Hey, so just before I start this chapter, just wanted to say that I'm experimenting with writing in the present tense, and I don't actually really like it, I have to force myself to actually remember to put things into it (and often end up writing two or three sentences before I realize that it was all in the past tense). But I want to at least be able to do it, so this came out of that. Also, I know I said at the beginning of the last chapter that this comes partially from something I touched on in Heaven Forbidden. But if you haven't read that and you haven't figured out what's happening here yet, don't go read it, or you'll spoil some of the surprise! That said, by the end of this chapter, you may very well have figured out the 'surprise.' I don't think I'm that good at subtlety. Oh, and one last thing, sorry if any of you got two notifications at the same time about this story, I don't know exactly how the notifications work, but when I uploaded this chapter I also re-uploaded the last one because I noticed one little spelling mistake that I then fixed.
This time, waking is distinctly more painful. The two places Sam was hit are throbbing in time with his heartbeat, and the shoulder that crashed into the edge of a sign aches.
They're in semidarkness this time, and as Sam groans quietly and lifts his head, he can see that the room they're in is rectangular, maybe 15 feet across. He's sitting against the wall with his hands above his head; an experimental yank shows his wrists are locked in heavy metal shackles.
There's a low "Sam?" from a few feet away, and turning, Sam makes out the silhouette of his brother, similarly chained and sitting against the wall adjacent to his. "Sammy? You okay?" Dean asks.
Sam grunts an affirmative and tries to shift to a slightly more comfortable position to ease the strain on his hurt shoulder. "What was that earlier about waking up chained in a dungeon?"
Dean's frustrated chuckle assures Sam that his brother is okay. He hears Dean pulling on his chains as well. "So any idea what our dancer friends are?" Sam ventures. "You mentioned it earlier, but I'm guessing not vamps, since they were out there in broad daylight at that club."
"Yeah, and shifters ain't exactly the pack-hunting kind. I'm guessing our best bet is demons," Dean says.
"Great," Sam says, "so what now?"
"These things are pretty sturdy," says Dean after a minute, and Sam can hear him pulling on the cuffs again. "But I bet I could get them open if I had some kind of pick."
"Anything within reach?" Sam asks skeptically. He wants out as much as Dean, but the chains connected to the shackles aren't long, and sitting down, Sam bets he could maybe, at most, touch the top of his own head. It's possible they could work themselves into a standing position and maybe reach their pockets, but he'd bet everything he had that those girls at least patted them down before chaining them up.
He hears Dean shifting in place, possibly thinking the same thing as Sam. "If I can just get standing a bit, I—"
The rest of Dean's sentence dies in the creaking sound of a metal door opening, echoing around the chamber they're in. Then suddenly a row of lights in the ceiling flicks on. Sam squints against the unexpected brightness.
When his eyes adjust, he looks to his side at where Dean is chained. Dean's legs are bent, he had obviously been about to try and stand, and his whole body is coiled with tension. And although he sounded fine earlier, Sam is still relieved to be able to see that his brother is uninjured.
He can now also see the room they're in. There are multiple sets of chains like his own along the wall, and one on the floor in the middle of the room, in what he can see now is an enormous devil's trap, taking up most of the floor. His brows furrow. What kind of demons keep people in a room with a devil's trap in it?
There are quiet footsteps on the other side of the wall across from Dean, and then suddenly the wall itself slides forward and splits apart, revealing the same two girls who attacked Sam and Dean earlier.
Sam stiffens and can practically feel Dean doing the same even from across the room. The two girls step forward, and in doing so move into the confines of the devil's trap on the floor. Sam's eyes flick between their faces and their feet, wondering what the hell is going on.
The older-looking of the two girls, with short-cropped hair, stays back while the other moves forward, toward Sam. He tenses even further as she approaches him. Dean growls a warning.
The girl stops a couple feet from Sam, just inside the edge of the trap. Without really thinking, Sam looks up at her and says "Christo" forcefully.
She blinks, clearly surprised, but her eyes don't turn black, she doesn't flinch away from him. She stands still for a moment more, then says quietly, "We're not demons." Her tone suggests she finds the very idea absurd, and possibly a bit… disgusting.
Hunters, Sam thinks, are they hunters? Nothing else makes sense. Who else would have a room with a devil's trap on the floor, and be able to ambush and take down two skilled hunters so quickly? But then, what was this? Another Gordon Walker? Were these girls convinced Sam and Dean were some sort of supernatural freaks who needed to be stopped? Great, Sam thinks, because we really needed more people against us..
The girl in front of him steps outside the devil's trap, now extremely close, and Sam shifts uncomfortably. "Hey," Dean barks from across the room.
She ignores him and suddenly crouches down, eye level with Sam. She reaches a hand toward his face and he instinctively flinches a bit to the side. "Don't touch him!" Dean yells.
The girls pauses, cringes slightly, and then moves forward again, ignoring Dean. "Sorry," she says, "can I…?" She touches the side of Sam's head lightly, pressing for him to turn his head further, then slides her hand into his hair carefully. Her touch is surprisingly gentle and reminds him a bit of Dean's. She lightly runs her fingers across the lump on the back of Sam's head where she hit him earlier, and he hisses.
Dean gives a frustrated, protective growl, and Sam hears him yank on the chains holding him to the wall. "Sorry," the girl says again, the pulls her hand back and reaches into her jacket to withdraw a metal key. She rises a bit out of her crouch and pulls on Sam's shackles. There is the sound of metal clinking on metal, and suddenly Sam's hands are freed. He drops them into his lap and flexes his hands a few times, trying to return blood flow.
The girl crouches before him once again and puts a hand under his elbow, gently helping him stand. Sam is utterly confused by the girl's sudden apparent kindness and gentleness, but still unsettled by this entire situation. Nothing makes sense, and though he remembers venturing into the club, then later being attacked, he still can't recall anything before waking up in that park, and can't help but feel these strange girls have something to do with it all.
He waits for the girl to go and free Dean as well, but she takes his arm and begins steering him toward the door. Halfway there, realizing she plans to separate him from his brother, he stops, twisting out of her grip and looking back at Dean, who is half-crouched, looking ready to murder someone. "The hell do you think you're doing with him?" Dean says, low and dangerous.
The two girls lock eyes for a moment before the one near Sam takes his arm again, with a bit more force this time, and once again begins guiding him out of the room.
Sam glances down at her, then over at the other girl, standing near the front of the room. Neither one appears to be armed, but neither is he, and based on the skill with which they were attacked earlier, there's a good chance they could take him down if he tried to fight them now. Plus, there were still two other girls at the club, whom he assumes are somewhere outside the room. Even if he overpowered the two in the room and freed Dean, there was still little chance they could make it out undetected.
Concluding that his best option is simply to wait and look for a chance later, Sam walks along with the girl steering him. He hears Dean pulling frantically on his chains behind him. Sam glances helplessly back at his brother for a moment, before he's suddenly on the other side of the doorway and Dean is out of sight. The short-haired girl is still in the room with Dean, and as she backs into the doorway, Sam hears Dean yell, "Let him go, you bitch!" Before she too is out of Dean's sight, sliding the doors back into place.
The room on the other side of the 'dungeon' seems to be a storage area of some sort. It's full of files and boxes stacked floor to ceiling on large metal shelves, and Sam wonders if they're in an old warehouse of some sort. The "doors" to the room they were in are also shelves stacked with boxes, which have moved back into place, hiding the room where Dean is still sitting.
Short-hair leads the way through the room, now, with the other girl still directing Sam. They walk past dozens of shelves to another door, this one plain metal, and Short-hair opens this one and motions Sam and his guide through.
They close the door behind them on the other side. Ahead is a long hallway, with a polished wood floor and paintings hanging on the walls. The place is more confusing by the minute: it can't be a warehouse, not with a hallway like this. This looks more like someone's old cozy retirement home.
Sam starts forward, expecting them to go down the hallway, but realizes the girls aren't walking with him. He turns back to see Short-hair leaning against the door, eyes wide. Sam's 'guide' is standing next to her, still facing Sam, also looking vaguely shell-shocked. A wide grin unfurls on her face and she turns toward Short-hair, bringing a hand to her mouth.
"Oh my god, Ali," she says, shaking with silent laughter. Sam stands down the hall a few steps, dumbfounded, wondering if perhaps they hit him harder on the head than he thought.
Short-hair, Ali, puts a hand up to the other girl's face and turns her head away in mock disgust. "Shut up, Kate." She shakes her head, biting her lip, and then straightens up again and begins moving toward Sam. "I'm going to kill him when he gets home," she says. Sam wonders who she's talking about. Are there more of them?
The other, Kate, giggles, and follows. When they get to Sam, she puts her hand on his arm again. "Sorry," she says yet again. "For…"
"All this crap," Ali says, moving past them and down the hallway.
Kate sighs. "Yeah, that." She lets go of Sam's arm and starts down the hallway, motioning for Sam to follow her. "Please, come upstairs. We'll explain. At least we'll try."
Sam follows warily down the hallway, around a corner, down a shorter hallway, and around another corner, into a room unlike any he's ever seen.
From the lack of windows, he'd say they're underground. The room he's standing in seems to be some sort of combination of living room and library. There's a large wooden table in the center, piled high with books and papers, and there are bookshelves lining the walls. There's a refrigerator in one corner, a ping-pong table in another, and a worn, circular plush rug next to the table, with what looks like Legos scattered on it. There are three different laptops sitting on the table, and a large tropical plant of some sort in a pot against one wall.
One more of the club girls is sitting on the table. She looks around seriously as Sam enters, then whips her head back toward the hallway opposite the one he just came down, her wavy blonde hair swinging around her shoulders. "Kathy!" She yells. "Get in here!"
There's a muffled answering yell from down the hallway, and Sam hears a door slam. The last of the four club girls, Kathy apparently, comes running down the hallway and into the room where they're gathered. She stares at Sam, who looks away.
Kate moves forward to the table, pulls out a chair, and motions to Sam. "Can you sit? I'd like to look at your head if you don't mind."
Warily, Sam moves forward and drops into the offered chair. Kate moves and he hears her voice from above his head. "Since they're awake now, we'll probably need a bit of warning when they get back," she says. So they are expecting someone else, Sam thinks.
Kathy moves forward from the entrance to her hallway. "I can set up the proximity alarm, that's probably easiest." She turns to the blonde on the table next to Sam. "Mary, can you set the sensors?"
"Sure," the blonde says, sliding off the table and heading with Kathy through a doorway behind Sam to the next room.
There's a few seconds of silence in which Sam can hear Kathy and Mary moving and clanking in the next room, then what sounds like an old computer starting up, and then suddenly from a different room to his side, a faint beeping alarm.
"Oh, my noodles!" Ali says, moving past Sam, who quirks an eyebrow at her childish substitute for swearing, before realizing she is literally talking about noodles—the beeping is a timer, and the next room must be a kitchen of some kind.
Kate snorts from above him, then her hands slide into his hair again, lightly prodding at the back of his head. He jerks a tiny bit, and she mutters a soft apology before moving down again, pushing his head forward a bit and pulling at the neck of his shirt so she can see where she jabbed him in the back with her elbow.
She just pushes lightly at the spot, hissing in sympathy. He can feel the bruise starting to form there. "Sorry about that, again," she says. "I jumped a bit off, landed just a bit too far from you, and you turned faster than I thought. You were supposed to go down quick like Dean, not get hurt."
Sam snorts disbelievingly. "You bashed him over the head with a gun," he says flatly.
"Fastest and easiest way for us mere mortals to knock someone out without any real complications," she replies, "unless you've got some kind of drugs and darts, neither of which we happened to have on hand."
Sam puzzles for a moment over the 'mere mortals' comment, absently rotating his sore shoulder. It doesn't go unnoticed by Kate, who lays a hand on it. "What happened?"
"Sign," he says simply, and feels her hesitate for a moment before her grip on him tightens a fraction.
"Ah. Sorry." There's the apology again, but Sam doesn't find it any easier to believe than the last few. Kate is suddenly acting like she is his friend, but despite the strange homey appearance of wherever the hell they are, as far as Sam is concerned, it's still a prison, and these girls are still his enemies. They'd better not think he's going to forget the fact that his brother is still chained up in the basement.
Kate is reaching around to his front now, undoing the top couple buttons of his shirt, then sliding it over his shoulder to see where it impacted the sign. "Jeez, Sam," she whispers, poking at the area. Sam twitches at the use of his name, but isn't surprised that she knows it, seeing as she apparently knows him.
There's a moment's pause while Kate riffles through a first aid kit that's sitting open on the table—when did that get there?—and then a sting when she swipes at his shoulder with an alcohol-soaked gauze pad. He must have broken the skin. Then Kate is cleaning the wound quickly and taping a bandage in place over it. "Doesn't need stitches, thank god, because if I did them Dean would probably insist on redoing them himself later," she mumbles to herself as she works.
Unsettled by her insight into Dean's habits, though he supposes anyone who has observed them for any period before would know about Dean's furious over-protectiveness when it comes to Sam, he hurriedly pulls his shirt back up and buttons it as soon as she is done.
She sits up on the table and slides over in front of him, watching him keenly for a moment. "Look," she says, sighing when he glares at her. "I am sorry about all of this. We don't exactly know what's happening either."
Sam meets her eyes. He doesn't see a lie in them, just the same confusion he's feeling. He wills himself not to soften too much toward her—he's been tricked before by someone pretending not to know what's going on, he thinks, remembering Ava—and he looks her up and down.
Kate's hair is the same light brown as Sam's, falling to about her elbows. Her eyes are a bright hazel, her nose a bit pointed. Overall, she is actually very beautiful, and combined with her slight but curvy body, long legs, and acrobatic ability, Sam would bet she gets a lot of tips dancing like she does in clubs.
Exactly the type of person who knows how to manipulate people, he thinks. If she is a hunter, then traits like hers would make her good at getting information out of people, and with practice, she would certainly be a great liar. Renewing his promise not to trust her easily, Sam looks her in the eyes again. "Then tell me what you do know."
She leans back. "We're hunters, which you probably figured by now," she says, tipping her head toward him. "We—it was a normal job. Perfectly normal. We'd already finished, and we'd just stopped by the club one last time, figured we'd pick up some extra money for one last performance—"
"So you'd been there before," Sam interrupts.
"Yeah, we were in that town for four days, taking care of a particularly bad haunting. Bunch of kids, drowned in a school bus that drove into the river thirty years ago because nobody stopped to help them. But we finished it, got rid of every one of them, we checked. And there's nothing else at all strange about the town," she adds, before Sam can speak up.
"We like to set up at a club or a bar, anywhere that has a stage, we get decent tips singing and dancing, and people talk to you more if you're 'established' there. We'll drop in a few times between researching and stuff.
"And this time, we were there, just like every other, and we get done and I look over and you are standing right there watching me." She gives him a frustrated, confused look.
Sam stiffens. "You know us?" he asks suspiciously.
"Took me a minute," she mutters quietly, then adds more loudly, "I know you don't belong here. We all know it."
She pauses and looks at Sam expectantly, as though waiting for him to respond to that. He tilts his head, raising his eyebrows, and her eyes widen.
"Don't tell me… you don't know?" She sucks in a breath at his continued confusion. "Sam… what happened before you and Dean came into the club? What were you doing?"
Sam tenses and sits up straight in the chair, staring Kate down. He contemplates lying, but decided to go with the truth. "We don't know. We woke up in the park across the street, couldn't remember anything before that, and headed into the club." He says it accusingly, glaring at her.
"Oh my god," she breathes. "You have no idea where you are, do you?"
"Should I?" Sam is getting agitated.
"No, you shouldn't. Not if you just woke up and headed right to us. God, we had no idea you'd only been there a few minutes. That's… that's good, actually. Really good." She's staring at him contemplatively now. "Well, at the very least, you'd never seen the place before, right?"
Sam hesitates. "Right. Never been there, as far as I know."
"So obviously something happened to you, something weird, and that's why you were suddenly there, with no idea how you got there."
Sam just glares.
"So you know you didn't belong there, right?"
Sam shakes his head, wondering what the point is. "Yeah?"
"Look, again, I'm sorry about this. But please, trust us, we're on your side. We knew you didn't belong there, it was obvious to us from the minute we saw you. We were going to try to come over, talk to you, find out how you got there and what the hell was happening, but you bolted."
Her pleading tone is getting to Sam, and though he still doesn't trust her, he nods and listens.
"We followed you, we were watching you from that building, because apparently you weren't very fond of us, and then we found out why. We heard you talking, we were listening in trying to find out how long you'd been there and what you might have done, and we heard you say you thought we were… shifters, or monsters or something. And we knew there was no way we were going to be able to talk to you.
"We needed to get you out of there, and somewhere safe and private, where we could talk to you, as soon as possible. So we, ah, you know," she raises her hands helplessly, "attacked you." She cringes at the word. "It was supposed to be really fast, just drop and knock you out, then get the hell out of there. But I miscalculated. I'm sorry you got hurt, I really am."
She's now looking at him earnestly, and he takes a deep breath and rotates his shoulders, trying to make sense of what she's telling him. "So what, then… you knocked us out, dragged us… here, wherever this is, and then chained us up in the dungeon?" He asks incredulously.
She gives him a guilty smile, but a voice from the doorway next to him speaks. "Yeah, we did." It's Ali, standing there now holding two plates of pasta with vegetables on the sides. She moves forward and hands one to Kate.
Kate pokes at it with the fork and makes a face. "You'd better have cooked mine."
Ali rolls her eyes. "Sorry you like your veggies limp and pathetic, you Americanized, tasteless brat."
Kate picks up a piece of broccoli and flicks it at Ali. "Sorry you're obsessed with undercooking things just because the French do it, you pretentious, stuffy, al dente snot."
Sam can't help but chuckle, and suddenly finds he's feeling much more amicable toward the girls. He knows that monsters and demons and bad humans sometimes have friends and lives and do normal things too, but he finds it a lot more difficult to be angry and suspicious of people who throw broccoli at each other.
At his chuckle, they both turn to look at him, smiling now. "We did," Ali repeats, "and like Kate has probably said about a hundred times now, we're sorry. Like she said, we didn't know what was going on either, only that you were suddenly there and that you should not have been there, and for all we knew you were the shifters, or demons, or something awful like that."
"So we got you back and put you down there, just in case." Kate continues. "But then, while you were still out, we tried everything. Rubbed your hands with silver, splashed you with a little holy water, sprinkled on some salt, all the others and the usual tests…."
"But it was all negative. So we concluded that you were just you, normal humans, and that you were probably just as lost and confused as us, and also…"
"That you were probably going to be pissed."
"Hence the chains, still," says Ali. "Together, you two can be seriously dangerous, particularly Dean when it comes to you. I don't think he'd be much up to listening to the people who knocked out him and his little brother and dragged them down here."
"And sorry for separating you," Kate adds, "we thought you might be a bit more likely to listen to us up here. If we kept you together, you probably would have just attacked us."
Sam nods, that's entirely true. If they'd freed both him and Dean in the dungeon downstairs, there was no doubt in Sam's mind that the brothers would have attacked them the second they had the chance. And even if they had then once again been overpowered and locked back up, Sam thought he would have been much less willing to come upstairs away from his brother and listen to Kate talk after being attacked and beaten and chained up twice.
"Earlier," Sam says, before Kate can speak again, "you said 'safe.' You said you wanted to get us out of that town and somewhere safe…. Are we in danger?"
At this, Kate and Ali exchange meaningful glances. "Possibly," Ali says carefully, "but not too much more than usual, hopefully. What we really meant was that we needed to keep you from doing something… bad."
Sam blinks. "Bad, how?"
There's another hesitation. "Look," Kate says, "like we said, you didn't belong there. We don't know how you got there, but it's not good. We needed to keep you from causing damage accidentally. And until we know more about how you got there, we can't really tell you any more."
Getting frustrated again, Sam leans forward. "Why not?"
"Because telling you too much could cause more damage than we could possibly fix," Kate says simply. "Please, believe us when we tell you this. We are just as confused as you are, and just to be safe, until we know more, we just can't say much more. We don't know if this is our fault, but it's our responsibility to fix it."
Sam sits back. "Well, when will you 'know more?'"
Kate glances behind her, into the next room, where Kathy and Mary disappeared to earlier. "We're waiting for some friends of ours to get back from a hunt that they've been on, and one of them has some, um, experience with this sort of stuff. He should be able to tell us more, and maybe how you got to that town." Kate leans down and looks at Sam seriously. "Do you believe us, Sam? Can you trust that we are not your enemies, that we want to help you?"
Sam locks eyes with her and stares for probably a full minute before finally answering. "Yes, I believe you."
Ali and Kate look incredibly relieved, and Kate sits back, picks up her forgotten plate, and begins eating. From next to him, Ali gestures to her own. "Sorry, would you like some? I don't think you've eaten in a while."
Sam almost declines, but he is very hungry, and he nods slightly. Ali disappears back into the kitchen, and a few moments later, Kathy and Mary come back from the other room. "Sensors are set," Mary says, glancing at Sam. "We all good?"
Kate bites her bottom lip as Ali comes back in carrying a plate full of pasta and vegetables, which she hands to Sam. "Sam is. So, big question," she starts, and the other three girls flinch slightly, all looking back toward the hallway that led back to the dungeon, "who wants to go get Dean?"