Chapter Ten
Sometimes Hauntings Aren't as Easy as a Salt and Burn.
Cal was breathing heavy, her chest hurt and the walls were closing in on her. No, wait. They were just really close all around her and it was dark. Where the hell was she? Fear pounded like a heartbeat in her ears, drowning out the screams she just knew were going on somewhere nearby. Face pressed up against the skinny, sharp little slats before her she could see horrible things on a large screen. Only she couldn't really see them. She just knew instinctively that whatever it was she could see was terrible, horrifying in a way she'd only ever imagined.
The slats were oddly familiar. A ventilation duct, maybe? If that was the case then it wouldn't be a big deal to kick off the grate and climb out. Her ribs hurt so bad it would be a relief to get a little space to stretch out. So she twisted her way around and shoved her feet at the metal façade, and hard. A quick pop and some loud clanging as the now bent and twisted cover flew across the room only to disappear when it reached a point beyond her line of sight.
Instead of relief when she climbed out there was only more shock, fear to add atop the fear she already felt in the shaft. Now the images were clear. Not only were they clear but they weren't just images on some screen anymore. They were real live events happening just across the room from where she crouched.
Sticky. Oh god, her feet were sticking to the floor. Not glued like in some strange dream, no she was having trouble moving because the floor was covered in some thick liquid that was drying and tacky. The soled of her shoes were covered in a rusty brown colored muck that threatened to keep her feet rooted to the floor with every step. Blood. Ew. God, but who does it belong to? What fresh hell have I just climbed out into?
She was Alice, only instead of a looking glass it was a ventilation duct leading out to the little shop of horrors in the shape of a small- town holding cell. Her father was there, fighting a vampire, trying to save the life of a man. Dad's kicking as! Sparing a moment to watch she saw he was holding his own just fine as usual. Three bloodsuckers dead already; body parts strewn all around him as another approached cautiously. He kept the leech before him, a man tied to a chair to his back. This was the man he was trying to save. At first glance the man was clean shaven, though she couldn't see his eyes. Half his face was covered by a huge, dark cowboy hat. She'd seen it somewhere before but couldn't quite place it. Then after she blinked he wasn't wearing a hat at all, although you still couldn't see most of his face behind all that shaggy mop of hair and beard. He was familiar, safe and dangerous all at the same time.
Her dad had changed when she looked back at him too. He wasn't Jacob O'Sulivan but Dean Winchester lobbing the head off a vampire in the copse of trees behind the farmhouse. Hm, wow. Freudian much? The man in the chair was free now. She had just finished sawing through the bindings around his wrists, but he was too weak to move on his own and there was another vampire approaching far too quickly. The scent of all the blood on the ground was driving it into a feeding frenzy, like some sort of shark with legs charging toward the nearest thing with a beating heart.
I'm too little for this. No way I'm strong enough to chop that thing's head off. It'll bite my arm right off while I try. Doubt and fear crept past her defenses but she stood her ground, knives in hand. Even that felt different though, wrong somehow. Looking down it was clear why, instead of the katana-like blades she usually kept sheathed in her boots for emergencies there was a much smaller boning knife with a sad, thin little blade to it. And what am I supposed to do with this exactly?
Looking back up at the vampire, who was nearly on her now, she just knew this was it: the final battle between her and the monsters that had stolen her mother's life. "Bring it on you pointy toothed freak of nature." A hoarse cry as it bore down on her.
"Cal. Hey, Cal!" Sam's voice broke through the madness of what was happening around her. Turning to see what was wrong, why he was calling her name on the cusp of such an important battle, she opened her eyes and saw…
The tacky flowered wallpaper of a dingy motel room wall. What?
"Cal, wake up! You're screaming yourself hoarse again." Sam was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her wrists on either side of her head to keep her still. "Sam? What the hell's happening? There were these vampires and Dad. He's gonna need my help…" But, if Sam was here with her then her father was still dead. That's when it hit her like a big brick wall. "Frigging nightmares. Great." It had to be the meds. Every damned time. Sam loosed his grip so she could sit up, now that he knew she was awake. She must have been thrashing around pretty hard for him to have felt the need to hold her still. Her ribs were thanking him for it, but they weren't liking her much.
"Yeah. You were talking in your sleep too. You were yelling for your Dad and Uncle Mal when we came in." Funny, she didn't have any uncles. Not any live ones anyway. Too much scifi before drifting off maybe? The last thing she remembered was settling in to watch a Firefly rerun just before Sam left to join John Wayne to finish the salt and burn Dean had left without finishing.
"We could hear you screaming all the way across the lot." A voice as deep as the Grand Canyon and rich as any chocolate she'd ever tasted spoke from somewhere above Sam. She'd heard it somewhere recently. Not just at the diner earlier, but in the dream she'd just had. Hard to say what the connection might be, considering how foggy her thoughts still were, but it sure was worth a moment of consideration.
"I don't know what it is about antibiotics and pain pills but it never fails, whenever I take either I get stuck with the most vivid nightmares." Sam had witnessed the phenomenon a time or two, when they'd first met and over the past year on the road. It was news to the new guy though, and Cal was willing to bet he wasn't thinking much about her tough hunter chick rep after watching her fall asleep at the diner and now this. "I need a minute." A request to Sam, directed at the Lone Ranger as a command. The message was clear: get the hell out of the room so I can collect myself here.
John Wayne had the gall to toss her a knowing smile, like he'd seen this before. Cal was seeing red, and it wasn't just leftover imagery in her mind's eye from that dream she'd just had. Still, he moved toward the door, intent on giving her what she'd demanded. Sam was close on her heels when she spoke his name. "Sam?" But what she really meant was please stay. The dream might just have been conjured by her subconscious but it had here wondering. John Wayne wasn't who he said he was, they already knew that much. Now she'd worried that they might have met before, in her distant past. Why else would his face turn up in a twisted dream about the night she'd killed her first vampire?
"You okay?" Worry lines only accentuated by the five o'clock shadow of new growth on his face. Sam looked like he was about thirty seconds away from tossing her in the car and taking her back to the hospital. "Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm good." He heard her hesitation because she was still stuck in her own thoughts about John Wayne. "Except?" And he called her on it. "Except I think I've met the cowboy before. I can't remember when or how and that's giving me the heebie-jeebies." He gave her a quick once-over, looking at her like he was trying to figure out what on earth it was she'd been dreaming just now. But he believed her. "You trust him?" he asked her, the unspoken understanding being that they'd leave him behind if she didn't. "I dunno. I mean, he is the only guy that's managed to get three feet from Dean in months, right? We'd be crazy to ditch him." She hesitated. Was finding Dean more important than listening to her survival instinct? "Okay. So we'll just be extra careful with the guy. Play our cards close to the chest. Try not to let on that we don't trust him until we find Dean." Reasonable, right? "Okay." It was as good a plan as any.
Cal was still fighting off imagery of her father in the middle of all those vampires. That terrifying moment when she realized how inadequately prepared she'd been for that vampire four times her size. Dream or not, some of those things had actually happened. Her only consolation was that she'd actually managed to take the vampire's head. There was something on her cheek, and she lifted a hand to brush it away thinking it was a stray hair or something. When she touched it though her fingers came back wet. "Hey," warm, sympathetic eyes held hers. Sam's voice soft enough to soothe a child. "It's okay, Cal. We'll figure this out and we'll be okay." Unfortunately she wasn't sure he was right this time.
Dean Winchester was a haunted man. That's right haunted, not hunted, though he was certainly that too. Ever since that John Wayne wannabe had surprised him in his own motel room the spirit of all the things he'd left behind had begun following him wherever he went. They were everywhere, waving their arms at him from every shadow just waiting to catch his eye. All he had to do was look a little closer, but when he did they were always gone.
There was the ghost of Sam, the one that sat just barely out of sight on the passenger seat next to him as he drove. The one whose voice made wisecracks about cartoon porn and Dean's juvenile nature and whose very presence used be enough to make Dean believe everything was going to be okay. That ghost was easy enough to handle. He was old news, having sat shotgun in the Impala once before. This was the same ghost who had hung around while the real Sam had been off at Stanford and who had helped him make the decision to sell his soul to that crossroads demon to bring the real Sam back from the dead.
There was the echo of Jason's voice in every child he happened to pass. Maggie was every sixteen year old girl giving her parents attitude. Playgrounds and shopping malls were the worst for conjuring those two up because there were always laughing chattering kids around. He couldn't escape it, could barely tolerate the itchy feeling he got just under his skin. The one that made him want to get in the car and drive North and let the Feds be damned.
Fran was every bartender in every bar he happened to enter. That was a bit of a pain in the ass at first considering the sheer amount of time he spent in bars. They were his best meal ticket, after all. Even she became manageable after a he'd had a couple. Numbness would set in and she would just sort of drift away into the background and become part of the scenery. Of course that led to other problems, like when the hellcat would show her face instead.
She was the real problem. She was the ghost Dean wished he could exorcise and be done with. Cal effing SheRa self proclaimed Princess of Power, who didn't back down or ever take no for an answer. The woman wasn't even in the same country as he was anymore and somehow she still managed to torture him incessantly. She was the nagging voice in the back of his head teasing him about his 'retro' eighties music and reminding him that he was slacking off on the job. She was the imagined warmth to the sheets on the other side of the bed when Dean was half dead in the early hours of the morning. Worst of all she was the comforting sound of slow steady breathing not his own before he even opened his eyes in the morning. Her big blue eyes glared challenge at him from the backseat in the rearview whenever the Impala pulled into the lot of… anywhere.
He couldn't think of her without remembering the look in those pretty baby blues during those final few minutes. "You want to end this and leave, just put me down and walk away if that's what you really want. I won't stop you." It wasn't what he'd wanted, goddamnit, not by a long shot and she'd known it. She'd known it but she let him go anyway because it was the right thing to do. It was the only way to keep her out of trouble. Not her usual brand of trouble but the kind that ended you up in a tiny room with no windows and just the one door, sitting in an uncomfortable chair at a metal table being questioned by Bad Cop and Worse Cop. They'd make a media farce out of her so that she wouldn't ever be able to manage anonymous again. She deserved better, had worked too damned hard to build what she had going for her just to have the guy who loved her tear it all apart. That's what he kept telling himself. That's was what was supposed to get him through those long nights when all he had in his head were those piercing blue eyes brimming with tears she'd been too proud to let fall.
So why did it still feel all kinds of wrong? Why did he still feel like nothing would ever be right again? The answer wasn't something he wanted to examine too closely. If he did there was a really good chance that he wouldn't like what he found.
Dean dealt the way Winchesters were raised to. Immersing himself in whatever work he could get his hands on while waiting for the inevitable to happen. Still looking for that answer to all his prayers but forced by reality to realize that the answer probably wasn't out there, and if it was it would probably come at a price higher than he was willing or able to pay. He'd lost the girl. He'd lost what semblance of family life that had been made possible for him. Now, it was pretty safe to say, he would probably grow old in prison for doing what had to be done to save lives. What Cal and Sam had bought him with that jailbreak (other than another ten years over the three life sentences he was probably already facing) was a reprieve.
He was going to use that time to make good. The people he loved were going to be as safe as he could possibly make them. He was going to sever whatever ties were left to link them to him and while he was doing that he was going to take every case that came his way. Somewhere deep and dark within in a place he didn't dare to acknowledge in case it decided to take over entirely, he hoped that maybe luck would be with him. Maybe he could avoid prison entirely the only certain way available. Maybe he wouldn't live through the next job or the one after it, or the one after that. Thoughts like that didn't make him sloppy, per say, but they sure didn't help him remember the salt lines and sigils at the end of the night either.
He'd figured the hurt would start to fade a little after that as a new pace set itself to this new version of what life was going to be. Maybe once that had happened that deep dark place would get a little lighter, a little less vocal. Experience had taught him that he could count on senses dulling themselves to the more acute pain because a dull ache was easier to deal with. Unfortunately that wasn't the case this time. He just missed them all so damned much!
Oh yeah? And whose fault is that, ya big caveman? "I know SheRa." He mumbled into the pillow, one hand stretched across the other side of the bed where she would have been. "It's all on me." Just then, as he drifted off to join her in his dreams he stopped caring that he was being tracked by the big ass cowboy military guy from hell. All that mattered was the ghost of her.