Part Seven

As Wyatt tumbled them both out of the cool, climate-controlled air of the precinct and into the blasts of hell, Dean could not help but think that there was someone out there in the universe who listened to him. He began coughing immediately on the thick, acrid smoke that was rolling through the air like a living thing, its fingers reaching out to first fondle and then strangle everything within its path. Dean raised the hand that held the gun so that he could cough against it, only to hiss and jerk away almost as quickly as his lips felt as if a burning brand had been placed against them. Dean's fingers began to burn a few seconds later, but he only gritted his teeth. Damned if he would drop the thing and lose it among the smoke now, not after he had fought so hard in all of the months since losing it.

"Mommy!" Wyatt screamed, and began to sprint away from Dean into the smoke. Dean grabbed quickly for him and barely managed to hook his fingers into Wyatt's collar, so that he almost strangled the boy as he jerked him backwards and against Dean again. "No, no, no, let me go, it has her, MOMMY!" Wyatt was wheezing desperately against his own tears by the time that he screamed the final word in a clear, full-throated wail. He twisted around and began to beat at Dean's leg with his fists when he realized that Dean was not going to let him go.

"Not so that you can go get yourself killed, too," Dean muttered, breaking off so that he could cough again. Dimly, through the smoke and its leaping orange handmaidens climbing the walls beyond that, he saw the same armchair that Henry had grabbed his shirt off of earlier. A second later, it was engulfed. 'I left them here,' Dean thought, unable to stop himself, that same old rotten tooth. 'I left them here, and it came.' He might has well have hopped in his car and made a road trip out of it, and left them to whatever mercies that the demon decided to mete out.

Dean twisted his hand even tighter through the back of Wyatt's shirt, making the boy yelp and momentarily pause in the beating that he was delivering to the side of Dean's leg. "Piper!" Dean yelled as loudly as he could. His voice cracked as he took in a deep breath of smoke that felt as if it was driving barbed wire into the soft inner flesh of his throat. Dean coughed hard and tasted soot before he yelled again. "Piper!" When there was no response save for the crackling of the flames and the increasingly insistent waves of heat beating against the side of his face, he tried again, his tone growing desperate. "Chris!" The demon had to be after Chris, then, and it wanted to leave him alive. There was a chance, however small, that he could get one person out of here.

The rest, he would just have to avenge. It was becoming a long list. Dean bit down on the inside of his mouth and tasted blood as he thought about it, and realized the satisfaction with which he would carry out the task.

There was a cracking noise, the only warning that Dean received before all of the windows in the living room blew outward. The shards of glass hung in the air for a moment, collecting the light from the flames and throwing it back like diamonds before they fell down to the lawn outside. Even though the glass was exploding away from them, Dean grabbed Wyatt up, held him against his chest, and whirled them both around so that he was shielding Wyatt with his own body. He did not do it a moment too soon. Encouraged by the fresh supply of oxygen, the flames jumped that much higher, until Dean swore that he felt fire licking at his shoulders and singing the hair from the back of his neck. He steeled himself and gripped ever tighter the gun that felt as if it was burning an imprint into his palm. Dean held Wyatt beneath his arm like a star quarterback running for the touchdown before he spun back towards the window and started to thrust Wyatt out of it. "Go the neighbors and call for help," Dean told Wyatt urgently, even though the boy was still shedding such hysterical tears that he was not sure that he was able to hear anything that Dean was saying at all, and the fire was spiraling so far out of control that most of the neighbors had likely already called. "Go the neighbor across the street, get as far away from this house as you can."

"No!" Still sobbing hysterically, Wyatt did not intend to be dropped out of the window and onto the relative safety of the lawn without a fight. He flailed his arm out and grabbed for the windowsill to keep himself from being shoved out of the house, cutting a deep wound into his palm as he closed his hand around a jagged piece of glass that was still caught in the frame. Rather than howling as most four year-olds would have done, Wyatt did not seem to realize that he had been hurt at all. "I want my mommy! I want to find Chris!" He braced one of his feet against the windowsill and began to kick at Dean's hands with the other.

"Goddamnit," Dean grunted through gritted teeth as he struggled to simultaneously maintain his grip on the gun and keep from dropping Wyatt onto his head. If Wyatt would cooperate with him, Dean might even be able to go back and identify the bodies of his mother and surrogate uncle for him. Yeah, Dean was offering Wyatt a hell of a deal, there.

"Dean!" Piper's voice was so cracked with smoke and strain that it was more akin to a banshee's shriek than it was an actual human shout. It was so welcome, and at the same time so startling, that Dean nearly dropped Wyatt in spite of all of his best efforts to keep a grip on him, damned good eel impression that the kid was carrying on or not. Dean jerked Wyatt back against his chest, where the boy shoved his face against Dean's neck and continued to make sad snuffling noises, so deeply embroiled in his own hysterics that he did not realize that it was his mother's voice that had echoed out across the living room. Dean turned.

Piper was still wearing her hair back in a ponytail, technically. Most of it had by now escaped into a dark cloud around her face, turning her into the image of every witch in every storybook that had been Dean's primers as he was growing up. There was a streak of soot across her nose, and a sullen trickle of blood from her lower lip, as if she was wearing garish lipstick that had melted in the heat. Alive and walking around when he had been so sure that she was dead only a few seconds before, Dean thought that she might be the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. Just for a moment, revenge faded to become a dim echo against all of his priorities, and Dean tightened his arms even further around Wyatt.

Piper was holding both of her hands out in front of her, clenched into fists as if she meant to wrestle the demon down to the ground if that was what was required of her. Henry was directly behind her and was holding Chris in his arms, while Chris screamed every bit as loudly as Wyatt had been wailing only a few minutes before. There was an ugly burn crawling over Henry's shoulder, actually melting scraps of his shirt into the blistered skin, running up to a point directly behind his ear. Henry held his head at an awkward angle, lips pulled back from his teeth, but his arms wrapped around Chris were every bit as secure as the ones that Dean had around Wyatt.

"Piper," Dean breathed her name and felt his knees unlock for a moment before they took him again. He shook his head once and looked around at the flames. "How-"

An enormous chunk of ceiling came down with a great rending noise of cracking plaster and breaking wood, a swirling of sparks that Dean had to shield his eyes from quickly or else be blinded. Piper threw her hands out quickly in a warding-off gesture, the air seemed to shimmer and grow pregnant for a moment, as if lighting might be born, and the ceiling materials froze in a fiery clump only a few feet from the living room floor. Dean could not keep himself from gaping for a second as sparks hung suspended in the air like fireflies. At least he knew now what kind of whammy Piper had laid on him back at the manor site. He shook his head to throw off the shock and yelled across the room at Piper, "Get-get Chris out of here, he's the one that it wants! I'll stay and deal with the thing." The smoke was making Dean's head spin, making past swirl into the present too quickly for him to keep a firm grip on which was which, and it was almost not Chris's name that he said.

Piper coughed and had to spite a fat gob of what looked like sooty phlegm to the side so that she could even speak. As she turned her head, Dean saw that the heat had already drawn an intricate web of fine blisters across her cheekbone down to the side of her mouth. "No, you don't understand," she said, and had to break off so that she could fall into a coughing fit. She froze one of the walls as she did so, flames and all, so that the fire looked eerily like an ice sculpture. "The fire began outside."

Dean's breath only had time to hitch in his throat for a second before an inhumanly strong pair of arms snaked through the window, grabbed him by his jaw and neck, and wrenched him back against the windowsill. The salt had all been burned or blown away when the window exploded outwards, and Dean's back slamming up against the sill soon scattered all the rest. He dropped Wyatt back down to the floor so hard that the boy almost went sprawling and gave him a shove in the direction of his mother. "Go!" Dean bellowed.

Wyatt, unbelievably, hesitated for a second so that he could look back at Dean, his small face settling itself into lines of determination as if he meant to actually intervene on Dean's behalf. At Dean's glare, he skittered around the frozen flames and ran to his mother's side.

Dean gagged as his head was jerked back at a nearly impossible angle by the hands that struggled to pull him over the edge of the sill, as they dug into the soft flesh beneath his jaw and threatened to take away his air altogether. Small and feminine the hands were, but they still carried with them a strength that went far beyond mere skin and bone. Dean tilted his head back even further in spite of the way that his neck protested, in spite of the way that he could hear his father's voice yelling in his head that he was only baring more of his throat as he did so. He stared into a pair of hazel eyes whose spark had long since been snuffed, into a face surrounded by long blonde hair that had seen a bad bleach job more than once. Essence of Valley Girl, in other words, so distilled that he could probably make a small fortune off of bottling and selling it. Dean would feel much better about his assessment of this girl if he couldn't feel fresh bruises being imprinted into his trachea with every moment. Dean wheezed and brought the butt of the Colt down onto the bimbo's knuckles as hard as he could. Even with black spots multiplying like flies in front of his eyes, even with his own exhalations whistling in his ears and no inhalations coming in to replace them, with his thoughts becoming dizzier by the moment and with a level of rage that Dean had never experienced before, even immediately after he had woken up in the hospital, taking over him from nowhere, that was still saying a hell of a lot. He heard the bones shatter and for a second swore that he saw splinters of white go flying by the corner of his eye. The hand around his neck loosened enough for him to pull in a deep, shuddering breath before it slammed shut again.

"You killed my family," the Demon Formerly Known as Barbie snarled down into his face. It had curled its lips back from its teeth like a dog, so that spittle flecked its chin. It couldn't keep its hand closed any longer, not with the way that Dean had shattered its knuckles, but instead squeezed and released at Dean's neck as if it thought that it was milking a cow.

"Fair enough, bitch," Dean growled back at it in a voice that was much deeper than his normal register and sounded as if he had been eating charcoal. If he could have spit a mouthful of brimstone up into the demon's face, he would have. "So now it's just one on one. You're the one who made it that way, as I recall." The gun might make a damned fine bludgeon, but it had been designed with a far more noble purpose in mind. Dean swung the Colt around and forced it beneath the bimbo's chin, shoved her head back at an angle that he hoped was even half again as painful as what he was doing to him. He jerked his finger back against the trigger.

This thing, this woman-shaped wrongness that Dean guessed had once been named Billie, changed its bared teeth into an actual smile, one that would have sent a shiver down Dean's spine if his vision was not tinted in red, the blood from the inside of the Impala and the blood that he had not yet gotten the chance to shed. But he would. Fuck, yeah, he would. Without Piper's intervention, it still seemed as if time froze, the second stretching on and on forever without snapping. Billie creaked her neck backwards even farther until her head was tilted at an angle that would have broken her neck if she had still been human, and shoved Dean backwards with a strength and speed that sure as hell could not claim to have ever been a part of the human race. There was a snapping sound not unlike a sonic boom as time resumed itself.

Dean skidded across the carpet and barked his spine against the leg of Henry's coffee table hard enough to make one side of his body go tingling and then numb, ducking his head so that he would not put out his eye on a frozen lick of flame. The bullet that should have taken Billie through the chin and left most of her brains splattered against the plaster above her head whistled harmlessly out the window. Though he knew that it was moving far too fast, Dean still swore that he could see it go. "No!" The last bullet, the last chance, gone into the sky and the leaves of Henry's fucking oak tree.

Billie paused so that she could inspect the last few grains of salt left on the windowsill, rubbing her fingers against one another as she braced herself on the sill and began to climb inside. Dean had not been imagining things when he saw pieces of bone go flying by his face. Her knuckles were mangled and bloody, flecks of white sticking among the red like maggots. "Yes," she continued as if Dean had not just tried and failed to kill her, "but you're the one who had to go and make it all personal. Tit for tat, as they say." Billie paused, crouching, in the window like a gargoyle and grinned across the room. "Hello, Piper."

Wyatt had rushed over to Piper as soon as he had realized that she was, against all odds, alive. He clung to her leg now like the world's largest belt ornament, all but sitting on her foot. In spite of this, there was not the slightest spectacle of the ridiculous about her as she stood staring Billie down, more akin to Athena than to any of the cackling witches riding across the sky on their brooms that Dean had learned about before his mother's death. "Over my dead body are you going to take Chris, Billie," she said, spitting out the girl's original name as if it was a death warrant. With the way that her eyes were glittering, it did not seem to be an empty threat. "Or did you forget how well trying to take my boys' power worked for you the last time?"

Billie's laugh had an unnatural, phlegmy sound about it. If she was thinking that she had only lost one to Piper's two, or if the cancer inside of her was thinking it, then they both had the good sense not to voice this thought aloud. "Keep him," she snapped. Billie made an imperious gesture with her hand, almost as a queen would shoo off an annoying supplicant. Even while the demon was wearing the face of a sweet and slightly dim co-ed, the menace carried across the room like a thundercloud.

Dean swore that the air rippled, and then Piper was flying was flying to the other side of the room to strike against the far wall with a thunking noise that sounded like bruised ribs. Wrapped up in the hyper-awareness that only came with being completely swamped by adrenaline, Dean saw flakes of plaster fall down and into her hair. Henry shouted, but it with his badly burned arm it was all that he could do not to drop Chris, let alone intervene. Dean grunted and pushed himself up to his feet to take the task on himself, only for Billie to make another one of those gestures with her hand. He careened through the air in the same way that Piper had only seconds before, striking his own wall with enough force to send déjà vu crashing over him in a wave. Piper shouted something that sounded as if it might be his name and flicked out her hands to turn the flames into another eerie frozen tableau. Dean could still feel the heat coming through his jacket, even though the flames against his shoulders were hard and still like being shoved against glass. He winced and struggled to get back down, not loosening his grip upon the gun even though the damned thing was useless now. The demon hidden within the girl made a scoffing noise before it turned its attention back onto Piper.

When Piper had flown backwards, so had Wyatt with her, still clinging stubbornly to her leg like one of those plastic monkeys that some people liked to put on the tops of their pencils. Piper's best efforts to shield his head with her arms still could not fully protect him, and he had fallen from her leg and down to the carpet with a dazed thump. Piper yelled her son's name in a voice gone ragged with panic, but the demon was keeping her pinned like a butterfly to a board. Veins stood out in her neck as she strained against the force and tried to bring up her hands so that she could unleash another one of her powerful and nearly indescribable blasts.

Henry set Chris down on the floor, where he put his hands over his eyes and continued to scream in terror, and rushed to Piper's aid. He scarcely touched her before he was flung into the wall himself, directly onto the burned shoulder. Henry made a terrible guttural noise that was only bested by the wet sound that the flesh made as it tore and slid, limp, back down to the floor.

"No," Dean muttered over and over again, unable to make himself stop, as he forced himself away from the wall. "No." It didn't get to end like this. That son of a bitch didn't get his happy ending after he had taken it away from everyone else. And more importantly, Dean told himself, feeling as if a dirty film had been ripped away from his vision after being there for so long that he had stopped noticing its presence altogether, everyone else got to be the ones to walk away at the end of the picture.

The demon cut him a sharp glance as it pulled Piper away from the wall and then slammed her back again, hard enough to knock her head against the plaster and leave a dent. The fire crawling up the walls that she had frozen came brilliantly alive again. "We'll settle our account in just a minute," the demon told Dean as it hurled him backwards one more time. He felt the hair on the back of his neck singe and begin to fill the air with a foul smell. The skin blistered as he set his boot against the wall and pushed himself away before he could be immolated. He was not worth the demon's interest beyond that.

With a gesture, Wyatt was dragged, shrieking, into the center of the living room floor. Finally, Dean understood. 'The fire started outside,' Piper had told him. So that the demon could destroy the careful protections that he had set out and then come inside, but not so that it could take Chris.

Piper stared at her oldest son, gasping, with all of the panic and determination that Dean had seen in her only seconds before stricken away. She looked as if it had been slapped right out of her. When the blankness began to roll away, what peeked out in its place was something very close to despair. She mouthed her son's name once before the demon began to haul her up the wall. Piper kicked her legs hard, her heeled boots beating out a tattoo that destroyed the plaster ever more, as a second grim smile began to spread across the front of her blouse.

"Like hell," Dean growled beneath his breath, the last articulate thing that he said before it was swollen up by a roar of pure rage. He launched himself from the floor and into the demon, carrying them both over backwards through his bodyweight. It was not in his father any longer. Fine, maybe it should not be so much easier for him to strike the thing when it was embedded in a wisp of a girl hardly half his father's size than it had been when it was in John Winchester himself, but Dean was not thinking of such things then. He flipped the Colt around in his hand one more time so that he was gripping it by the barrel and then brought it down against the demon's face, hard. The cracking of bone was the most satisfying sound that Dean had heard all day, only to be dethroned a second later by the following, louder crack as he did it again. Dean began to pant as he kept swinging the gun, that old film coming down over his vision again, not even caring any longer if he killed the demon or the demon killed him. He barely even heard the thump as Piper slid down the wall and back to the floor behind him. He was wheezing from smoke inhalation and from exertion, and the demon's eyes were flashing from yellow to hazel and back again, wildly, unable to stay any one color for more than a few seconds at a time. It was all that Dean could do not to put them out.

"Dean." Piper's voice when she called his name was low and plaintive, little more than a croak. It was as effective as if Piper had kneeled down in front of him and slapped him. He reeled back from the demon and stared into the face that he had ruined, of which the only part left was those glowing eyes. Dean twisted his head around and saw Piper through the smoke, though his eyes were stinging and her outline swayed and blurred. She was crouched over, one arm pressed tightly across her stomach. The blood leaking around her fingers glittered in the firelight.

Dean let the Colt fall from his fingers as he leaned back and stared at the damage that he had done. The gun was sticky with the demon's blood and took a bit of flesh with it from the burn that had already been seared into Dean's palm; he hardly felt it. "We're not done," he growled, noticing for the first time that the flames were active again and that the thick smoke was making it difficult to breathe. The demon did not speak-Dean was pretty sure that he had broken Billie's jaw-but it's eyes burned promises all the same. The air around them both began to feel thick and charged with energy. He had a way of getting thrown into walls every time that happened.

Dean rolled away and watched instead as the cluster of fire and plaster that had been hanging over the room like an awkward chandelier crashed down over the demon. He still felt his hands clenching and unclenching themselves into fists as he rushed over to Piper, still wanting to go back and put them around the demon's neck, and never mind that he knew that it wouldn't do a damned bit of good. He took the deepest breaths that he was able and wondered at how easy it had been a year before to convince himself that revenge was optional.

The look that Piper was giving him as he knelt beside her, one very close to horror, acted as a slap that he desperately needed. Dean wondered how much of the beating that she had seen and how much more horrified her expression would be if she knew that, even though his hands ached, there was a part of him that still wanted to dive beneath the flames and drag the demon back out again. If she was feeling the same thing, if they really were two peas in a spooky pod. "Lean on me," Dean told Piper in the most gentle voice that he was capable of at the moment. Smoke inhalation still made it into a low and threatening rasp.

Piper shook her head and pushed him away. "I can stand," she told him, even though the quaver in her voice and the amount of blood that he could see soaking her blouse and the front of her jeans did little to inspire confidence. "Go help Henry, hurry." She did not wait to see if he was going to obey her before she called out in a voice that croaked almost as much as Dean's own, "Wyatt."

Wyatt picked himself up from the place where the demon had unceremoniously dragged him and looked around, as if he thought hat he would be pulled back again the moment that he tried to move. When that did not happen, he rushed over to his screaming younger brother and threw his arms around him. There was no verbal communication between the boys that Dean could detect, but Chris, still wailing, followed Wyatt back to their mother's side after Wyatt put his arm around him. Piper put her hand against Wyatt's shoulder and used it to slowly push herself back up to her feet. Wyatt had stopped crying, though his tear tracks were still gleaming and fresh, and stood with more patience than any four year-old ought to be capable of as his mother used him for a few seconds of support.

Dean went to Henry, who was just beginning to stir back into consciousness, and tried to roll him over. Henry let out a short cry of pain before his eyelids fluttered and he stared at Dean uncomprehendingly. "Come on, man," Dean said, trying to slide his shoulder beneath Henry's to help him back to his feet. "We gotta shag ass." The fire was raging higher than ever, heat making the room around them ripple when it was visible through the smoke at all. If Piper had enough power left in those batteries of hers to throw out another freeze, then she was too distracted to do it.

Henry nodded and then sagged heavily against Dean as if even that movement exhausted him. "I'll lead." Dean was not sure that that was an idea for the history books, given the way that Henry still could not stand on his own, until Henry added, "I don't need to see to know where I'm going in this house."

Dean shrugged in acceptance before he turned to look at Piper and her boys, the start of it all. Piper was holding onto Wyatt's hand while he in turn held Chris's, so that the three of them were standing in a row like a set of Russian nesting dolls. Dean thought that she would rather be holding the both of them so tightly that they would hardly be able to breathe, let alone wiggle away, if she had not been so busy using her other arm to hold her blood inside of her. Dean glanced at the pile of plaster that was engulfed in flames and sending out new sparks that raced across the carpet like spiders before he nodded once to Piper and turned in the vague direction of the door. 'The people are more important.' Other people recited the Lord's Prayer. Dean would take what he could get.

They staggered out into the front yard as a unit at the same time that something within Henry's house gave way with a great crashing noise. Dean hoped that it fell down directly on the demon's fat, over-bleached head and made its ears ring for hours, even if it could not kill it. He gritted his teeth and instead turned halfway so that he was shielding Henry as a warm pocket of air followed the sound of the collapse and acted like an enormous hand shoving them all forward, carrying with it both sparks and shrapnel. He dropped Henry abruptly on the lawn as his knees gave out beneath him, collapsing down to the grass by Henry's side. Henry propped himself up on his good arm and bit hard into his lower lip, as if he was struggling not to scream. He looked up at the remains of his house and swore.

Dean put his hand on Henry's uninjured shoulder and squeezed. "Insurance, buddy."

The fresh air was so pure and so sweet that for several long seconds Dean's lungs did not know quite what to do with it. He coughed hard and spat out sooty phlegm before he made his way over to Piper. He did not hesitate before he put his hands onto her shoulders and turned her to face him. "Piper," he said, touching her hair, unsure if she even knew that he was there through the shock and the blood loss. Unsure if he even knew that she was there, as everything since leaving the house had a hazy, quality to it. If he could manage to lose the damned Colt, if he could manage to lose their last shot- It didn't bear thinking about, but Dean could not stop his mind from returning to it again and again.

Piper shook her head once in some kind of mute rejection before she leaned forward, for one second pressing the side of her face against his own. There were still faint traces of her shampoo in her hair, beneath the reek of the smoke. She was trembling, and her face was very pale as the sound of fire engines could finally be heard several blocks over. "Come one, we gotta leave before it digs out." Dean was not sure what he planned on doing after that. Find a way, through sheer force of fucking will if he had to, but that thing was going down. For his brother, and for his father, for the family in front of him and because once upon a time he had thought that revenge was not such an important thing, after all, and he liked that man a hell of a lot more than he did the one that he was playing at being now.

"This isn't the right place," Piper muttered before she stirred as if she was waking up from a deep sleep. The trembling ceased as abruptly as if a light switch had been turned off, and she pulled away from Dean's chest.

"Leave," she told him. "Now."

He leaned away from her, aghast. "What?"

Piper reached out and touched his face. Compared to the inside of the house, her skin was so cool as to be startling. "I trust you, Dean," she said, "but the police don't, and this will be the second fire today where a mysterious stranger has come to my rescue."

She was right, damnit, as much as Dean hated to admit it. He took a deep breath and glanced once more back at Henry's house, willing the demon to come back outside so that he could make a another try at bashing its head in. It would not, though, just as Dean had already known that he could not use Piper's and the boys' safety as an excuse to stay. The demon wanted to do its work in darkness. The fire was lighting up the lawn as brightly as if it were noon.

Dean matched gazes with Henry, who was wincing and struggling to pull at the edges of his shirt, fused into the wound. Watching it alone was enough to make Dean wince. Henry nodded very slightly in agreement with Piper and then jerked his head in the direction of Dean's car.

Much as Dean wanted to dig his fingers down into the grass and cling to the earth itself if that was what it took to keep himself from being driven from this place, even he had to admit that he was not going to be able to do much hunting if he was locked into a jail cell. He pushed himself to his feet, got into his car, and waited until the flashing lights stopped at the curb and the paramedics rushed towards Piper and her children before he drove away.

End Part Seven