He was a married history professor with three kids, a dog and a house with a white picket fence out front. The epitome of normal.
He was also a demon. Not so normal.
"You know it'd save us a whole lotta trouble if you just got out of him." Jo Harvelle said, slowly walking in a circle around the chair.
"And make it easy for you? Hell, no." He peered up at her hatefully, white-hot fury in his black, soulless eyes. Jo shrugged. The demon could have left the victim voluntarily or involuntarily, but he was still on a one-way ticket back to Hell.
"Have it your way, then." She said. "Deus, et Pater Domini nostri Jesu Christi, invoco nomen sanctum tuum, et clementiam tuam supplex exposco-"
The chair the professor was on was beginning to shake, and the professor's face grew pale and pinched, like he was trying to keep from screaming. Jo could only guess at what the pain would be like when you were being forcibly torn from someone's body and being tossed back down the pit.
"Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus, omni incursio adversarii-"
Little wisps of smoke were now starting to form around his head, and she could tell by the way he tried to flinch away from her words that it would be over soon. She'd be able to get home early.
"Reus es Filio ejus Jesu Christo Domino nostro-"
"Bitch!" He cried out with all the hatred as he could muster, and stared at Jo with those cold, dead eyes. "Whore. When He rises again, you will be among the first to die. He will reduce your world to ashes!"
She ploughed on relentlessly, ignoring him. Every time. Since she was a relatively harmless looking blonde woman, they thought they could psyche her out each and every time by throwing out a few random sentences. Bastards.
"The Black Eden is rising."
That caused Jo to pause, mid-exorcism. Her mother always said that curiosity was her greatest downfall.
"What's that?" She asked, staring at him through eyes narrowed to slits. The demon was staring down at the floor, shuddering, trying to regain some semblance of control. Jo wasn't overly worried. She still held all the cards.
"He'll kill you all. He will let you watch as He pulls out your insides."
"Who's he?"
"There's no need to shout." The professor's head lolled back against the hard wooden chair as though he was watching a show on the TV. "I can hear you."
"Who is he?" Jo repeated again flatly. Emotionlessly, she empted some of her flask of Holy water across the professor's face. He screamed.
"The one that died only to be born again." He gasped.
"What?" Jo asked harshly. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
The professor's lined face twisted into a hideous parody of a smirk. "You don't know?" It was half a smug statement and half an incredulous question. Suddenly the demon through his head back and laughed. "You don't know!" He crowed. "The signs. The signs are right there in front of you and you can't see them! This is too good!"
"Give me a name!" Jo demanded, empting more water over him. "Believe me, Doc, I can keep this up all night."
The demon looked up at her, panting slightly. "You heard from the Winchesters lately?"
"What?"
He continued to smile at her in that demeaning way that all demons seemed to have. "Mommy and Daddy didn't want this for you." He finally whispered. Jo had to lean forward slightly to hear what he said to her.
"Look at you. Broken. A shell. All innocence lost long ago because of the darkness. Mommy and Daddy wanted to protect you from the dark places of the world, so you could become a daughter they would be proud of."
"Shut up."
"Ever wonder why Ellen doesn't phone anymore? She's given up on you. She tried, but at the end of the day you were such a waste. A huge, useless, waste of life."
"Shut up!"
"That's right, let it out." He grinned. "Let that anger out! Let's hear that hatred! Tell me, sweetie, do you still ask yourself at night whether you're doing the right thing?"
Jo's lips pulled back from her teeth in a snarl. She empted the last of the Holy water over the demon, causing him to screech out. "Tell me, demon, do you still hide in the shadows hoping no one like me finds you? Are you still too gutless to take a stand and fight back? Hiding behind an innocent old man hoping you can go unnoticed for just a little bit longer?"
"Bitch." He snarled at her once more.
"You better believe it." Jo smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
She saw that Mom's car was parked around the side of Bobby Singer's house as she pulled up. Briefly she wondered who was watching the bar, but dismissed the notion as she climbed out of the car and walked up to the front door. She raised her fist and hesitated, still not entirely sure of what she was going to say, let alone do.
Hey, Bobby, listen, the other day I exorcised this demon and he said some guy was coming for us hunters. He didn't mention a name or anything but said something about a Black Eden, oh and by the way, have you heard from Sam and Dean lately? What, no reason. Just curious.
Yeah. That'd work.
Swallowing her doubts, she finally banged on the door. This was insane, the way Sam and Dean had been tied to everything they did, every demon they dusted. Their lives were so interwoven with Hell and destiny, but no one ever seemed to know why.
Or at least, if they knew, the Winchesters weren't telling.
The door creaked open, and a grizzled Bobby was standing in front of her. Even though he had been in the house most of the day, he was still wearing his trucker cap. Jo wondered whether he ever took it off.
"Hey." She said.
"Hey." He replied. "Whatcha doing here, girl? Weren't you supposed to be two states away chasing some professor?"
She didn't even bother asking how he knew. He wouldn't tell her unless it was important. "Done and done." Jo replied. "I just got something I wanna check up on, need to look in some books. You mind?"
"Jeez, you could have phoned first."
"It's harder to tell someone to get lost when they're standing on your doorstep."
His face broke into a wry grin. "You got your daddy's gift for dealing with people, that's for sure." He said, holding the door open for her. "Beer?"
Jo knew that it probably wasn't a very good idea to refuse. "Yeah, why not?" She looked around herself as Bobby rummaged around for a couple of bottles. There were books stacked every place they could have been stacked, in no particular order that she could see, though Bobby probably had a pretty good handle on things. How she was supposed to find something when she didn't even really know what she was looking for in the first place was beyond her.
"Where's Mom?" She asked, as Bobby came back and handed her a bottle. "I saw her car coming in."
"Asked me to do some bodywork repairs." The man replied gruffly. "Went on a damn hunt backing up one of the guys from the Bar, werewolf jumped on the hood of the car, mangled it pretty good."
She licked her lips. "Has this beer been watered down?"
Jo didn't miss how Bobby's eyes flashed over her, gauging her reaction. "So what you looking for?"
She shook her head. "The thing is, I don't know. Not really. This demon I did, he said that someone was coming."
"Someone? Who's someone?" The older man's curiosity perked straight away.
"That's the sticking point, he didn't give me a name." Jo said. "All he kept saying was that 'He is coming', with emphasis. So I'm pretty sure that the guy ain't too friendly."
"Was that all?"
"No. He said that the Black Eden was rising."
The old man's brows knitted together in thought. "Black Eden." He said, scouring his memory. Ever since his wife had died, he had studied every book that had been ever written on the occult and helping as many people as he could hoping he could find some sort of redemption. He was the go-to guy for random facts and obscure information. But-
"Don't think I've ever heard of that one before. Could be a band or something."
"Why would someone who's getting sent back to Hell use his last breath to announce a band comeback tour?" Jo asked sceptically.
"Don't sass me, kid. I don't like being sassed." He frowned at her, but the young woman wasn't looking at him. She was staring in front of her distractedly, as if trying to put together the pieces of a particularly nasty puzzle. Her expression was grim and soured, like she didn't like the conclusion she had arrived at.
"But there's a but?" Bobby guessed.
"It asked me if I knew where the Winchesters were. Not just Sam, like you'd expect. The two of them, plural." Jo finally met his eyes. "I would have called them myself, but they've changed their numbers. There's something bad going down, Bobby."
"You don't know for sure. Could be just a demon's way of trying to rock you."
"Me specifically?" She said in a deadpan sort of voice. "That's kind of what I thought, but-" She pulled a crumpled newspaper clipping from her pocket. She'd torn it out of some dude's newspaper he hadn't collected off the porch, and the paper had been practically burning a hole in her pocket the whole ride here. Bobby took the paper and smoothed it out across his palm.
"Mass disappearance from Oak Lodge, Wisconsin."
"Yeah." Jo said. "Only a small place. Hardly a spec on the map. Population of three thousand. And they're all gone."
"You checked it out?"
"Yeah."
"And?"
Jo flipped open her phone and brought up the photo.
Croatoan.
"Whatever's been coming," Jo said. "I think it's here. It's already started, only so small we hardly noticed." She lent forward. "I've been in contact with a few friends of mine over the past few weeks. The demons they've gone after, there's been something up with them."
"How do you mean?"
"Weeell, demons are usually nasty-arrogant, right? But lately they've been more… scared-arrogant."
"How?"
"They… lately they've been acting like they've… got something bigger to worry about. Like we're just insects buzzing around their heads that they'll swat at occasionally but wont actually bother to waste the energy getting up to get the can of bug spray."
"Interesting metaphor."
"I'm not kidding, Bobby. They're running scared. AJ caught one around the Bar yesterday-"
"What, that sort-of boyfriend of yours?"
"-and the demon inside actually said something about the 'End of Days'." Jo said. "At first I was thinking, nuh, 'cause like we deal with stuff like that at least three times a fortnight-" She stopped mid-babble, and hyped herself down.
"I don't like the coincidence." She finished gravely.
Bobby looked her up and down. She had the same roundabout logic that her old man once had, and whenever Bill Harvelle was worried, generally there was a very good reason to be concerned. Wordlessly he reached for his phone and dialled Sam's number.
Of course those brothers would be in the smack-bang middle of things. That was just the way it seemed to go nowadays, and Bobby was very rarely surprised by it anymore.
"Apocalypse." He grumbled. "And it's another Monday in Gotham City."