Chapter title is from song by Brian Tichy.
58
Chaos Surrounds You – Brian Tichy
The earth rushed up to meet him as he fell, the feathers of his grace burning off in the stratosphere's thin air, stripped from him one by one as fiery arcs searing across the night sky. The alien feeling of fear compressed his chest as he tried to right himself, tried to slow the dizzying speed of his descent with his flaming wings, but instead of catching on wind and air and flight they shredded, white hot pain ripping at his back and he fell faster. The ground grew freakishly in size and clarity as terror clogged his throat, drummed in his head, listening to the panicked shrieking of the others, his brothers and sisters, all of them falling and falling, order and harmony and paradise lost.
"Castiel!"
He jerked awake as Eliam shook him by the shoulder, concern and pity in the other angel's eyes. He could feel the imprint of the car window on his cheek as he blinked.
"Where are we?"
His voice was rusty, dragging out of his sluggish lungs. He shivered and burrowed deeper into Jimmy's trench coat, trying to shake the clinging ache of unspeakable loss, the remnants of Theo's nightmare.
Eliam brushed his forehead with two fingers and frowned. He leaned forward and whispered to Joanna in the driver's seat. Something about turning up the heat, and Joanna obliged.
"La Jara. We should be in Ridgeway soon."
Castiel looked out the fogged windows of Joanna's borrowed minivan. Fresh snow gleamed pristine and bright on the mountains, granite creases in the new skin of the earth, their edges delineated sharply against the azure sky. It was instinct, he supposed, for them to want to climb. Reaching skyward, towards home.
"Inias?"
The silence was his answer. They were uneasy, the others, their nervousness a bitter tang flavoring the air. If he were a better leader, he would make some rousing Today-is-not-the-day speech, something stirring and full of conviction. But he was no king and Dean was no Frodo, and there was no Mount Doom they could drop the First Blade into, not that that would fix anything anyway.
A faint puff of air blew across his cheek, disrupting his musing. Without warning someone was shoving his head up and backwards, so all he saw was the charcoal gray ceiling of the minivan above him. He thrashed and shoved weakly, trying to free himself from his unknown assailant. Everything careened drunkenly as Joanna slammed hard on the brakes, shouts of alarm and the sounds of Eliam struggling to reach him as the minivan rolled off the road. Everything spun around him except the thing suddenly at the center of his vision, Hannah's face, her lake blue eyes dilated almost to black with panic and desperation and fervor. She pinched his head up by the nose, forcing his mouth open as she slanted her lips harshly over his, burning grace, grace and smoke, pouring down into his mouth, clawing its way down his throat, like lava and salvation and wings. He would have reeled except he was already sitting, trapped by Hannah's vessel now slumped against him. He felt Eliam's hands shaking him but it felt far, far away, everything fading as bright, bright, starry images flashed with overwhelming quickness across his mind—Heaven, flash, Hell, flash, the Book, flash, Dean, flash, trap, flashflash, Ramiel, flashflash flash fear trap trap TRAP flashflashflash.
A screamed tore out of his throat, ripping out of his chest as everything rearranged itself, everything hurting and hurting and he went on screaming and screaming until blessed darkness descended.
"Yeager, get Jake to hold his horses. We're not far. You don't want to be messing with twenty of these things with just the two of you. What?…No, a head shot won't do it. No, we haven't tried the silver stakes, those things are too damned bitey. You really don't want to get bit, man... yeah, fire should do it, but… " Sam glanced around to check where they were, "…yeah…I know…yeah. NO. Wait for us."
With a silent fuck, Sam disconnected the call and flipped to the map app, looking at the traffic alerts.
"Where to?"
"St. Louis."
"Yeager?"
"Chompin' at the bit, as usual." Sam huffed with frustration. "Warehouse on 23rd and McKinley street. Better step on it, you know how Yeager is." Sam glanced in the side mirror at the SUV behind them. "I'll let Zee know."
He should have known better when they pulled up and saw Yeager's muddy red pickup parked next to the warehouse doors. This was how they always got into trouble hunting with Yeager and Jake, rushing in half-cocked because Yeager had jumped the gun, but he couldn't just stand there when he heard Jake's bone curdling scream. He didn't wait for the end of Sam's short curse, nor for Zee to pull her SUV to a complete stop.
He teleported, the tail end of Sam's aggravated "DEAN!" fading into nothingness. He blinked into the middle of the mess without caring he was one of the things Jake and Yeager would normally be hunting, and whacked the head off the zombie chomping down on Jake with a single swing of the First Blade. Someone had buried the sucker in a baby blue tuxedo, and it was not a good look when the shirt ruffles were drooping wet and red, soaked through with the blood spurting from Jake's neck as Jake convulsed one last time, the life already fading from his eyes.
More zombies circled around, smacking their lips, gray-dark gray-dark hunger every way he looked, calculation in their milky white eyes, sizing him up like a T-Bone steak. He swung the First Blade angrily as one of the filthy bastards darted in, feinting and weaving, trying to rip another piece off Jake's body. The ancient weapon thrummed in his hand as he swung again, hoping to hell that by now Jake was dead-dead, because no matter how hard he tried, Jake was getting ripped to pieces, gross slurping sounds and ravenous chewing coming from the fuckers all around him. He kept hacking away, a head here, a hand there, trying to keep them away, trying to buy enough time for whatever was left of Jake's soul to break free of his meat suit and not get eaten. He couldn't even see enough of Yeager left to identify and it should have been a friggin' reaper's job, to be here, to collect Jake and Yeager's souls when they fell in battle, except the cowardly assholes were nowhere to be seen, and he was pretty sure he'd be able to see them now, demon sight and all.
"DEAN!"
He'd heard his name like that a thousand times, Sam shouting for him, in the middle of a fight, in the middle of chaos. His brother, and there was something he had to do, something he had to do about his brother. A dry papery hand grabbed his leg and he swung low—the First Blade cutting through it like butter because it was hot in his hand, hot like the ember glow on his arm. He had to take care of this, obliterate the stench of death and starvation all around him, the miasma of it filling his lungs like the putrid ripe smell of the guts spread all over the ground, and Sam was in the way.
"GET OUT! DAMMIT, SAMMY, GO!"
He barked out the order, as sharp and clear as Dad ever had, trying to find Sam in the melee. It was hard to see, everything mixed up, everything confused. The things around him—they weren't light, they weren't dark, they weren't death, they weren't life. They were just hungry. He turned a full 360, the First Blade mowing down whatever was in his reach, thinning out the obsessive cacophony that was a howling need around him, trying to keep it together, trying to get a count.
Don'tcountSamDon'tcountSamDon'tcountSam.
Rage flared up his arm, obliterating his concentration, rage and fury and frustration. Try as he might, he couldn't see Sam, it was all one big gray blur, going in and out of focus, nauseating when he tried to look.
Come on, come on.
THINK.
LISTEN.
There. The sharp whisper of a samurai blade, the whoosh of a machete, THERE. He grabbed them before he lost them again in the foaming sea of gray, and threw as hard as he could, blasting a path for them to the sunlight far away framed by the doorway, before the burning in his arm roared up and consumed him.
Her sword was arcing up, aiming for an armpit when she was thrown off balance, flying through the air and slicing through nothing. She landed with a thud that jarred clear through her hip and up her elbow, then skidded, sliding uncontrolled through several feet of slippery reek and slime, green-black and pulpy like apple butter on the warehouse floor. She slipped in the gooey mess before scrambling awkwardly to her feet, confused by the clear space around her, like someone had nuked the zombies around them and blasted a path to the door while throwing her twenty feet through the air towards it. Before she could take a step she was being bodily hauled up, Sam lifting her clear off her feet, his face set and grim as he made a beeline for the warehouse door, half carrying her along. He didn't slow down until they burst into the daylight air, dragging her and careening to the right, away from the open door, throwing himself down on top of her as some force blasted the steel door clear off its hinges behind them, leaving behind the acrid scent of ozone and death.
Sam rolled off of her and got to his feet. He was covered in the same foul gunk she was, green-black zombie blood and pulp streaked down his jeans and jacket. He held out a hand and pulled her up.
"You okay?"
She nodded, her eyes on the angel blade in his hand and the darkness in his eyes.
"Stay here."
It wasn't a request. Sam didn't wait for an answer as he dove back into the warehouse, shoulders rigid down to the brittle tension in his arm, the silver blade balanced loosely in his right hand as if it burned to hold it.
A rivulet of stank green blood beaded at the tip of her sword, dropping heavily down to the ground. She looked at it, at the blood smear glistening on her jeans and caking her boots. With a practiced motion she flicked the katana clean and sheathed it. It was useless now. Useless against the demon inside the warehouse, the one that Sam was going to try to talk down.
She squinted against the bright midday sunlight. Telekinesis. It was a new power, born of desperation. Born of that damned stubborn protective streak. He was digging heedlessly into the demon's powers, stepping down the slippery slope. It'd be harder to come back; it should have been impossible already. There'd been far more than twenty zombies in there—closer to thirty, thirty-five—ravenous, poisonous, toxic even to him—and to wipe them out in self-defense should have been the demon's first instinct. But it wasn't. The man held the demon back from nuking everything; moving heaven and earth to save what mattered to him.
Sam.
Her hand went back to the pommel of her sword as she looked around the littered warehouse yard, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling uneasily. There was something wrong with this whole setup. It felt all wrong, too easy wrong, baited trap wrong. The obvious danger would be the demon inside, but that wasn't it. Her eyes landed on Yeager's truck. She didn't know Jake and she didn't know Yeager, except by reputation. The truck door was unlocked, the weapons cache in the cab left open, exposed, like Jake and Yeager had been in a real damned hurry. It looked like they'd pulled half the arsenal, machetes, silver stakes, shotguns, holy water, propane, whatever they'd thought might work. It was a disorganized mess—far too disorderly for two seasoned hunters—rushing into something without scouting it out first, as if something had superseded their normal caution.
She picked through the loose papers on the floor of the cab. Gas station receipts, bits from old case files, fast food wrappers. A bright purple bead rolled out and settled underneath the gas pedal when she pulled on a newspaper clipping wedged into the driver's seat. Leaning over, she retrieved the gaudy spark of color and looked at it. Crayola purple and plastic, it wasn't any kind of bead that belonged in a charm or hex. It looked like part of a toy. It really looked like…
Shit.
She climbed into the driver's seat and tugged the visor down. Nothing. She opened the overhead cubby for sunglasses, then flipped rapidly through the glove compartment. License, registration, tire gauge, backup 9mm. Frantically she searched through every compartment and cubby in the cab of the truck, emptying out the crumpled scraps of Yeager's life onto the driver's seat. Yeager's life.
Not Jake's.
God dammit.
Leaning over the stick shift she reached up and flipped down the passenger side sun visor, running her fingers over the fabric. She found the slit cut above the mirror easily and tugged on the stiff paper corner of the photograph wedged behind it.
What was rule ONE of hunting?
Don't do this.
In the photograph was a smiling brunette, red Santa hat perched jauntily on her head at an angle, the clean white fuzzy puff at the end dangling merrily over the head of a little girl, rainbow colored bracelet of plastic beads on her wrist. Long brown curly hair, bright green eyes, the smile of an angel in a green velvet Christmas frock, shiny chocolate brown Mary Janes on her stockinged feet and Zee swore, backing out of the truck in a hurry. She swept the yard left to right, scanning the weedy outcrops that had grown up through the cracks in the paving, looking up at the checkerboard of broken window panes, over the line of the roof two stories above.
Silence.
Nothing but silence and an uneasy feeling, lifting the hairs on the back of her neck. There was no sound coming from inside the warehouse, none at all.