Disclaimer, Summary, Rating: See Chapter 1.
THE SCENT OF YOU
Chapter 14
"Wha-!" Dean also jolted upright as Sam's cry made him jump. "What?"
Tossing back the bedclothes Sam scrambled out of bed and hurried across to the table, switching on the laptop as he pawed through the papers. "I know why those eleven people were killed. At least, I think I know. I'm sure…" he mumbled away to himself as he held up reports and diagrams of the 'satanic football'.
Also getting out of bed, Dean padded across the carpet and stood behind his chair, resting one hand on Sam's shoulder as he peered at the screen with somnolent irritability. "Um, Sammy, how do you suddenly know why they were killed at…ack…4:37 in the morning…?"
"You gave me the answer…well, you put me on the right track…last night when you showed that despite your usual horn-dogging you're not a total man-ho' after all." Sam pulled out the report he wanted.
"Why thank you," Dean retorted with a full load of Dean-sarcasm at this definitely back-handed compliment, making to move his hand until Sam reached up with his right hand as he typed left-handed and moved Dean's hand from his shoulder to the side of his neck.
"I've got a bit of a crick just there."
"What did your last slave die of?" groused Dean even as his fingers began to work on the knotted muscle.
"Nothing, you're right here," Sam quipped, earning himself a flicked ear in punishment. "You were on the edge, but you still didn't risk it with Kimber."
Dean snorted, "That's because the mother of my children will be Mrs Dean Winchester first…and I still don't get it?"
Sam found what he was looking for, muttering phrases to himself. "…possibly organic…residue…blah, blah…We have to go back to Amarillo campus to be sure." He tilted his head back slightly to warn Dean, who stepped back out of the way as Sam stood up from the chair and hurried back over to his bed and began pulling on his clothes. "Dean, come on, we have to get to campus a.s.a.p."
Dean folded his arms, "Okay, well pretend for a moment that this is Epiphanies for Dummies 101 and fill in the spaces with words, preferably of one syllable."
"I'll explain as we go," Sam tossed him his T-shirt which Dean deftly caught before it hit him in the face, "We have to go…and we'd best take everything we've got with us."
That galvanised Dean into action, recognising 'everything we've got' as a euphemism for the Winchesters' entire stock of weaponry. Considering that Dean didn't believe it was possible to have too much firepower, the Impala's trunk was solidly crammed with assorted guns, knives, explosives, ropes, garrottes, flare guns, bows, arrows, axes, maces, cudgels, bludgeons, nine different types of cross, pentagrams, protective herbs, Holy Water and so forth; he even had a hand-held portable rocket launcher in there somewhere. Not to mention the portable mini-arsenal they carried around in their holdalls.
At least at this hour of the morning traffic was sparse, Dean thought with relief as he pulled out of the hotel parking lot on to a deserted Highway 136. "I'm still waiting, Sammy," he insisted.
"Look, most of the evil things we hunt weren't born that way…they were created. They were originally something else, right?" Sam burbled earnestly.
"Sure," Dean recited examples as he drove, "A woman in white is the betrayed wife of a faithless husband who murders her children while her mind is unbalanced from the shock of betrayal and then commits suicide. A wendigou is someone who turns to cannibalism and keeps going…Mary Worthington was trapped in the mirror by her own murder…golems or tulpas and scarecrows are animated avatars of non-corporeal entities and demigods. Then there are demons and spirits…"
"Right," Sam acknowledged, "but that's not the case with everything. Some supernatural things are born…they have a life cycle, like humans…birth and death…"
"A reproductive cycle." murmured Dean, faintly seeing the light.
"The instinct to procreate is the most powerful any species possesses," Sam said, "even over and above self-preservation. It's why Black Widowers and Preying Mantis boys go after the female even though the Black Widow spider stabs hubby with a poisoned blade after he's fertilised her and eats him and the female Preying Mantis doesn't even wait until after – she decapitates her mate whilst they're copulating and eats his head while his body carries on banging her…So, kudos for your willpower, man." He finished slyly.
Dean loftily didn't deign to reply to the dig as he pressed the accelerator further down on the open road. Truth be told, for a second he had teetered on the brink of just burying himself in Kimber's hot, welcoming sheath anyway; even with the mental image of a baby gazing at him with big eyes that accused him of abandonment it had taken more of a Herculean effort than he would ever let on to Sam to stop when he had been that close to orgasm, especially as it had been a while. In fact, if he hadn't had that night with Cassie, it would have probably have been too long…but Cassie had been different. To her it had been at best an enjoyable nostalgic interlude, which had bordered dangerously close to a pity fuck, while he had had that stupid fantasy that if he pleased her enough, she'd realise it had always been much more than a fling to him and take him back…
Although admittedly 'blue balls' had never been a major issue for him personally, Dean acknowledged, despite his auto-pilot tendency to flirt and play up the bad-boy image. Hunting, even the 'easy' ones, was utterly exhausting not just physically and mentally, but often emotionally and even spiritually. The Hunt burned up your energy like fire consuming kerosene soaked wood and sucked up your adrenaline like a vacuum cleaner, leaving you weary and battered in more ways than one.
Even now he had a companion on the road again to take some of the stress and halve the effort Dean was still often left so drained by a job that his only fantasies about beds were of being able to crawl between clean, crisp sheets and sleep for a week or two. After Sammy had abandoned them for college and he and Dad had separated more and more often to work their own gigs, Dean had rapidly come to understand why John Winchester had had no difficulty ignoring his bodily urges despite his comparative youth when mom had been murdered – if Dean collapsed wearily into a bed of a night how much more so did Dad, twenty years older and twenty years longer at this job.
"That must have been why it took them," he murmured as the thought suddenly occurred to him, unaware he'd spoken aloud.
"What took who?" Sam asked, startled out of his waffling.
"The Vanir," Dean explained, as the sign for Amarillo passed in a blur. "It was one thing I wondered about, afterwards. The not-so-good people of Burkitsville had us corralled with those shotguns like lambs in a slaughterhouse yet the scarecrow ignored us and went straight for Auntie & Uncle Jorgeson; I don't think it even noticed we were there. All the previous victims were a young man and a young woman, but they were also couples, they had a sexual relationship with each other…and don't say it, Sam."
"Say what?"
" That crack about: 'Come on, Dean, you and Emily Jorgeson were imprisoned by her sicko relatives alone in that storm shelter for over six hours, and all you did was 'talk'- dude you're losing your touch.'" Dean snapped.
There was a momentary silence and then Sam said quietly, "Dean, I didn't think that. I've never thought that. When we were in that orchard all I could think about was that I didn't have any weapons and those freaks were going to stand there and let some demon deity turn my brother into calamari. And that if the scarecrow didn't disembowel me when I tried to save you one of the townsfolk would just unload their shotgun into me, and the last thing I would see was my brother being gutted by some monster after I walked into the situation without being 'loaded for bear' when I came charging in to 'rescue' you because I wasn't smart enough to figure out that the townspeople had to be in on the deal up to their psychotic Wicker Man-stroke-Children of the Corn eyebrows."
Dean felt his cheeks heat at this offbeat and obliquely delivered declaration of brotherly love, which engendered a warm and perilously close to mushy sensation within his chest. "Well…okay…I'm just grateful the not-so-good people of Burkitsville somehow missed the fact that the existence of a sexual relationship between the sacrificed couple was more important than them just being two young and pretty bodies…though considering how long they must have been murdering people for that thing, I don't know how…"
Sam shrugged, "Because they were just trying to use the Vanir for their own ends, they didn't really worship it."
"Er…that was the whole point of me and Emily Jorgeson being tied up in the orchard like suckling pigs," Dean reminded him dryly.
"If you worship something, you give it offerings of your own volition," Sam stated. "Someone worshiping a god brings it gifts freely and without resentment."
"Such as?"
"Depends on what the god requires. Some people sacrifice animals – sheep or cattle or pigs – to a god, others donate precious metals and jewels. Some people build temples or churches as a place to commune with their god, others like monks dedicate their lives to its service. Some will abstain from certain foods or alcohol because they worship a deity who has forbidden them, like Jews who don't eat pork, and such as Muslims or the ancient Nazirites in the Bible who were commanded to drink no alcohol."
"So how does that prove the townspeople didn't worship the Vanir?"
"Because they started murdering outsiders," Sam pointed out. "Their ancestors may have been the genuine article but somewhere along the way they became corrupted. If the townspeople had truly worshipped the Vanir they would have sacrificed a couple from amongst their own, not lured in innocent victims from the Interstate, and what's more that couple would have gone voluntarily for the greater good of their families, friends and neighbours…they would have been joyful, not terrified…"
"It would have been one hell of a spring-break party," Dean muttered sarcastically.
"Essentially, yes…the couple would have had one hell of a blow-out party and then walked hand-in-hand into the orchard. I strongly suspect that they would have made love under the sacred tree and then just snuggled up together and died in their sleep."
"That was not the way those couples went, Sam," Dean said more harshly than he intended, remembering the feeling of helplessness when he'd been unable to break out of that storm shelter and Emily's terror when they'd been trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys to those trees. "They died hard, terrified and screaming."
"That was probably the Vanir's way of punishing the townspeople. Saint Paul said it: don't be misled, God is not one to be mocked, for what a man sows, he shall reap. At Stanford there was one guy who never went near a church, mosque, synagogue or temple the entire four years he was there but who prayed everyday. He said, "'how would you feel about a so-called friend who only ever bothered to call when they wanted something from you? I'm not so stupid or so arrogant as to delude myself that God cannot see or doesn't know my motives and intentions.'" That applied to the Vanir," Sam explained quietly, "it knew what the townspeople were up to but it was bound by its honour."
"Honour? What honour?" Dean spluttered indignantly at that one.
"The Bible tells us it is impossible for God to lie…imagine how horrible the world would be if He could make promises such as Paradise and not mean any of it…? If He could break His word as easily and thoughtlessly as most humans do when they prattle, 'I promise..', or 'I swear…' every five minutes with no more thought than a baby and no genuinely honourable intent to fulfil the vow." Sam replied grimly. "The difference between God and the Devil is that the latter greedily takes and takes until you're an empty husk, whereas the former will give you sunlight and air without asking for anything…but if you do give Him what He does ask for then you'll get even more given you."
"So not interested in a theology lesson right now," sniped Dean, still not on board with the Vanir having any sense of obligation.
"That's what the Vanir was all about; the Vanir told its first worshippers that if they provided it with a yearly sacrifice of one human couple, a man and his mate, it would safeguard their crops and ensure bountiful harvests. The townspeople were fulfilling the letter of that contract even though they broke the spirit, and the Vanir had no choice but to do the same until a loophole was found. Enter the Winchesters; I strongly suspect that the people of Burkitsville will suffer a lot more misfortune than merely economic demise."
"I can live with that," Dean commented. "But what has all this fertility and sex stuff got to do with O&E at Amarillo?"
"I think UNT Amarillo is built right on top of the thing's lair."
"Seriously?"
"As a heart attack," Sam responded darkly. "Before UNT there was nothing there but swamp and trees. I think the O&E is one of those supernatural monsters that has a life cycle, being born rather than created. Either it or its forebears could have been on that site for centuries, even millennia."
"Until UNT Amarillo came tripping along," Dean mused, "and somehow they managed to build the college without disturbing it too much so it decided to let them alone and tolerate the humans. In fact, it probably got fat and lazy on a forty-year diet of all that youthful vitality and vibrant psychic energy being pumped out. So what's changed?"
"Someone found something," Sam declared. "That lump of…whatever…it was. They took something from it."
"You mean like on Star Trek?"
"Huh?"
"The Original Series, where they were killing the eggs of that moving-rug alien thing…Vorta, Hooter, thing…without realising it? You think the satanic football is really its egg or something?"
"It's possible," Sam conceded dubiously, "though like you said with that demon crashing planes, demons want death and destruction for its own sake; they're not the protective parents and nurturing type as a rule."
"Any other ideas?"
Sam scowled, "Plenty. Maybe it sheds every so often like that shape-shifter did and that's a bit of it, maybe they dug up the bones of its momma, maybe it's some object it needs to complete some arcane ritual. I have no idea."
"So we also have no idea why it was enraged enough to murder eleven people?"
"I'm not really sure, I get this feeling the answer's obvious but I just can't see – Stop! Stop!"
Continued in Chapter 15…
© 2006, Catherine D. Stewart