4 – Fathom

It was as dark as it was cold beneath the water, but Dean could make out shapes, and soon more.

He could not kick free from the thing that had grabbed him and was pulling him down towards the murky bottom, and in fact the thing started climbing him. It had cold, strong hands, and when he came face to face with it, he wasn't sure if it was male or female. The face looked very human, attractive in a fine boned, ethereal way, the skin as pale and shimmery as a pearl, the hair long and seaweed green, fanned out behind them like a halo. The eyes were large and seemingly pupil less, just deep blue orbs, and his first crazy thought was "mermaid". Because it was, wasn't it? It looked human until you looked beneath the shoulders, and the body was covered in blue-green scales that tapered down into a tail. It was an actual freaking mermaid. He didn't know those existed, and he certainly didn't know they existed here. No wonder Starbucks had one as a logo.

But then the mermaid opened its mouth, revealing five rows of razor sharp teeth before lunging at his face, and every erotic fantasy he ever had about mermaids flew straight out the window.

He'd been trying to break away from it, as his need for oxygen was quickly becoming dire, but mermaids were incredibly fucking strong. Dean had no choice but to go for Ruby's knife, and he managed to get a knee up in what passed for its midsection as it tried to eat his face off, and drove the knife into its chest. The water bloomed with bluish-green blood as he slit it open, and he'd finally cut it enough to make it let him go.

He kicked desperately to the surface, and barely broke it before gasping for air. The Mark was furious, raging in his brain like a hurricane, but he held it back by force of will, even though it was fucking exhausting. But he knew the more he let it out, the more ground he was losing to it. He knew what Cass had said in his last dream was right. He was going to lose to it. It just felt a lot closer to reality than he liked.

Dean swam for shore, but kept the knife out, in case the mermaid (merman? Couldn't tell) made another grab for him. As far as he knew, these waters could be teeming with them.

When Dean crawled up on the sand, he was already shivering violently from the cold. Puget Sound waters were not warm at the best of times, but right now it might as well be a lake in Alaska. His teeth were chattering, and he almost bit his own tongue. He needed to get out of here and get warm before he caught hypothermia.

Suddenly a big shadow loomed over him, and he rolled away as a huge hoof slammed into the ground where his head had been. "Do better," the bull man huffed.

"Fuck you," Dean replied automatically, not at all sure what he meant, or what the hell was going on. Were the bull man and the mermaid working together? "What the hell is going on? What are you?"

The bull man watched, huffing, as Dean climbed back up to his feet. "I am Judgment."

"Judgment of what?"

"Warriors," he said, and charged, head lowered and horns aimed straight for him.

Dean had little time to make a decision. The cold had slowed his reflexes, and his muscles were already starting to seize. The Mark's rage was pressing against his temples like a nascent migraine, but he internally told it to fuck off too. Dean turned to avoid the bull, but kept close enough that he could drive Ruby's knife straight into one of his big gold eyes.

The bull man let out a bellow of pain and jerked his head away, almost ripping the knife out of Dean's hand, but he held onto it because it might be the only usable weapon he had. "What gives you the right to judge anyone, asshole?" Dean quickly stumbled back, putting a bit more distance between him and the bull man. The Mark was screaming at him to go for the kill, but Dean still needed answers, and he had nothing but questions.

The bull man looked at him with his one good eye, as the one on his left side was now bleeding down his face. It didn't seem to be hurting him, although you'd think it would. "You have spirit. That can be more trouble than its worth."

"Good." He honestly didn't know how to respond to this thing. It certainly wasn't responding to him, even though he'd taken its eye. "What the fuck are you? Why are you doing this? Tell me!"

"You will know when you need to know," he said, and charged again.

Dean lunged and buried his shoulder in Bull Man's midsection, but his hope that it robbed him of air didn't pan out. Dean managed to get a hold of one horn, but the other grazed his arm, ripping through his sleeve and slicing into his skin, and while he managed not to scream, the bull forced him down on the sand, going for another, better goring. Dean still had a hold of the one horn, and he brought the tip of the knife right up to the bull's one remaining eye as he had knees up in the guy's chest. It was taking all his strength not to let the bull crush him with his weight. He was heavier than any guy of his comparable size. "Stop this or I fucking blind you!" He was slowly digging the tip of the knife right into the socket, so one flick and this guy was out of eyeballs. Could he regenerate those?

The bull's one eye gazed down at him almost impassively, as if he didn't care if he got blinded or not. Maybe he didn't. Dean didn't understand anything that was going on. "Better," the bull said. "You will be informed when you are required."

"What?"

The bull man slammed his huge head down into Dean's, and the dull pain of the collision was the last thing he remembered before he blacked out.


Sam wasn't sure why he was breaking out the good spells for Crowley, but he supposed it was just habit. When he wanted to find something, he went about it in the most efficient way possible.

He'd used this to search for something that would remove the Mark of Cain, but it hadn't worked. Then again, it was probably too vague a question. To work this spell, you needed to be as specific as possible. So it might work with the Bellmage Grimoire.

As soon as he was finished with the words, and dropped the match in the bowl, the crystal over the map moved. But the location was so strange, he did it again just to make sure he didn't screw something up passive aggressively.

Nope. The crystal returned to the same spot.

He was contemplating this when he thought he heard the slightest ruffle of wings, and looked up to see he was no longer alone in the room. "Hey Cass."

He had his grim face on. It was almost comical how dour he looked. "We have to talk."

"Okay."

"Dean is getting worse."

Sam almost replied "Was it him nearly gutting me that tipped you off?", but he wasn't sure he knew about that yet. "No kidding."

"I walked into one of his nightmares when he unconsciously called out to me. He thought I was just a part of the dream, but I wasn't. The Mark is torturing him. I think it's weakening his defenses from the inside out."

Unconsciously called out to him? Sam decided to just chalk that up to more of the Cass/Dean connection, which seemed exclusive to the both of them. Then again, you save a guy from Hell, and rebel against Heaven for him, and fight through Purgatory with him, you're going to be close.

Part of Sam didn't even want to hear about this new thing Cass had uncovered. He knew the Mark was killing Dean, and he could only imagine the horrors Dean was keeping to himself. It was bad enough just gathering the bits and pieces that Dean or the Mark let slip through. "What do you mean?"

Cass shook his head, and glanced down at the map on the table. He probably guessed what kind of spell Sam had done, but not the why of it. "When he sleeps, it invades his dreams, and kills him. It lets him feel it too."

"Feel death?" Yeah, that had never crossed Sam's mind. He knew he wasn't the guy he used to be, but part of him was heartened that he hadn't quite reached the level of cruelty that so many others had. "Is that possible?"

Cass just nodded. His grim look made so much sense now.

"What's the point? Beyond general cruelty."

"It wants to encourage him not to sleep." At Sam's questioning look, he continued. "The farther Dean strays from humanity, the more of a hold it has on him."

"So if he stops eating and sleeping, the Mark has an easier time sliding into the driver's seat."

"Precisely."

"Shit." He knew Dean had driven to Seattle without sleeping, and his appetite was scattershot at best, which Sam had already known was a bad sign. "We're going to have to tell him."

Cass nodded. "Will he listen?"

That was the billion dollar question. "I don't know. All we can do is hope." Which is all they had been doing lately, and to what end? Things just kept getting worse.

For a minute they were silent in their shared misery. Then Cass finally asked, "What's in Antarctica?"

Sam looked down at the crystal, pointing resolutely at the South Pole. "The Bellmage Grimoire, apparently. I don't understand how it can be there or how I'm supposed to get it, but I –" Sam looked up, and Cass was gone. Of course he was.

But he suddenly popped back into the room, this time holding a thick block of ice. He put it on the table, and Sam could kind of see there was something in there, but it was cloudy and hard to see. He wasn't going to ask how he found it or removed it, because, angel. "Is it in there? I can't tell."

Cass made a fist and hit the ice. It shattered like spun sugar, and he pulled out what had been hidden in the center. It was actually a yellowed, aged page of a book, layered between hard plastic. Cass glanced at it before handing it over. "It's instructions."

"What?" Sam looked at the page between the plastic, but it looked to be written in Old Latin. That wasn't his favorite language.

"To find the Bellmage Grimoire. Apparently it's been enchanted and hidden in a pocket dimension. That's a spell to get it back."

"Fantastic. A multi-dimensional scavenger hunt."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

Cass gestured at the page in his hands. "Why all this trouble for a book?"

That was a very good question. And added to Crowley's interest in it, he was beginning to suspect there was no way in hell the answer was any good.


It was the cold that brought Dean back to full consciousness. And only then did he feel the dull ache in his head, and the slightly sharper pain in his arm. Son of a bitch.

Why wasn't he dead? The bull man could have killed him while he was unconscious. Maybe that was how he killed Ben. So why didn't he kill him?

He got up shivering from the cold, and saw the hoof prints went up the beach, and mysteriously became human footprints before disappearing entirely. What the fuck was going on here? He tried to connect all the threads in his head, but couldn't. Then again, he might have a concussion, which would hinder clear reasoning.

Dean tucked the knife back in his coat, and found the Impala, which seemed to take longer than he thought it should have. He was shivering so violently it took him a moment to start the car.

Back at the motel, he stripped off his wet clothes and stood under a hot shower until he got feeling back in his extremities. The goring attempt had left a deep gash across his left arm, but he figured a little Super Glue would close it. Other than that, all he had was a reddish-purple bruise on his jaw, where the bull man had grazed him with that punch. Not bad considering how weird and impossible that entire fight was. And had there been a mermaid? He wasn't completely sure he hadn't made that up.

Dean needed to get his secondary phone out of the car, because the one in his jacket had been waterlogged. (At least he could prove he'd been thrown in the water.) So he dressed in layers because fuck it, he had enough of being cold for one night. Once he retrieved it, he called Sam. "So, have been sold into sex slavery yet?"

Dean frowned at the phone. "You wanna know what actually happened, or do you wanna be a smart ass?"

"Can't I be both?"

"Sam …"

"Fine. What happened?"

So Dean told him, as best he could recall. He didn't think he had a concussion, but he didn't know how he avoided it. Could the Mark have protected him from that?

Sam laughed when he got to the mermaid part, but otherwise he kept his mouth shut until the end. "Dude, did you just fight a minotaur?"

Oh hell. That had never even occurred to him. "Did I? They exist?"

"I guess. I didn't think so, but that sounds like what you faced. Half human, half bull?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, minotaurs are real then." Sam sighed. "Why not?"

"What about the mermaid thing? Do they work with them or what?"

"Not that I know of. But it does seem like they were tag-teaming you. Are you sure you weren't just daydreaming?"

"Very funny. What the fuck is going on here?"

"Got me." Sam paused briefly before saying, "I found an entry on minotaurs in the Men of Letters archives. According to this, one of the Men of Letters thought they may have actually been a real creature, something akin to a skinwalker, but native to the Greek Isles."

"Well, I ain't in Greece, and scratch the skinwalker theory, as silver didn't work on it."

"He ascribed to it super strength, and something close to immortality. There's nothing on how to kill it, or why he even thought this was worthy of mention."

Dean sighed, leaning against the bed and taking a swig of his beer. Of course he had a six pack in his room. It was the least he deserved after fighting a mermaid and a minotaur. "Anything on mermaids?"

"Just that they were probably water sprites or spirits of the drowned mistaken for something else."

"It was no fucking sprite, it was as big as me, and it was no ghost, as I cut it and it bled."

Sam made an exasperated noise. "I don't know what to tell you. Nothing beyond that in the database. Congratulations on finding two new creatures for the record books."

"Gee, thanks." He finished his first beer, and wondered where he was supposed to take this fucked up case next. How did you start searching for a minotaur? Also, how did you kill it? At least he knew its eyes were its weak spot, but if it could regenerate them, it was only a weakness until it could grow them back.

"By the way, Cass discovered something. If you give up sleeping and eating, you know, Human stuff, it makes it easier for the Mark to take over."

Dean sighed, rubbing his eyes. Yeah, of course it did. But Sam had no idea how torturous sleep was for him nowadays. "I'll work on it."

"Please do."

There was so much Sam wasn't saying, and Dean could just about hear it in the silence. Some plea for Dean not to lose himself, even though Dean was convinced he was already halfway gone. He felt like a lost cause, and didn't know how to break it to Sam.

So he didn't. That was a revelation for another day.


Dean probably should have tried to sleep, brave the nightmare one more time, but in the end he didn't. He did go out and get some food, which felt like a concession to humanity. He also stopped at a seedy bar, where he got a couple of cheap whiskeys, and some suspect pharmaceuticals guaranteed to keep him alert.

He was still trying to piece together these cases, and couldn't. Minotaurs? Mermaids? Witches? Could it all be connected? Maybe. It was weird shit, and it seemed to be concentrated in a general area, but there weren't a lot of through lines. He was missing something. What? And why didn't the minotaur kill him? Did he assume he passed whatever weird ass test that was? Dean actually didn't see how that was possible. He didn't beat up the minotaur at all. He took its eye, sure, and threatened its other one, but that wasn't exactly an ass beating. That was pure desperation against an opponent of overwhelming strength and durability. As weak points went, it was pretty obvious. Eyes, throat, groin, knees - the cardinal points of weakness in just about every species. He could even remember teaching Sam that when he was a kid, when Dad was off on one of his hunting trips, and Dean took it upon himself to make sure Sammy could defend himself if everything went wrong. How weird was it that was a fond memory?

Since he didn't sleep, Dean was up with the sun, and was the first in line to get a triple espresso that could have stripped the paint off a boat. With a lack of other leads to follow in Ben's case, Dean drove out to the high school in Edmonds.

From the paper, the other guy turned to stone was a nineteen year old named Garret Forney. He lived in Seattle, he had no obvious connection to Tyler or Edmonds, and he seemed to be just a regular aimless guy. So how had he ended up a statue in an alleyway? More questions for the pile.

He parked out in front of the high school and watched as the teens filtered in, wondering what he should do. Talk to more of Tyler's friends, right? Probably the football team. See if anyone knew who he was sneaking out to meet that night. Guys got more chatty about "conquests" in the locker room.

Dean was just leaning on his car, finishing his coffee, when he glanced at the clot of arriving teenagers. There was one girl who hung back from the crowd, and was deliberately alone. Asian, a little chunky, with a streak of green in her black hair, Dean suspected she might be Goth since she wore all black clothing and her eyes were heavily ringed with black eyeliner. She held her books to her chest, and everything about her posture screamed afraid of the world. She looked at him –

- and it was like he was hit right between the eyes. It was a burst of energy like an electric shock times a thousand, and he dropped his cup and grabbed his head, on the off chance it might explode. As suddenly as it had hit him, it passed, although he felt dizzy for a second afterward. What the fuck was that?

Dean looked back up, and found the girl was staring at him slack jawed. Had she felt it too? Or had she caused it?

She snapped out of her shock, and ran away, headed towards the back, where sports field gave way to a bunch of rural scrub land. Dean quickly gave chase, sure he could catch up to her.

The problem was, what did he do when he caught her? If this was a whole Carrie thing, he was in deep shit.