For notes and disclaimer, please see part one.
Then...
Darcy takes off of work in order to join Dean in the dark bayou, where the high priestess resides and does her magic. Once there, they learn a mortal is in with the priestess, who is cooking up her latest murder. Darcy leads Dr. Yates off to let Dean handle the priestess.
Now...
In the darkness, Yates kept a tight arm around Darcy's shoulders, guiding her in a very straight path from the voodoo shack. Darcy wasn't sure where she was within the bayou anymore, but she knew that was a direction that she and Dean had not been, and it made her worry that he was only leading her further into the darkness, to ensure no one would find her. His thoughts, while guarded, were worrisome.
"Even if you don't like alcohol, I assure you, it won't be enough to get you drunk. Just enough to keep you warm. My car is still a good while from here," he said, fingering the bottle in his pocket.
"Dr. Yates, I'm fine. So long as I'm with you, and we're on the way to your car, I'll be fine."
"Honestly, must you be so immature?"
"What do you mean?"
"The alcohol won't hurt you. It won't do anything except make you warm. Don't you want to be warm? You want my protection, my safety. Enjoy the warmth I can provide."
"No, thank you," she insisted.
"Darcy, please," he said, pulling the bottle out, thinking about ways to make her drink it.
While she expected to hear, in full, all of the dreadful thoughts Yates was thinking, she heard another voice, another train of thought, one that was running through options quickly, trying to come up with a way to get the upper hand again.
Dean.
She glanced back, towards the shack. "That cabin... is it yours?"
"What?"
"That cabin... It looked warm and safe. Dry."
"Believe me, it's not."
"Who lives there?"
"An old friend. Please, Darcy, have a drink." He tightened his grip on her shoulder to keep her moving forward, and not back.
"Ow, Dr. Yates, you're hurting me..."
"I'm protecting you."
Darcy managed to wiggle out of his grasp, and pulled the gun, holding it on him. "Hands where I can see them," she demanded, in a strong voice, one stronger than she realized she had. What further amazed her was her ability to hold the gun on him steadily, showing no fear.
"What the hell are you doing?" he asked, holding his arms in the air.
"On your knees."
"Darcy, c'mon..."
"Now!" she insisted impatiently.
Slowly, Yates lowered himself to the wet ground.
"Face down," she said, still listening to Dean's thoughts, to the fear that took over. She did the only thing she could do, in the hopes of providing Dean the distraction he needed. She screamed, for all she was worth, her best Fay Wray scream.
Dean watched as the old voodoo high priestess turned her face towards the sound of the scream. While the shotgun was still out of reach, a mason jar wasn't. He wasn't sure what the contents were, but he lobbed them at the high priestess as he slid around to get the shot gun.
She screamed herself, an ear-splitting sound.
"Easy, Opal," he told her, his hands secure on the shotgun as he swung it around, at her.
"No one's called me dat in years."
"Well, you've been dead a long time," he said, getting to his feet.
"Not anymore."
"Technically you're still dead. You're just... resurrected. Temporarily."
"You will die, chil'."
"Not today," he said, blasting her with rock salt.
The high priestess screamed again, getting a full shot. Dean, figuring she would have to take a few minutes to regenerate again, took off out the front door.
"Darcy!" he yelled against the quickening rain, heading towards where he thought she was, where he thought Yates was taking her.
"Over here!" she called.
He sped towards her, not expecting to find her in that position. She was standing with one foot on Yates' back, Yates' face in the mud, and the gun pointed at his head. "I thought you were in trouble."
"I knew you were... You needed a distraction."
"You are going to be the death of me," he told her, shaking his head. "All right, we gotta keep this guy out of our way." He didn't have any rope on him. He glanced over at Darcy, spotting her sneakers. He prepared the shotgun for its next shot menacingly, aiming it at Yates. Yates didn't need to know it was only loaded with rock salt. It could still be intimidating. "I need your shoelaces, Darcy."
Without question, Darcy untied her shoes, and removed the laces as quickly as she could.
"On your feet, Yates."
He slowly stood, eying him evilly.
"Face the tree," Dean said, not impressed with his expression.
He turned, following orders.
"Hug it like your Great Aunt Ida hugged you."
Darcy moved around, tying his hands together once he was hugging the trunk. She tied the knots as tightly as she could, as strongly as she could, doing her best to remember the different kinds from girl scouts ages ago.
"You lied to me, Darcy."
"Yeah, well. Ditto," she said as she fell in step with Dean, heading back for the cabin.
"You can't just leave me here!" Yates yelled, his pleas falling on deaf ears.
"So, you don't have a reading at all on our voodoo bitch?" Dean asked as they neared the cabin.
She shook her head. "Just you and Yates."
"All right, here's the plan: I'm going to shoot the hell out of her with the shotgun, but it'll only stun her. I'm sure she's got a book in there somewhere, with a spell or incantation that'll undo what she's done with regards to keeping herself alive. I need you to find it and I need you to say it."
"Will it be in English?"
He glanced at her, shrugging. She opened her mouth, to ask something further, but Dean was already leading the way into the cabin. The high priestess was back at her table, over her goblet, adding some white powdered substance. "We're back," he said, firing the shotgun into her chest.
This time, however, it didn't do anything, catching Dean mildly off-guard.
"Chil', you think I can't save myself with my own magics?"
"I wasn't gone that long."
Darcy scanned the room for the book, tucking her wet hair behind her ear. There were so many other things there: the mason jars, the colored bottles, the animal pelts. It was overwhelming, like trying to spot the needle in the haystack. Before she realized what was happening, the high priestess raised her hand, and Darcy went flying back into the wall, crashing into the shelf of bottles, feeling the glass embed in her backside. She couldn't decide if it was worse or better, but Darcy found herself remaining suspended there nonetheless.
"Hey!" Dean shouted. "She hasn't done anything to you!"
"Dis chil' has power..." she said, tilting her head to one side curiously, looking at Darcy, held against the wall, as though she had captured an insect under glass. "Dis chil' has power I can take," she said hungrily.
Dean didn't like this new turn of events at all and angrily shoved the table in front of the high priestess over onto her, spilling the contents of her goblet.
She wailed that unearthly wail and Dean went flying again, lost in more broken debris. Returning her attention to Darcy, she tilted her head back, skyward, as she started mumbling an incantation.
"D… Dean," managed Darcy weakly. She couldn't move. She couldn't lower herself off the wall. She felt as though something heavy were descending onto her, pressing against her, keeping her there, draining her.
Slowly, Dean lifted himself from that blast, knowing he would be very sore in the morning. While the high priestess was distracted, he frantically searched for a book, any book, finding a small tome beneath a skunk pelt. He flipped it open. Had it been Latin, it would've been no problem. He wasn't as proficient as John, or even his brother Sammy, but he wasn't too bad.
It looked like it might be Latin-based. He'd dabbled in enough foreign language classes in high school to know that romance languages were born from Latin. Cajun, he knew, had French influences. He flipped through the pages, looking at the graphic pictures accompanying each incantation. He glanced up at Darcy halfway through the book to see her looking sickly and pale. Turning pages faster, he finally found what looked like it might be the right spell. Swallowing hard, he did his best at pronunciation. After all, it looked as though Darcy's life depended on it.
As he started the incantation, the high priestess spun to face him, allowing Darcy a slight reprieve. He sped through the reading, noticing that some of it seemed to be hurting the high priestess, though she was still standing there. He looked again at the page, speaking louder, stronger.
The high priestess cackled. "You do not know the words. The ancient words," she taunted. "Chil', I always win with my magics."
"Except when you were cut into seven pieces and buried in this godforsaken bayou," he said before continuing the reading.
"Chil', you are not a believer. Magics never works for da ones like you."
Dean certainly believed. He believed that she had killed the Martins, and was about to kill Patricia then Darcy. Dean believed she was one badass bitch, and he believed that he had the ultimate knowledge to kill her.
"Death needs life, chil'," she taunted.
He wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but he continued on. He decided his best bet was just to continue on the way he had been. As he read, a cut on his forehead dripped blood down his cheek, dropping onto the page.
Darcy watched with heavy lidded eyes as the high priestess began to flicker, as though she were a candle's flame. "D..." She tried to get his name out, but just couldn't.
He read a little faster, realizing that the high priestess hadn't said anything else, as another drop of his blood landed on the open book. As he finished the incantation, he looked up, in time to see the high priestess trying to grasp at things... anything in order to keep her in the living plane. "Go back to hell, bitch!"
She yelled, though the earsplitting sound was mostly muted. As she disappeared once and for all, the shack fell into further disrepair, what it must've looked like before Yates and Patricia brought her back. The mason jars that had been left standing were now moldy, covered with dust and cobwebs. Darcy fell, groaning as she landed, the laws of gravity back working with her, or, rather, against her.
Dean crossed to her immediately. "Darcy," he whispered, brushing her hair back from her face. "Darcy, look at me..."
She opened her eyes, but only slightly and for a second, holding his gaze ever so briefly before closing them again.
"Darcy!" She was still breathing, which was good, but she seemed lifeless other than that. "Hold on..." He slid the voodoo book into his jacket pocket before scooping her up, cradling her in his arms.
The walk back to the Impala was shorter than he remembered, even in the driving rain. All he focused on was getting Darcy back to civilization. He knew he had seen a hospital somewhere on one of his outings. He'd take her there, to the ER... He'd have to make up some story, because certainly no one in the hospital would believe that the two had just battled a decades' dead voodoo high priestess.
As he set her carefully in the passenger seat, he took a better look at her injuries thanks to the car's interior light. Her coloring was still deathly pale. She had some cuts, some scrapes... He tried to brush the wooden pieces and glass bits from her clothes, hoping again that she would just wake up now that they were safely out of the bayou.
No such luck.
It had been a week, since Dean had managed to best the voodoo high priestess. A week since Darcy had been admitted to the hospital, with no change to her vitals. And, starting on two weeks since Dean had heard from his father. He was definitely ready to move on from New Orleans, to try to catch back up with John, but at the same time, he felt badly. He didn't want to abandon Darcy, not while she was still in a coma. At least his superficial wounds were nearly healed.
The end of the voodoo priestess meant an end to Patricia Martin. Her death had been chronicled in the paper. After all, father, mother, and daughter all dying within a week was pretty peculiar.
Another favorite of the front page was the story of the missing LSU folklore professor. Dean figured that the good Dr. Yates had passed on in the midst of the bayou somewhere along with the priestess as well.
The way he saw it, everything was settled. Everything was back as it should've been. Except for Darcy. And that bothered him.
He had learned her last name--Ryan--only after having to fill out the admitting papers, finding her ID in her backpack, beneath her iPod and headphones. The hospital administration had taken it upon itself to try to contact her family in Virginia. From what Dean understood, her mother had answered, and stated she didn't have a daughter by that name.
One thing he was really concerned about was whether or not the voodoo priestess had succeeded before he managed to kill her, if Opal Moon took Darcy's telepathy with her to the grave. With Darcy unable to answer, he feared the worst.
He rubbed at the back of his sore neck. Sleeping in a hospital chair wasn't the most conducive to a good night's rest. But, Darcy didn't have anybody and Dean didn't have anybody there either, so he figured they could be there for each other. Or at least, he for her, for right now.
Standing, he figured he'd hit the coffee pot, grab a cup. He had so little else to do. As he walked towards the door, his jacket slipped off the chair, and something spilled out of his pocket.
The voodoo book.
"Huh." He crossed back to his chair, picking it up and sitting down at Darcy's side again. As he started thumbing through the pages, he heard the monitors checking her pulse and blood pressure start to beep faster. "Darcy?" he asked, looking up and closing the book.
With the book closed, the machines returned to the normal pattern, and her pulse and blood pressure dropped back to where they had been as well.
This time, keeping a keen eye on Darcy and her monitors, he opened the book, watching again as her rates increased. He closed the book again. Somehow, her health was connected to it. Damn. He should've figured that out earlier.
He paced the room for a moment, thinking of how to cut the ties that bound them, the book and Darcy. If he destroyed it, maybe she would die. If he left it alone, she could be in a coma forever. Could he take a chance with her life?
That was something Winchesters didn't have to do much of, play God with fellow human beings. With the denizens of hell, that was another story. And he liked Darcy. He didn't want to hurt her.
He looked over at her, resting as comfortably as the doctors could make her, hooked up to an IV tube with electrodes attached to her body and connected to a half dozen monitoring devices. That couldn't be that comfortable, really, Dean decided, grabbing the book and striding out of the room.
He headed down to the Impala, grabbing a few things from the trunk before finding a garbage can in the parking lot, away from the hospital itself. He tore a few pages from the front of the book, noticing that the cover sheet held an interesting inscription: "Property of Dr. O. Yates, LSU Folklore Department."
"You son of a bitch... that's how you raised Opal from her graves--all seven." Sighing, he tossed the book inside and salted it liberally. Pulling out his Zippo, he lit the removed pages, before dropping them onto the book.
He watched as the pages curled, as the smoke began to swirl. It didn't take long for the whole book to disintegrate to ashes. Just to be safe, he doused it with the holy water, tossing the empty bottle in on top.
Putting the salt container in his pocket along with the lighter, he headed back for the hospital and up to Darcy's room. As he got off the elevator at the proper floor, his heart sank to his stomach. Nurses and a doctor or two seemed to be running in and out of her room. Fear fueled his run to her door.
The commotion cleared, and only one doctor remained in the room with Darcy, checking her eyes and asking her questions. Dean let out a sigh of relief. She was awake.
While continuing to speak to the doctor, she looked over at him, and smiled softly. "Dean..."
He slowly entered, looking up at the doctor who nodded to him. "So, when can she go home, Doc?"
"We're going to keep her another day or two, just to make sure she's okay. Everything seems to be in perfect working order now, though." With that, the doctor scribbled in her chart, and headed out.
Dean eased down on the chair next to her, where he'd spent his long vigil. "How are you feeling?"
"I feel wonderful now," she said with a nod.
He looked at her, asking his next question through his thoughts: 'And your gift?'
Her smile grew--quite possibly the most beautiful thing Dean had ever seen. "I've still got it," she murmured.
"Good. I was afraid Opal might've..."
"Nah." She laughed. "I'm tougher than voodoo."
He smiled. "Yeah, you are."
"They said I was out over a week?"
Dean nodded slowly, but kicked himself. "I should've thought of it sooner..."
She didn't follow. "Thought of what?"
"Uh..." He immediately thought about... puppies. "Nothin'. I'm just glad you're okay."
"I figured you'd be long gone by now, to catch up to your dad."
"I wanted to make sure you came through."
"If he's mad at you, tell him it was all my fault, okay?"
He pulled his chair closer to her bedside. "Don't worry."
"So, you headed out now? I mean, I'm healed."
He looked at her for a long moment. "Well, it's almost dinner time, and I figure they gotta bring you some Jell-o, and, y'know, there's always room for Jell-o." He smiled, hearing her soft laughter. "I'll leave first thing tomorrow."
She reached out, finding his hand. "You really didn't have to stay."
He made sure not to think about what had just transpired with the book; he didn't want her to know. "Yeah, I did."
She laughed. "For being asleep so long, I'm tired. Isn't that weird?"
"It's been a long week," Dean acknowledged. "Close your eyes."
Darcy woke slowly the next morning, with sunlight filtering in through the window blinds. She reached up, rubbing her eyes, remembering too late that she still had an IV tube in one hand. Sighing, she sat up slowly. The room was empty. The chair where Dean had been was... empty.
For a moment, she wondered if it was all just a dream. She managed to press the nurse call button, and waited until someone came in.
"How are we this morning?" asked the woman in the pink scrubs.
"There was a man here last night... did he say anything? Did he leave?"
"I'm afraid so," she said sadly. "But, he asked that I be sure to give you this," she said, pulling a flat present, wrapped in newsprint, from her tray table near the door.
"Oh," she said quietly, taking it. When Darcy said nothing further, the nurse left.
She realized the paper he had wrapped it in was the local paper, describing the disappearance of Yates and the untimely death of Patricia. She wadded the paper up, tossing it towards the garbage can, barely missing it. Inside the package was a CD. A Led Zeppelin CD.
She laughed slightly, looking at the note taped to the back. "My favorite. I thought you might like it. Until next time."
"Dean..." she murmured.
He was hip deep into Texas, listening to Zeppelin sing about how to Ramble On. He had yet to hear from his Dad, but figured he had some good ideas of where to start looking. What he hadn't counted on, however, was the sudden hauntingly sweet and soft voice that filled his mind, drowning out the loud music. Thoughts of Darcy infiltrated his memory as he wondered if that was really something she was saying at that moment, or just his wishful thinking.
"Dean..."
End.
Soon...
The War Between the States--On the run from the FBI, the Winchester boys think they've found a safe haven and perhaps a reprieve from work until, that is, they find themselves at the center of a troubling possession--their own.