And here we are at the beginning, where the moment of choice lights a new quantum track, the story telling itself as it burns down the timeline, leaving finality in its wake. We are here.
One
"So then Naamah, who was Asmodai's mother, cursed the soles of its feet so that wherever it walked, the soil was dead, see." Bobby Singer took a good slug of cold sweet tea, looking up into the old beech tree making shade in Missouri Moseley's back garden. "And over time the cities got big," he said, "and Asmodai just naturally got to liking the pavements and all that nice cool dead stone, and it stuck close and you could say it got fond of humanity, in a way. That's why—"
"Hang on," said Joanna Beth, like she didn't know whether to roll her eyes or shoot him for a lying dog of a hunter. "Demons have mothers?"
Bobby'd come to think lately that maybe it was possible to be a little too serious on the subject of demons, especially if you were still a kid, pretty much, and your menfolk all happened to be fools, or dead.
None of his business, and Bobby wasn't stupid enough to say it to Ellen—wouldn't know how, anyway—but come right down to it, the girl was headed for trouble; anyone could see that. A friend would notice, anyway. Ellen might remember that he'd been that, once. He might remind her. He grinned at Jo.
"Well. Like you have a mother?" Didn't look over to where Ellen sat with her chair angled away from the rest. She hadn't said much of anything to anyone since that night at the hellgate. "Not really. More like, Naamah thought Asmodai up. See?"
Jo frowned, trying plain as anything to get her head around that. Missouri made a noise that was half laugh and half disgust, from her place under the big tree. Bobby had an idea that she'd seen the fracture between Ellen and the girl, same as him. And that it worried her, too, though Bobby'd never known anyone who could really tell what Missouri Moseley knew, or how she knew it.
Missouri's garden was stone-walled, with borders of sage and honeysuckle and clumps of zinnias looking radioactive in the summer glare. One Winchester was wandering back and forth on the flagstone perimeter, restless and sweating in the broiling air; the other mostly watched him quietly, till Missouri said, "Tcha. Look at him. Like a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rockin'-chairs." She raised her voice. "You worried your own personal devil's gonna hear its name, come runnin'? Put your shirt on, Dean Winchester, and sit."
Sam turned his stare on Missouri, who ignored him, fanning herself easy and slow, till the silence got to be uncomfortable. She was looking at Jo like her little speech had been aimed at making Jo see something, and then reading in Jo's face what it was. Dean kept pacing.
Bobby let his story go, watching the others and feeling the air for trouble. Bee-hum and the skitter of a lizard over the stone coping said all was well, if you didn't count the humans.
He had no clue what lay buried under the high walls or what had gone into the making of them, but he'd known the minute he'd set a foot down on that ground that it wasn't a place where malice could do much more than skulk outside the gate. It was, never mind Dean's guilty jittering or the look on Sam's face, safe. Even with the Undead leaning back in a rickety lounge chair over there in the deep shade.
As much as that could be said about anything, that summer.
TBC