Chapter One: A Derivative of Absolution
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't anywhere close.
Darkness arched in a thick black-satin mantel above the highway, a paved path lost in a tide of high grass. Half-buckled barbed-wire fencing chased the road, down the horizon until it swallowed into nothing. To the left of the incoming thoroughfare, there was a low-lit strip of residual daylight as the tawny-red sun dipped itself beneath the horizon and vanished.
The highway was as close to deserted as it could be at this hour, aside from the constant companionship of various and sundry tatters of roadkill.
And one lonely car.
Her tires gobbled asphalt with soundless pleasure, but the rest of her was another matter entirely. Her throaty purr announced that the Queen of All Roads was here, and every other vehicle of any size or stature, make or model, had best shift aside or find itself bumper-to-bumper with a tough gal who'd seen enough to make their prissy Prius engines curdle fuel.
She was a nineteen-sixty-seven Chevy Impala, fifty years old, and these highways were her home.
John Winchester drove with a one-handed feel on the steering wheel, his free elbow propped on the window-frame, one callused hand teasing through the silver-streaked sweaty curls near his temple. He couldn't remember exactly when the inky black hair of his youth had adopted the salt-and-pepper quality of age, but he had a feeling he'd left the wisdom by inheritance somewhere far behind him. Otherwise, why would he be on this road, going to this fight?
The Impala's massive posterior swayed with a sudden violent thrust, like someone had given her a solid kick. John's jaw tightened, his fingers purchasing on the steering wheel in a vice-tight grip. He checked his side-mirrors for any other cars, but the strip was as deserted as it had been for the last twenty miles coming in.
That was cause for concern. Quality fights tended to garner interest; interest meant arterial clogs of vehicles on the approach of a Pit. But this one was emptier than a beer keg on New Year's Eve and that, more than anything, had John's hackles hunching and his throat bubbling a steam of unidentifiable cusswords as he drove. The last thing he needed, down to an eighth of a tank of gas and his last five-dollar bill, was to make this trip to backass nowhere and find out that his name had been taken off the cards.
The last swirls of daylight had bottled and faded when the Impala churned her way over a slope in the road and gave full view of a seedy, rustic barn floating in the pastureland, its doors flung wide with light spilling through the windows. The knot in John's broad chest eased slightly and he rubbed his hand up his arm, bunching his long-sleeved shirt at the elbow. The cool wind traveled through the window and prickled his exposed skin, the excitement and anticipation turning the feeling to pure goosebumps.
The dirt parking square in front of the barn was littered with cars of various origins, few of them younger than thirty years and every one showing clear signs of damage. It was easy to pick out the ones that had brought in fighters: always the oldest cars, skinned of paint and wrapped in clawmarks, punctures from teeth that looked like bulletholes, ancient sweeps of blood that had never been washed clean and had become a warbadge worn proudly on bumpers and doors.
John stretched his stocky frame from the car, relishing the feel of coiled muscles relaxing after so many hours on the road. In a swirl of leather and whiskey-smell, bittersweet, John hoisted himself from the car, the door creaking when he slammed it shut. John palmed the roof gently, removing a fine layer of pollen that had accumulated during his travels.
"Just you and me, old girl." His bass murmur blended with the first burps of frogs and crickets in the grass. John followed the smooth curve of the Impala's flank with his fingertips to the trunk, which had grown still except for a vibration that was barely enough to twitch the wheels. John unhooked a coil of pronged chain from his belt loop, the inward-facing barbs lethal enough to have his full attention as he un-twisted the five-foot tether and checked the knot at the end. "Here we go."
He unlocked and flung the boot of the car wide open, and from there it was a dangerous struggle of human limbs and wiry twists of graying sinew. John waded in to his elbows in the foray that was impressive for just himself and his catch; five minutes later and with his gouged hands to pay respects, John had the creature trussed and muzzled, its flesh-favoring fangs trapped under a mesh cup almost like a breathing mask nurses wore.
John stepped back, the rope moving with him, snapping taut between force and lack of motion. "C'mon, outta there."
The creature was hunched over in the trunk, barely able to assemble its enormously spidery limbs into the cramped space; it watched him, beady, hateful eyes in a hairless face. John's patience slackened.
"I said, move!" He wrenched the tether, sinking the barbs into the creature's neck. Its head pin-wheeled side-to-side, a hideous snarl tapering off when one of the prongs jabbed its throat. John stepped back, and it moved with him, in grudging relent, slithering onto the dusty ground in a heap before scrambling into a decently upright position.
Cautiously satisfied, John backed toward the barn, his eyes on the creature at all times; at three months and one week, it had been with him longer than any of his other catches. No love lost between them, but there was the terrified placation of a slave to its master, a beaten dog to its owner. A monster to its Handler.
As it should be.
The barn itself had been converted, from one massive shelter into two rooms; the foyer alone, where John stopped and blinked against the rusty glow from the lamps strung onto the joists overhead, hummed with a sort of eager tension.
The line to the waiting counter was short, but not short enough. The creature was already regaining its sensation, sniffing blithely at the air, growing fidgety with the nearness of so many humans, and no doubt scenting the other fighters. John kept a tight grip on the steel-corded leash as he stepped up to the counter.
"Winchester. John." He gave the rope a firm tug. "Got a Wendigo here, gearing for his fight."
"He's not the only one." The check-in eyed John with thinly-veiled disgust as he scrawled a checkmark next to John's name on the list of Handlers.
John favored him with a look of equal dislike. "It's Crowley, right?"
"The one and only." The check-in scooped up a stack of cards and thumbed through them with leisurely slowness.
"Well, Crowley, I've got a monster here ready to take somebody's head off if he doesn't get into the Pit soon. I suggest you work a little faster."
"Going as fast as I can, scruffy." Crowley licked his thumb casually and tipped the corners of the cards. John cut a glance to the side, wrestling with his volcanic temper, and in the split-second of shifting vision, he caught a glimpse of blackened varicose veins hidden under Crowley's tailored sleeve.
A wiry, unpleasant smile inched John's lips to the side. "Demon?"
Crowley looked up with some mocking surprise in his eyes. "Well. I am. This vessel here comes from a very long line of boring bankers." He located John's identification card after an inordinate amount of searching, and offered it to him between two fingers. "Trust me. This life? Much more exciting."
John snatched the card from him. "I wouldn't take the word of a parasite for the breath its takes to say it."
Crowley arched a superior eyebrow. "I should say the same. Will you be placing any bets today?"
"Two grand says this one takes the prize." He jerked his thumb at the Wendigo.
"I'll take that wager." The sleepy drawl tapped John's back from the barn doors, and he glanced over his shoulder.
Tall, dark-skinned, flannel shirt tucked into jeans and cowboy boots to complete the image of lazy poise, the man lounged against the wall behind him, and John bristled. "Gordon Walker."
"Johnny Winchester." Gordon was flanked by three buckle-bumping wannabees, each with a hat bigger than their heads—but not, John assumed from their stances, bigger than their egos. "You still owe me, what was it, five grand? From that fight in Atlantic City?" Gordon sniffed. "Your vamp lost an awful important round against mine."
"Take the bet, and when this thing cleans house," John snapped the rope loosely, sending a ripple up its length. "We can call it even."
Gordon smirked, a feral flash of white teeth between dark lips. "I'll take that wager. And we'll call it ten thousand you'll owe me when that scrawny sack of crap gets knuckled under." He tipped his hat to Crowley and turned back out into the night, taking his men with him.
"I may be a swindler at heart," Crowley said. "But even I wouldn't cheat a broke man out of his last five dollars."
John glared after Gordon's retreating back. "Then why'd you let me make a wager. If you know I can't meet it?"
"Because when Gordon Walker realizes you've stiffed him yet again, he'll be sure to take the prize right out of your well-toned and not altogether unfortunately supple backside." Crowley leaned his flat palms on the table. "And I do love to see human violence every once in a while."
John almost stripped the skin from his hands as he hauled the Wendigo away.
~X~
Nobody knew exactly when the demons first came.
Speculation held the date at sometime in the mid-to-early nineteen hundreds, when John's grandfather had still been alive. The general consensus was that the date of their arrival didn't matter so much as the events that had followed it. Like a harbinger, they'd brought calamity with them, and they were here to stay: not in bodies of their own, they had no bodies, and nobody knew what they really looked like when removed from a host, from their vessel.
The two surefire signs of demonic inhabitation: onyx eyes and ridges of black veins spidering up arms, backs, and necks. John had first become familiar with them the day his father had picked up an axe and swung it at John's head when he was thirteen years old; back when the demons had outright murdered at random.
Lately, in the last thirty or so years, their influence had shifted direction.
Humans and demons had co-inhabited the earth for nearly a century. But long before that, there had been the Hunters, and the Hunted. Humans, and monsters. When the demons had gotten their hands on their first monster meat, things had shifted drastically, a swinging pendulum of point and purpose, from reason to madness.
The economic slide was in the chokehold of this black-eyed alien race; the only real way to earn a living, to make cash quickly: betting in the Pits. John couldn't allow himself to think of a time before this life, when the chains were used to secure a monster before he slid his knife into its ribs, when the shotgun tasted tender flesh rather than dust and disuse by his bedside in filthy motels between fights.
Tonight was only tonight. It was only this.
It was a circus orchestrated by demons.
The doors to the barn's interior swung wide, at least sixty spotlights all focusing on a webbed circle in the center. John walked through a wide aisle into the loading shoot, where he deposited the Wendigo into one of the empty cages and slipped off its collar, before elbowing his way to the Pit itself.
It was an older establishment, one of the oldest from when Pits were really that, pits, dugouts in the hard earth where monsters wrestled monsters, before the demons had upgraded to boxing rings and from there, to technologically-savvy holographic arenas. Dangling from the rafters and scaling the supporting posts like monkeys, not to mention the bodies pressed sweaty skin to sweaty skin on the ground floor, John estimated there were maybe seventy-five people in attendance; not a bad turnout, after all.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" The amplified voice boomed through scrounged speakers strung from the rafters, eliciting whoops of delight from the crowd. John swiveled on heel toward the plywood divider at the back of the room, saw the man crouched precariously on top, one hand gripping the un-sanded wood while the other tapped wildly against the grip of a microphone in his hand. "Welcome to our very own, one and only, straight-to-your-backyards-here-in-Amarillo-Texas, Pit Match!"
The screams of delight would've better suited winning a war; John folded his arms and watched the man on his dangerous swaying perch.
"All the cards are filled…all the competitors have arrived," The announcer held his breath and John felt the people around him vibrate with excitement. "With our contenders Handled by Mistress Marianna and the up-and-coming Martin Jay Highborn…let's get this party started!"
A high-pitched buzz split the air and the first two doors in the slotted chute were dragged up by steel cords; with a bird's-eye view, Pit-side, John watched the monsters streak out into the illusion of freedom. It was the sight of high-arching walls, leering faces above, that must've reminded them where they were.
One: tall, barrel-chested, with a dog's head and swaying forefeet that barely grazed the ground with every swaggering step. John arched an eyebrow; Chupacabra, had to be. Rare.
The other: for all intent and purposes, it looked like a man, strapped with cords of muscle that would've made a professional wrestler take a hit at his bodily image. It was only when the monster stepped into the light that the glowing silver eyes of a Shapeshifter found their way through.
All in all, a standard-fair fight; the crowd was rallying itself for nothing, and John let his focus slip. His eyes tracked the room by force of habit, noting every exit, every possible way in or out, and that was when he noticed them; despite the oppressive, sticky heat that made most humans claustrophobic, these four were standing clustered together; arranged in almost a square, their elbows brushing, they watched the scrabble in the Pit with a hawkeyed intent that raised the hairs on John's arms.
Demons. Had to be. With one of their kind working the check-in, and the way they stood out, with that chilly stillness in a room that thrummed with violent heartbeats and rowdy demand.
The demon at the group's head, in the vessel of a girl who would have never been allowed in this barn by age alone under normal circumstance, lifted her head suddenly; a tangle of dark hair fell over her shoulder, and she met John's eyes across the Pit. He challenged her with a glare that could have turned a man to stone, and watched her full lips curl with a kind of savage pleasure before she leaned over the railing, watching as the hulking Shapeshifter below was stripped skin-from-skin by the Chupacabra that, no doubt, belonged to the demons.
The fight was over before John had really taken time to assess it; the Shapeshifter went down and the Chupacabra snapped the human head neatly off in a fount of blood.
"Looks like someone missed Fight Rule Number One!" The announcer shimmy-hopped down the plywood divider. "Don't lose your head."
A few polite laughs punctuated the hackneyed joke; every eye was riveted on the Pit as the Shapeshifter was dragged out in a sloppy mess of skin and blood, and the next monster was loosed through the chute into the Pit.
It was a hectic swirl of light and sound, the roar of human bloodlust mingling into the shrieks of the creatures as their claws and teeth ripped against each other's bones.; in the background, constantly, the announcer narrated the fights, every blow met with a hard breath and an, "Oh, that's gotta hurt!" Blood swirled through the dirt, turning it to mud, and John watched with no surprise but livid frustration as the Chupacabra rose undefeated through the ranks. By every standard of the industry, this was a small fight; but the money peddling through it was real, and so was the adrenaline-high produced by the engrossed viewers. Loss wasn't affordable when every Handler needed the winnings to survive to the next town and the next fight.
It was an electric jolt when John heard his name being called, the characteristic squall of the next fight's beginning superseding any real sense of sport. No one knew John Winchester's name, because unlike any human with a title in the sport, he kept his nose as clean as possible.
But tonight, someone was noticing the leather-jacket, nondescript human man in a toss of strangers.
The demon was watching him again, with that same cat-like sneer. John ignored her, intent on the fight as the Wendigo slipped its muzzle and honed in on the closest strum of blood in veins: the Chupacabra, dancing and circling, its dog-like head swaying on its human neck. They were almost evenly matched, height and muscle, and John felt the first surge of hope that this was the fight that would turn his Winchester luck around.
The monsters circled one another for a full minute, the shrieks in the room abating slightly in the breathless pause. John gripped the woven ropes of the Pit's fencing with one hand, the other dipping into his back pocket and running over a papery edge for a second before it, too, slid up to feel the scratchiness of the twine.
The starving Wendigo lunged first; its teeth sank into the Chupcabra's arm with a sick squirt of blood that put the crowd into frenzy. John leaned forward with a rush of relief making him lightheaded; below him, his fighter released its prey and circled, bleating a near-human sound of frustration around the tough, ropy slab of skin still hanging from its mouth. It spat and lunged, slewing sideways, jolting the Chupacabra off its feet and perching on its chest, savage teeth tearing for the throat.
The crowd went wild, their screams of pleasure at a good fight lifting John's mood higher than he'd felt it in months. He spared a satisfied smile for the demon, who for the first time in over an hour looked unsettled and angry. She was young, John surmised, maybe even at her first fight, and not understanding that the feelings of loss and failure that the demons thrived off of in the humans, worked both ways.
Though not often. Almost never. In fights, human Handlers to human Handlers, it was a fair draw. But there was something in the method of training that the demons employed, something that made their fighters a hundredfold stronger, always two steps faster, with blows that dealt greater damage time and time again. Humans winning in demonic matches was unheard of; looking back now, John could think of no exception, yet they let humans buy their creatures into higher and higher rounds that they'd never qualified for, only to fall harder and harder every time. Sometimes the price, John knew, was more than they could bear to pay. Those that ran, never ran for long. It was a vicious cycle of pain and fear and desperate scrabbling to the top only to tip over the vast plunge back down the other side. There was no winning, but there were always the stupid few who tried.
John suspected the demons relished in that, almost as much as they enjoyed being pitted against their own kind in the finals, in the most dangerous fights.
The pained squeal of body cracking against the wall dragged John from his headspace, and his stomach vacated its lot to splash into his knees when he saw the Chupacabra lift the Wendigo bodily for a second time and hurl it against the wall. John heard bones crunch, his fighter falling warped into the mud.
"No, no-no-no-no-no, come on, you son of a bitch. Come on!" The words distorted themselves through his teeth as John leaned against the rope, willing the Wendigo to rise.
And it did, if for nothing else than for survival; its limbs folded underneath it and it straightened, slinking away, wounded and confused until the Chupacabra fell on it again, tearing a handful of meat from its side, exposing the ribs beneath, gritty flashes of white through raw flesh and ropy strands of muscle making some of the spectators gag and turn away.
John watched his dreams of canceling debts, earning money, making a name as the first to take a demon's crown, vanishing like smoke as the Wendigo flopped and wriggled away on all fours before the Chupacabra descended on it one last time.
John was watching the girl, not the fight, when the Wendigo's limbs started to snap off one-by-one in superhuman hands. Eyes glittering with triumph, the demon lifted her chin, her chest swelling with the whoops and jeers of the spectators, the enthusiastic commentary of the announcer playing right along; they were utterly under her spell, under the spell of her kind, this shroud of violent entertainment that they'd brought with them when they'd first arrived. Humans were slaves to the thrill of brutal, abject violence, and once again John had played into their hands. Just like the rest of them.
He tugged up the collar of his jacket, and sank back into the crowd.
~X~
Gordon Walker never did catch up to him, and for that John was grateful.
He parked the Impala far from the barn after a good hour of driving off-road, escaping the body of his latest failure, the smug look of the demon named Crowley and the vindication of a girl whose name he didn't know; he found solitude under a shroud of stars so thick and uninhibited they seemed like flakes of snow trapped in the atmosphere. He pulled a bottle of Jonny Walker Blue from under the seat and tipped it down his throat on his way around the front of the Impala.
Propped against the windshield, watching the endless bank of the night sky with one leg outstretched and the other cocked at the knee to his chest, John drowned the burn in his chest inside the tang of the booze, until all the lights swirled together and he was blinking sluggishly at his own hand outstretched, trying to blot out the moon with his thumb. Chiding himself silently, and sometimes aloud, in faint fits and bursts. He could've sold the Wendigo's meat to someone who would've gone hungry otherwise, recouping a few dollars at least; or butchered it himself and saved the scraps for the next monster he came across. They were difficult to feed, not to mention expensive.
Expensive. Dollars and cents. It all came down to money or items of value, the only things besides luck and love that John found in short supply.
It hadn't always been that way. Before the fights had become so popular…
John's brain skirted away from that trail of thought; it only ever dead-ended in pain, the kind he couldn't suffuse in anything but the bottom of a bottle. Sometimes whiskey, sometimes stronger.
The hood of the Impala was still warm beneath him; John rocked his hips slightly to find a more comfortable position on her hard blacktop, massaging his knuckles against the polished metal. The burning shame of another loss grappled against him; John Winchester wasn't supposed to lose. As a Hunter, he'd been something. He'd had something, a fragile construct of a life. Not like this wayfarer's existence on the road, hopping from Pit to Pit with whatever monster he'd managed to catch. Catch. He was supposed to kill them.
But what choice did he have? What choice did any of them have? They were all just pawns in the demons' cat-and-mouse game.
The wind teased itself around him with the arctic taste of winter threatening; the fights would chase themselves deeper underground, soon, farther south. And like a wandering nomad, John would go with them.
He slid a finger into his pocket again, catching a fluttering scrap of paper between two fingers and drawing out the glossy, creased photograph that was almost like a badge worn on his body at all times. Its corners curled in, bent by his restless fingers during fights, and it had been crumpled in a drunken fist more times than he cared to remember, smelling like pungent beer and Scotch. The quality of the picture had faded to an unsaturated blur.
It was all he had left.
Two faces, frozen forever in happiness: a woman with golden hair and a smile like sunlight, a little boy snatched up in her arms, crew-cut brown-blond hair and an ear-to-ear, cheek-splitting megawatt grin. A tattered, wrinkled photograph was all John had left of them, and he'd never felt it more profoundly than tonight; alone, and at the end of his rope. No money, no monster, no hope.
He tipped forward, carding his hand back through his dusty, unkempt dark hair, tracing their faces with his eyes. For as many times as he'd seen the picture, he'd memorized it, backwards and forwards, inside and outside; the image of their faces burned on behind his eyes.
He had nothing left: just the picture in his fist and the car beneath him, and the weapons stashed in the trunk. And an empty house, a semi-permanent lodging to go back to after everything, just as cold and isolated as the journey had been. It was a ghostly structure, haunted by the last memories of the laughter that used to paint the walls; John never stayed there longer than he had to.
With the Wendigo gone, that tomb was the only thing waiting for him at the end of this pointless road.
The silence of the night was suddenly, chokingly overwhelmingly; John dug through his other pocket, flipping open his phone. The weak backlight flickered to life on a fuzzy screen, and John was already dialing before the phone had caught up to the frantic sweep of his thumb across the keypad; with how many times he'd been within a breath of dialing the last crucial digit to close the distance between them, and lost the courage at the last possible second, he had the number memorized almost as well as the faces in the photograph.
The phone rang half a dozen times, the grating buzz winging between his ears. When it clicked to life on the other line, he heard the sound of voices, cheerful and loud, slurred by distance and colored by laughter.
And then, right in his ear: "Hello?"
He squeezed his eyes shut; she sounded breathless and happy, the way he'd always tried to imagine her. She sounded like the woman in the picture, in his mind. "Mary. It's me."
If it was possible to feel a shift in demeanor over the miles, he felt it just then. "John." There was a stringent finality to the word that made it sound like an accusation. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
"No, don't…don't hang up."
"How did you get this number?" Her tone suggested that any answer would be the wrong one, and John found himself wishing he'd never opened his mouth; that he'd just listened to her laughter and hung up and remembered her that way.
"Be surprised what you can suss up if you keep at it long enough."
She sniffed, and he could imagine her crossing one arm around her waist, turning her back on the people around her so that she could focus on the thing that was infuriating her the most: him. "What do you want, John?"
"Nothing. Everything. Mare, I dunno." He admitted. "Who're you with?"
"None of your business." She snapped.
"All right, all right, I know. And I'm sorry. Guess I just miss you."
"After twelve years? You have an awfully hard time moving on."
There was a pregnant, painful pause, John studying the staggered reflection of the moonlight on the Impala's hood. Finally, Mary sighed.
"They're just some friends we've been staying with. Temporarily." The volumes of sadness in her voice made John's skin tingle. "I should go."
"Mary, wait."
"What, John?"
"What do you mean, temporary? Everything okay?"
"They're moving to Europe, John." It was unfair, the way her tone suggested he should know that, but somehow John still had to temper down a fleeting rush of guilt. "No, it's not okay. I don't know what I'm going to do to get us to my next paycheck. Now, what is it you want?"
He felt like a fool just for saying it: "I need your help."