Chapter 8

"Oh my god, I forgot what being warm felt like."

Jodi's words were accompanied by a sudden blanket of relief that seeped into the link. She breathed deep and sank against the warm material of his back seat and the impression of safety and home were added to the mix.

Sweet Primus, it had been so long since he had shared such a connection that he needed a moment to collect himself. The emotional feed was more potent in such close quarters, and the blend of that plus contact was a heady concoction. He couldn't let himself get lost in this, couldn't let it overwhelm him.

Especially since he was almost certain that Jodi couldn't feel the link like he could.

"Don't get blood on my seats," he grumbled at her, more because she would expect it from him than actual irritation.

She lifted her hand and gave him a rude gesture, though there was nothing fueling it.

Barricade had led them all back to the road where the older Winchester had left his car, half hidden by some trees.

There was a soft knock on his passenger window. Sam Winchester stood there awkwardly, a red plastic box and a bottle of liquor in hand and something tucked under his arm. "Umm, may I come in?"

Jodi gave an annoyed kick to the back of his seat when he made no move to answer the boy. His vents cycled in defeat.

He swung open the passenger door and folded and slid the seat to allow the human access into the back seat. Smug satisfaction settled into his spark at the boy's wide eyes when he jumped back to dodge the door.

"C'mon in Sam. Ignore 'Cade, he thinks it's hilarious to scare people."

The human had the intelligence to look unsure of himself. "Uh, right." With that he climbed in, folding his legs almost comically to fit in the cramped space.

"What's with the booze?" Jodi asked, scooting to give him as much room as possible.

"Ah, we ran out of rubbing alcohol, so-" He gave the bottle a little shake. "Our back up. I also found one of my sweatshirts floating around in the trunk, just in case you were still cold."

She accepted the bundle of cloth, only to pause to run fingers over the emblem on the front, a bold S behind a pointy-looking tree. "Stanford? Dude, you were at Stanford?"

"Until recently, yeah."

"Holy shit." Recognition, bright and strong vibrated through the link, and Barricade really needed to dial it down if Jodi felt everything this strongly. "That's why you looked so familiar! My art class was there for a field trip. You helped me pick up my stuff in front of that creepy gate statue."

The boy's face scrunched before smoothing out, his eyes lighting up. "You ran off after your phone made that aweful screeching noise. That . . . wow. I forgot about that. I'm surprised you remember, honestly."

"That week was kinda hard to forget, all things considered." Jodi's thumb absently traced the energon burn on her arm, faint echoes of fear and rage and pain pain pain filtering through. But they faded quickly, mere phantoms of an event and nothing more."My whole life changed that week."

With a jolt he realized exactly when she was referring to. After they had been properly reunited, Jodi had told Barricade all about her class outing, and how she had thought that he had tried to contact her. Later, it was speculated that Soundwave had taken notice of the Decepticon frequency that Barricade had programed into her comm unit, leading him to track it to it's source. Which resulted in the whole mess that had followed.

He could certainly see why the surrounding days would be memorable.

Primus knew Barricade couldn't forget. Sometimes his nightmare featured Jodi lying stone still back on that beach, back laid open to her bones and beyond, blood coating everything. Other times it was Soundwave's claws piercing his armor, digging for his spark chamber.

"Anyway, let's get this over with." Jodi tapped his seat with her palm, refocusing his attention back to the present. "Hey 'Cade, can we get some light?"

Obligingly, he flicked on the cabin light, and increased the brightness for easier visibility.

"This has got to be one of the stranger situations I've been in," Sam muttered, eying the cabin warily.

"You get used to it," his charge said as she shifted around to put her back to the other human, displaying the bloodstain that had taken almost a whole quadrant of her shoulder.

With careful fingers, the taller human felt for other tender spots surrounding the source of the blood. When he found none, he lightly plucked at her shirt. "I'm going to need you to lift the back of this for me."

"Just don't get weird on me, okay? I got . . . um, I have a lot of scars."

Nerves bubbled up at the words, and Barricade realized that Jodi was being self conscious about them. That realization came as a surprise, because he thought that she had long since adjusted to them.

It was still such an odd concept to him, that scars were shameful things to be hidden from the world. When he had first realized his human was going out of her way to hide the marks on her back, he had inquired as to why. That was when he learned that many humans judged others by their skin. Permanent decals, tattoos, were often frowned upon, but deemed more or less acceptable, but someone who bore the marks of survival were avoided, or looked down upon.

He remembered his reaction once she had finished her explanation. He had placed her in front of her bedroom mirror, and ordered her to truly look at herself. She was small, certainly, but she had a titanium will that had defied Autobots and Decepticons alike. She had survived an attack by one of the most terrifying officers the Decepticon army had ever produced, and had narrowly avoided being permanently crippled in the process.

He had refused to let her think less of herself for carrying a reminder of such an amazing feat.

He made a mental note to find another, more subtle way to remind her once they were back in Tranquility.

Barricade materialized his holoform in the driver's seat, smirking as it's sudden appearance earned him a flinch from Sam. Jodi rolled her eyes at his little display, but her nerves calmed when she saw him, leaving him satisfied.

"I promise not to get weird. Trust me, Dean and I have seen a lot over the years."

"Okay." Jodi took a deep shuddering breath, crossed her arms to grab the hem of her shirt before hiking it up and away until it cleared the injured area. She didn't remove it completely, but it did expose the entire expanse of her back. The three long slashed were the most prominent, the lines thick and bold but tapering at the ends. The energon burns haloed the damage done by Soundwave, bright and shiny compared to her normal skin tone.

Those had been his own doing, however accidental. He had been coated with his own energon and had forgotten how it reacted to human flesh.

Barricade observed the other human carefully, a scathing comment on the tip of his processor, should his reaction be unfavorable.

To the boy's credit, his reaction was minimal. A slight widening of the eyes before it went away completely, putting his full attention on the fresh wound on the top of her right shoulder, creating a cross-hatch on the top-most point of the slash marks left by Soundwave.

"Alright, this is going to sting." He poured some amber liquid on some gauze and pressed it firmly to the wound.

Jodi hissed, fingers digging deeper into the fabric she still had clenched in her hands.

"Sorry."

Uncomfortable with the steady stream of low level pain, Barricade decided to offer a distraction. "So what exactly is your brother doing? And may I say, he looks remarkably well for a dead man."

The boy's eyes flicked up to his holoform before returning to his task. "He's reading through the journal Jodi found back in the cellar. Hopefully it'll give us a better idea what we're dealing with. Besides the ghost, I mean. And that wasn't Dean back in St. Louis, it was a shapeshifter wearing his face."

"Right." Tonight had already been a huge strain to his processor. There had been human illusions that had enough juice to completely crash a Cypertronian holographic emitter, and monsters that were composed completely of human DNA. Why not add shapeshifters to the list of things he didn't know about Earth.

"Considering you're a sentient car, I don't know why you're so skeptical."

Jodi snorted at the other human's sass, hiding a grin against her arm. Amusement seeped through the link, smoothing over his sharp spike of annoyance. His goal had been to distract after all.

Sam finished wiping the wound and then rummaged in the box. "Well, good news is that it's shallow enough not to need stitches."

Barricade narrowed his eyes at the boy. "Do you really believe I would let you touch her with a needle? Somehow, I doubt you are a fully qualified medic."

"True," the boy conceded, spreading a salve on a square of gauze and touching it gingerly to the wound. "But it's amazing what you learn to do when hospitals aren't an option. Dean has a steadier hand, but my sutures tend to be neater. Can you hold this in place?"

Jodi lifted her hand to comply, only to find that Barricade had already done so. The only word he could find that described the resulting emotion was fond. "We know all about making do with what'cha got. Right 'Cade?"

"You be quiet," he grumbled, retracting his hand as Sam applied white tape over the gauze.

She laughed.

There was an obnoxious tap on his window, drawing everyone's attention. Dean Winchester stood there, leather journal in one hand while the other made a quick rolling motion. Barricade rolled down the passenger window at Jodi's expectant look.

Scanning the pages with a finger, the elder Winchester leaned in and started talking before looking at the rest of the group. "So this some really fucked up-" His eyes flicked up and widened. "What the hell happened to you?"

The emotional feed from Jodi sobered as she pulled her shirt back down and Barricade bristled in response.

Sam shoved his brother out the window with his forearm, scowling. "Really Dean?"

"No, I'm serious! Dude, did you see those? How the hell is she even walking?"

Barricade was a nanosecond away from relocating his holoform to deal with the loud-mouthed human personally. Jodi grabbed the sleeve of his holoform in one hand and squeezed the back of his driver seat in the other, the dual sensation halting him and bringing his attention back to his charge. The direct contact with the girl's skin seemed to bring the link into sharper clarity, much to his dismay.

The glare she was giving the man outside was one that she usually reserved for some of the more annoying human military personel they had to deal with back on base. Her self-consciousness had morphed into irritation and a cold determination. "If it's so damned important to you, my spine was severed. The same technology that allows me to see is the only thing keeping my spine in one piece instead of five. You wanna know how long I was under the knife? How about how many stitches it took to close me back up?"

Dean held his hands up in surrender. "Whoa, sorry! No offense kid, but usually when we encounter what looks like a miracle there's something dark behind it." His eyes shifted to Barricade as a whole, and then to the glaring eyes of his holoform. "I'm still trying to wrap my head around mustang-man over here. Between that and this crap," he holds up the journal, "My brain is officially tapped on dealing with impossible shit, okay?"

Barricade was still bristling, but Sam seemed to zero in on something his brother said. "What did you find out?"

Dean huffed through his nose, before cracking open the journal and flipping quickly through the pages. "Well, I found out what we're dealing with for one." He stopped on a page, flipped the journal around to present to he brother. "We are dealing with a bona fide homunculus."

"No way." Sam froze before scrambling forward to snatch up the book. "Dad never found a case with a real one. Besides, it's way too big!"

The older Winchester stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Yeah, well, we apparently managed to find the best one ever made. Old man Casper was a third generation alchemist. He died creating the damn thing using as much of his own body as he could before he-" Dean drew a thumb across his neck.

"What's a homunculus?" Jodi asked Sam, her curiosity echoing off of Barricade's.

"It's an unnatural sentient construct, kinda like manufacturing a person-shaped monster," Sam answered promptly, eyes glued to the pages as he hastily scanned them. "The creator takes skin and hair and a whole bunch of other disgusting things to make one, but they're usually small enough to fit into a pickle jar. But all the manuscripts I've read claimed that they're extremely fragile. It's not supposed to take much to kill them." The boy's lips pressed together in a firm line.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Thank you, College Boy."

"So- what? The reason it pops up as human on 'Cade's sensors is that it's made from bits of human?" Mild levels of disgust and horror bled into the link as Jodi absorbed that.

"Most likely, yeah."

"That's so gross. How do you guys even know this stuff? About the ghosts and the shapeshifters?"

Sam looked up from the journal, but it was Dean that piped up from outside. "Family business kid. We were raised on this crap."

"What I want to know is why they are collecting bodies." Sam muttered, back to flipping pages.

"Harvesting," Jodi pitched in, "That's what they called it when they took Renee." Those words came with a wave of guilt and regret, and a sense of wrong wrong wrong reverberated from Jodi's very core.

"Who's Renee?" Dean asked. Barricade was glad he did so, it saved him the debate on whether or not he should.

"A local woman," Sam answered. "She got dragged away before we were able to escape."

Guilt. "We shouldn't have left without her," Jodi's voice was quiet but sharp, and clearly directed at Sam. It was clear the two of them had some sort of conflict over it.

"There wasn't anything that we could do for her. If we tried there was a good chance we wouldn't have made it out."

Jodi's jaw clenched but she didn't say anything, her emotions swirling enough that Barricade had a hard time discerning them. Not that he was trying too hard at the moment.

"Okay! So let's see what we got," Dean clapped his hands and then began ticking off fingers. "We have the ghost of the dead alchemist. We have the homunculus. We have the alchemist's very human son. Plus the string of people they keep nabbing and butchering."

Jodi's thoughts all shifted to a diamond-hard point, focused and resolute, and the bottom of Barricade's fuel tank dropped when he realized what she was going to say.

"So. How do we help?"

Author's Note: The hardest thing about this chapter was actually finding a natural stopping point. It's a rare occasion when I feel a chapter is running too long, but here it is. Next up: arguing, game plans and moving the story along. Thanks for hanging in there kids! I haven't forgotten about this verse! Happy reading! - Shadow