Dean Winchester lay prone on one of the two small army surplus cots that had been hastily pushed to the center of Bobby Singer's circular panic room. Ali sat next to him, his head in her lap, and watched as he labored to catch his next breath while she nursed the burns on the palms of her hands where she had mistakenly touched the walls of their prison. Crying out in pain she had cursed the over-cautious old bastard as he had doused the iron plates with a generous coating of lunar caustic, a mixture of salt intended to keep demons out and silver now used to keep the likes of them in. "I thought you said he was like a father to you," Ali bitched and blew cold, dead breath on her hands in a vain attempt to ease the pain.
Dean laughed weakly, "Yeah, one who can recognize a lie when he hears one and a monster when he sees one."
"What do you suppose he's gonna do to us, Dean?" she then asked and smoothed back the matted hair from his blood damp forehead.
Looking up at her with fever bright eyes he sighed, "He'll let us rot in here until we're too weak to put up much of a fight then, when the sun's just right, he'll slide back that plate in the ceiling and poof, ashes to ashes. Then he'll probably suck us up with his handy dandy Dust Buster." Dean pointed to the small portable vacuum sitting on Bobby's desk.
Ali snorted. "He thought of everything, didn't he? Iron, silver and salt, no square corners for a witch to hide..."
"There's no such thing as an old hunter," Dean told her and she had a new found respect for the older man's plans to be the first.
"What if he's already called your father?"
"Then he'll help him when he gets here," he said in no uncertain terms. He closed his eyes and hoped his father was near because he hurt, not just physically but emotionally, and he thought that maybe he just wanted the pain to end.
Dean had seen the look on Bobby's face when he'd carried Ellen into his house and deposited her on the hunter's tattered old leather couch, the puncture wounds on her neck angry red and still oozing fresh blood. Bobby's emotions had run the gamut from confusion, to fear, to stunned realization, and finally to disgust when he'd seen the guilt written plainly on Dean's face. Hoping to keep Ellen quiet until he could get the medical help he needed and the two of them could be on their way Dean and Ali had each fed from her not ten minutes before their arrival; a stupid idea that had landed them in the panic room.
"Your father, he could just kill you?" Ali wondered aloud inching out from under him.
"In a New York minute," Dean knew full well and told her as she stuffed one of the pillows under his head and rose up from her place on the cot.
Restlessly, she walked slowly around the room her eyes taking in the small desk, the sturdy bookcase filled with books on everything from the occult to dressing battle wounds in the field and, finally, the olive drab army surplus bag that hung from a hook welded to the wall. She lifted the bag from the hook and placed it on the floor.
Dean watched as she unzipped it and looked inside. "Any alcohol in there?" he asked and closed his eyes against the cold glare of the fluorescent lights that hung suspended on chains from the ceiling of the silo-like structure.
"Only rubbing and..." she lifted a small package triumphantly in the air, "Morphine!"
Never a huge proponent of drugs Dean made an exception and let her jab one of the sticks into his thigh. The rush was intense and some relief came almost immediately and his eyes rolled back in his head and his lips formed a crooked smile.
"How's the pain?" Ali asked solicitously kneeling on the floor next to the cot.
"On a scale of one to ten about a 'fuck me'."
"Good, that's down from a 'fuck me sideways'," she laughed then placed a piece of wood between his teeth and commanded, "Bite down on this because it's way too soon in our relationship to be meeting your stake wielding parent." Ali held up a scalpel and a pair of evil looking long nosed surgical forceps she had taken from the bag and made her intentions clear. She would not die in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, now or ever for that matter.
Pulling the wood from his mouth Dean asked thickly. "Chew know what'chr doin'?"
"Damn it, Jim, I'm a bartender not a doctor," she said gruffly and pushed the wood back between his teeth and he smiled, his eyes growing even more vacant. "Just remember, baby," she added as she unbuttoned his blood soaked shirt, "This is gonna hurt you more than me."
"Thanks, Ali," he mumble sarcastically around the wood then removed it again and added, "Just keep the morphine handy, m'kay."
Once again she pushed the wood between his teeth and threatened to duct tape it in place if he kept pulling it out to ask stupid questions or to make obvious demands.
Upstairs in the old ramshackle two-story house Bobby stood, a glass of cheap rotgut whiskey in his hand, and looked down at Ellen Harvelle.
She looked up at him, her eyes hard, her lips angrily pressed together forming a thin slash across her face. Sucking air in through her nose she sighed and asked, "Why didn't you kill him?"
Bobby pursed his lips and thought for a minute and wondered why he hadn't killed Dean when he first realized he was a vampire, a given in any other situation. "Probably because the kid's like a son to me."
"Oh, how proud you must be," she said and gave him a withering glare, "You and John."
"John doesn't know...yet."
"Well, give me the god damn phone. I'll tell him."
Bobby held out his hand offering not the phone to the female hunter but the libation. Ellen took it gratefully hoping to numb the pain in her throat as well as the one in her heart. "You know they killed Bill, don't you?"
"I guessed as much. It's just hard to think of Dean doing anything like that," Bobby said still standing awkwardly in front of her.
"He's not the sweet little boy you used to know!" Ellen declared hotly.
Bobby chuckled and told her, "Dean was never a sweet little boy."
Ellen slammed the whiskey glass down on the side table furious that he wasn't taking her or the situation seriously. "He's a monster and if you're not gonna take care of him, I will!" she shouted threatening to get up.
Bobby pushed her back down onto the couch and told her in no uncertain terms, "John Winchester is on his way and nobody, not you, not me, nobody is going to do anything to that boy until he gets here."
Ellen relaxed and wondered aloud, "Do you think he'll have the nerve?"
"Have you ever known John Winchester to back down from anything...even when he's wrong?"
"And you think this is wrong?"
"Hell yeah! This is seven kinds of fucked up! A man's son, his flesh and blood, turned into the very thing he hunts? So yeah, it's wrong...but John won't back down. He'll do what needs to be done," he said and, as suddenly as it had flared, the fire was gone from Bobby's eyes and the steel was gone from his voice and his shoulders slumped under a tremendous weight as he added softly, turning his head to the sound of a tortured scream rising up from below, "and I'll help him."
Dean had bitten clear through the piece of wood, his teeth slicing into the tender flesh of his own tongue. "Jesus, Ali," he panted and begged, "No more. Please. No more."
The vampire ignored him and jabbed him again with another morphine syringe and waited patiently for him to go deeper into his drug-induced stupor. She was done removing all the superficially embedded silver shards and started digging around with the scalpel and forceps and her fingers trying to locate the more deeply embedded shards. It was tedious and painstaking work but well worth it as she watched the lesser wounds heal completely in minutes. She would need him healthy and strong if they were to have any chance of getting away from "Uncle Bobby".
Her hands, deep in his intestines, were slick with his blood while even more of the tainted but precious fluid ran down his ribs to soak into the army blanket beneath him, the blood leaving dark, blackened patches where he lay. She guided the tip of the forceps with the tips of her fingers until finally she felt no more molten silver, just the chill of his rapidly healing insides. Satisfied that she had removed all of the crucifix pieces, Ali leaned in and punctured her full bottom lip with her fangs and made it all better with a long, lingering, sustenance rich kiss.
Allison Whitehall had always been a frugal girl and, never one to waste a gift, she sat down on her own cot and stared into Bobby Singer's startled eyes as he stepped up to peer into the room and watched as she began to lick the blood and gore sensuously from her hands.