Part Ten
According to Piper, the Halliwell family as a general rule had very little experience when it came to the fine art of breaking and entering. Dean just thought that that was a waste of a perfectly good well of talent. He said as much as he brought the Mustang to a halt on a darkened street in a strange, cramped neighborhood that he had never seen before, even though he had been to San Francisco three other times on jobs. There were a few apartments, mostly two and three family jobs that looked as if they might have been stores themselves before the owners had given in and decided to find a more reliable way of making their money, but the majority of the spaces were taken up by occult shops ranging from those that mainly offered weekend hobbies to bored yuppies to those that Dean could tell at a glance were the real deal.
Piper snorted when Dean suggested that she give up the life of a stable, dependable club owner and instead turn to one of magic-enhanced cat burglary. "Thanks, but my boys don't really need any encouragement to indulge in criminal enterprises." She glanced at Wyatt through the rearview mirror as she spoke, a look that Dean could not translate and did not think that he was meant to see.
Dean grinned in spite of himself and cut the Mustang's lights. There was a dog barking several blocks away as he stepped out of the car, but that was the only sound. In the absence of all others, Dean felt his skin begin to prickle. No noise at all was frequently every bit as dangerous as the wrong noises. He looked up and down the street and saw a few electric lights glowing in the buildings that had been converted into apartments, but beyond that all was quiet. The shops that carried the kinds of wares that he and Piper were going to need, at least the legitimate ones, understood the wisdom of closing up with the sinking sun. Dean had always thought that this was because quite a few of the proprietors were using the shadows to bump as fiercely in the night as they could before Dean would show up to bump back, but as long as they carried what Piper needed he would behave himself. Even if the mere thought of magic was making him every bit as cranky as it always did.
He would not have needed to use magic if he had been able to hit the broad side of a barn in the first place, a voice inside of his head whispered. Dean scowled, and it shut up quickly. "Come on," he said, more brusquely than he intended.
"This is wrong," Piper said as she got Wyatt out of the backseat of the car and followed Dean. She kept Wyatt's hand clasped firmly in her own, as she had been doing every available second since they had been reunited. The only time that she had released him was so that she could set him in the backseat while she sat in the front, and even that had been with an audible moue of distress.
"You got any money on you?" Dean turned and asked her. Piper shook her head. "Then it's either this, or wait until morning and hope that we don't burn down the Holiday Inn." His tone was still much harsher than he intended and at the same time much less harsh than it wanted to be, than it would have to be in order to convey how pissed off he still was at himself.
Rather than flaring up, Piper merely cocked an eyebrow at him and said, "You're doing it again," in a no-nonsense tone of voice.
Dean sighed. "Doing what?" he asked, looking up and down the street for a shop that was large enough to contain everything that Piper said she needed. The more that they broke into, the greater the chances that someone out for a nighttime stroll, a barking dog, or some other unforeseen variable would trip them up.
Dean would really hate to have to tell people that he had been arrested because of someone's yapping mutt.
"That thing," Piper said, pointing at his face with her free hand, as if that was supposed to somehow make all of the pieces come together within his mind. He frowned. "You've been giving me that look ever since we left the hospital, whenever you think that I'm not looking. It's not your fault that I got hurt."
"That gun could have ended all of this, right then and there, if I could have shot in a straight line," Dean growled, not willing to accept the forgiveness in her eyes even less than he was the pity. He had been the one so stuck on keeping the family together at the expense of revenge, if that's what it came down to, and now the family was gone and revenge was all that he had left. It had been Sam's legacy for a year and Dad's for over twenty years before that; now Dean supposed that it was his, too. It would have been a lot easier to make his peace with that if Piper were not so personable and with such a low tolerance for crap, if she did not have such large brown eyes, and if her boys did not remind him so powerfully of he and Sam when they were small and just starting to realize that the world had teeth.
"Damn that demon and its pesky ability to bend reality," Piper snapped, sounding as if there was a great deal more irritation locked up and just waiting for Dean to push the right combination of buttons that would set it loose. When Dean flashed her a look, she added, "Yes, I saw. Besides, if I wouldn't have been hurt if you had been able to stop that bullet from disobeying the laws of physics, then I also would not have been hurt if I had been keeping up with my magic for the past year. There are crystals that can repel demons much better than salt and blessed oil, even if they are a much bigger pain in the-" She glanced down at Wyatt briefly before she continued, "Butt. I would not have been hurt if my sisters and I had been smart enough not to trust Billie in the first place, since this thing was so scared to mess with the Power of Three, and I would not have been hurt if I had given up my powers when I had the chance a few years ago. Then my kids would have been born normal-" Piper cut herself off, frowned for a moment, and then went on, "Well, they would have been normalish. But the demon would not have been interested in them. It would have set the neighbor's house on fire, so that someone else who wasn't as prepared to deal with this thing as you or I could die." Piper quirked her eyebrow at him again. "Do you see where I'm going with this?"
He did, but that did not mean that he was willing to hear it. "It's more complicated than that," he said.
"It usually is," Piper said, and sighed. "Look, I wasn't ready when that thing attacked, not like I should have been. For all that I know, without your help I would have died. So we can play the self-recrimination and what-if game until the sun comes up, or we can get on with it."
"Will this place have everything that you need?" Dean asked rather than answering Piper directly, pausing them in front of a store that managed to strike a balance between the obvious frauds and the dark, cramped shops that very well might have dragons chewing on virgin bones in the back rooms. Dean made a note of all of those so that he could come back and check them out more fully later. He had a lot of things that he needed to burn off.
Piper looked disappointed at the brush-off, but she tilted her head back so that she could read the store's sign in the moonlight all the same. There were very few streetlights in this neighborhood. Dean was sure that this was by design.
"Yes," Piper finally said reluctantly. "I used to buy a lot of my potions ingredients here." She cast Dean a reproachful look, but still raised her hands into the flicking gesture that Dean now recognized as a sign that she as about to either freeze something or unleash another one of those bursts of wild energy. Piper turned them towards the store windows, her mouth set in an unhappy line. For all of her protests about law and the impromptu civics lesson that she had tried to give him on the way over, which he had roundly ignored, she still knew how to get things done when it came down to crunch time. Take away the cute kids and the pretty brown eyes, and there was still a woman in there after his own heart.
Dean stared at the store dubiously, which looked no different to him than it had before Piper had unleashed her whatever on it. "That freeze-frame of yours work on magical alarm systems, too?" he asked, putting his hand on the door and giving it an experimental rattle. That was an obstacle that he had learned to sidestep by the time that he was fourteen.
Piper gave him another reproachful look. "The owner of this store is a sweet old man," she said.
"Some of those eat children," Dean said, and snuck a look towards some of the more suspicious stores that had caught his eye again. He could almost see the smoke rising from the rooftops. Piper put her hands quickly over Wyatt's ears and gave him a warning look, as if Wyatt was not holding up under everything that he had been through far better than many adults would have in the same situation. Dean flashed Wyatt a grin and then fished a small fold of leather, a wallet to the untrained eye, from his jacket. He had the appropriate pick in the door and the door itself swinging open in under thirty seconds. If any curious eyes came along, Dean figured that Piper could easily freeze them. Give him a little more time and he might even wind up liking the whole magic thing, after all.
Behind him, Dean could hear Piper telling Wyatt in a solemn tone, "Wyatt, I don't want you to be anything like Dean when you grow up."
Dean turned around and gave them both his very best grin. "Little man," he told Wyatt grandly, "you should only wish that you were more like me." Wyatt flashed Dean a very small smile, the first that he had worn in hours, and Piper made a huffing noise. Her irritation drained away, however, when she saw her son's face.
"Thanks," she whispered into Dean's ear reluctantly as she walked past him and into the shop.
"Power of my charm," Dean said, following her. "Everyone falls eventually."
"Ha-" Piper began, only to cut herself off with an abrupt clacking sound as her teeth came together. She hurled both herself and Wyatt backwards, taking the time to throw Wyatt headlong into Dean's arms first. Dean closed his arms around the child instinctively to keep him from falling as a long, dark shadow fell, hissing, from the ceiling.
'The goddamned dragons,' Dean thought, ludicrously, as he leapt both himself and the boy out of harm's way. 'I picked the wrong fucking store.' He held Wyatt against his chest with one arm and reached out with his other hand to grab for Piper, who was still way too close to the reaching, grasping shadow. As it hissed again, there was a flash of white that he realized now were fangs. Dean closed his fingers around Piper's wrist and tumbled her back against him as she flicked her hands out in the gesture that Dean now knew so well. Nothing happened; the shadow continued to whip itself around in a frenzy.
See, now that was why Dean did not like to rely on things that he could not see. You never knew when that battery was going to die on you.
They all ducked as the shadow lashed out over their heads, so that it struck the wooden doorframe rather than Wyatt's face. Dean glanced back at the door and saw two neat holes driven into the wood and oozing a yellow-white substance that reminded Dean of a pixie bite that he had gotten when he was little that had subsequently turned infected. The pus-like substance caused the veneer painted over the wood to smoke and bubble wherever it made contact.
They did not have time to figure out why Piper's magic was picking now of all times to stop working on her. Dean glanced around quickly and saw a silver athame sitting in a glittering window display, surrounded by chalices and bowls. Those Dean knocked quickly out of the way as he reached for the knife.
"Please don't let a genie out or something," Dean muttered as he swung wildly at the shadow the next time that it drew near. Rather than a wisp of fog and smoke, however, he felt the athame go up to the hilt into flesh that wriggled and fought and screamed. He pulled the blade free with a meaty sucking sound, drew his arm back, and stabbed again. Blood, black as ink and so congealed that it was hardly even liquid, sprayed out in a wide arc that obliged them all to duck their heads again. When Dean looked up, the black blood was dripping down the walls, the remains of the door, and even the ceiling, while the shadow had resolved itself into the biggest snake that Dean had ever seen. It hung motionless, its neck slit open in a wide second mouth directly below its head, and swayed too and fro slightly in the night breeze that came in through the door. As the three of them watched, the animal decomposed rapidly and then fell to the floor in noxious-smelling clumps that ate away at the floor.
"They never have attack kittens," Dean muttered as he stared down at the mess on the floor. "Puppies, even. Something with teeth smaller than my freaking finger." He glanced back once at the deep fang marks that had been left behind on the wooden doorframe and wondered what that venom would have done if it had entered human flesh, not noticing as he did so that he had tightened his arms around Wyatt even further.
"Maybe he's not quite as nice an old man as I thought," Piper admitted as she disentangled herself from Dean's embrace. She had one of her arms pressed tightly across her stomach, Dean noticed, and he saw a hint of fresh blood against the creamy flesh of her forearm when she moved.
"What's wrong?" he asked her, instantly becoming alert again.
Piper shook her head and pulled the hem of her blouse up so that she could peek at her stomach, where there was more blood. She swiped at a few of the welling drops before she released a sigh of something that sounded a great deal like relief and let her shirt fall back down again. "The stitches are still there," she said, "and they're pulling a little bit." Piper smiled at Wyatt as Dean set him back down again, for his small face was tight with worry. "Everything's fine, sweetie," she said. "Mommy just has a scratch or two left."
Wyatt stared up at her without a change in expression for several lengthy seconds before he finally said, in a small voice, "Promise?" Dean was beginning to think that the Wyatt that he had seen earlier was the kid experiencing a rare bout of downright chattiness.
Piper's face twitched, caught between a smile and a stricken expression. It might be time that she began to listen to her own lectures, Dean thought, as Piper whispered, "Promise."
Dean glanced down at the knife in his hand and saw that the blade, once gleaming with the sheen of fresh blood, was now rapidly drinking it up and becoming a matte black color. He made a disgusted noise and threw it to the side before it could twist around and bite at his fingers. "Are you sure you're all right?" he asked Piper. Even in the darkness of the store, he could see that her face was white and drawn with care. "Your mojo doesn't seem to be working out for you so well tonight."
Piper opened her mouth, began to speak, and then shook her head and changed direction. "No," she said, and flashed Dean a wan smile before she threw a black look around the store. "He could have told me that he was going to put a spell up like that," she muttered before she reached out and grabbed one of the small plastic baskets that could be slung over the shopper's arm, her movements short and angry. All hints of guilt over what they were doing were gone from her, and Dean nearly doubled over with laughter right then and there. Of course the old man who had a giant magical snake guarding his threshold would also set out baskets for his customers' convenience. That made perfect sense. "I'll be hitting up the Tylenol pretty hard as soon as we're done, but I'll get through." She reached out so that she could touch Wyatt, who was hovering so closely on her heels that it was a wonder he wasn't stepping on her shoes, and ruffled his hair. "I have to, don't I? I made a promise."
Piper roamed the shelves, first finding three crystals, each the size of her first and ranging from pink to a deep, bloody red depending on how the light struck them, and stacking them into her basket. She pulled the prescription pad that she had been scribbling fiercely on over the duration of their car ride and flipped ahead several pages, read what she had written there, and then grabbed a cluster of herbs that released a sharp, musty smell when the stalks were crushed. Dean watched the shop warily while Piper collected her supplies, waiting for another one of the sweet old man's pets to come dropping down from the ceiling. He blamed this distraction for the way that he was completely blindsided when Piper asked for a low, soft voice that was meant to be gentle, "Why are you hunting this demon, Dean?"
He spun and stared at her. Dean was sure that his expression was forbidding, but Piper did not flinch backwards. There was probably a long list of others who had been stared down with nothing more than the power of those steady, compassionate eyes. "I'm not trying to pry," Piper said quietly. She reached into the basket and twisted nervously at a sprig of her herbs before she realized what she was doing and stopped. "Magic is delicate. It picks up on the emotions of everyone in the area. If you're upset, then everything could go wrong, and we can't afford for anything else to go wrong." Her mouth twitched again, one of those smiles that really wasn't. "I'm not sure that I can pull this off as it is." Piper went back to shoving things back into her basket at random, some herbs that Dean recognized and some that he didn't-and he hoped that the mullein root was only going in there because she was searching for an excuse not to look at him, or otherwise they were going to have a talk-as if the conversation was over because she said that it was. Only the set of her shoulders betrayed her.
Dean clenched his teeth together and felt a muscle in his jaw begin to jump. Two possible responses warred against each other: 'And you think there's any way that I'm going to become less upset?' and 'Pick a better lie, Piper.' She could not even look him in the eye. Dean exhaled slowly until he felt his first moment of real anger with Piper, not irritation or even fond exasperation at her complete unwillingness to just let him rescue her and do his job, reach its crest and begin to ebb away. He glanced towards Wyatt, who was still clinging close to his mother and watching every move that Dean made.
"Killed my mother," Dean said. He clipped off each word and spit it out as he would the bullet that he wished he still had. "Killed my father. Killed my brother. Just took it a couple of decades to get the whole set."
Piper stopped putting together her witch's brew so that she could stare at Dean for a long moment, her mouth falling open in horror. "I'm so sorry," she said, and that was not a lie. Her eyes said so.
Dean turned away and threw off an urge to raise his shoulders into nonchalant shrug that no one would believe, least of all himself. "Focus on how we're going to finish it," he said. "Not on how either one of us got here." It came dangerously close to a platitude, and didn't think that anyone believed that, either.
Piper looked at him for a few seconds longer than she needed to before she ducked her head and reviewed everything that she had placed into her basket. "I think that I have everything," she said, her voice lower and quieter than it had been while she was snapping commands at everyone back at the hospital. Maybe she was beginning to regret that she had asked; Dean was certainly beginning to regret that he had answered. "We can leave."
The dead snake, or shadow, or whatever it was that the old man had conjured up instead of just getting a mean, ugly dog like most people would have done was slowly eating a pit into the floor as they walked to the door. Dean stepped around it carefully.
"I need to make a note of all of this," Piper said half to herself, staring down into her basket as all three of them stepped back into the cool night air. Her lips moved silently as she counted. "So that I can pay for it later." She cast a wry glance over her shoulder at what was left of the snake. "And that. There are pesky rules against fixing it myself, even if I could. My life would be a lot easier if no one had ever come up with the no personal gain clause."
"Paying for it?" Dean gaped at her. "The man just tried to kill you."
"He didn't try to kill me specifically," Piper said, then rolled her eyes as if she was realizing how ridiculous she sounded. "It was an alarm system." When that came out even worse, she huffed and added, "He gives the boys candy, okay? And sometimes he would give it to Leo, too, which was pretty funny." Her voice for a moment did not know if it wanted to be fond or sad.
Dean tried to imagine the man that Piper had married, this Leo, and found that he could not. He glanced towards Wyatt as he struggled to see what those features would look like in about thirty years and instead discovered that he could only see Piper: the faint touches of her around his eyes, the way that his nose turned up slightly, the defiance that he had already shown. He and Piper both were made for standing their ground, swaying like prizefighters but refusing to drop.
After a moment, Piper's hand found Dean's arm, warmth that radiated even through the leather of his jacket. She squeezed lightly, once. Even though Dean knew that the gesture was probably based largely out of pity, he decided to let her hand stay.
End Part Ten