A/N: Happy New Year, all!
August 18th, 2017, Missoula, Montana, 11:40 p.m.
Frak. Frak. Frak. The rhythmic cursing chant was the only formed thought in Faith's head as she kicked and clawed her way through the one hundred and eight cubic feet of grave dirt separating her from the twenty-one percent oxygen, seventy-odd percent nitrogen night air above. Slayer training hadn't quite prepared her for this, so she improvised. Faith thrust downwards with her legs in a scissor kick, as if treading water, while at the same time she scrabbled to use her cupped hands to push away the soil on top of her.
Her lungs were burning, her throat dry and scratchy with earth, when at last her torn fingernails made it through the dirt and out into the open air. They were quickly followed by her hands, her wrists, her forearms, and finally her head and shoulders. Coughing, the Slayer attempted to get some of the dirt out of her mouth. She rested for a moment before pulling the rest of her body out of the grave. Thankfully, the backpack had survived her unanticipated adventure, and she did not have to go back in for Peter's Spider suit.
Faith danced from one foot to another in an attempt to shake the earth free from her clothes. She looked around for any signs of whoever had tried to bury her alive but saw no one. The cemetery was once again abandoned.
Frustrated, the Slayer checked her phone, which had been tucked into her front pocket and so was mostly unscathed. She still had no texts from Dean, but there was a missed call from Sam. Frowning in concern, the Slayer started walking in the direction of Caroline's car and called him back.
"Hey, Sam," she said as soon as a click on the other end of the line alerted her that someone had picked up. "How's Livvy doing?"
"She's fine," replied Sam, but his tone was far too terse and choppy for fine.
"What's wrong?" pressed Faith. She passed beneath the cemetery's front gate and extended a middle finger up at the curving arch overhead. Screw Sunset Memorial, and screw whoever left backhoes lying around where vampires could get a hold of them.
"Dean's gone."
Faith stopped dead in her tracks. The gut-churning worry in her intestines vaulted exponentially higher, and for a split second it morphed from concern and mild anxiety into nauseating terror. Pushing the fear back down where it belonged, the Slayer demanded, "What?"
"The doctors decided to admit Olivia overnight to observe her, and Caroline asked me to bring her some clothes, 'cuz hers had blood all over them. Your place is closer to the hospital, so I thought I'd borrow some of your things and grab that spare set that Dean keeps for me in the garage and then race right back - I figured you wouldn't mind."
"Not in an emergency situation, no." Faith unlocked the car and got inside. She noted absently that her fingers were trembling where they gripped the steering wheel. Too much adrenaline, she figured. Aloud, she said, "Cut to the chase, Sam. What happened to your brother?"
"When I got to your place, the lights were all off. The Impala was parked in the driveway, and Reggie was stuck in the backseat, barking his head off and going frantic. I let him out, and he just started spazzing, running in circles around me and the car. I checked the house, just to be sure, but there was nobody there. And then I found Dean's phone on the cement under the car. Screen was cracked, the back of it was bent in half - it's broken."
"G-d dammit," muttered the Slayer. "You still at the house?"
"Yeah. I've looked all over, and there's not a single sign of what happened - no footprints, no drag marks, no tire prints, nothing. Just a plastic tulip, like the nice kind of fake flower. That's when I called you, but you didn't answer."
"Sorry about that," Faith explained briskly. "Somebody thought it would be fun to bury me alive."
"Oh my G-d. Are you okay?"
The Slayer hurried to reassure him. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just pissed. Frakking frakking, frakking, frak. Look, I'm headed your way. I can be there in like ten. Not sure what you sticking around can do, though. You can leave the phone on the kitchen table and stick Reggie back in the house. Go back to Caroline and Olivia; I'll feel better if you're with them and -"
Sam interrupted her. "It's not just Peter that's gone now," he said sharply. "It's Dean, too. You need help. I'm gonna help you find him. The doctors can take care of Olivia, and he's my brother, Faith."
"Hey, listen to me, Sammy. Listen to me. Hospitals are not vampire proof. They aren't residences, so fangs don't need permission to waltz in. They are open access, no security, free entry. You hear me? A vampire could just walk in there, right now, and finish what they started with Livvy - or with Caro. You need to go back to the hospital and protect them."
There was a sharp intake of breath. "I'd . . . I'd forgotten about that," the hunter admitted, his tone becoming more and more panicked with each successive word. "I - do you - are you sure -"
"Perfectly. Besides, I'm starting to think that now is turning into a really, really good time for an angel ex machina."
"You can't mean - ?"
"Whatever it takes."
"But didn't he say that he was going cold turkey on meddling in human affairs?"
"That," said Faith grimly, "was before Dean went missing. Go take care of your family, Sam. I'll handle this."
The line clicked again as Sam hung up. For a brief moment, Faith felt like screaming. Instead, she tightened up on the brakes and drummed her fingers angrily on the steering wheel, staring up at the red traffic light and waiting for it to turn green. Despising herself for indulging, she held down the 1 button on her phone keypad and allowed it to go to speed dial.
There was no ringing or buzzing of a call going out, only a short pause and then the gruff, "You've reached Dean Winchester. Leave a message at the beep."
Faith hung up before it could reach the beep, and then she dialed a third number.
"Hello?" came the quick answer.
"Heyyyy," the woman dragged the word out until it almost resembled a sentence in and of itself. "I've got some more bad news."
"More?" echoed Tony Stark incredulously.
Deciding that it was best to get this part over with quickly, she answered, "Yeah. First off, your tracker's not working. You got anything else that might be useful? Like a GPS in Peter's underpants or something?"
"Okay, now you're just being weird, and I feel personally insulted. I may be paranoid, but I'm not creepy."
Faith grit her teeth. As much as she liked Stark during the best of times, her banter tolerance was reaching an all time low at the moment. "Wasn't insulting you personally, Tony. I just have to cover all the bases."
"I get it. And, uh, no, I don't have a tracker on anything else."
"Fantastic," said the Slayer sourly in a way that implied it was anything but. "'Cause here's the second thing - Dean's disappeared, and I'm like ninety-nine point seven percent sure that the same people who took Peter took him. Otherwise, it'd be one hell of a coincidence, and -"
"And those don't happen," the man finished for her. "Look, uh, Faith, I think it's time to call in the cavalry. I'm stepping out of this party and coming your way now. You need me."
"On one condition," qualified the Slayer. "You come straight to Peter's suit, okay? I'll have it on me. Don't go anywhere - anywhere - else in Missoula. We already got two men down, and I ain't got the time to go catch a tenderfoot if you get yourself into fang trouble. Comprendes, Stark?"
"Your wish is my command," Tony rushed to assure her. "Although to be honest, in this situation it's more like your command is my command." He paused and then asked cautiously, "How much worse have the odds just gotten? Do you think they'll be all right?"
The worry surged again, and again Faith shoved it back down where the sun didn't shine. "I hope so," she replied with less impatience and more empathy. "And I'm about to call in an old arcane favor or two, so our odds are getting a little better. Do me a solid?"
"Anything."
The automatic promise almost made her smile. "Bring me a cooler of O negative with you, will ya? I've got all the IV tubing and other transfusion supplies, but all we've got in the house is lamb for rituals and pig for emergency vamp rehabilitation. I was an idiot and didn't restock on human after we ran out a couple months ago."
"I - uh, I can do that. Will we – will we need it?" he added apprehensively.
"Not sure. Hope not, but we prolly will. Anyways, ya always got to be prepared. I'm pretty sure the Slayers that live longest were Boy Scouts in their previous or subsequent lives," Faith added dryly.
"Okay, you got it. I'll grab the blood and be there in a couple of hours."
"Thanks, Tony. I appreciate it." Ending the conversation, Faith hung up. The red light in front of her at last changed to green, and she slammed her foot down onto the gas pedal.
12:00 a.m.
After far, far too many minutes of silence, Dean gave an unearthly groan, flopped onto his side, and slowly pushed himself up onto his knees and elbows.
"Wakey, wakey, little darling," trilled Drusilla. "Mommy's got all sorts of lovely plans for you."
Dean lifted his eyes from the ground and stared balefully at the vampire. His face was still pale, but at least the wound at his neck had stopped oozing and had started to clot over. Grimacing at the sight, Peter pulled at his chains. His shoulders were going numb, and he wondered if this was what chronic dislocation felt like.
"What kind of plans?" asked the teenager, trying to sound clever. From the irritated glance that Dean sent him and the gleam of self-satisfaction that flashed across Drusilla's face, he was being anything but.
"Family is what matters," hissed the vampire, almost talking to herself. "They've taken my family - all lost, all gone. Grandmother is lost, and she took my Daddy, and she took my darling Spike."
"What's a spoike?" Peter asked, pronouncing it the way that he had heard it.
"My Spike, my William, my beloved, beloved boy. She took him," spat Drusilla. "That horrid little Slayer. Well, now I'll take her family. And here you are, two beautiful boys, just fallen plop plop into my lap . . ."
"So you came here looking for revenge," surmised Peter.
"Why Faith?" Dean pressed. Some of the color had returned to his face, and his voice was stronger. "Isn't Buffy the one who took Angel and Spike away from you? Why don't you go after her?"
"Because the stars don't sing of her," explained Drusilla. She dropped onto her hands and knees and crawled towards him, grinning wide. "Not that they sing of that nasty Faith, either. But they do sing of you, still. Sad songs and regretful songs, but songs all the same. And the melody has a new note - him." She nodded at Peter. "Spiders and swords and stars - all lovely things that start with 's.'"
The hunter had reached the end of his patience. "Look," he said caustically, scrambling backwards, halfway falling onto his rear end, "I'm not trying to be super rude here or anything, but could you go ahead and kill me? Because listening to you talk is worse."
Drusilla stood, crossed the remaining space between them, and backhanded the hunter across the face in less time than it took for Peter to breathe in. She knocked Dean flat onto his back and straddled him, her knees pressing down on his upper arms. The man struggled fruitlessly and glared up at her.
"Get the frak off me."
"Ah, ah, ah." Drusilla pushed his hands away and then reached down to trace a pattern across the man's shoulder's and chest. "I'm going to carve the stars - here, here, here, here." Her path ended directly between his navel and the belt buckle on his jeans. "Let's see if that will make you sing."
Dean spit in her face, and she backhanded him again, splitting his lip.
"Bad boy."
The hunter coughed on the blood that trickled down his throat. "Great," he complained lightly, but the hatred in his green eyes was enough to drill holes through reinforced steel. "Torture porn. You know, Dru, I'm only a fan of one of those two things."
"Dean -" said Peter worriedly. He hadn't said anything, afraid that he would only make things worse, but now he found himself unable to keep his mouth shut any longer.
"Be quiet, Pete," the older man commanded, quiet yet firm. "This is between me and the crazy bitch over here."
Peter protested, "But - "
Rising to her feet, Drusilla kicked Dean once in the stomach so hard that he doubled up. Then she walked over to Peter, who was still chained into a pretzel. "Shhh, little lamby." She ran one slender fingertip down his forehead from the edge of his hairline to the curve of his nose. "Close your eyes. Mommy hasn't the time for you now."
She tapped him once on the tip of the nose, and Peter's eyes rolled up back into his head, and the teenager went limp.
"See?" said the vampire delightedly, once again straddling the hunter. This time, she settled herself on top of his hips. "Already you make me stronger."
Drusilla ripped Dean's plaid shirt open from the top down, sending buttons flying She frowned when she saw the black t-shirt underneath. Grabbing the hem with her long fingernails, she tore the undershirt in half from bottom to top, slowly licking a pathway up the man's chest as she went.
Gritting his teeth, the hunter grimaced and looked away.
"Don't worry, sweetling," crooned the vampire, her mouth hovering half an inch above the space where his shoulder met his neck on the side that she hadn't bit already. "Just another taste to get you nice and ready before the fun starts. And then, you're going to feel everything."
August 19th, 2017, Missoula, Montana, 12:05 am.
Faith slammed the front door behind her, slid the top three dead bolts, and nudged the German Shepherd away with her shin. "Sit," she commanded brusquely.
Reggie sat.
The Slayer dropped Peter's backpack onto the entryway floor and raced up the staircase. She shouldered open the door into her room and knelt in front of the cedar chest at the foot of her bed. Faith yanked her wallet open, fished out a small brass key, and unlocked the chest, and started digging through its contents. She pulled out two large shoeboxes, each labelled with black marker scribbled on a strip of masking tape. Tucking the shoeboxes under her arm, she ran back downstairs, where she set one box on the bottom step and opened the other.
While the German Shepherd watched and whined, Faith lifted a bundle of dried moss and a small glass bottle of holy water out of the shoebox. She sprinkled holy water over the moss, then lit the bottom with a a Bic lighter. Placing the smoldering moss on the tile in front of the door, she retrieved a cross from the box, held it up to the locked doorframe, and recited a stream of Latin, ending with "hicce verbis, consensus recesses est." The Slayer stepped back automatically as the moss exploded into a gust of flame that reached halfway up to the ceiling.
Reggie retreated into the living room, whimpering.
"Man up, dog."
Retrieving the second shoebox, Faith retreated to the library. She closed the library door and then pressed a spot on the edge of the work table. There was a groaning noise, and the concrete wall to her left receded to reveal a hidden closet with a black mini fridge in the corner. The Slayer pushed past three bottles of diet coke and an expired package of yogurt to find a jar filled with dark, congealing liquid, which she placed on the oak table. Reaching back inside the closet, Faith yanked out a disposable plastic tablecloth. She rolled the tablecloth out across the cement floor and opened the jar of lambs' blood. After she painted a quick circle in blood on the cloth, the Slayer drew lines dividing the circle into four quadrants. Inside each quadrant, she inscribed a slightly different squiggle.
Next, she dumped the contents of the shoebox onto the floor. She placed a small white tea light candle at each end of the dividing lines and lit them with her Bic. Then she set a small copper bowl in the center of the circle and quickly tossed small bundles of thyme and saffron tied with pale ribbon into the bowl, along with a handful of crumbled oak leaves and a month's wroth of Thursdays that had been cut out of an AKC puppies calendar. Faith poured a drop of holy oil onto the top of the Thursdays, struck a match from the Graceland wedding chapel match book, and dropped it into the bowl.
She stared down at a laminated card with an incantation written across it, shook her head in a gesture of rejection, and bellowed, "CASTIEL! Get your feathered ass down here!"
There was a clap of thunder, a great rush of wind, and all the lights in the room went dark. Out in the hall, Reggie howled. Lightning flashed, brilliant white, and standing on the far side of the circle was a somber man in a trench coat.
"Faith," said the angel, frowning at her.
The Slayer straightened up. "Castiel."
They stared at one another for a long, silent moment, the air heavy with nearly a decade's worth of competition and mistrust.
"I need help," Faith finally admitted begrudgingly, once the silence had dragged on just long enough to be incredibly awkward.
"You didn't have to yell," Castiel remarked, stepping around the outside curve of the summoning circle. The still-burning candles were the only light remaining, and they illuminated his solemn features from below, shadows flickering across his forehead and chin.
In a quiet voice, the woman said, "I wasn't sure if you would come. But it's an emergency."
"I assumed it would have to be one in order for you to trouble yourself enough to summon me," remarked the angel with more than a little dry irony. "Where is Dean?"
Faith fought the urge to fidget like a five-year-old. Castiel's chilly blue eyes were judgmental at the best of times, and tonight was about a million miles away from good times. "That's the emergency," she blurted. "Vampires got him - and the kid."
"Which child?"
"Peter Parker. He's - "
"Spiderman, yes. I do check in with Dean from time to time."
"I'm all out of terrestrial ways to find him, but I don't think he's warded from angels."
"Unlike Dean."
The Slayer nodded her head. "Exactly. Unlike Dean. So here's what I'm asking: find the kid and take me where he is. I know, I know," she added before he could interrupt her. "You've got higher priorities than us humans. But be honest with me, Castiel. Do you ever have a higher priority than Dean?"
The angel frowned and turned the question around on her. "Do you?"
"Sure, I do." Faith shrugged. "Kickin' ass, takin' names, savin' lives. Look, I woulda called you earlier, but we both know you woulda told me to frak off."
"And of course your pride would have had no role to play in that," muttered Castiel motto voce.
"I'm not the only proud one here. Come on, dude, do we have to do this now?"
"I am not the one being hostile."
"I'm not hostile!" snapped Faith, losing her temper. "You just irritate the crap out of me."
"The feeling is decidedly mutual," he replied. "After all, you are reckless, impulsive, excessively violent -"
"Plus I'm quasi-atheist white trash from South Boston. Don't forget that part, Sparkles."
"Well, since you mention it . . ."
They eyeballed one another for about fifteen seconds, and then the Slayer huffed with laughter. "So I guess it's business as usual, then, huh - mutual dislike with a side order of toning it down around Dean, once we find him? After all, isn't he like your prime directive or some other sh-t like that?"
"And yours the same, I believe."
"Mmph." Faith huffed in dislike. "Here." She whipped out her phone and scrolled through the pictures to find a shot of Peter and Dean mid-hot dog eating competition a few weekends ago. "This is the kid. Can you find him?"
Castiel exhaled. He made a show of blinking and shaking his head as if to clear it. "I can try," he said flatly. "If he is un-warded as you say, it should not be impossible."
"Great," said Faith. She allowed herself to experience a tiny fragment of relief. "You go looking - I'll pack myself a kit."
Leaving the angel to his own devices in the library, the Slayer hurried back upstairs to her bedroom and the cedar chest. She unzipped the top of Peter's backpack and removed a calculus textbook, two half-bent spiral notebooks, a handful of pens, and far too many crumpled pieces of paper. In their place, she thrust in half a dozen stakes and a liter-sized bottle of holy water. Ignoring her still-twinging ankle, she exchanged her going-out boots for her heavy duty Doc Martens, then slipped a stake into the side of each boot. She strapped her favorite crossbow to her back, her second favorite knife to her left hip, and a revolver filled with silver bullets to her other hip. After opening another bottle of holy water, she poured that into a Super-Soaker modified with a pressurized air canister and slung the strap over one shoulder.
Finished with the chest, Faith went out into the garage. She pulled a beer bottle out of the recycling bin and carefully poured it halfway full of gasoline from the small red gas can that went to the lawnmower. Then the Slayer topped off the bottle with cheap vodka from the emergency stash that she had hid out underneath Dean's tool bench. She stuck half of a grease-covered rag into the neck of the bottle and then covered the top with saran wrap and a rubber band. Faith was just checking her pocket to make sure that the Bic lighter was still in place when the door from the garage to the mud room opened, and Castiel joined her.
"I have found him," he announced. The angel raised an eyebrow at the Slayer's arsenal, but wisely said nothing.
"That was quick."
"He is not far."
"He or they?"
"They. Dean is with him."
"About time we had some good news," Faith exhaled. "What's the sit-rep like?"
"They are being held in the basement of an abandoned house. There are at least a dozen vampires in the room above."
She nodded. That sounded about right. "And in the basement itself?"
"One vampire, female."
"Let's go." Faith held her arm out to the angel.
"Upstairs or down?"
"That depends," said the Slayer with a feral grin. "You feeling like throwing down some heavenly wrath before or after we rescue the princesses from the tower?"
"Basement," Castiel corrected her. "They are in the basement."
"Okay, there it is. Rescue first, Hulk Smash later. Either way, c'mon."
Castiel took her hand, and the world dissolved into a spiraling twist of color and sound that resolved itself barely seconds before Faith thought she would give in to the urge to vomit. Her boots landed with a heavy thud on a cement floor, and she straightened out of a crouch to take in the scene before her.
"Holy frakking hell," swore the Slayer. She briefly scanned first Peter, who probably had both shoulders dislocated from the way his arms were bent back behind him and the green tinge to his face, then Dean, who was sprawled across the floor, unmoving. Someone had been busy carving crosses and six-pointed stars all across the skin of his chest, which barely rose and fell with each breath. Finally, her eyes landed on the aspiring scar artist, and she elbowed down Castiel's upraised hand, already lifted to smite the vampire. "Cut it out, angel dust," she growled under her breath. "Crazy town's mine."
Taking a step forward, Faith repeated herself. "Holy frakking hell, Drusilla, what the frak are you doing here?"
Instead of giving a straightforward answer to the question, the vampire continued her work, tracing the edges of Dean's anti-possession tattoo with the tip of one of her sharp fingernails, outlining it in blood. "Hide and jump and run and catch," she sing-songed in satisfaction, a dark curtain of hair falling across her face and hiding it. "Run and catch, run and catch."
She turned her head to the side suddenly, the moment sharp and reptilian. The expression on her face was one of contemplative ecstasy. "Has Faithy come out to play at last?"
Faith's fingers danced across the stock of the stake stuck through her belt. "Next time you want me to play, Dry, you should ask first," she said lightly. "Don't start the game without me. And you really, really shouldn't take out my people."
"Did I not leave enough clues?" wondered the vampire. She lifted her blood-streaked hand from the limp hunter's chest and licked the ruby red liquid from her index finger. Her eyes widened in delight. "Sweet as a berry," she purred.
Although her stomach crawled, the Slayer did not even wince. "You're disgusting," she pointed out.
"And you?" the vampire laughed. "Disappointing. I leave clues - "
"What clues?"
"Poor Faith," continued Drusilla, once again dodging the question. "Not good enough for Daddy, not good enough for Buffy, not even good enough for the failed Michael Sword." She tapped the man's chin with her bloodied nails.
"You know what fills his dreams at night?" the vampire asked, a cruelly amused gleam in her wide yes. "Nasty dirty naughty things - the woman who could not bear the truth, the woman with the son, the angel he dishonored in the back of his car - but not you. Never you - pathetic, ruined, useless -"
"You talking about me or you talking about you?" said Faith, taking another step forward and wondering how this would all end. Would it be crossbow or holy water or angel fire or slow beheading with her knife? Spike would have kittens. Buffy would send her a thank-you gift certificate for a massage at that national gym chain she was obsessed with. But if she didn't get Dean and Peter out of this safely, none of that mattered.
Drusilla grinned, then sliced open a ribbon of skin across her left wrist. Blood dripped from the wound onto Dean's collarbone. The vampire leaned forward, bringing her bleeding wrist close to the hunter's mouth. "Enough of your nasty words," she scolded. "Shall we watch him eat you?"
"That's it, said Faith. "I'm done. I am so frakking done." She lifted the automatic revolver from its holster at her hip and shot a single 0.34 caliber bullet. It hit Drusilla right between the eyes, but the vampire only giggled and pressed her wound against the man's lips.
"No," growled the Slayer, and she shot off another round.
The second bullet was followed by one, two, three, four more, Faith advancing steadily as blood and skin and fragments of bone splashed into the air, until the back of the vampire's head exploded, spraying Dean and Peter in the face with brain matter. Still, Drusilla laughed, and still Faith continued walking forward. Then she sprinted the last step and ducked low to shove a fire-hardened stake of wood through the woman's diaphanous dress and corset and into her rib cage.
Drusilla froze, mid-laugh, and a look of great surprise spread across her face. Then she smiled, grabbing Faith's hand in her pale, bony one, and squeezing so tightly that bone and tendon crunched together. "Yesss," she hissed, and mixed in with the malevolent pleasure in her eyes was a glint of what might have been gratitude.
Faith jerked her hand back in disgust, and the vampire crumpled into a pile of dust overlaying Dean's body. The hunter coughed weakly, but otherwise did not move.
Blood continued to spill liberally from the bite marks on either side of his neck, soaking the ruined collar of his plaid shirt and staining the concrete floor. His eyes were half-open, half-closed, and he did not look up as she knelt down to wipe the vampire blood away from his mouth and to check his pulse. It was faint, but there.
"Spike is going to frakking kill me," she observed aloud to Castiel.
"Who?" came the faint mumble from Peter, speaking for the first time.
"Cass, can you take care of this?" Faith pointed first to the man's vampire bites with her stake and then to Peter. "Then get them back to the house. Here," she pulled Peter's spider suit out of the backpack and tossed it over towards him.
The angel nodded. He traded the Slayer places and laid his palm against Dean's forehead. The marks on his chest and neck faded from bright red to pink to white and then disappeared entirely. Although the man did not open his eyes, his breathing deepened.
Next, Castiel stepped over to Peter. He touched the chains and ropes with that same palm, and they rusted and dissolved to pieces in an instant. He placed his hand on first one shoulder and then the next, and they popped into place with a loud crack that left the teenager wincing.
"But - " spluttered Peter, his wide eyes darting from the stern angel to the grim-faced Faith to the too-silent, too-still Dean. "Is he -"
"He'll live," said Faith emotionlessly.
"What happened to you?" the teenager gasped, at last taking in the dark smudges of dirt that clung to the woman's arms and face.
"Somebody thought it would be fun to bury me alive. It wasn't. Listen to Cass. He'll get you out of here okay."
Hoisting her crossbow up to her shoulder, Faith walked through the last of Drusilla's ashes and strode up the stairs towards the main floor. She had more vampires to Slay.