Part Six
The day was pushing into sunset and the boys were on their second DVD before Henry got off of the phone and rejoined Piper and Dean. He scrubbed his hand over his face, then across the back of his neck, and stared down at the floor for a long moment without saying a word.
"What happened?" Piper asked eagerly. Dean didn't see the need. John Winchester had been a believer in reading the victim as much or more than reading the demon, as so often the victims were being less than forthcoming with their own involvement in dark magic and the like. Dean, eager student that he was, had watched every move that his father had made. If there was a single thing that Henry was broadcasting now, it was defeat.
Henry met Piper's eyes and winced. "No go," he said, shaking his head. "If I was an actual detective, I might be able to come up with a good lie, but as a parole officer…" Henry shrugged and snorted. "As it turns out, evidence tampering is a felony. What do you know?"
Beside him, Dean watched as Piper subtly deflated back into the couch. "Magic, then," she said in the tones of someone who had just been told that the minor mole on her back was in fact not so minor at all. She pushed herself to her feet. "I'll start working on a spell."
"Isn't this usually a Power of Three thing?" Henry asked her.
Piper managed to look scared, frazzled, and stubborn all at once. "It'll be a Power of One thing," she said, inclining her head to check on Wyatt and Chris where they were paying rapt attention to the latest adventures of Sponge Bob Squarepants. "I'll make it one. Got a notepad that I can borrow?"
"Sure." Henry arched his eyebrows at Dean before he led Piper away, as if asking if he could manage to stay out of trouble for that long.
"Think I got it covered, buddy." Dean pointed to the disturbingly yellow little man who was cavorting under the sea with his friends. Chris let out a high-pitched giggle, and Wyatt gave him a look of long-suffering disbelief so similar to the ones that Dean had once given Sam that he felt his throat closing up for a moment. "I can't wait to see how this one ends."
Henry's eyebrows only went up higher. "Murder?" he asked Dean. His tone suggested that a good answer had better be forthcoming.
Dean flashed him the easy smile that only seemed to fail when he turned it onto Piper Halliwell. "Mistaken identity."
If Henry's tone had told Dean that his answer had better be a damned good one, then his expression said that that was not a good example. "You have no idea how many people say that to me," Henry said flatly.
"And in my case it's true." Dean nodded to where Piper was busily going through Henry's drawers again, apparently looking for a pen. "But I'm sure that she's already filled you in."
Henry had turned to watch Piper also, his tone becoming softer and more protective for a moment. "For whatever reason, she trusts you," he said as he turned back. "Don't fuck it up."
Dean watched as Piper's shoulders twitched, as if she could sense obscenities being said within a fifty-foot radius of her kids even when she herself was not within hearing distance. He tired the grin again, to roughly the same effect. Okay, so Piper Halliwell, and Henry. "I'll keep that in mind," he said as Henry finally left him alone.
Dean glanced out of Henry's living room window and made note of the deepening twilight. The demon would likely attack again shortly after night fell, and they were running out of fresh houses to shuttle to. Dean had better have a plan in place by then, or else the situation was likely to come to a grim and grisly end, like so many other families before it. Though Piper had insisted over and over again that she had been nothing more than scratched by the earlier attack, Dean had still seen her wince and place her hand against her stomach repeatedly.
He needed the Colt, Dean thought stubbornly, remembering the way that his father's eyes had turned gold, the way that the headlights had filled up his entire world before it had exploded into pain. It was not until he felt a sharp, stabbing sensation in the palms of his hands and glanced down that he realized how tightly he was clenching his hands into fists, until he was on the verge of cutting the flesh open. He needed the gun so that he could end this, finally, so that he could bury it as surely as he had buried the corpses of many other nasty things over the years, and rest knowing that there would be no more Maxes or Sams made. Rest knowing that this sour taste of bile in the back of his throat, this buzzing thirst for revenge in his head, could finally be quenched.
Gee, and that would all be so much easier if the gun was not one thousand miles away and in a police precinct that knew his face far better than he was comfortable with. That left him trying to work with a trunk full of rock salt and a witch with self-image problems.
"Magic," Dean muttered in a tone of deep disgust. Something else that he could neither touch nor see, though he still had the deep scratches on the side of his neck to tell him all about the danger of things that he could not see. He sighed and pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialing in a number quickly before he raised the phone to his ear.
Missouri answered on the first ring. "What is it, sugar?" she asked.
Dean pulled the phone away from his ear so that he could give it a look of surprise and deep suspicion before he put it back and asked, "Did you know that I was going to call?"
Missouri made a huffing noise that managed somehow to let Dean know exactly what her expression was, even though he could not see it. "Boy, do you think that I spend all day waving my hands over a crystal ball?" she demanded. "I got Caller ID years ago. What do you need?"
Dean let the silence gather until Missouri made another huffing noise, perhaps thinking that the line had been disconnected or that Dean was deliberately ignoring her. "It's about my dad," he said, and then swore beneath his breath to hear the shake that he could still not control even now.
"That mouth is going to get you in trouble that it won't be able to get you back out of again, mark my words," Missouri said, her tone gentle. "And I had a feeling that it would be."
"More psychic wonder games?" Dean asked dryly.
"Dean Winchester, just because your brother put up with that crap does not mean that I'm going to." Dean had gotten himself into the habit of not thinking about Sam unless he was forced into it. Even thinking about Dad for a prolonged period of time was giving him a throbbing head and making him see why Dad had sometimes drank a shade more than was healthy. "It's common sense."
"How often did my dad call you to talk shop?" Dean got right to the point, hearing a brusque note in his voice. He sounded as if he was on the verge of shattering altogether.
Either Missouri heard that note, or she was using some of her psychic wonder abilities, after all. Her voice was gentle as she said, "Close to every week at first, less as the years went by and he found his feet. Why do you want to know?"
"Did he ever talk to you about the demon?" Dean asked. There was no need to specify which demon he was talking about.
"All the time, sugar." Missouri's voice was soft, gentle. Dean almost wished that she would snap at him again. "What do you need to know?"
"Did he ever mention another way to stop the demon, something that doesn't need the Colt?" Dean asked. When the only sound on the other end of the line was that of Missouri's quiet breathing, he once again heard that trace of panic in his own voice. "Look, Missouri, I have no gun and no journal, so I'm pretty much throwing myself on your mercy here…" It hurt to say that, but the last year had hurt a lot more.
"I head you, Dean," Missouri told him. "No. He talked about that demon close to every time that we talked-sometimes it was all that he talked about-but all he ever did was pin his hopes onto that gun."
Dean swore again, not even bothering this time to keep it under his breath. Missouri said his name sharply. "Yeah, language. You're as bad as Piper."
From the other end of the line came the sound of Missouri's deep, reverberating sigh. "As if I wouldn't be able to hear you thinking it, anyway." There was a long beat of silence in which Dean struggled with the question that had been tugging at him all day, unable to quite bring himself to voice it aloud. "Anytime, Dean, don't even worry about it. We can talk shop, or we can talk about your dad. Anything that you want to."
"Thanks," Dean said gruffly before he hung up the phone. Glancing up, he saw that Piper had gone back into the kitchen and taken a seat at Henry's table. She was writing furiously on the notepad that Henry had loaned her, pausing to glare at what she had written, scratching it out again almost as quickly. Dean would not be surprised to see sweat break out along her hairline next.
"No Colt, and a neurotic witch," Dean muttered to himself. "Oh, yeah, this is going to turn out great." He did not allow himself to dwell on the thought that really wanted to dig in and take root, the one which said that if he had still been with Dad or Sam and at the top of the game he never would have left the Colt behind, never mind that Dean had been sick with grief and frequently still reeling with pain. Sam would have found a way to sneak it back out again. When the thought refused to retreat on its own, Dean shut it down with a speed and ruthlessness that surprised him before he threw it out of his mind altogether. It was not until he tasted flakes of enamel on his tongue that he realized that he might out to relax his jaw before he wound up snapping all of his teeth off at the gum. Dean shoved the phone back into the pocket of his jacket and rubbed at his eyes, sighing. Best that he could figure, his options were either to hope that Piper's mojo was real enough and strong enough to do the job, and that she could get herself together long enough to actually get it pointed in the right direction, or to cram everyone into the car and head east to take the gun back himself. With the way that things were going so far, he would wake up from a catnap to find out that the demon could pin people to the roofs of cars, too.
Something tugged at the hem of Dean's jacket. He jumped, and his hand even curled into a fist before he managed to get himself back under control again. Turning to see what it was that had startled him, Dean let out a huffing sound that still did not come anywhere near to being a laugh. "Little man," he sighed, forcing his fist to uncurl, "this is really not a good night to be creeping up on people."
Wyatt stared up at Dean with big, solemn eyes and still did not release his grip on Dean's jacket. Puppyish infatuation with Dean or not, Dean still had to admit that Piper's oldest had a creepy-ass stare on him. Chris was still engrossed in the castle under the sea, not paying any attention to where his brother had gone. He was still young enough to shrug this night off without too much injury. Wyatt was another matter altogether.
"My mommy says that guns are bad," Wyatt told Dean in a monotone. He released Dean's jacket at last and dropped his hand back to his side, where he began to clench and unclench it into spasmodic fists. It was the only sign of emotion that he showed, for his face remained as blank as a china doll's.
Yeah. Cute kid all around, and Dean was growing fond of him in spite of himself, but creepy.
"Your mommy is a smart lady," Dean replied distractedly before he reached out and ruffled Wyatt's hair again. "I can show you more tricks for fighting demons later, okay? Right now I'm busy." Trying to conjure a plan out of thin air.
Wyatt neither leaned into Dean's hand nor pulled further away. "Can that gun kill the thing that tried to hurt her?" he asked.
"Yeah, should," Dean said, barely glancing at Wyatt at he pulled his hand back. Sam would come up with a plan, so he needed to think like Sam. College boy Dean might not be, but he was still a damned long way from stupid. "We don't have that gun, though, so there's no point in kicking ourselves around about it." Dean could picture every detail of the hospital, every detail of the town in his mind, seeming so close and yet so far away.
"I can see it," Wyatt said abruptly before he reached out, grabbed Dean's wrist, and gripped it tight. For a young boy, he was surprisingly strong.
"What the hell?" Dean asked, only to shut his mouth abruptly as he felt a sharp tugging sensation beginning from behind his navel. He gasped and swore. Wyatt's hand only tightened in response, and a blue haze began to fill Dean's vision. He heard Piper shout, though her voice sounded as if it was coming from a great distance away, and the haze was so thick that he could not see where she was. The tugging increased, Dean's feet left the ground-
-and after several whooshing seconds in which he could not say where he was, what he was touching, or even if he was still breathing at all, he felt his boots come down on something solid again. Dean stumbled once and caught himself, instinctively drawing Wyatt closer against him so that Dean could protect him. He shook his head as the last of the brilliant blue faded from his vision, like shaking off the afterimage from flash photography. When he was able to see again, his jaw dropped.
"Little man," Dean said, "your whole family is something else, do you know that?" He had made swift tracks to get his ass out of town after leaving the hospital. Didn't mean that he couldn't tell exactly which precinct he was standing in now. It appeared largely deserted, though when he focused he could still hear voices from further down the hall. A few jackets were draped across chairs, a few cups of coffee were still sitting out on desks, steam curling from their tops, while a country singer on the radio wanted Dean to know that he didn't know who was cheating who, who was being true, and who didn't even care anymore.
Wyatt's only response was to tighten his grip on Dean's hand and shrink even further against his side. Yeah, the kid was plenty brave when was teleporting Dean onto cross-country jaunts, not so much when they actually reached their destination. Dean clenched his jaw until he felt a muscle in his cheek begin to jump and squeezed Wyatt's hand back. Incredibly, he felt the kid relax even further against him. Four year-olds had a strange sense of courage. "Lucky for you, I'm not the kind that's going to look a gift Colt in the mouth." The idea that it could be over, that he could finally have the satisfaction of putting a bullet into the demon's head, was intoxicating.
While Dean had never been in this particular police station, he had spoken to enough of its officers to get a pretty good idea of what he could expect if he ever entered the building, and was delighted to note that it filled all of his most vicious daydreams. As long as he got his gun back, the fine citizens of this little backwater could hold their police proceedings in a basement and their city council meetings in an attic for all that he cared.
"Good boy," Dean murmured as they began to creep forward. "Good, good boy." Wyatt looked pleased by this particular bit of praise, so much so that he might even commit what was, for him, the audaciously rambunctious act of even smiling. Weird kid, Dean thought, not without fondness. Someone really ought to talk to Piper about that. So long as he could help Dean get his gun back, though, Dean would happily take him to every baseball game and show him how to kill every supernatural beastie that his heart desired. Along the way, he might even remember what it was like to have fun doing it.
"What in the hell are the two of you doing in here?" Wyatt jumped at the sound of the voice and then shrank closer against Dean, as if he would become a part of Dean's thigh altogether if he could. Dean put his hand onto Wyatt's shoulders as they both turned around. Already, the smile that managed to charm everyone on the planet who was not Piper Halliwell or a part of her merry band was back on his face.
"Evening, officer," he said, squeezing once at Wyatt's shoulder as a warning for him to keep his silence. Not that that was likely to be a problem, not with the way that Wyatt was actually trying to squirm behind Dean so that he could peek around him. So the kid was big on the cross-country teleportation, but not so much on the follow-through.
"What are you doing here?" the officer repeated, coming a few steps closer to the two of them. Okay, so the grin worked on everyone except for Piper Halliwell, her friends, and jerkwater cops from the ass end of nowhere. Dean firmly believed in making every day a learning experience. He watched as the cop's hand crept closer to his gun even as the rest of him remained soft, inattentive. Dean, Dad, hell, even Sam could have put his guy on the ground before he even realized that the rattling in his mouth was his own teeth coming loose. But that gun…
"Weapons, weapons, everywhere, and not a one for me," Dean muttered before he made sure that his grin was bright and blinding again. He grabbed Wyatt by the back of his shirt and dragged him back in front of him. With the way that the kid hissed and squirmed, Dean would be lucky if he was not arrested for kidnapping as well as that nasty murder charge that kept following him around. "This little guy lost his dog," Dean said, gesturing down to Wyatt. Wyatt broke off his wiggling long enough to look up at Dean with big saucer eyes. If this was the best that the kid had, they would never make a good liar out of him. "It was a pureblood, too, and there were, um, signs of theft. Isn't there some kind of report that I can fill out about that?"
"It's nearly eleven at night, and the front desk is that way," the officer said, pointing out of the room and down the hall to where Dean had heard the voice. There was a great deal more confidence in the officer's stride now as he came forward, but his hand never left the butt of the gun. Dean watched every move that he made.
The time difference. He had let himself forget; fuck. It was the exactly the kind of sloppy mistake that someone hunting alone could not afford to make. Dean's smile flickered for a moment, like a light bulb that only had a few hours left to it before it burned out, and he watched the answering flicker in the cop's face. Maybe not as soft as Dean had pegged him for, then.
"Is it really?" Dean scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck and glanced over at the windows as if he was just now noticing that it was full dark outside, when in California it was still in the most velvet part of the twilight. "We went to a movie, and you know how these little monsters are about sugar. I told my son-" Another goggle-eyed stare from Wyatt. Sam was a better liar. "I told him that a soda bigger than he is was a bad plan, but of course he had to have one. Soon as we get here, he has to pee. Must have gotten lost looking for the bathroom." It was a ludicrous lie, but Dean had certainly sold worse, provided that his audience was receptive.
This one was not. "You took your kid to a movie after you found out that the dog was missing?" the cop asked skeptically. His eyes widened as he came close enough to get a good, leisurely look at Dean's face. One more second-
"Nah, that would be stupid," Dean continued in that pleasant, just-a-citizen voice. If his eyes had gone cold and calculating by then, then the shadows hid it well. "We went before we found out that the dog was missing. Little bladders, you know, you remember how predictable they are."
The police officer did not, in fact, remember how they were. He looked as if everything that had taken place before his twenty-fifth birthday was a blur to him, and as if he breathed a sigh of relief on the day that his childhood was gone forever. "Yeah, that makes perfect sense," he said, changing his tone to one that he would use to coax a mental patient off of a ledge and back to where the soothing hypodermic of thorazine was waiting. If he was trying to sound friendly, then Dean had finally found the person who was the worst liar in the room. "So why don't you step away from the kid while I get that report for you."
"That's an excellent plan," Dean said. His friend in the uniform had finally come close enough for Dean to reach him without putting a few unwelcome holes into his own hide. Dean used the hand that he had shifted into the back of Wyatt's shirt to push him away from himself, so hard that the boy almost lost his balance. He still chose carefully to make sure that Wyatt was not going to crack his head open on the corner of someone's desk at the same time that Dean was trying to avoid getting himself shot, but Wyatt squawked in surprise all the same. The cop's eyes moved to follow the sound. All that Dean needed was a single second in which he was not the center of attention. He lunged forward.
The cop spun around at the sound of Dean's feet with a speed that shocked Dean and made him reevaluate everything that he had thought about the man in the span of a single second. John Winchester would not have made that mistake, John Winchester would have allowed for the cop to possess hidden depths. Dean was goddamned sick of standing himself next to a ghost and finding himself wanting each time even as he could not quite make himself stop, like a sore tooth that he could not keep his tongue away from.
Dean caught the cop's wrist a second too late. When he jerked the man's hand away from his holster, the gun came with it. Dean grit his teeth together at the same time that he shoved his thumb into the sensitive nerves and tendons on the underside of the cop's wrist. The pressure would be excruciating, more than enough to make any normal person drop the weapon.
The cop did, but not without first pulling the trigger back and sending a deafening boom echoing throughout the squad room. For so long as he lived, Dean would never stop swearing that he felt the bullet pass so closely by his head that he could have turned his head and kissed it. In the echo of the report, Dean heard Wyatt scream. His heart stopped in his chest.
It was not until he realized that Wyatt had screamed from fear and not from pain that it began to beat again, though that still was not coaxing it back down from his trachea. Dean was thrown up onto a wave of adrenaline and relief that twisted violently on him, wrested the gun from the cop's nerveless fingers, and shoved it back on him before the rest of his body knew what he was doing. "You aim at little kids?" Dean yelled into the officer's face. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
The officer stared at him, breathing in harsh pants. Dean leaned back as he realized that Wyatt was also staring at him with wide eyes and that the cop had not been aiming at Wyatt at all, that the shot had gone wild. Like a rotten tooth; he couldn't stop himself.
"Where's the evidence room?" Dean demanded instead. He could not say how far away those voices had been, but gunshots had a way of bringing people running. No answer. "Hell with it, this place isn't that big." Dean put the butt of the service pistol into the cop's temple, and the man dropped like a stone. Wyatt was still staring and breathing hard, as if he was watching a terrible movie that he did not know how to turn off. "That right there was about fifty different kinds of illegal," Dean said awkwardly, feeling as if he should be imparting some kind of wisdom onto Wyatt, since he sure was not having any trouble teaching him about violence. "So don't grow up to be me, okay?"
"Okay," Wyatt breathed.
"Good boy," Dean said. "Are you hurt?" He waited for Wyatt to shake his head before he switched the gun to his other hand so that he could examine his palm, which was burning from where he had grabbed the gun by its barrel. Dean began to mutter a litany of obscenities beneath his breath that would have earned him a glare from Piper, at the very least, if she had been present. It was not as if Wyatt was close enough to hear what he was saying, anyway, Dean thought as he could almost feel Piper's eyes on him. He was not sure that Wyatt was of a mind to even understand what Dean was saying if he had been standing right next to him. They boy had his arms wrapped around himself and was staring down at the crumpled cop with a mixture of horror and fascination.
"Don't worry about him, little man," Dean said, clapping Wyatt lightly on the shoulder as he passed him. Just as if Dean had clipped a leash onto his shirt, Wyatt turned and followed him. "He's not hurt. He's just going to sleep for a little bit while I get what you brought me here for."
In spite of the marked resemblance to Leo that Dean had noticed the first time that he had seen Wyatt, the prim, no-nonsense look that Wyatt gave him was his mother in miniature. "You're not supposed to hit police officers," he informed Dean.
Dean tallied up the number of assaulting an officer charges that he should have been charged with since he had come of age a decade previously and snorted out a laugh. "No, you're not, but I think that I can be forgiven this time." He checked the safety on the officer's gun and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans and put his hand back onto Wyatt's shoulder. "Come on, we gotta hustle." Gunshots had a way of making people agitated, even in the ass-end of nowhere.
Wyatt did not shrug Dean's hand away from his shoulder as Dean guided him quickly through the darkened station, shrinking so close instead that Dean more than once thought that they were going to step on one another. He found the evidence room-in a precinct this size, more like an evidence closet-and took off both the lock and the knob with two sharp whacks with the butt of the gun. Dean winced once to hear the ringing sound, as shouts and feet were coming up the hallway. He pushed Wyatt into the room ahead of him and shut the door quickly. They had a little time, but not a whole hell of a lot.
"Stick close to me, little man," Dean whispered to Wyatt as he fumbled around for a light switch or chain. Wyatt reached up and hooked his fingers through the belt loops on Dean's jeans. For most kids, the scariest things in the shadows were the shadows themselves. Wyatt had seen enough to know better.
"There we go." Dean found the chain at least and pulled on it, illuminating a single bulb that swung back and forth and almost created more shadows that it dispelled. He felt Wyatt's hand in his belt loops tighten even further. Dean leaned forward and blew dust from a line of boxes that did not look as if they had been touched since the station had been built, hoping that the officers who ran this place were still as rattled and frightened as they had been when Dean had still been in the hospital, hoping that no one else had been called in who would get the bright idea to take the Colt with them, hoping that human pride could still be counted on to do its job.
When none of the boxes appeared to have labels, Dean pulled one of them down from the shelf so that he could rifle through it, all the while muttering dark things about precincts that were either too lazy or too poor to buy a freaking magic marker. "I don't suppose that you have any other psychic abilities in that toy box of yours," Dean asked Wyatt hopefully. Wyatt opened his mouth, looked panicked for a moment, and then finally shook his head. Dean sighed. "Didn't figure." Wyatt must have heard Henry talking on the phone, then, to know where the precinct was. Dean lifted the lid off of the box and pulled out clothing that did not look as if it had been worn since Woodstock and still smelled faintly of marijuana. Wyatt crinkled his nose.
"You know," Dean said when the silence stretched and became oppressive, speaking softly to avoid attracting the attention of the increasingly alarmed voices outside of the door, "I had a brother like you, not quite normal." His breath hardly hitched as he referred to Sam in the past tense. Dean guessed that he ought to be proud of himself for that. "Not exactly like you," he went on as he realized that Wyatt was hanging onto his every word. "He didn't come with his own transport, for one. But he could still do a lot of other things that would flip most people's brains inside out. Probably literally, if he got mad and brooded about it for awhile." Dean stopped sifting through everyone else's bad behavior as the clouds of dust that he was sending up began to feeling as if they were creating sand dunes in the back of his throat. He coughed into the sleeve of his jacket. "You sure you don't have any Shining that you're holding out on me? Think really hard: if you were a demon-killing gun shoved into a closet by cops who had been trained in Hazzard County, where would you be?"
Wyatt shook his head and smiled shyly, so Dean sighed. "Damn." He leveled his finger at Wyatt. "You don't go telling your mother that I've been cussing in front of you, either."
Again, that shy smile. From what Dean had seen of Wyatt so far, he didn't do it often. "I won't."
"Good kid." Dean pulled down another box and blew the dust from the top before he cracked it open and began going through the contents. He was beginning to think that the better part of human nature had triumphed and the gun was now sitting with the FBI rather than being squirreled away by people who had no idea what they possessed.
Yeah, so much for that plan. Dean's hand closed around something smooth and cool, and he nearly whooped with joy. He pulled the gun from the box, pushing to the side fragments of what looked as if it had been a stop sign before being peppered with buckshot. The Colt snugged against Dean's palm in a way that felt many times over more natural than the fit of the cop's lifted gun, as if it had been made for him to hold it. Dean had never been one to believe in destiny. Even so, he had to admit that his heart was beating faster as he raised the gun so that he could examine it beneath the light of the single swinging bulb. They had even done him the favor of keeping it loaded for him. One bullet left.
"Guess I had better not waste it, then," Dean muttered. He only shook his head when he saw that Wyatt was looking confused. "Don't worry about it, little man. Just thinking out loud here." A sound directly outside of the room made Dean swivel his head quickly in that direction. He held out his hand so that Wyatt could take it. "I really hope that that power of yours is a roundtrip thing, 'cause otherwise we're screwed."
Wyatt put his hand obediently back into Dean's and squeezed hard, while a blue haze began once again to rise up and fill Dean's vision. He returned Wyatt's knuckle-cracking grip and felt the old sensation of something settling into his navel and jerking him forward, though the smile never left his face. He had the gun, his gun, the ass-kicking, name-taking gun that was going to end all of this once and for all. There was very little that could happen at this point, he figured, to take that victory away.
End Part Six