Chapter Twenty
Your Broken Pieces, Like Shards of Glass, Cut Me to the Bone.
To say Cal slept would have been a gross overstatement. She dozed, jarring awake at every little sound. She dreamed horrible nightmares that always ended in rivulets of tears or short, heart stopping shrieks which inevitably woke her too. She was still in too much pain for sleep to have any type of firm hold on her and maybe it was better that way, considering how she was coping. Dean would've hated the thought of her stuck inside her own head, reliving whatever the hell it was that had affected her so deeply, unable to wake and escape it. As it was the backseat wasn't big enough to contain her brokenness.
Malcolm occupied passenger seat in silence for the first little while. It wasn't in any way peaceful or nice like when Sam used to sit there. Every little sound that came from the back made him jump. Every set of headlights in the rear-view mirror etched lines of concern in his face. There was no plan and except for Malcolm no one in the car had any idea of what they were facing. They were at a severe and dangerous disadvantage and yet he couldn't find it within himself to swallow his pride enough to speak and break the silence.
Maybe it was just that he was pretty sure Dean would put his best effort into trying to kill him once he did start talking. In his place, Malcolm would surely be of a mind to, so there was no reason to blame Dean for entertaining the idea. Unfortunately there had been enough of that over the past week. Malcolm wasn't really all that keen to go there again, for any reason.
Sam called sometime after they crossed over from New Hampshire into New York State. He had fairly good news, for the moment. Fran and the kids were scared but so far there had been no obvious signs of trouble. Dean glanced at the backseat through the rear-view mirror and Malcolm could see the slightest bit of relief pass over his features. He smiled when Dean told Sam that maybe Cal had been on to something with this buying time idea she'd had.
On his side of the car, Dean was engrossed in the conversation he was having with his brother.
"Nothing's changed up here, Dean. Bobby hasn't seen anything and Ellen says Ash has been holed up with his computer for hours now. I don't know, maybe Cal was wrong." He looked back at the woman cocooned in blankets behind him. No, Cal was scared. They couldn't pretend this away, she wasn't wrong. He would have told his brother as much but Malcolm chose that moment to finally open his mouth.
"Tell him it's too late to look out for them in town. They would have done their digging around months ago; this has been in the works a long time. There's no telling who might be in on this now." Great, add 'eavesdropping' to the increasingly long list of things Dean couldn't stand about the guy. Ignoring the man next to him, he relayed what he'd just learned. "Yeah, I don't think it's a good idea to let our guard down just yet. Cal's scared Sam and Malcolm seems to think that whatever this is, it's been a while in the making. We can't trust anyone but each other with this." And even that much was sketchy considering who was feeding them the infornation. Sam was right there with him too. "So, we're trusting him now?" You couldn't miss the skepticism and Dean wasn't any happier than Sam about it either.
"I don't think we've got much choice. Cal's in pretty bad shape and she won't go anywhere without him." Go figure that one out. "Oh." Sam's surprise pretty much summed it up. There wasn't much more that could be said with the man of the hour sitting shotgun. They couldn't exactly talk freely with Malcolm sitting less than a foot away and listening to every word. So they wrapped it up with Sam promising to hold up their end of things and Dean promising to call as soon as they'd found a place to lay low for a while. In the meantime, there was some business that needed to be dealt with.
Now, Dean had it in mind pretty much from the moment he'd set eyes on Cal again in the airport parking lot that he and Malcolm were going to be having a bit of a 'chat'. The hope had been that he could get the man alone but since Cal wasn't doing that well he'd had to wait. That was about to change.
She was sleeping for now, deep even breathing hinting at a moment of peace in the darkness. The first one since they'd hit the road, Dean knew. No better time to clear the air and do what needed to be done. There might not be another opportunity for a while, judging by the way the night had gone already.
Malcolm resigned himself to the inevitable when Dean began pulling the car over to the shoulder of the deserted interstate. They both knew it would eventually come to this. The time had come to get it out of the way. He waited until the car was at a complete stop and then for Dean to set the hand break just for good measure. When Dean's eyes fell on him, boring holes into the side of the other man's head, Malcolm finally spoke. "What do you want to know?" Time to face those demons, old man. But Dean didn't speak. Shaking his head, he glanced back at Cal and gestured for them to take the conversation outside. Great, the odds just went up that things would come to blows.
They faced each other in the glow of the Impala's headlights, probably because Dean wanted to be sure Cal would know where they were if, or more likely when, she woke again. There was always the possibility that Dean just wanted to see what he was hitting.
"You've got ten seconds to try and explain away why in the hell she's so broken and you're not." To call attention to the torn, filthy state of his clothes wouldn't do Malcolm any good. Dean already had it in mind he was going to let his fists fly. "Go ahead. Get it over with." Malcolm gave him permission to do exactly what he'd been itching to do. "What?" And took Dean completely by surprise.
"Hit me, Dean. Just do it." It was time for a little show and tell. "Right in the face, man, and don't hold back. Or better yet, grab that knife from under your seat. Yeah. That'll work better." It was the excitement in the older man's voice that got to him. Suddenly Dean Winchester wasn't so sure of himself. In fact the look he gave Malcolm said that he was pretty sure the man was insane. Did that stop Dean from resorting to violence? Hell no! Things had already gone too far to stop now.
Before Malcolm even saw it coming Dean had landed his fist, knuckles first, right smack in the middle of the man's face. Malcolm stumbled backward and landed in an inch of water on his ass in the grassy ditch a foot and a half away with a bleeding broken nose.
"Good! That's perfect." Now Dean could see first hand why it was Malcolm wasn't broken. Pulling himself up out of the ditch he held up a hand to stop Dean from going at him again and pointed at his face. "Now watch."
It wouldn't take very long, the healing process had already begun. His body was already in overdrive after everything he'd been through over the last five days. This broken nose was righting itself even faster than it normally would. The blood that had been gushing out of his nostrils stopped as if someone had turned the knob on a faucet, without having to even be touched. The bone righted itself, the tiny split of skin on the bridge where Dean's fist had made contact closed itself up and disappeared. A bruise appeared in its place, Dean's eyes going wide as he watched it fade.
"What was that?" For a normally over-confident guy, the way Dean's voice cracked suspiciously like a teenager's was a pretty good indication that he was about to lose his cool.
"That is the reason I've made it through more than six centuries." Still, the younger man was skeptical. "Witchcraft?" Apparently Dean figured there'd been time to cast some kind of healing spell in the moment and a half he'd spent in the ditch. "Nope." This gift of his had never taken that much effort, though there was a possibility it could have started with witchcraft. "Crossroads deal? You play some tonsil hockey with a demon and get yourself some immortality?" Well it was a realistic enough suspicion considering the well known Winchester family issues. "Nuh-unh." But wrong again. "What then? How?" Dean was out of guesses. Unfortunately Malcolm didn't have any kind of satisfying answer. "Don't know. Back in my twenties the Black Plague swept through my village (and all of Europe), I got sick and died. Two days later I started breathing again and I haven't stopped since." He hadn't aged either, but Dean didn't need to be told what he could see with his own eyes.
"So, you can't die and you've got some freaky Wolverine-like healing powers?" Yep, Dean was definitely looking just a little freaked out. "Pretty much. If I'm really banged up I've got to be unconscious for the healing to happen and if that's the case my body just sort of shuts down on me. They'd been wailing on me for days so when I finally made my move it was just too much. I blacked out in the hallway before I could break Cal out of that closet. It didn't do much good but it got me enough strength to hack the door open with an axe, carry her out to a car and then drive us to the airport where we met you. After we got to there I passed out again, probably from internal hemorrhaging. That's why I look okay. Can't be sure but I think one of my kidneys was ruptured. Normally it's a pretty unmistakable pain, but there was so much of it all over the place it was hard to focus enough to be sure."
"And you drove through Maine and into New Hampshire for hours like that?" He didn't look as impressed as Malcolm would have expected. Even after watching the broken nose heal up Dean was dishing out a heavy dose of skepticism.
"Had to. I killed four of them trying to get to Cal so we could get the hell out of there." No need to explain there. Just looking at Cal was enough to get the picture. "These folks are a vengeful people that know how to hold a grudge. You can bet the second they find the bodies all bets will be off. They lay their hands on us and they'll make us wish we were never born." Well that wasn't ominous at all, and there was that goddamned 'they' again! This time Dean was going to get a straight answer as to who in the hell they were dealing with here.
"Would you please just freaking explain to me who in the hell these 'they' people are supposed to be?" This was the first time Malcolm had been genuinely surprised by anything Dean had said or done and it took him aback.
"Cal didn't tell you?" The disbelief spoke volumes. Cal knew alright and Malcolm knew for sure that she did too. Yet neither of them had felt the need to clue Dean in on any of it.
"You want me to break your nose again? Enough with the bull, just spill it already" Dean had clearly had enough of being strung along. It was time for answers and he wasn't going to go messing around about it either.
"They are O'Sulivan's, the lot of 'em. They're her kin, Dean. It's her family who did this to us." If Malcolm hadn't been so stone-faced serious it could've been some totally screwed up joke. As it was it was hard to grasp that Cal had any family left, let alone that they would be all kinds of crazy.
Dean wanted nothing more than to deny it, if only to save her from the truth. "That's impossible. Her parents are dead. She's the only one left." He knew an awful lot about her history. The O'Sulivan family journals had always been kept in her father's office in the barn at the farm, to be used as reference material whenever the need arose. They'd skimmed through them often enough that if there was other family out there, they'd have known about it. As far as anyone knew, Cal was the only living O'Sulivan left.
"Her grandfather had a brother. He had kids, they had kids, I'm sure you've had the talk. Birds and bees and all that." Oh, ha ha! A comedian. Just what they needed.
"Okay, let's say I'm buying into the whole 'long lost family of insane freaks' story. What's the deal? They've left her alone her whole life, right? So what do they want so bad they have to come after her now?" This was the important question. Whatever it was, they might be able to use it as leverage to keep Cal safe from these idiots, preferably for the whole rest of her life.
"Look, Dean, there's an awful lot of history hash out and not nearly enough time to do it now. What I can tell you quickly is that when Cal's grandfather died her father hid the massive collection of books they had. We're talking reference books, family journals, Bibles and religious material; the whole nine yards. Until recently the rest of the family had been under the impression the books had been burnt to ash when Jake cremated his father."
"Now they know he didn't and they think Cal has them, because she does." Uh oh, Dean really didn't like where this was going.
"Yeah." Suddenly the weight of the world settled itself right between his shoulder blades.
"How do I know you weren't the one to tell them?" Trust was still an issue here. Malcolm had been the one to cut them out of the whole thing, after all. If he hadn't, things probably would've gone a lot differently over the last four days.
"Would Cal be asking for my help so readily if I was?" A fair point. The Cal O'Sulivan they all knew and loved would've been on the war path.
"She'd be trying to kick your ass, broken or not." And she wouldn't give him a second to recover and heal either.
Cal was tossing restlessly in her sleep again, moaning so that they could hear her through the closed windows and the rumble of the idling engine. They didn't have much time left. "Okay. I'll go along with this for now." Regardless of his own personal feelings about the guy, Dean could see the merit in having an ally that was able bodied along for the ride. Not to mention that Malcolm knew the whole story. More time with the guy meant getting the chance to drill him for information. Win-win as far as Dean was concerned.
"Dean? What are you guys doing out there?" A groggy Cal called out to them with a raw voice. Their time was up.
"Needed to stretch my legs." "Nature called." The men answered simultaneously. Neither sounded too convincing, and they were well aware of it.
"Tell me there's a plan." Dean whispered as they turned back toward the car.
"Not yet but I do have someplace for us to hide out until she gets better." Well that was about the only comforting thing the guy had said all night.
"Alright, good. Let's go then." The sooner they holed up, the better.
"You're not going to like it." And there was that ominous tone again. Damned if Dean was going to let it get to him though.
"Don't care. Let's just get there and worry about the rest after that." It seemed like the best course to take; one thing at a time.
"Probably better if I drive." Although it made sense since Malcolm was the one who knew where they were going, Dean was most definitely not on board with the direction this was taking.
"Not a chance in hell, dude."
"Do we have another ice pack?" Cal interrupted the impending argument just in time. "My ankle is swelling up again and I don't think keeping it raised is going to be enough."
"I don't like the sound of that Cal. You mind if I take a look?" And it sucked to have to ask permission but at this point they were all pretty sure she needed the courtesy.
"I guess." She just looked so lost. Those blue eyes had become haunted, not quite Cal because she still looked so scared and Dean knew at that exact moment that he was totally screwed.
"Hey!" He called out to get Malcolm's attention before tossing the car keys at him. "I'm trusting you." A warning over the hood of the car accompanied by a very meaningful look that somehow conveys that Dean'll find a way to snuff out the immortality in the guy if he breaks that trust.
"Just remember you said that when we get where we're going, alright?"
Dean already didn't like it; already regretted giving him that trust. There wasn't much to do about it now.
Pulling open the back door on the driver's side where Cal's feet were propped up he leaned in and just barely touched her toes with the tips of his fingers. "Lift those puppies up, She-Ra. I'm sliding in." For the first time since childhood when his father had been the Impala's only driver Dean climbed in to the backseat uninjured. He could only hope Cal got the significance. It wasn't likely to ever happen again.
