A/N: First off, big thanks to my beta, Dimeliora, who's been making her way through a massive pile of draft for this-the next seven chapters, in fact. (The end is in sight, folks.) So the good news is, we're back on track, and this will probably update weekly through to the end of the story.
It won't, however, continue to update here.
This is the last chapter I'm planning to post to FFN, and although I'm leaving my stories up here for now, I may delete them off of here eventually. I like to be able to make tweaks to my stuff if I read back and notice a typo or missing word, and FFN's doc management system makes that about as difficult as possible; this rich text editor I'm typing in right now strips out my dividers, and likes to be cranky when I manually put them back in (eta: case in point: IT JUST STRIPPED OUT ABOUT HALF OF THEM FOR THIS CHAPTER, RENDERING THE ENTIRE THING NONSENSICAL. THANKS, FFN, YOU ARE GRAND). Even though the changes I make after posting are usually small and inconsequential, it bugs the hell out of me to have multiple, slightly different versions of my stuff floating around the internet-but syncing things up on here is just too much of a pain in the ass.
So, if you would like to continue to read this story, head on over to ArchiveofourOwn dot org (AO3): archiveofourown users/ MadBadAndPlaid/ pseuds/ MadBadAndPlaid. (Not that you can even follow that link-because of course FFN doesn't allow hyperlinks. Nor can you simply copy and paste that url into your browser and take out the spaces, because FFN also doesn't allow you to select and copy text anymore-a wonderful feature that does nothing to prevent pirate sites from scraping our stories and archiving them, but does hamper fans' ability to share links and discuss stories. A+, FFN!)
TL;DR: This is the last chapter I will post to FFN. I will continue to update on AO3. You can find my stories under the same handle, MadBadAndPlaid. Huge thanks to all who have been reading and reviewing on this site; I hope you'll continue to enjoy on AO3, where the site design makes it easy for me deliver a better reading experience.
And now, without further ado, the fictional universe where everything hurts.
:::
"I want you to do the divination ritual again."
"Do you know what time it is?"
Dean knew exactly what time it was. He had, in fact, been acutely aware of the clock since 5:39 p.m. on Friday, April 6, 2012. If Canby didn't know that yet, then he wasn't as bright as he liked to think. "Yeah, and it's earlier here. What, is it keyed to the phases of the moon or something?"
Canby let out a put-upon sigh. "I got to put the phone down."
That it wasn't "I'll call you back" suggested Canby already had the herbs and stuff set up, which meant he'd found the blood Dean had left in the fridge. Good.
After about two minutes, during which Dean tapped his foot and watched Sid's kitchen clock (Hello Kitty, which Dean just found disturbing), Canby was back on the phone, yawning. "Still alive." He paused. "Not… quite as alive."
"Come again?"
"The flames are a reflection of… call it life force. They aren't quite as high as last time, not quite as strong."
Dean had known this was a possibility. It wasn't like he thought Sam was at Club Med, but he hadn't been prepared for definite information. "This is taking too long, Canby."
"You're telling me. I can't even smoke while you're fumbling around out there."
Dean could not have given less of a shit about this asshole's nicotine fix. "Look, I found the cyclops and killed it, but he—it didn't have the Brand, either. I'm going to have to track down the one that does have it, and it'd go a lot faster if I had Sam."
"That's not how this works."
"Do you want your fucking museum piece or not?"
"Very much, a great deal more than I ever did before I met you. But that really doesn't have any bearing. Besides, thought you were some hunting legend. Are you trying to tell me you can't close the deal?"
Dean thought he was starting to see why Rufus had disliked this guy so intensely. He started throwing open cabinets, looking for a suitable container and grabbing a steak knife along the way. "I want you to do the ritual every day."
"I'm out of blood."
"I'm overnighting you a pint." Dean found a thermos with a good screw-top seal. Perfect. "You run low, you call me. Something changes, you call me."
"Alright."
"Say it, make it a statement that's ironclad with your truth spell or whatever."
"I will perform the same pyromancy I showed you daily with your blood unless physically prevented from doing so, and I will inform you of the status of your brother's vitality." Canby paused. "Do you really want this distraction, Dean?"
Dean's jaw clenched. "I'll text you the expected delivery time."
"As you like. Anything else? I got animals to tend."
"If my brother dies because of your bullshit—"
Canby laughed. It was hearty, almost warm, and for half a second Dean was too shocked to be angry. "Oh, I can imagine. I can well imagine. So hurry up, will you? I got a list of ways I'd prefer to die, and you don't even make the top ten."
He hung up.
Dean ran a hand through his hair, wincing when he brushed the knot Sid had left him on his temple. The concussion wasn't good news, even if getting knocked unconscious practically qualified as sleep for them at this point. As he tourniquetted his arm and bled himself into the thermos, he knew that losing a pint wasn't going to do him any favors, either, but he didn't have time for a bubble bath and a nap. Not with Sam's—Sam's life force or whatever waning.
What did that mean, anyway? Some demon or angel torturing him? A djinn draining him slowly?
The wall coming down?
Dean had been here for hours. He'd checked the attic (empty), tossed Sid's laundry pile (redolent of Axe), even gutted his giant bean bag. No sign of the Brand; no clues to where it was. No sign of the special monster steel that had gone missing from the mill, either. He didn't know what that meant, but he didn't like it.
Sid had confirmed that a cyclops did have the Brand, and that it wasn't in Chicago. That was something. But "not Chicago" left a lot of country—a lot of planet—to search unless Dean could dig a lead out of this house.
His failsafe was Bobby, an email with everything he had on Sam's disappearance queued to send if Dean stopped resetting the timer on it. But he wasn't feeling great about Bobby either, at this point. Canby's geas prevented him from calling trusted allies unless he broke the deal completely but not, apparently, from receiving voicemail. The one Bobby had left him the night the foreman died at the mill had cursed Dean roundly for not having warned him that their FBI scheme was burned in the entire state of Rhode Island.
What an almighty fuckup.
A wave of dizziness hit him and Dean leaned heavily against the kitchen counter. He might not have time to sleep this off, but he was going to have to put something in the tank.
He opened the refrigerator. The platter Sid had made up the night before was there, leftovers neatly saran-wrapped. Dean stared at it for a minute, then shrugged and took it out. He grabbed the 99¢ hot dog buns off the top of the fridge too.
The smell of feta hit him as soon as he unwrapped the plate. It was strong, but not unpleasant. He could really go for some of that, actually. He loaded up a bun with chunks of lamb and sharp, crumbly cheese. His stomach rumbled. Then he stopped with the bun halfway into his open mouth.
You gotta try this fresh feta. Cousin Sakis sends some every year for Easter.
How in the hell had he missed that? Cousin. The son of a bitch had been fucking with him the entire time.
Dean was on his feet. Easter had been all the way back on April 8th, two days after Sam had been taken. But Orthodox Easter had been on April 15th, a week and a day ago. And Sid the Cyclops—metalhead, shift worker, bachelor incarnate—had not, when Dean was searching this house earlier, come across as a guy who took his trash out like clockwork.
Dawn was just firming up outside when Dean circled back to the recessed stairwell leading to the basement. Sure enough, the blue plastic recycling bin there was half full. He started tossing items out. Contents: nine beer bottles, two pie plates, stack of catalogues, Forging magazine, styrofoam takeout clamshells, paper towel tube—and one cardboard box, neatly collapsed.
He held it up and read the address field. TO: Sideris Katopodis, 919 N 99th St, Chicago, IL. FROM: Sakis Voskos, PO Box 497, Huntsville, UT.
Dean's heart soared in blood-donation giddiness and, pushing up from beneath the exhaustion and this almighty mother of a headache, savage triumph.
"I'm coming, Sammy. Hold tight."
A woman in a green victory suit sat on a bench. Her back was to him. Her hair was dark. Her ass was round. She was flipping through an oversized photo album of black-and-white architectural shots.
Just you wait till it's yours, she said. Red nails turned a page.
A room. Pale wallpaper with a silver stripe. Plants everywhere, old and dry, and oh, shit, he was supposed to come back and he never did. Jess was standing before their birdcage in a satin nightgown, prodding the dead goldfinch inside with a twig. She knew he was there but wouldn't turn. "Baby…." She shook her head. Disappointment, resignation. "Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam."
She walked out and became Lindsey. He couldn't remember her being so thin but he knew those vivid blue eyes, and they were in that bar in Oklahoma again. No, they were passing under the bar, to a church basement. Stale doughnuts and instant coffee and If anybody is here for the first, second, or third time, please raise your hand so we can welcome you. Guy in a leather jacket raised his hand. "I got a brother; how do I kick that habit?"
"Fuckin' junkies," Lindsey said with disgust and a New England accent. "Always got a sob story."
"Why're you being such a bitch?" Sam asked, bewildered. "You brought me to this meeting."
She hadn't heard him. "Walking time-bomb," she sing-songed.
"No." Sam seized her. One hand held her upper arm, the other drove in the knife. "No." Her body jerked every time he stabbed her but she never reacted, like he wasn't even there.
Tunnel vision. No; he was in a tunnel. He was both hot and cold.
I always knew you had it in you, a voice whispered all around him.
No, not a tunnel, but the pipe.
Sam woke.
His scalp itched, and he reached up to find dust in his hair. He had a fragmentary thought that he'd slept so long he'd gotten dusty, but then he clocked that the banging echoing down here was Lindsey, hammering at the concrete. It was pitch black. He twisted in the confines of the pipe and felt at the spot right at the bottom of the vertical shaft. There was a pile of grit there, not large, but present. A grimy little layer of progress.
But his body was slick with sweat, and his arms didn't want to support him as he crawled out to his own water source. He collapsed on his side there, shaking.
Quick inventory: sick, dehydrated, starving, stuck. Little he could do about the last two at the moment. The second he could fix, albeit one drop at a time. The first—the first he would just have to ride out.
He could. That he had a fever he could no longer deny, but he'd had worse ones. Not while imprisoned in a sewer or slowly starving, but, hey, he liked a professional challenge now and again.
He stayed curled up in the alcove for a long time, waiting for his mind to clear and trying to pep talk himself that he wasn't completely useless yet.
Sometime later—an hour, maybe? A night?—movement drew his attention to a spot on the floor. It was the three-footed rat, approaching slowly, nose testing the air. Canny little thing. Probably had to be, to survive missing a limb. Clarity settled on Sam. He watched the rat come nearer and nearer and curled his fingers around the blackjack in his pocket.
Finally it was arm's length away. It stopped and licked at a puddle.
Sam let go of the blackjack. The rat remained, drinking, for some seconds before wandered unhurriedly off.
Time passed in the spasmodic, uncomfortable, over-lubricated way it did down here. Like diarrhea. His fever fluctuated, and the darkness felt like it was vibrating. He tried not to think, or to remember his dreams. Throughout, from above, came the sound of Lindsey hammering.
At some point his limbs started obeying his commands again. The film of sweat and filth over his body was more than he could stand though, and so he honed somebody's sternum down to the finest blade he could manage. It wouldn't do a thing to the ghost, but he could use it to scrape his skin. Dry baths: another of Dad's old survivalist tricks. Another gift from Yellowstone. The motion was repetitive, the object trivial, but it gave him something to focus on.
He was doing this when Lindsey called down to him. It was the first she'd spoken since he'd been up there. "Sam? Are you there?"
"Yeah." It came out hoarse; he cleared his throat. "Yeah, Lindsey, I'm here. You okay?"
"Fine. Can you come up here?"
"I—" He bit his lip. "What do you need?"
"I've almost got one of these bars free."
It took a minute for that to process, but when it did, Sam jumped to his feet. The head rush nearly put him flat on his face, but he didn't care. "Lindsey, that's—that's amazing! You're amazing! Okay, here's how you can use it against—"
It occurred to him suddenly that he hadn't actually heard her hammering for a pretty long time, and that that was weird if she was spitting distance from her first real weapon against the thing that had been starving and terrorizing her for months. Just as it did, she said, "The bones finally broke. I used the pieces, but those broke too, and— I don't have anything left to work with and the bar's still stuck. You said there's more down there?"
His excitement turned to apprehension. He didn't want to think about how much climbing the pipe would drain him now. The way he was feeling, he wasn't even sure that he could.
"One end's almost out, I really think it's almost out," Lindsey said.
He couldn't help picturing what shimmying up the pipe entailed: how much strength it took to push against the walls, and then to hold himself up over the sheer drop; how much pain he'd been in after the last time. How many calories it would take.
But this could be the one thing standing between him and his brother, and Dean wouldn't stand here wringing his hands. He wouldn't be calculating the cost, and he sure as hell wouldn't hesitate over the pain. Dean would persevere.
Sam pulled off his shirt for a makeshift sling and started loading bones into it. "I'm coming," he promised.
Chicago to Utah was a twenty-hour drive. Dean might have been able to do it in a day, if not for the concussion, but it took two and there was nothing he could do about it. So he had time, as skyscrapers gave way to prairie and mountains rose up out of the plains, to think.
Sid had asked him who he thought the ur-blacksmith made something like the Brand for in the first place. Someone who could use it, presumably. Dean thought about Alex Karras's ugly Masonic painting, about Strabo and Homer and Hesiod and all the other shit Canby had gift-wrapped for him that Dean, despite better resolutions, had been in too much of a hurry to unpack. Not one breed of cyclopes, but two: the blacksmith and the herdsman.
Placed beside the legendarily strong smith who could manipulate metal on an atomic level and control furnace reactions with his mind, a guy who made cheese and watched sheep didn't sound very scary. But Dean had been doing this work for a long time, and he did not find that reassuring.
Huntsville was a tiny town in the eastern foothills of the La Sal mountains a couple hours south of Salt Lake City. Its main distinguishing feature was that it was large enough to have a post office that served unincorporated areas that were even tinier. Inside the post office, a somnolent postal employee informed Detective Roger Waters of the Salt Lake City PD that the owner of Box 497 did not live in town, paid cash annually, and had no contact information on file.
So the PO box was a bust. No surprise there; Dean had never expected it to be that easy. He'd told Canby this would go a lot faster with Sam, and he'd meant it. Well. What would Sam Winchester do?
Sam would run it down.
Besides the post office, Huntsville did have something else worth the drive. It was something in which small, rural towns actually tended to excel: genealogical and property records. Sakis Voskos could not be found in any of them, but a Search the Web inquiry for just "Sakis" informed Dean that this was a diminutive name for Athanasius. Since he seemed to be having a run of luck with the crudest tools the internet had to offer, he plugged Athanasius Voskos into a translation engine. He got back "deathless shepherd."
Sakis Voskos might not exist in records, but Athanasius had immigrated to Carbon County in 1893 along with a lot of men from a lot of countries who came to work on the railroad and in the mines. He appeared on the company payroll of the Denver and & Rio Grande Western Railroad until 1898. After that, he disappeared. But it must've been a family name, the librarian helping Dean said, because in 1949 the deed for a private inholding in what became La Sal National Forest that year was grandfathered in for, yes, Athanasius Voskos. Very popular in the family, that name. In 2007, yet another Athanasius had filed an updated survey of the inholding boundaries with the county.
It was zoned for agriculture. He had a ranch.
It took a couple of false starts, but Sam made it to the top of the pipe. While Lindsey took the bones he'd brought, he checked the excavation. She wasn't wrong: they were close.
"You're almost through on this end," he said, probing it.
Her face was pinched with anxiety. "But the other end—we've barely touched it."
Sam tested the flexibility of the rebar. "You work where you've been working, and I'm going to try something on the other side. When one end is free, I think we might be able to pry it out without excavating the whole thing."
They went to work.
There was tension, though the physical demands were taking up most of Sam's attention. Working in the confines of the shaft was like something out of Kill Bill: focus. See the concrete. Punch forward. Repeat. So it was Lindsey who actually spoke first.
"The ghost—it's been for me, now. It's been for Jacob. It never bothers with Marian. So… do you think it's time? Will it be you, next?"
Sam thought of the spirit hanging silently in his chamber while the others slept on. The message had been clear: it was waiting for him to weaken. Well, he was pretty weak now. "I don't know. Maybe." See the concrete. Punch forward. "I don't… really know what will happen, when it does. I know what Jacob is hoping for, but I don't know if—" If I can hack it, if I still have abilities, if I'll bring down the wall in my head when I try. "If it doesn't work out, you need to use the iron," he told her. "It'll repel the spirit. Maybe it'll even work on the doors and grates, I don't know. Try. And no matter what, survive. My brother's coming. He'll find this place. I don't want to think about what he'll do to pull it off, but he will. You're not forgotten down here, Lindsey. You're gonna make it through this."
He glanced at her and was surprised to see her eyes brimming. She sniffed once, wiped her nose with the back of her arm, and hit the concrete again. "Okay."
Focus. Punch. A hairline crack appeared.
"Something else," he said. "If I do get a shot at the ghost, I'll need all the ammunition I can get. You said it was interested in your work, your old house. I want you to tell me what those memories are about."
She resumed hammering. "I don't really remember, it was all a blur."
"I don't think less of you for it, but you're lying."
"Go fuck yourself."
"Answer the question and I'll do my best."
"I just did."
He kept his voice steady and put all his anger into his arm. Focus. Punch. "I've been working as an investigator since I hit puberty, Lindsey. I know when someone's hiding something."
"Newsflash: we're all hiding something."
Sam slammed bone into concrete. Something shifted minutely.
At the same time, there was a metallic clunk and Lindsey exclaimed, "I'm through! I can feel the end of the bar!"
Sam pushed up on the rebar from below. Lindsey shrieked. "It's moving!"
It was. The bar was free at one end, had a little bit of give. On the opposite side of the pipe it was still mostly encased in concrete, but their crude tools had taken a bite out of the lip of the shaft and, oscillating the bar gently, Sam could feel instability inside. "Lindsey, I think this is it. I'm gonna push, you're gonna pull, alright?"
"Wha's happening?" Jacob called up.
Sam braced himself. He barely felt the fever right now. "Got a grip, Lindsey?" She wrapped both hands around the rebar, and her knuckles looked like beads strung on wire but he could see the sinew in them. "Go slow. We want to break the concrete, not bend the bar. On three."
Lindsey pulled. Sam pushed. He could see the crack he'd made widen, but—
"Okay, okay. Let it down a sec. Alright. Again. One, two—"
Sam shut his eyes and focused on what the concrete felt like, not the fact his muscles were screaming. He pushed, pushed—
Lindsey went tumbling backwards and Sam just barely had time to duck as the bar came free at its butt-end. When he looked back up, there was a head-sized chunk of concrete missing from the floor, and Lindsey was on her ass staring at the bar in her hands.
She shrieked.
"You got it," Sam said, disbelieving.
"Sam—! Jacob, we got it! We got one of the bars!"
"You what?"
"We got a bar out! We got iron!"
They whooped, Sam and Lindsey and Jacob down below. For a minute, the elation was the best analgesic in the world.
Lindsey stood and tamped the butt-end against the hole it had left, knocking the concrete off into two big pieces. She was left holding a four-foot-long, beautiful, beautiful iron sword. She looked it up and down with her mouth hanging open.
When the cold and pressure slammed down around them and Marian started up, Sam was half expecting it. From the way she froze and darted a glance at him, he thought Lindsey probably was, too. "Guys, I think it's coming back," Jacob called up. "Is it— Oh, fuck, what if you pissed it off—?"
"Forget about that," Sam said, not to Jacob but to Lindsey. Then, more forcefully: "Forget about that. Focus. We can fight back, this time."
"What do I do?"
One of the pressure changes boomed through the sewer. "If it comes for me, don't do anything." He didn't have time to get down safely, but the fall wouldn't kill him. "If it comes after you, use it like a sword."
She adjusted her grip, staring at the wall where the spirit had manifested last time. For a second, her face crumpled, and then he saw her iron it out.
"Jacob, get ready to move that grate!"
Then it was there.
The spirit stood. Sam had never seen it stand. He hadn't thought it could stand. It was flickering, twitching between incoherence and something approximately bipedal. One moment it was all necrosis, the next he thought he could almost make out clothes. It shifted a step towards Lindsey.
"Stay in position, Jacob. Be ready to try that grate and keep trying!"
Lindsey shifted her feet and flexed her grip on the rebar. She didn't look away from the spirit. It shifted another step towards her, pale neck craning as if something from its missing face were sniffing.
"Swing when it comes at you, Lindsey. I'm right here. I'm right here with you. Just swing it like a sword and keep swinging until it gives up on you and attacks me, okay? Lindsey?"
Sam could see the dark line of the rebar tremble in her hands, but she stood her ground. The spirit shifted another pace forward.
One more and it would be on her. Lindsey and the ghost stared at each other. "Lindsey, now!"
She dropped the bar.
She just opened her hands and let it fall. It clanged against the floor. She made no move to retrieve it, her eyes still fixed on the spirit. The ghost spasmed, knobs and limbs jerking under shapeless skin, and then it slowly closed the space between them. Lindsey never attempted to move.
Sam stared.
There wasn't much show, this time. It just took her. The length of iron rebar lay inches from where she hit the floor, and a body-length away from where Sam was still caged.
The inholding Sakis Voskos owned didn't have an address assigned or, nominally, public access, but Dean had the survey the librarian had turned up for him and a map of the surrounding parkland. He was finished at the library by early afternoon. The librarian, the only fully awake person he'd met in Huntsville, advised him to wait until the next day to seek out his long-lost uncle Sakis, as the drive was likely to take time and the weather up in the mountains could be unpredictable even in what was nearly May. Dean thanked her, topped off the spare gas cans, and headed out.
It took even longer than she'd estimated. Voskos's inholding was connected to the outside world only by fire and service roads, including one that he could see from the map had to exist but wasn't actually on it. He had to drive up and down a stretch of SR-9827 for a good hour before he found the turnoff.
When he did, he wished he'd hot-wired a truck and left his baby safe in town. The road was a washed-out track of gravel and bald clay, and reckoning by the topo map, ran for three miles before it reached the probable location of the ranch. He crept along it at five miles an hour.
The sun was sinking fast toward the mountains when he bumped to the end of the track, long orange rays skimming down the slopes to illuminate fence lines, sheds, and, built into the hillside, a dwelling.
He got out of the car and stood in the yard. Pens extended on either side of it, but there were no sounds or smells of animals anywhere. Hay feeders and watering troughs stood empty. In the house sitting in the middle, every window was dark and cold.
The place was abandoned.
Jacob was calling out frantically. Sam made some reply, too numb to register what. He barely felt it when he lost his grip on the walls this time and half fell down the shaft.
He sat in the cold at the bottom without a single thought in his head.
Afterward, the first sign that Lindsey was awake was weeping. Quiet, steady, wordless. Sam sat there for a long time unable to formulate a response, just hearing it. It wouldn't stop, the weeping. The inconsolable weeping of a child.
"Lindsey."
His only answer was a louder sob.
Sam tried to understand. He tried to believe that dropping the bar had been an accident, or perhaps the ghost's compulsion, and not the choice it had looked like.
"Lindsey."
She sobbed one more time, sucking in snot with a wet, tearing noise and managed a, "Sam."
"Lindsey, just… why?"
"I just wanted to go outside," she whispered. Then, louder: "You can't make me give that up. I won't let you!"
Sam sat with his head in his hands as she repeated it, eventually screaming. You won't take that away from me. You won't. You won't.
By the time she subsided into crying again, another voice had joined her, just moaning low and compassionate: Marian. Lindsey and Marian, crying in stereo.
Lindsey hiccoughed, sobbed. "Is… Do you think God is punishing me?"
Sam didn't answer.
They listened to Lindsey's sanity disintegrate in the dark.
The weeping came and went. Sam wasn't even sure if she was sleeping. When he tried to talk to her, she'd reply, sometimes, with halting, random confessions: the $16 she stole out of her mother's purse. The shiny Lexus she clipped in a parking lot without stopping. Dropping bang-snaps down on a puppy that was always tied up in the next yard. Feeding seagulls rice at the beach.
But the rice thing was a myth. She'd read that somewhere. She'd never believed it anyway, that you could make birds' stomachs explode. She wouldn't have done it if she'd believed it.
Sam tried to convince her to give him the iron bar they'd freed. If he had that, if he had metal, he could remove the other three bars blocking the pipe. He could arm Jacob, and he could get into Lindsey and Marian's room to look for a way out in there, maybe get through to one of them. But Lindsey never responded to any of his attempts to bring the conversation around to the subject of their freedom.
Jacob still coughed when they talked. It sounded curiously dry; but then, coughs often did at the beginning of an illness. Sam gave him the next rat he killed. He wasn't sure he'd be able to keep food down, anyway.
The flu-like feeling in Sam's skin seeped down into his joints, and something started to happen to his thoughts. Past events kept bubbling to the fore, like something rotting at the bottom of a pond, and each time it got a little harder to index their proper place in time. The structure of them was changing, too. Whether his dreams were starting to bleed into his thoughts or his thoughts were just becoming more dreamlike, he couldn't tell.
He had to do something physical, no matter the caloric cost, or risk falling down rabbit holes he might not get out of. Casting about for a form of exercise that might serve as a final bulwark against insanity, he discovered that he knew yoga. He had not known any before he'd jumped in the pit. Sam had always thought of yoga as being a spiritual practice, but apparently you could be incapable of spirituality by definition and still like it. Who knew.
Sometimes, as he did the poses, other memories leaked through. Just flashes: motel carpets. Sleepless nights. Prostitutes admiring his body. Watching his brother's body as he slept.
His arms kept giving out and dropping him on his face. Bet that never happened to the other him.
The ghost came for Jacob again. Without the iron, there was nothing he could do to stop it, of course. Sam didn't know whether the spirit actually cared about Jacob right now or if this was just another display of violence on its part. Didn't know how broken it wanted him before it moved in for the kill.
How much the others would have to suffer before it was satisfied.
"Lindsey." Sam kept his voice neutral as best he could. He was at the bottom of the vertical shaft, as close to her as he could get without climbing. "Please throw down the bar." Silence. "Didn't you hear the ghost when it came for Jacob? Didn't you hear him screaming? If he has iron, he won't have to go through that again." Silence. "You want the spirit to take you outside, right? You should give the bar to Jacob. If he can fight the ghost off, he won't take any trips away from you anymore."
Silence.
He tried a few more times with the same result. He was starting to leave the pipe when she spoke.
"We had a dog named Dinah."
He stopped. He didn't want to hear whatever tearful confession this was going to be, but if there was any chance of getting through to her, he had to listen.
"She was a Golden Retriever. She was fat. Fat and stupid. Old and fat and stupid. She'd eat anything. That's all she'd ever do, eat and sleep." Her voice was thick. "Cousin Eric was always over at our house, because Uncle Tommy was always drinking and hitting Marmee and Dad was always working and Mom was always resting. Eric was a liar. He always hated me, he always told lies, he tried to make everybody think I was bad."
Sam stared at the side of the pipe. It was too dark to see it.
"He said I fed Dinah things that would hurt her. He said I hit her paws and pulled her fur. He was a liar, she was old and sick. Old and sick and disgusting. She threw up blood. She peed everywhere. That whole house smelled like it, forever."
She was quiet for so long that Sam thought she was done, had gone back to sleep. Then he heard her sniff, long and wet. Her voice cracked when she asked, "Do you think this is Hell?"
It was pitch dark inside the shaft, but the edges of his reality blurred.
"We have got to have a plan." Jacob sounded a little raw, a little ragged. A lot edgy. Sam couldn't blame him; he'd just finished sleeping off the ghost.
"Yeah." Upstairs, Lindsey had moved on to muttering, mercifully too low to make out words. "I know."
"So what do we do?"
Sam kneaded the bridge of his nose. The tremor never left his hands anymore. The heat of fever just left his skin more sensitive to the cold. "If we had the iron bar, I could dig the other bars out. I think I could get up the pipe one more time and stay there long enough for that. But without it— Breaking the concrete with bones took hours, Jacob. I have no idea how many. A lot of hours."
Jacob was silent for a long interval. "What about my other plan?"
Sam dropped his hands in his lap. "What about it, Jacob? I can't make the ghost come to me. I've already tried, in case you hadn't noticed. Instead it just keeps—"
"Okay, okay, shit, sorry. Sorry."
Sam exhaled harshly. "No, I'm sorry. I'm—" Losing my grip. "Yeah. Sorry."
They sat like that for a while. Lindsey's conversation with herself was getting to him even though he couldn't hear what she was saying. Maybe it was worse for that. He kept his own voice down to avoid antagonizing her, which was increasingly easy to do. "How are you still sane right now?" he asked Jacob. "Like—hell, you've been down here longer than I have and you're still… together."
"Honestly?" Jacob paused. "Good, old-fashioned escapism."
Sam laughed, the sound surprised out of him. "Tropical beaches and underwear models?"
"Pretty much."
"Good deal."
"I kind of… go away in my mind a lot," Jacob said after a minute. The confession was quiet. "With all the dark down here, it's easier to do than not, you know?" Sam knew. Sam really knew. "Growing up, I was always a bit of a neat-freak. Bethany was like polar-opposite, used to drive me crazy; I… well, I guess I like to be in control, to be honest. Get the feeling you do, too. Down here, we don't have any, so I think about the times in my life when everything went right, went exactly the way it was supposed to."
They were quiet for a minute. "I would push a small child into traffic for a shower right now," Jacob said.
The words were light, facetious, but still a direct hit on Sam's own worst dread of this place. He could take the slow starvation, maybe even the sensory deprivation to a point, but the filth— Sometimes, the dimness was a mercy: you couldn't see how bad it was. Sometimes that same dimness was the worst part: you couldn't be sure how bad it was. Because he'd been in Jacob's home, Sam had always felt like he knew him a bit, though he also knew that might be illusory. One thing he was certain of was that Jacob was a fastidious guy.
He fetched the scraping knife he'd made. "Here." He passed it carefully through the grate. "Old outdoorsman's trick: if you don't have enough water for a bath, scrape yourself down."
"Wow." The bone disappeared as Jacob took hold of it on the other side. "This is like razor-sharp, holy shit. Don't you want to keep it?"
"I can make another. It'll give me something to do."
"Thanks."
"I can hear you, you know," Lindsey said sharply. Sam jumped as her voice cut through the dark.
"Lindsey, we're just—" Jacob began.
"I know what you're doing. I can hear you down there, fucking—conspiring together."
"We're just talking about how to get out, Lindsey, how to get us all out—"
"Don't lie to me." Sam had never heard a human being snarl like that, and every hair he had sat upright. "You both think I'm so stupid. Stupid and helpless. Think you can just ignore me, think there's nothing I could ever do to you."
"Lindsey, listen to my voice," Sam said. "Focus."
He could hear her breathing all the way down here now, a guttural sound pulled up from somewhere deep in her belly. That feeling he sometimes got on a hunt when it was all about to go bad flooded through him. "I will kill you, you freak." Marian whimpered. "You think you can leave me here? I'll kill you. I'll make it slow. I know how."
Sam abandoned Jacob where he was softly chanting "oh fuck" behind the grate and started for the pipe. "Lindsey, I'm coming. It's okay. Just— I'm right here, Lindsey, I'm coming—"
"Don't talk to me like you know me!"
If Sam hadn't already been in the pipe, relatively close, he would never have heard Marian say, weakly: "Lindsey."
The growl that crawled down the walls of the pipe was all the warning Sam got.
From above came an impact and a clang. Someone cried out. Someone else grunted and snarled. And then whoever had the worst of this fight began to scream.
Sam swarmed up the shaft. When he reached the top, he saw a figure in blue on top of another with long black hair. Marian's screams were like nothing else he'd heard out of her, and Lindsey was making grunting, wet noises that Sam's brain refused to parse.
"Stop! Lindsey, stop!"
Abruptly Marian's screaming became squealing, over and over as cloth tore and Lindsey's head jerked from side to side.
Lindsey had dropped the bar closer to the shaft, but Sam still couldn't reach it. He strained from his shoulder to his fingertips, but it was too much distance to close. Marian's squeals were down to gurgles.
His hand found the chunk of concrete, and he threw it.
He couldn't see where exactly it hit Lindsey; it happened too fast and there wasn't enough light. But he saw her snap sideways under its impact and stop moving, and her bare ankle going still against the floor. Underneath her, Marian was motionless already.
Like that, chaos had been replaced by silence.
Sam wasted precious seconds staring at them before he renewed his struggle to reach the rebar. The remains of the grating dug at his clavicle, his neck. Slapping around at the floor, his hand met bone. Femur. He grasped it, reached with it, snagged metal. Pulled. Lost it. Reached again. This time the bar rolled toward him.
He didn't really register bringing the iron down on the concrete, or the chunks of the stuff flying, or the surge of adrenaline to thrust one, two weakened bars up and out of the mouth of the pipe. As soon as the opening was big enough, he forced himself through.
The women lay still where the nearest wall met floor. Marian's face was hidden under Lindsey's shoulder; Lindsey was face-down on Marian. Neither one was moving. Marian's legs were splayed and Lindsey's lay over them. They might have looked like crash dummies, had the diameters of their limbs not been far, far too narrow. Something dark ran down what was left of Marian's clothes.
Sam took hold of Lindsey under her shoulders to lift her off of Marian. It was like handling driftwood. Her blond hair was stained putty-gray, but there was something darker at her temple, something warm and leaking and concave. Sam felt for her carotid, harder, then harder.
"No." He sat down. "No."
Her lower face was a mask of red.
Marian was slumped against the wall. Her top had been torn open and her lap was full of blood. Everything from the moment he'd heard Lindsey snap to when he'd thrown the concrete had seemed to happen so fast; but it must have gone on for some time, because so much of Marian's skin was missing.
Every bone in her showed. It was a miracle she'd held on as long as she had even before this. He didn't know what else to call it. Anything this horrific, God was usually involved somewhere.
Moving slowly, Sam crawled over to her. There was a deep crater in her throat. He couldn't leave her sitting like that. He reached out to take her shoulder in one hand, her ruined neck in the other to support her head. Gently he guided the corpse down to the floor.
He looked down at it and found it looking back.
Dean searched the ranch. The house, constructed half in an abandoned mine, had no electricity. There was a generator, but it had been drained and disconnected. Unlike Sid's house, which had been overflowing with pop culture nods and the flotsam of modern life, this one was devoid of personal effects. The stone walls looked like the masonry in pictures of the walls of Mycenae.
The pens and paddocks were empty. Large pieces of equipment, like the hay baler, were still in place, but watering troughs were inverted on blocks and the hoof prints were faded. There was no lingering animal smell.
This place had been abandoned for weeks.
If it had been years, that might not have been as bad. A years-long absence would mean a years-long presence somewhere else, and that would be traceable. But this guy had pulled up stakes exactly long enough ago that he could be anywhere. The property, as far as Dean could tell, offered no clues about where he had been headed.
Dean had not been bullshitting about winning the geography bee. Geography had been his best subject in elementary school, and he'd gotten better at it with each passing year their father dragged them around the country. Central Utah was 2,400 miles from Rhode Island.
The air in the yard was shading from rose to blue when his phone rang. Mechanically, he pulled it from his pocket. It was Canby.
"Dean."
"What do you want?"
"A progress update."
A progress update. That was a good one. Dean would have to use that one sometime. "In our whole fucked up little ride together, you've never once been the one to call me, Canby, so what—" He stopped dead. "Is it Sam?"
Canby paused. "He's not doing well."
Dean forced himself to loosen his grip on the phone when the casing began to bow. "Anything you want," he said. "It's yours. You know I'm good for it, but find him now."
"I can't."
"I'm close, I can get this thing for you, but not without my brother, my sources—just— Please. I'm begging you, okay? Just let me save my brother!"
"You don't understand: I can't."
Dean dug the fingers of his other hand into his hair and pulled, pulled, pulled. "What are you talking about?"
Canby made a short, frustrated noise. "Dean, what did you think you were doing all this time? The magic we're working—it requires a power source, and that's you. Your bond. Your devotion. My part is to make ready the final sacrifice and observe certain rules of asceticism. Your part is to pass the trial you've undertaken, in order to be ready to undergo the ritual. You're on a path. A quest, if you like. It must be completed. There's nothing to work with, otherwise. If you want my help finding Sam, you have to finish this."
When Dean was silent, he went on, urgently, "Listen! This is going to work. I can feel it. I don't mean that like some coach giving a locker room pep talk; I mean that I can feel it, professionally. This potential that's building—it's strong. You do this, and I'll have what I need to get you back to your brother. I believe that. I really do."
Dean's voice shook, not wholly from anger. "You're just saying that so I won't ditch out," he said. "Trying to keep me from tearing up your fucking geas and jumping ship, leaving you with nothing."
"Sure. But it's all still true. Thanks to that geas, you know it's true. I can't lie to you."
Perhaps he couldn't lie, but Dean didn't doubt that he could still deceive him. "'Final sacrifice,' you said. What is it?"
"Nothing you'd morally object to."
That was no answer. But it scarcely mattered one way or another if he couldn't deliver.
"Look," said Canby, and for the first time Dean could recall he sounded hesitant. "I'll see if I can think of something that might help you without compromising the magic. On top of it seeming like an adequate quest object for the job, I really do want 'my museum piece,' as you called it."
"Fine."
"Where are you?"
"Utah."
"I'll call if I have something."
"Fine."
Canby rang off. Dean stood in the deserted yard and looked out over the Uinta Basin. The moon was rising in the east. It was a waxing crescent.
Sam sat between the women. Lindsey was dead. Marian was not.
She should have been. She'd lost too much blood, and too much tissue, to survive; but then, she'd lost most of her body mass and her mind, and clung to life regardless. Now that she was on her back, he could hear her breathing, fast and shallow.
She'd spoken, before Lindsey had attacked her. Just the one word, but it had been an attempt at communication, so someone was still in there.
"Marian."
She hyperventilated up at the ceiling.
"Marian? Marian, can you hear me?"
He should take her hand, probably. Touch her somewhere it wouldn't hurt, try to deliver something like comfort, let her know she wasn't alone. He didn't. He'd done enough damage without touching anybody.
As best he knew how, he kept trying to get something, anything out of her. But she only lay there, panting shallowly like a hit-and-run dog.
A cowardly part of him was waiting. It seemed like this couldn't last long, not with wounds that size on a body that damaged. Nevertheless it showed no signs of stopping. She was obviously in agony, but she wasn't dying.
It fell to him, then. He wasn't getting out of it. He shut his eyes for a moment, like the coward he was, before he moved over to her.
It was hard to think of this body as someone. The shape of it, the mass of it, the colors were all wrong. It looked like a corpse from a mass grave. But it wasn't a corpse. Marian's eyes were wide, her chest bobbing with her rapid respiration, pain stark on her face. He swallowed. Pain. Think about the fact she was in pain.
He cradled her neck in the crook of his elbow and started to compress.
Her eyes went wider and she began to struggle. Her heels fluttered against the floor. He constricted both sides of her carotid with steady, even pressure and started to count. Then he thought of the Frenchman in his cave, how it had taken him five minutes to count to 120.
Sam stopped counting.