2 – Hell's Bells
Dean just waded into the demon scrum, stabbing everyone who wasn't chick him or chick Sam. This turned out surprisingly easy.
Deeanna was a fucking maniac with her (Ryu's) knife, hacking her way through the pile to get to Bishop, and shooting farther away demons in the knee to take them down. Sam was doing that too, although she was using a sawed off full of rock salt and silver shot, which didn't kill demons, but it hurt them like hell. In fact, there were enough of them screaming that the noise soon became deafening, and that was before Sam brought out the holy water. They were Winchesters, all right.
There was no point in finesse. He simply grabbed the closest demons and stabbed. They were unfamiliar with him, had no idea who he was, so their initial attacks on him were direct and stupid. Dean took a punch or two, but after he killed the first four who went after him, the rest of the demons began to treat him with more wariness. Quick glances showed that none had managed to close the distance on Sam, and Deeanna had waded into the center, and stabbed her way through. What she lacked in grace she made up for in sheer brutality.
Bishop noticed him, and although he kept sinking back, farther away from Deeanna and him, he asked, "How the hell are there two of those knives? How's that fair?"
Dean didn't answer, and Deeanna couldn't, so he was just shit out of luck. In fact, his luck was remarkably shitty, as the three of them took out his demon followers in no time, and the scrawny asshole was forced to retreat.
Dean stabbed one of the remaining demons in the chest, while Deeanna got the other one in the face, and Bishop was already out the door. "Catch you on the flip side," he said, before turning and disappearing. Sam chased after him, but not for long.
Dean and Deeanna went around the room stabbing the wounded demons who were on the ground but not dead. Didn't take them long. And Sam came back, shaking her head. "The little weasel escaped again."
"We have to find out what ganks that guy," Deeanna insisted. "Before he completes the ritual."
Sam shrugged, putting away her sawed off. "Bobby's looking into it."
"What is this ritual?" Dean asked. "And how the hell can any living person be a hellgate? That doesn't make sense."
Deeanna frowned at him, putting her knife away. She still didn't trust him, and that was fair, because if their positions were reversed he didn't think he'd fully trust her either. "We're pretty sure he's some kinda demon baby," Sam said. "He was made for this purpose specifically. Even Cass can't smite him. But an Archangel might have the juice."
Deeanna scowled at her sister. "You really want to track that dick Trickster down again? After last time?"
Sam sighed, and Dean recognized it. How freaky. "Dee, it's worth considering."
"Says you. He didn't kill you a million times."
"That happened to you too?" Dean exclaimed. He suddenly felt very sorry for her. "God, that sucked."
Deeanna raised an eyebrow at that. "Did everything that's happened to me happen to you?"
Dean shrugged. "No idea. But it's starting to sound that way." They shared a look best described as foreboding, and said, in unison, "Hell?"
Okay, so they'd both gone there and come back. And they both probably had the same PTSD issues. That was something. Nothing good, but if he wanted to talk to someone else about his experiences, he'd just found the perfect person.
Sam looked between them warily, as if they might have a collective breakdown. This Sam seemed to be slightly mellower than the male version, although maybe he was just seeing her at her most tired. "If you wear the same shoe size, I officially give up."
Deeanna shot her sister a dirty look. "Call Bobby, find out about the green spectral fire thing?"
Sam nodded. "My first thought."
As they walked out of the warehouse, Deeanna said, "I hope Cass is okay."
If he hadn't known this was another version of him before, he knew now.
"She's been banished before," Sam said, reasonably. "She'll just have to find us again."
It was night here, and they seemed to be on a run down pier of some sort. It finally occurred to Dean to ask, "Where are we?"
"Seaside, California," Sam reported. She made a beeline for the car, and he was delighted to see it was the Impala. So Baby made it through the gender shift intact.
"Holy shit. The other side of the country."
"Yeah, you got booted through a different dimension and a few thousand miles extra," Deeanna said.
Dean caught himself heading for the driver's side, where Deeanna was going, and he made himself stop. Looked like his car, but was not his car. He wasn't looking forward to getting into the back seat. "So I guess I'm stuck with you guys until Cass gets back?"
Sam gave him a look best described as deadpan. "Well, we're not driving you to Maine."
"We got us a living hellgate to kill," Deeanna said, getting in the driver's seat.
Dean got in the backseat, a little surprised that the car smelled pretty much the same: like old fast food and gun oil. That hadn't changed either. "I thought you said he was unkillable."
"So far, yeah," Sam admitted. "But there has to be some weakness. Not even angels are completely invincible." She settled in the passenger seat, and already had her phone out, presumably calling Bobby. Was Bobby a woman here too? He tried to picture Bobby's female counterpart, but the beard kept throwing him off.
"Cass figures he might be invincible until the final ritual," Deeanna said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. "But his window of vulnerability might be slight, so we need to strike at the right moment. The problem is, we may not know it until it's right in front of us."
"I don't get the whole hellgate thing," Dean admitted. "How does that work? I mean he what, lets demons enter the world through his body? How?"
Sam held the phone away from her ear, and Dean could hear the laughter. "She says she can't believe two of you could possibly exist without the world exploding."
Deeanna rolled her eyes, and shouted, "Thanks a lot, Bobby."
Sam put the phone back to her ear. "Think how I feel. I'm in the car with both of them."
Deeanna shook her head, and glanced back at Dean. "Cass explained it, and it was boring and super metaphysical. Apparently he becomes only semi-corporeal, yet able to regulate the flow of demons into the outside world. I don't get it all, but it sounds super fucked up and like something we should kill immediately."
"I'm with you there, Deeanna."
"Dee," she replied. "Nobody calls me Deeanna. Except Cass sometimes, and I'd rather she didn't."
He got that. There were a lot of things he wished Cass wouldn't do that he did anyway. Cass was like that.
Sam put her phone away with a sigh. "Bobby's on it. Bobby also wants me to send her a photo of you, because she can't imagine what a male Dee would look like."
Dean didn't know what to say to that, so he simply shrugged.
"Nothin' like me," Dee said, taking a belt from her flask.
Dean stared at her profile. She had a point. But their noses looked vaguely similar. So did their eyes maybe. The jaw line was definitely different.
Dee dropped her flask in her jacket, and started the car. "Should we go ahead and take care of that thing with Root?"
"What about him?" Sam asked, jerking her head in Dean's direction. "Should we drag him into a hunt?"
Dee shrugged. "We could drop him at the motel."
"Hey, I just helped you kill a buttload of demons in there. If there's a hunt, I'm in." Dean insisted.
Dee eyed him in the rearview once more. "Sure you can take it?" At his evil scowl, she smirked.
Jackass. He hoped Cass came back soon, because he couldn't imagine how fucked up things were getting in his real world.
When it first happened, Sam thought it was an optical illusion. Dean was there, and then he was gone. But the tree crashed down, and Sam couldn't see anything beyond its trunk and the dust cloud it kicked up.
Sam scrambled to his feet and managed to reach the fallen tree before another "boom" shook the ground, and sent branches raining down from above. None of them big enough to hurt him, but they were annoying. This was doubly true when he felt a spider scramble down his face. "Dean!"
There was no answer, but looking over the tree, he saw no sign he got flattened and splattered either, so that was good. But that line of green fire where he had been a minute ago was just gone. It had been there, right? He was sure it had been in a crisscross pattern, but now there was just the one line.
Did that mean something? Sam thought it might, but the fact that Dean seemed to have disappeared was a more pressing concern. He was wondering what he should do when he noticed a man lurking beneath a fir tree. Or was it?
He looked human, but his arms seemed to be covered with long brown feathers, and he was wearing a bear skull on his head, obscuring much of his face. He wore buckskin pants, and some kind of fur shirt … if it was a shirt. Sam couldn't tell from this distance. But you wouldn't think he could both have feathers and fur naturally. Sam raised his gun, but even as he did it, he had a feeling it wouldn't do any good. "You shouldn't be here," the man said. His voice was deep and commanding, and Sam could feel it in his chest like a fishhook. Definitely not human.
"Where's my brother?"
The man's only answer was to wave a hand at him –
-and suddenly Sam was standing in the middle of a street. A horn blared and he cringed as a car screeched to a stop a foot from him. "Get out of the road, asshole!" the driver shouted.
Sam looked around, trying to figure out where the hell he was. Goddamn it, why did every thing they touched lately turn into a nightmare?
The "thing with Root" turned out to be a haunting, which was easy enough. But maybe not.
It was the vengeful spirit of a woman named Elaine Root, who'd gone full poltergeist and threw a man out a two story window (he lived, but he was still in the hospital). They thought, when they began investigating it, that she was tied to the house where the dude did the involuntary Louganis, but Elaine was the opposite of her surname, in that she seemed to be moving around. Also, she was a murder victim, and while her murderer was dead (died when California had the death penalty), she had been dismembered, and parts of her had never been recovered. So they could burn the body, but there was no telling if that would banish the ghost. In fact, odds were it wouldn't. There were things tying her to this world, and they couldn't burn them all.
"We could trap her," Sam said. "Lure her into an area, capture her in salt."
Dee made a noise Dean recognized as audible doubt. "I'm not crazy about that. She deserves a better end than that."
"I agree, but we don't really have a choice here, do we? She's turned violent. We know how this goes. Once a ghost turns, it doesn't turn back. She'll escalate and eventually kill someone."
"How is she moving around?" Dean chimed in from the backseat. It really felt weird sitting back here.
"Bishop and his people hit her with an unbinding spell," Sam said. "She's the last of five that have been roaming around the city. We got the other four, but Elaine's been the hardest to track down. Because of the infamy of her death and murderer, the location of her body was a secret."
"There's an unbinding spell for ghosts?" He was just learning a shit ton of new stuff here. But was it applicable in his universe? Dean wondered if Cass would know.
Dean caught Dee rolling her eyes at him. "And you're a hunter, huh?"
"This is powerful black magic," Sam said, cutting him a break. Just like regular Sam, when he wasn't in a pissy mood. "If he isn't familiar with a living hellgate, he probably hasn't encountered this either."
Dee shrugged half-heartedly, like she didn't want to give him the benefit of the doubt. "So how do you wanna do this?"
Dean almost answered, before he realized she was talking to Sam. "Her body's in a crypt for the Sanders family in St, James's cemetery. We go there and burn her bones, and summon her into the crypt. We'll have the room lined with salt, and once we're out of there, we'll seal the crypt. She'll be stuck in there, and unable to hurt anyone else."
"Unless someone breaks into the crypt," Dean pointed out. He actually thought it was a solid plan, he just felt like it should be pointed out.
"If they're that much of a dickhead, they're getting what they deserve." Dee replied.
"Besides, if we're lucky, burning her bones will banish her," Sam said.
Dee scoffed. "Yeah, our luck's been great lately. Don't know if you've noticed there's an Apocalypse on."
Sam shook her head. "No need to be a smart ass."
"There's always a need to be a smart ass," Dee replied.
"You got the same deal going?" Dean asked. "The Lucifer and Michael bullshit?"
Dee glanced at him in the rearview again, and Sam turned to glance at him. "They want to wear you and your brother as meatsuits too?" Sam asked. He nodded, and she turned back. "So Winchesters are cursed no matter what universe they're in. Awesome."
"At least it's a constant," Dee said.
Dean nodded. That was true.
St. James's Cemetery was one of those graveyards that was probably really popular come Halloween, as it was going to seed, and had a nice, manageably spooky atmosphere. If it was too far gone, it would have been too scary for the tourists, but right now it was in the sweet spot. Maybe in another few months, it wouldn't be.
Dean had the feeling Dee really didn't want him to help, but he was here, and salting and burning a corpse was a milk run for him, as it was for all hunters worth anything. Besides, he figured with his manly upper body strength, he could pop the crypt door easily.
He never got a chance. Dee simply took the crowbar and did it, like she did it all the time. But she had Linda Hamilton Terminator 2 arms (second reference tonight), and it didn't seem fair. She must have done a lot of pull ups.
The crypt was small, so small that the three of them, along with the coffin in the center, almost took up the available space. Sam outlined the left wall in salt, Dean took the right one, and Dee salted the corpse and covered it in lighter fluid before tossing in a match. The remains roasted nicely, although the smell was terrible.
Sam laid a line of salt in front of the door, while Dean lined the back wall. They now had a perfect, unbroken rectangle of salt. A perfect ghost trap, if they could get Elaine inside it. "Okay, let's summon us an angry spirit," Dee said, turning to Sam.
But Dean noticed the temperature drop, and saw his breath come out in a white cloud. "Don't think we need to bother."
Suddenly, a spectral woman appeared right in front of him. She wore '50's style clothes, and Dean had not expected her hair to be in pigtails. How old was she when she died? He'd mentally calculated she must have been a teenager when he saw the sheer hate in her expression, in her curled up lip and narrowed eyes. She wasn't just an angry ghost, she was full on furious. He could feel her power making the hair on his arms stand on end. She was incredibly fucking dangerous, maybe more than any of them had realized.
And while reaching for the iron crowbar, she plunged an icy hand straight into his chest, and gripped his heart, stopping it dead.
