9 – Drink Up and Be Somebody

Bishop was currently staying at a decaying mansion on the outskirts of town, where he had some kind of party raging most of the time. Because of the location, they figured Bishop was really a guy named John McNiven, the scion and only survivor of the McNiven family who owned the property. The parents were murdered in a scandalous, still unsolved case when John was seventeen, and Sam suspected it was some kind of demonic sacrifice ritual so arcane, the cops didn't recognize it. Sounded about right to Dean. What little he'd seen of Bishop, he still could easily picture him as the type who would murder his parents to make a demon deal.

On the drive up, Dean was the unfortunate backseat witness to an argument between Sam and Dee that sounded sadly familiar. Sam was wondering if she shouldn't "get juiced" to take on Bishop, because she was sure she could do major damage to him if she did, and juiced was a clumsy cover for demon blood. Dee was absolutely not on board with that, and insisted she'd rather die than go through all that shit again. Which Dean understood completely. He was a hundred percent on Dee's side here. Letting Sam drink the demon blood and go all psychic boy … er, girl was a whole different world of trouble that just wasn't necessary. Maybe it would help, but maybe it wouldn't, and while there was doubt there, there was no point in endangering Sam and everyone else.

Not that he said any of that. He wasn't so stupid that he was going to blunder into the middle of their argument. So he just watched from the backseat, and was secretly glad there were never too many passengers in his Impala, especially when he and Sam were arguing.

They did the usual, which was park farther away and approach on foot, keeping an eye out for sentries. Bishop wasn't concerned about them attacking, as he felt invincible, but he was concerned about party crashers.

Which was why it was funny to come across a muscular decapitated body, and five Goth boys playing a very loose game of kickball with the man's severed head. One of the guys, with black hair flopping over one of his eyes and a spiked dog collar around his neck, looked at them and sneered. "Winchesters. The Queen sent us to kill Bishop with you, I guess. I don't know why."

Oh, Dean could guess, but kept his mouth shut, and tried not to smile.

"Just the five of you?" Dee replied, clearly disappointed.

Floppy haired guy shrugged. "Guess so."

The three of them exchanged looks. Dee looked annoyed, Sam shrugged, and Dean was just trying to keep from laughing. All five looked like Goth Justin Biebers, and while they were vampires and probably could do some damage, they were perfect cannon fodder. If he was a vampire, he'd have totally sent these guys to their death.

"Know how many people in the house are demons and how many aren't?" Dee asked.

Floppy shrugged. "Mostly demons. Very little human blood smell, lotsa ass blood smell."

"Ass blood?" Sam asked.

"Demon blood smells like ass."

Dee glanced at Sam. "You never told me that."

Sam's fuck you look was priceless, and once again, familiar.

"We want the humans left alone," Dee said, and at this, the vampires groaned. "But the demons are fair game."

"So what fun do we get out of that?" Floppy demanded.

Dee pulled out her machete, lightning fast, and held it up against floppy's neck. "I don't kill you, and neither does your Queen. We clear?"

He pouted like a bratty teenager, but he sighed and said, "Fine."

"You wanna go ahead, storm the castle? We'll be right behind you," Dean said, jerking his head towards the mansion.

Floppy scoffed. "You'll hardly be right behind us, old man." At that, floppy and his friends disappeared. They weren't ghoul fast, but vampires were slightly faster than humans on their best days. Nights. Whichever.

"I can barely contain my hatred," Dee said.

Sam shrugged. "At least you know why the Queen sent them."

That was certainly true.

They started up the wide slope of lawn to the decay house, as Sam cut her palm and started quietly intoning a spell that would offer them a little bit of protection against the demon horde. It wouldn't hold for long, but hopefully it wouldn't have to.

Dean could hear the music coming from the house, and it was the nicer, slicker cousin of the music at the vamp club. That had a thumping, mechanical, migraine sort of feel, but this music was lighter, bouncier, rabbit fast. He was pretty sure the time of raves had gone by, but maybe not in this dimension.

Dean took out his sawed off with the salt rounds, while Dee put her machete away, and slung the bag she was carrying to the front, so she could access her grenades easier. These weren't your typical grenades; in fact, they were more like fancy ass water balloons, filled with holy salt water and a little bit of explosive, just enough to guarantee a wide spray pattern. Dean would be covering her while she tossed them around.

By the time they were about thirty feet from the house, people were boiling out the front door like angry bees out of a hive, screams and shout behind them. The vamp Biebs were making trouble, but that was probably easy for them. They could show up and sulk and throw a bitch fit, and make everyone irritated.

Dean didn't get much of a chance to eye the décor, as once he was inside, he started shooting anything with black eyes, and Dee started throwing grenades. Sam had Ryu's knife this time, and started slashing and stabbing any demon that got close enough.

The demons screamed and smoked as the holy salt water hit them, clearing a path towards a huge red carpeted staircase that was so large and dramatic it might as well have been part of a movie set. Some Goth boys were in a fight with some demons in the living room, breaking furniture and sending someone flying through a window. Dean was hoping someone got thrown into a stereo so that goddamn house music would shut off.

Dean got his .45 out in his left, and started taking out the kneecaps of approaching demons, as even they couldn't stand on a leg that had been mostly shot off. He didn't take any time to contemplate how many demons there were here, because he didn't want to psyche himself out, but damn, there were a fuckload more than he thought there'd be. The vamps weren't lying about the amount of them.

He was trying to look everywhere at once as they began their ascent up the stairs, but as he turned to shoot one demon in the face, another stabbed him in the back. He couldn't help but let out a shout of pain, and Dee turned and gave his assailant – an otherwise cute girl mostly wearing body paint and hot pants – a grenade right in the face. She howled in agony and spun away, her face pretty much melting down to bone. Good.

Dee looked at the wound, and he asked, "How bad?" He took a second to catch his breath, and shot a charging demon in the face. A second one was coming in on the left, but one of the Goth boys tackled him and started pounding his head into the marble floor.

"It's a kitchen knife," she reported. "If I pull it out, you're gonna bleed more. Can you live with it in?"

"And give some weaponless demon a weapon to use against me? Fuck no. Pull it out. I'll live."

"Are you sure?"

"It didn't puncture a major artery or vein, did it?"

"Not that I can tell."

"Pull it."

Dean tried to brace himself, and Dee pulled it out as fast as possible, but holy fuck, that hurt. Dee broke the blade on the stair's railing, and threw the jagged, useless handle aside. Dean could feel blood, warm and itchy, pouring down his back. He took the hit near the shoulder, but it wasn't impeding movement, at least not yet, so he figured he could live with it. Not that he had any choice in the matter.

Dee was out of grenades, so she tossed the bag away, and pulled out her own sawed off shotgun. "Move to the center, I'll cover our six."

"I got it." Dean insisted.

She grabbed his arm, and stilled him so she could walk a step down from him. She then glared at him. "Cover Sam. I've got our six."

Bossy, wasn't she? He was still afraid to argue with her, so he did as she said, covering Sam as she intoned another spell, one that should preempt any spell Bishop might try to throw. Now the demons on the first floor were starting to show, realizing the guys on the ground floor had not done their jobs. Dean shot one in the face, and the other in the knee, and the knee shot was so good he took the bottom half of the demon's right leg clean off. The guy screeched as he went down, and Dean chided him, "Play through the pain, asshole." He was doing that himself.

It wasn't the first time Dean had been stabbed, and it probably wasn't the last either, not with his fantastic track record. But the one thing weird about all of them was they either hurt more than you expected, or less. This one was throbbing, but it didn't really hurt that bad. At least not right now. Maybe when adrenaline wore off, it'd be a motherfucker, but right now, he was golden. If he couldn't feel the blood running down his back, he wouldn't know he'd been stabbed at all.

Despite the fact that there were dozens of doors on this floor, Sam knew where Bishop was hiding out thanks to the spell. Of course he was down at the far end of the hall, behind the biggest set of doors. He and Dee shot everything that moved, and for one fleeting second, Dean was sure they had made it.

And that's when the door beside Bishop's room opened, and they heard the unmistakable snarling growl of a Hellhound.

"Fuck me," Dean said, as he heard the second growl and click of claws on floorboards only twenty feet away from him.


Sam had a new thing to check off his theoretical bucket list: chainsaw attack.

Luckily, this was semi-rural Maine, so of course there was a hardware store with ample axes and chainsaws, including ones that no regular human could possibly lift. So Cass got one of those. Sam picked one that had a weight he thought he could best handle, and Sylvia did the same. None of them had ever fought with chainsaws before, and in fact, Sam had never used one before. Sylvia had a spare can of gasoline in her car which they used to power them. She said she kept the large can of gas because you never knew when you'd need to light up a body, a phrase that would have been super sinister coming from anyone who wasn't a hunter, and still kind of was, in spite of her job.

It'd be a three pronged attack: Sam from the left, Sylvia from the right, and Cass had the more dangerous job of attacking from above. This felt unbelievably dangerous and stupid, but there were no other moves to make beyond simply running away. And while that sounded kind of nice at this point, and he was sure he could get Sylvia on board, Cass wasn't going to leave it. And that was the right thing to do. It was just this was going to be a hundred different kinds of horrible, and that was assuming everything went as planned. But was that new? This was the life of a hunter: epically fucked up. He just hoped, wherever Dean was, he was having a much better time.

The demon beast was still shambling down main street, and still trampling everything in its path. The good thing was they were never going to have to track this thing, as there was a slight possibility you could see it from orbit. The sound of the chainsaws firing up made no difference to the thing either.

Sam took a couple of deep breaths, so glad the chainsaw had a dead man's switch, so the second pressure was taken off the trigger, the chain stopped dead. He couldn't accidentally slice his own arm or leg off. Actually, it was still possible he could hurt himself, but it would be hard. Sylvia was a little worried about it too. Cass didn't care, but again, angel.

Sam decided to pretend he was Dean, and therefore capable of enjoying this, as he ran up to the beast and jammed the chainsaw into its elongated neck.

It took a few seconds to get through the scaled skin, but when the blade finally bit into flesh and blackish-brown blood started flying, the thing jerked its head right into him, sending him flying.

Sam hit a crumbled car, and the chainsaw smacked him in the face. He'd let go of the trigger, so the chain was off, but it still cut his chin on impact, and when he slipped down to the road, the heavy chainsaw slammed down on his thighs, grazing his groin. Wow, that hurt a lot more than he expected. Should have worn a cup.

Sylvia ended up in the same boat as him, shrugged away as soon as she hit something, but Cass then popped up on top of the beast again, and drove the chainsaw straight down. The beast reared and sent him flying, but he disappeared in mid-air, as only angels could.

He popped back into reality near him, as Sam pulled himself up to his feet. "At this rate, we'll have its head off by Thursday."

Cass scowled. "I don't think reality has that long."

Oh, what fresh hell was this? "What?"

"The dimensional fractures are getting worse. They will eventually collapse into a singularity of one reality, which will then collapse as well."

"When were you going to tell me this?"

Cass gave him a baffled look. "I just did."

For the most part, Sam honestly believed Cass liked being literal around Dean because he enjoyed Dean's exasperation. Sam couldn't prove this, but he just had that feeling, and exasperating Dean was kind of fun (and so very easy). But every now and again, Cass did something that reminded him he was genuinely alien. Not Human, not demon, something other than mortal. Such as when cosmic level bad shit didn't seem to bother him, at least not externally. "Can we stop it?"

"Possibly. We do need to take care of this demon first."

"Then stop it moving so we have a better shot," Sam snapped. He blamed his irritation on both the crotch hit, and the fact that he had to have another nigh apocalyptic event rattling around his head. Couldn't something go right for once?

Cass blinked out of existence, and then he was back on the beast again, this time driving the chainsaw down right into its spine. The beast made the eardrum torturing noise again, making Sam wince and grab his head, but the beast did indeed collapse on the asphalt.

Okay, so, being literal with Cass sometimes paid off. He had to make a mental note of that.

Sam hefted his chainsaw, ignoring the blood dripping from his chin, and started the saw again. He couldn't even pretend to enjoy this. This was going to suck a thousand times before it ever got remotely better. He didn't want to do this. But want didn't come into it. He had to.

With Cass still on top of the beast, and Sylvia on the other side, Sam swung the saw, and started cutting.