Chapter Twenty-Nine: In Which Jody Plays the Game

"That is it! I'm calling Jody."

Jody pressed the phone closer to her ear in order to hear the protests in the background, but she still couldn't distinguish much. It seemed that the people on the other end were fighting over the phone, because the receiver jostled back and forth.

"Ellen?" Jody said uncertainly, pressing the receiver closer to her ear as if she could clear up the garbled conversation. "Is everything okay?"

If they'd been kidnapped by a demon or something like that, Jody was not looking forward to cleaning up that particular mess.

"I've got a case. You in?"

Things had been rather quiet in Sioux Falls lately. Jody would be lying if she said she wasn't itching for something to do.

"What is it?"

"Bobby."

Needless to say, there were skid marks on the road outside Jody's house less than five minutes after she put the phone down. It only took Jody another fifteen to make it all the way up the meandering path to Bobby's scrapyard slash house.

"Ellen? I'm gonna kick the door down if you're not here in three seconds!" Jody shouted.

Despite herself, Jody's fingers tightened reflexively around the cool metal of her badge. It wasn't likely that the creatures Bobby and Ellen tangled with on a regular basis would respect her jurisdiction, but it made her feel a little more prepared anyway.

Jody took a step back when she heard another round of scuffling behind the door. She reached one hand for her small bottle of holy water and the other for her gun.

"Don't kick anything!"

That was Bobby. Jody breathed a small sigh of relief.

Finally, the door swung open. Jody raised her eyebrows at the two disheveled hunters standing in front of her. Ellen's hair stuck up at wild angles and Bobby's forehead glistened.

"So, should I come back later, or—"

Ellen sighed, "No," at the same time that Bobby said, "Absolutely."

"Okay, I'm getting conflicting messages here."

Before Jody could so much as figure out what was going on, Ellen yanked her into the house. Bobby scowled.

"What's going on?"

If it was possible for Bobby's frown to deepen, it would have.

"This idiot," Ellen said, "went and sold his soul."

Was this really her life now? Jody felt just the tiniest bit faint.

"What?" Jody did her best not to yelp, but she probably failed. "Bobby, what were you thinking?"

Bobby gave her a dark look. "I was thinking that I was saving the world."

Jody just blinked. Ellen sighed and launched into a quick explanation. Apparently, the two boys and their mother that had showed up the day her husband had—the day she'd met Ellen, were knees deep in apocalypse. Bobby cut in to explain that in order to stop it, they'd needed to find Death.

Frankly, Jody was getting a headache.

Ellen went on and told her that Bobby had decided the best course of action was to get the information by any means necessary. In this case, his soul.

"So, uh, what does this entail?" Jody asked, a little shakily.

"We've got seven months before I've got an eternity of Hell to look forward too," Bobby said grimly.

"He didn't want to drag you into this," Ellen added.

Jody didn't know quite what to think about that. Rather than worry about what that could possibly mean, she decided to focus more on the task at hand.

"Okay then. What can we do about it?"

Ellen gestured for her to follow into the living room. Bobby grumbled something under his breath, but clomped on in anyway.

"We have…an idea."

To Jody's surprise, they led her down into the basement. It looked pretty neat compared to the rest of the house (not that it was overly difficult to achieve that) aside from the woman tied to a chair in the center of the room.

"Um."

It had been a fair few years since Jody had been over the rules of officer conduct, but she was pretty sure that, as a sheriff, she was duty bound to report a kidnapping.

"This isn't what it looks like," Bobby put in hastily. "She's a demon."

After her first run-in with the supernatural, Jody had done some research of her own. She'd managed to get her hands on the notes of a pastor in Blue Earth, Minnesota that had died under some pretty mysterious circumstances. His interpretations of the lore had been pretty close to what she'd learned so far.

"Wait a second, does that mean she's possessed?"

Ellen nodded, but the woman—the demon—was the first person to speak.

"Two lady friends? Compensating for the wife, Bobby?"

Wife? As well as Jody has gotten to know the two of them over the last year or so, they didn't spend a lot of time talking about their past. She only knew that Ellen had once had a daughter because she'd comforted her over losing her son again.

Bobby's only response was dump an old water bottle—presumably filled with holy water—over the demon's head. She hissed in pain and tried to withdraw to no avail.

"Isn't that hurting the host?" Jody asked, thinking back to all the missing persons reports that she'd seen come across her desk over the years.

How many of them had been taken from their homes by a creature lodging themselves in their body?

"It's dominos," Ellen said with a heavy sigh. "See, if we kill the demon now, it kills the host. But if we don't, the host dies when the demon smokes out and the demon goes on to kill other people. If we stop it here, it stops. If we don't, it doesn't."

Jody couldn't argue with that logic. She was a sheriff, she made those kinds of choices all the time. But there was something about knowing that there was an innocent woman in there somewhere that made it hard to get past.

"Why do you need me?"

Jody had been getting a bit of a crash course in the supernatural from the two of them, but she didn't think learning about demon torture would happen this early in the game.

"Well, someone's bound to hear her at some point," Bobby pointed out. "We figured it'd be better if there was some law enforcement here to start. Plus, we need someone to man the phones."

The phones?

/

"You don't look a thing like your granddad."

Sam looked up from the research laid out in front of him. Standing on the other side of his teetering stack of books was Deanna Campbell, hands resting lightly on her hips. She scrutinized him carefully, clearly looking for a resemblance she couldn't find.

"Yeah? What'd he look like?"

After a little more than five years on the road hunting, he'd learned not to question it when he ran into people. The hunting community wasn't a big place, and there were only so many strange cases cropping up in an area at a time. It made sense that they'd meet up with her again at some point.

"He was bald, for one thing," Deanna laughed. "Course, he had a full head of hair when we got married. Used to tease him about it."

She looked off into the distance, eyes developing the same look that Mom usually got when she talked about Dad. Sam wondered if the angels had set up the Campbells, too.

"Maybe you'll go the same way," she added, spark back in her eyes. "Feeling better?"

He'd been practically incoherent when she'd left. The fact that he was sitting upright was a marked improvement.

"Yeah."

Mom didn't seem suspicious about Deanna's resurrection (and maybe she had a right to be because it seemed that the Winchester-Campbells just couldn't stay dead) but Sam had his reservations. He'd been raised for Dean's soul, Dean had been raised so he could be Michael's vessel, and he'd been raised again because Death was feeling…charitable?

"You're nervous," Deanna noted, plunking herself down beside him. "Can't say I blame you, personally."

"Any leads on who brought you back?"

Her face darkened. "Nope. I'm working on it, though. And those alpha monsters."

So that's where Mom got it. Whenever she faced a problem, her first instinct was to find the most difficult case she could to distract herself.

She grinned at him. "I got the alpha rugaru the other day. Now that's an adventure. No time for that, though. What's the word on this one?"

Sam shifted his papers so she could get a better look. "Well, whatever it is, it's taking the hearts of the vics."

/

As it turned out, manning the phones was every bit as un-glamorous as it had sounded. Jody made herself comfortable behind Bobby's desk and skimmed through his lore books, trying her best to ignore the screams of the woman downstairs, Bobby's low growl and Ellen's sharp, no-nonsense tone.

"Yeah?" she asked, scooping up the phone on its third ring.

"How do you kill a Lamia?"

Lamia? The creature hadn't come up in any of Ellen or Bobby's lessons so far. Jody was too distracted by the familiar voice on the other end of the line to dwell on it.

"Dean? Dean, right?"

"Sheriff Mills?"

A rustling noise, and someone else on the other end of the line spoke up.

"Mom says hi, by the way. How'd Bobby convince you to take the phones?"

As she explained what was going on, Jody thumbed through a book titled Tales Around the World that had clearly been stolen from the Sioux Falls library. Jody doubted that Bobby had ever paid the overdue book fees.

Dean swore under his breath. "I forgot about that. Sort of small potatoes with everything else going on, but now that things have calmed down…tell him to hang in there, will you?"

"Will do. Oh, here it is."

Japan. Well, at least now she had somewhere to start. Jody flipped open a new book and found the index, swearing to herself that she would get Bobby to digitize his library if it was the last thing she ever did.

"Silver knife, blessed by a priest."

/

The Lamia sure looked better dead than it had alive. Mary absentmindedly wiped some of the blood from Dean's face. When it clung stubbornly to his forehead, she wet her finger with her tongue and tried again.

"Mom! Seriously?"

Deanna laughed. "Always knew you were going to be that kind of mom."

She glanced over at Sam, who was massaging his forehead with his fingertips. Mary sincerely hoped the Lamia had given him a nice egg and he hadn't broken down the wall in his mind.

Dean's phone rang, so he walked off to the side to answer it. Mary looked down at the Lamia again. That goo was going to be a pain to get off her shoes.

"So, this Bobby you were calling. Bobby Singer?" Deanna asked.

"Yeah. He's sort of a go-to man for hunters. Family friend, though."

Deanna shot her a sideways glance. "Friend?"

"Mom!"

She laughed. "Naw, you were never gonna end up with a hunter."

She wasn't when there were angels involved, at least. For a brief moment, Mary considered telling her what she had learned about the Cupids' role in her relationship with John, but decided better. Her mother might storm the gates of Heaven itself.

"Hey, Sam, how fast can you get us plane tickets to Scotland?" Dean asked.

"An hour, tops," he said, pulling out his laptop.

How he was managing to get a wi-fi signal out here was beyond Mary. Always curious about the computers that she didn't quite know how to use, Deanna wandered over to peek over his shoulder as he started clicking through websites.

Mary didn't have a clue why they were headed to Scotland, but if it was about Bobby's soul, she didn't care. "Hey, Mom, do you want to come?"

"Always wanted to see Scotland," Deanna mused. "Real sweet of you, Mar, but he'll be wanting me back."

"He'll?"

Deanna blinked. "Did I say that? Well, Mary, you know how my head's going. Getting resurrected will do that to you. I'll be seeing you, hon. Just not right now."

She hightailed it out of there just like she always did. Mary watched her go, an unsettled feeling still resting in her gut.

Deanna Campbell had been saved. But by what?

/

"Those Winchesters of yours nearly got me killed!"

Cas's heart technically didn't need to pump, but it still hurt when it skipped a beat. Crowley paced back and forth across the testing room they'd thrown together for the alpha monsters. Deanna Campbell stood with her hands on her hips, watching him go.

"Don't you touch them," Cas growled.

At the same time, Deanna jumped in with, "I'll do it myself if you go near my daughter."

Crowley ignored her completely. "Do you want to open Purgatory or not? Good luck with that if I'm dead. Keep them on a short leash!"

Cas merely stared at him. "You act like I can control them."

Crowley gritted his teeth. "Get them to back off or the deal's off and they're dead. Just like that."

He snapped his fingers and vanished, leaving Deanna and Cas in the room by themselves. She fixed him with a cold stare.

"I don't know the full story, Halo, but I can't believe you're working for him."

They were working together—he'd never work for a demon—but he didn't bother correcting her.

"You are," he pointed out instead.

Deanna shook her head. "It's for Samuel."

So that's what Crowley had promised her. Her husband, safe and sound. Cas had seen that weakness in Mary enough to understand.

Seen it often enough in himself.

He wouldn't let any harm come to Dean—to any of them. No matter what it took.