Note: I have no excuse for the unannounced two-month hiatus. I have reasons, but they're not good ones and they're boring. Updates are probably going to be shaky from here on out.
Previously on Mad Science from Hell: Sam's back - more or less - but the crisis continues with a demon prowling around the Yard, which is swarming with ghosts, some of whom Dean has trained to exorcise demons. A little incense is slowly clearing the ghosts out, but with the demon around, the gang's figured they'd best abandon the area and come back when it's safe to walk around outside without the protection of a salt-filled hula hoop. Using one such salt hoop, they've crossed the ghost-infested yard and have reached the ghost-proof, demon-proof van - first cutting through the blessed rebar wards in order to get Sam inside.
With a sack of salt slit in the bottom and set down over the gap in the rebar, they were good to move. Bobby drove; Dean had gone for the driver's seat first, punched helplessly at the disconnected clutch and gas pedals, and felt like an utter tool when Bobby pointed out the hand lever system.
They figured the demon would be avoiding the ghosts, but if it was still hanging around, it would be because it wanted Sam. To catch it, their best bet was to leave Spook Central, find a hill or someplace with decent visibility, stake Sam out like a sacrificial goat, and trap the demon. Then they'd Knife it. Time was, Dean would have a hard time pushing that past Bobby, but today they each agreed the host was acceptable collateral damage.
Demons had just wonderful ways of shredding your soul.
Dean crouched on the steel panel that covered over where the shotgun seat had been, watching the mirror and side window as they trundled through the junkyard along the gravel drive, lit warm and pink-orange in the retreating sun. He checked on Sam—kneeling on a pile of blankets, bracing against the jumps and sways of the shocks with his stiff-spread arms. Like the van's floor was bothering him and he was worried he'd fall on something blessed or salty.
They were approaching the main gate when the demon sprinted out from behind a column of scrap metal, knelt in the middle of the gravel road, and abandoned its host in an angry black funnel-cloud.
Bobby cursed louder than Dean had ever heard him, and yanked the brake lever. The van skidded. Sam slid forward faster than he could push off the blankets. Dean and the wheelchair rocked forward into the dashboard, and he clung there for an instant before two-hundred-some pounds of Sam ploughed into the backs of his knees.
Dean folded like a pup tent, tipped backwards, and smashed his head against something soft on the steel floor. Sam's hand.
The rest of Sam was crammed into the footwell with Dean's shins, and as the van rocked to a stop the wheelchair tipped, wobbled, and crashed onto Dean's face.
"Fix the salt," Bobby ordered.
Dean shoved and squirmed his way to freedom, staggering to his feet as Sam blinked dazedly, and glanced back into the cargo compartment. "Shit," he said. The twenty pound salt bag he'd set over the break in the sanctified ReBar had rolled over, spilling salt across half the floor. Dean snagged one of the blankets and quickly smeared the stray salt back into place, then righted the bag, sealing the wards again. "We good?" he asked, checking the cab.
"I think so," Sam said. He'd righted Bobby's wheelchair and was on his feet, examining something on the dash. Dean followed his glance to the path of the ReBar railing that curved up and around the dashboard, wire-tied to the plastic at the front edge of the windshield. Near miss.
"Demon bailed," Dean remarked, getting his bearings. He hadn't felt a thump under the front tires, but then again, he'd been in the process of backflipping over Sam at the time. He looked out the window, just as a dusty-looking tow-headed beanpole staggered to his feet, gripping the van's grille. Mr. Singer, the guy mouthed, gape-jawed.
"Aw, dammit," said Bobby.
"Friend of yours?" Dean asked, oddly irritated.
Bobby scowled out the window. "Just open the sliding door." To the young man outside, he jerked his thumb, and the guy nodded and wobbled around the side, listing against the panels.
Dean planted a foot on the salt bag to pin it in place and slammed the door open, only to take a pointy, sunburned elbow dangerously close to the nuts. He grabbed the guy by his shoulders as he sagged for the floor. "Sam, little help?"
Sam loomed next to him and grabbed on, and together they got the man into the van and propped him up between a wall and another sack of salt. His limbs quivered and his eyes darted, feverish, from Dean to Sam to Bobby to Sam to the door to Sam…
Sam scrutinized him, still as a praying mantis, with black eyes staring, head tilted, arms resting on his knees.
Dean coughed. "Sam, go to the front. Get a blanket."
Sam stood with a jerk, clocked himself on the roof so hard the van echoed, and bent to grab one of Bobby's army blankets that had had them both sprawled out on the floor just a minute ago. Didn't even wince. Dean thought about leprosy, where your arms go numb and you go to sleep and wake up to discover that rats had eaten your hands off.
"Mr. Singer," the ex-host said. His eyes were scrunched shut now and he was clenching his fists. Dean draped the blanket around him and he flinched.
"Phil," said Bobby evenly, turned around in the front seat. "Your folks all right? Cindy?"
Phil's lips worked. "They, they…" He blinked and shoved himself out of his slouch. "I'm not tellin' you dirtbags anything! Should've damn well known, with the locks and shutting me out of the yard and the damn devil-marks in the bottom of that cistern—"
"Hey," barked Dean, gripping his shoulder roughly. "We're the good guys. We don't work with—Bobby doesn't work with—damnit, we kill those things."
Phil didn't look reassured.
"Dean," Bobby snapped.
"What?"
"Good Lord," Bobby growled. "Count the ammunition if it keeps you occupied, just get out of his face."
Dean grimaced and backed off, still scowling at Phil. Not that he could blame the poor guy, he just… Bobby heaved himself from the driver's seat to the chair by a handle bolted to the ceiling, and when he glided into the cargo area, Dean headed for the cab, squeezed past Sam, and sank into the warm upholstery.
"You asked why I'm such a paranoid old coot, well this is why," Bobby was saying to Phil.
Dean shut his eyes for a moment and let the bucket seat wrap around him and the sunset play across his eyelids as Bobby talked down the civilian. Deep breaths. So damn tired.
Sam's jacket rustled. Sam. Right. "How's your arm?" Dean demanded, straightening.
Sam blinked at him with those oily black eyes. "My arm?"
"The one you just cut a new lock into, genius. The bleeding one. Where's the first aid kit in this thing?"
"I got it," Bobby cut in.
"Bobby," said Dean, half rising from the seat, as Phil protested, "Mr. Singer—"
"I said, I got it," Bobby snarled. He shot the chair over a few feet, shimmied the front wheels to get a fold of blanket out of the way, yanked open one of the cupboard doors, and tossed a small tacklebox at Sam, who fumbled it on his elbow and miraculously recovered it an inch from the floor.
Dean took another deep breath. "Pass it over." He gripped the box between his knees, unfolded the neat trays of gauze and tourniquets and forceps and iodine, and grabbed Sam's left elbow. Sam rolled up his jacket and button-down sleeves, revealing a gigantic blood smear and a crude ring of slipping skin. "Getting sloppy, part of it still looks attached," Dean remarked. Goddamnit. He turned to Phil and Bobby. "Water?"
Bobby pointed out a box on the floor to Phil, who grabbed a bottle for him. Bobby threw it and Dean caught it, cracked the seal, and wet some gauze.
Once he had most of the blood cleared away, he could see what he was dealing with. Sam's hand must have been shaking when he'd done the sigil—parts of the circle went clear through the skin, he'd nicked a vein that had half-soaked both layers of sleeves, the hatch mark looked like it'd gone into the muscle, and half an inch hadn't even been touched. "About as secure as a pair of pasties in August when the air conditioning's broke," he muttered. Good thing they'd gotten Sam into the van when they had, or who knows where those ghosts would have sent him.
He cleaned the wound out the best he could and slapped some butterfly bandages on it, figuring it could keep until they got to Sioux Falls, then, if it turned out not to be infected, he'd stitch it. Sam held as still as a medic could ask for as he tugged and prodded and swabbed with painful antiseptic before strapping the whole thing up in a roll of wide gauze.
"That'll hold ya," he said, slapping Sam on the shoulder.
Sam was watching Bobby. "Does he know anything?"
"Hold yer horses," said Bobby. "Phil, in all the years I've worked with your daddy, there's never been no ill come to him from me. I never cheated him, never hurt nobody, for God's sake, I let him take a six-cylinder off the lot for three-twenty back in '05, and you've been walkin' in and outta here four days a week for the past three months. You never seen no trouble 'til these chuckleheads trailed it in after 'em."
"You," Phil panted. "You kill these things?"
Bobby sighed. "Whenever it's practical."
Phil dug out a water bottle for himself and took a long sip. "Okay."
"Good," said Bobby. "Do you know anything? Did it do something, let anything slip, was it planning anything?"
Phil shook his head. "Not like that," he muttered. "Not like, like voices in my head or nothin'. Just hung around the yard. Ran a bit. Beat on somebody's dog."
"You sure?" Sam asked. Dean saw with a start that he'd managed to clear the black out of his eyes to talk to Phil. Be nice if he could have picked up that trick earlier, and let everyone's blood pressure come down a few notches.
Phil shook his head. "Gave me a message for you before it left. Thought maybe it was some kinda demon gang war or something, but I guess it's just scared of you all. Said it'd come back with a machine gun."
"Machine gun," Bobby echoed, eyebrows raised.
"This thing bullet proof?" Dean asked, patting the door.
"Project for another weekend," Bobby replied. "So Phil here was just the first convenient host, and now it's gone to find somebody better armed. Rancher or a cop."
"We could make more hex bags, throw it off the scent," Dean grudgingly suggested.
"Won't work," said Bobby, as Sam shook his head. "It's been in Phil, it can figure out what's in the house."
"What's in the house?" Phil asked.
"Drink your water. There's crannies and rocks we can use for defense, and with the thirty-ought-six, I can disable its gun so I get a chance at trapping it," Bobby growled. "Nothing's getting into the library."
"You mean 'we,'" said Dean, imagining Bobby wrestling his way up a hillside so he could have his one-man-stand. And Sam accused him of having a hero complex.
"I'm not risking your lives over a pile of books," Bobby insisted.
"Like you could keep Sam away with a roll of razor-wire," Dean snorted. "Those books save our asses every other job."
Bobby glared at him. Dean steeled himself and glared back; it wasn't often that he had logic on his side, and he was not losing Bobby today.
"We need help," Sam interrupted. "Something the demon won't know how to handle."
Dean blinked at him. Sam was still disjointed and mechanical; his eyes were clear again, but he still couldn't see Sam in them.
Bobby seemed to know what Sam meant, luckily, because Dean was at a loss. "No," Bobby snapped. "We are not calling in your pet angel."
"Hey," said Dean, brightening. Cas was pretty good in a corner, as long as he didn't need to do any acting.
"No," said Bobby again. "I mean it. That thing ain't reliable. It ain't human, it don't follow orders—"
"He can do that teleport thing and he's bullet-proof," Dean insisted. "We give him the Knife, he tracks it down or sees it coming, whichever, and poof, no more demon."
"Castiel got good Hunters killed," Bobby snarled.
Ellen and Jo. Dean sobered.
They still didn't know what had held up Cas in Carthage, while Hellhounds ripped into Jo's ribs and they'd all holed up to turn a hardware store into a weapon. They just knew that Cas had been too late to help the Harvelles, but right on time to save the Winchesters. Dean had noticed that he seemed to be the only person who actually liked the guy, but he didn't like to think that he was also the only person who had any reason to.
"Whatever," said Dean. "I'm calling him."
"Whatever? That all you got to say?" Bobby demanded.
"Yes!" snapped Dean. "All right? Sure he screwed up, bad, but nobody was expecting Hellhounds. We went in loaded for bear and it wasn't enough. Cas can take care of one demon, and he's got to know something about fixing Sam."
"Dean's right," said Sam.
Dean growled, pawed violently through his coat pockets, and retrieved his phone. Speed dial number three. Pick-up on the first ring. "Hey, Cas," he said. "You busy?"
"Yes," announced the angel's sepulchral voice.
Dean grimaced. "Can, you, uh, put it on hold a few hours?"
"Yes. Where are you?"
"Bobby's yard, by the big gate. We're in a white van—"
Phil yelped, and Dean spun around just in time to see Cas lifting two fingers off of Phil's forehead as he slumped on the floor, angel-whammied. Castiel straightened as much as he could under the van's roof, his vessel's springy black hair smashed against the steel, arms dangling outside his trench-coat pockets, eyes staring. He glanced at Sam, who stared back at him, and his stare turned to a squint. "Dean, there's a matter I must discuss with you in private."
Dean cursed to himself as he realized how close he'd been to getting Sam angel-smited. "No," he said, thrusting an arm in front of Sam. "No, this is part of the problem. Sam got turned into a demon."
Cas'—Jimmy's—round eyes got round again. "I wasn't aware—I must discuss this matter…urgently."
"No, Cas, he's still Sam. He didn't turn evil, it just happened by accident, I don't know, it was just—one minute he's fine, next he's getting exorcised by his own freakin' tattoo."
"Before we get around to Sam," Bobby interrupted, "there's a demon after us needs killing. Dean, give him the Knife."
Bobby was thread-bare and pissed-off. Dean decided not to poke the bear, unsheathed the Knife from his belt, and handed it to Cas.
Cas held the Knife.
"Put it in your pocket or something," Dean said. "You look like you're gonna star in your own slasher flic."
"Might as well take Phil to the ER while he's at it," said Bobby. "With any luck, he'll put the whole thing down to heat stroke and head trauma."
Cas looked down at Phil. "This man hasn't suffered a head trauma," he announced.
"So keep it that way," said Bobby. "I need my gofer with his wits intact."
"You're certain that this is Samuel Winchester?" Cas demanded, barging into Dean's personal space. Dean got distracted for a moment by a weird vein on Jimmy's right eye that looked like the letter Z.
"Yeah," he said, patting Sam's shoulder. "We checked. He's having a really bad day, and we just—sooner he gets fixed, the better."
"I am unaware of any reliable method to do so," said Cas.
Dean's chest went cold and he lunged for him, just as Castiel bent to the side, grabbed Phil's shoulder, and vanished without even a rustle of wind. Dean's fist was caught on empty air. He dropped his arm, straightened in the seat, and stared out the window at the little asphalt strip beyond the gate. "F—" he whispered.
"Well," said Bobby, "now we have our own personal teleporter to get us through the ghosts, we might as well head back to the books and work up some theories."
Dean nodded. He got out of the driver's seat, Bobby lifted himself into it, and they hung a u-ey and rumbled back toward the house, Dean hunched on a sack of salt, Sam staring silently out the window.
Apart.
Apart, a part without parts, fragment without union, atomized, all weakness, all loss, all separation, all lack: hole without space, void without time, need without hunger, without self.
I, it piped, so weak, so weak. I I I I I I—
And its self congealed around it, and it was one under the scorn of the stars and the burn of the wind, one and alone between the enmity of earth and iron. It writhed upon the grating air. In the shadows of iron it hid from the departing sun, quailing before an apparition of iron and salt and hatred, hatred that would strike it with terror had it flesh for terror.
The thing of iron and hatred bore two bright hot lights as it departed, so brilliant, knots of coiled white fire that pulsed and rippled, blazing with every glory that it had not, that it desired and envied. But the chained fires were sealed away. Another of its kind was with them.
If it could, it would feel rage, but it had no flesh to feel it in; the desire to feel rage drove it under and between the cold-searing mounds of iron and earth, seeping and probing for some other light, some warm thing in which to still its self. It searched long and desperate, for the land was near barren of sparks, and in its pride it disdained those first few fires it found—until, in a deep of earth under iron, it met a slow and cautious blaze double-coiled as its flesh coiled. It drove itself upon that spark, and it was not repulsed.
Blood churned sluggish. Fire smoldered low. It made its new host writhe within its earth-home and felt rage.
Anchored and at leisure, it pondered how to satisfy its rage.
It had woken torn and lost, atomized within the air, no light, no shelter, ripped from its host. It supposed that it was weak and small for its kind. It was prey. The other of its kind had been close enough to prey upon it, to subdue it and wrench it from its host and take it for its own.
It stirred in its host's blood and wormed itself about the slow fire in its flesh.
The other was stronger, so it had no chance of retrieving the host it had stolen, not until it was vacant. It would wait, frustrated and prudent, for the other to move on, and then it would seize its old host with its hands that could grip and strike, and chase after the other with all the weapons its vengeance could muster, and the other would never shame it again.
An unpleasant memory of a lonely expanse of cold blood and lightless flesh disturbed it, and it wondered why it had taken such a host, stripped of its glory. It recalled.
Recollected.
Oh, shit, Sam thought.