I can't run, I can't stand for more than ten minutes, I can barely walk. The can mocks me over there in the corner of my room, and then of course I don't use it, and I fall into bed at the end of the day and hate myself for how bad it hurts. It seizes up. It cramps. It spasms. I can't wear shorts (not like I ever did before), not even here, because then you can see the scars and the damage to the muscle. Even in jeans, I limp, so you can tell.

I don't get many visitors, and so many people know what happened to me. But so many others don't, and they ask, and I have to live through it all over again. Just like I do every time I wake up and the muscle has decided to shrink itself down to the size of a quarter.

I live with constant pain. And that's really not what I wanna bitch about here, because that's nothing new with hunters. That's nothing new with people. Leukemia, fibromyalgia, phantom pain, arthritis, Crohn's disease, hell, even grief. Emotional pain. Even if Dad had just stayed a mechanic, he would have kept hurting over what happened to his wife for the rest of his life. Every day. Just like he actually did, in the profession that he chose.

What I can't stand is the constant weakness that I also live with. That's what forced me out of the field, and that's what I hate. If something tracked me down up here, I wouldn't be able to run away from it. I'd take one step and fall down. Get eaten or turned or whatever.

It gives out on me if I bump into something with it. It won't take my weight, some mornings. There's a bottle of painkillers in the bathroom just in case I can't handle it. And the cane - don't even get me started on the fucking cane.

This is as good as it's going to get. I'm twenty-three, and I can't really use one of my legs, and I won't be able to use it until I die. In this cabin, because I'm stuck here and I'm never going to be able to leave.

There's nothing else for me. And I owe all of that to my leg, and what it isn't capable of anymore because of that damn wendigo.

- Personal journal of Sam Winchester


There was no sign of what had happened the Nadia the morning after. Sam's wooden floor was old and hard enough that whatever porous quality it used to have had long since vanished, so it had been easy to scrub the blood away without leaving a stain. The bottle had been thrown away, along with Nadia's few clothes, and he'd stripped her cot in order to wash the bedding. The door of her cell was standing open to let it air out. He'd straightened up the bathroom where Vaughn had made a mess looking for the antivenon. He'd washed the blood, both his own and Nadia's, off of himself and out of his hair, and iced the swollen, bruised knot on the back of his head, making it shrink and the pain diminish.

Nadia's body, he burned. On a pyre out in the back yard, near the safe edges of his circular property, wrapped in a sheet, kindled with his and her blood-soaked clothes. He buried the ashes once it'd burned down, which took hours and seemed to plunge his left leg into a bath of undiluted acid. He gave every monster that came to him a hunter's funeral, partly so that they wouldn't be dug up by wild animals or overzealous collectors, partly so that they wouldn't dig themselves up and come after him - there was a surprising number of creatures who just didn't stay dead.

He used to perform autopsies out in the shed, drawing diagrams and taking notes as he went. But he told himself that he already knew plenty about djinni as he touched the flame of his lighter to the gasoline-soaked wood in front of him.

Sam tossed that lighter onto his desk when he staggered in around midnight, dragging a useless and agony-stricken leg behind him. Vaughn's door was firmly locked and closed, and his untouched meal had been disposed of. The demon was still gagged, and Sam had no doubt that he was staring him down mercilessly, but he couldn't see his eyes in the darkness. Sam crammed the clothes he'd swapped his bloody ones out for earlier into his washer, showered off all the dirty of grave-digging, and somehow got himself into bed. Where he slept uninterrupted for a full twelve hours, much like he had the night after he'd burned the demon with the poker.

He rose like a zombie when he first opened his eyes, pushed through the pain in his leg in order to pull on his noise-cancelling headphones and leave his room, and walked into Elspeth the banshee's cell. There was really only one thing he still needed to learn about her, as he had reminded himself yesterday, and he'd written it down by the time he left the cell again.

Sam went through all the little rituals that were supposed to make him feel human again every morning once he'd finished with the McClouds' banshee. Eating breakfast, showering, shaving, brushing all the knots and tangles out of his hair, getting dressed. He even spent around fifteen minutes working at his leg with patient hands and a bottle of lotion, relaxing the shapes that last night's work had twisted his torn muscles into.

It was early afternoon when he crossed the floorboards he'd scrubbed Nadia's blood off of yesterday, a bowl of steaming spinal fluid and brain in his hands. He unlocked the door to Vaughn's cell, but knocked as politely as he could before opening it.

It was immediately obvious that Vaughn had thrown up sometime during the night. Sam could smell it, even with the thick stripe of mentholatum he'd painted under his nose while thawing the brain he was currently carrying. Walking over to Vaughn's cot, where he was still cocooned in his blankets and pillows, he set the bowl down on his TV tray in an unintentional repeat of yesterday.

"How're you doing?" Sam asked softly. Vaughn rolled over, looking up at him with eyes that looked slightly swollen. Clearly, he hadn't been asleep for at least a few hours. "You sick?" He turned his head and nodded to a mostly-dry puddle of thin bile in the corner.

Vaughn shook his head, sitting up. He kept his plush comforter wrapped around him, though, Sam noticed. "No," he said softly. "I'm okay. I was just…I heard you come in, last night. After you were done with Nadia. And I thought about how much blood there was when she was…" He scrubbed a hand almost aggressively through his hair. It didn't help a case of bedhead that rivaled Sam's own when he'd first gotten up this morning. "Laying there. After you'd stabbed her." He said it bluntly, then looked up at Sam and squinted at him. "I would've starved to death by now if I was out on my own and I had to hunt people and stuff. I puked just because I was thinking about blood – no way could I drill a hole in somebody's skull and suck their brain."

"Well, you're just not used to stuff like that," Sam replied. He was still emotionally drained from Nadia's death himself, and wasn't sure that he'd be able to help Vaughn through a breakdown right now. There was a reason he wasn't a parent. Or, well, actually, there was a metric fuck-ton of reasons, but his emotional issues were one of them. "A lot of people would say that that's a good thing."

"Yeah, but I'm a predator," Vaugh replied. "I'm supposed to like blood and gore and stuff, right?" He tugged his blanket cocoon down around his waist, and folded his hands in his lap. "Did you come in here to kill me?"

Sam probably would have been less shocked if Vaughn had just hauled off and punched him in the face. "Excuse me?"

"The banshee's gone," Vaughn said matter-of-factly. "I felt her just…" He trailed off, and made a "poof"-ing gesture with his hands. Sam reached up and rubbed at his face.

"Elspeth's…dormant," he said tiredly. "I found a lot of theories about how to neutralize a banshee. The only thing left to do with her was to test them, and one worked. The book's done." He lowered himself, gingerly, onto Vaughn's cot. "I was planning to finish up with her today anyway. What happened with Nadia yesterday had nothing to do with it – I'm not getting rid of you."

"What about the demon?" Vaughn asked. He'd been staring down at his hands, but now he looked up at Sam, which Sam took as a good sign.

"I wish I knew how to get rid of him," Sam replied, struggling not to roll his eyes. "Especially because I have to go interrogate him before Gordon starts riding my ass about it again. Which means taking out his gag."

"You gagged him?" Vaughn asked, raising his eyebrows, and, for some godforsaken reason, Sam felt guilty.

"I had to," he said sullenly. "I…couldn't bring myself to, before. Because his throat was so messed up when he first came to me. But I had to last night. You heard what he was saying."

Vaughn nodded, slightly, then said, "He hurts."

Sam shook his head. "He's a demon. He can't."

"Well, he does," Vaughn insisted. "It's not as bad as it used to be, but…he still hurts."

"And how the hell do you know?" Sam asked, unconvinced. Vaughn just shrugged. "Okay." He stood up, and nodded to the bowl on the TV tray. "You need to eat. I'll clean up that." He waved a hand at the corner where the wraith had thrown up, then walked out of the cell.

Sam could only kill so much time scrubbing the floor of Vaughn's cell and cleaning out the bowl that today's brain had been in. He felt the demon's eyes on him the entire time, burning a hole in his back, and he ignored him as he gathered what he'd need. A notebook – he was planning on another book, since he was sure that hunters besides Gordon would find information on how to hurt a Knight of Hell useful. A Bible. A book of exorcism rituals. Holy water. Salt. He paused next to the umbrella stand by the door, eyeing the poker that he'd returned to its place after the last time he'd used it, then grimaced and kept limping. He knew that all he'd done was coax a handful of crocodile tears out of the demon, but they'd hit him hard, and he wouldn't be able to use iron on him today.

Everything was tucked neatly under one arm as he unlocked the gate and stepped into the cell, perfectly calm. He planned on taking everything that he was carrying with him when he left, unlike the last time he'd done this. The demon sat up straight with exaggerated movements as Sam walked towards him. Obviously unable to say anything, he leered at him with eyes that had suddenly gone black. Coming to a stop, Sam cocked an eyebrow.

"Cat got your tongue?" he asked pleasantly. The demon growled in the back of his throat, a savage, animal sound that sent an involuntary twinge of fear singing down Sam's spine. He hid it by laying out all his equipment on the floor where he could easily reach it. It occurred to him that, maybe, he should have brought a table in here, but he didn't have any small enough to serve the purpose. "You're gonna be getting my undivided attention from now on – you just became my main project." He scooped up the Bible. Its leather binding was scarred, the gold leaf that spelled out its title mostly worn away. He paged through it often. In search of lore and passages specifically designed to hurt unholy things, rather than any sort of guidance. Sam believed in God – it was sort of hard not to, when you'd received direct proof of the existence of angels. He just didn't believe in worshiping the bastard. "Which means that, until I figure out how to either kill you or put your smoky ass back where it belongs, I'm gonna be pulling out every trick in the book to squeeze as much information outta you as I possibly can."

The demon's jaw worked, and Sam guessed he was indicating the gag, asking how he expected to get information out of him if he couldn't even talk. One side of Sam's mouth quirked up in a humorless smile.

"That'll come out eventually," he promised. And "eventually" was a long ways off, if he could help it. "First, though, we're gonna go back to figuring out what hurts you and what doesn't. And I'd really appreciate it if you didn't cry this time – all that's gonna do for you is dehydrate your vessel."

The demon's eyes, still an unbroken black, narrowed. Sam cracked open the Bible in his hands and flipped through the fragile pages with practiced fingers, looking for a specific passage.

"So, normal demons don't react well when I read to them from this book," Sam said, voice taking on an automatic businesslike quality as his eyes swept across the tiny print. "They don't like the Torah or the Quran, either, which I guess makes sense, 'cause all of those draw from the basic mythology that you guys are part of. It didn't matter what language – the words seem to burn them." He found what he was looking for, and tapped the page in triumph. "But I'm curious to see what the effect is gonna be on you, since you're not exactly a normal demon."

There was no response, besides a slow and somehow apathetic blink. Sam sucked on the inside of his lower lip, then returned his gaze to the book and started to read. It was a standard passage (technically a psalm) he used with demons, painful to them because it was a commendation of God, and he probably could have recited it from memory. But there was still the intimidation factor to think of, and there was more theatricality to reading than reciting.

"'Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil…"

He shut up before he even reached the end of it, since it was pretty obvious to him that it wasn't having any effect on the demon. When he raised his eyes from the text in order to glance at him, he looked bored, obsidian eyes heavy-lidded and posture slouched. Definitely not bothered by what Sam was saying. So he cut himself off, flipped a few pages, and tried again.

After reading off a couple of more intense passages that did about as much good as the first one, Sam closed the Bible and snorted softly, eyeing the gagged demon.

"Well, aren't you special," he said, setting it down and replacing it with his notebook. He dug a pencil out of his pocket, lowered himself to the floor, and started scribbling. As per usual, it didn't take him long to lose himself in noting down his observations. But he was broken out of it when the demon began to make loud, realistic gagging sounds. That must be the only way he could be annoying, without being able to talk.

Sam looked up at him and raised another eyebrow. "I honestly expected you to act a little more…dignified," he told him dryly. "I mean, you're a Knight, after all." He set his notebook aside (he was done writing for the moment, anyway) and stood up, the book of exorcisms in his hand. "I guess you wanna go back to it. We can do that."

The exorcism rituals, when Sam started reading one of his personal favorites off the pages, yielded a much greater result than the Biblical quotes had. The demon immediately got antsy, blinking rapidly and squirming against his bonds. He grunted, the sound so loud that Sam could hear it even over his own voice, then squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again a few seconds later, they were green, but only briefly. Black flooded them again soon, a reaction to the Latin that Sam was pouring onto him.

"…incursio infernalis adversii. Omnis congregatio et secta diabolica…"

Sam stayed where he was, calmly reading rite after rite and watching the demon's apparent discomfort mount, until whatever the exorcisms were doing to him seemed to reach its peak. His head bowed suddenly, and Sam felt sure that he would have doubled over if the straps around his chest hadn't prevented him from doing so. He started coughing. Sam felt a sudden spark of uneasy excitement, thinking that, maybe, he was being forced out of his host. So, on one hand, he'd figured out how to ship this particular breed of demon back to Hell. On the other, he hadn't actually learned anything else about Knights, and he'd be lucky if Gordon didn't skin him and wear him as a jacket. Still speaking Latin, reading aloud from the book, Sam stepped forward, reached out, and yanked the first rag, the one that had been around his mouth, off of the demon. The second promptly fell into his lap, the end of it flecked sparsely with red and brown. He raised his head to look at Sam, clamping his lips tightly together, but when they parted, black smoke didn't pour out of his mouth. Only a thin dribble of bloody saliva did, really more pink than red. He didn't even manage to launch it at Sam this time.

"What is it with you," Sam asked, lifting the rag in his hand and using it to roughly wipe the demon's chin clean, "and spitting at me?"

"Seems to bother you," the Knight rasped out. His voice was much rougher than usual, making him sound like he'd been gargling with sand – or maybe a dry rag. "Mouth's too dry for it right now, though. Water?"

"I've got plenty," Sam replied neutrally, turning on order to nod at the silver flask sitting on the floor.

"Bastard," the demon accused, before his head dropped and he let out another hacking, gagging cough. Sam was unmoved. He didn't need water to wet his mouth and throat – he could draw on the reserves of his vessel easily enough. When he was finished coughing, he jerked his head at the book in Sam's hand, telling him, "Not gonna work. Not on me."

"Yeah, I'd kinda figured that out," Sam replied, closing the book and taking a few steps back. He set it down next to the Bible, then straightened back up to regard the demon with what he hoped was a perfectly blank expression on his face. "Why is that? Just because you're a Knight of Hell? Too high up on the totem pole to get chased out by a little Latin?" He folded his arms. "Or did you lock yourself in your vessel somehow?" That would actually make sense, given that the rites had had an effect on him but hadn't booted him. But if he had a seal on him somewhere, it was one hell of a coincidence that Sam hadn't found it yet; he was missing his shirt and one leg of his jeans, after all.

The demon smirked, black coiling back into his pupils and leaving his eyes human again, and smugly rasped, "Wouldn't you like to know."

"I would, actually," Sam answered. "Which is why you and I are gonna play a little game." He bent, then stood with the flask of holy water in one hand and his canister of rock salt in the other. "I'm gonna ask you some questions. You're gonna answer. If you're a smartass or if I think you're lying…" He shook the containers for emphasis. "You get splashed with one of these. Maybe both, if I'm feeling like it." He opened both, movements deft enough to inspire a brief flash of self-pride, and stepped forward again. "So. First question: why can't I exorcise you?"

"Forgot to pop a Viagra beforehand?" the demon suggested. Sam wasted no time in splashing holy water onto his chest, prompting a hiss from both him and the steam that suddenly billowed upwards. "Son of a – " He cut himself off, clamping down on his tongue with his vessel's perfect white teeth. His eyes had flashed black again, and he glared at Sam with them.

"Why can't I exorcise you?" Sam repeated calmly.

"'M just that damn special." This time, it was salt, large grains sticking to the water on the demon's chest and burning into him. He swore loudly, squeezing his eyes shut and grimacing, and Sam waited for his reaction to die down before speaking again.

"For, supposedly, the most powerful demon out there," he said, "you really don't have a very high pain threshold, do you?" He crossed his arms, which was a little awkward since his hands were full. "Again: why can't I exorcise you?"

"Part of it's 'cause I'm a Knight." The demon's voice seemed to be steadily getting stronger, less raspy. Sam considered going for his notebook, then decided he'd be able to remember what he was saying. "I'm stronger than other demons. I can dig my claws in a lot deeper. And then part of it's 'cause this vessel's special to me."

"Special?" Sam asked, frowning. "How is it special?"

"Guess you could say that it's just really close to me," the demon said with an exaggerated smile. Sam's frown deepened, but then a possibility clicked for him.

"Are you – are you trying to tell me that you're riding one of your relatives?" he demanded, disgust creeping into his voice before he could check it. "Was this guy – " He gestured to the freckle-covered vessel with the canister of salt " – your cousin, when you were alive? Your nephew? Your son?"

The demon bounced his eyebrows at Sam. "Hey, look at that, you know where demons come from. Good for you…a relative." He glanced up at the ceiling, appearing to think it over, then shrugged. "Yeah, you could probably call it that."

Sam's fingers tightened on the flask, but he forced control on himself. He couldn't punish the demon for doing something he didn't like – that wasn't how interrogation worked. But the demon must have been able to pick up on what was running through his head, because he grinned suddenly.

"Oh, you don't like that, do you?" he guessed. "You were a hunter before something took a bite outta you and made you useless." He nodded to Sam's bad leg. "Born and raised, from the way you carry yourself. Which means you had the importance of family stomped into you whenever there was an opportunity. Don't trust anyone but. No one else matters. So the idea of me going after what used to be my own flesh and blood just bothers the hell outta you." He made a show of looking around, hitting all the directions that he could. "But where's your family now that it takes you half an hour to cross a room?"

Sam swallowed, and didn't give him the satisfaction of an answer to that question. Instead, he stiffly asked, "What condition is your vessel's soul in?"

"Don't know what you're talking about," the demon answered smoothly. "Ain't nobody in here but me."

Sam squeezed the holy water, but the demon's words had the unfortunate, sickening ring of truth to them, and the rules that he'd laid down himself wouldn't let him punish him for that. But he got plenty of chances to fling salt and holy water at him later, because the honesty definitely didn't last. Getting any information at all out of the demon was like pulling teeth, and every real answer that Sam did manage to get was hard-won. He moved agonizingly slowly down his list of questions.

"You were stabbed with a knife that hasn't ever failed to put a demon down before. Why didn't it kill you?"

"Why are your eyes black when only the most run-of-the-mill demons have black eyes?"

"What, exactly, makes you a Knight of Hell?"

"What were you doing here when Gordon caught you?"

"What's going on? Why are there so many demons up here?" (Because several hunters, over the last few days, had hinted at that while talking to him over e-mail and IM – not just Gordon.)

"Are you really the last Knight? Or are there others?"

The rock salt and holy water that Sam splashed onto his face and chest again and again, trying to get him to realize that just answering his questions would be a whole lot easier on him, made him grunt and twist and clench his jaw. But whatever unpleasant feeling it gave him (not pain, Sam had to keep firmly reminding himself, as the demon sucked in air after each wave of water, that his kind didn't feel pain) obviously wasn't enough to motivate him.

"What does it take to make a Knight of Hell?"

Sam suspected that this newfound stoicism might be because of his pain threshold comment. The demon, a creature born of, potentially, centuries of unimaginable torture (assuming Knights were made basically the same way as the others), was proving to him that he wasn't anywhere near as weak as Sam had accused him of being. He could see an odd parallelism between the two of them. He didn't like it.

"Is there any class of demon more powerful than you? Where are you in relation to the Lords?"

Sam knew that he didn't need to breathe. But he was putting on a show for him anyway, hunched over as far as his bonds would allow him to be, panting raggedly, an expression of fatigue fixed on his face. His eyes, still black with all the abuse he'd been receiving, looked glossier than they had before. When he didn't say anything at all, much less something that could be contributed as an answer to Sam's question, Sam pursed his lips and brought the silver flask up again. But this time, nothing came out of it. He blinked down at it, and resisted the urge to shake it upside down to make sure that it really was all gone. He'd known that the supply was getting a little low, but this flask was much bigger than the others, and he couldn't believe that he'd managed to use the whole thing.

"All gone?" The demon's voice was a little raspier again, now. Like he was losing the strength to treat the dryness in his mouth and throat. He raised his head, regarding Sam dully. "You know what they'd call that in the Pit? Ambition." He half-heartedly shrugged wet, salt-covered shoulders. "Or motivation. Either way, you would've caught Alastair's eye by now. Probably been promoted."

"Alastair?" Sam asked. It was a name he'd heard before. He knew it belonged to a demon, and not much else. "Who's Alastair?"

Once again, the demon didn't even try to answer. Just closed his eyes and tiredly shook his head. So Sam reacted exactly the way he'd told him he would earlier: he dumped salt onto him, where holy water had already matted his close-cropped hair to his skull.

He screamed through clenched teeth and shook his head wildly, trying to get rid of the salt, but most of the grains stuck to him. His face was already wet, but now more moisture was squeezing out from between his tightly-shut eyelids, just a few tears that couldn't be real. A strong, bony hand gripped and strangled Sam's heart anyway, though. He found himself suddenly unable to breathe. Especially when the demon spit out, "You should ask him for a fucking application. They always need more torturers in Hell."

Sam stood there as the demon slowly calmed down, blankly watching his muscles unknot themselves and his exhausted body go limp against the chains and straps (but demons didn't get tired). An empty flask in one hand and a mostly-empty canister in the other, he was still for a few long minutes, thoughts running in familiar circles. Finally, he came to a decision and turned around, bending over to pick up everything he'd brought into the cell with him. And giving the demon a near-perfect view of his denim-clad ass, he realized inanely, but he just couldn't see him caring about that.

He heard a muttered curse directed at him as he left, but it was too weary to have any real bite to it, so he didn't let it bother him as he put everything back in its place. Then gathered up supplies that he really shouldn't be wasting on a demon. When he returned to the cell with a stack of clean washcloths, a stainless steel bowl of warm, soapy water, and the first-aid kit, the demon stared him down with human eyes.

"Working off your guilt again?" he asked, upper lip twitching with a weak sneer. Sam didn't answer.

The first thing he had to do was wipe away all the salt and holy water, though it seemed to have stopped burning him about a minute after it hit him. Most of his bandages, which had been on him for too long, anyway, had been soaked by Sam's interrogation techniques, and he peeled them away once the skin around them was dry and free of salt.

"This doesn't make you a good person," the demon said quietly. Sam had just scrubbed his vessel's dirty-blond brush cut dry, and it stuck up in haphazard spikes and tufts as he moved down to dab away the blood that had oozed out from between the stitches that he'd put in his stab wound several days ago. "You might be able to trick yourself into feeling better by playing doctor with me, but I know what you are. And I think you know, too. Since you spent the last ninety minutes hurting me and liking it so much that you didn't even notice when you ran out of holy water."

"Your ribs are looking a lot better," Sam replied, voice detached. He just had to keep his focus on bruised flesh and broken bones and skin puckered by stitches, rather than what the demon was saying to him. "So's this." Two fingers swaddled in a washcloth stained with blood, he gently tapped the stab wound in the demon's solar plexus. "I'll probably be able to take the stitches out in a few more days. Gordon really tore you up."

"I'm planning on going after him just as soon as I finish up with you," the demon answered. A ripple ran through the sculpted muscle of his torso in response to Sam's prodding, which he suspected was a wince. A fake one, of course. "You're a real son of a bitch…but he's something else. With you, I'll probably just be satisfied after I rip your throat out. With my teeth." He bared them. They needed brushing; dried blood, brown and black, had collected in thin lines between them. "Him, though. Gordon. I wanna feed him his own intestines before he dies."

"That's actually something I've heard other demons say before," Sam replied. "They want people they hate to eat their own guts. You guys seem to be fixated on that – it's like you all have some sort of entrail fetish. Like Jeffrey Dahmer." Or was it Ted Bundy? One of them, he knew, had played with the spilled guts of roadkill as a child, but he was a whole lot fuzzier on human monsters than inhuman ones. There wasn't any need for him to study serial killers. "Okay. The swelling's gone down in your knee, but I'm pretty sure that it's still hurt bad." He'd just unwrapped it. "I don't think it's good for it to be bent all the time. I'll get a chair or something to put your foot up later." For now, he just undid the strap around the demon's ankle.

"I'd heal just fine, if you left me alone," the demon said. His eyes burned into the skin of Sam's face like green embers. "Everything's coming back. All my power. You won't be able to keep me in here for long." Sam stood and pulled the wet bandages off of the demon's throat. It looked like it had almost totally healed, so he probably didn't need to wrap it up again. After all, he was talking. "I'm weak right now, from all the shit Gordon did to me. That's the only reason you can hurt me." Sam turned in order to toss the soggy bandages onto the growing pile next to the first-aid kit. "But even with how I am right now, I'm nowhere near as weak as you."

He punctuated the last word by slamming the booted foot of his injured leg, the one Sam had just barely freed, into Sam's scarred calf. His vision flashed completely black, hot agony bursting across it like fireworks. He heard someone screaming and sobbing from a distance, and only realized that it was him when he came back to himself, sprawled out on the cement floor with his chin stinging and the taste of blood in his mouth. His elbows and the heels of his hands were scraped up, and his ribs ached. He must have hit the bowl of soap and water on the way down and tipped it over, because his side was wet and cold.

And his leg. His leg was wrapped in razor wire that had been heated almost to the point of melting, then cooled down slightly in a vat of acid. It was pain so hideous and overwhelming that it seemed to crush down on his lungs, making it impossible for him to take a full breath, and rip through his brain, so that he couldn't think straight. He tried to scream again, but the heel of the demon's boot suddenly came down on his flaming calf and ground into the muscle, and the shock meant that it came out as weak as a kitten's first cry.

"Whatsa matter?" the demon hissed. Sam couldn't believe that he could hear it, over the frantic pounding of his own heart. "Can't take what your kind dish out?"

The floor was wet, riddled with leaf-choked puddles of stagnant rain water. The air stank heavily of rock salt and rotting flesh. Filthy claws, razor-sharp, were buried in his calf, pulling once-strong muscle into hamburger meat, and his blood pumped out into the water. Sam raked at the cement beneath him, tearing his fingernails ragged in the process, and somehow dragged himself away from the claws. He crawled towards the light, tears of pain and fear clouding his vision.

"Coward!" the demon shouted at him, furious. "Get your sorry ass back here and finish what you fucking started!"

Sam couldn't stand. His leg was useless. He hadn't seen the damage yet, but he knew that. Trying to get to his feet would be a waste of time, and mere seconds could make the difference between life and death. There were strange markings in the stone of the floor, runes and carvings that bit at the bare skin of his hands and forearms, but he couldn't worry about them right now. He had to get out. It couldn't follow him into the sun – he'd be safe there.

"Yeah, that's it, crawl," the wendigo taunted. "Like a damn cockroach. Can't even take one kick. How the hell'd you kill the djinn?"

"Dad," Sam croaked. That was all he could manage. And he knew that he was already dead, because he'd seen the thing swipe him across the torso and send him flying into the cavern wall with a crunch of breaking bones, the pink ribbons of his intestines unspooling in the air. He was alone, now. And he was probably going to die here, too.

"Crying for your daddy, now?" He reached a hand out in front of him and touched the cool iron of the gate that covered the cave entrance. "Is he the one who dumped you here to rot with us monsters after he'd milked all the worth outta you he could possibly get?" The pain ran waves and roots up his leg, spreading itself out into his entire body. It was deep enough to make him sick, but he held back the vomit that was rising in his throat, knowing that he couldn't afford to throw up all over himself right now. "Maybe he thinks you're one of us." Sam shoved the gate, unlocked, open. "Maybe it makes him sick to look at you, and that leg of yours." He heaved himself over the threshold, sure that he was leaving behind a trail of blood that would lead the wendigo right to him once the sun set. "Maybe all of them hate you like that, 'cause of your leg, and 'cause they can see that, deep down inside…you're just like me."

Sam was out, in the sunlight, he was laying limply on hard floorboards, instead of in the needle, twig, and cone litter that he'd thought would carpet the pine forest outside the cave. That was weird, but okay. His leg had gone blissfully numb, which he knew was probably a bad sign, but he couldn't stop relief from flooding him.

"I'm going to kill you. No one'll find you for weeks, and when they do, no one'll care that you're dead."

That was the very last thing Sam heard the wendigo (demon? Was it a demon?) say, before he passed out from exhaustion and (he assumed) blood loss.