Chapter 7 Memory
Whitefish, Montana
"He's not answering," Dean said, throwing his cell onto the sofa in disgust.
"Who?" Sam looked up from the laptop's screen, brow wrinkling up as the phone bounced on the cushion next to him.
"Eddie Murphy," Dean growled, swinging around to pace past him. "Frank!"
"Give him some time."
"It's been weeks!"
"Twelve days," Sam corrected.
"That's–that's nearly two weeks!"
"Nearly," Sam repeated, leaning back on the sofa. "C'mon, Dean, five-digit number, there're a lot of possibilities."
At the other end of the room, Ellie was sitting at the kitchen table, her phone against her ear, one hand writing fast as she listened to the hunter talking on the other end of the line.
Dean ignored his brother's comment and looked over at her.
Showered, hair clean and back in its habitual long braid, the cuts and bruising patterning her face stood out vividly against creamy skin. His face and arms were no better, but he'd barely noticed his injuries and he couldn't seem to remove his gaze from hers.
In the life.
"What do you want to do?"
Sam's question drifted over him, heard distantly and without impact. Over the top of it, he heard another voice, from the past, a droning voice with a slightly nasal lisp.
It is hard to contend against one's heart's desire; for whatever it wishes to have, it buys at the cost of soul.
The thought, whole and intact, swam up from buried memories and he blinked at it, staring at Ellie, feeling a rushing sensation as the past seemed to flood into his mind – a school room in some no-name town, some unknown number of years ago.
Turning away, Dean frowned as the memory got a bit clearer. The teacher's name had been … Attison. A loser dude who'd worn a baby-crap brown three piece suit, summer and winter, had glasses and a prominent Adam's apple, that'd bobbed up and down in his neck like a turkey's when he'd gotten excited about something. They'd been there nearly four months. His father'd had a broken ankle and had been like a bear with a sore head.
"Dean?"
He'd been half-asleep in class, idly checking out the length and curve of Annie Riley's thigh where her skirt had been rucked up by her continuous squirming in her seat, Attison's voice droning in the background, the room still and hot.
'Heraclitus,' Attison'd boomed out at the class, making him jerk upright in his seat. 'He believed in the constancy of change; that permanence was merely an illusion – or even a delusion; that opposites and cycles of opposition were the driving force behind everything.'
"Dean!"
"What?!" He turned around to look at his brother, the memory fragmenting.
"Where the hell are you, man?" Sam asked, waving a hand over the low table he was sitting next to, its surface taken over by the laptop and piles of books, as if it explained both his annoyance and their reason for being there. "What do you want to do about Frank?"
Buys at the cost of the soul –
Scowling slightly, Dean shrugged, pushing the thought away and covering whatever expression was on his face with a rough swipe over his jawline.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Go see him? See if we're getting our money's worth?"
"I don't think pushing him is gonna get us a whole lot further," Sam said.
They both turned as Ellie closed her cell with a snap and swivelled around in her chair. "Good news and bad news," she said, getting up.
"Good news," Dean demanded, heading for the cabin's antiquated refrigerator.
"Roman's definitely looking for an artefact," she told them over her shoulder, walking to the counter to refill her coffee cup. "He's got ten teams, digging from northern Turkey, all through the Middle East, to the border between eastern Iran and China."
"Looking for what?" Sam asked.
"He hasn't specified that to the people working for him," she said, setting her cup onto the table and giving him a shrug. "He's given possible sites, but told the archaeologists in charge that he wants all the remains examined by his own teams, if and when they find something."
"So," Dean said slowly. "He knows what it is. Just doesn't want to say."
"Mmm-hmm."
"And the bad news?" Sam picked up his empty cup, shook his head at the beer Dean was proffering and went for the coffee.
"The bad news is that some angel told Methuselah about the Levis, back before the Flood and all the rest of the upheavals," she said, rubbing her fingertip over the small crease between her brows. "The information in the heretical section of the Vatican library, under lock and key."
She pushed her notepad toward Dean, and he leaned over to look at her neat, backward slanting notes, glancing back at her and lifting a brow.
"Summed up?"
"They were here before anything crawled out of the sea, and for a few million years, they were severely restricted in reproduction," she said, dragging the pad back. "Then, sometime toward the end of the Cretaceous period, there was a double-whammy–a lot of volcanic activity, lasting anywhere from five hundred to seven hundred and fifty million years, and sometime in the middle, a meteorite or asteroid hit the planet in Mexico and changed the climate–"
"That wiped out the dinosaurs–" He lifted a brow at her. "I saw Jurassic Park."
Ellie shrugged. "The impact was one thing – it changed the planet's climate to a much cooler one, but it was more than likely accompanied by radiation and a change in the chemistry of the earth's atmosphere, and between them, they jump-started evolution of most species in a very accelerated way, even though it killed off other species."
Dean rolled his eyes. "Lemme guess, the bigmouths got the booster, not the flick."
"Right," she said. "Reproduction went completely haywire and they were locked up."
"Why'm I hearing a 'but' here?"
"Probably because there is one," she remarked, tapping a nail against the page. "It wasn't just the climate change or radiation booster that enabled the changes to their increase in numbers, the angel told Methuselah. They had some help."
"From?"
"Lucifer, it seemed."
Dean blinked at her. "Lucy-in-the-Cage-Lucifer?"
"Yeah, that one."
"How?" Sam asked. "People weren't even around then."
"No, and he wasn't in Hell," Ellie agreed readily. "There was no Hell, as it is now, back then. But this angel told Noah's father that Lucifer had been fiddling with the planet for some time, and he – uh – seems to have made a mistake in some of his experiments."
Dean's exhale gusted out with impatience. "You're sayin' that Lucifer fucked up a science project and that's how the levis got outta hand?"
"More or less," she said, mouth tucking in at one corner at his paraphrasing.
"How is it that his dad didn't kill him for that one?" Dean muttered, turning away. "I'm guessin' this hasn't got a happy ending?"
"Well, according to the history the angel gave them, Lucifer thought he'd be able to keep it under wraps because he made it a ritual. They couldn't reproduce without the ritual, and they needed a few key elements."
"But that didn't work out?" Sam frowned, leaning forward across the table.
"Not really," Ellie said. "The leader got hold of the bowl the angel'd made and hid it. They started going nuts with being fruitful and all the rest of it, and God swept them up and locked them into Purgatory, leaving the bowl somewhere topside."
"So he's digging up every place he thinks it might've been left?"
"That's about it." Ellie finished her coffee.
"Can we get ahead of them?" Sam watched his brother's scowl deepen.
"It's possible," Ellie said, turning back to look at him. "People in that world aren't exactly thick on the ground and they hear things, tell each other things. We'll probably get a few hours notice, if anyone finds it."
"A few hours–!" Dean swung around.
"A few hours is all we'll need," she told him, hands raised placatingly. "He's a hands-on monster, right? It'll go to wherever he thinks is the safest place."
Sam stood. "The Death Star."
Dean shot him an annoyed look. "Corporate headquarters is in Chicago," he added to Ellie.
"We'll keep an eye on that too."
"With our magic remote tracking devices?" he asked her, his sarcasm right up against his teeth.
"Jericho lives in Chicago, Dean," Ellie explained, drawing in a discreet breath for patience. "He's laid up with injuries at the moment, not so bad he can't do some surveillance. I already called. He's keeping a routine watch on Roman – and," she added, flicking a look at Sam. "The Death Star."
Four hours later
Ellie stood at the kitchen counter, the knife in her hand flashing up and down as she mindlessly chopped up tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, garlic, zucchini and peppers, her thoughts on the information Patrick had given her.
Was it coincidence that Lucifer seemed to have been involved in absolutely everything that could've gone wrong with the world, she wondered absently? No. Not coincidence.
Fallen angel, bright as the sun, with heart and mind as black as the space between the stars. No soul, but essence of energy, power beyond imagining wielded by the whims of a child.
She didn't know where the quote had come from, but the accounts of the Morning Star were pretty universal on one thing – Lucifer had been a brat, petulant and impatient, his great beauty and warrior's skills wasted on a mental state that had been spoiled for too long.
On the stove next to her, the deep cast-iron skillet was heating, the oil thinning, and she swept the garlic and onions into it, watching it for a moment to make sure it was sizzling without burning. Next to the pile of vegetables, the bowl holding a pound of ground beef went into the skillet next, and she stirred it quickly, turning it until it was a uniform brown.
Dean and Sam sat on opposite sides of the small table, their faces lit up by laptop screens, expressions intent on what they were reading. Background, she knew, because that was all they had to look at right at this moment. On the digs scattered across the desert. On the apocryphal documents Patrick had scanned and sent. She added the vegetables to the skillet and poured a glass of red wine into the mix, turning to fill a saucepan full of water.
The harsh buzz of a cell phone brought both men's heads up, Dean looking around. "Not mine."
"Not mine either," Sam said, turning to Ellie. She shook her head.
The buzzing continued and they got up, moving to either side of the low table and shifting the piles of books and notes. The phone vibrated across the scarred wooden surface and Dean looked at it as if it were a snake, turning away and returning to the table. Sam frowned and reached down to pick it up.
"Hello?" he said, the frown deepening as Dean turned abruptly away. "Uh … no, he's–uh–he's not here. Maybe I can–?" He paused. "Well, I'm–uh–a friend–"
Ellie looked up from the stove as Sam stopping speaking. "Hang up?"
"Sounded like a kid." Sam nodded, his expression distracted.
Dean snorted. "For Bobby?"
Walking back to his seat, Sam shook his head. "Maybe–I don't know–a hunter's kid? She said her dad'd told her to call Bobby Singer specifically."
Ellie watched as Dean's expression closed up, his gaze dropping back to the laptop's screen.
"Her dad'll left her another number," he said, his voice low and a little thick.
Sam opened his mouth to argue as he dropped into the chair, closing it again when he saw the rigidity in his brother's shoulders. "That what Dad did for us?"
"Yeah," Dean said, his tone suggesting that was all he was going to say about it.
The water in the pot was boiling and Ellie took a handful of pasta and dropped it in.
He'd told her, in disjointed bits and pieces, about their childhood. Sam had filled in other details. There'd been times when they'd been left alone, sometimes for days, told to stay put and the responsibility on Dean to make sure Sam went to school, ate his meals, brushed his teeth, got to the bed on time – and was completely protected. He hadn't sounded resentful in those scant retellings, just a little wistful that Sam hadn't gotten as much of a childhood as he had.
Somewhere along the line, in the last couple of years, though, resentment had begun to manifest. Not for the taking care of Sam, she thought, but for the responsibility of keeping him–keeping both of them–safe while John had tracked and hunted down whatever he'd been able to find on the demon who'd stolen all their lives.
Jim Murphy, then if I couldn't get hold of him, Bobby or later on, Caleb. There were a couple of others, but Dad pissed them off and by the time Sam left for Stanford, it was really just Jim or Caleb.
They'd been sitting at a bar, waiting for midnight, a ghoul's nest to clean up in Santa Fe, and he'd picked up his beer, downing it in a couple of gulping mouthfuls, his voice a bit thin, his expression strained.
One night … he'd been gone a couple of days, he'd said, his gaze fixed on the bottom of the empty glass. I was scared as hell, thinking I'd give him til morning, not sure if I should wait that long. He came in about one, cut up and bloody, broken arm, broken ribs, his back all ripped up …
Looking up at her, a smile stretching out his mouth with no humour in it, just the echoes of his fear.
I tried to patch up him, but I wasn't sure I was doing it right. I called Jim. He'd shaken his head, tipping it back and dragging a deep breath. Sonofabitch nearly died in my arms, on the bathroom floor of a roach pit in Kentucky. I was ten and I wanted to hate him then, all the hours I had to wait till Jim got there.
Wanted to hate him but couldn't, Ellie thought, stirring the sauce absentmindedly. Not back then, no matter what the load was, Dean had tried to be a man and carry it, tried to grow up as fast as he could.
Now, watching him stare at the screen, she could almost see the cracks, that'd started opening up when he'd found out how much his father had been keeping from him, and were now widening. Deepening. Old resentments and the realisation of all he'd done, all he'd given up for his love and his loyalty, were pouring out, filling him with a poison just as destructive as keeping them locked away and buried had been.
She needed to talk to him about it, but they were so far from the right place and the right time it was almost laughable. He couldn't listen right now; couldn't see past what was going on right now. At best, he'd hear her out and ignore it. At worst … at worst, she thought he might decide it was easier not to have someone in his life like that. Someone who insisted that he deal.
Flicking her wrist, she caught up a couple of strands of spaghetti in the fork she held, blowing on them and tasting them. They were almost done. A couple more minutes. She looked at the sauce, thickened nicely and releasing a rich scent into the cabin's big main room. Going to the rickety dresser, she pulled out plates, checking on the oven as she passed it. A waft of steam escaped, laden with the enticing scent of garlic bread. Setting the plates and cutlery on the counter kept her hands busy. She turned off the oven and burner under the sauce, her thoughts cycling back to where she'd started.
It wasn't just him, she acknowledged wryly, taking the pot to the sink and draining the pasta. She wasn't in a good frame of mind to deal with anyone right now either. Less than the pretence she'd lived with for years was the shock of having turned away from reality, of having tried to make her past something it wasn't. It was undermining the way she'd seen herself, undermining everything she'd spent the past dozen years building.
Ladling the pasta onto the plates, she looked over at the table. "You ready to eat?"
Dean looked up, blinking as if he was just registering the smell of the food. She saw him swallow and nod, closing the laptop screen with a forceful click. On the other side of the table, Sam turned, drawing in a deep breath and closing his screen. He passed the laptop over to Dean and got to his feet, going to the kitchen.
"Smells good," he said, taking two of the loaded plates.
"Just spaghetti," Ellie told him, picking up the third plate and the cutlery and following him to the table. "Nothing to write home about."
"Anything home-cooked is something to write home about," Sam retorted, setting the dishes down and dropping back into his chair. He leaned over and drew in a deep, appreciative breath. "Anything not served in a greasy paper bag stinking of onions is something to write about," he added.
"Grease is good for you." Dean sat down and reached across for a piece of the garlic bread. "Clogs up your arteries so you don't bleed out so fast."
"You can tell it to the paramedics when they're trying to keep your heart beating after a massive heart attack," Sam snorted, twirling a load of pasta onto his fork.
"Okay," Ellie interceded. "Can we eat?"
"We're eatin'," Dean protested, one cheek bulging with a mouthful of garlic bread.
"I still think we should go check on that girl," Sam added, almost over the top of him.
"Sam, we got our priorities –"
"Which as you told me, over and over, was helping people–"
"You don't even know if she needs help–!"
"Who rings Bobby Singer specifically if they don't?" Sam's brow wrinkled up as he looked at Dean. "This obsession with Dick isn't paying off, Dean, we've got other things we should be doing–"
"Babysitting ain't one of them!"
"We don't know–"
"Sam, how are you going to find this girl?" Ellie cut in, her fork poised over her plate. The two of them had been cooped up in the cabin for too long. They weren't in sync anyway and they'd be at each other's throats if they had to stay here much longer.
"Caller ID," Sam said, turning to look at her. "I can find the address from the number."
She raised a quizzical brow. "From a cell phone at some random motel? You'd have to hack into a telco office to get that, even if you've got the number."
"Right, waste of time," Dean said, his gaze on his plate, but a smug certainty in his voice.
"How'd you find out where we were, when we had to drop all our old numbers?" Sam ignored his brother, mopping up the sauce with the last of the bread.
"I got Franklin to talk me through running an ANI trace from an office I broke into," she told him. "He did the work, I just got into the hardware. I had messages on my phone to give me a matching date and time stamp."
"Fine." Sam frowned. "I'll call Franklin."
"You really think this girl needs help?" Ellie asked.
Glancing at Dean's stony face, Sam nodded. "She sounded scared."
"Franklin's in Hawaii," Ellie said. "Two month sabbatical. Send the number to Ray and let him do the hard yards. You'll have an answer in the morning."
She caught sight of Dean's expression as he got up and took his plate to the sink, sighing as she recognised the feeling behind that curled lip.
He turned around. "Do whatever you wanna do," he said, his gaze flicking to Ellie then back to Sam.
"If you want to get on with a job, I'll take off in the morning," she said, getting to her feet and picking up her plate. She wasn't here to mediate between them, she told herself, ignoring the nervous flip of her stomach.
"I don't want to chase some kid–" Dean started to say, then caught himself, his gaze dropping to the floor. "You get an address, Sam, you could check it out. Me and Ellie'll go see Frank, find out what he's doing."
He lifted his head and looked at her. "Alright?"
She looked back at him. In his eyes, there was a plea; mute but there. A tacit request to stay.
"Alright," she said, walking past him and putting her plate in the sink.
Don't go. I don't want you to go.
He thought it, the words loud in his mind, a little past midnight, in the darkness of the bedroom.
It was the truth, but there was still something unspoken behind it, something he couldn't make come clear. Or, he realised, didn't want to think about. He couldn't shake the feeling she could sense that … thing … between them, too.
Since they'd gotten back from Spokane, he thought he'd been able to feel her, moving away, little by little, even now when he felt her turn against him, her sigh soft against his chest.
This was the one place they couldn't hide things and for the first time, replaying the last hour and a half, he was pretty sure she'd shut herself off from him, not much, not enough to be certain. Keeping something back. He couldn't hold it against her or even ask about it, because for the first time, he'd been doing the same thing, trying hard to find that place they made together, where he could be himself, nothing hidden, but knowing despite the blaze of sensation that'd filled him, that it wasn't the same.
Everyone leaves you, Dean, you noticed?
Over the last few years, that fear had only gotten stronger. Maybe because everyone had.
It was kind of hard not to notice.
Sam'd come back. Then Cas and Bobby. Then Ellie. But losing them all in the first place had done something … irrevocable … something he still couldn't face.
You couldn't put me out of my misery!?
It'd been the first time he'd recognised that the people he cared most about, the ones he'd loved with everything he had, didn't know him. Not well enough to know how it would feel, to him.
It wasn't a fair thought. Sam'd been soulless. Ellie'd come and seen him playing house and had thought he was where he wanted to be, he'd told her as much and at that time he'd never said to her – with you. I want it with you.
Bobby'd known the truth, known how he'd felt, known how Ellie'd felt, but had figured he was safe and settled and that was all that he needed.
Looking back, he wondered what would've happened if they'd been in his life, at the end of a phone, or dropping by from time to time. Would it've changed anything? He didn't think so. He'd seen Ellie, in a grainy news photo on the other side of the world, and he hadn't left.
I want Dean to have a home.
He'd wanted a home. Some place that didn't smell of the last transient guest. Some place he could relax. Some place where he didn't have to guard every look and every thought and every feeling. It hadn't been like that with Lisa. Hadn't been like that anywhere, with anyone. Until now.
For the last few days, despite everything going on, he'd gotten a glimpse of what having a home might feel like. The day after they'd gotten back, they'd pulled the weapons from the bags and cleaned them, not speaking of the levis or the elemental, or any of the other millions of problems waiting for them, just around the corner. It'd been shooting the breeze, reminiscing a bit about cases, discussing tactics, talking about people they knew, the three of them sitting there together, even his little brother holding up his end and coming up with crap he'd barely remembered, making her laugh. Making him laugh.
The cabin'd been filled with the old familiar scents and he'd felt his tension just bleed out of him, arguing amiably with his brother over some old memory … and it was all like that, in some way he couldn't quite work out … going to sleep wasn't something he dreaded anymore. His dreams, if he dreamed at all, were mild, sometimes pleasant memories, sometimes wishful thinking; it didn't matter because when he opened his eyes in the morning, squinting against the clear light, he felt rested, not chewed out … and at any time, he could look around and she was there, doing whatever she was doing, stopping, looking back at him as if she could feel him looking at her … in her eyes, he saw the man he'd wanted to be, believed in that man, for the most part, because she believed in him.
Then why the fuck don't you believe it, he asked himself in frustration? Why do you keep thinking it's all gonna fall apart?
The question was the answer, she sometimes said. He knew he was looking for the cracks 'cause it'd fallen apart before. He wasn't all that sure he wanted to face that again.
I-92E
"So he – what? Subsumed the personalities of the people he was possessing?" Ellie asked, twisting around in the seat to look at him, her journal open and on her knees, a pen hovering over the page.
"I don't think so," Dean said, staring through the windshield. "It was, uh, more like he took over the driver's seat but wasn't controlling where he were going."
"Strong emotion is a pretty potent lure for any kind of spirit energy," Ellie pointed out.
He glanced across at her. "This wasn't like a poltergeist or any other kind that feeds off energy–more like it was generating the emotion to get something it needed."
"How often have you seen that?"
"Twice," he said. "Had no idea what it was, the first time."
The asylum had been filled with ghosts, he remembered. All of them had been stuck there thanks to the unfinished business they'd had with the man they'd killed. He still sometimes had nightmares where that sound, that empty click, was all he could hear. His brother's eyes, narrow and bright with hatred, all he could see.
"Aetheric revenants draw out the energy of any living thing within their field of influence?"
"Not that either," Dean said, shaking his head, trying to shake off the past. "We've handled them before."
More memories crowded against him. The way the girl'd looked, in the little house down by the Gulf, her eyes too big for her face. At first, they'd thought they'd been dealing with another shtriga, but it wasn't. Sam'd gone full parapsychological geek on that case, and they'd seen it at work, cameras all over the house and every kind of generated field meter registering the movements, the fluctuating energy fields, taking digital and film stills and movies … and they'd finally figured on what they'd been dealing with. The second time had been in Seattle. Four college students had died from that ghost, living in the cheap student accommodation they'd thought was such a bargain, every bit of energy sucked out of them.
Glancing sideways at her, he shrugged. "They all die the same way, y'know. Salt and burn the remains and it's done."
"Mmm."
"What do you want to do with all this info?"
He felt her look at him, the pen's scratching stopping.
"I'm not entirely sure," she said, and he heard a strange note in her voice, gone a moment later. "There's so much, you know? I keep thinking, if I could get more together, could get it into something that we could search, that we could use … spend less time spent on trying to work out what we're dealing with and more time on actually getting rid of them–"
He frowned at the road. "We've got Jim's journals–Rufus', Bobby's, Dad's, some of Ellen's–"
From the corner of his eye, he saw her nod.
"I know, and I've been copying them, transcribing them, but they're like–a–a tip of an iceberg, Dean," Ellie said, the end of her pen tapping hard against the page under it. "I've storage units full of books–I know Bobby had as well–your grandfather had a library–I've never had a chance to go there and dig it out–I–"
"Okay," he said, turning to look at her. "Okay, I get it. But you know that stuff is probably a lot safer where it is than wherever we could put it?"
"I need a new base," she agreed, nodding. "Someplace I can really protect."
His knuckles tightened slightly on the wheel, his heart giving a weird little double-beat at the words. For Ellie, this was the life, her life. He didn't think she was thinking about giving it up, not for normal. Maybe not even for him. As much as he'd found a feeling of home when she was around, as much as he could see answers, see how things might just be able to work when she was there, he knew he was also going to be looking at lifetime of worrying about what might happen, what could happen. What, given his track record so far, had pretty damned good odds of happening.
Tappen, North Dakota
Almost twelve hours later, Ellie lay on the bed, listening to the noises in the bathroom through the partly open door. Dean was in the shower, disjointedly singing every third or fourth chorus of the song playing in his head.
Rolling onto her stomach, she stared at the clock on the nightstand. She had a feeling Dean had gotten a look at the grief lying in wait for him, while they'd been trapped in the cave. Enough of a look that he didn't want to let any more in or out. He was thinking if he could keep on the move – drive fast enough in any direction – he could outrun it, for a while at least. He knew it couldn't work like that, but it wasn't going to stop him from trying.
The shower stopped, the screen rattling aside.
Kicking the covers back a little, Ellie closed her eyes. She needed time. Her past was pushing and shoving at her, demanding that she look at it. Accept it, she thought, stop pretending it wasn't hers.
Going through the two things together, with no other distractions, might have worked well for both of them, but that wasn't possible. It was, she realised with a sour sigh, unlikely to ever be possible. He couldn't look away, and she never had, and maybe the world needed saving too often for its own good, but it was what it was and there was no percentage in wishing for different now.
With the sound of the door opening, banging a bit on the wall behind it, Ellie opened her eyes and looked over her shoulder as Dean walked out, his towel slung insouciantly around his hips, his hair spiking wetly in every direction.
As he pulled the towel off, she was somewhat amused to find her careful perusal of his body was more professional than amorous, her gaze purposeful as she studied the cloudy healing bruises on his arms and shoulders, the scabbed-over small cuts that seemed to criss-cross his face, neck and chest.
"Checking me out?" he said, his grin widening as he sat on the bed beside her.
"Everything looks like it's healing fast," she told him, repressing a smile.
"Huh." He propped himself on one elbow, reaching out for her hip. "Admit it, you were ogling me."
She dropped her face into the pillow with a snort. "Damn, you caught me out," her reply came out muffled.
"S'only fair," he told her, pulling her over to lie back against him, his mouth on her neck sending a crackle along her nerves. "I ogle you all the time."
He leaned over her, his mouth covering hers before she could say anything else, and the kiss, starting slowly, his lips moving feather-light over hers, lit her up inside and wiped out the worries and plans and thoughts.
Touch deepened, wrapped around with emotions that were still too turgid, too immediate and demanding. Ellie's arms slid around him as his tightened abruptly around her, both feeling that never-admitted need geysering up, masquerading as arousal and igniting them as readily as if it was, but underlaid with all the things they hadn't said.
He lifted his mouth, ducking his head to taste the long line of her neck.
Stretching out, she said, "Do you want to see Frank–"
"No." Dean's head came up to look at her, his eyes dark under the shadow of his brow, just a hint of anger in them. "No Frank. No levis. No jobs. Not here."
The sharpness dropped from his voice as he added, "This – with you – this is the only place I can get away from that crap, get out of my head." He looked away, but his fingers closed a little more tightly around her ribs, his voice thickening slightly. "I – I gotta have someplace where it's … no past. No future. Just right now. Here. I can't do this with anyone but you."
She nodded, stroking her hand up the back of his neck, the admission filling her throat. At some level, she thought, she'd known it. Known it without knowing she had. One of the unsaid things. One of the things she hadn't thought he'd be able to say.
Her fingertips slid over his cheek and jaw, drawing him back. The kiss was urgent this time, both apology and acknowledgement and an admission of her own. She thought that somehow he knew all of that, had felt it, could feel it, because he pulled her closer, until their bodies were pressed tightly together, skin to skin all along their lengths.
Sometimes it was like swimming in a warm, calm sea; swallowed and caressed and filled with a peace she'd never imagined could be possible. At other times, it felt more like body-surfing the wildest rapids; full of frenetic and jarring cacophony, of sensation, of feeling, scrambling together to reach the peak. It was never the same and it was never predictable, and he knew her better than anyone, but still didn't know all the things inside of her, all the shadows and crevasses and the parts she barely knew herself.
His groan rumbled in his chest, reverberating through her ribs as it gusted out over the skin of her neck, his body shuddering against hers. She arched backward, driving upwards, needing to get closer, to find a deeper connection, feeling that need reciprocated as his darkened eyes met hers for a second and it burned between them, swamped and swept away when he moved or she moved, nerve reaction taking her breath and body in the same pulsing explosion.
Under the curve of her back, his arm pulled her closer and she breathed his scent, hers, theirs together, the second detonation shaking through her with his, so close that the air itself seemed visible, light streaming from somewhere, filling her eyes with him.
The aftershocks twitched his skin and muscles, winding down slowly. He rested on one side, one arm still curled beneath her neck; the other wrapped possessively around her hip, eyes closed, mouth still open, sucking in deep breaths. His heart's pounding was finally slowing, the thump against the inside of his ribcage easing its violence.
He felt heavy and loose and empty; warm and comfortable and swathed in a contentment he'd come close to, years ago, but hadn't quite reached, back then.
This we were good at. It's all the other stuff … not so much.
The memory – her voice, her touch, where they'd been and what they'd just done – no longer stirred him and he smiled at that. The older memories didn't hurt any more and that was better.
The only time I get to see the real you is here! She'd yelled at him, thumping her fist on the bed. You make love to me like I'm the only woman you could ever love, but the second your feet hit the floor, all that's gone!
Sighing a little, Dean shifted his position, feeling Ellie inch closer.
Cassie'd been right. She'd accused him of only wanting intimacy when they were in bed, and he'd thought about that. Not straight after. A while later.
It was – it'd been – the only place he could let down the walls and reach out to someone, and even then, he'd known it was a kind of lie, 'cause if they'd called him on it, he'd've denied it, given some line about making sure everyone was satisfied, no unhappy customers – whatever came into his head to head off that kind of discussion. It hadn't worked so well with Cassie, and it'd taken seeing her again to realise he'd wanted more only because when Sam'd gone off to Stanford, it'd left a hole and he hadn't known how to fill it.
The job hadn't. His father hadn't. He'd been working his ass off and the emptiness was still there. His father hadn't needed protecting and it'd taken him a long, long time to get that he needed someone to protect. Someone to watch over.
He'd had the feeling back when Cassie'd called. Emotion he'd forgotten about had come back, not just with seeing her again, not just with the memories of being with her, but in seeing her like – vulnerable, defenceless – needing him. Afterwards, when the truck and its welded-on vengeful spirit had been destroyed, he'd kept trying to tell himself that the emotion was just as strong. He'd gotten into the car with Sam and closed his eyes and he'd known it wasn't. Had known that in spite of what he'd just told her, he wouldn't be back to see her again.
It'd been the same with Lisa and Ben, he admitted to himself, more Ben than Lise, since the boy'd needed him, had put all his hopes into having a father. He'd wanted to be that father, even when his doubts about how he was handling things crowded up against him. It wasn't enough. Not for him, not for Ben, and nowhere near enough for Lisa. If he'd had that clear in his head when he'd promised Sam, maybe he'd've saved them all a shitload of unnecessary heartache.
…whatever it wishes to have, it buys at the cost of soul…
He'd given up his life and soul for his heart's desire, to make sure that his job was done and his brother lived, that he wasn't facing a lifetime of seeing himself as a failure. That hadn't worked out too good for anyone either.
Turning his head to look down at the woman curled against him, he wondered if he was still looking for someone to protect. She didn't need his protection. Didn't need him to look out for her, give up his life or soul for her; didn't want him to sacrifice his dreams. She'd fought and bled to try to save him; had walked away to protect him, and Sam; had stayed away when she'd thought he'd wanted something different, a normal life, his own family. He didn't really have any doubts that she would do it again, if she thought he wanted something else. If something convinced her that he wanted something else.
He changed position slightly, feeling her adjust to the shift automatically, the rise and fall of her ribs steady under his arm, and brows knitting together as he realised he wasn't sure if he knew what he wanted or what he could offer her.
Redford, Minnesota.
The battered and unkempt-looking house sat alone on its lot, the nearest neighbour almost a mile back. Dean stopped at the beginning of the driveway, and gave Ellie a half-shrug.
"He's nuts," he said, waving a hand toward the building.
Ellie smiled. "Sometimes, that's what it takes."
Making a vague noise in his throat to indicate disagreement, he got out of the car, and pulled out his gun, checking the mag and pushing it back in, glancing at Ellie as she did the same with her Sig on the other side of the car.
"He's paranoid, so don't give him a reason to put a bullet in you," he told her, heading up the slope.
She nodded, following him, her gaze moving over the house, then around the yard.
The front door was locked and Dean gave up the idea of knocking, walking back down the porch stairs and gesturing to the back, his stomach sinking a little as he wondered if coming here was such a great idea.
The back door was open, leading into some kind of storage area. Metal shelving and computer racks took up about half the floor space and lined the walls. Some of it looked like junk, Dean thought, picking his way around a couple of free-standing shelves packed with black hardware from top to bottom. Some of it had lights showing, a steady red or blinking green.
"That's far enough."
He stopped, the Colt snapping up as he caught sight of Frank. Gimlet-eyed, a week's worth of grizzled beard and clothes that looked like they'd been in slept in for a month, the computer genius stepped out from behind a rack of servers, holding a double-barrelled shotgun, the round ends aimed directly at him.
"Take it easy, Frank."
"Take it easy, he says," Frank muttered, his gaze flicking past Dean to Ellie and back. "Go find out about Dick Roman, he tells me. Then I'm burned outta every IP I ever so much as looked at, black ice eating through my security, mooks on every fucking corner –"
He cocked the shotgun, lips drawing back from his teeth in a humourless smile. "An' he sez, take it easy!"
"How you doing, Frank?" Ellie asked, moving to one side of Frank.
"How'm I doin', she asks?!"
"You know him?" Dean turned to look at Ellie.
"We've met, right, Frank?"
"Baton Rouge, 2005. You said it was hoodoo, I told you it was revenants, and who was right then, eh?" Frank rattled off at her, eyes narrowing. "But that's just the sort of information a bigmouth would have, right off the top of its pointy head, isn't it?"
"Yeah, c'mon, Frank, this isn't helping." Dean uncocked the Colt, spreading his hands out and lifting them. "Not Leviathans."
"How'd you find me?" Frank took a step forward.
"Sam and me were here, a few weeks back," Dean said, forcing himself to keep a level tone.
Frank blinked at him, then jerked the barrel toward a bench to one side. "Knife's there, let's see the colour of your blood."
Glancing at Ellie, Dean tucked the Colt into his coat pocket and walked to the bench. He gave the knife a grimace of distaste, but picked it up, rolling his sleeves up past his wrist.
"Look," he said, nicking the skin on the inside of his forearm. A bead of red stood out against his skin. "Red-blooded American, okay?"
"An' her?" Frank's gaze slid suspiciously over to Ellie.
She slid the Sig into the holster under her coat and held out her hand for the knife. Dean passed it to her, half his attention on Frank as she pushed her sleeve up and made a similar small nick on her forearm. Blood trickled down to her wrist, bright red against her pale skin.
He took the knife from Ellie and turned back to Frank, lifting a brow. "Your turn."
"What? I'm not –"
The Colt was back in Dean's hand in an eyeblink, levelled at the older man, the click as he cocked it loud in the silent room. "Prove it."
Frank's face screwed up. "Oh, alright!"
He eased the hammers back on the shotgun, and tucked it under his arm, taking the knife and wincing as he made a small cut on the back of his wrist. He held it up as blood leaked from the fine line.
"Happy?"
"Not really the right word," Dean said, uncocking the Colt and shoving it back into pocket. "But since we're all now good friends here – what've you found out?"
Frank stared at him, his expression affronted. "It's been, like, three days!"
"It's been two weeks!" Dean snapped back at him.
"It has?"
"Tell me we didn't hand over fifteen large to you to get a donut, Frank," Dean said, taking a step toward him.
Frank glanced at Ellie and shrugged. "These things take time, you can't just rush –"
"Frank, did you get anything from the numbers?" Ellie asked, cutting him off.
"Maybe," Frank allowed, turning back to the interior door. "Come on."
Dean waited for Ellie, muttering from the corner of his mouth, "Guy's one step away from the tinfoil hat –"
Ahead of them, Frank's voice rose. "I heard that."
Ellie smiled. "Paranoia's a reasonable response when everyone's out to get you."
Scowling, Dean followed her through Frank's kitchen, bare and covered in dust, and into what might've been a dining room, once.
Every wall was covered in metal rack shelves, and every shelf held hardware. Behind the shelving, copper wire mesh had been fastened to the walls, to the ceiling and floor, barely visible, but discernible in the odd sensation he felt as he walked into the room.
"Faraday cage," Ellie murmured. "Cuts out electrostatic and electro-magnetic transmission."
"Those numbers you gave me turned up bupkis," Frank said, setting the shotgun down on the desk and dropping into a worn leather office chair in front of a bank of screens. "Five digits and I ran every conceivable possibility, with a net return of zero."
Dean opened his mouth to argue and Frank held up a hand. "So, I started to wonder if mebbe our friend, Bobby, lost one of the numbers before he got a chance to hand them over, being as how he was leaking brain matter."
Ellie inched closer to Dean, her hand curling lightly around his arm. He looked away from Frank, mouth thinning out, keeping his thoughts behind his teeth.
"With six numbers, I gotta hit straight away," Frank continued, oblivious to the palpable rage radiating beside him. "Coordinates."
"To what?" Dean asked tightly. He sucked in a deeper breath as he felt Ellie's hand squeeze his arm.
"A field. In Wisconsin," Frank said, tapping a key and bringing up a map on the screen in front of him, an inset visual of the empty lot popping up in one corner of the screen.
"What!?"
"Purchased three months ago by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Roman Enterprises," Frank added. "They've been surveying for the last week, getting ready to build."
"Build what?" Ellie asked, leaning past Dean to look at the screen.
"Damned if I know!" Frank said. "The planning applications they've put in claim they're building an advanced medical and biotech research centre."
Dean stared at the empty field on the screen. "Huh."
"Was that the only hit you got from those numbers?" Straightening, Ellie looked at Frank.
"No," Frank answered, his tone acerbic. "No, coincidentally, there was another match."
He turned around and hit the keys in a blurrily fast sequence on the keyboard to his right and two more screens lit up, these two sharing the one image. Dean turned to look, brows knitting as he looked at the shape rotating on the black background, looking much a length of curling ribbon, and the tightly packed text below and to one side of it.
"What's that?"
"It's an enzyme, isn't it?" Ellie asked, moving around both men to read the text. "One of the ones involved in autoimmune problems?"
"Correct!" Frank bellowed, stabbing a finger at the screen. "EC GKG.8.95. Its location is described in binary as 454895."
Dean huffed an impatient exhale. "In English!"
"This enzyme is essential in the human body to prevent viral DNA from infecting and destroying cells," Frank told him with a long-suffering look. "The levis don't appear to be able to produce it, even when they copy the human body exactly."
"So … they're getting sick?" Dean asked, frowning at Ellie.
"Not yet," she said, shaking her head as she kept reading. "But they might be susceptible to things that most people aren't – and I would guess they're trying to rectify that situation right now."
"The Martian Solution!" Frank chuckled to himself.
"What?" Dean stared at him.
"In War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells had the Martian invasion defeated by the common cold," Ellie threw over her shoulder. "Since the Martians were undefeatable by any technology mankind could come up with, it was kind of an elegant solution."
She looked at Frank. "Can we get printouts of all of these – and whatever else you've got on Roman's activities?" She pulled a notebook from her bag, snagging a chewed-down pencil from Frank's desk and writing out an email address. She tore off the sheet and handed it to Frank. "And send everything to this address while you're at it."
"Anything else?" he asked, squinting at the paper. "Who's this?"
"A friend," Ellie said. "Someone who also works in a Faraday cage."
"Oh." Frank heaved a sigh and turned back to the screen. "Alright."
A moment later, the printer at the end of the room whirred into life and Ellie walked over to it. Dean glanced at Frank before following her.
"Why would the coordinates be the same as the whatchamacallit?" he asked her, watching as the printer spat out page after page.
"Not a coincidence," Ellie agreed. "Roman's sense of humour? I don't know."
"What now?"
"Ray might have a couple of other angles on this," she said, gathering the pages together as the tray filled up. "I want to send a copy of this stuff to Patrick too, see if it helps with digging through the pre-Christian records they've got."
Putting the pile down on an empty chair, she looked at him. "This is really long-term stuff, you know," she said. "Months to build the facilities they need, more time to do the research, to find a solution – it means we have more time too."
"Unless he finds whatever it is he's digging around for," Dean pointed out.
"Alright," Frank interrupted, swivelling around in his chair. "It's gone. I've got a lock on the frequency they're using for their home-grown surveillance of the lot; got a trace on the county network waiting for updates to Roman's files; and I'm running a search to see if there's any way of tracking Big Pharma on deliveries to folks who happen to be missing EC GKG.8.95 and are medicating for it – there's nothing much –"
"Have you run MPs and MIAs on all the faces going in and out of Roman's head office?" Ellie cut in, pushing a strand of hair back from her face with the inside of her wrist as she wrestled one-handed with the armful of paper from the printer.
"What for?" Frank asked suspiciously. "Roman's keeping a low profile."
"If we can get a list of names and pictures to match, we'll have an easier time keeping ahead of the known levis, Frank," she answered. "They know us, we don't know them …"
"Fine," he said, tone just short of a snap. He swivelled back to the desk. "Where do you want the info sent?"
"Same address as the rest," Ellie told him.
Dean took the load of printouts from her. "Frank, you really think they're onto you here?"
"Be idiots if they weren't," Frank grumbled at the screen. "I got a solution. No one's getting me."
"What solution?"
"Mobile and elusive," the programmer returned over his shoulder, eyes glinting in the glow of the screens. "Now why don't you piss off, the pair of you?"
Letting out an impatient exhale, Dean turned away and walked for the kitchen. "Stay in touch!"
"Bite me!"
Ellie looked back at Frank's hunched-up form. "We'll see you, Frank."
"Not if I see you first," he muttered, staring at the fast-moving numbers that scrolled up in front of him.
