When Sam woke up, he was lying in a dingy motel room, and dawn was just beginning to crack the sky open. He groaned and drove the heels of his hands into his eyes. When he blinked the dark spots out of his vision the rest of the room came into focus. There lay Dean, still unconscious, on the opposite bed, and sitting watching him, faced away from Sam, was the Viti from the night before.
Sam half fell out of bed and scrabbled in his jeans for his gun.
"Get away from him!"
The girl didn't turn. Her voice was low, and resigned.
"Dean's stable. He's dreaming."
"You get away from him or I swear to god-"
"I hid your gun. Sorry, but I didn't want to take any chances."
Sam took his hands away from the insides of his pockets and threw them in the air, exasperated. "What are you still doing here? Why didn't you escape while you had the chance?"
The girl's head bowed, and her words were broken, barely louder than a whisper. "I don't know."
He stopped short, tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. "Are – are you crying?"
The girl sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "Yeah, I'm crying."
"…Why?"
The girl spun round in her chair and glared up at Sam where he stood, her eyes shining with fire and tears and pain. Her eyelashes stuck together and her hair was in rattails. "My dad just died. You killed him. Why wouldn't I cry?"
"I, uh…" Sam was genuinely at a loss for words, his face looking caught somewhere between confusion and mild panic. He didn't know that monsters could cry.
"I'm not a monster," the girl muttered, casting her eyes down, looking as if she wanted to say more but wasn't sure how to. She almost smiled when she looked up again to see Sam's expression of strangled fear before it was hastily suppressed.
"I'm a creature of the mind, remember?" she said, tapping the side of her head. "I can see all kinds of crap. Including the inside of your head." It almost looked like a shudder passed through her at that last comment. Must've been his imagination.
He decided to use a different tactic. "What's your name again?"
"Abby."
"Hi, Abby. Could you tell me what, uh-" he gestured to Dean's slack expression and motionless body; "- what's wrong with my brother?" he flashed her a brief, panicked smile, glancing back at her before returning his gaze to Dean's comatose state.
"He was the subject of a feed," Abby said, sobering up from the tense moment and turning her attention back to the hunter. "It was only brief, nothing that could kill him, but-"
"But what?"
"There will-" she said, pausing and changing tack when she saw the expression on the Winchester's face; "-may be some complications."
"Like what?"
Before Abby could respond, there were the sounds of a stirring and they both watched as the eyes of Dean Winchester slid open.
Sam broke out into a relieved smile, forgot the entire conversation he was currently in the middle of, and he rushed past Abby to kneel by his brother's side.
"How're you feeling?"
Dean's eyes, once they had time to focus, were disoriented and filled with apprehension. Before anyone had time to react he was standing upright, and a loaded gun (amongst other things, a pang of annoyance went through Sam – right, so she took his gun but neglected to remember Dean's?) in his hands.
"Alright," he barked, his voice as commanding as it had ever been but with an unsure, undoubtedly frightened undertone, the likes of which Sam had never heard before. "Who the hell are you people?"
Abby winced at the expression on Sam's face. Confusion, like it was taking a while for his brain to process the words.
"Dean, it's me."
"Yeah, and who the hell's 'me'? Where the hell am I?"
"Dean." Abby's voice was calm, and fixed in a tone Sam hadn't heard from her before, like she knew what she was doing. "What do you remember?"
"What do I remember, what's that supposed t- oh god-"
Sam rushed to his brother's aid as he fell to his knees, groaning and clutching his head. He blinked and shook his head, trying to clear his vision as he shrugged the arms off of his shoulder.
"Hey hey hey, talk to me!"
"Get off of me! I'm fine."
"Don't think about it too much, it'll only make things worse." Abby kneeled in front of the two where they sat and put a hand to Dean's forehead. "Mental analysis," she explained to Sam.
"Can anybody else hear that? What's that noise?" Dean pivoted his head left and right, provoking a soft keep still from Abby as a look of deep concentration came over her.
After a couple of seconds she stood and straightened herself out, but when she turned to Sam her expression was grim.
"The thing about… us, is that when we feed, we tend to go for the good stuff first, like a survival instinct."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning when Dean got fed off-" Sam couldn't help but notice that Abby was trying to avoid directly acknowledging her father, "-he got the good stuff taken first. The stuff he would never in a million years forget; his family, the licence plate to his car, his time… downstairs. He remembers what he was taught, like his two times tables and how to handle a gun or whatever, he just doesn't remember who taught it to him. He's kind of non-existent to himself – he's not really self aware in the fact that he's got a name, what he looks like, where he came from. He just is."
"Can you fix it?"
Abby's eyebrows furrowed, as if she were in conflict with herself. She bit her lip.
"Abby." The tone in Sam's voice stirred a feeling of pure loathing, right in the pit of Abby's stomach. Such a demanding, arrogant tone, as if he wouldn't understand why someone would risk so much for a man that means nothing to them. She raised her chin, indignant. She could prove to Sam that she wasn't a monster.
"We kill the Alpha." Abby's face was a perfect mask, letting no insight to her thoughts leak through. "The energy that was taken from Dean was a source of matter, and matter can't be destroyed, right? Only transferred. When a Viti dies, any energy that it was still holding onto is transferred to the Alpha, kind of like a vulture. And if we kill the Alpha, the energy will be transferred – hopefully – back to Dean."
"And where's the Alpha?"
Abby frowned slightly. "I don't know. But I can find out."
Sam raised his eyebrows. "Well, let's do that then!"
"To find the Alpha will take me a matter of days, and even then only the general location. There will be no telling when or where he'll move next. And-"
"And what?"
"Well, to use that kind of amount of power… It will weaken me."
Sam took a step closer to Abby, his cautiousness forgotten amidst the desperation that was starting to consume him. "He's my brother. We have to try."
Dean, who was currently still kneeling on the floor where he collapsed, frowned slightly, trying to catch a memory that seemed to keep eluding him.
Abby took a deep breath, and inclined her head. "I'd best get started, then."
Sam only nodded and turned away.