Chapter title is from song by The Outdoors.

31

Barricade – The Outdoors

"Elias."

The name whispered from her lips before she could swallow it. She was back at the sawmill, dusty wooden planks beneath her feet, her feet not quite touching them. Moving like a breeze she drifted her way across the room, her icy cold hands smoothing over an old maroon overcoat. It was freezing out. There was new snow dusting the windows and the forest floor, and when she found Elias again, he would need his favorite coat.

A swirl of wind rattled the window panes, shaking her concentration, and the coat fell through her numb fingers to the floor. This wouldn't do. She needed strength and substance and speed if she was going to retrieve her boy.

She cast a cool glance at the whimpering figure huddled in a corner of the long room. Flesh, warm flesh, like the kind she used to have. She wanted it, the warmth and pliancy, the burning incandescence inside, the spark.

She craved it.

Without thinking about it she zapped her way across the room, blinking in and out of existence, a gift the angel had brought her. Her next meal let out a frightened shriek and blubbered inanely, something about please and don't and made screams like music when her fangs punctured his jugular. Thick warm blood gushed over her tongue, strength and warmth and life, salted with shining motes of soul and it wasn't enough. It still wasn't enough.

"Shh. Shhhh."

She put one hand over the man's mouth, to keep the sharp distress out of the gurgling noises he was making. She pulled the scarf away from the flesh on his neck, watching in fascination as his Adam's apple bobbed with the cries in his voice, and hmm.

Opening her jaws wide, she ripped the tasty morsel out.

There was no grace and no elegance to her fumbling as she rolled off the motel bed, her boots hitting the floor with a thunderously loud thump, one hand over her mouth, trying not to vomit right then and there. Cold tile hit her knees when she stumbled into the bathroom, bent over and hurled the foamy, acidic remnants of last night's tomato soup into the toilet, and hurled again when her eyes told her it looked far too much like blood. When her stomach was done emptying itself, she let go of the toilet bowl and sank down on her calves, and bent over the tearing pain in her side, triggered by the vomiting. When the spasms eased at last, she slumped over, breathing shallowly, letting her palms fall flat and empty against the cold tile floor.

The smooth tile against both her hands jerked her upright. She felt around behind her, hand coming up empty from her holster. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed onto the edge of the vanity and pulled herself upright. Her knees shook, fragments of her nightmare clouding reality. She gripped the counter tighter, took one careful step and peered back into the semi-dark room.

Her dagger rested untouched on the nightstand. She was unarmed, vulnerable, but the nightstand might as well have been a million miles away. She forced a breath to calm herself, and took stock of the room. Toby was curled up in his bed, sound asleep for once, and the salt line by the door remained undisturbed.

It was quiet.

She gripped the counter edge until her knuckles were white and forced a deeper, slower breath. Inhale, hold, and slow, slow exhale, easing out the shakes and tremors and sharp jabby pulses of pain, trying to reorient her head. She was in a motel room, not back at the sawmill. The mirror showed her pale reflection, white lips and haunted eyes, hair still comfortably brown with no signs of blonde. There were the familiar calluses on the heels of her hands from her sword and the taste of squishy flesh between her teeth.

She spat violently into the sink, then ran some cold water so she could gargle, once with water then twice with mouthwash for good measure, trying to wash out the squeaky, tendon-y taste in her mouth, thin skin and meat and flesh and iron rich blood. She dry heaved again with the memory, and shut her eyes, right hand curling tight into a fist until her plain trimmed nails bit into her palm.

It tasted like chicken.

Raw chicken, a little bit of snap to the bite.

Desperately she opened her eyes and looked at the coffee maker sitting to one side of the vanity, under a cluttered mess of options, caff or decaf or tea, and she grabbed two coffees and a tea and threw them together into the filter, filling the carafe and hitting go. She needed caffeine, and she didn't much care how she got it. She hung on to the first waft of brew, thin and weak, but not raw meat, and traced her fingers over the wad of bandages on her right side before lifting her shirt carefully.

There was the faintest hint of red showing through.

She didn't move.

It was just blood. That's all. It was a large gash, there being a hunk of missing flesh and all, and it would be unreasonable to expect the stitches to hold perfectly together when one was fighting ghosts and running from demons and moving around way more than the strongly recommended in no uncertain terms stay still for ten days edict she'd been given.

Or there was something wrong.

She chewed on her lower lip. Technically, it wasn't a zombie bite. The zombie queen had jabbed in with her fingers and tore off a chunk, but it wasn't a bite. Technically, if it wasn't a bite, then it wasn't contagious. Probably. Sure, Mother had eaten it, but it wasn't a bite.

Was it?

It was a pain in the ass, the whole demon-not-sleeping thing. Sam had drifted off sometime after the Late Show, before the infomercials, and luckily for Dean, before the Dwayyo had come sniffing around. He nipped out without having to face The Inquisition, and ran the Dwayyo down in an alley two blocks out. It was a strange place for a Dwayyo to be—he thought they usually stuck to the woods. But when super-sized Wolverine charged him like an enraged bull, he wasn't stopping to ask for ID. He was back in the room before Sam turned over, the First Blade behind his back, in case Sam woke up and literally smelled blood. He was cleaning the First Blade off in the bathroom when through the thin walls he heard Zee roll out of bed and hit the floor with an uncharacteristically loud thump.

He stopped mid-motion to listen.

Huh.

All hunters had nightmares. It came standard with the job description, like wheels on a car or wings on a plane, and both he and Sam had had their share. Sometimes you just woke up freaked out, not sure where you were. Some things were just that bad. It was probably nothing.

Then again, he'd been listening to them move around their room(s) for days. He'd gotten used to hearing certain patterns, certain sequences.

She'd left her dagger behind on the nightstand.

He frowned into the mirror. That was unusual, but it was none of his business. She was likely to bite his head off if he asked, so he was better off not asking. He turned back to cleaning off the Dwayyo blood, trying not to notice the way it disappeared into the crevices of the old jawbone, as if the Blade were drinking it up. He gave the old weapon a final wipe, one ear on the room next door, on her footsteps and the clumsy rattle of the coffee machine, followed by more, quieter footsteps, then by the distinctive rip of surgical tape being peeled off the roll and it really was none of his business.

She was still too shaky when she opened the room door for a breath of air. A bracing blast of cold hit her in the face, and she gulped it down, grateful for the arctic iciness of it. It'd been years since the dreams had been this bad, where the four walls of the room closed in on her, the space too small and cave-like and small, filled with artificial light that could give way to darkness without warning, a darkness that would go on and on without the relief of daylight, and she wasn't thinking about that.

A low growl of words cut through the dark from somewhere to her right.

"You look like Death hung over."

Her hand froze on the doorknob. She turned to find Dean leaning casually against the hood of his car, an irascible look on his face, two cups of coffee in his hands again, one of them extended in her direction. The Java Joe logo was bright in the barely lit parking lot, and he crooked one eyebrow up, those eagle green eyes too sharp on the bloodlessly thin line of her lips. The promise of alertness wafted across to her—a Triple Red Eye was her guess—and she narrowed her eyes, because there were no Java Joe's within 50 miles of here.

He cocked his head sideways, a deprecating, self-mocking gesture, reading the suspicions in her mind.

"The city never sleeps."

The city was a long way away, but maybe not for teleporting. She looked at him and looked at the coffee, undecided. The memory of raw chicken squeaked over her tongue, and abruptly she crossed the few steps between them and plucked the coffee out of his hand, ignoring his bemused expression in favor of taking a healthy swallow and another and another, ignoring the fact it was still burning hot.

"Hey. Hey! Easy!"

She lowered the cup a fraction, then stuck her nose in the steam, needing to scrub out the scent and taste memory of squeaky raw flesh. The hot liquid warmed her cold fingers, and she focused on the earthy, wakeful aroma. She took another long, deep swallow, focused on that first real hit of caffeine that would clear her head. She was halfway through the coffee before she realize it was silent around her, or rather, that he was silent, staring intently at her lips where they met the cup, the tip of his tongue parked between the part of his lips.

She inhaled sharply; struck by a sense memory so intense it seemed real. The way his mouth fit over hers, the slick and the slide of it, urgent and heated, like the half-remembered fragment of a dream. She took a hasty step back, unsure when she'd gotten so close, close enough to smell the clean scent of his aftershave cutting through warm coffee, close enough to bask in the heat radiating off of him like a furnace.

What the hell was she thinking? He was a demon.

She took another cautious step back, her eyes never leaving his, all too aware that he hadn't moved, his back still against the Impala. She was the one guilty of crowding his space, leaning in, by habit, as if his presence could ward off her nightmares. She had no idea why she even thought that; it had to be some weird holdover from the days at the hospital, when she'd been doped up and not in her right mind.

She jerked her nose back down to the coffee cup in her hands and inhaled more vigorously, trying to clear her head.

Dean cleared his throat awkwardly. He looked around her into the motel room. His lips twitched down when he saw the thick line of salt just visible beyond the threshold. He took a tight and completely unnecessary breath, his features stern and harsh again as he nodded towards the room.

"Kid get any sleep?"

She studied the black plastic lid of her coffee cup. Toby had slept like a log—a deep, sound sleep for once. Who knew the answers to his nightmares lay in putting two coats of wax on the Impala?

She bit her lips before looking at Dean again.

"Yeah. Thanks for that."

There was a gleam in those green eyes, a reflection of the lights, perhaps.

"Detailing the car always wore Ben out too. Figured it'd work the same."

The words were pulled from him like he didn't want to let them out. Ben. Ben and Lisa, and the story Sam had told her. She dropped her eyes to hide her surprise that he would bring it up when it clearly scraped like a raw wound. Before she could say anything, he cleared his throat and tipped his cup in the direction of her freshly re-taped waist, all brisk business again.

"Are we going to have a problem with that?"

She paused with the coffee cup halfway to her lips, hearing what he didn't explicitly say. Was she going to turn, pale and bloodless and ravenously hungry, starving for the taste of flesh?

"Shouldn't." He frowned at the caveat in her word. She clutched the coffee cup tighter. Maybe having that salt line there keeping him out wasn't the best thing for Toby's protection. She flicked her thumb restlessly against the paper sleeve around the coffee cup, the rustling loud in the dark. "It wasn't a bite. She tore off a chunk with her fingers."

She mimed a tearing motion with one hand, bending her fingers like claws.

She stepped back again when he edged forward, green eyes intent on her face, as if he were trying to solve the problem by seeing around the hex bag in her pocket, like he was trying to sense if she was still human. After a minute he heaved a frustrated sigh, a constipated crease forming between his brows. He glared at her, annoyed, like everything, the angels, the ghosts, the zombies, was somehow all her fault, which it wasn't. She was pretty sure. If anyone was to blame for all this hullabaloo, her money was on the demonic mother hen currently scowling at her.

Abruptly she peeled the lid off her coffee cup and drained it. She was going to need a helluva lot more java if she was going to be dealing with him, whatever the hell it was that he was.

Dammit.

She snapped the lid back on the cup. She walked back into the room and broke the salt line with the toe of her boot before she turned to face him.

"I'm going to let him sleep in." She made a shooing motion with her free hand. "You know where we are. Now go away. We'll meet up with you guys at that Biggerson's down the street around ten."

It could've been a lie. She could've cut and run, but he took her at her word. One show of good faith for another; it was only fair. He had to drag Sam away from the motel by the hair, with Sam arguing with him every step of the way.

"Dean." Sam said warningly, eyes narrowed and furious at him for being so stupid. "She's going to bolt. God knows she's been trying to. She doesn't know about all the crap that's been showing up at night. They're going to be sitting ducks."

He smiled at the hostess then gave Sam a speaking look when the blonde turned around, leading the way to a table in the middle of the room.

"She said they'd be here, Sam."

His life was not made up of faith. When the hostess stopped at a four top, he looked around the room before putting on his most charming smile.

"Is that table free? See, this one, here, he's got just a touch of claustrophobia. He likes a window seat."

He pointed to a table by the window overlooking the street, and the motel down the street, ignoring the flustered outrage that predictably went across Sam's face, and waited for Patti to nod before he dragged Sam with him to the table with a view.

"Thanks. We'll take two coffees while we wait."

By the time Patti had jotted all that down, Sam was almost done spluttering.

They were dawdling through the slowest breakfast ever, suffering growingly impatient looks from their waitress when there was finally activity down the street. He kept his eyes on the SUV when it pulled out of the motel's parking lot, half expecting her to hang a hard right and vamoose on down the road. It had to be an even-odds toss up between Plan A: Run like Hell and Plan B: Hang Out with A Demon Just in Case You Might Turn into A Zombie. She had to have a better place to park the kid in case of this kind of emergency. So he was actually kind of surprised when the SUV pulled up next to the Impala and parked precisely between the white lines.

The bright greeting on Toby's face when the kid saw them answered at least part of his questions for him. She wasn't going to do anything to jeopardize the fragile and temporary peace the kid had found, at least, not yet. Not until she could find a graceful exit.

It was lunacy. How were they going to get from here to there? He totally got it, but it was still nuts. He didn't know what else to do when Toby turned to him, all bright eyed and bushy tailed.

"Will you show me how to throw a knife?"

He slid a look at Zee. Where the hell did that come from?

"Toby." She said, quiet.

"Please?"

"Why do you want to learn to throw a knife, Toby?" Sam interjected, because Sam was good at making the third degree sound friendly when he wanted to.

"My dad could do it. And he could hit the bull's eye on a dartboard every time. Dad said he'd teach me when I was older. I'm older now. Will you teach me?"

Well, shit. What were they going to do with that?

Zee put the menu into Toby's hands. "Eat, then we'll think about it."

The kid's glance around at their faces was astutely assessing. He sucked in his lips, strategically postponing his arguments, and looked down at the menu.

Zee glanced once at her menu and set it down, preoccupied and probably silently cussing. Learning how to fire a shotgun was one thing—brute force self-defense know-how that wouldn't hurt. Learning to throw a dagger, on the other hand, was a finely honed skill.

A killing skill.

Dean pushed the eggs around on his plate. Why had he gone off and gotten eggs? Eggs, not surprisingly, were sulfur flavored in this incarnation of life, and he should have stuck with the pancakes. He would eat his hat (and it would taste about the same) if she did not know how to throw a dagger, very, very well. That dagger she had in her boot was weighted for it.

He met her troubled frown across the top of Toby's head.

It was the first time the kid had brought up his Dad. SEAL, Sam had said. He'd seen the shape of the dog tags under Toby's shirt, and the oval bump of something else on that standard issue ball chain.

Wait. Amulet?

What if that was the monster magnet?

He was about to poke Sam with the thought when he turned to find Sam staring at his hands, eyes wide as his fingers shook like someone had attached him to one of those belt machines that promised to vibrate you down to size 10.

"Sam?"

Sam shook his head, still staring blankly at his quivering fingers. Not my doing. Abruptly Sam's eyes rolled back in his head and Sam's whole body jerked, bumping the table and jiggling the cutlery.

"SAMMY?"

Sam jerked spasmodically again, head and arms twitching like an out of control marionette.

"SAM!"

Dean was up and out of his chair in a flash, grabbing Sam's wildly thrashing arms before Sam sent the table flying. Toby was staring at Sam frozen and wide-eyed, but the Ninja wasn't made of ice for nothing. She moved decidedly to Sam's other side, peeling back Sam's eyes for a quick look.

"Is he epileptic?"

Dean shook his head. If he could take his hands off Sam and trust Sam not to hurt himself, he'd be looking for a hex, but Zee beat him to it, glancing at the grimness of his face and coming to the same conclusion he had. She grabbed Sam's bag and dumped the contents out onto the floor. Sam gave another violent twitch, almost knocking over his water glass. A trickle of foam ran out from one corner of Sam's mouth.

The hex had to be close. Somewhere on Sam, if not in his things. Dean reached inside Sam's jacket, feeling along the pockets, and yanked his hand back when the angel blade burned against his skin. His breath hissed out and his vision went gray, and Zee paused mid-motion rifling through Sam's bag to stare at him, him and his black eyes and he had to get himself under control. He clenched his fingers around the sizzling burn on his palm and took a deep breath, blinking once to get the world back to normal colors.

Zee went back to what she was doing, turning Sam's bag inside out, feeling along the lining with a frown. She shook her head.

Nothing.

Sam's whole body twisted, up in a tight arc of pain. The waitress and the hostess gathered around them, frowns on their faces when it seemed like he was doing nothing but frisking through Sam's jacket to steal his wallet when he should have been calling 911.

"His medication." He gritted out, by way of explanation. "I just have to find his, um, medication. For his, um, claustrophobia."

They looked dubious, but he didn't have time to care. He pulled Sam's cell phone, the Impala's keys, some crumpled up receipts and Sam's other, other cell phone out of Sam's pockets. Sam gave another spasm, his head rolling back at an uncomfortable angle, the drool of foam dribbling out one corner of his mouth getting worse.

"No no no no no. SAMMY. Stay with me. Come on. Sam. Come on."

Zee glanced up from where she was sorting through Sam's things at his panicked patting down of Sam's jeans and hissed at him under her breath.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He would have thought it was obvious, checking around the dagger tucked into Sam's right boot, looking for the hex.

Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"What are you, a newbie? A hex has power. Bloody well FEEL for it."

What did it look like he was doing?

"Not THAT way. The OTHER way. YOUR way."

Oh.

And it was right there, a dark pull in a gray world, pulsing in the pile of coins on the table from Sam's left front pocket, looking like a penny but it wasn't a penny. The taste of magic was bitterly strong once he thought to look for it, shimmering around the illusion of a penny like smoke at an Ozzy concert. He fished it out of the pile and looked at the markings on it. A triskelion, made of serpents. Now where did he know that from? He'd seen it once before, only not in the dusky brown of oxidized copper, but bright and gleaming, emblazoned on a wooden chest, in a different kind of metal…

Shit.

He turned the fake penny flat and drew the sharp edge of the table knife against it, coming away with a smear of gold. Crap. He should have remembered. The lake was nearby. He should have taken care of it when he was out last night. They couldn't finish the job before, but he'd bet he could do it now. He pinched the gold coin between his fingers tight, holding it as far from Sam as possible and caught Zee's eye.

Look after him for a minute?

She nodded.

He rolled the coin/hex into his fist, feeling the waves of hoodoo venom in it pulse against his skin.

"I'll be right back."