I kind of like big cities.

In a little town, if you get kicked out of the bar, you're done for the night. In a city, well, you just go find the next bar. You don't have to worry that the one hot chick in the place is going to turn you down, because if she does there's another place, or even another hot chick. In a city, my biggest problem is usually finding a place to park my baby.

Because that's another thing I like about cities: weird stuff tends to stay away from them. I don't know why; maybe too many witnesses. And for exactly that reason, I don't get to spend much time in big cities.

My brother Sam and I were in Chicago in the cold gray week after New Year's trying to track down a lead he thought he had on the demon who owned my soul. It killed me to watch him trying so hard to get me out of the deal I'd made, when I could feel in my bones that there just wasn't any loophole. He thought it was his fault, because I'd made the deal in the first place to save his life. I kept trying to tell him that I knew what I was doing when I did it, but that didn't stop him.

If all this sounds crazy, be glad. It means you're not the kind of person who sees the weird shit that's behind the normal part of the world.

We'd spent a couple of days trying to track down Sam's lead, but in the end it had petered out. Then I let him mope for one night—one thing about my brother, he can mope on a practically Olympic level—and the next night I took him out, over his protests. I kind of guilted him into it, a combo of "we need some cash" and "I just want to have a little fun (before I die)", but hey, whatever works. A guy's got to look out for his little brother, even when the little brother's four inches taller.

So we went to a bar. We spent the first part of the evening enhancing our cash supply by letting drunk fratboys think we were worse at pool than we really were. We didn't even have to get in anybody's face about it; the first couple groups didn't realize they'd been hustled, and the one guy who did in the last group sized up me and Sam, took in the fact that two of his buddies were practically weaving, and decided to write off the loss. After that we switched bars, in case the guy got dumber as he got drunker, because most people do.

I give Sammy a hard time for being no fun, but really his problem is that he worries. When he forgets to worry, he's great to hang with. Of course it's tough to make him forget lately, what with four months till D-day hanging over our heads, but sometimes I manage.

That night he didn't make me work at it. We talked and laughed, and when the girl in the blue top went by and gave me a look he didn't even roll his eyes. So when she came back I reached out and tugged on her sleeve. She had two drinks in her hands, which was a good sign.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Dean." I was feeling no particular need to get fancy.

"I'm Chris," she said. "I haven't seen you guys in here before." She put some seriously nice subtext on it about how she'd have noticed.

"We're not in town long." It's always better to let them know up front that there's not gonna be a second date.

"Long enough, I hope," she said, and this time Sammy did roll his eyes, but I totally didn't care.

"At least the next, say, eighteen hours or so."

Chris laughed. "Look, I have to take these back to my friend." She gestured with the glasses at another girl, this one in a red dress that left just enough to the imagination to make it interesting.

"We've got extra seats, bring her over here," Sam put in. I was kind of surprised he was getting into the spirit of things.

"Sure, I'll—oh, crap," Chris said, her voice turning annoyed.

"What?" I asked. Sam and I turned to look at the other girl. Some guy was talking to her, and she didn't look happy about it.

"That guy's been bugging Liz all night," she said. Before the sentence was quite finished Sam was swinging off his stool. "I'm on it," he said over his shoulder.

My little brother has a chivalrous streak.

There was no way to hear the conversation over the noise in the place, so I kept an eye on the body language just in case. The other guy wasn't a pipsqueak; on the other hand Sam's six-four, and he knows how to use it when he has to. Within a minute he and Liz were back at our table.

From there the evening picked up. I was pretty busy talking to Chris, but it seemed clear that Sammy wasn't going to have any problems sealing the deal with Liz if he wanted to—and I was pretty sure he wanted to. I mean, the way he and I live practically in each others' hip pockets, I know some things about him I'd rather not, but take it from me: your right hand is just no substitute.

When the crowd started thinning out we decided to move the party to Chris and Liz's place. Chris and I went to get the Impala. It took us a few minutes to get to where I'd parked because we kept having to stop and kiss. I was tempted as hell to just put her in the back seat and get down to business, but I could just picture the bitchface I'd get from Sammy if we took that long. I settled for leaning her on the passenger door and letting my hands roam a little, till we were both breathing hard. She called me a bastard when I stopped, but she was laughing.

When we came around the corner to the street the bar was on, it was clear something was wrong. When we'd left, Liz had had Sammy up against the wall and was searching for his tonsils; now neither of them was anywhere to be seen. I pulled up to the curb fast and hopped out, calling for Sam. Chris got out too; before she could speak I heard Sam's voice from the alley nearby.

No one looks good under streetlights and neon, but I've seen Sam hurt often enough to know when someone's rung his chimes for him. He was only half sitting up and his eyes weren't too focused. As soon as he registered I was there he said urgently, "The guy, the one from inside. He's got Liz." Chris gasped behind me.

"Seriously?" I said, using sarcasm to cover the worry. "You let that guy get the drop on you?" I started to help him sit up, checking for hidden injury as I did.

"Dean. His eyes were black," Sam said.

Ah, crap.

"Did he have a car?" I asked. I couldn't think of any other really good way of tracking down a demon in a city the size of Chicago, but at least Sammy might be able to get into the DMV records.

"I'm calling 911," Chris announced, and opened her little purse. I let Sam go, which fortunately he was steady enough for, and got a hand over her phone right before she hit the first button. Her eyes flew from the phone to my face, and she looked startled and the beginnings of scared…of me.

"We can't call the cops," I said, hoping that using "we" would reassure her.

"What are you talking about?" she demanded. I like a girl who gets pissed when she gets scared. "Liz has been kidnapped, what the hell else can we do?"

"The police don't know what they'd be dealing with," Sam said, finally back in the game. Or at least on his feet, which was all I had time to wait for.

"And, what—you do?" Chris said.

"Yeah," I said. I hoped I didn't sound as tired as I felt. It's like the universe fucking hates Winchesters, seriously. Can't even take my brother out for a night on the town without running into some demon. "Look, Chris, we can find Liz, we can help her, but if we call the cops someone's just going to get hurt. It's kind of hard to explain—"

"Well you better explain, because if you don't I'm calling the police!" Chris brandished her phone like a weapon. I threw Sam a glance. Dealing with the Big Reveal was his job. "You can start with why it matters that his eyes were black."

Sam hung his head for a moment and I felt a little pang. Telling people about the real world always kind of sucks, because after that…well, they were never as safe as they thought, but once you tell them they know about it. The ones who get scared aren't the ones to worry about, though. The ones that get mad are, because they're the ones who end up hunters.

"His eyes weren't black like Dean's eyes are green," Sam said, starting with the easy part. "They were black all over. The part that's usually white, too."

"I saw him when he was talking to Liz. His eyes were perfectly normal."

"Yes, when you were talking to him," Sam said. "He can change them."

"Wait, what? Like, like contacts?"

"No, Chris. He can just change them. Probably does it to scare people. He's…" and here it came, here was the part where she wasn't going to believe us and we'd have to scare the hell out of her to keep her quiet while we looked for Liz…

And Chris's phone buzzed.

She looked down at it, as startled as we were. "Oh God, it's from Liz." It was a text message and she read it quickly, her eyebrows drawing together in confusion. "What the hell?" She tilted the phone so Sam and I could see it. It said QXB 7? blue.

"Plate number," Sam and I said in unison. "It must not have taken her phone," Sam continued.

"It?" Chris said.

"Uh, yeah," Sam said. "Look, with this we can find her, OK? I swear. I swear to you, Chris." She looked at him, stared into his eyes, and I held my breath.

"Fine," she said. "I'm crazy, but fine." She looked down at her phone again, then back up at me. "What do we do?"

*…*…*

We went back to her place after all, with a quick swing by the motel to pick up Sam's laptop. Sam was flipping the thing open practically as we walked in the door, and I spent a few minutes convincing Chris to go change out of her club outfit while he fell into the rabbit hole of whatever he does to make computers his bitch. Then I made coffee. And then, there was nothing to do but wait.

First he went into the phone company. Liz's phone had lost signal not long after she got the message out to Chris, and she hadn't had the GPS on anyway, but he worked out the three cell towers it had been closest to when it went out. Armed with the general area, he burned an access to the Illinois DMV to look at plate records—he tried to explain to me once why ins like that only worked a few times, but I don't have that kind of brain—and out of the hundred possible QXB-7s only one had an address close.

By then it was getting light out. When Sam had the address, I went and shook Chris awake from where she'd dozed off on her couch, to tell her we were going to get Liz. And that turned into a whole new problem, because she was determined to come along. We went back and forth for about ten minutes, me getting louder all the time which I knew was not the way to go, but it was coming up on twenty four hours since I'd had any real sleep, and I'd hit my second wind by then but that didn't make it easier to hang on to my temper. Finally we compromised on her coming, but staying in the car to be ready to call for help if we needed it, by which I meant if Liz needed it, because hey—a SWAT team might actually be able to get her out if the demon killed us, right?

*…*…*

The neighborhood was nice—almost suburban, every house with its own little backyard and some with honest-to-God picket fences. There were kids going by us on the way to school and guys walking their dogs, and it was all so nice it made my teeth hurt.

I used to live in a place like that, but that was when I was too young to know that the world isn't safe.

We parked the Impala a block from the address. Chris called my phone and I stuck it in my pocket so she could hear us, and we set up a system of checkins; if we missed two in a row or told her to, she'd hang up on me and call the cops. And though she looked mutinous when I told her to, eventually she agreed to cut and run if she saw the guy from the club.

Sammy and I loaded up as inconspicuously as we could. Nice suburban neighborhoods don't take it well when you show up carting shotguns in broad daylight, so we put the iron in a duffel for transport. Chris's eyes got huge when she got a load of the trunk.

"This is what we do," I said. Chris just nodded. Then we were done, possession-wards hung around our necks (and it occurred to me we ought to do something to make those harder to lose), bottles of holy water in our pockets, salt and iron and memorized Latin, and I put my hands on her shoulders. "We're gonna get Liz back," I said, and hoped to hell I wasn't lying.

We went in through the back, from the little alley that fed the yards and garages. There was a privacy fence around our target's, but that wasn't unusual. We cracked the gate, took in that there wasn't anything like cover, and just went up to the back door as fast as we could. Sam popped the lock in a few seconds; I can pick locks, but he's got a talent for it. When we were kids, Dad used to reset the combination on a safe lock and challenge him to see how fast he could open it.

The door gave onto a kitchen. We went in fast and closed the door behind us, and I opened the duffel and tossed Sam his gun. The kitchen was set up, but nothing was working; it'd look OK to someone glancing through the window but it was clear the demon didn't use it—and why should it? They don't have to eat.

"Dean," Sam said, and nodded at the welcome mat we were standing on. It had a pattern woven into it in dark brown on light, a familiar pattern: a devil's trap.

"What the hell?" I muttered.

"Guess it doesn't want any other demons coming in to play," Sam said in the same low tone. "On the rug like that, it can move it."

I nodded at him. "OK, upstairs or down?" he asked.

Like that was even a question. "You know this kind of thing always goes for the creepy basement," I said, and he tilted his head to concede the point.

"Probably that door," he said, jerking his chin at it. We set up to either side, shotguns pointed, and Sam reached out his hand to open the door—and from the other side, muffled but clear, I heard a woman start to scream. Liz.

"Shit!" Sam exclaimed. I could see him wanting to charge in, hell I wanted to myself, but he just pulled the door quietly open. The steps went down and then made a right-angle turn, so we couldn't see what was at the bottom, aside from a glow of orange light. I glanced at the lightswitch in the wall, decided not to risk warning the demon, and Sam and I started down the stairs, quick but quiet. We stopped a step up from the turn and I put one eye around the corner.

The place was all set up, the kind of thing you read about in books on torture-killers. There were racks, honest-to-God racks, and Liz was stretched out on one of them. Or at least, it was a woman, and her hair was the right color; I couldn't see her whole face. She was still screaming through the gag in her mouth.

The problem was, she wasn't alone. There were two guys in there with her. One of them was tall, fuckin' taller than Sammy, though skinnier than my brother by a long shot. He wore a long black leather coat and carried a weird carved walking stick that made me think of the old guy in those elf movies Sam liked. He was heading for Liz, quick. The other one was closer to my height, and…OK, look. I like girls pretty much, but this guy? Even under these circumstances, he was so hot it was distracting. And he was scanning the room in a familiar way, checking for threats; I pulled my head back just before he'd have seen me. Neither of them was the demon. I held my hand up with two fingers, so Sam would know what we were dealing with.

"OK, OK, I've got you," one of the men was saying. "It's OK. We'll get you out of here." I glanced at Sam and saw he looked just as confused as I felt. Where the fuck had these two come from?

"I'm going to check upstairs, Harry," the other guy said. That tore it. We had about a second to decide how we were going to introduce ourselves. I saw Sam think it over in a flash and come to a decision. He opened his mouth, checked me, and I nodded.

"There are two of us up here," he said. From below, instant silence broken only by Liz, who was crying now. There was a long pause.

"Who's that?" said the guy who'd been coming up.

"Our names are Sam and Dean," Sam said. "We came to find Liz." Another pause. I could imagine the frantic, non-verbal conferring that must be going on.

"Come around the corner. Hands up," the other guy, Harry, said at last.

OK, fair enough. I didn't put my gun down, though, and neither did Sam, just shifted our grips as we stepped down to the landing.

The hot guy was pointing a Desert Eagle at us. The tall guy, standing directly between us and Liz, was pointing…a stick. It was maybe eighteen inches long and as big around as my thumb. But he handled it like a weapon, so I figured maybe he knew something we didn't. They both tensed when they saw our guns.

"No one do anything they're gonna regret," I said.