Part Four

Piper alternated between calling him Jack and Al for a good ten minutes before he finally interrupted her. "I also answer to Dean."

Piper threw him a long, sharp look. She was still holding Chris close against her chest, and he in turn had his arms wrapped around her throat and his face pushed tightly against the side of her neck. Whenever she turned her head to speak to one of the numerous people who had questions for her, Dean could see that Chris had tangled his hands through his mother's hair and formed knots so intricate that it could take hours to untangle him again. Wyatt stood by Piper's side without speaking, his legs braced far apart. Dean wondered for a moment if Wyatt would actually bite his hand if Dean tried to touch his mother without permission.

"Well, I don't know," Piper answered him waspishly. The fire looked as if it was on its way out, but Dean could already tell at a glance that most of her floor was going to be unlivable for a good time to come. "'Dean' is about the only ID that you didn't have."

"Somehow I have the feeling that you know a little something about secret identities yourself," Dean shot back. Piper narrowed her eyes at him without flinching, but Dean missed most of her expression. He was too busy watching the cops as they roamed back and forth taking everyone's statements. There were way too many in one place for Dean to possibly relax around them, and it was taking everything that he had to look as if he belonged there. 'Absolutely, officer, friend of the family, no wanted murderers here.' "And if you hadn't thrown that whammy at me earlier, I might have been able to explain." An officer strode past them, and Dean found a shadow that required his complete attention. When he turned back around, he found Piper watching him with a quirked eyebrow.

"Was he a friend that you're not quite ready to have the tearful reunion with yet?" she asked.

Dean flashed her a thin-lipped smile. "Ease up on the sarcasm, cupcake. I'm not trying to kill you or set your house on fire. I'd say I'm a step up from what you were dealing with earlier."

One of the firefighters approached Piper again. He threw a quick glance over Dean, but that was about as far as his interest extended, and that was just the way that Dean liked it. "I think that we've done all that we can here, Mrs. Halliwell," he said. "Contact your insurance company as soon as you can and find a friend that you can stay with in the meanwhile. It will be a few days before we can make sure that the apartment is safe enough for you to reenter and start seeing what you can salvage."

While the firefighter was speaking, Dean was looking up at what had once been the boys' bedroom window. All of the glass had been blown out by heat, and the brick surrounding the sill was scorched by long, black fingers. Though Dean looked hard, he saw no telltale silhouette standing in the room and waiting for him. Didn't mean that he couldn't still feel it.

He ordered himself to unclench his hands from their fists before he would up cutting himself, looking back down just in time to hear Piper say, "What about the bedrooms?"

"They were both completely destroyed," the firefighter said, and added, "I'm sorry," when Piper's face went white.

"Thank you." Piper made a brief attempt to pull Chris free from her hair before giving it up as a lost cause. She shifted him onto one of her hips instead so that she could reach out and take the man's hand. "There, um, there was just a lot of irreplaceable stuff in there. Pictures and…things. But thank you, for all of your help. I mean that."

"You're very welcome, ma'am." Dean thought that the man was on the verge of tipping his hat before he walked away. He watched the firefighter go and wondered how much simpler his life might have been if he had chosen that as a career instead, and how much more complicated the Halliwells' had just become since fate decided to focus on them.

No, Dean amended a bare second later. Given what he had seen of the family thus far, he was willing to bet that their lives had been pretty damned complicated before he or the demon had ever thought of setting foot in San Francisco. "Are you all right?" he asked Piper, who looked as if she was on the verge of smacking herself in the forehead in frustration.

She shook her head and said, "Yes," ignoring the disbelieving look that Dean gave her. "I made a very stupid mistake."

Dean looked up at the window again and wondered if he had not done the same by not shoving Piper and her family out into the hallway and trusting that they could find their way down to the ground floor and safety from there, while he himself lunged through the flames to deal with the demon. He could have tried.

Dean remembered Missouri's phone call and warning to him before he remembered the smell of his own family's blood in his nose. The two of them battled against one another for a moment before he said, "Look, I have a motel room not far from here. It's not exactly the Four Seasons, but it'll be safe while I fight this thing for you."

"We already have somewhere to go," Piper told him. For someone whose home had just been destroyed and who still had the mark of her own close call spanning across her stomach, no matter how she might have insisted to the EMTs that it was nothing more than a scratch, she seemed remarkably calm. Maybe there was more of his mother in Wyatt than Dean had first supposed upon looking at their family picture. She leaned back and gave Dean a long, searching look. He had the feeling that he was being put through some kind of mental test, and still was not sure whether or not he had passed when she rocked back. "You can come with us, since it sure looks like you're tangled up in this mess, too."

Fine. Dean had all the real tools of his trade in the trunk of the new car, anyway, and he was not inclined to argue if it would help him get to the demon that much faster. "Whatever," Dean said gruffly. He took another glance around the parking lot, noting all over again how crowded it was with people in uniforms who might want to put questions to him that he could not answer without winding up in a pair of handcuffs. It had been hours since they had left the apartment, but Piper had still not excused herself to call anyone. "I'll keep an eye on the boys while you call Leo, and we can get on the road."

Dean expected Piper to look surprised and even a little annoyed that he knew the name of her husband, as she had thus far treated him with an icy suspicion suggesting that she still half-expected him to pick their pockets if she let her attention wander for too long. He did not expect her to rear back as if he had slapped her in response to a question that he had actually asked in a pretty courteous tone of voice. Neither did he expect Chris to briefly lift his face from his mother's neck so that he could stare at him, or for Wyatt to once again take on an expression suggesting that he would much rather be a pit bull rather than a little boy.

"How do you know about Leo?" Piper demanded of him. "How much research have you done on my family?"

Dean held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "So you got me, the journalism story was a lie."

"No kidding," Piper said. As tough as her tone was, she was still paler than Dean had ever seen her before, and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. Dean remembered a knife that had once belonged to a friend of his father's when Dean had still been small. It had survived centuries, Darien told him while Dean divided his attention between the knife-the dagger, really-and watching his father drop silver bullets from their molds and into a pan of cool water. It had been through so many battles against so many demons, though, that magic was the only thing that was keeping it together any longer. One good tap…

'I hope that you're stronger than that, Mrs. Halliwell,' Dean thought, before he remembered that he was dealing with a family that had a fair bit of magic to call its own. "I looked you up in a newspaper article while I was trying to figure out where that thing up there was going to attack next," Dean told her. "There was some background on the family included. Look, if there's been some kind of nasty breakup or something-"

"Leo died," Piper said shortly. She began the slow, arduous process of disentangling Chris from around her neck with a softly murmured, "Honey, Mommy needs to breathe," so that she could set him down on the ground. He made immediate tracks for the leg that Wyatt was not already guarding.

"I'm sorry," Dean said gruffly, not sure what else there was to say. If the way that Piper turned her head away quickly to study the ruined building was anything to go by, then neither was she interested in hearing it.

"Now you're stealing my lines," she said in a voice so low that Dean could scarcely hear her. A moment later, her face hardened again. "Why were you looking up my family?"

Dean turned and pointed towards the place where Piper's apartment had once been. When he tilted his head just right, the sooty marks almost resembled a face. That wasn't helping the sick, just-ate-glass feeling that had been taken him and had been twisting him ever since he had gotten Missouri's phone call and had looked up where the Halliwells lived now. "That wasn't random."

Piper's face hardened further. She reached out and pulled Chris closer to her, as if he wasn't already doing everything short of actually burrowing into the side of her thigh. "No," she said. "It was a witch."

Yeah, like Dean hadn't already figured out that there were layers upon layers of past history with this family that wasn't exactly going to be found in any newspaper article. He only paused for a second to process that remark before he shook his head. "A demon."

Piper's expression cleared for a second, and she let out a short, hollow laugh. "If only. That, I would know what to do with." Her face underwent another one of those strange freezes before she was able to bring it under her control again, as if she was holding herself together with a white-knuckled grip and nothing else. She might be putting on a good front for the kids, but Dean could still sense that there was a good eruption waiting just inches below the surface, looking for something to set her off. He would wait until her kids were no longer standing out in the open parking lot that was making Dean's skin itch with all of the different angles that he could not cover at once before he began to push at her. "No, I saw her. I know who the witch was, she's had a grudge against me and mine for a long time."

"The demon can possess people that you know," Dean told her. He felt a bitter twist overtake his mouth as he said, "It puts in an extra-special happy place, actually."

Piper stared at him for a long moment, as if taking his measure, before she shook her head and said briskly, "Okay, so I can already tell that this is not a conversation for wide open parking lots." Thank God, she had more danger sense than Dean had been willing to give her credit for. "Henry is just going to love seeing me again so soon. Come on, I have a car."

"So do I," Dean said, and pointed towards the Mustang where it sat by the curb.

"Does it have car seats?" Piper asked him.

"No, but it has a trunk filled with things that can stab, shoot, and bludgeon," Dean replied. "All things that put me in an extra special happy place." He could hear the savage note that came into his voice and could not pull it back again before Piper blinked and leaned back subtly. "We can move the car seats."

Piper shrugged, and he could all but see the wheels in her head turning as she decided that their method of transportation was not high enough on her list of priorities to be worth fighting over. If Dean were in her place, he would be more worried about getting into any vehicle that was outside of his control, but Piper had also not gone through the same experiences in a very similar car that Dean less than a year before. He had already seen that kid of hers glow, anyway. There was no telling what else he was able to do if he got spooked.

Working together, it only took the two of them a few minutes to transfer the car seats from Piper's responsible family car and into Dean's. When both of the boys were bundled into the back seat and buckled in more firmly than astronauts at liftoff, Piper slid into the front seat and ran her hands over the dashboard. "My husband loved classic cars," she said in a musing voice, half-sad and half merely nostalgic. Dean stayed quiet, not sure if she even meant to include him in the conversation, or if she was only sharing something with herself and he happened to be here.

"This is a '65 Mustang," Dean couldn't stop himself from pointing out when the silence ran a little too long.

She looked up, confused. "So?"

"So," Dean said, "if your husband had any taste at all, he would not have given this car the time of day." Piper looked at him, snapping out of her fugue long enough for an amused half-smile to cross her face. 'Boys and their toys,' it said, and Dean rolled his eyes. "It's temporary."

"I bow to the superior intellect in this matter." Piper put her seatbelt on and turned to stare out the passenger window. "Leo liked pick-ups best, anyway."

And that put them right back into the happy place where he had no idea what to say, not a place that he was used to and certainly not one that he liked. He cleared his throat and started the car instead. Outside of giving him directions to the house of this friend of hers, Piper seemed to have exhausted her supply of words for the morning, and the boys said nothing at all. If he had been dealing with ordinary people, this was the point where Dean would be peppered with questions about how demons could possibly be real, how they could be stopped, how he was going to make it better, but, well, Piper stole time and her kids glowed. He was pretty sure that ruled out the chances for a normal existence in one fell swoop.

Dean cast Piper several surreptitious glances as he drove and she stared out the passenger window at the passing streets and houses. She was still wearing her wedding band on her left hand, and it caught the light whenever she moved her hand to push a few strands of hair back from her face. It was an easy mistake to make, especially when he was already rattled by the fact that the demon had made the unprecedented move of attacking during the day. The way that Piper had jerked back at the mention of his name would suggest that it had been a recent wound.

"I'm doing the same thing, you know," Piper said without taking her eyes away from the neat, tree-lined streets.

"What's that?" Dean asked, straightening. He glanced into the back seat to check on the boys, almost without realizing that he was even doing it. Chris had calmed down and was busily scrubbing at the tearstains on his face. Wyatt was meeting Dean's gaze through the rearview mirror. He blinked and looked away when he realized that Dean had caught him out.

"Watching you like you're watching me." It was more likely, Dean thought, that she was watching his hands to make sure that they stayed on the steering wheel and where she could see them. The way that her only twitched every time that she was startled had not gone unnoticed.

He flashed her a grin that was easy and relaxed even though he himself was not. "I'm that obvious?"

"Those cops and firefighters weren't making you so nervous because you thought that they were going to be jealous of your slick detective skills." Piper straightened and turned away from the passenger window at last so that she could fix Dean with a long stare. Her eyes were one of the deepest shades of brown that Dean had ever seen, large and searching. "You helped me, and I'm grateful for that. I've gotten help from…dubious…people before, but I want you to know right now, whatever you did, if it's something that could come back to hurt my boys, then turning yourself over to the police will look like a missed opportunity in comparison."

She meant every word of it, too. Dean took one hand from the wheel and held it up in a gesture of mock surrender. "Mrs. Halliwell, as much as this sounds like a cliché, in my case it's true: I'm innocent. Case of mistaken identity."

Piper glanced over at him again. "Evil twin?"

"Close." In for a penny, in for a pound. Given everything else that he knew and suspected about her family, there was every chance that she would not do any more than bat an eye. "Shapeshifter. Decided that my face would be a fun one to take a joyride around in." The grin was almost a reflex by now. It should have had her eating out of his hand within seconds. Maybe there was a delayed reaction at work here or something. "Can you blame him?"

Dean thought that he detected amusement when she looked over at him again. "Shapeshifter," she said flatly. "I liked 'evil twin' better. Don't guess that I'm in a position to decide what's impossible and what's not, though."

Dean cast a pointed glance at Piper's hands where they were folded in her lap. "Not so much."

"What did you do?" Dean made an outraged noise. Piper rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine. What do they think that you did?"

This was the part that Dean had been dreading. He paused to weigh the merits of the truth against those of an outrageous lie, aware that Piper's eyebrows were crawling up when the silence dragged on for too long. Frankly, he had an equal track record with either one. Fine, Dean decided ultimately. He was tired, and it was the kind of day for the truth. Like ripping off a bandaid. He was sure that Missouri would approve. "They think that I killed somebody."

"Pull over and let me out," Piper answered immediately.

"Let me explain," Dean started.

"No," she cut him off before he could get more than a few words out. "There are certain statements that can be made better when they are followed with 'let me explain'. 'I murdered somebody' is not one of them." Those hands that she seemed able to wreak such damage with were clenching into fists, and she had twisted so that she had them both pointed in Dean's direction like a pair of pistols.

"I didn't say that I murdered someone," Dean snapped back at her, feeling both offended and ridiculous at the same time. "I said that they think that I did."

"Pull over," Piper said again, almost shouting. "I swear, I can blow you straight out of the driver's door if you don't."

"You'll crash the car," Dean said in a milder tone than he felt, but put his foot to the brake and began pulling the car over to the side of the curb all the same.

"Wyatt, orb your brother," Piper ordered over her shoulder to Wyatt as soon as she felt the car starting to slow down.

"Piper-" Dean forgot to use her surname as he leaned over quickly and grabbed her by the forearm. She jerked back, stiffening, and Dean braced himself for her to let loose with that mojo again. It didn't come. That was something. Dean leaned back onto his side of the car again, holding up his hands. "Okay, sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have confessed to murder," Piper said, but she wasn't jumping out of the car and running down the street yet. Probably because Wyatt in the backseat was still struggling with chubby fingers to let himself out of his car seat so that he could even reach his brother.

Dean rolled his eyes and made an irritated huffing sound before he could stop himself. "Lady, you need to work on your listening skills. I didn't do it. Try to keep up."

"The convenient shapeshifter." Though Piper's voice was dripping with sarcasm, she still hadn't moved. Dean was willing to consider that a victory.

He was just annoyed enough to flash her a devil-may-care smile and mean every inch of it. Using that smile again, Dean felt better than he had in a long time. "Why do I think that that's not such a stretch in your world?" Piper opened her mouth, closed it again, and gave him a suspicious eye. "Meanwhile, I know more than just about anyone else left on the planet about that demon that attacked your kids."

"Witch," Piper said automatically, but she didn't sound convinced.

Dean didn't roll his eyes, but it was a near thing. He still felt more like himself than he had in months. "I can help you. As I recall, I've already helped you. So I'm asking you to take a leap of faith here." These were the lines that Sammy was supposed to say, as he had the eyes on the trust-me vibe of the future lawyer to work for all that he was worth, and Dean felt faintly ridiculous saying them.

"On a murderer."

"We've already been over that."

"I don't trust you," Piper said. In the back seat, Wyatt had finally managed to let himself free from his car seat. Piper made a quick gesture for him to stay where he was. Dean thought of that as a victory.

Dean grinned at her again. She didn't look like she was buying it, but Dean thought that it was more for his benefit than it was for hers, like stretching out a muscle that had developed a cramp. "All I ask is that you trust my guns." A second later, he winced. "And ignore what a bad choice of words that was." When several more seconds went by and Piper still did not take the opportunity to jump out and run screaming down the street, Dean put his hand on the keys and started the car back up again. "Gonna blow me through the driver's door?"

"I'm still thinking about it," came Piper's wary response.

"Your face is going to freeze that way if you keep it up," Dean told her, and watched her scowl grow deeper. Hell, it was keeping his thoughts away from how narrowly he had let the demon get away from him at her apartment, and that was all that Dean asked.

Piper's directions did not take him to another apartment complex, but instead to a small, well-kept house on a nondescript street. Dean eyed it up and down and immediately began assessing what he would have to do in order to defend it. "Will you get Wyatt?" Piper asked as she unbuckled her seatbelt and let herself out of the car.

"You mean that you trust me not to slit his throat?" Dean asked as he did the same.

She flashed him a faux-bright smile, but the tension had bled out of her frame. "He's precocious."

Dean stared after her in bemusement as she ducked into the backseat so that she could release Chris. He was not aware of having been given any kind of Mama Bear test in the minutes that had passed between the 'Hello, I'm a murderer, but not really' conversation and pulling up the curb, but he must have passed. Or else, Wyatt really was just as powerful as Dean was beginning to suspect would be able to hurl Dean all the way across the street and through the trees in the neighbor's lawn if it crossed his mind.

Dean pulled a duffel bag full of the most important odds and ends in his collection from the car's trunk and threw it over his shoulder before he went to help Wyatt out of the backseat. Metal clinked against metal from inside the duffel bag as Dean shifted it into a more comfortable position. Wyatt listened avidly.

"What's in there?" he asked, pointing at the bag as Dean unhooked the seatbelt and hoisted him down to the ground. It was first time that Dean had heard him speak. He had been beginning to wonder if the kid was not mute.

'A hell of a lot of unpleasant things made for killing even worse things,' Dean thought, but did not say. He glanced over Wyatt's head and noticed that Piper was monitoring their conversation with great interest. Truth or not, that was still probably not something for a kid Wyatt's age, no matter how exceptional that kid might turn out to be. Had Dad been that blunt with him when he had started to ask questions? Possibly. Hell, probably. But Dean had also been a little bit older than Wyatt was now by the time that the shock had worn off and the eldest Winchester had begun to reshape himself into the underworld's newest bogey man.

"Tricks of my trade, little man," Dean answered. From across the top of the car, he saw Piper cock an eyebrow at him that was either amused or approving, or maybe even both. It was hard to keep a bead on her, as she had a tendency to get snappish at normal things and stay calm in the face of events that would send most people to rocking in the corner.

"My job is a little different than most people's," Dean continued. "I have to keep my tools with me all the time." Wyatt looked up at him, frowning, without responding. So they were going back to basics, then. Dean reached out to ruffle the kid's hair, but Wyatt was too quick for him. He ducked away and then ran up the walkway to the front door.

"I want to ring the doorbell!" Wyatt hollered.

"Wyatt, you get back here right now and stay close to me!" Piper yelled, causing Wyatt, Dean, and even Chris to all swivel around and stare at her. The shrill note that had entered her voice as she called her son's name was the closest to outright panic that Dean had heard from her yet. Piper noticed all of the eyes on her and pressed her lips into a line. "It isn't safe," she finished in a more normal tone of voice.

"Hey, man, don't you worry about it," Dean said to Wyatt as the kid slunk back to his mother's side and cast him a hurt look from beneath his lashes. "We probably don't even need a doorbell, as good at yelling as you are." The next look that Piper directed Dean's way was about as easy to decipher as the first, but Dean thought that there might even be a flash of gratitude mixed in there. Rather than being pleased, as most boys would be at being told that they were very good at making a great deal of noise, Wyatt retreated back into stubborn stoicism and stared at Dean without saying a word.

Sure enough, the front door opened before any of them could get near enough to ring the bell, permitting a tall, good-looking man to stand before them in drawstring pants and without the benefit of a shirt. He was no stranger to the inside of a gym, either, and did not care if the neighborhood knew it. Dean felt his eyebrows crawling upwards as he threw a glance Piper's way. As hard as she had snapped at him when he had brought up Leo, he had not figured her for the type.

'Now watch this guy turn out to be her brother,' Dean told himself, 'and you'll have to put the case on hold while you go and have a lobotomy.'

Though it was close to two in the afternoon, the man in the doorway had the tousled hair and wrinkled face suggesting that Wyatt's shout had pulled him from a deep sleep. He scrubbed his hand over his face before he asked in a disbelieving tone, "Piper?"

Piper winced. "Hi, Henry," she said. "Just in case you hadn't had enough of us, there's been an emergency."

Just like that, all of the sleep vanished from Henry's eyes, leaving a different man standing there from one moment to the next. This one looked as if he could do a lot more with his muscle than impress the pretty ladies at the gym. "Are the boys all right?" Henry asked immediately. He cast his gaze over Dean as he said it, searching the stranger for any sign that he might be a threat. Dean wasn't certain that he had passed by the time that Henry looked away, towards Piper again.

Piper had picked Chris up and was bracing him against one of her hips again. She reached out and tugged Wyatt quickly closer to her. Dean was not sure that she was even aware that she had made the gesture until it was done, but Wyatt began to squirm immediately. "They're fine," Piper replied. "The apartment didn't come out without a few black eyes, though, and it looks magical. Can we come in?"

"Sure." Henry stood to the side so that they could all pass. The inside of his house had definitely been decorated in bachelor chic, but it was clean and uncluttered. Dean immediately made note of all of the doors and windows as he set the duffel bag down on the nearest chair and began to go through it for the salt. Henry's eyes went flat between one second and the next as he watched, and Dean knew that he had not missed the gleam of gunmetal from inside.

"Easy, man," Dean said, waving him off. "None of them are loaded."

"Do you have licenses for them?" Henry asked, stepping closer so that he could peer into the depths of the bag. The jars, and the things floating around inside of the jars, were of particular interest to him before Dean zipped it closed again.

"They're unloaded," Dean repeated, flashing Henry his most winning smile. "Let's not get too bogged down in the other details." He lifted a can of salt and shook it for emphasis. "I'm going to salt down the doors and windows." Dean wasn't asking for permission, but he still experienced a moment of confusion where he did not know which of the adults that he ought to be addressing.

Piper frowned. "I know from demons," she said, though she still let a significant pause go by before she could bring herself to pronounce the word. 'I'll just bet that you do,' Dean thought. "I've never used salt to repel them before."

"Live and learn," Dean said. He glanced towards Wyatt. "Want to give me a hand, little man?"

Wyatt looked to Piper for permission. She nodded, though she beckoned him over to her first so that she could lean down and whisper something into his ear. Piper adjusted Chris back onto her hip and flashed Henry a wan smile as Wyatt ran back over to Dean. "Guess I owe you some explanations."

"One or two," Henry replied, glancing over at Dean again. He paused long enough to grab a shirt from the back of an armchair and pull it over his head before he led Piper away into the kitchen.

Dean took Wyatt over to Henry's front door and helped him flip the top up on the canister. "Just pour out a nice, steady line," he told him. "You don't need to dump out the entire thing in one place, but you don't want any breaks, either."

Wyatt wrapped both of his small hands around the canister so that he could hold it steady and did as he was told, his face as screwed up in concentration as if Dean was showing him how to dismantle a bomb. "This keeps the bad things out?" he asked Dean.

"Most of them." Dean reached out and corrected Wyatt's line, as it had broken when he looked up to wait for Dean's response. 'Not all of them. Not nearly enough.'

"Will it keep out the thing that tried to hurt my mommy?"

Wyatt was getting downright chatty. Dean hesitated for a long moment so that he could choose his words carefully. They had not known about salt and it's ability to hold off evil when his mother had been killed. The demon had already been inside the room, inside of his father, when he had begun to lay out the barriers during his last tangle with the monster. "I don't know," he said finally, deciding that the comforting lie would do so much more damage if he was wrong than would telling the unpleasant truth now.

Wyatt finished with the front door and gave the canister a thoughtful shake before he went to work on Henry's windows. He was a quick study, and Dean did not have to correct any mistakes again.

End Part Four