"We need to cool him down."
"I'm goin' as fast as I can."
"He's burning up!"
"Dean," they caught eyes in the rear view, "I'm worried, too, but keep your head on straight." Dad looked away.
Dean glared at the back of his father's head. He adjusted Sam in his lap, the kid shivering as Dean hugged him in closer. He brushed Sam's matted hair aside, grit his teeth when he felt the sweat – cold and clammy – that left Sammy with skin that'd give a ghost a run for its money.
The countryside was a blur of darkness, walls of mountainside and forest loomed on either side of the narrow highway.
"Dad...what the hell- I mean you think it was poison or something?" Dean asked. He caught dad's eyes again, watched him look back to the road and the blazing headlights.
"I don't know."
He didn't know.
"He was serious," Dean pushed. Dad turned a little and looked back at them in the backseat. "He seriously thought we'd put a hit on him. Like it's his fault that demon fucker-"
"Language."
"-bastard forced him. Why would he – I mean what the hell? Why'd Sammy think you'd go executioner on him?"
It was dark, too dark to see dad's expression at least. He didn't give an answer. Dean clutched his brother closer, knowing it was too tight, but screw it.
The motel was quiet except for the familiar hum of the heater. Sam peeled open his eyes, felt the crust at their corners tumble away when he rubbed at them. He turned his head toward the soft snoring of someone lying beside him.
Dean.
He looked the other way, toward the other bed. There was dad.
Why?
Why was he alive?
They didn't know what he was. He didn't know what he was. Maybe he told them about the blood, sure. He told'em. But they didn't know what he could do. They didn't know what it made him.
"Monster."
"Vampire."
Because what else was there on the planet that would want more? What else wanted to drink blood?
"Sammy?"
Freaking Dean and his freaking weird sixth sense, seriously.
His big brother rubbed at his own eyes, but concern already marked his brow. There were lines etched in his face, ones that had no business being on him at nineteen.
"Hey kid," Dean said, the lines fading a little. He smiled, "How you feelin'?"
Sam thought about it a second because he felt like crap. Broken arm, concussion probably, but it was more than bumps and bruises. It was more than aches and pains.
"I'm fine," he lied.
Dean knit his brows, the smile fading to a frown. "That right..? Busted arm, smashed head. But yeah, sure. You're fine."
Sam felt the red flood his cheeks and looked away. Dean seriously shouldn't... Sam wasn't his little brother anymore. He was something else. Something bad.
This wasn't going to end well. He could see it, right there.
Wasn't your fault, Sammy, but you kept on going with it – kept making the same mistake.
Again. And again.
The first time it wasn't your fault. But you did it again. And again and again and again to get to oblivion. That sick feeling. Power.
"So?"
Sam blinked, turned his attention to Dean. "So what?"
"What happened?" Dean asked in that weirdly gentle Dean-way. Like he talked to Sam when he was a kid - real little - and got picked on by the kids at school. Sam knit his brow.
"I told you."
"Yeah, but you didn't tell me why."
"I don't know, Dean, okay? It just...I don't know. It just wanted to mess with me or something."
Dean didn't say anything, just looked at him with those big green eyes. Just listened.
Sam groaned in frustration and buried his face in his pillow.
"I don't know," Sam muttered, "I just... don't... Look, Dean..? Don't tell dad."
"I promise."
Sam turned his head, dared to look at his big brother who looked for all he was worth utterly solemn.
Damn it.
Sam pushed himself up, leaned away from the pillow and spared their sleeping father a long glance.
Finally, "I moved something."
Dean raised a brow.
"With my mind."
Sam looked back, hesitance screaming every inch of the way. "I don't know what it did to me, but... it did something."
Dean was quiet a while, just looking at Sam. Then at the bed, at the door- dad, and the window. Anything. Everything. Processing.
Then, "Well, wait, Sammy. It coulda been Casper, right?"
Sam huffed, "Why would it hand me the stuff I'd need to salt and burn it?"
"We've seen it before, right? Maybe he didn't like being vengeful or whatever. Coulda know how to take the easy way out, right?"
Sam hadn't actually considered it before. There was a point there. Score one for Dean.
"Maybe," he agreed quietly, but Dean answered with a jerky nod
"See? You're fine dude, just a ghost. Nothin' we haven't dealt with before."
Sam didn't look convinced, but he bobbed his head in a compliant nod.
"Dad's not gonna kill you either, dumb ass."
He looked over to his brother, flush apparent. "I just thought-"
"Even if it were you doin' some kinda freaky Jedi mind trick- and I'm not sayin' it is - but even if it was, I mean c'mon, Sammy. Dad? Really?"
"Monster's a monster, Dean."
"Yeah, well a Sammy's a Sammy."
They stared each other down until Sam finally cracked a smile. It was tiny, but it was something.
Power line – power line. River, birds. The sun tucked behind purple, gray and pink clouds, all of them heavy and blotting and letting just a little orange peak through. Sam watched it all roll by, a blur.
Perfume and cigarette smoke – but it was faint – and dusk setting in too slow and the miles going by slower.
On one side of the sky it was already night, on the other the sun refused to sink.
Six hours from Virginia to New York and he had three to go.
The driver nearly hadn't let him board the bus, something about minors and Sam looked every bit his fifteen years – barely.
Father LeBore was the Chief Exorcist of the Archdiocese of New York and he was in Poughkeepsie. Father LeBore was gonna help Sam. He had to.
Sam flipped the book over in his hands, went back to the prologue. Demonology wasn't a fun topic. It was old and hard to read. Solomon and others like him didn't exactly speak English back then and the translations were worse than the epic poems.
Nothing he couldn't handle, though.
It was hard. Half the time Sam wanted to snort. Hall's writings and Solomon's excerpts explained angels and demons and everything in between - but it was the 'in between' that he knew. That was the part that was real - Sam'd seen it face to face and 'in between' was what killed his mom.
He wondered, just for a little bit somewhere around Philadelphia, if maybe the angels were real too.
The old lady across the aisle was giving him the stink eye again. Sam couldn't blame her – his phone had been ringing non-stop since mile marker ten and putting it on vibrate didn't help stifle the annoyance.
Sam mouthed a quick, 'sorry' at her and reached into his pocket, the buzzing against his leg starting to make it a little numb after call – what was it, thirty-six now?
Big, black letters stared accusingly up at him in a glow of blue.
Dean Calling
Six calls from dad. Thirty from- Thirty-one from Dean.
Sam looked back to the book in his hands. Old and delicate, it was stolen from the Library of Congress by some unnamed hunter at some unnamed time. A strange symbol, a hexagram – an Aquarian Star, Sam eventually figured out – was marked in ink on the top right corner.
No other marks, none could be found like it anywhere else in or on the book.
Sam tucked the symbol away as an interesting tidbit and opened the book to where he'd crimped one page's corner.
"Everything has a pedigree. Everything, whether animate or inanimate, whether a thing of sense or a creation of the mind, every idea whether based on fact or the growth of a delusion, every truth and every error, has its pedigree.
A pedigree is a line of ancestors, a chain of causes and effects, each link first an effect and then a cause. Rarely, if ever, is an effect the result of an isolated cause, but causes cross and interlace in such endless combinations, that novel effects are continually being produced."
It read more like Darwin than Demonology.
Still, what a novel consideration it wasn't. Obviously everyone descended from everything. Everyone – everything could be traced back.
Hall's claim, though, was that this was true for the literal, honest to God, actual Devil.
Everything had a pedigree.
Why shouldn't Lucifer?
Sam swallowed the bile in his throat, swallowed it back down and let it fizz in his gut.
Maybe angels were real. But that would mean that there would be a bad one, too.
Would salt and consecrated silver keep the Devil away?
Sam set his forehead against the window; he let the cool glass temper the uncomfortable and feverish train of thought until it faded.
Two hours and forty-five minutes til New York.