9 - Public Housing
Sam was giving him the look. That "you stupid motherfucker" look that honestly Sam should have slapped a patent on, in case anyone else wanted to throw him that look too. And quite a few had, so Sam was just leaving money on the table. He thought he taught him better than that.
"Can I talk with my brother a moment? " Dean said.
Lyla shrugged. "Why would I care?" They stared at her until she realized, "Oh, I'm supposed to leave?" She rolled her eyes, but stepped outside.
As soon as the door was shut, Sam pounced. "You know this a trap, right? You cannot bluff having the Mark of Cain."
"I can. I lived with it long enough."
"Don't you get what this is? Divide and conquer. You're in the bar, up to your ass in demons, and I'll be facing who knows what outside."
Dean knew it would upset him more, but he couldn't help but shrug. "Won't be the first time. We should be able to do this in our sleep."
Man, Sam's face was going to stick that way if he giving him the stupid motherfucker look. "Getting ourselves killed doesn't solve this."
"Neither does sitting and waiting for something to happen. If we can get a line on who's behind all this, I say we take the risk."
"You always say we take the risk, and look where that's gotten us."
Ouch. Dean was no longer sure if he deserved that or not. Probably. "So what's your alternate plan?"
Now he got the look twice as hard, and Dean knew why. Sam didn't have a plan B - he simply hated plan A. Part of him wanted to get mad at Sam, but the other half of him got it. This sucked. "Dude, look, I know. This sounds like a suicide mission. But how many of those have we lived through? We can do this. And more to the point, we have to do this. If we want the killing to stop, this is the next move. Yeah, it eats, and we'll probably get our asses kicked, but it's worth it if we get the evil piece of shit behind it all. You with me or what?"
It was amazing that his teenage pout was still perfectly intact, despite all the years. Some things didn't age. "You keep your phone on and open so I can hear everything going on in the bar."
Dean nodded. "Easy enough." He went to the door, and peeked his head out. Lyla was leaning against a stranger's car in the parking lot, arms crossed, scowling at nothing. She did notice him. "Oh good, are you two finished with your bullshit?"
"We're the Winchesters. We're never finished with our bullshit. But yeah, come on in."
She sighed, and pushed herself off the car. Dean wondered how far Lyla was going to carry this cooperative act. What was her endgame? If it was revenge, he could get that. But there was something so slippery about her. He wouldn't be surprised if she was after more, although he couldn't guess what that would be.
For the moment, the rest was just working out the finer details. Lyla didn't want Sam right outside the bar, as someone might put it together, so Sam reluctantly agreed to wait a block over. Neither of them mentioned the open phone line, so Lyla had no idea he'd be listening. At least that was one trick they had up their sleeves. If it made any difference was a question yet to be answered.
They headed out, and stuck to the meager plan. Lyla wanted to take the lead, and Dean was more than happy to let her. He was trying to get back into that psychopathic Mark headspace. Care about nothing; live to see the world burn. He could do it, but he didn't like it.
Hanrahan's was dark and cramped, and smelled of beer and sulfur, which was pretty much what he expected. There were no windows, as windows and demon bars didn't go together. Dean had no idea why. No witnesses?
Everybody turned to look at them as they came in. Scratch that - they turned to look at him, the one that didn't smell right. They seemed happy to ignore Lyla, which was the opposite of what usually happened in such a sausage fest of a bar.
Dean met their gazes with glares. The Mark wasn't afraid of anything. In fact, it would look forward to such a lopsided fight, just so it could show off.
Lyla went up to the scarred wooden bar, and the bartender came down. His muscles had muscles; his arms were as large as one of Dean's legs. It was clearly gym muscles, which were limited in their usefulness, but still, when you got to a certain size, that was going to impact the fight. He had a bullet-shaped head, shaved clean, so you could see the snake tattooed on his scalp. Basically, he looked like he could chew on tinfoil and spit out nails. Probably a good choice for a demon bar.
Lyla played it cool. "You Liam?"
"Who's asking?" he replied.
"Ferdinand," Lyla said, giving the code.
Liam looked between the two of them, and Dean tried to look as bored as possible. Whenever the Mark wasn't doing something evil, it got bored fast.
Liam let out a grunt of annoyance, and hit a button under the bar. One of the walls suddenly slid open, revealing a black hole of a space. Anything could be in there, and probably was. Lyla took point and he followed, still feeling the eyes of the entire bar on him. In the doorway, he turned and waved at them, as the door slid shut behind them. Yeah, that was a Mark move, but also, he kind of enjoyed it as well. He might pay for it, but that was a later problem.
The dark entryway gave way to a poorly lit back office, where a broken-down desk and chair were the only traditional furniture. The unconventional furniture were the cases of booze piled up against the walls.
Behind the desk was a man with thinning dark hair and an ill-fitting suit that was either really cheap or really expensive - for whatever reason, the extremes got mixed up easily. He was pouring decent whiskey into a glass, and he looked rumpled and tired. "So you're Tony's friends?" he asked, capping the whiskey. Of course he didn't offer them any.
"Yeah. You know the fuckers that killed him?" Lyla replied, anger in her voice. She was a very convincing actress, but of course she would be - shapeshifter. She had to pretend to be someone else all the time.
The man shook his head, and shotgunned his whiskey. How could he do that? You only shotgunned the cheap stuff that tasted like shoe polish. The better stuff was too damn good for that. Damn it, he hated this guy already. "Nah, just some hunters. Who gives a shit?"
"I do," she insisted.
He studied her a moment, and shrugged, "Well, if you wanna track 'em down, that's up to you. But I thought you were looking for work."
"Depends on the work."She crossed her arms over her chest, expression slipping down into what was best described as resting disembowelment face.
The man waved his empty glass around. "We need part of this city cleaned out of the trash. You know, homeless, beggars, hookers, that sort of thing. Everything from 15th to 8th. All you can eat."
"And what's the pay off?" Dean asked. The Mark didn't give a shit about money really, but it didn't like feeling like it was being taken advantage of either.
The man held his gaze for a long time. This was Dean's first tip-off he wasn't human. "You smell weird. What's your story?"
"Ever heard of the Mark of Cain?"
The man scoffed. "Bullshit."
Dean pushed up his sleeve, revealing the Mark drawn on his arm in permanent ink. No, it didn't have the burned on look of the real one, but he was counting on most people never having seen it in the wild. After all, many of the witnesses to it were dead.
The man - Vincent? Victor? - leaned forward, and stared at it a moment. "Holy shit. How did that happen?"
Dean let his arm fall at his side, dragging the sleeve down with it. "This stupid human piece of shit wanted to kill a Knight of Hell, and didn't look at the fine print on the contract."
"Yeah, humans ain't the brightest," the man agreed, pulling on his tie. "Base rate is a thousand, but will go up if you bring us in a few extra heads."
"Literally or figuratively?" Lyla wondered.
"Literally," he said.
The temptation to stab this bastard in the face was overwhelming. Was he too much in the Mark's headspace? Or was he just one of those guys that seemed to be afflicted with anti-charm, some sort of miraculous ability to make people hate you at first sight? Dean honestly wasn't sure.
"Why?" Lyla asked. "Wouldn't it be cheaper to burn the city down?"
"No, we wanna preserve some of the real estate. It ain't all bad." Dean was finding new levels of hate with this guy every time he opened his stupid mouth. He wanted to smash up his desk and make him eat it, piece by piece.
"So that's it?" Dean asked. "We just go out, start killing, and come back for our checks?"
He sat forward again, and his chair creaked loudly, like a tomb door opening. As foreshadowing went, it wasn't subtle. "Well, we do like to vet people if we haven't met them before." There was a noise, like something being dragged, and the man got up and went to stand in the farthest corner away from them.
He shared a look with Lyla, making sure they were on the same page, and they turned to find two men had come in through a secret door. They were big meatheads, possibly relatives of the bartender, and they had barely faced them before they were thrown against the wall, obliterating Vincent/Victor's desk on their way.
Dean hit the wall back first, which briefly winded him. And oh yeah, it hurt like a bitch. But he had to remain in Mark headspace and not lose character. The Mark wouldn't care if its vessel was hurt or not. The Mark would see this as a love tap, if it even noticed it at all.
He forced himself to swallow it, and stood up, grinning like someone straight out of Arkham Asylum. "That the best you got? I was hoping for more foreplay." Dean lunged towards the guy, but at the last second, pulled back. The guy, picking up on Dean's terrible move, threw a roundhouse punch. Dean felt the wind of it going by his face, but it was a clean miss that set him slightly off balance.
That's when Dean moved. He stepped into the guy, grabbing his meaty arm, and stomped down on his knee. Something cracked, and the guy roared, flinging Dean across the room. This time he was ready for it, and managed to take the impact on his shoulder. Yeah, it still hurt, but it was easier to ignore.
Lyla was simply beating the everliving shit out of her guy. He was already on his knees as she jackhammered punches into his face, threatening to shatter his skull with her bare hands. They probably weren't ready for a super-strong shapeshifter, but who was?
Dean's dance partner came roaring back, swinging wildly, and after an attempted punch he ducked under, he felt the slightest unexpected tug on his hair. A quick glance showed a bony spike had shot out from under his wrist. Oh, great, a wraith. Were illegal weapons allowed in the ring?
But then again, Dean had faced that before. And he knew how to handle it.
To keep from being cornered, Dean kicked the wraith in his impressively hard stomach and pushed him back, giving himself room to move off the wall, but his friend was in no mood to draw out this fight. He didn't so much throw a punch as attempt to skewer Dean in the face, but it was telegraphed way before he did it, and Dean was ready. He ducked under, but came up fast, grabbing the man's muscular arm and turning it against his own momentum. Using all his strength, Dean managed to shove the man's fist into the soft area beneath his chin. His spike went into his own face, and there was a crunch as it broke through the cartilage of his nose and came out through the bridge. He hoped he didn't wear glasses, because that wasn't going to work for a while.
The wraith stumbled back, making a sort of choking noise of horror as blood poured down from his impaled nose. "Didn't anyone ever tell you not to bring a knife to a fistfight?" Dean said, pasting on the deranged grin of every evil motherfucker he'd ever encountered before.
The wraith yanked his spike out of himself, but as he stabbed at Dean, Dean caught it. It was slick with blood, but it still wasn't that hard to pull on the weak point, and shatter it with a palm strike. Now he howled in pain, blood pumping through the severed appendage, and Dean brought up the shattered piece of spike and stabbed him in the chest with it. None of this would kill the wraith, but it would be very clear who won this battle. "Stay down, or I'll stab out your eyes," Dean said, as the wraith hit the far wall and slid down it, reaching for the spike in his chest. He got his fingers on it, but was in no hurry to pull it out.
Dean had no idea when Lyla ended her fight. Her wraith was basically hamburger in a large pool of blood on the floor. If he wasn't dead, he was probably wishing he was with what little sense he had left. She was standing out of the way, arms crossed, resting disemboweling face back on, her hands red with blood.
Dean felt almost lost in character now. The Mark wouldn't take this. It wouldn't even consider it acceptable, considering how powerful it was. The Mark would be offended.
Somehow, the whiskey bottle survived the destruction of the desk. As he stomped over to Vincent/Victor, he scooped it up, and the man didn't seem to expect Dean coming right towards him, getting in his space, and shattering the bottle right beside his head. He yelped and cringed as flying shards cut his face, and Dean pushed the jagged neck of the bottle right into his eye line. "You do not test me, little man," he snarled, the urge to shove the bottleneck into his eye socket almost overwhelming. "I am not your puppet. I am the Mark and I deserve respect."
"Dean," Lyla said. She sounded concerned. "We won. Back off."
"Not until this little pissant learns some manners." He attempted to move his head away, and Dean placed the glass against his cheek, puncturing it. He didn't push it in, it was barely a scrape, but Dean saw panic flare in his eyes. He wasn't used to getting his hands dirty, or getting hurt. Tony had been right - he was a middle man, a nobody, a Smithers doing someone else's bidding. The more he cringed, the more Dean wanted to drive the bottle's neck in deeper.
He had fragile eyelashes. Dean was close enough that he could pick out individual blood vessels in the whites of his eyes. He could imagine popping them with the slightest piece of jagged glass. Dean was willing to bet this guy was a real screamer. Those deep from the diaphragm howls you could hear for blocks.
"Dean," Lyla repeated. She sounded even more concerned this time.
"Wh.. what do you want?" he asked, his voice going up an octave. Dean could smell the fear on him now, and it was remarkable how much fear smelled like piss.
Yes, what did he want? The Mark would kill him. Cut his throat and leave him to bleed out on the floor beside his thugs. It could offer him nothing besides a painful, amusing death.
No. No. He wasn't the Mark anymore. He was acting and he had gone too deep. He needed to pull back now. The problem was, Dean wasn't sure how he got here, or how to get out.
"I want to peel your skin off," he finally said. "But you're not worth the time." He threw the bottle shard down, and it felt like a tremendous act of will. That shouldn't have been so hard. Why was it?
He stepped back, and Vincent/Victor sighed so hard with relief it looked like he had partially deflated. Dean turned to see Lyla looking at him with ... fear? Really? Lady Macbeth was going to judge him now?
Dean felt this bone-deep shudder threatening to erupt out of him, but he managed to hold it back. He didn't know how long that would last. He was glad his arms were covered, because he could feel gooseflesh breaking out all over.
Since he didn't know how long he was going to be able to hold it together, Dean headed out the door, and back into the bar, where the eyes met him again. But just as quickly, they all looked away. Dean wondered why, until he noticed Lyla wasn't the only one wearing the spoils of victory. He had blood on his hands, his shirt, and he could feel some getting cold and sticky on his face. It was only when he noticed some blood dripping that he realized he had a cut on his palm, most likely from when he had broken the wraith's spike. He hadn't felt it.
It was all he could do not to run out of the bar. The air outside was unseasonably stuffy, warning that a storm was coming in. Dean leaned over and put his hands on his knees, and attempted to ride out the nausea.
Lyla followed him out, and grabbed him hard by the arm, pulling him into the alley beside the bar. "What the fuck was that?" she said in a low, angry whisper.
Dean saw someone approaching from the other end of the alley, but even in silhouette, he recognized Sam. Oh shit. He heard it all, didn't he? Dean still had the open phone in his pocket. Fuck.
Dean was pretty sure he wasn't going to vomit and pass out - which, honestly, should have been the other way around if life was fair at all - so he closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. Oh God, this sucked so much.
Lyla was still whisper ranting at him, but he easily tuned her out. It wasn't that Dean didn't know he had a very dark place in him - he'd been a torturer in Hell, right? He knew - it was just horrible to realize it had resonated with the Mark so much. About half of the shit he blamed on the Mark was just him, wasn't it? That murderous, swampy place in his mind he didn't like to acknowledge in any way, shape, or form. The monster in him. He'd kind of always known he was one, didn't he? You didn't grow up like he did, survive what he had, without being some kind of abomination.
"Back off," Sam said to Lyla, as he joined their cheerful little party. He was the only one not wearing blood.
"Back off? He's a fucking time bomb! How could you not tell me that?"
"He's not a time bomb," Sam said. Sam lied. He had to know, right? "He was possessed by the Mark for years. Tapping into it was going to have consequences."
"Consequences? His little American Psycho act blew this for us! We have no line to the boss now."
"Please stop talking about me like I'm not here," Dean said, as soon as he was sure he could speak. Screaming and crying had been on the table, and honestly still were. But he'd kind of like to be alone for either of those. The shudder had hit, but he was sure it was too dark for anyone to see.
Lyla glared at him. "You're not here. I have no fucking clue who you are right now."
"Says the shifter who beat a wraith to death with her bare hands," Dean snapped. He was not taking this shit from her.
"You what?" Sam said, looking at Lyla and taking a step back. Was it even possible to beat a wraith to death? Dean had no idea, but if anyone could, it was Lyla.
"He isn't dead," she shot back. "He's just gonna take a long time to heal, so at least he's off our radar."
"And I didn't hurt the middleman either," Dean said. Okay, he had a couple of glass cuts, and the shallow jab in the cheek. Horrible to look at, but not that damaging. Facial wounds bled a lot, but were rarely serious, unless you went after the eyes.
She didn't look remotely placated. "You literally scared the piss out of him. This is ... fuck it." She threw her hands up in the air, and turned, skulking down the alley.
"Where do you think you're going?" Sam asked.
She turned around, and flipped them both a middle finger. "You know, I didn't get the Winchester hype at all. You're just sad little daddy's boys. But now I get it. He's the attack dog, and you're the handler. So put a leash on him, Sam, and drag him home."
"Fuck you," Dean spat. It was not the first time someone had called him an attack dog, but it hurt every goddamn time. "Why don't you tell us who you really are, blue balls?"
That hit home. She stopped, and stared death at him through narrowed eyes. "I've told you who I am, unlike you."
"You really haven't," Sam said. He was still looking at Dean out of the corner of his eye, and Dean saw he had that little worried vein that popped out on his forehead when he was about to have an anxiety snit. Fuck.
She'd opened her mouth to insult Sam when her phone hummed. With an impatient huff, she pulled it out. "What?" she snapped.
All the anger in her expression drained away. You could almost trace its descent, from her forehead to the base of her neck. After several seconds, she said in a low, quiet voice. "Okay."
After she hung up, she sighed heavily and shoved her phone back in her pocket. "Well, congratulations, Cujo. You did it."
Dean really didn't like being called Cujo. Who knew the attack dog insult got worse? "Did what?"
"The big boss wants to meet you."
Well, at least something good came out of this shitty situation. Dean was going to try and concentrate on that.