Beyond Here, It's Nothin'
Chapter 1
There is a peacefulness that follows any decision, even the wrong one.
~ Rita Mae Brown
February 12th 2007. Tangiers, Morocco.
"Have you checked the lines of Destiny, Uriel?" Raphael walked to the rail of the balcony. Beneath him the Mediterranean Sea stretched to the northern horizon, the colours ranging from turquoise to cerulean, deepening to indigo where the shallow land shelf dropped away. Along the coastline fishing boats, dhows and pleasure craft were dotted like randomly thrown confetti across the surface. The breeze was light, fitful but cooling at this height. At the shoreline it would be stifling.
"Yes, it has to be Dean Winchester," the angel said, the dark skin of his vessel gleaming with perspiration in the bright sunlight. He disliked being down here, even so far from the monkeys. "He's the correct line, and Alastair has advised that there's no hope that his father can be broken. Dean is the only one left."
Raphael's dark eyes narrowed for a moment, his expression cold as he stared across the sea. "No, there is one other," he said, almost absently correcting his subordinate. "But Dean will do the job well enough. What about the other half of the prophecy? Will he be strong enough to bring it all down?"
Uriel shook his head, smiling. "He is in a state of collapse, has been since John Winchester sacrificed himself. We may not have had the leverage while his father was alive, but there's no problem with it now."
"Good." The archangel looked disinterestedly at the people far below, scurrying like ants about their business. "I expect you to do your utmost to ensure that this goes as planned, Uriel. Everything depends on it."
"I understand," Uriel promised, moving to the rail to stand near Raphael but not too close to the archangel. "I will not fail."
Raphael turned his head slowly to look at the angel. His expression was chillingly blank, the dark eyes of his vessel filled with the zealous fire of a fanatic. "You had better not, Uriel."
He turned away dismissively, and Uriel sagged a little against the rail, dragging in a deep breath of salt-laden air. The plans of the archangel had been in place for a long time. The pieces had been moved in to position. The end game would mean everything to Heaven.
The thoughts were blasphemous and he tilted his head a little, looking up into the clear sky, wondering if any of them would be struck down before the end. He didn't think so. Their Father had left, possibly longer ago than any of them even realised. They were alone and adrift, and they were making their own destinies now.
April 5th, 2007. Nebraska
Jo looked up as the door opened, her heart lurching a little in her chest as she saw the broad shoulders and short, dark hair of the man who walked in. He was turned away from her, talking to the taller young man who walked in behind him, but she would have known him anywhere, that deep voice, rumbling indistinctly as he spoke to his brother.
She walked to the bar, ducking under the hatch as they came up to the counter and sat down.
"Hey," she said, nodding to Sam and flicking a glance at Dean from under her lashes. There was still a level of discomfort with Sam, the memory of Duluth hard to get past. It hadn't been him, but when she closed her eyes and in memory, felt the jerk as he'd tightened the bonds on her wrists, it was his face she saw.
"Hey, Jo," Sam said, pulling off his jacket. "Just a beer, thanks."
Dean rested his elbows on the bar and smiled at her, a little absently, she thought. "Same again."
"What've you two been up to?" she asked, pulling a couple of long necks from the fridge and passing them across the counter.
"Same old," Dean said, twisting the top off and tipping the bottle up. "What about you?"
"Not much," she said, glancing over her shoulder as her mother came through the hatch.
"Boys, good to see you," Ellen said, walking over to stand beside her daughter, her expression wary. "You staying long?"
"Uh," Dean glanced at his brother. "A few hours. R&R."
She nodded. "Ash says he's close to something, he'll know in a couple of hours."
She glanced around them, making sure that none of the few customers scattered thinly at the tables had overhead her. Dean followed the glance, noting that most of them were hunters. His gaze cut to Sam.
Jo watched as Dean exchanged a glance with his brother. "So, you two want rethink the something to eat?"
Dean turned back to her, his smile warmer this time. "Why not."
She smiled back, feeling her heart stumble again. "What'll it be?"
"Bacon and cheese burger, fries," Dean said, his eyes half-closing in anticipation. Sam shook his head.
"BLT for me," he told her. She nodded, and turned away, ducking under the hatch in the counter and slipping into the small kitchen behind the bar. She put a fresh basket of fries into the hot oil, turning to the fridge to get patties, bacon, tomatoes, cheese and rolls, wondering again why she couldn't get Dean Winchester out of her head.
Pushing his plate aside when he finished the meal, Dean caught Jo's gaze as she walked by. "Good burger."
"Thanks."
She nodded with as much indifference as she could manage, leaning past him to pick up his plate. She picked up Sam's and carried them out to the kitchen, rinsing them and stacking them in the dishwasher. Sam was standing by the jukebox when she came out, looking at his phone, and Dean tilted his head toward the pool table.
"You want a game?"
"Still working, maybe later," she told him, glancing at her mother. Ellen stood by the middle of the bar's u-shaped counter, her head very slightly turned toward them, listening.
"Okay," he nodded agreeably, picking up his beer.
It wasn't that he wasn't friendly, she thought, going around the tables and collecting glasses and bottles, loading her tray and wiping the tables down with a clean cloth. He didn't seem to be any more than friendly, even the last time they'd been in, before Sam's possession, he'd been arguing with her over her taste in music, like a –
- like a big brother. The thought came into her head, immediately followed by Sam's words in the bar.
'Cause, see, Dean, he likes you, sure. But … not in the way you want him. I mean … maybe it's kind of a – as a little sister. But romance? That's just out of the question. He kinda thinks you're a school girl, you know, Sam-possessed-by-Meg had told her.
She bit the corner of her lip as she looked over at the youngest Winchester, still by the jukebox. She'd meant to ask Sam if that'd been his opinion, or the demon's.
It was ten when she finished her shift, the bar filled but quieter, more hunters sitting at the tables, working on their notes or talking in low, uneavesdroppable tones to each other. Hanging up her apron at the back of the bar, she looked in the flyspecked mirror and tugged a little at the hem of her top, the scooped neck dropping accordingly, showing a little more cleavage. The front door opened and she turned, catching sight of Dean looking around to see who'd come in, her gaze following his.
Ellie Morgan.
Jo had met the hunter a few times, when Ellie'd come in to talk to her mother or to Ash. Quiet, serious and as self-possessed as a cat, Ellie was cordial rather than friendly, she'd thought on each of those occasions, cold and uninvolved with anyone except Ellen and the bar's eccentric stray.
There weren't many women in the hunting life and she'd briefly wondered if Ellie would take her on as a partner after her partner had been killed. She hadn't met Furente, had been at school, the freak with the knife collection, when the two had infrequently stopped by the roadhouse, sharing information mostly. Her mother had kyboshed the idea in thirty seconds flat, telling her that Ellie hunted alone and it was best to leave it that way. She'd said much the same thing about Gordon Walker, Jo remembered. And about the Winchesters.
Opening the hatch and stepping out from behind the bar, she stopped, seeing Dean get up from his chair, walk straight to the slender redhead, ducking his head close to her to listen to what she was saying. She couldn't remember seeing him do that for anyone else. Her eyes narrowed consideringly as she watched him follow Ellie, the pair crossing the room and walking around the pool table to Ash's back office. Ellie knocked on the door, turning to say something else to Dean, and Jo saw him shake his head, his hand waving in a vague gesture toward the bar.
"Hey, Jo," Sam said quietly from behind her and she started, head snapping around to look at him.
"Sam," she answered shortly. Sam's gaze shifted behind her and she looked back to see Ash's door open, Ash rubbing a hand over his face as he peered at the two standing outside it. He stepped back, opening the door wider and Ellie followed him inside, leaving Dean standing alone as it closed behind her. Jo frowned as she watched him stare at it for a long moment before he turned around and headed back to the bar.
"That Ellie?" Sam asked, sitting on a vacant stool and leaning on the bar as his brother walked up. "What's she doing here?"
Dean looked at him, nodding, his eyes sliding to Jo briefly and cutting back. His tone was distinctly casual as he responded, "Said she had something for Ash."
He took the stool on the other side of Jo, glancing at his watch and staring vaguely toward the shelves of bottles that lined the back wall of the bar.
Jo leaned a little closer, her shoulder brushing his. "Still feel like that game?"
He turned to face her, and she saw his gaze cut past her to the door on the other side of the room, flicking back almost immediately. "Sure."
Walking to the table, Jo wondered if he'd even remembered the earlier offer. Most of the guys who came into the roadhouse were wide-eyed and ready to try their best lines on her as soon as they saw her. Of course Dean had to be the exception, she thought. Neither of them had mentioned what her mother had told her, the afternoon they'd gotten back from ghost hunt. Even Ellen hadn't mentioned it again, her mother trying to evade a more detailed conversation about her father's death ever since. That outburst had hurt him as much as the revelation had hurt her, she knew. She didn't know how to apologise for it, or even if she should. It still hurt.
She picked up the rack and released the balls, retrieving them from wide slot at the end of the table and setting them up. Dean was still at the bar, talking to Sam. The music from the jukebox was just loud enough so that she couldn't hear what they saying, and Dean's back was to her, but she could see that Sam was slightly agitated about something.
The older Winchester shrugged at his brother and got up, turning and walking to the pool table. He chose a cue and smiled at her, his expression clearly indicating that he considered the game a friendly waste of time. She smiled back, hiding her annoyance at his built-in arrogance.
"Want to make it interesting?"
He glanced at the table and shrugged. "Sure. How much?"
"Fifty?" Jo pulled the note from the role of tips in her pocket and laid it on the table. He looked at it for a moment and pulled his wallet out, peeling off another fifty and putting it on top.
"You can break," he told her, returning the creased leather billfold to the back pocket of his jeans.
Jo picked up her cue and walked around to set the white ball, glancing sideways as Sam brought three beers to the table closest and set them down. From the corner of her eye, Jo could see her mother watching them as she polished glasses behind the counter.
She bent over the table, her attention split between lining up the ball and the awareness that she finally had Dean's attention as he stood at the other of the table and got a good view of the shadowed cleft between her breasts, framed by the low scooped neck of her top. She drew back and hit the ball, watching it crack into the grouping of coloured balls at the other end, sinking two of the smalls.
Looking up, she saw Dean smiling slightly as he picked up his cue and walked around the table to line up the larges.
They played a slow game, drinking their beers and talking occasionally to Sam, for ten minutes before the door to Ash's room opened again. Jo watched as both Sam and Dean stopped what they were doing and turned to look.
Standing next to Ash, the computer genius' arm around her shoulders as he planted a kiss on her cheek, the redhead was only a couple of inches taller than she was, Jo realised. And the same age. Her mother had let that slip after Ellie had been there last time. Glancing back at Dean, she saw his brows draw together at the sight and felt a flash of irritation at him.
Ellie was smiling patiently and nodding at whatever Ash was saying softly next to her ear, when Jo's gaze returned to them. She nodded, slinging her bulky bag onto one shoulder and threading her way through the tables to the bar without looking at either Dean or Sam. The smile had vanished and Jo thought she looked almost worried as she took a stool at the end of the bar and spoke quietly to her mother.
The brothers exchanged another of the lightning-fast glances that seemed half-telepathic, and Dean put down his beer, walking to the side of the table and lining up and sinking two balls in quick succession as Sam finished his beer and left the table to walk to the bar.
Walking around the end of the pool table, his expression no longer friendly or relaxed, Dean sank two more balls fast, his last two, the sharp cracks of the white hitting the others followed by the heavy clunks as they fell into the pockets. The last shot left the white ball in a direct line with the black and the corner pocket, and Jo realised she'd managed to hustle herself as he leaned over, his concentration fierce, lining up the black ball and sinking it with a sharp click and a decisive clunk into the pocket. He straightened up and walked unhurriedly around the table, putting the cue back on the stand, taking the money from the table's edge and picking up his beer. He gave her a somewhat apologetic smile as he noticed her staring at him.
The smile turned her stomach over and she found it hard to raise a smile in return.
"You want your money back?" he asked, picking up her bottle and handing it to her as she walked around the table and back to the table. She took it and shook her head.
"No. I'll know better next time," she said, swallowing a mouthful. His gaze shifted to the bar and she realised that not being able to read the expression on his face as he watched them was even more irritating than his more obvious feelings earlier.
"You two working with Ellie now?"
He turned back to her and shrugged. "Sometimes."
"I thought you worked alone, family thing," she pressed harder, trying to keep her voice light.
"Mostly we do," he agreed noncommittally, throwing another fast glance at the bar.
"Thanks for the game." He finished his beer and set the bottle on the table, turning away. Jo watched him walk to the bar and stop between Ellie and Sam when he reached it. He stretched out an arm behind Ellie as he joined their conversation, leaning against the bar. Whatever they were talking about, their voices were pitched too low to overhear, Jo realised with disappointment.
"What'd Ash say?" Dean asked as he propped himself on one arm, leaning against the bar and looking from Sam to Ellie.
"He said that he won't have the full data set correlated for at least another two weeks," Ellie told him, picking up her glass and sipping at the whiskey. "But the signs are there, the demon is back on this plane, somewhere."
"What good does it do us? We don't have a way to kill it," Dean said irritably.
"There might be a way," Ellie said, sliding off the stool and picking up her glass. "I haven't been able to get hold of all the ingredients yet, but there's a ritual that can locate lost objects, anywhere."
She took a step toward him and he backed up to let her past. Sam's forehead creased up questioningly at him as he got up and Dean shrugged, looking down the bar for Ellen. Beer wasn't going to cut it for this conversation, he thought, seeing his brother follow Ellie to the booth across the room in the periphery of his vision.
"What's going on?" Ellen asked as she walked over to him, catching his look at the bottles behind her and reaching for a glass.
"Maybe nothing," Dean told her, watching her pour the whiskey. "Ash might've found something concrete."
Ellen nodded, adding a second shot to his glass. "Ellie got something for you?"
His attention shifted back to the woman with his brother. Ellie slid onto the bench seat, her over-sized backpack on the seat beside her as she pulled out a file and opened it.
"She thinks so."
"Dean, we're all friends here, right?" Ellen leaned on the bar toward him. "This isn't just your fight."
He looked back at her and picked up his glass. "Thought you didn't trust us enough to work with, Ellen."
She looked away, her hair swinging forward to hide her face. "I was afraid for Jo, you know that. I still am."
He'd read Jim Murphy's journal at Bobby's place, after Ellie had told him to look it up. The priest had written down the account his father had given him about the gate in Pasadena. For a moment, Dean wondered if he should tell Ellen about it. Glancing back to the booth on the other wall, he decided against it. There were too many things they had to get done. Past history had waited for a lot of years. It could wait a bit longer.
"When we know something for sure, you'll know about it," he said, hoping that sounded like a commitment, even though he knew it wasn't.
Ellen seemed to know it as well, her expression doubtful as she looked at him. He couldn't promise anything and he turned away, carrying his whiskey over to the booth. Sam and Ellie were both looking at the file on the table and he slid in beside her, setting his glass down as Sam looked up.
"It might work," his brother told him.
Jo turned around at the light tap on her shoulder, looking at Trip Havers, the young partner of one of the more experienced hunters who frequented the roadhouse.
"You finished waitressing?" Trip asked with a grin. "Can I buy you a drink?"
She looked at him and shrugged inwardly. What else did she have to do? "Dwight not here tonight?"
Trip shook his head. "No, told me cut out and have some fun. We got a lead on a haunting down in Mississippi and we're leaving tomorrow for it."
"What do you want?" He looked down the counter at Ellen. Jo followed his gaze, seeing her mother flick a glance their way and sighing inwardly. Someone had put the Stones' Satisfaction on the jukebox and it seemed entirely too ironic for her.
"Bourbon and Coke," she said, taking a seat at the end of the bar.
He nodded and walked down the counter, stopping in front of Ellen, a couple of feet from the brothers. Her mother served him, glancing at her daughter with a slightly raised brow as she heard the order but pouring out the drinks anyway. Hers would be light on the bourbon, she knew.
Swivelling around slightly as Trip returned and set her drink on the counter, she looked just past his ear as Ellie got up, forcing Dean to step back, and carried her drink to a booth on the other side of the room, Sam following her. Dean was leaning on the bar, talking to her mother.
Picking up her glass, Jo swallowed half in the first long mouthful, noting without surprise that the bourbon was indeed light in her glass. She watched Ellen pour Dean a double, frowning a little as her mother leaned closer to the hunter to say something. Whatever Dean said back, it'd unsettled her, she saw. Not much could do that. He turned away from the bar, and she watched him carry his glass over to the table where Sam and Ellie were now sitting, looking over a file that Ellie had drawn from her bag.
Dean dropped onto the seat next to Ellie, a little closer than was necessary, Jo thought, on the pretext of reading the file in front of her.
She'd asked him, the last time the three of them had been in the roadhouse together, if he was interested in the hunter and he'd looked at her, his expression derisory as he'd denied it. But what he said, she thought now, and the way he acted around her, were two different things.
"You ever get that hunt you were putting together going, Jo?"
She dragged her attention back to the young man in front of her. "What?"
"That job you thought was a case in Pennsylvania?" Trip clarified.
She shook her head. "No, not yet."
"We could do it together if you're mom's okay with it," he suggested, glancing at the formidable woman standing behind the bar.
"Yeah, I'll check," she said absently, turning a little more so that she could look over his shoulder at the booth. Dean's arm was resting along the back of the seat, and he leaned closer to the redhead, a paper held in the other hand.
What was it about him, she wondered unhappily. He was attractive, in a rough and careless kind of way, but that usually didn't set her off this way. There was a deep sadness in him, a wide streak of protectiveness, both of which she found unendurably attractive. He'd told her a while ago that normally he'd have hit on her so fast her head would've been spinning, if it hadn't been for the series of events that had dogged them in the last few months, but that'd been nearly four months ago, and he still hadn't, and looking at him now she didn't think that it had anything to do with what was going on in his life anymore.
She watched as Ellie turned her head to look at him and for a moment the two of them were still, Dean looking down slightly into her eyes, Ellie looking up at him and neither moving. Then Ellie turned away and she saw Dean's eyelids close for a second before he opened them and looked back down at the file.
What had that been, she wondered?
"What about Bobby?" Sam asked, looking up from the list in the file at Ellie.
She nodded. "He's looking but some of this stuff isn't available in this country, and he says he's too old to deal with jet lag," she told him dryly. "I've got a flight out tomorrow evening."
"Wait a minute," Dean said, trying to force his attention back on the requirements of the ritual, instead of wondering what the hell had just happened. "Even if this works, if we get all this stuff, and Ash comes up with a location, we're not thinking this thing is just going to sit still for us to put it all together and kill it, right? We still don't even know what it wants."
Sam looked up from the file, his eyes flint-hard. "It took Ava, Dean. It killed Mom and Jess and it's done something to god-knows how many kids. Whatever it wants, if we can find the Colt, we can kill it and that puts an end to it, for good."
Dean closed his teeth on the retort that rose; that he'd fired at it and he hadn't been able to kill it. He didn't want to have that argument again in front of anyone else.
Watching the booth obliquely through the tarnished mirror behind the bar, Jo saw Ellie gathering up the papers and putting them into the file, closing it and passing it to Sam. The hunter nodded at Dean, getting to her feet. He got up and moved out of her way and Jo's attention sharpened as his hand closed around the woman's slim wrist as she passed him, ducking his head to say something to her without letting go. Ellie shrugged slightly, and he released her, and the redhead turned away, raising a hand to Ellen and smiling briefly in her direction as she headed for the front door.
Her gaze flicking back to the brothers, Jo watched Dean sit down again, leaning across the table to say something to Sam.
"Well, thanks for the drink," she said to Trip, getting up.
"It's early –"
She smiled thinly. "Not for me, my boss is a hard-ass," she told him, her smile only half-joking. "See you around."
Walking out through the door beside the bar, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, wondering if there was any point to the pretence. From her window, she watched Trip head out to his car, driving out of the gravelled lot and turning south. She sat in the dark and waited to hear the growl of the Impala's engine, pretty sure the brothers would be heading back into town. It was another missed opportunity, she thought morosely to herself, but it was hard to find a time and a place where she could talk to him alone.
After half an hour of listening, she came back down the stairs, glancing around at the couple of hunters who were still there, working on their cases or just going through the papers her mother ordered from the cities across the country. She walked slowly over to the booth where Dean was sitting alone, the open file still in front of him.
He looked up as she stopped beside him.
"What's that?" she asked, looking at the file, not knowing what else to say. He followed her gaze and shuffled the papers back inside the file, closing it.
"Job."
She sat down on the bench seat opposite him, propping her chin on one hand. Dean gave her a quizzical glance, picking up his glass. There was barely a mouthful left in it.
"You know, Ellie's the same age as me," she said. He looked at her, one dark brow lifting.
"And that would be important – why?"
Jo sighed, leaning back. "I just think it's interesting that you don't tell her to go back to school, do something else, don't treat her like a kid."
His expression seemed to be somewhere between disbelief and bemusement. "She's got experience."
"And how'd she get that, huh? She went out and did it," Jo said exasperatedly.
"She trained with someone else for two years when she did," he corrected her, a little impatiently, the humour gone from his face. "Someone good."
"And got him killed," Jo muttered under her breath, looking away from him. He heard it anyway, leaning forward across the table and staring at her.
"How do you know that?"
"Everyone knows what happened to Michael Furente," she told him acerbically. "Demon took him because he gave himself up for her."
Dean's eyes narrowed. "Who told you that, Jo?"
She shrugged, looking away again, her expression stubborn. "Mom. Ellie was in here, a few months after it happened. She told Mom."
"And she told you?" he asked softly. "And you tell everyone else? Whether it's their business or not? You are a kid."
She straightened up, offended. "I'm not and I'm not the keeper of everyone else's secrets. If she didn't want it known, she should have kept it to herself."
The look of disbelief he gave her was cold, and in that moment, Jo recognised that she'd just blown whatever chance she might've had at gaining his trust.
He got to his feet, picking up the file with a dismissive shrug. "Yeah. Whatever."
April 10, 2007. Richmond, Virginia
The circle drawn on the broad, wooden boards of the church's floor was large, candles flicking at each of the cardinal points and the smell of the burned herbs and powders thick in the air.
"What's it mean?" Sam looked down at the untouched map in the centre. "It didn't work?"
Ellie shook her head. "It worked," she said, her voice neutral. "The gun's not here, not on this plane. Or it's warded."
"So, it didn't work," Dean said sardonically, turning away from the circle and walking to the door. He wasn't sure if he was disappointed or not. The whole plan had worried him, even getting the Colt back. He didn't think they were ready to take on a demon that powerful. His brother was as reckless as his father when it came to Yellow-Eyes.
"I'm sorry," Ellie said, looking up at him.
He glanced back to her and shook his head. "It was worth a shot," he admitted tiredly. With the Colt and the one bullet left, he might've been able to kill it. Without it, there was no chance at all.
"What now?" Sam asked, getting to his feet.
"Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to get out of sight for a while," Dean said, looking out through the door at the ordinary suburban street beyond it. "Let the APBs gather some dust after Folsom."
"What?! No, we keep looking," Sam blurted out, looking from his brother to the woman kneeling on the other side of the circle.
Ellie gathered up the candles, in the reverse order of how she'd set them up. She glanced up at him. "He might be right," she told Sam, getting to her feet. "Aside from the odds being good for running into some cop who knows your faces, you know what happened to Andy."
"No," Sam ground out. "We don't know what happened to Andy. Just that he's disappeared. Like Ava," he added pointedly, looking at his brother.
"You're in such a damned rush to risk your life, Sammy?" Dean snapped at him, turning back from the door.
Sam scowled at him. "I want this to be over!"
"So do I, but I told you, it's not worth dying for," Dean said, his voice deepening.
"I disagree," Sam said coolly.
Dean stared at him for a long moment then turned abruptly and left the church.
Sam turned and looked down at Ellie, dropping to one knee and helping to pack away the map and the emptied bowls. "Ever since Dad … he won't listen to me, doesn't even to pretend to listen anymore."
Ellie reached into the bag for a bottle of water, dampening a cloth and starting to wipe the spell circle from the floor.
"He'd rather die than lose you," she said matter-of-factly.
Sam sank back on his heels, watching her clean, his breath running out noisily. "Did he tell you what Dad told him? About me?"
She nodded, glancing at him.
"We don't even know what it means, Ellie," Sam said, his voice hard with frustration. "And Dean can't, he won't do it. So one of us has to be stronger."
"He won't do it unless he has concrete proof because he loves you, Sam, and he needs his family," she said, straightening as she stopped wiping and looked up at him. "You said it yourself, you don't know what it means. Meg found a way in and he knew it wasn't you. Don't you think he'll know the difference again?"
Sam didn't respond and Ellie looked back at the floor, dampening the cloth and wiping the last traces of the circle from the boards.
"Are you going back to the roadhouse?" Dean asked her as she locked the church door and came down the steps.
She shook her head, opening the truck door and throwing her bag inside. "No, there's a woman I know who's in the country at the moment," she told him, glancing at his brother. Sam was leaning against the Impala, his arms folded tightly over his chest, staring at the ground.
"She specialises in getting hold of hard-to-find information and artefacts and she said she had some information that might be relevant to the demon," she continued. "If she does, I'll leave it with Ash, or see you there."
He nodded, looking down the street, his expression pensive. "We'll be there," he said. "We have to keep our heads down now anyway."
April 18, 2007. San Francisco, California
The stone-paved balcony overlooked the Bay, a capricious breeze fluttering the edges of the large umbrella shading the elegantly set table by the balustrade and blowing the last traces of the morning fog away, revealing a panoramic view of sea and sky.
"I hear you've been helping the Winchester brothers."
Ellie turned away from the view to look at the woman sitting opposite her. The English woman was immaculately and expensively dressed, her honey-blonde hair loose, tendrils lifting in the light breeze and framing a speculative expression.
"I thought you decided that getting involved in hunter business was beneath you," Ellie countered mildly, picking up her wine glass. "Too much emotion, wasn't it?"
The woman smiled. "Well, certainly some of them. I keep my contacts, Ellie, you know that."
She did know it. Bela's contacts were world-wide and she heard everything, using the information to further her ambitions. For all that she was amoral, scheming and usually playing several angles on any single situation, she was a good business contact, her reputation upheld by a rigid adherence to keeping her word once a deal had been struck.
"What did the document say?" she asked, bypassing the question. "And how did you authenticate it?"
"The authentication came with the delivery," Bela said, the smile fading slowly. "I trust it." She picked up her glass and leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs as she looked at Ellie over the rim.
"As for what it says, well, I can tell you it's interesting, fascinating, even," she said. "Particularly so, in light of your recent associations. More than that will cost you."
"How much?"
"A quarter-million, in sterling," Bela told her. "There are several other interested parties."
Ellie grimaced inwardly as she kept her face expressionless. It was possible, but it would take a couple of days.
"The usual account?" she asked and Bela laughed.
"I do like doing business with you, you're so utterly prosaic about it," she said. "And yeah, the usual account will be fine."
"It'll take me a couple of days to move that," Ellie told her. "And I'm going to want more than your assurance that the document's worth it before I make the transfer."
"I'm aware," she said, reaching for the large satchel on the chair beside her. "You have no idea of how difficult it was to get it translated."
Ellie refrained from telling her that she had a very good idea of how difficult it would've been. There were only three people she knew of who could make a translation like that, and they all would've charged the earth for the job.
The single sheet of paper Bela withdrew and passed across the table was dense with printed text, and Ellie put down her glass as she took it, skimming over the contents first, then going back to the top and reading it through. Her heart was hammering against her ribs when she'd finished and she kept her gaze on the page until she was sure that none of the shock that was filling her would show on her face.
"How do you want to manage delivery?"
"Safe deposit box," Bela said, holding her hand out. Ellie passed the paper back and nodded.
"The key will be at the bank as soon as the funds have been verified." Bela held out her hand and Ellie shook it.
"As always, a pleasure," Bela said, getting to her feet. "I have a flight in two hours, so I hope you won't mind me cutting this short."
"The funds will be in the account by Friday," Ellie said, repressing her impatience for the other woman to leave. There was a flight to Rome at six, she thought she could just make it.
"Splendid," Bela said, picking up her bag and turning away. "Ciao."
Ellie watched her walk off the restaurant's patio and inside and pulled out her cell, her thoughts chaotic as she tried to prioritise everything she was going to have to do in the next two days.