I blustered through the labyrinth of white that reeked of fear and death under a sharp shroud of disinfectant. Blue-white lights hummed and quivered as I passed under them, whispered warnings down the hall. The only thing worse than a demon with an addled mind is a demon with his heart – or whatever could be constituted as such – and his eyes on a prize.
And goddamn that clarity felt good. So good I never considered how false it was.
Hatred has a nasty habit of dressing itself in absolution.
Mystery was alone when I found her, sitting at the edge of a papered examination table, her forearm enveloped in a medical-grade splint. Her head lifted with haste upon my door-banging entrance, a flash of trepidation radiated in her bones before she registered it was only me.
"Ah tak' it ye'r th' ainlie hell beast oan premises? " she said, terror turning lukewarm at the sight of my face.
I kicked the door shut and pounced upon her, sealing the distance between with my hand around her throat. Using excessive force I belted her back onto the padded table, pinned her down in a deathgrip. Her legs bowed, slipped for purchase at the foot of the bed as her chest heaved against threats of suffocation. The fingers of her good hand clawed at mine, tried to pry me from her trachea. Surprise claimed the delicate features of her face, but her eyes. Those giant blue orbs were calm. Not just calm. Cold.
"Whit… th' bugger… urr ye daein'?" Her words grappled against my grip, came out choppy. She paused, stared me in the eye, waiting for me to let up. When I didn't, her perfect Scots broke away into subtle midwestern slurs. "Seriously, John," she growled between clenched teeth. "You're… gonna blow our…" Pause. Struggled inhale. "Cover."
"Who are you?" I barked, my face closing into hers.
"Does... eh'matter?"
My fingers tightened, her breath became a sharp weeze. Her face burned, but the ice in her eyes held fast.
"Who. Are you?" I repeated, slow and fierce.
Despite the increasing difficulty of breath, Mystery abandoned her combat for freedom and stared up at me, her hand stilled upon mine, her knees arched with the soles of her feet on the end of the little table.
"No one… who'll be… missed," she sputtered with that same old lack of fear that edged my skepticism further down Doubt Boulevard. "You… wanna let the… last… twelve hours go… t'waste?" Her eyes narrowed as she stared straight into me. Her hands closed around my fingers, encouraged them to apply more pressure; to really cut her breath. "... do it."
I almost did. God help me, I was milliseconds away from crushing her windpipe. It would be so easy. Better than a cigarette. Better than sex.
And then Dean walked in.
"SHIT!" He moved like lightning, advancing upon us in three stormy strides. "What is wrong with you?!" He clasped a hand around my wrist and tugged, trying to pull me away from the blue-haired damsel who's level of distress was debatable. "Sam's fuckin' dying!" he blurted, raw and drenched in anxiety and grief.
"I'm not choking her out for fun."
Aren't I, though?
My hands were the jaws of a wolf, her neck the scruff of a rabbit. Not even a bullet could break my proverbial teeth from making the kill. Dean recognized this, and he pulled away from me, but only for a moment. Just long enough to introduce his angel blade to the situation.
"Sam's dyin'!" There was a tremble in his voice, an unstable compound of utter fury and fear. He pressed the tip of the weapon under my chin with pressure enough to readjust my focus. "Some kind of trauma hemorrhage. They're sticking a goddamn tube in his head, and you're in here choking out the girl he went down for?!" He cinched the blade, summoning a bead of blood from my flesh. "Let go of her. Now."
Distress and malaise cast their shadows over the room as Dean and I stared each other down, two beasts lost in a similar abyss. He didn't want to kill me. It would ruin him, of that he made no effort to conceal, but oh, he would do it if he had to.
I forced my hands to unlock, forced them up and open in surrender. Air sucked jagged through Mystery's throat, her chest rose and fell in rapid succession, a single tear slipped down the side of her face into her Caribbean sea hair.
"You're right," I told him, turning slow, careful not to let the blade knick me again. "Sam did go down for her." My words were gravel splattered in blood. My boy's blood. "And just who the fuck is she?"
Dean's hand wavered at the question, his eyelids blinked over misted jade, but only for a second.
"You're the one who wanted to save her in the first damn place," he growled, seizing to with ferocity.
"Gee, thanks," Mystery muttered aloud, already restored to her usual sarcastic self.
"We're the ones who got her swept up in this," Dean continued without mind to Mystery's mutterings, using his confession as a weapon against me. "You always taught us saving people came first." He paused, blinked, and revealed the depth of his exhaustion. "No more casualties." The first time he said it, he said it to himself. Then his eyes refocused on mine, and he repeated it back to me. "No more casualties. Especially not on a paranoid compulsion. Not on my watch."
The conversation ended there with the abrupt appearance of a short, husky nurse with a pretty face. Swift as ever, Dean made his blade disappear, and Mystery launched herself upright.
"Agent Mac na Carriage?" Her tone was sweet with the honey drawl of the south, but her dark eyes went wide when she saw Dean and me hovering over her patient. "Oh. Agent Young." Her eyes fell to me, then quickly away, and she stood in awkward uncertainty. "Should I come back?"
"Na," Mystery spoke for herself, assuming the identity of another woman. "Thae gentlemen wur juist aboot tae lea." She scolded me with her eyes before turning a convincingly charming smile on the nurse. "N' please, ca' me Ailsa."
How many faces did she have hidden away in there? How many names did she keep, how many accents and languages could roll off her tongue? It was now my business to know, and I would get them all out of her, and then... Then I could move on to the next phase of my slowly waking plot.
I followed Dean out into the hallway and followed him an ear-shot away from Mystery's room.
"I'm going to check on Sam," he said without looking at me, his voice low and sharp. "Do I need to cuff you to the van?"
A deceptive smile curled at the corners of my lips, and if he had seen it, he would have cuffed me to himself.
"No," is all he heard while taking in the view of the white on white on white, and then a mocking, "I'll behave."
"Good."
And he ambled off in his bowlegged ramble, one hand digging frantic into his pockets for his flask. I could have should have would have felt worse, but I didn't.
And still I mistook rancor for vision.
Fucking demons.
Had my life at this point (or afterlife or whatever the fuck this shitshow was) been a hurricane, I was in the eye. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time; I was drunk on false clarity, relieved by the warmth of the sun and stillness of the air. Completely at ease with life, and the fact that I had a woman lying bound and gagged in the backseat.
For all her efforts to protect herself with fearsome authority, the only real difficult part about slipping her out of the hospital was convincing Freya to stay behind to keep a nose and eye on my boys (they're not yours anymore) and Xael.
A strip of duct tape held in the angry screams she tried to shriek at me, reduced deadly arrows to muffled marbles.
"Are you trying to exorcise me?" I adjusted the rearview mirror down until it held her image. Her hair was wild, her eyes the hot blue at the base of a fire. "While I'm driving?" I turned my eyes back to the narrow back road, hard packed earth and ditches and trees illuminated in yellow headlights. "Shut up for a minute and listen." A quick glance back told me I had her reluctant attention. "The fact that I don't know who the fuck you actually are is starting to bother me, and my window of opportunity to fix this goddamn mess my way is very, very thin." I stuck a cigarette between my lips and lit it. "I don't have time to worry about whose side you're on. When I stop, I'm going to give you one chance to tell me who you are, but I gotta be honest, things are not looking good for you. Not only did shit not really hit the fan until I met you, you lived through 'Camp Crowley' to have a second meeting, and now one of my boys is..." My mouth refused to speak what my heart knew to be true. Instead I sucked in smoke and glanced back in time to catch a venomous scowl. "You see how this looks from my seat, right?"
Mystery attempted to hurl what was undoubtedly a slew of vulgarity, but nothing but unintelligent mumblings sounded in her throat.
I drove until I found a little cove tucked in a thicket near a riverbed, and there I killed the engine. The indecipherable profanities crescendoed, an eleventh hour requiem and futile defiance. Calm, iron hands yanked her out into the night, and she tumbled into the grass. The same hands – my hands – picked her up enough just to throw her back down, this time on her back, arms pinned beneath her, face up.
This time there was fear. Delightful.
And then Lady Luck intervened, chose another side, and charged with Mystery's name on her lips.
Crowley was officially done with foreplay, and he reiterated it for me now, like I hadn't gotten it in the motel parking lot. This one started with a nice sloppy stab in the gut with something that curved as it savored the taste of my insides bite by mind numbing bite. Of course it was drenched in holy water.
The second assault came before the sabre – that had to be what it was – could chew straight through to my lower back, and it came in the form of a violent stab, a shorter blade driving through my heart. More holy water hell.
You've seen how this goes.
The first fall was calculated, with enough equilibrium left to keep me balanced on my knees. And then it was gone, and I crumpled in a heap on my side like a tattered rag. Mystery rolled out of my way and out of sight, but I could hear her fighting against her restraints just before the tempest returned in gales of mirrored pain and voices.
… proper demon What is wrong with changed everything
dyin' world to its knees
no more casualties little more broken
Sam's dyin never let you die
mighty have fallen savage
The white fever wound its sacred ribbons around me and pulled, threatened to sever me into a hundred little pieces. Air cut like razors with each struggled breath, my clenched jaw trembled under the weight of a scream I could not allow.
It felt like an eternity of this hallowed hell by the time Mystery wandered into my unfocused field of vision. She staggared, arches of silver tape clinging to the ankles of her boots, her upper body putting everything into ripping her bonds, and she did with what probably would have been a wild scream were it not for the tape. When she did free her lips, she growled true beast fury.
"Fuck you!" She screamed mania into the night, and swung the toe of her boot into my face. A crunch sounded inside of my head, the iron smell and slow run of blood bloomed in my nose. The equivalent of an infant swinging a rattle in that moment, and if she knew, she didn't give a shit.
"You paranoid mother cunt fucking shit ass!" Her boot made contact with my stomach once, twice, three times, and breath fled my body. "You want to know who the fuck I am?!" Square kick to the chest. "Ursula fucking Torrie." Her boot caught the underside of my chin, blood blossomed on my tongue. "Okay?! My fucking name is Ursula Torrie. I'm a freelance fucking journalist from fucking Michigan and I can't fucking feel anything because of a traumatic fucking brain injury." She kicked me in the shoulder, and still it paled next to the ceaseless acid pumping around the blade in my chest, carrying throughout the rest of my body, but still she kept on kicking me. "The world of the supernatural chose me when the fucking ghost of my twin fucking brother made a fucking killing filed out of the marina, and that, John, is how Crowley fucking tortured me. He made me." Words choked on the memory, tears loosened from her eyes. "He made me relive it, in my mind, on loop. Me digging up my six month dead twin brother. Having to light his deteriorating corpse on fire, having to smell that…" Another tear fell, and I realized then that her eyes were full of them. "But I fucking endured it, even the fucked up twists he added. I sucked it the fuck up for you." Another kick. "I can't close my eyes without seeing my brother's rotting corpse, and this is what I get?!" She gave one final kick, then swayed back, heaving in raw emotion. "Fuck so far off you fall off the planet! I should exorcise you right now, you demented son of a bitch!"
A sob fled from her chest, a cry that was followed by a wild, wounded scream. Exasperated she dropped to her knees, and for a minute it looked like she was going to collapse on the cool earth beside me. And then she ransacked my pockets with uncaring hands until she had what she needed to survive the night; my Kurdish blade.
From where I stood, or laid, or whatever the fuck ever, it looked like it was The End. She had one of the few weapons that could actually kill me, and in that moment I hoped to the very god who had forsaken me that she would.
And oh, she thought about it. The berserk look in her eye, the way her lips snarled up to show barred teeth, an animal cornered and about to free itself from everything. She drew the blade back, back behind her head and… she hesitated. It fell without aim to her side, loose in defeat.
She chided herself in a slew of creative vulgarities, visibly bothered with her inability to follow through with a sure fire way to make it all stop. And that was all she needed to do, wasn't it? Remove me from the board, and the game would end. No real victor, just life and time wasted on fell creatures like me.
Mystery rose and backed away by a few dizzying steps. Her head arched back and she released every ounce of oxygen inside of her in a half scream, half yell. And then she fell, hard, right on her ass.
The look she hurled at me was raw and red and poison, her face flushed and streaked with black eye makeup. But the longer she looked, watched me writhe and pant on the ground, the smoother the edges became.
"No." She shook her head. "No. I'm not going to." Her words were directed at me, but they were meant for herself. She looked away, then back again, still shaking her head. "You were about to kill me, so I'm not, okay? Quit looking at me like that."
The pain roiled under my flesh built pressure in my chest, and a haggard sob spewed out of my throat. It never mattered how many times my twisted essence and borrowed body was pumped full of holy water, how many non-lethal places Crowley stuck his stolen angel blade. Tolerance had no place here, no room to rise and protect. There was and could only be the blazes that froze as they burned. Angry divinity gnashing blinding light over the damned, ripping out bites of hope and spitting it into oblivion.
I bit back another scream, but not enough to keep a meek and miserable wail from evading my will.
Pathetic ateup motherfucker.
"Fuck." The mutter was followed by a rich, defeated sigh. "Fine."
Mystery stood up for a moment, long enough to shuffle unhappy to my side, then she sat back down.
And she took my hand in her hers.
Of all the justifiable things she could have done to me, she held my fucking hand, and finally I could see her.
I flinched, tried to pull away from the cool and undeserving touch, but she held faster than I cared to battle.
"Just hold my damn hand," she grumbled, pointedly avoiding my gaze. "Squeeze if you need to."
The urge to pull away was louder than the whispers of comfort, but relief was there all the same, and had I not been in so much pain, I well may have cried. She couldn't see me the way that I could see her in that moment, but her requiem was fast and absolute. Profound.
And it completely altered the shape of our fates.