A/N: Have you ever gotten broccoli or a fleck of pepper stuck in your teeth and not known it? Yeah. This is me saying to myself, "SBG, your insecurities are showin' and no one needs to see them." I could blame the upcoming holidays, the four-day migraine or the fact that my muse has deserted me, but ultimately it boils down to the insecurity. I can usually get over it without letting it show, but sometimes I look at other stories and wonder how in the heck they're getting hundreds of hits/reviews...whoop, there I go again. Enough of that. Thank you all for the nudges of encouragement.

On with the story, eh? We can't leave Dean restrained by crazy kids and Sam angsting about it.

All the Little Children
Chapter Four

At first, Sam thought he was hallucinating, or somehow otherwise being made to see what wasn't there. They came from nowhere, one right after another, as if they stood behind a curtain being drawn back by an invisible hand. Sam barely held on to an upright position, head pounding, stomach aching, and muscles shaking. He did a slow turn, wobbling slightly. He counted fifteen. They all looked back at him with the same cold calculation in their eyes. He swallowed a couple times, suddenly certain this wasn't in his head. They were just kids, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, but they had a certain hardness that was far older. And evil. Their eyes were dead, emotionless, just so wrong.

"What in the hell?" Dean said, quiet and confused.

Sam couldn't remember if he'd ever mentioned to Dean that Azazel told him about other generations of kids in a way that seemed to indicate there were many, many of them. It was one of those things, he thought, he had omitted out of fear and the need to learn more himself. Like Mom's connection to it all, and the demon blood pumping through his veins even now.

It was also one of those things associated with Cold Oak, a reference to events neither of them wanted to talk about if they didn't have to. There hadn't been time to even think about it himself, really. Part of Sam had assumed that if his generation had been wiped out chances were good other generations had met the same fate. He hadn't had the time to devote to finding out, not when so much of his concentration was focused on keeping Dean alive at the end of his twelve months. All the excuses in the world weren't going to make this go away.

"Maybe we should start over," the kid said with a chilly smile. "My name's Anthony, and, no, you can't call me Tony."

"Well, Tony, I'd say it's nice to meet you, but it's nuggh…" Dean's voice cut out, leaving him only with muffled groaning sounds. "Mmmph."

"Now I just said you couldn't call me Tony, Dean."

"What are you doing to him?" Sam said.

Sam moved closer to his brother, stepping over the dead woman with a grimace. He grasped the back of the chair to stay somewhat steady. He knew it wouldn't work, but he tugged at Dean's shoulders, trying to get his brother free. Anthony chuckled, and then like an echo, all fifteen other children laughed in precisely the same way. The sound was eerie, and familiar to Sam in some way. Dean continued to issue muffled groans, probably clever insults and curses, while Sam latched onto his good arm and held on.

"That won't work, Sam," Anthony said, with another small laugh. Again, all the other kids laughed, too. "You know there's nothing you can do to free him. Yet."

"Yet?" It was disconcerting. Sam couldn't seem to get his head around the situation, distracted by Dean's presence, Dean's pain and his own damned weakness. "I don't…."

"You probably have a ton of questions. First things first, we'll do introductions later. You've got time to get to know everyone else. For now it's simpler to just talk to me."

Anthony strolled toward him, all adolescent swagger. The kid contained none of the awkwardness most twelve-year-old boys possessed. Sam knew already, even still confused, that he had to stop thinking of Anthony, of all of them, as being kids. It was clear they were not, not any longer, with willful murder of innocent humans under their collective belts. He couldn't figure out how there were so many of them. Anthony plucked the knife from the air, where it still floated. The boy looked at its bloodied edge thoughtfully, before transferring his attention to Dean. Without warning, he drove the knife into Dean's existing wound and twisted. Dean choked, throwing back his head in clear pain.

Sam pulled at Anthony's arm, grabbing the knife. It exited Dean's flesh with a wet, slurping sound. He thought Anthony had allowed him to take hold of the knife, the only reason for the success. After only a moment in his hand, the weapon flew from his grip, landing on the floor across the room, next to a boy, no, a girl who looked impossibly small for her age. She picked it up by the blade and balanced it on the tip of her pointer finger. Sam looked away from her.

"Whatever it is you want I can assure you, you will not get it if you keep hurting my brother," Sam said through clenched teeth, anger and concern making clarity of thought return faster. He examined Dean's arm. The wound was jagged and ugly, but it wasn't the worst thing Dean had ever endured.

Dean stared at him with intensity, his mouth forming words Sam couldn't hear.

Sam looked away, disturbed by the image of Dean's muted attempts to talk. It seemed he couldn't look anywhere without being disturbed. "So just tell me what the hell you brought me here for."

"Oh, Sam, I thought you were supposed to be smart." Anthony tilted his head.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw all the other kids do the same. Dean mumbled something that this time Sam knew was another what the hell without hearing the words. It looked like monkey see, monkey do, but Sam didn't think Anthony was controlling the other kids. They just naturally moved together like a communal entity, like foot soldiers marching, which was actually a scary prospect. He didn't know if he could get to all of them, if he had to. He looked around the circle of faces and finally noticed they were all dressed the same; most of them had the same haircut. His clothes, his hair. Jesus.

"You probably thought we were like your generation, that ol' Yellow-Eyes weeded through us to get to the last one standing," Anthony said. "But that would be a waste, wouldn't it? I thought it was kind of stupid for him to do that to you guys, but at least his mistake didn't make it down to us."

"You all lived," Sam said, still fishing for information.

"Well, no." Anthony mocked up a sad face and a headshake, which was mirrored all around by the other kids. The circle tightened slightly, each of them taking a step forward. "Vanessa was a weak baby, so she totally had to go. And don't get me started on Jack and Daniel. All they wanted to do was be normal again. I don't get why anyone would want normal after they had this. What a couple of whiners."

"You killed them."

"They killed themselves."

The vague illness Sam felt now had less to do with his physical state than it did with his mental state. Anthony showed no remorse at all. He looked disgusted not for the loss of life but for the apparent weakness of those poor children. The thought that this cold, evil heartlessness was the way Sam was supposed to be, or was somewhere deep down, troubled him. He couldn't believe it of himself, and desperately wanted it to not be true about these kids.

"What about your families? People who care about you?"

"Not important anymore. Besides, they were never our real families. We're our real family, Sam, and you're part of it. We all share the same blood, the blood he gave all of us."

That unleashed a string of angry mumbles from Dean. Sam gave his brother a guilty glance, not surprised to see the veins in Dean's neck standing out as he kept struggling to break free. He hadn't wanted Dean to find out about Azazel's gift to him this way, hadn't wanted his brother to find out at all. Hell, it was something he'd tried damned hard to forget about himself, chalking up the way he sometimes felt about a hunt – detached, distant, cold – as mere experience, an instinctive progression away from empathy toward practicality. Hunt, or be hunted. Kill, or be killed. Deep within himself, as he stood there staring at Anthony and the others, a part of Sam identified with them. It didn't matter how small that part was. It existed. And it terrified him.

"It makes us strong, all of us."

"All of us," the kids repeated.

"Mme mmar morg."

Though still unintelligible, Sam knew Dean had just made a Borg reference, betraying his inner geek. Sam half smiled and nodded at his brother, thinking the same thing. The hive mentality creeped him out, though probably for slightly different reasons than it did Dean. Sometimes, Sam swore he heard the kids speaking when they hadn't, faint whispers of words and thoughts tickling on the edges. Dean blinked at him, looked confused and scared, that brewing-just-below-the-surface, barely there but huge kind of fear. Sam didn't think the psycho kids had that much to do with it. He let the half smile fade away. There were bigger things to be afraid of. Like him. No, not him. He wouldn't, couldn't live with his brother being scared of him.

"It makes you evil," Sam said, "not strong."

"And what would make us strong? Just saying no? But it feels so good to say yes. You should try it again sometime."

"So good," parroted the others. "Try it."

God, they were like a group of bad backup singers, and totally getting on his nerves. Sam flicked his gaze back to the girl with the knife. If he wanted it enough, he wondered, maybe he could get the blade to come to him. He looked back at Anthony, who smiled as if he knew exactly what Sam was thinking. Sam pursed his lips and stared back.

"We waited for you, you know," Anthony said. "After everything went down, some of us thought you'd come. But you never did and we got sick of waiting around."

"So you set up the thing with Andy's van, killed innocent people, just to lure me here."

"No one is really innocent, Sam."

Sam did another slow circle. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Hope, maybe, that at least one kid wasn't evil. All he got for his trouble were cold glares and increased unsteadiness. These kids didn't need him, they'd proven that, but they apparently wanted him. They'd expected him to come. They were supposed to be part of his army, he thought, maybe even ranking officers. Kids. Sick anger swelled within him, for what was done to these children, and what they in turn had done to others. He kept searching their faces. One of the kids, chubby and awkward and so similar to how he had been at twelve, nodded at him. It was an almost nonexistent thing, hardly noticeable. Sam didn't understand what it meant, if anything at all.

"You expect me to lead you," Sam said. Dean mumble-swore some more. "Why would I do that? How could I? Yellow-Eyes is dead, and so are what few powers I had."

"We all know that's not true," Anthony said, smiling at Dean as the kids played echo once again. "I think you already know why you'll do it, but maybe you need a reminder."

Sam stepped between Dean and Anthony, as if that would keep his brother from getting hurt. This time the weapon of choice wasn't a physical one. Sam didn't give any pretense in hiding his emotions; there was no need. Everyone in the room knew what he felt. Even if Dean hadn't followed him there, he thought the kids would have still used him. Dean had been right about that, like Anthony was right about why Sam would go with them. He felt it the second Dean's pain became too much for him to bear. His brother grimaced, letting out a strangled groan. Sam felt Dean. Squeezingheartohgodithurtshelpgonnadie all rushed at him along with the visible signs of Dean's suffering. He didn't know if it was thought or feeling or both. It didn't matter. It was Dean.

"Okay," Sam said, far more calmly than he thought possible. I can't let Dean die, was all he thought and he didn't care who knew it. "You've proven your point."

Dean's breathing eased a bit, but remained ragged. Sam looked at him. Saw and somehow heard Dean's Don't do this, Sammy. Funny how their pleas for each other were almost identical, or maybe it was more like tragic. Maybe if he went with these kids he'd have access to things that would help him save Dean for more than just right now. He didn't know, but he did know he couldn't lose Dean today. He was nowhere near ready to live in a world without his brother, whether they were together in it or not.

"I'll go with you." Dean's nostrils flared at his words, panic seemed to deepen the green of his eyes. Sam apologized silently, looking away. "But only if you never do anything like this to my brother again."

"I suppose you want us to pinky swear."

Sam knew that trusting them was like trusting a snake not to bite. It wasn't about trust, at least not between him and them. Anthony smiled at him, in that cold, knowing way that had been aggravating the first time he did it.

"Let's just say that if I do go with you, and I do somehow become this mystical leader you seem to think I am ... and you do hurt Dean again, it'll be the last thing you ever do."

"Ooooh," Anthony said, shivering exaggeratedly, "Scary."

"You don't believe me?"

Sam took a step toward the kid. On the fringes of awareness, he heard a faint buzzing and felt a recognizable pressure in his skull. No, not this time, he thought, and mentally pushed back against the feeling. For the first time, Anthony's countenance lost some of its smug evilness. There was a flicker of fear first, and then satisfaction. Sam could feel it, the desire to give in and use the powers he knew he had buried somewhere, had never fully believed were gone. He swallowed a couple of times.

"I believe you."

"So your choices are don't hurt him, kill us both right now, or hurt him later and I kill you."

Dean growled. If Sam knew his brother, and oh he did, Dean would keep trying to stop this forever, and by this Sam didn't mean the simple devil's deal he was making. The kids seemed amused by Dean's reaction. Sam spread his hands out and focused on Anthony, who didn't seem too concerned by the death threat. Sam couldn't take them all down, but he could take the one he needed to.

"Well?"

"One last Jedi Mind Trick. Emily."

"Give Sam your car keys, Dean," a soft voice said from somewhere behind him.

Dean moved. Rather, someone moved for him. Sam was horrified. Knowing his brother wasn't in control made it discomfiting to watch, as Dean's actions were stilted, mechanical. He held out his hand after Dean withdrew the keys from a pocket. He felt rather than saw Dean's hand shake with the unsuccessful effort to stop the force moving his arm and hand. Because it was all he had and all he dared to do, Sam grabbed his brother's fingers and squeezed for a second. Sam hoped Dean knew he was sorry it had gone down the way it had, but that he wasn't sorry Dean would live. Sam had to do what he had to do.

"Aww," Anthony said.

Sam dropped his hand. The keys jangled, heavy in his grasp.

"Let's go, Sam. Enough holding hands. We've got places to go, people to kill. Things to talk about."

Sam choked a little, appalled by the blasé way Anthony spoke.

"Tell me you'll let him go first."

"All these demands. So boring." Anthony jutted his chin toward the door. The rest of the kids filed out of the warehouse. "But they're kind of like orders, aren't they? In that case I'll do what you want, Sam. We'll let him up after an hour or so. I promise. Cross my heart."

He didn't really believe Anthony, but he didn't seem to have many choices and he did believe in Dean. His brother would be okay. A good, bad or ugly decision, he followed the kids away, without sparing his brother a glance until he was almost behind a pile of pallets. Sam made eye contact from a distance, just for a millisecond, and then he turned away again because the desperate look on Dean's face was unbearable. He'd been so consumed lately with preventing Dean from leaving him, so terrified of that because Dean had never once left him. It was he himself who kept walking away. There was terrible cruelness in that, for both of them.

*

An hour or five minutes, it didn't make much of a difference. The time Dean had spent trapped in the warehouse with only a few enormous rats and a dead woman for company was endless, his mind filled with what if scenarios and frustration and stark fear. Sam had kept things from him, BIG things. Sam had demon blood in him. Sam had voluntarily joined that group of evil pipsqueaks. Sam had left him.

But Dean couldn't pretend he didn't understand why any more than he could pretend he wasn't more frightened than angry. Before Sam had died and come back to life, Dean would never have doubted that his brother would be fine in the company of evil. He would have been frantic with the need to protect and save, but he would know Sam would still be Sam at the end of the day. Now, though, he couldn't say that and the need to save and protect was underlain with dread that even if he miraculously found Sam, his brother wouldn't be his brother, that every minute Sam spent with kids so far gone would be one minute closer to the darkness.

Dean stared down at his phone. He thought again about calling Bobby for help, knew their friend would be there in a flash, like he'd been so often in the past. Then he thought maybe Missouri could help, because she was even closer. He tossed the phone on the bed and scrubbed a hand down his face instead. It was the middle of the night, and neither one of his friends could help him now or ever. No one could.

He was the guy who traded his soul to the devil for a handful of magic beans, only to find out those beans were an illusion. He stared at Sam's open duffel bag, the laptop over on the table. Both items seemed like tokens. He couldn't help but wonder if his brother had ever really been there at all. Dean physically shook himself out of those thoughts. He had to do something besides sit around with his thumb up his ass. He wasn't so preoccupied he didn't recognize the irony of being in the situation he'd so not wanted to be in.

The problem was he didn't have a thing to go on. In the first few hours after he'd regained the ability to move his own limbs, he'd been all over the place. He'd thought someone, somewhere must have seen a big guy in need of a haircut surrounded by sixteen kids in need of the same haircut. He was still confused about those kids' existence, but they should have been memorable. They'd been in the middle of an industrial district, though, which housed only transients and people who knew better than to see anything even if they saw it. No amount of charm had helped, and so there he was feeling exactly like he had when Meg snatched Sam, when Azazel had taken him that last time. Sam was just gone. Dean feared nothing but luck would help him, and luck was unreliable. He tried to quell the panic rising inside him.

"Damnit, Sam," he said out loud. "What am I supposed to do now?"

The duffel and laptop, all that he had left of his brother for now, didn't respond. He felt like an idiot for talking to an empty room. Dean didn't know what he'd even do if he knew where to look. Been there, done that, got the whammy. He was outnumbered. The sloppily tended-to stab wound in his arm was a constant reminder of how powerless he was. He didn't even have any weapons. Though he wasn't particularly interested in dispatching the kids, it was true they couldn't be allowed to keep doing what they were doing. Honestly, he didn't really want to think about having to kill them. They were just kids, albeit kids with a nasty penchant for homicide. Sam might have been privy to two of their killings, but like that Anthony kid had said – they'd been practicing, for months.

He sat up straighter. He and Sam hadn't looked before. They hadn't thought to look for other things that could be connected to Azazel; all they'd done was focus on figuring out how Sullivan had been connected, or rather how he hadn't been connected. Dean moved over to the laptop and powered it up. He didn't know the full scope of what to look for, but he could search for other mysterious, unexpected suicides and people who dropped dead from strange brain-liquefying maladies. Chances were those two definitive skills had been practiced at some point.

He logged on to the Lawrence Journal-World website. He didn't have a specific point of reference, but he assumed a similar pattern fit with this younger generation. Sam had apparently known about them but had never bothered to tell him about them. Dean clenched his jaw. Not that he was upset about that at all. He figured he could go back in the archives to about the time Ava had disappeared. Beyond that, he just didn't know. Kids could have vanished long before Ava had.

Kids. That was another angle he could use. Now that he knew to look for twelve-year-old kidnap or runaway headlines, he might actually find something useful. Anything at all would do. Dean started, if not to feel better exactly, at least like he was doing something that could produce results. The search was slower than it would have been with Sam at the keyboard, but soon Dean moved with greater efficiency, and he became absorbed in the task. After hours, though, it seemed a waste of time. He found nothing at all in the Lawrence area or in nearby communities, or anywhere in the state.

"It's starting to look like we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto," he muttered.

That wasn't good news, and Dean wished he wasn't right. He knew he was. He stood up and stretched, muscles cramped from hunching over the computer for too long. A quick glance at his watch revealed he'd lost another three hours, should be sleeping. There was no way he could sleep. His mind was too filled with thoughts of Sam succumbing to the dark side. Or worse. Those damned kids weren't going to follow anyone not down with their agenda, so that meant either Sam would cross the line or he'd be dead. Shit, shit and then some more shit.

Speaking of shit, he started a pot of cheap motel coffee. Dean moved to the window and peered out through the drapes. If he had to hit the road, he was going to have to borrow a car since the Impala was as gone as Sam. The lot didn't hold much. A rusty old Gremlin, no. An '84 Grand Marquis, that was a maybe. Ah, a Ford F150. He wasn't really into trucks, but it would do. The coffeemaker beeped. He poured a cup and got back to work, searching once again for a Sam-shaped needle in a very large haystack. There was no Andy Gallagher to send him a beacon this time, no way he could expect a mental phone call from any of the mini-me Sam clones. He grimaced, really hated the idea of an evil army of small soldiers that looked like his brother.

He had a sudden thought, though. Azazel had dropped Sam and his generation in a dead ghost town, and not coincidentally they all ended up as dead as Cold Oak. Almost all. Cold Oak was a supernaturally oriented location. Maybe the younger generation had been taken and put somewhere with a similar history, only not a place already dead and abandoned. Dean would start with New Orleans, easily the most haunted city in the United States. After Katrina wiped it out, it was the perfect place to set up a bona fide boot camp for evil kids. Bare bones police department, an upswing of crime even before the forces of hell were unleashed, and lots of unoccupied spaces made it his best option.

It took him about two minutes to figure out he was going to have to sift through a lot of human-related crimes to see if there were supernatural events hidden among them. He sighed and topped off his coffee cup. His eyes already felt like someone had taken sandpaper to them. Dean knew at some point he was going to have to sleep. He'd be of no use to Sam if he were dead on his feet.

He'd be of no use to Sam if he were dead, period, which made him think of other things. The more he considered his deal, the more he hated it for Sam, and a new element of regret was growing for himself as well. The fire and brimstone of hell would be nothing compared to the knowledge that he'd brought his brother back from the dead all wrong. Nothing bad is going to happen to you as long as I'm around. He'd said those words, and he now had to choke while he ate them.

Dean sighed, squinting at the laptop's screen. Murder, murder, gang-related violence, theft, more murder. His instinct told him New Orleans was the way to go, but he briefly perused other hot spots as well. Galveston, Texas was surprisingly clean. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania only had the usual haunts. The words started blurring on the screen. The caffeine from the coffee had made him jittery but didn't prevent exhaustion. He needed sleep if he was going to road trip to anywhere that wasn't Lawrence. He'd look closer at New Orleans after he slept for an hour. It felt like even an hour off was crucial.

He reluctantly moved away from the laptop and sprawled face first on what had been Sam's bed. He fell asleep within minutes. His dreams were filled with black horror and screams that wouldn't stop. Shrill, trilling screams. Like a phone. His phone. Dean rolled onto his back and peered around, confused by the phone ringing and the sunlight streaming through the drapes. The phone was on the bed he hadn't slept in, and he fumbled for it. He saw on the LED that it was an unknown caller. He flipped the phone open, disappointed it wasn't Sam even though he didn't expect it to be.

"Yeah," he said. There was a long pause, and followed by unsteady breathing on the other end of the line. "Hello, who is this?"

"Uhm, is this Detective Rather?"

Detective Rather? Dean furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, brain still half asleep and preoccupied with the cries and horrors of his dreams. And Sam, finding Sam and the kids before it was too late. It came to him after a second. Buck Zeise. It seemed like he and Sam had talked to the guy a long time ago. Days. Weeks. It had been a little over twenty-four hours.

"Yes."

"This is Buck. Buck Zeise?" Buck said, pausing again as if to let the information sink in. "You gave me your card to call you if I thought of something else."

"Yeah," Dean said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Buck, I remember."

"I didn't think of something, exactly. Uhm. Did you know your car is in my parking garage and that it doesn't have Kansas plates? I didn't notice that before."

"What?" Dean blinked a couple of times. He must be more tired than he thought. "It is? How'd it get there?"

"Yeah. I don't really know how or when it got here. Last night sometime, maybe," Buck said awkwardly. He cleared his throat in Dean's ear. "You'd think I'd remember something like that. It must have been after my shift was over. But you'd think someone else would have seen it."

"Not really," Dean said.

"What?"

"What?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind." Dean didn't really care how or why the car ended up at the parking garage. It could have been Sam, he thought hopefully, or then again it could have been Anthony thinking he was the cleverest little shit on the planet. "It doesn't matter. Do you have the keys?"

"No. Wait." Dean heard rattling metal and paper rustling. "No, no keys but there's a towing slip from Bulldog Tow with a message written on it."

"Read it."

"It says 'don't follow'. What's that supposed to mean, I wonder?"

Like hell. Dean wasn't even sure where to go yet, but when he did he knew he'd go. Sam had to know that, assuming the message was from him. He clenched his jaw tightly. Hell, Anthony and his gang probably knew that, too. If he went, he'd go against Sam's wishes and would do exactly what the kids wanted.

"I'll be there in twenty minutes," Dean said.