Chapter Ten
It was beyond creepy, Sam decided. A body in a chair, lax, seemingly dead and not quite dead, with the faint shine of eyes—living eyes—showing in slits beneath lowered lids.
Crowley's vessel didn't breathe, but it also wasn't empty.
Sam had threatened to let Crowley's vessel rot, should anything happen to Dean. But could it rot?
Sam gazed upon Crowley's empty vessel, but did not see it. He saw instead his resurrected brother, as demon, housed within the chair, bound by rope and sigil-etched cuffs, sweating, and bleeding, and hurling insults; using words, and eyes, as weapons.
Maybe I was just tired of babysitting you. Of always having to yank your lame ass out of the fire since . . . forever.
A chill ran through Sam's body.
It was Crowley who had ushered in the new-made demon. Might he try again?
Sam went to the table, took up the knife, the Kurdish-made weapon with its Arabic etchings that once was Alastair's, then Ruby's. He crossed the iron in the floor, approached the vessel in the chair. He stationed himself behind it, bent down low, positioned his mouth very close to one ear.
"I think it's possible you're listening." Sam pitched his voice low, almost intimate. "I don't know how, but I'm taking no chances. Maybe you left a fragment of awareness behind. Something. So, listen closely, Crowley."
He set the blade against the vessel's flesh and carved the slightest of bloodtrails.
"Bring him back," he commanded within the echoing stillness. "Bring my brother back, whole in all things, in blood and flesh and bone, or I swear on the souls of my grandfather, of my father, and of my mother, hunte5rs and legacies, that I will find a way to end you. In whatever form you wear."
Dean, as demon, had said, I know what you did when you went looking for me. I know how far you went. Crowley told me all about it. So let me ask you . . . which one of us is really a monster?
Sam nodded once. Yeah, he could do that, again. Be that, again. If that's what it took.
For his brother. Once more.
Winchesters were nothing if not men of their word.
By the time he—well, they, counting Crowley—hit Kennesaw, the rain had stopped. The Impala's tires hissed through puddles, the cadence and pitch depending on how much water she crossed. Dusk was transforming to darkness, and streetlights blinked into brilliance. Dean made the necessary turns to find the correct street.
No open parking spaces within a block of the warehouse.
"Hey," Dean said, growling in irritation, "You're the King of Hell. A little parking whammy, maybe?"
'Oh, I don't know, Squirrel. Maybe a touch of Fried Green Tomatoes.'
Dean, circling the block for another try, scowled blackly. "Fried what?"
'Green Tomatoes. I swear, you and Moose . . . Kathy Bates's character was trying to find a parking place at a large grocery store. Just as she did, two young ladies scooted into it in their VW Beetle. After being verbally insulted, Bates's character was so incensed she drove her sedan into the back end of the VW. Repeatedly. Because, you see, the girls were younger and faster, as they claimed, but she was older and had more insurance.'
Dean was appalled. "You want me to crash my car into another car? Over a parking space?"
Crowley sighed. 'Never mind. The point is beyond you. All right, a little "parking whammy" it is.'
And there it was, a space immediately across the street from their destination. Dean deftly tucked the car against the curb without kissing bumpers on either end of the Impala, climbed out and headed for the door.
In answer to his pounding, the window slot was pulled back. He saw, as before, the reaper's chocolate eyes gazing blandly back at him. He gestured for her to speed things up.
She did not. "I'm still waiting. And I got all day. And all night. Hell, if it comes down to it, I got forever."
"C'mon, lady. You know it's me."
"Gotta hear it," she drawled evenly.
He drew in a breath, blew it out noisily, began chanting the chorus to 'Camptown Races' rapidfire.
"No," Billie said, cutting him off. "Something new."
Crowley told him. Dean stared back at Billie as his eyes widened. "You're shitting me."
'If you want to enter, Dean, you might as well just acquiesce. Because she does have forever.'
Billie arched an eyebrow.
Dean closed his eyes a moment, pressed his lips together, then met the reaper's gaze.
"And you have to sing it," she told him.
His eyes went wide again. "Sing it?"
Billie's tone was ironic. "With notes and everything."
'Oh, this ought to be good,' Crowley remarked.
Dean swallowed, drew breath again, screwed up his face, then sang the lyrics with exceeding swiftness and off-key exactitude.
"The hills are alive with the sound of music/With songs they have sung for a thousand years/The hills fill my heart with the sound of music/My heart wants to sing every song it hears."
He stopped then, face burning, and waited.
Billie gazed back at him. "Huh. Stay out of show business, kid."
And then she unlocked the door.
A/N: You can find the Kathy Bates "Fried Green Tomatoes" scene on YouTube. And the idea of Dean attempting to actually sing "The Sound of Music" just makes me giggle.