he did remember Eileen telling him he looked like he needed it.
“Nightmare?” Eileen asked.
“Something like that,” he answered, only just managing to remember to sign it, too, because he didn’t think she could read his lips from this angle.
“Vision?”
He wasn’t going back to sleep, so Sam curled up toward his knees, got his hands under him, and slid his butt back until he was sitting, then he turned to face Eileen. He shrugged.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“I went crazy, like Nick, and Dean shot me.” Not that it was really him, but without the demon blood, Lucifer, or the Mark of Cain, it had felt more like him, like Dean, like it was an ending that could happen. He caught Eileen’s frown and, rubbing the itch on his brown, said, “I guess you died, were killed, and between that and mom and everything, I snapped.”
“And started killing people?”
He grimaced. “I . . . kinda got the impression they were surrogates for . . . me.”
“So you were killing other people to symbolically kill yourself? That’s crazy.”
“Well,” Sam answered wryly, attempting to brush it away with humor, “I got the idea that was the point.”
Eileen didn’t smile, didn’t scoff, didn’t frown. She studied him, and then said what Dean would have let slide because it was one of the things they rarely talked about directly. “You’re scared.”
He squirmed, but nodded.
“Because of the visions?”
He hesitated. “Not exactly. I mean, I’m not going to start drinking demon blood again. We already got rid of the Mark of Cain, and Lucifer’s dead. It’s not like any of those can still happen. You know? But we’re also talking about God, so what if he can somehow still make them happen? It would fit with him bringing Lilith back, but—”
“But?”
“But it’s not just those big things. It’s also me going crazy”—which seemed a bit too real in this moment—“or Dean becoming a vampire”—and not killing him—“and I’m not just seeing them when I’m asleep.” Even if it was only vampire Dean he saw when he was awake.
Eileen frowned, much the way she had when he’d been the one threatened by her knife instead of the werewolf, set the popcorn aside, and scooted to sit directly in front of him. “You see them all the time?”
“Not all the time,” he answered. “And not really them.” He didn’t know if she meant the other Sams and Deans, or if she was talking about the dream visions as a whole, but the answer was the same. “Just Dean. As a vampire.”
She made a sound in her throat he didn’t know how to interpret. “He kills you?”
“No. Or, not yet. We talk, mostly. Go places. Do things.”
“But you don’t kill each other.”
He shook his head.
“Maybe it’s something different.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Like what? Me going crazy?”
“No!” Eileen scowled at him fiercely enough, he was certain she’d have socked him if they hadn’t been sitting on separate beds. Then the expression wiped away. “You only started seeing vampire Dean after Sergei messed with your wound, right?”
“Right.”
“Has anything like this ever happened before?”
“Not really,” He blinked as he remembered the visions that had sent him on a desperate quest for answers about his destiny. “I mean, about fifteen years ago, I had visions of people dying. But those were from Yellow-Eyes, and they stopped after we killed him.”
Eileen lifted her eyebrows. “What if they didn’t?”
Sam wiped a hand over his face like he could wipe away the idea. He shook his head. “No, they stopped. I only ever saw people connected to the demon. Once he was gone—” He spread his hands helplessly. It couldn’t be that. His abilities had disappeared along with the demon. He had no reason to think they could exist without him. Except Magda. She’d still had her powers years after the demon had died.
“Maybe the connection to God woke them back up.”
That wasn’t a possibility he wanted to think about. The visions, the pain, the horror, had always been something that had been done to him, been forced on him. He’d been glad when they’d gone. He’d never wanted to be a freak (part of him knew his father could never really love a supernatural, even if he could occasionally work with them).
He rocked forward, dropping his head so he hair hid his eyes. “Maybe,” he allowed, because Eileen didn’t know what she’d suggested.
She smiled. “Are you about ready to head back?”
Sam took a deep breath, pushed what she’d said away. “Yeah. Just let me grab a shower.” Maybe he could wash the idea down the drain.
*
He tried, but some part of his brain latched onto it and wouldn’t let go.
It was a pretty big idea to process—him maybe being a psychic. Not just seeing things because he had demon blood—a particular demon’s blood—flowing through his veins, but actually having innate precognitive abilities. It sucked the breath from his lungs.
But it couldn’t be true, could it? Surely, he would have known if he was having visions. Right?
*
The driver back to the Bunker passed uneventfully. Sam insisted on following because he knew Eileen hadn’t slept, but he didn’t really think she needed the tail—anymore than she had for the hunt. But it gave Sam something to focus on that wasn’t his maybe-psychic-visions and whether there was any evidence of him being even more of a freak than previously thought, which was all he’d been looking for.
“Remember our agreement,” Eileen said with pointedly raised eyebrows and an equally pointed poke to his chest.
Sam covered the spot with his hand, grimace not entirely fake. “I’ll remember.”
“Good night, Sam.”
“Good night.”
He considered sitting do some more research, but the quiet Library didn’t appeal to him. He stopped by Dean’s room, to check in, and found his brother sound asleep, headphones on, hugging a pillow to his chest, still fully dressed—boots included—on top of the covers with the light on. But looking about as peaceful as Sam could remember seeing of late.
He scribbled a note on the pad Dean had tossed on top of his dresser, left it on the nightstand with Mom’s picture, then quietly backed out of the room.
Sam passed Eileen coming out of the bathroom. By the time he finished his ablutions, her room was dark and quiet. Like his own. He didn’t bother turning on the light. He shucked his shoes, socks, overshirt, and jeans, then crawled under the covers and turned on his stomach.
He’d had nightmares a lot as a kid. He remembered that. Dean had mentioned it a few times. He was pretty sure they’d started before he knew about the family business. The mind was the most open when a person slept. What if some of his nightmares had been really visions? What if his dreams had been?
*
If Sam dreamed that night—morning, he didn’t remember it. He woke up on his own. He didn’t encounter any strange or unnatural versions of Dean while he relieved himself and brushed his teeth. He didn’t encounter any version of Dean at all, not even the real one, his brother’s door still shut and the light off.
Of course, if he really was psychic and seeing the future, that other Dean was also the real one.
Castiel and Eileen, however, were both up and both real. Eileen looked a little tired still despite the fact it was—Sam checked his phone—almost one. He wondered how long she’d been up, if he’d have any luck convincing her to go to sleep. Probably not, he decided, padding up to them.
Eileen noticed him, her face lighting up in a smile, before he made it close enough to hear what they’d been talking about. “Sam,” she greeted, hand and voice working in concert. “We were thinking about lunch.”
Which struck him as weird. Yesterday’s lunch aside, Sam knew Castiel didn’t need to eat, that joining the group for mealtimes had been to put the apocalypse world refugees at ease, since none of the angels from the other world would have condescended to anything so human.. But Castiel’s expression conveyed willingness, so apparently he was eating, now, as a regular thing.
“Sure,” Sam said, feeling wrong-footed, like he’d woken in the Twilight Zone for no reason he could put his finger on. “Yeah. I could eat. Where were you thinking?”
Castiel volunteered to get the food once they’d reached their decision, and Eileen immediately jumped to go with him. There was no way food for only three people required three people to go pick it up, so he waved them away, never mind that the two of them heading off together, after whispering with their heads together before he arrived, felt like a setup.
A setup for what, though, he didn’t know. He and Dean weren’t fighting, hadn’t had any unresolved disagreements. He supposed they might think he needed to talk to Dean about his visions, but he didn’t think Eileen would have told Castiel about that. He couldn’t think of any other reason to get him and Dean alone in the Bunker together. Unless Dean had something to tell him?
Sam shuffled forward absently while he thought—not that it was hard to come up with a reason why Castiel would want to get out of the Bunker; things between him and Dean were still tense. And Eileen, well, Eileen had been dead and in hell; it wasn’t a stretch to think she wouldn’t want to spend all her time stuck in the Bunker—and put his hands down on the back of Castiel’s chair.
He’d stepped back before he really realized what he’d seen, simply because of the overwhelming rush of—of light, of electricity and brightness and power, that swept through his being. It left his knees weak, his fingers tingling, and his head buzzing. Something tickled his cheek. When he wiped it away, his hand came back wet.
He rubbed his thumb over his fingers. The fluid was clear, smeared easily. Tears, he realized vaguely. He was crying. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Not when Jack died—they’d been too busy with Chuck and the aftermath of him opening hell. Not when Mom died—they’d had Jack to worry about and find, stop. But now he couldn’t stop the liquid from leaking from his eyes. The sorrow was too great, so deep and wide it could swallow whole mountain ranges, whole continents; the grief so potent he felt he couldn’t breathe, so heavy he felt he would sink through the floor and never rise.
He would drown in it.
Under it, though—under it, he could feel anger, hurt. Anger at God for killing Jack, for betraying everything He’d taught them. Anger at Dean for his stubbornness, for being unable to let go of his anger, for being unable to see that he had made the best, only choice he could.
The anger let Sam push away the grief, let him find the edges of it and separate it from himself, let him realize the power and the grief and the anger were Castiel’s, and as soon as he had, the power of it dissipated. In its place, he saw Castiel, grim, surrounded by bright lights and colors that might have been a casino or carnival. The angel held Sam’s gaze, then looked down at his arm. He worked the sleeve of his trench coat and shirt sleeve up over his forearm, revealing one long, red line and the two shorter, perpendicular lines that made up the Mark of Cain.
Then he was looking out across the Library into the War Room. Sam blinked rapidly to clear his vision, turninng in a circle to make sure—that he was still in the Library, he supposed, all traces of that other place gone. The familiar shelves, tables, chairs, lights, and knickknacks were all where they were supposed to be.
He frowned at the chair. Some psychics, he remembered from his research in earlier years, saw visions when they touched objects. The lore said objects gathered energy through daily use, which accounted for a good feeling around an object or place, or an ill feeling, but that only close, personal objects would imprint from their owners, and only strong emotions—usually those associated with hate, sorrow, or death would be able to transfer to a psychic and convey any type of personal information about the person.
He didn’t think any of that applied to Castiel’s chair, which was only used by the angel sometimes and wasn’t his sole property, though he couldn’t deny that the emotion he’d gotten from Castiel’s power qualified. Add to that the fact that Sam had never displayed any signs of clairsentience, and Sam didn’t have any idea what had just happened.
He needed to know if that had been a one-off.
His breath shuddered on the way out when he imagined feeling that power again, the foreign grief, and the fingers he stretched toward the wooden back trembled. Briefly, he curled his fingers into a fist, then, steeling his nerves, quickly tapped the chair back.
Nothing happened. Feeling foolish but relieved, he first rested his fingers along the top curve, then slid them down the front of the backrest until his palm fitted against the top. Nothing weird happened. He huffed and let go of the chair. Did that mean it had been a one-off fluke? Was it something that would only happen with Castiel? Would he be able to get—feeling or images or whatever from other objects if he touched them?
He’d just started to look around the room, considering what other objects might yield useful data regarding his potential clairsentience when the sound of the door opening drew him into the War Room to see what Castiel and Eileen had forgotten, but Castiel held a tray with four drinks, and Eileen had two food bags.
“We got Dean a burger,” Castiel announced before Sam had found his voice.
“Great.”
“They didn’t have any yogurt.”
“That’s fine.”
“Are you okay?” He didn’t know when she’d come up beside him, but Eileen frowned at him, now, one hand reaching for his face.
Abruptly, he remembered the tears and scrubbed his cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I, uh, spilled—”
Thankfully, she backed off, neither her nor Castiel apparently in making him continue. They probably assumed he’d been grieving Mom or Jack, and while both of those were accurate, to an extent, the fact that it’d been Castiel’s grief that caused them meant he couldn’t look the angel in the face. But that was fine. They had food to eat, which discouraged face-gazing, and Dean charged in like a conquering hero before they’d passed the stuffing-their-faces stage, giving everyone something else to think about.
And when he’d finished explaining his plan, the Mark of Cain on Castiel’s arm made a horrible amount of sense.
*
Not that seeing the Mark of Cain on Castiel’s arm following an intense emotional transference from an inanimate object necessarily meant Sam was genuinely psychic. Castiel was an angel. Sam was connected to God. The last time Castiel had touched him, Sam had ended up in God’s head. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that that connection to God could let Sam into Castiel’s, and angels weren’t necessarily bound by time.
It was just weird that he hadn’t been touching Castiel, or anywhere in the angel’s presence, when it happened. But that still didn’t mean he was definitely psychic.
*
On to PART FOUR...
The process of getting to the hunt didn’t help him feel any less crazy. Eileen hadn’t left any paper clues, or electronic ones, in the common areas, so Sam poked his head in her room to see if she’d left anything obvious—a quickly jotted note, a newspaper article, an open laptop—forgotten phone with a GPS marker.
Nothing like that existed, and Sam wasn’t so far gone that he could convince himself searching her desk or dresser wasn’t anything except a gross violation of her trust and privacy (a line which he’d already crossed by opening the door to look in her room, but he might have done that much just looking for her if he hadn’t run into Cas), so he backed out quickly.
And slammed into the closed door when he thought he saw Dean behind him, bathed in red light, lunging grim-faced with the First Blade arcing to slip past his lungs and pierce his heart.
He stayed against the cool wood while his heart-rate settled to something normal. At least Castiel was too far away to have heard the commotion and come running. Dean—he jolted. Dean should’ve heard. The bedrooms were all in the same section, and he had a vague memory of Dean stopping by the Library a few hours ago, talking about taking a shower and getting some research done.
He hadn’t been in the Library; he wasn’t in the kitchen. If he’d finished in the garage, he should’ve—
Sam shoved open Dean’s door without knocking. The calm, rational voice in the back of his head reminded him sotto voce that barging in on his brother was a good way to get shot, especially if Dean had been sleeping. But Dean wasn’t. He had his back propped against the headboard with his cadre of pillows, ankles crossed, headphones on and a book open in front of him. He tipped his head up to see Sam, then pulled his headphones off his ears.
Sam could make out AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap from across the room.
“Hey, man,” he greeted. “Everything okay? You ready to eat?”
“What? No, Cas—”
Dean sighed heavily, dropping the book off beside him and sliding one foot to the floor to sit forward. “Sam, you can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Not eating.”
“I ate,” he argued defensively, annoyed at the accusation when Dean had been hiding in his room to avoid having to interact with Castiel. “Cas—”
“—made you a sandwich. Yeah, man, I know. But that’s not what you need. The sooner you accept reality, the better. Or do you really want to lose control and go psycho on some innocent on our next hunt?”
Sam stared. Had he really given Dean reason to believe he’d lose it on a hunt? His hand drifted up to hold onto the wall, needing the grounding. “I—”
“Look, Sam, I get it,” Dean said when it became clear Sam wasn’t going to finish that sentence. “It’s a hard transition. I’ve been there, remember? But when you’re ready, I’ve got you. Went and picked up a child molester. Caught him in the act and everything. Guy deserves it, right?”
“What?”
“I said, you just gonna stand in the doorway or what? Seriously, Sam, creeper is not a good look on anyone.”
Sam blinked, twice—double-tap, because Dean stared back at him from the bed, ankles crossed, headphones pulled down to dangle from his neck, book still cradled in his lap.
“Sam?” Dean prodded, part annoyed, part concerned—concern creeping higher the longer Sam stood in his doorway without talking. “Did you need something?”
He nodded quickly, then shook his head, and scrubbed a hand over his face in defeat. “Yea-no, not really. Just wanted to check on you. What’re you doing?”
“Research,” he answered with the precise, drawn-out diction that indicated he thought Sam was slow. As proof, he turned the book around so Sam could see. Since Sam was still standing in the doorway and the print was tiny, all Sam could really see was that he didn’t have Busty Asian Beauties hidden between the pages.
“Right. Okay.”
“You sure you didn’t need anything?”
“Yep. Just checking in before I head out.”
“Head out?”
“Yeah, I just—” He waved a hand vaguely. “—need to clear my head.”
Which didn’t do anything to clear the sharp, pinched look from Dean’s face, but his brother nodded slowly. They’d promised to be upfront with each other when they had a problem, after all, and to respect each other’s decisions. “Call me if you need me.”
Sam smiled at the echo of their previous conversation, their rolls reversed. “Always do,” he agreed. He closed Dean’s door behind him. And determinedly did not think about what had just happened—or not happened. His head throbbed faintly.
It was the work of a few minutes to activate the GPS on Eileen’s phone, get her location, and grab his go-bag and the weapons duffel from under his bed, then head out to the garage. He couldn’t take the Impala, but the Men of Letters had plenty of other cars—most of which Dean had gotten back in working order. He’d driven the Crown Vic last, though, so those keys were still on the peg and easy to grab.
He pulled out of the garage and set a sedate pace until he hit Lebanon city limits, then he hit the gas, racing to the little blue dot pulsing on his phone screen.
*
He’d been driving for half an hour when the dot stopped moving. He glanced at it once, twice, three times, to be sure. He’d made up some time, but he was still over an hour out. There wasn’t much chance that he’d get there before Eileen finished the hunt.
He kept driving, anyway. If he saw her start coming back his way, he could turn around and head back. Until then, he’d just assume he was backup—a fail-safe, in case things went south.
Sam just wished driving didn’t leave so much time alone with the road noise and his thoughts. He’d had enough of the latter before he left the Bunker. Having Dean along would’ve been better—Dean was pretty good at distraction. But he’d have known something was wrong, more wrong, and brotherly leeway would only have gone so far. He’d have wanted to know what was going on, and Sam had promised no more secrets.
He scrubbed his hand over his forehead, then cranked down the window until the wind snatched his hair and boxed his ears, lashed at his eyes. He could breathe, then. He could breathe better still when he cranked the window the rest of the way down and hung his arm over the ledge. He’d have probably hung his whole body out, except then he wouldn’t have been able to drive.
No, ok. He gripped the steering wheel tight in both hands and took a deep breath, so deep his shirt strained at the seams and his lungs ached, held it until he thought he would burst, then exhaled deliberately through pursed lips. He was ok. Eileen was ok. There was no reason to be freaking out. They would figure out a way to trap Chuck, and then whatever was wrong with Sam would stop. He just had to deal with this until then, until they figured this out. He’d held on for months through Lucifer-vision. This was cake compared to that. He just needed to figure out how to manage this. A cheat. There had to be a cheat. He didn’t think pain would do it, this time.
He raked his hair back out of his face for the dozenth time and cranked the window back up.
“How long are we going to do this, Sam?”
Sam turned to look at the driver’s seat. Dean had tilted his head back, braced it with his left hand on the window ledge while he steered one-handed. His eyes flashed in the headlights like a cat’s. “Do what?”
“This.” His hand-wave meant there was no hand on the wheel and took in them and the car. “You won’t eat. You can’t stand to look at me. If you want my blood, Sam, just say so.”
The idea of taking Dean’s head off, even if he knew that wasn’t necessary for the spell, locked up Sam’s body. He’d had a dream—vision—nightmare (who could tell)—where that happened. Where he’d done that. Dean’s head had rolled into the corner and fixed hazel eyes had stared at him, scared and betrayed. Sam’d barely made it out of bed before voiding his dinner. “I don’t want your blood, Dean.”
“Yeah? Then how do you see this going, huh? You gonna starve yourself until you snap? Maybe then you’ll grab a kid, a little blonde-haired girl or goofy-looking boy. Is that the plan? Starve yourself until you do something horrible and then make me kill you? Because that’s a sucky plan, Sam. I won’t do it.”
“No!” Sam scrubbed both hands over his eyes, his face, trying to get the blood under his skin moving so he’d feel less dead. “No, that’s not the plan.”
Dean glanced over, paying more attention to Sam than the road as he tried to judge if his brother was lying. Sam tipped his head that way so Dean would stop threatening to total Baby. Some of the anger bled away as Dean refocused on the road. “Then what?”
“There is no plan. I haven’t—I just can’t believe this is it.”
“What?” Dean quirked an eyebrow at him. “You think we’re gonna retire to a beach, now? Sit on the sand in the sun and sip Coronas?”
“Since when do we drink Coronas?” Sam interjected inanely.
“Because news flash, Sam: we might not fry extra crispy, but it’s not going to be the relaxing adventure you’re looking for.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Dean’s head whipped his way, fingers flexing on the wheel. “Do you also know Jody and Bobby are gonna come after us? Because they will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for months or years, until we’ve had time to lose touch with our humanity, but they will. How are you looking to go out, huh?”
Sam didn’t have an answer. He’d been defiantly not thinking about that. He’d been not doing a lot of things.
“Because, me?” Dean continued when Sam didn’t. “I say we kill as many evil sons of bitches as we can before we go bottom up.”
Sam’s lips twisted against his will. “The Family Business?”
Dean’s grin was all teeth. All vampire teeth.
Sam looked away, his chest aching.
“What’d you say, Sam? You ready to eat?”
The idea turned his stomach. He made a face and scrubbed at his forehead. “Dean. . . .”
“No, Sam. You gotta make a choice, man, now. Before you’re not the one making it anymore. The monster is. All in or all out. And if you say ‘all out,’ I’m right behind you.” Dean held eye contact as best he could while they kept driving, not that he needed to for Sam to know he was serious.
So what was Sam more afraid of: becoming a monster or killing his brother? Making Dean kill him. Chuck had been so sure that was how they were going to go out. How the story always had to end.
He took a deep breath, let it out in a rush. Really, there’d only ever been one answer, with them. “All in.”
“Alright!” Dean crowed. He looked around, peering at their surroundings. There wasn’t much—trees, what might have been a farm or field coming up, no lights or headlights on the road as far as the eye could see. With two quick spins of the wheel, Dean pulled them off onto the shoulder. He put Baby in park and killed the engine, then threw open his door with a an oddly jubilant, “Come on!”
Sam followed him around to the trunk.
Dean opened it with a flourish. “Ta-da!”
Inside, a man—early forties, receding hairline, buggy eyes, and a look Sam recognized—curled in a fetal position facing them, hands and feet bound, gag muffling his ability to scream.
“Dean!” he hissed. “How long have we had a body in the trunk?”
“Since the rest stop. And he’s not a body, dude. Not yet.” Dean looked at him, then rolled his eyes at the expression on Sam’s face. “What, Sam? You were asleep. I was bored.”
“So you kidnapped some guy?”
“Some pervert,” Dean corrected. “Ole dickface, here, thought it would be cool to corner the kid in the Men’s room while mom was outside, none the wiser. Guess he didn’t see me, thought they were alone. Ain’t that right, dickface?”
The guy shook his head, quickly nodded when Dean’s eyes narrowed. “I won’t do it again,” he garbled around the gag. “I swear. I won’t touch ‘em. I won’t. I won’t do it again, just let me go.”
Dean considered him, then turned expectant eyes on Sam. He didn’t say the words, but Sam knew this was his call. He could say the word, and they’d either dump the guy out of the trunk right here or drive him to the nearest rest stop, but he’d live. Probably. Maybe he’d get picked up by the police, do time in prison. Maybe.
But he wouldn’t stop. Child molesters didn’t stop, they just got better at covering their tracks or they got caught. He inhales the scent of the man’s blood. “We gotta start somewhere, right?”
A smile grew on Dean’s face. “That’s right. You want me to go first?”
The sight and smell of the blood would make this first step easier, draw the monster forward. But just the idea was enough, Sam able to hear the guy’s pulse rabbiting as he cottoned on to the fact that this wasn’t swinging his way. It called to Sam, in a voice as familiar as the rage that had attracted Lucifer, as the one who’d called him to revenge.
His fangs popped. Turned out the first bite was easy.
*
When the hunger was satisfied, that just left the blood, the thick, coppery taste of it in his mouth, and the memory of the last time he’d bent over the edge of a trunk to drink someone dry.
Sam’s stomach turned over before he realized he was going to be sick. He just missed the trunk, one hand braced against Baby’s taillight, but if Dean complained he couldn’t hear it over the rush of blood in his ears as his stomach violently turned itself inside-out.
He felt more than a little shaky by the time his body decided he’d purged all the poison. He spit a couple times, trying to clear the taste from his mouth. He expected the scrape of Dean’s shoes through the gravel any second, the weight of his hand on his shoulder, an open bottle of water thrust under his nose so he could rinse out his mouth and start rehydrating.
None of that happened, though. He swiped his tongue over his teeth, gathering every bit of sick he could find, and spit again, twice, before straightening to search for his brother. If Dean had run off to escape the smell and sound, after years of bragging about his cast iron stomach, Sam would never let him hear the end of it.
But there was no sign of Dean—not on the side of the road, not across the street, not amid the sparse foliage further off the road. He turned to see if he’d gotten back in the car, distracted from helping Sam by something on his phone, maybe, and felt a chill down his spine, because the car he’d been leaning against wasn’t the Impala. The paint was too light to be black. And he wasn’t a car nut who could identify the make, model and year of any car made in the last fifty years in the dark, but he could pick out the Impala blindfolded, and he knew the body shape of this car was wrong.
Which meant everything was wrong. Because if this wasn’t the Impala, Dean had never been here. They’d never talked, and Dean had never—
He’d wandered away from the trunk while looking for Dean, but now he lunged for the gaping, black hole, heart in his throat, because if Dean hadn’t grabbed the guy at the rest stop, and there was a guy in the trunk, Sam had—
He couldn’t tell. There was something back there, something dark taking up an unknown amount of space, no pale splotches of hands or face to betray a person, but he might’ve covered him. If he was grabbing people while hallucinating or sleepwalking or—then he might’ve done anything.
His hands shook as he dug his phone out of his pocket, almost fumbling it to break on the ground before he got a solid hold. It took three tries to swipe and tap at the correct icons to turn on the flashlight. Then he aimed the beam at the trunk.
He sagged when the only things in there were the duffels he’d packed, exactly as he’d left them. His knees threatened to give out so he sank onto the bumper. Then covered his face with his hands and bent at the waist, and breathed.
This isn’t like before, he reminded himself. There wasn’t anything broken in his mind. Castiel had checked. This was a side-effect of being linked to God by the Equalizer. As soon as they locked God away, this would be over.
But until then? How was he supposed to help Dean and Castiel when he couldn’t trust what he was seeing? How did he think he was supposed to help Eileen?
Eileen.
With a curse, Sam searched for the phone and pulled up the map. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see—Eileen headed away, back toward the Bunker; Sam way off track in a different state—but their blue dots were right next to each other.
He pushed off the bumper, looking, this time, for another car, and spotted a dark gleam about a quarter mile on. Walking would’ve been quieter, but he climbed back in the car and drove until he could pull in behind Eileen’s red coupe. A quick search of the interior didn’t turn up anything, so he picked the lock on the trunk. It looked like she’d packed something for everything. He studied the array, but he didn’t know how she organized her stash and couldn’t begin to guess what was missing.
He picked up a box of ammo that looked like it might have been moved recently. When he opened it, he discovered silver bullets, fifteen rounds missing. Silver could mean werewolves, or shapeshifters. Or about a dozen other things, but probably werewolves. He closed the box and put it back where he found it, then closed the trunk.
Sam didn’t trust his perceptions enough to carry a gun, so he grabbed a couple silver knives, tucked one into the waist of his pants and the other into his jacket. Then he headed for the manufacturing plant that held the only signs of civilization as far as human eyes could see.
The plant was blocked off from the general public by a chain-link fence. Sam didn’t know how Eileen had gotten in, but he picked a spot and scaled it, dropping easily to his feet on the other side. He held there, knees bent in a crouch, waiting to see if anyone had noticed him, but no one called out, no flicker of movement betrayed a stealthy approach.
There were lights on further inside the complex, though their exact location was was difficult to tell with how close the pipes, scaffolding, cylinders (silos?), and buildings stood to each other. Still, he was at the edge of the complex. The only way to go was further in.
Sam kept his eyes peeled and his steps light, his pace varied, but he was starting to think there wasn’t any point by the time he’d worked his way to the center of the compound. He hadn’t seen any sign of Eileen or whatever she’d been hunting. He was starting to think she’d met someone here and the hunt was somewhere else.
Then he heard a clatter, scuffling, the sound of something impacting metal.
He hurried towards the sounds. When they stopped, he had no way to know what that meant. If Eileen was okay, or if the monster had knocked her out, killed her. Calling out would only give her opponent his location. His heart lodged in his throat.
Even on alert, Sam wasn’t prepared when Eileen lunged from the blind side of the silo, silver knife poised to plunge through his heart. He blocked on instinct.
“Sam?”
He didn’t hear the werewolf coming up behind him. And Eileen didn’t see Dean.
*
The hallways of the Bunker were empty when Dean came back, as were the War Room, the Library, the kitchen, the showers, the garage (not that he’d expected to find Sam there, but he did know there were no cars missing, so Sam had to be here, just not in), his bedroom, Dean’s bedroom, Mary’s old room, Jack’s old room, Eileen’s old room, the laundry room. He checked the archives last, all umpteen rooms of them, because neither he nor Sam ever went in them anymore unless they were stumped on a hunt or looking for something specific, but he wasn’t surprised Sam wasn’t there, either.
If he were honest, he’d known he wouldn’t find Sam just doing his thing around the Bunker. He’d seen the missing persons reports, looked at the dump sites, read the coroners’ reports. He knew his brother’s handiwork when he saw it. He just hadn’t thought it could’ve really been Sam, his Sam, who’d always felt for the victims, the families, who’d wanted to save lives, who’d balked at any unnecessary death, even among the supernatural.
That wasn’t the Sam he saw when he slipped through the Dungeon’s doors. This Sam didn’t have a problem grabbing random men off the street. This Sam didn’t shy away from causing pain. This Sam was even less the brother he hadn’t recognized when he’d been running around with Ruby way back before the end of the world, drinking demon blood, and conspiring to kill Lilith. This Sam hadn’t been eating regularly. This Sam had been consumed by his grief and rage.
It broke Dean’s heart, but he couldn’t let that stop him. He closed the Dungeon door behind him, let his own grief carve his face from stone. “What are you doing, Sam?”
Sam’s head came up. But while he’d taken pains to keep this from Dean’s attention, he didn’t try to hide his work, now. Based on the number of cuts, some shallow, some deep, criss-crossing the man’s body, his ragged whimpers and feeble struggles, the blood on the table, Sam had been busy for a while, maybe even since Dean had left.
If he’d driven around the block and come back, would he have been in time to stop this? Would saving this man’s life have been enough to save his brother’s?
Could it have changed how this had to end?
“What do you think I’m doing, Dean?” Sam’s eyes burned hot, intense, dark holes of flame that would consume him from the inside—if they hadn’t already. “He has to pay for what he did to her.”
“Who is he, Sam? Hm? Who is he?” Dean eased closer, sparing a look at the man’s face now he could see him better. He wasn’t one of the one’s Dean had known about. The police hadn’t found that one yet. It was possible Sam hadn’t dumped the other body yet.
“He’s the one who killed her!”
“Killed who, Sam?” he demanded, stalking closer still. “Eileen? The thing that did that is dead, man. We kill it. Mom? That was Jack, or old Yellow-Eyes, and it doesn’t matter because they’re both already dead, Sam. Or are you talking about Jess? Huh, Sam?” His brother’s eyes had turned a little frantic, his breathing fast and shallow. “Because that was Brady, man. You got him. So who are you talking about, Sam?”
“Her!” he bellowed, knife tip pointing past Dean at someone who wasn’t there.
Dean swallowed the fresh swelling of grief and tried again. “Do you even know who he is, Sam? Do you know who you have? Look at his face, man. Look at him!” Sam looked. “What’s his name, Sam? Do you even know his name?”
Sam’s brow furrowed, uncertainty penetrating the crazy furor for the first time. For a moment, he looked like the Sam Dean remembered. But it didn’t last. Sam shook his head, the knife moving restlessly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course, it matters, Sam. This man hasn’t hurt anyone.”
“No! He needs to pay for what he did to her.”
“You need to let him go, Sam.”
“No! He—”
“He’s human, Sam! We don’t hunt humans, remember?”
“Human?” Sam seemed to sway at the idea. He looked back at the man’s face, searching it. But any hope Dean had that Sam might have been coming to his senses disappeared when he realized, whatever Sam was looking at, he wasn’t seeing what was right in front of him. “No,” Sam abruptly decided. “Maybe he was human, but the demon did something to him. He hasn’t been human for a long time. It’s his fault. He has to pay for what he did to her.” Sam lifted the knife to his shoulder.
Dean swallowed his tears, the grief that would’ve shaken his voice. “I can’t let you do that, Sam.”
“You have to.” Looking away from him, Sam raised the knife above his head, gripped it with both hands.
Dean might’ve been able to get around the table before the knife came down. He almost certainly could have gone over top of it to tackle Sam, could probably even have done so without the knife ending up in his back, or Sam’s, but then what? Lock his brother in the looney-bin? Tie him to the bed upstairs?
No. Slow or fast, this only ended when Sam was dead. He was too far gone for anything else.
Dean’s hands were steady when he pulled his gun. His vision blurred, but it wouldn’t matter, not this close. He squeezed the trigger.
His tears fell with Sam.
*
Sam jerked awake, disoriented. He wasn’t in his bed. It was too soft, the comforter stifling. The lights were off, but the TV on. He smelled popcorn. He looked to his right, where Dean should have been, and found the door. He rolled over.
Eileen glanced at him over the popcorn in her hand. “Ok?”
He looked passed her to the open bathroom door, then rolled onto his back, getting a glimpse of stained ceiling, and covered his eyes. His head felt heavy, his eyes gummy with sleep, but he remembered following Eileen, interrupting her hunt only to need her to save him, seeing Dean lunging at him right behind the wolf, and them getting a room together when the motel proved unexpectedly busy. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he did remember Eileen telling him he looked like he needed it.
“Nightmare?” Eileen asked.
“Something like that,” he answered, only just managing to remember to sign it, too, because he didn’t think she could read his lips from this angle.
“Vision?”
He wasn’t going back to sleep, so Sam curled up toward his knees, got his hands under him, and slid his butt back until he was sitting, then he turned to face Eileen. He shrugged.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“I went crazy, like Nick, and Dean shot me.” Not that it was really him, but without the demon blood, Lucifer, or the Mark of Cain, it had felt more like him, like Dean, like it was an ending that could happen. He caught Eileen’s frown and, rubbing the itch on his brown, said, “I guess you died, were killed, and between that and mom and everything, I snapped.”
“And started killing people?”
He grimaced. “I . . . kinda got the impression they were surrogates for . . . me.”
“So you were killing other people to symbolically kill yourself? That’s crazy.”
“Well,” Sam answered wryly, attempting to brush it away with humor, “I got the idea that was the point.”
Eileen didn’t smile, didn’t scoff, didn’t frown. She studied him, and then said what Dean would have let slide because it was one of the things they rarely talked about directly. “You’re scared.”
He squirmed, but nodded.
“Because of the visions?”
He hesitated. “Not exactly. I mean, I’m not going to start drinking demon blood again. We already got rid of the Mark of Cain, and Lucifer’s dead. It’s not like any of those can still happen. You know? But we’re also talking about God, so what if he can somehow still make them happen? It would fit with him bringing Lilith back, but—”
“But?”
“But it’s not just those big things. It’s also me going crazy”—which seemed a bit too real in this moment—“or Dean becoming a vampire”—and not killing him—“and I’m not just seeing them when I’m asleep.” Even if it was only vampire Dean he saw when he was awake.
Eileen frowned, much the way she had when he’d been the one threatened by her knife instead of the werewolf, set the popcorn aside, and scooted to sit directly in front of him. “You see them all the time?”
“Not all the time,” he answered. “And not really them.” He didn’t know if she meant the other Sams and Deans, or if she was talking about the dream visions as a whole, but the answer was the same. “Just Dean. As a vampire.”
She made a sound in her throat he didn’t know how to interpret. “He kills you?”
“No. Or, not yet. We talk, mostly. Go places. Do things.”
“But you don’t kill each other.”
He shook his head.
“Maybe it’s something different.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Like what? Me going crazy?”
“No!” Eileen scowled at him fiercely enough, he was certain she’d have socked him if they hadn’t been sitting on separate beds. Then the expression wiped away. “You only started seeing vampire Dean after Sergei messed with your wound, right?”
“Right.”
“Has anything like this ever happened before?”
“Not really,” He blinked as he remembered the visions that had sent him on a desperate quest for answers about his destiny. “I mean, about fifteen years ago, I had visions of people dying. But those were from Yellow-Eyes, and they stopped after we killed him.”
Eileen lifted her eyebrows. “What if they didn’t?”
Sam wiped a hand over his face like he could wipe away the idea. He shook his head. “No, they stopped. I only ever saw people connected to the demon. Once he was gone—” He spread his hands helplessly. It couldn’t be that. His abilities had disappeared along with the demon. He had no reason to think they could exist without him. Except Magda. She’d still had her powers years after the demon had died.
“Maybe the connection to God woke them back up.”
That wasn’t a possibility he wanted to think about. The visions, the pain, the horror, had always been something that had been done to him, been forced on him. He’d been glad when they’d gone. He’d never wanted to be a freak (part of him knew his father could never really love a supernatural, even if he could occasionally work with them).
He rocked forward, dropping his head so he hair hid his eyes. “Maybe,” he allowed, because Eileen didn’t know what she’d suggested.
She smiled. “Are you about ready to head back?”
Sam took a deep breath, pushed what she’d said away. “Yeah. Just let me grab a shower.” Maybe he could wash the idea down the drain.
*
He tried, but some part of his brain latched onto it and wouldn’t let go.
It was a pretty big idea to process—him maybe being a psychic. Not just seeing things because he had demon blood—a particular demon’s blood—flowing through his veins, but actually having innate precognitive abilities. It sucked the breath from his lungs.
But it couldn’t be true, could it? Surely, he would have known if he was having visions. Right?
*
The driver back to the Bunker passed uneventfully. Sam insisted on following because he knew Eileen hadn’t slept, but he didn’t really think she needed the tail—anymore than she had for the hunt. But it gave Sam something to focus on that wasn’t his maybe-psychic-visions and whether there was any evidence of him being even more of a freak than previously thought, which was all he’d been looking for.
“Remember our agreement,” Eileen said with pointedly raised eyebrows and an equally pointed poke to his chest.
Sam covered the spot with his hand, grimace not entirely fake. “I’ll remember.”
“Good night, Sam.”
“Good night.”
He considered sitting do some more research, but the quiet Library didn’t appeal to him. He stopped by Dean’s room, to check in, and found his brother sound asleep, headphones on, hugging a pillow to his chest, still fully dressed—boots included—on top of the covers with the light on. But looking about as peaceful as Sam could remember seeing of late.
He scribbled a note on the pad Dean had tossed on top of his dresser, left it on the nightstand with Mom’s picture, then quietly backed out of the room.
Sam passed Eileen coming out of the bathroom. By the time he finished his ablutions, her room was dark and quiet. Like his own. He didn’t bother turning on the light. He shucked his shoes, socks, overshirt, and jeans, then crawled under the covers and turned on his stomach.
He’d had nightmares a lot as a kid. He remembered that. Dean had mentioned it a few times. He was pretty sure they’d started before he knew about the family business. The mind was the most open when a person slept. What if some of his nightmares had been really visions? What if his dreams had been?
*
If Sam dreamed that night—morning, he didn’t remember it. He woke up on his own. He didn’t encounter any strange or unnatural versions of Dean while he relieved himself and brushed his teeth. He didn’t encounter any version of Dean at all, not even the real one, his brother’s door still shut and the light off.
Of course, if he really was psychic and seeing the future, that other Dean was also the real one.
Castiel and Eileen, however, were both up and both real. Eileen looked a little tired still despite the fact it was—Sam checked his phone—almost one. He wondered how long she’d been up, if he’d have any luck convincing her to go to sleep. Probably not, he decided, padding up to them.
Eileen noticed him, her face lighting up in a smile, before he made it close enough to hear what they’d been talking about. “Sam,” she greeted, hand and voice working in concert. “We were thinking about lunch.”
Which struck him as weird. Yesterday’s lunch aside, Sam knew Castiel didn’t need to eat, that joining the group for mealtimes had been to put the apocalypse world refugees at ease, since none of the angels from the other world would have condescended to anything so human.. But Castiel’s expression conveyed willingness, so apparently he was eating, now, as a regular thing.
“Sure,” Sam said, feeling wrong-footed, like he’d woken in the Twilight Zone for no reason he could put his finger on. “Yeah. I could eat. Where were you thinking?”
Castiel volunteered to get the food once they’d reached their decision, and Eileen immediately jumped to go with him. There was no way food for only three people required three people to go pick it up, so he waved them away, never mind that the two of them heading off together, after whispering with their heads together before he arrived, felt like a setup.
A setup for what, though, he didn’t know. He and Dean weren’t fighting, hadn’t had any unresolved disagreements. He supposed they might think he needed to talk to Dean about his visions, but he didn’t think Eileen would have told Castiel about that. He couldn’t think of any other reason to get him and Dean alone in the Bunker together. Unless Dean had something to tell him?
Sam shuffled forward absently while he thought—not that it was hard to come up with a reason why Castiel would want to get out of the Bunker; things between him and Dean were still tense. And Eileen, well, Eileen had been dead and in hell; it wasn’t a stretch to think she wouldn’t want to spend all her time stuck in the Bunker—and put his hands down on the back of Castiel’s chair.
He’d stepped back before he really realized what he’d seen, simply because of the overwhelming rush of—of light, of electricity and brightness and power, that swept through his being. It left his knees weak, his fingers tingling, and his head buzzing. Something tickled his cheek. When he wiped it away, his hand came back wet.
He rubbed his thumb over his fingers. The fluid was clear, smeared easily. Tears, he realized vaguely. He was crying. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. Not when Jack died—they’d been too busy with Chuck and the aftermath of him opening hell. Not when Mom died—they’d had Jack to worry about and find, stop. But now he couldn’t stop the liquid from leaking from his eyes. The sorrow was too great, so deep and wide it could swallow whole mountain ranges, whole continents; the grief so potent he felt he couldn’t breathe, so heavy he felt he would sink through the floor and never rise.
He would drown in it.
Under it, though—under it, he could feel anger, hurt. Anger at God for killing Jack, for betraying everything He’d taught them. Anger at Dean for his stubbornness, for being unable to let go of his anger, for being unable to see that he had made the best, only choice he could.
The anger let Sam push away the grief, let him find the edges of it and separate it from himself, let him realize the power and the grief and the anger were Castiel’s, and as soon as he had, the power of it dissipated. In its place, he saw Castiel, grim, surrounded by bright lights and colors that might have been a casino or carnival. The angel held Sam’s gaze, then looked down at his arm. He worked the sleeve of his trench coat and shirt sleeve up over his forearm, revealing one long, red line and the two shorter, perpendicular lines that made up the Mark of Cain.
Then he was looking out across the Library into the War Room. Sam blinked rapidly to clear his vision, turninng in a circle to make sure—that he was still in the Library, he supposed, all traces of that other place gone. The familiar shelves, tables, chairs, lights, and knickknacks were all where they were supposed to be.
He frowned at the chair. Some psychics, he remembered from his research in earlier years, saw visions when they touched objects. The lore said objects gathered energy through daily use, which accounted for a good feeling around an object or place, or an ill feeling, but that only close, personal objects would imprint from their owners, and only strong emotions—usually those associated with hate, sorrow, or death would be able to transfer to a psychic and convey any type of personal information about the person.
He didn’t think any of that applied to Castiel’s chair, which was only used by the angel sometimes and wasn’t his sole property, though he couldn’t deny that the emotion he’d gotten from Castiel’s power qualified. Add to that the fact that Sam had never displayed any signs of clairsentience, and Sam didn’t have any idea what had just happened.
He needed to know if that had been a one-off.
His breath shuddered on the way out when he imagined feeling that power again, the foreign grief, and the fingers he stretched toward the wooden back trembled. Briefly, he curled his fingers into a fist, then, steeling his nerves, quickly tapped the chair back.
Nothing happened. Feeling foolish but relieved, he first rested his fingers along the top curve, then slid them down the front of the backrest until his palm fitted against the top. Nothing weird happened. He huffed and let go of the chair. Did that mean it had been a one-off fluke? Was it something that would only happen with Castiel? Would he be able to get—feeling or images or whatever from other objects if he touched them?
He’d just started to look around the room, considering what other objects might yield useful data regarding his potential clairsentience when the sound of the door opening drew him into the War Room to see what Castiel and Eileen had forgotten, but Castiel held a tray with four drinks, and Eileen had two food bags.
“We got Dean a burger,” Castiel announced before Sam had found his voice.
“Great.”
“They didn’t have any yogurt.”
“That’s fine.”
“Are you okay?” He didn’t know when she’d come up beside him, but Eileen frowned at him, now, one hand reaching for his face.
Abruptly, he remembered the tears and scrubbed his cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I, uh, spilled—”
Thankfully, she backed off, neither her nor Castiel apparently in making him continue. They probably assumed he’d been grieving Mom or Jack, and while both of those were accurate, to an extent, the fact that it’d been Castiel’s grief that caused them meant he couldn’t look the angel in the face. But that was fine. They had food to eat, which discouraged face-gazing, and Dean charged in like a conquering hero before they’d passed the stuffing-their-faces stage, giving everyone something else to think about.
And when he’d finished explaining his plan, the Mark of Cain on Castiel’s arm made a horrible amount of sense.
*
Not that seeing the Mark of Cain on Castiel’s arm following an intense emotional transference from an inanimate object necessarily meant Sam was genuinely psychic. Castiel was an angel. Sam was connected to God. The last time Castiel had touched him, Sam had ended up in God’s head. It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that that connection to God could let Sam into Castiel’s, and angels weren’t necessarily bound by time.
It was just weird that he hadn’t been touching Castiel, or anywhere in the angel’s presence, when it happened. But that still didn’t mean he was definitely psychic.
*
On to PART FOUR...
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