Season 5, shortly after 5.10.
Gen. Some cursing, violence, black magic. Should run up to 30, 40,000 words.
Characters were stolen from Kripke.

Suspended from the high steel rafters was a Brahma bull on a flying trapeze.

It jerked and contorted, bucking, swinging head-down from one broken hind-leg as its eyes bulged from its wide white face, cavernous nostrils slinging bloody foam on the blue-hooded chanters below. Dean's jaw twitched in sympathy. Head-down, the thing was strangling on its own guts.

The chant was in Greek, for an annoying change of pace, which meant that Sam was squinting and mouthing along with the words—Dean always wanted to slap him when he did that—and Dean wasn't even bothering to pick roots out of the mess. Instead he peered around the side of their packing crate, keeping his face in shadow.

There were thirteen witches, most of them tall enough under their sky-blue robes to be men, and no human sacrifice to be found in the whole warehouse. Sam and Bobby had been positive that the ritual they were attempting—to buddy up with some big-name demon called Marbas—demanded the life of a virgin bull and a virgin man, but "life" could be a code word for lots of things. Until the blue bastards and bitches dragged some pimple-faced basement-dweller out of a hockey bag, he and Sam were strictly reconnaissance.

Dean could just tell they were going to pick up some demonic "allies" again, what with Lucifer being such an equal opportunity contemptuous prick, and was not looking forward to the inevitable screwing.

The lead witch pulled a lasso out of his robes and managed to loop the wildly swinging bull around one of its forelegs. There was some shouting and stumbling and dragging, but with four witches laying hands to the rope, they managed to bring the bull to a standstill over the unmarked granite slab they had brought for the altar, and its three foot washbasin. Head Witch left the lasso to the underlings and drew a machete.

The winch at the opposite wall whirred and dropped the bull as it gasped around its huge and purpling tongue. Head Witch pulled the machete across in a clean, powerful swipe, and blood spurted and poured down into the basin as the bull's legs quivered overhead.

The bull's eyes stopped screaming, and Dean had to remind himself that that was normal when critters got their arteries cut. Lucky bastard.

The chanting picked up again.

"They just say New York?" Dean hissed.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "Think so. If this is the Salomonic rite, the human sacrifice should be coming up, but I don't see—"

Head Witch tossed back his gory hood, bent his head over the bowl, and slit his own throat.

"Holy shit," Sam breathed, watching two of the assistants step forward and hold the corpse in place by the elbows.

"Nice work ethic," Dean murmured. Head Witch contributed another half-gallon before the flow petered out and the assistants dropped him to the concrete. The chant droned on. Dean heard, "Chicagos."

"Sam. It just me, or do they have some fixation with major cities?"

Sam scrunched his eyebrows together, like he was trying to switch the chanting to instant slow-motion replay with the power of his mind, which was so totally a Sammy power Dean almost wished he could. Almost. Sam's face cleared, and he hefted his shotgun. "S'not just you. We're stopping this."

Dean grinned, raised his pearl Colt. "Now you're talking."

The rest of the coven didn't take well to the suggestion that they abort the ritual until two of them had salt burning into their throats and faces, and Dean had loosed an iron round into a third's leg as Sam slid new shells into his 12-gauge. The witches grabbed their wounded and bolted, with the promise of Indianapolis' finest on the scene, as soon as they got back into their street clothes and stopped by the emergency room.

That left Sam and Dean with maybe fifteen minutes to look over the dropped ritual paraphernalia and somehow purify a human corpse and ten gallons of blood. Sam snapped a few camera phone pictures and grabbed some pine pallets from a corner, snagging a slept-in refrigerator box for kindling on the way. Dean jogged back from the Impala with the salt-and-burn gear, accelerant sloshing in the jerry-can.

"Tell me there's wood shavings in this place," Dean panted, rolling the shivering corpse onto Sam's makeshift pyre, "sawdust. Ass-load of paper towels."

Sam eyed the brimming basin. "Could salt it, float accelerant on top, and do a ceremonial purification. When we burn bones, it's not like we have to crack open the molars to get rid of the pulp…what?"

Dean had paused, the stream of diesel over the body dribbling to a stop, and was staring at Sam like he'd had a face transplant with Justin Timberlake. At least it was better than the hollow stare that used to make him check his own eye-color in the rear view mirror. "Sam, this here's a half-done blood sacrifice, and when witch boy comes back 'cause his Romeo act got wasted, he's gonna be pissed. We gotta go nucular on that shit."

"It's nuc—sure, if think you can burn it all, go for it." Sam frowned. "But with this ritual, who knows what burning it will do. We get this wrong and the demon might just go ahead and loose a thousand plague dogs anyway."

"Plague dogs, that's a new one," Dean remarked, flicking a match. The diesel flared up in a gout of smoke, burning hot and slow, slow enough for the wood and fat to catch. They smelled burnt hair and polyester.

"They start out as normal dogs, sounds like. They were asking him to turn some into something like daevas and slaughter half the country."

Dean raised his eyebrows. "That'd suck."

"Yeah."

"Better not screw this up, then."

"No."

He watched the fire eat into the corpse's jeans, the hair already crisped away, fingers blackening. Smelled like hot dogs. He huffed. "Dude, it's an offering to a demon. How're we gonna defile that? S'like a backwards oxymoron."

"Non-virgin blood mixed in?" Sam suggested, pulling at one sleeve.

"Sam, you're supposed to be the smart one."

"I'm just saying—these rituals are pretty specific—"

"Let's pile on more wood, get some coals going, and dribble it on nice and slow. The salt oughta tell it hands off. No fancy shit."

Five minutes later, they had five minutes left and not nearly enough fire, in Dean's opinion. The corpse was smoking and steaming, a heady mix of delicious barbecue and vomitous offal perfuming the air. But the coals from the pine pallets were getting nice and strawberry red, and they were running out of lumber. It was painfully hot two feet from the fire, which might barely be up to boiling off ten gallons of liquid.

"On three," said Dean, across the unwieldy basin from Sam. "One, two, three."

The blood sloshed. "Dammit, keep in step," Sam snapped. Their eyes met, Dean watching Sam's face, Sam not daring to look away as the blood steamed under his nostrils, and they froze until the bowl stilled.

Dean looked away first. "Okay. Small steps. And, step." They glided sideways, steady and controlled. "Step. Step." The pyre blazed against his jeans. "And pour."

Nice and slow. They leaned over the coals, smoke stinging, panting in the hot steam that rose when the blood splashed down.

"Okay, let's move it over," Sam grunted, when the heat began to dampen. They still had more than half the bowl to get rid of. Dean had sweat in his eyes, and his palms had grown slick against the glossy steel.

They poured again, more blood dampening the salted fire, and as the basin tilted slowly steeper, it happened. Dean sucked in a breath as the bowl began to slip across his hands. Sam quickly hooked his fingers across the inner edge. The bowl rotated, Dean pushed up on his end to compensate, and blood sloshed over Sam's hand and dribbled down his sleeve.

Sam looked stricken.

"It's an ugly-ass coat," Dean remarked when he got his breath back. "It's had a good run, but—Sam?"

Sam's mouth was clamped shut as though he was trying desperately not to throw up, and he was staring down at his chest as though something was burning him. Dean seized the bowl and heaved the whole thing as squarely over the corpse as he could, the basin clattering to the concrete as he gripped Sam's arms. Sam clutched at his chest with his bloody hand and grunted at Dean, eyes panicked.

"Sam, what? It do something? You gotta get outa here?"

Sam grunted again, swallowing, swallowing, and clamped a hand over his nose and mouth with what looked like bruising force. Something sizzled under his jacket. Dean prodded at him, helpless as Sam's eyes seemed to lose focus, fear-glazed.

Sam gave a muffled whine and his eyes bled black.

"F—!" Dean shouted, dropping him and crab-crawling backwards for the salt, unable to look away from Sam kneeling, curling in on himself, with wide, beetle-black eyes. And then Sam lost his grip.

Light flared through his jacket where the tattoo was, and as Sam's hand slipped down from his mouth, his head slammed back and demon-smoke exploded out of him, buoyed on a raw scream. Not again, not freakin' again, and Dean latched onto the salt gun as the smoke trailed off and churned overhead, swooping around the hanging bull like some deformed dragon, watching like the dark. Dean racked in a shell and pounded a fist against his own tattoo, his muscles burning with shock. "You wanna rock, bitch?" The warehouse echoed, clamorous. The boom of salt through the shrieking demon's center-mass was louder.

The smoke squirmed around the hole from the salt blast and shot for the warehouse door, splattering across the wall before it poured itself through the doorjam. Dean blasted the tail end as it disappeared.

"Sam?" Dean hissed. He set the gun aside and shook his brother by the shoulders. "Sam, wake up. Sam!"

-

This is a work in progress, has been since the hiatus after they Abandoned All Hope, and I'm such a slow writer I figure I've got to get it online before the show's over. There's a lot on reserve. Like, three quarters of it.