There was a monster storm on the way as they crossed the campus, coming in on laughing wind that made Sam's ears ache and his eyes burn. There wasn't a tree in sight that still had leaves, the brown patches had raced along the grass like it was fire spreading them, and the flowers in every bed they passed were frost-death green and matted to the ground. The sky was the color of a week-old corpse and lightning flowed across it like burst capillaries.
"We got any kind of real game plan here?" Dean had to lean in close and practically shout into Sam's ear to be heard.
"Remember the okami?" Sam shouted back. "Last spring. The ones Vaughn found."
Dean grinned at that, mood having improved significantly, so excited he almost looked feral. Sam was used to seeing the expression on his face; on Presley's, it was unnerving. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
Sam tried the doors of the church with stiff hands. They didn't budge, so he stepped immediately aside and let Dean tear them right off the hinges and hurl them onto the lawn.
Quite a few of the staff, nuns and priests, were inside the sanctuary, as they saw when they entered. Huddled in the pews, the aisle. Sam had lost track of time, wasn't sure if they would have been there for Vespers by now or something else. They had turned to stare when the doors were torn open, but they all still seemed to be mostly preoccupied by what was standing on the steps leading up to the altar.
It looked like a man, olive skin, dark hair. Naked from the waist up, it was well-muscled, and wreathed in transparent, slow-moving flames that swept from hips to skull. They crystallized behind it in four massive wings, and over its head in a pair of steer's horns. Its bare arms and chest were covered in photographic grayscale tattoos, wheat and barley and grapes and olives, plants flowing into and out of each other, surrounding seven empty spaces. One on each shoulder, one on each pectoral, and the last three surrounding its navel.
Even from this distance, Sam could see its eyes were empty, charred pits, burned so deep you could see the dry arch of cheekbone on each side.
It detracted a little from the ridiculousness of the Wranglers and cowboy boots it was wearing.
It smiled at Sam and Dean as they stepped inside. The kind of smile an executioner offered a prisoner he'd come to genuinely despise. Sam heard Dean's eyes change.
Green was in front of him, facing it down from the altar with a crucifix held out like he was in a patient's room performing an exorcism. He had a black eye where Sam had hit him in the face with his elbow. He looked at Sam too, and the steely (if shaking) resolve on his face melted into something outraged, hateful.
"You!" Green boomed, plenty audible over the storm. "This was you, wasn't it? Neither you nor the dark masters you serve could stand the work we're doing. The salvation, the deliverance of souls to Heaven after they've been marked by Hell. But it's not going to work. I don't care how many demons you - "
"Demons?" The thing on the stairs interrupted, voice deep and mild, carrying an accent Sam would personally have loved to study. Not the time. It turned its empty gaze on Green. "You keep calling me that, priest."
Its flames, jumping and twisting in slow motion like seaweed underwater, grew steadily larger, and blue crept off his skin, seeping past all the other colors. Around it, pews and carpet smoldered, and staff scrambled free of the danger zone. The skin on Sam's face started to feel tight.
That burning smell was back, so strong Sam swallowed gag after gag. Dean muttered, low, "Smells like a damn cookout in here," which was true. If somebody's face had been held against the hot grill for twenty minutes at said cookout.
"You called me that when first I appeared. Are you so ignorant?" Still staring at Green, its head cocked slowly to the side. "That you've no idea at all how to separate one thing from another? That you can't recognize your benefactor?"
Green's face whitened, and at this point it could have been anger or fear. He lifted the crucifix higher. "You can lie as much as you want, but we recognize you. 'He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness - '"
"It's not a demon!" Sam had been scanning the church, trying to figure out a way to move forward, a next step, feeling desperately like he needed more time, almost agonizingly aware of Dean at his back, just waiting to be told what to do. He realized he needed to do something when he saw white starting to build in the flames. "It's not a demon."
Everyone was looking at him again, including the burning thing. It smiled again.
"Someone knows me, it seems."
At the altar, Green laughed. It sounded a little thin. "Not a demon."
"No." Sam set his jaw. "It's a god. The one you've been making sacrifices to since you first started punching people's tickets for them."
The fear in the church was momentarily replaced by shock and anger, a lot of yelling very briefly happening. The fear came back fast when the god started walking slowly down the aisle. At least its flames weren't blue anymore.
"Tell them, Gatekeeper." It was unsettling, feeling like something that didn't have eyes was looking right at you. "Name me."
Sam swallowed. "Moloch."
Moloch nodded. "Pleasant to be known," it (he? It was shaped like a man) murmured. "If only you hadn't dragged that...enduring atrocity into my lands." He gestured to Dean.
"Ooh, 'atrocity,'" Dean repeated. "That's a new one for the business card. Don't you think, Sammy?"
"Collin?" Green, who apparently hadn't noticed Dean before now, seemed gobsmacked.
"Moloch is a demon." Another priest interrupted, loud and angry. Hands on the backs of two pews, he pushed himself up straight, proud. "It's simple demonology. There is one god, and you expect us to believe it's this...this thing? And that we've been. I'm sorry, you think we've been worshiping it?"
His voice went almost laughably high and shrill with disbelief. With blue returning to Moloch's flames, Sam floundered, let the first thing in his head come out of his mouth.
"Hell recycles names," he started. "Th-they, uh, they plagiarize a lot from pagan gods and goddesses. Belphegor, Nergal. Probably got the idea from you guys actually, with the whole demonization thing, so technically speaking, yeah, Moloch's...probably a demon, but - " He flung a placating hand out towards Moloch. " - Moloch's also a god. Was a god first."
"And," Moloch said placidly, "last."
Sam felt Dean sidling up to him before he saw it. Leaning in, Dean breathed in his ear, practically no sound to the words, "Please tell me your actual plan is not to fucking filibuster the god of burning people to death."
"No! No, I just - "
Sam heard running footsteps, too late. He saw Green through Moloch's wing a split second before a stream of holy water leaped from the bottle in his hand, aimed squarely at Moloch's back. Hair a mess, eyes wild and furious, he bellowed, "In the name of - "
Of course the water didn't do anything but sizzle. And of course the exorcism didn't do anything but cut abruptly off when Moloch twisted and caught Green across the stomach with one beefy arm, backhanding him all the way to the front of the church. When he hit the cross on the wall, Sam wasn't sure if the noise he heard was it breaking or Green's bones. Both fell heavily to the ground with horrified gasping and screaming from the staff.
Moloch was already turning back towards them when Dean grabbed Sam's arm and teleported him to where the cross had fallen behind the altar. Dropping to one knee with Dean standing protectively over him, Sam paused, seeing Father Green inches away. When he went to check his pulse, Green grabbed uselessly at him with an obviously-broken arm, baring pink teeth at him. Sam couldn't tell if the blood was from his nose or his mouth.
"Call it off," Green told him, weak. "Please, call it off. Take me. Don't hurt...not anybody else. Let Collin go."
Sam pulled clear of his grasping fingers, wrenching a large splinter free of the wreckage of the cross.
"Know you won't believe me, but I hope you live," he said shortly. "Wanna see your face when I let my boyfriend set your sack-of-crap book on fire."
He stood and turned around, sliding the makeshift stake up his sleeve. Moloch had gotten a hold of Sister Bernard and was holding her up by the throat, watching with no emotion Sam could see as she thrashed weakly, weeping through her gurgling. A few other nuns and a priest were standing nearby, staring like they wanted frantically to help but didn't know how. Almost everybody else was either out of the church or in the process of very rapidly leaving, streaming through the doorway Dean had left open to the wind and the beginnings of rain.
Bernard's habit was starting to smoke, Moloch's flames spreading to her, as Sam swung himself over the altar and ran down the stairs.
"Put her down," he ordered. "You don't want any of them, you want me. I brought the demon here. 'Cause that's what made you angry, right? Him."
He pointed at Dean, who was of course inches from him. Looking at the two of them, Moloch lowered Bernard until the very tips of her shoes could touch the ground, letting her suck in some wet, reedy gasps. Then he laughed. Sam instantly wished he hadn't.
Dean's mountain analogy came back to mind. Boiling, bubbling vents of black smoke.
"They've made covenant with me," Moloch told Sam. "I take no pleasure in doing so, but they are mine to punish as I see fit for disobeying my laws. Revocation and reversal of my blessings: destructive weather, blight on their crops, death. For failing to expel a demon when they call themselves exorcists. When they claim to wield the power of Yahweh." He dropped Sister Bernard, whose legs failed to catch her. She immediately started retching, shaking hand almost but not quite touching the oozing, blistering burn on her throat. The air around it was still shimmering with heat. "You know more of His power than they do."
"They didn't know what they were doing." There were laws. All bound by laws, these kinds of things, and if Sam could trip Moloch with one he'd violated, knowing or unknowing, that could do it. "You heard the priest before, they're not choosing to make sacrifices here. None of the people they've killed have been dedicated to you."
Moloch stepped over Bernard, leaving her behind. The other nuns immediately swooped in once he was clear, to stamp out her still-smoking habit and haul her to her feet. They led her quickly out of the church, leaving only the last priest behind, half-crouched now in the pews with a bible in his hand.
"I am old," Moloch began. As he approached, Sam stiffened, and Dean moved closer, their shoulders a hair from touching. "Very old. Old enough to have learned how to change, even as my temples have crumbled, my shrines and effigies have been defaced. Do you know how many others of my kind I have seen die over the centuries because they failed to adapt? Family, friends, all who failed to taste the wind, all believing the original ways would always be there, would always be enough?"
"Your kind aren't usually open to change, in my experience," Sam replied. Because this was fascinating, and he was absolutely going to get as much of it down in writing as he could remember once it was all over, but mostly, he just wanted to keep Moloch talking. Let him get closer.
"Hubris," Moloch responded. "Fatal. We draw our life from humans, and you are much like the one who created you: you grow bored so very, very easily."
He'd come to a stop, still yards away. Dean spoke up.
"You talk about adapting, but it doesn't seem like you did all that hot," he pointed out. "Nobody believes in you anymore. You're dumpster-diving. The people here weren't just not sacrificed to you, they didn't even burn."
"Any innocent who dies in a war," Moloch said pleasantly, not nearly as angry about being addressed by a demon as Sam might have hoped, "is choice fodder. Including a war against your kind. Perhaps they aren't as satisfying as they would be if they had died in my name, but as I said, I've adapted. At least I'm the only one feeding here...and things have grown so much easier since the infernal were scoured from the world. Mostly, at least. Have I thanked you for that yet, Gatekeeper?" He addressed Sam. "Not that you deserve it, with the exception you made. It has never been my place to condemn any pursuit of pleasure, but I do not feel I've overstepped by saying what you've committed is foul."
"Been a while since we heard this kinda stuff," Dean muttered to Sam. "Gonna be honest, I almost missed it."
Sam cleared his throat. Moloch wasn't moving, and he was too far away. If Sam charged, he'd put him through the wall. Dean could teleport him in, but he wanted to try and save as much of his power as possible if he could. They were fighting on consecrated ground, after all. Anything would be more of a drain than normal.
It always came down to churches, for them. Why did they have to do everything important in churches?
"I'm gonna make you an offer," Sam told Moloch. "Just once."
"And what could you possibly offer me?" Moloch asked, cocking his head to the side. He took a few slow steps closer, interested. "I have no interest in your soul, nor in mounting your Pitborn. You have little else."
Sam felt his jaw tighten. He told Moloch, "You said you could feed on any war. Unfortunately, there's a whole lot out there to choose from. So my offer's you leave, right now, and you never do anything like this again, and we'll let you go."
Dean's eyes, a full, glossy black to Moloch's empty ones, were on him. Moloch was close enough when he stopped walking to look down at Sam, smiling. He was tall. Much taller than Sam had realized. Or maybe he'd grown since they'd gotten to the church.
"You care so much about saving those who beat and bound you," Moloch marveled. "I've heard of you, you know. It's that desire that burned out everything strong in you, little godhead. Why do you insist on the rescue of your enemies?"
"I don't," Sam replied, clear and tight. "But if you're still here, protecting this place? These people? We can't take it down to the fucking studs."
Moloch looked initially startled. Then he started to laugh. It sounded like drums, echoing off the vaulted ceilings of the church, and Dean grabbed Sam's shoulder as he dropped the cypress stake from his sleeve into his hand.
Stabbing someone in the stomach, especially when that person was as muscle-bound as Moloch and you were using a relatively dull, flimsy piece of wood, wasn't easy. There were hearty layers of fat and muscle and skin to get past, ligaments, the peritoneum. So when Sam went for the patch of empty skin right below Moloch's navel, very aware he wasn't exactly in top shape right now, he put the full power of his arm and core behind it, not to mention most of his weight.
He wound up nearly tackling the god, absolutely would have if Dean hadn't been hanging onto him so tightly. It felt like punching into a leather drum, only empty space under the skin. Moloch's skin stretched unpleasantly around Sam's fist as his hand went way deeper into him than he'd intended.
Sam had to let go of the stake, since it was almost instantly engulfed in yellow-white flames, and Dean teleported him behind the altar before steadying him. Screaming with a dozen voices, Moloch doubled over with his hands on his stomach. Something was flowing out of him. Not blood: it looked like ash, fine and silky, full of fragments of...Sam had no idea, they looked like tiny sticks and pebbles. It was hard to make out through the filter of Moloch's feathers, since all four wings had coiled protectively around him, gone blue enough to make the floor beneath him smoke.
"Down," Dean said tensely. "Down, now!"
They both dropped to their knees, shielded by the altar. Sam reached for Green, now unconscious, and grabbed a handful of his shirt, dragging him fully into safety, a second before a boiling-hot concussive blast ripped three hundred and sixty degrees through the church. The windows shattered, and Sam wasn't even sure if it was from the explosion or from all the pews and bibles flying through the stained glass. Along with the one priest who'd remained in the church. It was all grass outside, so if nothing landed on him, he'd probably be fine. For the most part.
"Fuckin' hate your altruism," Dean grunted to Sam. "Get another stake."
Sam did, snatching another splinter of the cross right before Dean grabbed him under one armpit and hauled him to his feet to get a bead on Moloch.
He hadn't moved, but he'd straightened, all four wings spread wide in a gleaming St. Andrew's cross around him, coating of flames gone wild. The carpet in a ten-foot radius of him, and all the debris on top of it, had burned away, and the wooden floor beneath was rapidly blackening.
The bare circle Sam had stabbed, right under his navel, was gone, all free skin crumbled away right to the tattooed edges. There was nothing left but a scrim of ash between his boots and an endless black socket, a lot like his eyes.
"Do you really intend to kill me?" Sam jerked backwards, Moloch's voice like a blow to the face. If there had been any glass left in the windows, it would have shattered then. "Do you think you can? Two humans, at the core of you - I am a god!"
"Gonna have to try a little harder than that to impress me," Dean called down to him as Sam's ears rang. Today had not been a good day for his hearing. "I've taken out way heavier hitters than a Chippendale playing demon for table scraps."
He teleported them directly behind Moloch, even as a razor-thin scythe of fire screamed through the air where their chests had been. Sam tightened his grip on his stake.
"And I didn't have him then," Dean finished, nodding to Sam.
Moloch whirled. They dropped, ducking his wings, and then Sam came up, aiming immediately for the circle above and to the right of his navel. He knew how much force to use this time. Stake in and flaming, ash pouring free, Moloch bellowing, fingers like superheated scissors in Sam's hair, and then they were in the sacristy, cut off from the sanctuary. Not in any way that mattered, but it still felt safer.
Sam patted at his hair, feeling the burnt-off sprigs and melted ends, and groaned before glancing at Dean. "You took out a god before?" He'd never told him that.
"Knocked Xolotl out for an hour once," Dean answered with a cough.
Sam had a whole lot of questions, but went with the most relevant one. "How'd that work out?"
Dean hesitated before admitting, "Got cursed." He looked at Sam. "How we doing here?"
"Two chambers down, five to go, and no major injuries on either of us." Sam hadn't even really been doing that much, but he was panting, lungs feeling raw and scorched. "Not bad, but I need more cypress."
"Grab a handful this time." Dean stared through the wall. "Magic Mike's still on the floor. We're going again, I'm gonna swing you over the cross before we hit him. You ready?"
Sam was only halfway through his nod when the remains of the cross were blurring sickeningly underneath him. He shot out a hand, snatched at what looked like wood, felt stinging pain in his palm and nails and one finger, but gathered up a lot of cypress. He'd barely closed his fist around it before he was sprawling over the floor of the sanctuary, splinters scattering everywhere, a cry that was mostly just a rush of air from the impact popping out of him.
The sanctuary spun around him. Stormclouds framed by empty windows, ceiling, fire, Moloch, stormclouds...his shock-ravaged muscles were not at all pleased by his hard contact with the uncomfortably-hot floor, and his thoughts were scattered and slippery in almost the way they got when he had a concussion.
What the fuck had happened? It felt like they'd hit a brick wall.
Sam rolled onto his stomach, breathing hard, propped himself up on both elbows. Focusing through the vertigo, he found Dean locked in place on the stairs, wide-eyed and trembling.
A memory punched up, Dean receiving Alastair's orders in an abandoned convent. Every muscle tight with resistance, completely paralyzed. Helpless.
It felt like someone had just dug an auger directly into Sam's guts and twisted.
Moloch had a hand outstretched, a grin on his face even with two empty, ashen chambers on his stomach. "This one," he began, and Sam realized with a jolt he was referring to Presley, "may not have shed blood here, and he may not be a believer in this war, but he has been here for months. He is one of mine. And my claim holds precedent over the forced occupation of some rotting Hellspawn parasite."
Moloch didn't seem to have a chance to do anything before Presley abruptly emptied, black smoke dumping out of him almost in one go. Mouth, nose, eyes, ears, even his pores. Dean sieved fluidly through the minute gaps in the floorboards soon as he was free, gone in half a second.
Moloch grunted in disgust, flinging Presley aside. He hit the ground like a ragdoll, skull bouncing off a section of still-carpeted floor at an angle that made Sam cringe. He looked, saw his stakes (some useful, some smaller than a toothpick) spread out in an arc along the floor, pulled up onto his knees and snatched for the nearest one. Before he could reach it, a cowboy boot came down hard on it, incinerating it at a touch.
Moloch's boots had bulls worked into the leather. They were easily the ugliest things Sam had ever seen. He looked up at Moloch, looming over him.
"Your demon's abandoned you," Moloch told him, almost sympathetically as the other scattered wooden shards ignited. "So very foolish of you to expect loyalty from it just because you spent pieces of yourself to keep it free of the closing Gates."
"I don't expect anything from him just 'cause of that," Sam responded roughly, because talking kept him busy. "I'm not worried. You oughta be."
A snapping noise suddenly rang through the church. Moloch turned, and Sam peered around him, to where the priest who'd been thrown out the window was straightening behind the altar. He had a bloody scrape on his forehead, and black eyes. Dean grinned, waving with a brand-new cypress stake.
"Hey, there. Me again."
With Moloch preoccupied, Sam forced himself to his feet on tender, swollen-feeling joints. He grabbed Presley, knowing he shouldn't move him but figuring burning alive was worse than a spinal cord injury, and just did his best to support his head as he dragged him into the relative safety of a transept.
Presley was stirring by the time they reached it. Kneeling next to him, Sam patted his cheek, trying to get him to come to. "Hey. Hey." If he could walk, he needed to get out of here. "You okay?"
Presley mumbled something harsh and definitely not English, eyes opening a sliver. A molten glow oozed out, and burning loops like coronal ejections swelled and broke and trailed off into nothing between his lashes. Sam nearly tore his fingernails free scrambling away from him, one on his right hand already loose where it must have caught on the cross when Dean had him grab more stakes.
After a second, he crawled back in, nipped the amulet off Presley, shoved it into his pocket.
Speaking of Dean, he was popping around the church at a speed that nearly brought Sam's vertigo back. Floor, ceiling, walls, window frames, never in the same place twice, never still long enough for Moloch to land a blow on him. Moloch was spinning, wings spread, hands in fists, ropes of flame thin as carbon filament slicing the air in a dozen places at once. The only way this worked, Sam realized as he stood again, was if Moloch didn't know where Dean was going to be next. Which meant he wasn't going to be able to get anywhere near Sam.
He needed to get as close to Moloch as he could without him noticing. Dean was going to have to toss him the stake. And Sam was going to have to hope as hard as he could Dean managed to read him.
Sam began to run, following his own circuitous pattern around the church, trying to stick to Moloch's back or wings, make sure that if he wasn't fully hidden he at least wasn't in his direct line of sight. Thankfully, he seemed pretty fixated on Dean. It was sweltering in here. Sam ripped his collar open without thinking, panting as he bolted and stopped and bolted and ducked in what very rapidly started to feel like the world's most stressful game of Red Light, Green Light.
At least Presley wasn't moving.
He was close enough to feel the heat billowing off Moloch's wings when the stake fell from the ceiling. Moloch didn't notice, Sam caught it almost on instinct. He crouched, edged closer. Closer. Waited as Dean turned Moloch by degrees, until he was in the absolute perfect position to carve into the chamber on the left side of his stomach.
There was no time to react beyond letting go of the flaming stake. Moloch's hand got close enough for the stitching on the shoulder of Sam's shirt to melt and fuse into something plasticky, then Dean was there, shoving him out of the way. On the floor, Sam looked up, saw Moloch grabbing his vessel by the face, and then Dean's smoke rocketing out from under his fingernails. He left the beds raw and bleeding.
Fire uncoiled in thin loops from the palm of Moloch's free hand, moving almost snakelike to ensnare Dean, but the smoke was too fast. Dean skated in a single ragged sheet along the smoldering floor until he vanished under the melted edge of the carpet.
"Not this time." Moloch gave his wings a single hard flap. Feathers dislodged, the kind of downies Castiel shed on the regular, but sculpted entirely of fire. They floated evenly around the church as Sam scooted backwards on his ass, and then they fell, flattening out like raindrops made of glowing jelly and setting the carpet instantly ablaze.
Sam rolled to his feet, sprinted up the steps, once again took shelter behind the altar. Green was still alive, still unconscious. Sam shoved him out of the way under the altar, started grabbing stakes from the shattered cross.
"Your kind enjoy fire, don't they, demon?" Moloch's voice was mocking and, Sam thought, maybe just the slightest bit unhinged. "You're all but incubated in it, down in Hell. Why do you run from my flames? Is godfire somehow different?"
Sam heard the thuk of feet lightly hitting the floor, where the fire had largely burned away. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing where Mary Ruth had jumped in through a window and was now straightening with black eyes.
"Fool," Moloch stated, and flame like blue lightning traced out a devil's trap on the floor, Dean and his new vessel in the center of it. Dean looked down, the glow gathered in the folds of Mary Ruth's habit. "So many opportunities to run, and you keep returning."
"Fuck's this?" Dean asked, and hearing it in Mary Ruth's voice made Sam squint.
"Hateful as I find your kind," Moloch told him, "I've found it necessary to learn how to bring you to heel. Much as I despise following your rules."
Dean looked up at him. Then he rolled his eyes and vanished, reappearing in front of the altar. Leaning casually on it with one hand, he drawled, "Learned all about us, huh? And yet you obviously can't even tell one breed from another. Lemme clue you in on something here, Fabio: I ain't your average pair of horns."
With his free hand, he made a "come here" gesture behind his back, at Sam. Sam had only managed to work two actually useful stakes free, but he vaulted the altar anyway. The wall of flame was there when he blinked.
It wasn't that it rushed up at them from Moloch. It was that one moment, the entire area wasn't full of coursing, screaming fire, and the next, it was. And Dean was parting it like Moses with the Red Sea, his vessel's small body flung wide in a Christ the Redeemer pose with her veil flapping in the wind coming off it all. Sam saw him shaking.
Sam's hair was crisping, his skin tightening. He didn't even know if he was sweating, so hot it would have instantly evaporated the second it came out of his skin. His mouth and eyes and nose were dry and it hurt to breathe. Even his clothes were too hot on him, the fabric itself burning.
"Go," Dean growled out, and Sam had already been moving, a stake in either hand as he ducked under one of Dean's arms and practically wrapped himself around him so he didn't catch on fire. He ran down the narrow aisle Dean had carved for him in the flames, down the stairs, saw the end of it, where the burning walls met, dropped to his knees on the ashy floor and slid right under Moloch's outstretched arms and close-drawn wings. Then he snapped to his feet, even though it felt like standing up inside the fucking sun, and punched the stakes in his hands through the two chambers in Moloch's chest.
Moloch reacted faster than Sam had expected him to, and Sam didn't react as fast as he should have.
He kept hold of the stakes too long, burned his palms badly enough to make him cry out. He jerked his hands free, locked into fists, driving hot splinters into tender skin. Then Moloch grabbed him by the head.
He lifted him slowly off his feet, a massive hand that felt like superheated metal searing its print into Sam's scalp, and regarded him with his terrible eyes. Sam gritted his teeth, eyes stinging with tears, reached up to grab Moloch's wrist even though he knew it would burn him worse.
For the first time, he was close enough to actually watch it as the chambers crumbled empty. Ash. And mixed in with it, bones. Perfectly-formed and human, the skulls marking them as children's with their tiny teeth and huge eye sockets, even the pelvises no bigger than marbles. All charred dry and black.
Sam gagged.
Moloch grinned, and turned him to face the front of the church. There was Dean slumped against the cracked, blackened altar, looking like it was just about all he could do to keep himself on his knees. He was staring at Sam wide-eyed, tear tracks spidered down through the soot on his face. Sam tried to tell him it was okay, knew suddenly he'd scream if he opened his mouth and didn't want Moloch to get that out of him.
Moloch began to laugh quietly anyway.
"I hope you enjoyed your adventure in godslaying," he told Sam. "What are you going to do now?"
That was when Sam looked past the altar. To where the flames had poured down over it. To where the cypress cross that had been resting in pieces on the floor wasn't anything anymore but matted ash, laid out in a starburst of ignition.
His stomach fell out of him in an agonizing swoop, and he let go of Moloch's wrist, all of his weight falling onto his neck.
"You can't even flee," Moloch murmured, and then he addressed Dean. "Tell me, demon. How long has it been since you took so many new hosts this rapidly? You must be realizing by now how much of yourself, your power, you've allowed to lock itself inside the body you wore here. Has it occurred to you yet? Just how very weak you are without familiar flesh?"
Dean bared his teeth, but his lips were twitching while he did it, like even that was sucking at the dregs of his strength. Moloch hoisted Sam higher, above his own head.
"This is what I will do," he told them. "First, I will bind you, demon." A ring of blue fire began to steadily march its way around Dean. "I'll burn most of you clean. Then, while what's left of you watches, I'll cook the Gatekeeper's brain in his skull. Slowly." His fingers tightened incrementally. Sam grunted. "Once both of you are gone, I can move on to the just punishment of my disappointing flock."
Cas, Sam thought frantically, fire inside him and out, Cas, please, we need your help, it's a god, it's gonna kill Dean, it's gonna -
His thoughts were interrupted with a laugh. "An angel? An angel will do you no good. Not against me. Besides...do you think anything will hear you without my allowing it?"
"Really wanna kill the free ride you got going on here?" Dean asked raggedly.
"It's not as if it will be difficult to find new devotees. New sacrifices. New lands to claim as my own.."
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam saw Moloch's other hand lift, and then Dean's vessel stiffened. She juddered, thrashed forward a couple of feet, and then bent violently backwards in an Exorcist pose, hands claws, screaming with her head out of sight. In the next second, she was up on her feet, eyes bleeding fire the same way Presley's had been. She looked around, singed veil whipping, and as Moloch shook Sam for emphasis and made the bones in his neck grind alarmingly, Mary Ruth snarled something in Phoenician.
Most likely Where the fuck are you? because seconds later, Green's voice answered, "Right here."
Somehow unburnt, Green climbed spider-like and broken-limbed up onto the altar. His hair was badly singed, his clothes, but everything else looked fine. In him, Dean began to stand, eyes black, everything snapping back into temporary place with sickening wet cracks until he had a functioning vessel, feet planted on the altar.
"Right here, bitch," Dean repeated, and in the tiny seconds of clarity that came between each throbbing heartbeat, Sam hated hearing him talk with Green's mouth, and wondered where in the hell he'd learned to understand Phoenician.
Sam couldn't see his face, but Moloch didn't seem all that bothered. Behind Sam, he asked, "What will you do, demon? Drained as you are. And with no more hosts left to creep into."
That was when people began to return to the church. Walking in through the front doors, the back, the side, climbing through the windows. Nuns, priests, patients, including Wyatt. Their rain-soaked clothes began to steam as soon as they were inside, but it wasn't enough to fully obscure the flames in all of their eyes. Even Presley stood, took his place among the gathering ranks.
It felt like he had to haul the entire weight of his body up by his mouth to do it, but Sam clenched his jaw, and swallowed.
Dean looked around at all of them. Then he looked at Sam for a long, long second. He streamed out of the scrapes and cuts covering Green's body, hung above him after he collapsed nauseatingly off the altar only long enough to gather up all of himself, and then dissipated in every direction. Like somebody had punched a fist through the center of him and sent him scattering.
"Gone to his first body," Moloch theorized. "A last resort. He already knows I locked its power. And when he reaches it, he will find it just as full of me as all other flesh here. All flesh…" Moloch dropped Sam. "But you."
He couldn't even make an effort to catch himself. The most he could do was keep his face from hitting the floor, though that made the muscles in his neck twist and scream. Shaking, Sam hauled himself bodily up onto his knees, wanting to at least manage that, then brought a reluctant hand to his scalp. He hadn't stuck to Moloch's palm, so it couldn't be that bad, but he was still afraid of what he might find. Some blisters among his hair, burns on his forehead and ears from fingertips, but overall not as bad as he'd been scared it might be.
His hands were a different story. Both scraped up and full of splinters, though his right was worse than his left, and also had a jammed finger and a lifted nail. But the burns were the worst. Rising white blisters up and down pads and palms, edged by tight red skin.
Sam's attention was torn away from his own injuries when he heard a rapid series of snaps. He looked up at the altar, saw Green rise with no trouble and flaming eyes. Sam blinked.
"Did you just...heal him?" he asked Moloch with a heat-roughed voice, a little incredulous.
When he glanced over his shoulder, Moloch tipped his head, looking down at him. He replied, "He's served me very well, whether he knew it or not. And he will serve me again now, should I need it. Then when his punishment comes, and it will very soon, it can be delivered properly."
Sam looked around. The entire population of the St. Anastasia Center, minus Dean, gathered in one place, all clustered tightly around himself and their god in a circle. Almost a circle, the back was left open. Behind Moloch, in the direction of the gaping front entrance.
"You're really gonna kill all of 'em?" Sam asked quietly. No cypress on the floor, just ash and embers between all the sensible shoes and bare feet. Dean gone to a body worse than useless all the way across campus. Just Sam, wounded and exhausted and, once again, drawing a complete blank on anything, anything at all, that might help.
And it all felt so fucking familiar.
"Oh, yes," Moloch agreed, nodding. "But first, I think." He reached down, gathered the half-melted fabric on the front of Sam's shirt in one hand. Sam tried to pull away, but of course it was useless, didn't stop him from being lifted again at all. "You."
Holding him, he turned, then hurled Sam headfirst through the hole where the front doors had once been.
Sam caromed off the wet concrete of the walkway like a rock skipping on a lake. The first bounce, with the full strength of Moloch's hellish throwing arm behind it, shattered the blinding agony of fracture through his pelvis and down both legs. The second wrenched free something soft inside him, brought blood out of his mouth. When he hit for the third time, the time he stayed down on, acidic lightning blitzed down his left arm and across his clavicle. His head hit at an awkward angle, knocked him briefly, blessedly out, but he came to on the rebound. There was a sound that was more of a sensation at the jerking of his neck, the cartilaginous grind of displaced bone shearing into something important, and then most of the pain from his throat on down buzzed out into a terrifying absence.
Sensation flickered disorientingly through his body as he skidded to a halt in mud and grass, trajectory finally having brought him off the concrete. Feeling blinked on and off, orphaned nerves sending dead pings that only got responses one time out of four, and blood foamed thickly out of Sam's mouth and nose with a sucking gurgle. The rain felt like somebody standing over him whipping frozen gravel down a handful at a time, and he was shivering through tiny periods of believing that was exactly what was happening.
He could hardly breathe, half the blood and half the paralysis. He couldn't feel his lungs, but he thought one was collapsed, the other rapidly filling. On his back, it wouldn't drain. He sucked in a single wet breath that produced a hell of a lot of crunching and squishing from his chest, felt consciousness start to drain out from under him, wished it had happened sooner. When he took a second breath, it brought faint sulfur rushing grainy over his tongue, and he didn't realize Dean had just pounded himself into him until the firework presence in his head brought Sam instantly back awake.
Jesus fucking Christ. Dean was franticscaredfuriousguiltyhateful, every single thing he was feeling right now bleeding over to Sam in a blended puddle. His mental voices, because there were several all blended into one, were rapid-fire. Jesus fucking Christ. Oh, I am gonna shuck him outta those flames and peel him clear of his skin. Gonna fillet him, gonna fucking eat him alive, gonna take his guts and cram 'em down his -
It devolved momentarily into a split second of what Sam would only later realize was one of Dean's memories of Hell, something foul and wet and dark and gleeful, only to cut off abruptly. Guilt got stronger in the mix.
Sorry. Sorry. Are you okay? Fuck, 'course you ain't, he turned you into fucking soup. Dean's twang was a lot stronger than usual. Okay, Sammy, you're gonna be just fine. Gonna take care of you, baby, gonna fix you up, promise, just...not sure I can heal...all of this right exactly now…
Then don't. Dean was something to hang onto, a point of clarity for Sam to hold tight. He wanted to convey how having him back felt, knew he'd be able to feel it just fine. Just pull me together, keep me stable, and block the pain.
Dean didn't even argue. Sam tried to ignore the stomach-turning judder of his body becoming mobile again. Feeling flushed him, his now-straight limbs and hard spots that were supposed to be hard and soft spots that were supposed to be soft, and he sat up. A second later, a fireball that probably stamped a neat little imprint of itself on Sam's retinas all but ripped the whole front of the church off, and Moloch's flame-zombies began to file out.
Sam got to his feet. Okay, I've got probably a hundred compound fractures, internal bleeding, most likely at least one concussion, and a spinal cord that's at least injured. Not counting the burns and everything else from earlier. You're gonna need Cas' help to heal me, so we're gonna have to get as far away from here as possible. But we need to put Moloch down fast as we can 'cause we really pissed him off and I don't wanna see what he can do mad, and we need cypress, so...you think you can make a jump to Libya?
Dean didn't say anything. Sam could feel him thinking, feel him supremely struggling with himself, like two cobras in a death-match inside his brain. There weren't a lot of walls between them right now. Sam watched, through slicing sheets of rain, as Moloch appeared at the top of the church's steps, and looked right at the two of them.
Dean must have had his smoke in Sam's eyes, because he saw Moloch, but now he also saw Moloch. Saw him as ancient, crawling madness, a mess of wings and horns and arms and screaming figures that rose and grew and writhed and died like fire, and mouths. So many mouths, a thousand, human and animal, child and adult, constantly open and gulping and chewing and desperate as liquid flame wept out between the teeth.
This was what it looked like. The human capacity for institutionalized cruelty. For unthinkable acts in the name of something greater. The price that was too high, had always been too high, but someone was forever eager and willing to pay.
"You've taken it under your skin." Moloch's voice distantly reached Sam. "I'd thought you couldn't befoul yourself any further, but it seems I was mistaken."
Sam took a step back, said out loud, "Dean?"
"Is it trying to keep you alive?" Moloch continued. "Or just hiding from me? You won't find success with either. If you insist on it, I'll end you together."
Finally, Dean teleported them. There was the non-sensation Sam remembered, although it was a little different when the demon was inside him, and he caught the barest glimpse of something he didn't like very much. Then they stopped, and it took him less than an instant to figure out they were in his room in the dorms.
"We gotta go further than this," Sam said grimly. He shook his head before thinking about it, and tensed, but Dean must be keeping all the severed nerves spliced together. Like the two frayed ends of a broken wire touched to each other to conduct a current.
No, Dean replied, all but dripping with pain as he said it.
"What?" Sam was genuinely shocked.
No, we don't have to run, Dean replied. We can beat him. I can hold you together, help you out with my strength, my powers, but you'll stay in control, much as I'd like to just put you under and knock this one outta the park myself, 'cause you gotta be the one with the stake, right?
"Has to be a human," Sam answered automatically. "People of the Levant loved their David-and-Goliath stories. But we don't have any - "
Dean, sifted into all of Sam, dragged a memory up and passed it to him. The cross on the wall in Green's office, sunlit ivy curling over it. A snippet from the tour Sam had gotten on the first day: " - only one in the entire state, unless you're counting the smaller version I have in - "
Sam's heart jumped inside him, but he didn't immediately tell Dean he wanted to go for it. Quietly, he asked him, "Are you sure?"
I crunched the numbers here, Dean replied bleakly. If we pull it off, this'll hurt you the least.
Sam was silent, thinking about the kinds of things Moloch would undoubtedly unleash during the time they were gone, even if it was only for a few hours...which seemed unlikely, given Sam seriously was soup and the fact he'd be healed by a demon who wasn't really built for it and an angel who had been cut off from Heaven. A pagan god was still a god, and Moloch had been feeding here for years, expending no more power than it took to grow a really nice garden and keep clouds away.
Even strangers' deaths would weigh on Sam, but there was always the possibility of Moloch scorching a path through the people they both cared about. Vaughn. Bobby. Castiel. They couldn't get everyone to safety, because Sam wasn't even sure what safety would be.
He thought about what the responsibility for that much death, for losses that potentially personal, would feel like, hung around his neck. He weighed it, then told Dean, "We can go. If you want."
There was surprise, but not a whole lot, followed by gratitude and grim resignation, Dean's emotions a little more clearly defined now. Tell you what, Sammy, means a whole lot to hear you say that. Means even more to feel you mean it. But we ain't leaving 'til Hasselhoff McBonfire's a greasy smear on the ground.
Something swelled inside Sam, warm and huge and faded through with love. "Thank you."
I'm the one who dragged us here, Dean replied with less humor than Sam thought he'd been going for. Least I can do's stick it out.
Okay. Sam reached into his pocket, wincing when his damaged nails dragged on the stiffened fabric, and pulled out Dean's amulet. He slipped it over his own head. Let's go, then.