This chapter: Dean goes on a trip—the kind with roads—as part of a plan to find Sam. (It's not a very good plan.) Sam also goes on a trip. (It's the kind without roads.)
A/N: I know it's been a while. There are a few reasons for that, but I won't bore you with them. Many thanks to everyone who's read and reviewed so far.
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What sealed the deal was that when Dean flipped to the section at the back of Rufus's address book devoted to Hunting accidents - medical care (as distinct from Hunting accidents - public relations or Hunting accidents - waste disposal), he found J C Canby cross-referenced yet again. His shoulder was still dislocated, and this Canby guy was a lot closer than Doc Robert. Next stop, West Virginia.
He could have called first, but he'd never cared much for forming first impressions over the phone. Before bringing a stranger on to help him find Sam, he needed to know they wouldn't be sold out or strung along. To that end, Dean wanted to look into the man's eyes, first. Or, at least, to look around his kitchen.
The trouble with location spells was that nearly of them were black magic. Implicit or explicit sale of your soul kind of shit. Winchesters put witches like that out of business, they didn't subsidize them. Of course, Canby could be anything from a civil engineer to a bookie, no sort of magical practitioner at all. But Dean thought not. Canby had managed to rile Rufus, and that required an extraordinary skill set.
And if Canby didn't pan out, well, Dean knew the exception to the rule about location spells.
Dean had awoken this morning in the moldiest motel room he'd ever occupied just outside of Burning Well, Pennsylvania. What woke him was the owner pounding on his door. The man had informed him that it was 11:35 and he'd have to charge Dean for an extra day. Dean had looked at the walls, frosted with mildew; then at the parking lot, empty but for his car, and shut the door in his face. Ten minutes later he'd paid in silence and left. There'd been no ice in the machine for his shoulder.
Signs advertised a hospital just a few miles west in the borough of Kane, PA, population 3,730. He almost went. Adrenaline and then exhaustion had gotten him through the previous night, but now there was nothing to distract him from what a dislocated shoulder really felt like. Four hours' sleep and immobility hadn't helped. In the end, though, having a genuine "hunting accident" to bring to Canby was his best in, so he'd gritted his teeth and had ibuprofen for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. The pain helped keep his mind off the distance growing between him and Providence.
Mount Storm, West Virginia (pop. 109) was a loose accretion of houses and trailers around the junction of Routes 50 and 42, folded deep into the Appalachians; Dean was unclear on whether it had any reason for existing other than the nearby power plant and the coal it burned. Canby's address was a few miles south. Dean drove for miles at a go under the silent sweep of wind turbines that loomed from each ridge without meeting another car. Traversing mountains had always made him obscurely uneasy. He could know exactly where he was and yet feel lost. He supposed it was something to do with the way the car moved over hills, rising and falling like a craft on some great, frozen ocean. Boats were not his scene. Plus, every respectable vampire story started with a long climb into the mountains.
As he drove, Dean considered his plan. It wasn't a good one. Even disregarding factors of time, it wasn't great. Dean wanted to find Sam. Dean hadn't been able to, so that meant he wanted someone else to find Sam. Except that most of the hunting community assumed that Sam was dead. Most of the rest wanted a word with him. Even if this Canby guy happened not to be one of them, there was nothing stopping him selling the information to someone who did. The best that could be said for this current plan was that it got him a closer to where he'd need to be for the next plan, and that plan wasn't great, either.
When he turned in at 6 Plato Lane, there were no hoodoo signs, occult symbols, or overt signs of devil worship. What there was were cows. The Impala dipped and bounced as Dean crossed over a cattle grate, and the first thing he saw pass under his tires was a cow pat. Sheep and goats appeared, staring with slot-eyes and busy jaws, and from somewhere he could hear a rooster. He could neither hear nor see pigs, but it wasn't long before he could smell them. It began to look like Rufus's cryptic note about Practical application (husbandry) had meant literal husbandry.
His shoulder was a steady bore of agony, and he felt every jolt as the car crawled up the rutted drive. Finally it ended before a tin-roofed, white clapboard house that backed into woods. The front yard was full of flowers and herbs, but they were laid out like a vegetable plot. As if they were arranged for access, not beauty. The back of his neck tingled. Witches had a use for husbandry, too.
Dean parked behind an ancient El Dorado and got out feeling kind of stupid. He had little more than a hunch to say that Canby was a player. But, Dean supposed, even if he wasn't, he might still be good for popping a shoulder back in. For damned sure he'd need that for plan B.
The screen door on the sagging porch creaked open. It discharged a slim man in corduroy and chambray, a cigarette burning between his fingers. For a long moment, he and Dean stood looking each other over. The man had silvery hair, but his skin, deeply tanned, was pulled smooth around his features in a way that made it hard to be sure of his age. Dean pegged him at Bobby's, give or take a decade. "Help you?" he asked.
"You Clovis Canby?"
"Was when I woke up this morning."
Dean indicated his makeshift sling with his good hand. "Heard from a friend that you're helpful with hunting accidents."
"Which friend was that?"
It wasn't like the truth could harm Rufus much. "Rufus Turner."
The man tapped his cigarette with his index finger. "Well, now, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Told you I'm a doctor, did he?"
Dean knew he was being tested, but there wasn't much he could do about it. "More or less."
"Well, I'm not." Canby moved the cigarette to his mouth, took a drag, lowered it, and tapped it once again, almost daintily. When Dean hadn't moved by the end, he added, "But I used to be. Come on in."
Smoke hung in a visible layer inside in the slant of late afternoon sun. The living room looked ordinary, no rabbit carcases, no books bound in human skin, no occult garlands over the doors. Canby gestured Dean to the sofa as he himself settled in an old rocker; Dean cleared his throat and remained standing.
"How'd you put out your shoulder?"
"Hunting accident, like I said."
Canby looked him up and down. "Must've been a big deer."
"It was."
The man looked more amused than anything. He stubbed out his cigarette and placed it on a line of butts stacked in the ashtray like cordwood. Then he sat, waiting. Fumbling one-handed, Dean took out a few twenties. Canby looked at the bills, then back at him with a slightly pitying expression. Dean gritted his teeth and took out a few more.
Canby stood beside Dean and rolled up his sleeves. "I got one rule in my house, and I take it seriously: no swearing. Can you abide by that?"
"I think I can control myself."
He did, but he didn't like it. No matter how many times he dislocated this shoulder, it was always a bitch going back in. Canby was practiced and efficient, though, which supported his claim that he'd at one point been a legitimate physician. While he probed the joint checking for tears, Dean rasped, "Got a drink?"
There was that smile again, like Dean was cute bordering on quaint. "Yeah, sure," said Canby. "Come on into the kitchen."
Canby had none of Rufus's standards for alcohol. He didn't have the unusually well stocked spice rack of most witches, either, and Dean wasn't sure at this point whether that was a pro or a con. Canby poured Dean some whiskey that smelled like rubbing alcohol in a jelly glass—Dean had been hoping for moonshine, which at least usually tasted pretty good, but apparently Canby only took his Farmer Brown routine so far—and busied himself with a clanking enamel kettled topped with, for whatever reason, a tea cozy shaped like the guidance counselor from South Park.
"Thanks." The drink numbed Dean's gums, and the pain in his shoulder was receding to a dull throb.
"Sure. You want to tell me what you're really after, now that's out of the way?"
Dean swallowed his mouthful of whiskey. Battery acid, he decided, with top notes of paint thinner and cirrhosis. "I know I didn't give you much, Canby, but jeez, even cheap whorehouses let you catch your breath after."
Canby's face hardened. "I asked you not to swear in my house."
Dean had to replay the sentence in his mind. "What, whor—?"
"The other," Canby snapped. "Now talk."
Dean looked at him carefully. "What do you want me to say? 'You're the best I ever had'? I can lie, if that's what you're into."
"Come on, son. You wrenched your shoulder a day ago, by the bruising. It's a dislocation, not a gunshot, so even if you've been upsetting people, a hospital wouldn't think enough of an injury like that to report you to the authorities, and hospitals are a lot easier to find than I am." Canby leant against the stove holding the tea cozy. "That means you wanted to see me specially, and you thought you were being smooth driving around with a dislocated shoulder to disguise the fact, which means you ain't very bright. Do better."
"Or what?" Dean asked. "Mr. Mackey's gonna shoot me?"
"He might."
Dean's eyes flicked between Canby's hand and his face. "You'll ruin your kettle cover."
"Don't think I won't be sad about it."
Dean watched him a moment longer. It was long enough to be sure he wasn't going to get shot. If physical violence had been Canby's stock and trade, he wouldn't have bothered with threats. "I want to find someone."
"How come?"
"They took something from me," Dean said, and that much wasn't a lie.
"So go to the police."
"Already went. Well, more like they came to me."
Canby laughed, and the gun made a muffled clunk through Mr. Mackey when he set it on the counter. "Yeah, that I believe."
"Well?"
"Well, what?"
"Well, was Rufus just jerking my chain when he said that you could help?"
"Depends. What is it, exactly, that he told you?" Dean held his eye but didn't say anything. "Ah. I wondered if that part was a lie. Rufus hates giving up a contact."
"I want to find somebody," Dean said again. "I want to know where he is within a hundred-yard radius. Can you do it?"
Canby sucked on his teeth. "Maybe."
"Are you a witch?"
"Nope."
"Then what the— What are you?"
"I'm a problem-solver."
"Yeah, but are you solving problems with bowls of baby's blood, is what I'm getting at."
"Not generally. Though I've never understood why folks get all upset about that; you can take a few milliliters of the red stuff as safely from a baby as from anybody else." Dean couldn't help staring; Canby looked at him like he was slow. "It's a question of quantity. These things often are."
Dean blinked. "Right. Okay. So you're squeaky-clean, no devil-worship at all."
Canby nodded slowly. "That about covers it. Yeah, that's pretty much the crux of it."
Dean was starting to lose patience. "I came clean with you. If you want to do any kind of business, return the favor and tell me what your angle is."
Canby drew another cigarette out of a shirt pocket. "Professionally speaking, I guess I'm a priest."
"What kind of priest?"
"Every kind of priest."
"You're a hunter," Canby said as he led Dean along a track worn into the pasture. The sun was going down, and Canby had a pail of corn. "You obviously could find witches if you wanted them. Why didn't you?"
"Because witches are skanks?"
"And?"
A flash of screaming, of blood and bone and juxtapositions of the two never intended, cut through Dean's mind. He pushed it down. "Because of the literal devil-worship?"
"Right." Canby stopped in front of a chicken coop. "So you have a problem, but you don't want to use witchcraft, or be a party to witchcraft, because you're a hunter and you know that selling your soul ain't just a Sunday school story. All of us have wants, but not much is worth eternal torment." He glanced at Dean as he opened the door to the coop. "Is it?"
Dean's smile was strained. "Not much, no."
Canby began to strew the corn in front of a collection of some of the most bizarre birds Dean had ever seen. There were hens and roosters in the familiar shapes and colors, too, but the others looked like avian drag queens. "What the hell are those?"
"Chickens. Plain chickens for plain tables, fancy chickens for fancy tables. And watch your step, because some of these breeds I spent years hunting up, and some of them I had to breed myself. A lot of times, you can get by with substituting modern equivalents, sometimes those actually work even better, but other times it's important to have historical accuracy."
Fancy chickens. He'd driven five hours with a busted shoulder for fancy chickens. "I don't get it," he said finally. "You said you aren't a witch."
"I'm not. Devils aren't the only thing that like a small, furry snack. Or a large one, as the case may be. As far as I can tell, demons don't really care about sacrifices except as a matter of tradition and a handy way to start corrupting people with the small-time acts of cruelty and waste, but I haven't gone around asking any to be sure. I was raised Southern Baptist, with a healthy fear of the devil's works."
Dean stopped and looked at him. "You're summoning something else."
Canby shook his head. "Spirits are summoned. Gods are petitioned."
Dean recoiled. "You're calling up pagan gods? Do you have any idea what those sons— Do you know what those things do?"
"If you ask nicely, they may do what you ask them to. And, this being the important part, they don't put a lien on your soul. Most gods reckon it's a perk if they don't have to show up for your afterlife at all."
"No, they just want to show up for your blood sacrifices in this one. I've met gods, Canby. They're monsters. If you don't understand that, then you're just one screw-up away from finding out. Whatever favors you're getting along the way—they're not worth it."
Canby led him out of the coop and carefully latched the door. "Some gods are more bloodthirsty than others. Most will take what they can get, even if it's not what they'd prefer. Every client has a limit. Things they're willing to do or have done for them, things they aren't. My job's to work within those limits, and that's what makes me different from a witch. My way's less certain, but it's less certain both ways: in the result, and in the cost. Ah, don't go in there, that there's the snake hutch."
Dean stepped away from what he'd thought was another chicken coop. "If it's so safe and moral, what you do, why are they paying you? Why doesn't everybody just dial up Zeus on the 900 line?"
"Because Zeus hasn't picked up since 1752, for one thing." Canby was headed now for the barn. "There's half your answer right there: know-how. You got to know which gods to try, and how to try them. Do you know how to supplicate—that means 'ask nicely,' by the way; I know you're not real familiar with the practice—Boldogasszony? Atargatis? Which of them's likely to do what, for what? Of course you don't. I do, and that's worth something. But say you got lucky and found out. What would you do then? Burn a placenta on birch twigs? Castrate yourself with a knife consecrated in Balikli Göl?"
"Uh," said Dean.
"Well, let's say that you do—"
"Can we not?"
"—What would you do then? Walk away once you had what you wanted?"
"Well, yeah, pretty much." Dean followed Canby into the barn and watched as he fetched down a sack of feed. "Isn't that the general idea? Quid pro quo, everybody goes home happy. According to you."
Canby handled the feed sack like it weighed nothing. "The tricky part about receiving favors from a god," he said, without turning, "isn't initiating the relationship. It's terminating it. That's where I come in. I manage the relationship."
Canby's speech had left Dean with a lot of questions, not all of which was he sure he wanted answered. "So these gods don't like getting dumped for putting out on the first date, but they don't mind you slutting around with other gods? I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time believing that."
Canby shrugged, finished with the feed, and turned toward the house. "Gods aren't jealous, by and large. What they like is loyalty, which isn't the same thing as monogamy. And loyalty takes tending." The grounds were in twilight; a cow mooed somewhere, and the air was ripe with manure. "I am a gardener, sir. I am a constant gardener."
Practical application (husbandry).
The walk back to the house was silent. Dean's first instinct was to dismiss Canby's claims. Scratch that; his first instinct was to get the hell out of Dodge, because gods might not be demons, but they weren't a hell of a lot better. Demons at least all died the same. But of course, Canby was selling concierge god-services. No need to trouble yourself with dealing with gods directly.
Dean thought of the hundreds of rituals he and Sam and Dad had performed over the years. A lot of their incantations had invocations buried in them that Dean had never paid much attention to; if it wasn't "Hail, Satan!" it wasn't on their radar. Yet those rituals had worked. They still seemed to him different from what Canby was describing, but he'd never put that much thought into the mechanics. Clearly, Canby had a high enough success rate to support a small farm's worth of sacrificial animals. It wasn't surefire, by the man's own admission, but then, Dean's backup plan wasn't something that he'd ever tried for himself, either. And time was of of the essence.
So much had passed already.
Back in the house, his host switched on the living room light and resumed his seat in the rocking chair. Dean still didn't take the couch. His shoulder had dulled to an ache, and he was still tired, and Sam was still gone. His head hurt. "So you're, what." He searched for an appropriate term. "Like a god-broker?"
Canby looked delighted. "A god-broker! I like that. That's pretty good. Not everything I do is priesting, though. Maybe thirty, forty percent. Sometimes you can borrow old forms and bend them your own way. Sometimes, if you have the right stuff to work with, that can actually be stronger. It all depends."
This stank. Everything about it stank, from Canby's goddamned chain-smoking to the pig shit outside. "Say I hire you. What god are you going to ring up for this, and what are they going to want?"
"Trade secrets," said Canby.
"Are you kidding me?"
For the first time, Canby betrayed annoyance. "Did I barge into your home and start insulting your livelihood? You came to me. If you don't like the way I do business, you can show yourself out anytime."
Dean pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. The tightness in his chest, the tightness that had been there for two days and wasn't getting better, that was panic. Panic made you sloppy, and panic made you stupid. But he couldn't switch it off. He never could, with Sam. "Prove you can do it."
Canby regarded him with undisguised disdain. "You need someone to have manners for you. It's a good thing that's a service I offer professionally. No, son, this is not where you make demands and I do your bidding. This is where you say what you've got to offer so I can say if I'm interested."
"If there's one thing this life taught me early, it's that if it seems too good to be true, it is."
"Lucky I don't claim to be that good, then. Look, when you've got a problem like yours, you've got three kinds of messy to choose from: mine, theirs, and yours."
Dean narrowed his eyes. "Mine?"
"Do nothing."
It was designed to rile Dean, and it worked. "A dragon hoard," he ground out. "The real thing."
"Yeah?" Canby whistled. "Boy. What's in it?"
"Gold, what else?" Put that way, it did sound considerably less exotic.
There was that pitying look again. "Is that really the kind of coin you bring to a transaction like this?"
"You just gouged me a couple of hundred for my shoulder!"
"That was for your shoulder."
Dean ran a mental inventory on the contents of the trunk. "Mojo bag. Nineteenth century. Works like a supernatural amp."
Canby made an approving sound. "Nice. What else?"
Dean gritted his teeth. "Dagger. Magical. Damascus steel by way of the Vikings, serious old-time religion." When Canby just nodded, Dean banked his rage and went ahead. He'd be showing his desperation, but for some people—people like Canby—desperation was part of the bargain. They wanted everything you had more than they wanted something valuable.
Besides, they had, like, half a dozen of the things at this point.
"The sword of an angel."
Canby raised a skeptical eyebrow. "What's that when it's at home?"
Dean smiled thinly and took some pleasure in being about to rearrange this guy's entire conception of the cosmic order. "Exactly what it says."
"Huh. What's it do?"
It was the logical, practical question. It was precisely the question Dean would have asked in Canby's place, but it still irritated him. It irritated him to be standing here haggling for his brother's life. It irritated him that it had become habit. "What do you think it does? It's an angel blade. It kills things. It kills everything. Demons, every kind of monster ever spawned"—And hopefully the ones that had yet to be, but no need to go into that just yet.—"angels."
"Why should I believe that this pig-sticker is what you say?"
"Because." Dean set his jaw. "I'm Dean Winchester."
Canby just sat there patiently, waiting for more.
Well. There was no graceful way to salvage that, was there? "I take it you haven't heard of me."
"Should I have?"
Dean narrowed his eyes. "I thought you worked for hunters."
"What do I look like, a door-to-door salesman? Hunters are some of my best customers, but they come to me. I keep myself to myself; no time to tend to the animals or my researches, otherwise. So, no, son, I haven't heard of you. You can spare me whatever it is you're known for; I don't keep up on all the little vagaries."
"The apocalypse is a little vagary?"
"Must've been, if I ain't ever heard about it."
There was a point there. "Look, I don't have time for this. Just name your price."
Canby looked at him and rocked for a while. Looked, rocked, looked. "You a good hunter?"
Dean smiled tightly. "You could say that."
"Alright, then. The mojo bag, the Viking dagger, and the heart of a werewolf."
Dean's stomach dropped. "The full moon was two days ago."
"It sure was."
"Fine. You get the bag and the dagger now, you do your thing, I'll come back with the heart."
"I'm afraid it's my policy to require payment upfront for new clients."
Dean felt himself blanch with anger. "No deal."
Canby shrugged. "Okay."
And he seemed content to leave it at that. "The bag, the dagger, the gold, and the angel blade," Dean said, trying to keep his voice level and unconcerned. "All of them are yours. Any of them's rarer than werewolf guts. That's my final offer."
"The bag and the dagger could be useful in my line of work. I got enough money already. Weapons are useless to me. You want my services, come back with the heart."
For a while, all Dean could do was stare. Then he turned and left.
"Call first," Canby called after him.
He made it to the end of Canby's drive before he threw the car into park and pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, controlling his breathing by force of will. It was fine. They were fine. There were demon signs less than a hundred miles down the road. Time for plan B.
Sam might not have time for plan B.
Sam might not have had time for his little road trip as it was. Suddenly it rolled up in Dean in a gut-churning wave: how wrong it was for him to be here. Sam was in New England. Dean was in Appalachia. He was hundreds of miles and days, days away from Sam. Dean was here, and Sam wasn't. And that was all he knew for sure. Sam could be hurt. Sam could be bleeding. Sam could be worse than bleeding; Sam could be catatonic, the wall in his mind gone for good, falling forever. Sam could be in the hands of demons or hunters or some hopped-up monster champing at the bit for Mother's Day. Sam could be trapped. Sam could already be—
—Deep in conversation with the drain pipe. It was a good listener.
"It's just," said Sam, "everything's different, but everything's the same, but everything being the same is what's so different."
"I know exactly what you mean," said the drain pipe.
"I knew you would."
The drain pipe swelled and deflated, swelled and deflated. Its voice was raspy. "You shouldn't get too hung up on that. Your insides will fall out. Like an omelette."
"Yeah, I know, but last thing I remember, he'd hardly even touch me." The walls rippled with the vibrations of his voice. "Then I wake up and he's like he was when we were good. I mean, hell, I wake up and I'm wearing a different shirt size. Is the floor bothering you, too?"
"No," said the alcove.
Its voice was the size of a grain silo. Sam shrank from it and fell on his ass.
He crawled back over to the drain pipe and sat sideways next to it, pressed against the wall so the alcove wouldn't see him. The pipe's concrete stopper fuzzed over in sympathy. "I used to have this dream," Sam said, hushed. "It's, like, an hour before a seminar class, and I haven't done the reading. So I'm going to try to skim and fake it. Only I don't know what the reading is. I can't look it up, because I can't find the syllabus. I can't find the syllabus, because I never picked it up, because I never went to the first class, because I never registered for it, because I never enrolled in anything after I got off the bus, and the whole year's over and I haven't been to anything I was supposed to. The dream, I didn't even have it while I was at Stanford. I started having it afterward. And I kept having it. The apocalypse started, and I was still having this dream. I went to Hell, came back, apparently, and I'm still having this dream. Seems kind of unfair."
"Don't you think you're being kind of a pussy, though?" the pipe said, sticking its tongue out, tasting the air.
"No, I like dogs better."
"Yeah, but, in misogynistic, semper fi terms. You're just sitting here."
"I'm trapped."
"That's no excuse."
"Um."
"Look," said a new voice, and turning took a very long time, but Sam did it. There was a great totem pole climbing up the wall. Blue and red and ocher dark-shine. One of its heads turned, owl-like. "If you spend long enough in a cage, you sprout feathers," it said.
Sam nodded. He remembered that from the back of the seed packet when they grew marigolds in elementary school.
"So do you want to sit around," said the drain pipe, "or do you want to get out of here and make a lot of pancakes?"
"A lot of pancakes," said the alcove.
Sam thought about the pros and cons. "Pancakes, please."
.
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Next time: Dean finds himself a demon. Sam finds himself an outlet. Fun for the whole family, in other words.
