A reminder of the soul once dancing through the graves with voice like rays of light.
It wasn't going to happen, plain and simple. Dean wasn't about to let something like this come to fruition, he wasn't going to spend the rest of his natural life wondering what else might have been done, if there really was a way to send this demon scum back to the filth from which he came without committing the act of murder.Sam must have slipped into a state of temporary insanity, that must have been it. All those nights without proper sleep had finally done him in and now here they were, standing in front of a concrete and steel garage about to attempt convincing a haunted woman to let them kill her.
Trude, for being completely and utterly blind to the concept that she had to die for Johnny to go away forever, was surprisingly cheerful over the intercom – an intercom, Jesus, this chick was five steps ahead of Dean in the Protection of Beloved Classic Cars department – that was until she realized who was on the other side of the door.
"If you thought, guys, that I would actually let you in here after what happened over the phone you're daft," Trude explained with a slight terror to her voice. "So far beyond daft, in fact, they haven't created a word for it yet."
Good, she didn't think the compartment filled with ghost busting equipment was worth mentioning. That or she was a damn good actress and was hiding behind that steel door waiting for the SWAT team to arrive because she had already called the police about it.
"Please," Sam said as he pressed down on the appropriate button, "if you could just let us explain ourselves. We're not leaving, so wherever you can make room for us…."
"You have a freaking shotgun in that car, I'm not letting you in here."
"We aren't bad people, Trude. I know it seems like it, but we really are just trying to help you and Jo," Sam said, trying that card again. "We… we hunt ghosts for a living, harmful spirits, and if you'd just let us in there to talk to you maybe we can figure out what to do about this."
Good, he was having second thoughts about slipping her something or whatever it was he was planning to do to her.
Trude scoffed. "Well, that explains all the salt you have stashed in there."
Dean decided his wait for his turn was over. "This is no laughing matter, Trude," he tried in a scoldingly stern voice like a father talking to a just-walked-into-the-house-an-hour-past-curfew son… a strangely succeeded. "Whether we come in there or not Jo is going to be badly hurt and if I were you I'd take my chances with letting us inside. I know you're doing this for her own protection but unless we can figure out a way to stop him, keeping us away from you isn't going to help anything or anyone."
There was silence on the other side of the door for quite a while, just long enough to make the brothers worry that Johnny was not only sadisticly e-ville but ridiculously impatient. But then there were scraping sounds coming from Trude's side of the door, a whole mess of them: she must have been undoing five more locks added to the key ends Dean had counted on his side of the steel slab of door, which then slowly slid open to the brothers' left.
"Just be glad Jo's having a class tonight and's out of his range," Trude muttered, clearly unhappy to even be taking this kind of a chance with fate. In her mind it must have been like expecting parents decorating every square inch of the nursery before the baby's born, in a way saying a big fat, "Go on, I dare you" to God.
Dean was the last one to enter the garage, would have been the first to speak if he hadn't run over to Black Beauty first and stroked her in a way Sam had never seen his brother do before: it was so loving it was downright creepy, so he turned around to address Trude who was pushing the door back into position. Being the gentleman that he was, he helped her to close the door and reengage all the locks.
"'His range'?" he asked, losing his mental count of the locks after six deadbolts. She certainly loved that car of hers.
"It's kind of like Phiip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy; the people's souls can only go a certain distance away from their humans before the pain sets in, unless of course the bond that ties them together is broken. With Johnny there is no pain, but it's like a wall of unbreakable glass, he can't go further than the fields in any direction," Trude explained calmly, more like she was giving a lecture about cow breeds than discussing an evil demon with a vice grip around her soul.
Sam nodded, soaking it all in and not liking the comparison just made because he had read those books long ago and still remembered how many of the children being put under that soul separating guillotine-like machine had died. Granted, some had lived including the main character and that was a shimmer of hope, but it was faint through a dense fog.
"That's why I've never moved," Trude interrupted Sam as he was about to speak. "As much as I want to, as much as I need to get away from this town and start a new life, I can't risk other people getting hurt. And that's why I baby that car so much," she added turning around with the younger Winchester brother to acknowledge Soft Top parked next to Black Beauty (and to look at Dean, who was still talking in sweet whispers to his baby, patting her and assessing her boo-boos more closely). "See, that was my Uncle Monty's car. Every Sunday afternoon when Jo and I were kids we would pile into her and take a drive around the county, went all the way to the lake once much to my parents' dismay. He was our guardian after our parents died and then when Johnny went after him the car was left to me."
"I read about that," Sam said gently. "You had just turned seventeen."
Trude hugged herself, still staring hard at her Impala. "In a way that hurt more than anyone else. I never really knew my parents, they were always working and by the time they got home it was like the house was an extension of the office building, the court room. Uncle Monty was always there when we needed him, though, whether Jo had the chicken pox or I wanted to bother him with a puppet show, advice about what I should do on a first date."
Dean was in the driver's seat by now, running his right hand across the leather upholstery and absolutely determined to choke-smother-wrap Beauty with the loving nothingness raining from his mouth. He was adjusting the side mirror, telling his first and only love how he was going to buy her a nice air freshener in her favorite scent when all was said and done and over with, when a face completely different than his own popped into the glass he was meddling with. Out of his surprise, Dean screamed and tried to put his hands out to protect Beauty, not caring to notice that she was much bigger than his arm span could ever dream of covering.
When the connections were made with Trude, when he could see that bastard demon hovering around by the shadow that passed over any kind of reflective surface, Dean had never stopped to ponder about what that might mean. Because he had never taken the time to dissect those shadowy forms he saw flirting with Trude's jewelry, with Soft Top's fine wax job, or with that gasoline puddle, he couldn't have known that it was more than possible he would be able to see said bastard demon in anything that would cast a true reflection, like Black Beauty's side mirrors for example.
For whatever reason, Dean had been unknowingly cursed with the ability to tap into this freak's evilness, with the cord binding it and Trude together. It hadn't been enough that he could hear that song when Trude did as long as he was looking into her eyes, but adding this? This was far too much to handle.
Johnny, an honest vision cast to Dean by that damn safety mirror, looked like he had been Satan's dog's chew toy and because he wasn't rubbery or tasty enough had been spat back out. That was only evident in his eyes (human save for the fact they were black and led to nowhere), otherwise this demon could have swooned woman in circles around Dean. Isn't that always the way? The most evil pricks had to be the most handsome, the kind of handsome that would make Errol Flynn himself throw up his hands and hide beneath a rock for the rest of his afterlife.
The time between Johnny's coming and going took no time at all, Dean's heart hadn't even beat twice before the demon cracked a maniacal smile and went away. With a blink, his mouth still dropped open in faded scream, Dean saw himself again in the mirror.
"What is it, what happened?" Sam asked, running over to the car as Dean got out of it and marched to the back of it. He was closing the door Dean had left open, had just arrived at the trunk to see Dean lift open that spare tire compartment and gather the big shotgun, witness him load it with the rock salt like they were hunting the Hook Man again. "What?"
Dean was listening, but didn't want to waste precious ass kicking time in answering his brother's questions. He snapped the shotgun back into place and stepped back, turned around in a circle with gun at the ready and a wild look on his face. "Come on you, bastard! Is that all you can do, show yourself to me in a mirror like some pussy?" He cocked the gun for a kind of movie-esque emphasis to his insults. "Show yourself you fucking asshole. I'm not going to stand around here and wait for your dignified presence any longer. It's time you paid the fucking piper, Johnny!"
Trude had followed behind Sam, but was no longer in a state of worried awe to do anything. She was looking around her, petrified far past the point humanly possible. "What are you doing? Do you want to get yourself killed? Don't mess with him like that!"
"Like what?" Dean asked, moving away from Black Beauty in case he had to shoot the gun at too close a range to her. "I'm not messing with you, am I you fucking coward? Some demon you are, hiding behind a little girl all your life in order to stir a little death and destruction. What's the matter with you, did everyone in Hell know you still piss your bed and did this to you, bond you to Trude here, because they knew you couldn't do any better? You're no demon from the underworld, you can't even stand on your own two feet!"
Sam had taken up another gun and was trying to move a hysterical Trude away from Dean. He felt horribly uneasy about what Dean was doing, but he knew it would snow on the mountains of Hell before he could get a personality transplant for his brother.
"Stop it!" Trude screamed. "You don't want to do this, you don't want to make him angry!"
"Oh, but I do," Dean remarked with a smile. "What's the matter, Johnny boy, you cock shy? Aw, don't worry, Dean'll teach you not to be afraid."
Embarrassed was what Sam would have been had Trude not stopped yelling, had not buckled to the floor and pressed herself against one of Soft Top's tires with her hands over her ears. Her knees were up to her chest, her forehead pressed against them in a cheap imitation of a potato bug.
Sam turned to his brother, gun raised. "Dean, I think you should listen to her."
"Show yourself you motherfucker!"
Before one could say Vitameatavegamin, Johnny did as Dean had asked so rudely to do.
He appeared smack dab between the brothers, showing Sam why Trude was huddled away covering her ears. Johnny, taller than any basketball player, was screaming in tongues so loudly as to break crystal. The barrel of the shotgun Dean was holding bent with a metallic whine when Johnny grabbed hold of it, flung it and Dean across the room to slide across the floor and collide with a tool storage wall. The wall shook madly, causing an awl to fall point down a smidgen to the right of Dean's femoral artery, meeting the concrete between his legs in a violent kiss.
"You missed," Dean observed sourly, his back the victim of a numbing spasm that took too long to pass.