CHAPTER SIX
"How we were raised was jacked."
"Sam Winchester"
"Supernatural" Episode: "Bugs"
xxxxXxxxx
To say the air was tense hanging out in a bar filled with vampires was like Sam saying that Lucifer possessing him hurt only a minute amount.
Sam palmed the phone in his jacket pocket like having physical contact with it would make it ring faster. The room was so heavy with silence it felt like something was trying to pull the building under.
Dean was leant up against the bar, helping himself to the whiskey from the shelves. Katherine Piece sidled up to him and stole the bottle and Dean glared at her, but had let her take it from. He'd been in enough situations with enough supernatural beings to know when to pick his battles; and he'd take a drunk vamp over a sober one any day, it made them easier to kill.
The vampire leaned up right next him, her breasts not so subtly pressing against his right arm. "This is bugging the hell out you isn't it? Hunters forced to work with vampires."
"Not as much as you're bugging the hell out of me right now." Dean slammed another double shot of whiskey back from the pour spout in the bottle.
Katherine looked affronted. "Wow, I can see where your brother got his smart mouth from," she sounded turned on by her own remark.
"Who is calling you exactly?" Stefan's remark was more demand than question. He was leaned up against a table, arms crossed, standing next to Elena, both looked on edge, particularly Stefan.
"Sorry, I don't give out my personal directory to Vampires." Dean snapped. He wasn't happy having to work with Vamps, they had no loyalties to anyone outside of themselves.
The air grew as tense as a hairline trigger. The vibrating of Dean's phone extinguished it before anything could happen. He pulled it out of his jacket and flipped it open.
"Hey, whatcha got?" Dean pulled away from Katherine who practically shoved herself on him to try and overhear the conversation.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Dean ignored Katherine's question and walked towards the back of the bar towards the service door but Elena blurred by the door and stopped him with a feral look and a hard grip on his arm.
Dean covered his hand over the phone. "You gotta be kidding me!-"
"You're not leaving." Elena insisted.
"Dean, are you still there?"
Dean stared down Elena, who, despite being a vampire, still looked very young. "One important fact you're going to need to learn about me real fast is that I take offense to being ordered around-"
"And I'm not letting you walk away," Elena snapped. "Not if you know anything about Damon," Elena shared a glance with Stefan who looked like he was about to back her up by ripping out Dean's throat.
Dean seriously wanted to call the deal off; working with Vampires, with the exception of Benny, was something that went against every fiber in his body. But now that he knew of the existence of such a place, that took people and turned them into experiments, he couldn't just walk away from it.
"Dean, did you just say Vampire?" Jody's voice was shrill in his ear. He had given her the key to the Bunker before they left, a contingency plan in case something happened to him and Sam. She had been in Kansas yesterday visiting an old friend, and when Dean called her he found out that she was in the bunker, looking over the books. So he asked her for a favor. "What the hell are you?"
"Just tell me what it is," Dean didn't mean to snap as harshly as he did to Jody, but he made up for it in deliberately not saying her name out loud. He knew that the entire bar full of Vampires was listening in, and the less they knew, the better.
"I found a hit that matches the specs you and Sam gave me," Jody pulled down a leather bound Men of Letter's volume labeled '1800-1850' , blowing off half a layer of dust before she set the book on the map carved table. "Parkesburg, West Virginia, small tourists' trap town. But, back in the 1800's it used to be part of the Underground Railroad, most of the buildings still standing from that era have been converted into museums by the historical society, all except for this one piece of property, the descendants kept it privatized. I looked it up online, it's currently owned by a man named Gerome Maxfield-"
"Maxfield?" Dean repeated the name, trying to place something. "Why does that-?" He looked over to Sam who shook his head at him, not recognizing the name either.
"Maxfield?" Elena repeated the name too, but with an indication that she knew about it.
Stefan looked to Elena "Isn't that the Whitmore Bio Teacher?" He swiveled his head to Dean first, then Sam, waiting, not with bated breath, but with a silence attached to a trigger that would detonate if his answer wasn't met with what he wanted to hear.
Sam had been half listening to Jody and Dean's conversation, and snatched the phone from him. "Hey, is there any reference of Gerome Maxfield's living relatives in this century?"
"Most likely, but this isn't Google Sam," Jody returned. "It would take me at least a few hours to find that out-"
"Never mind, just email me the coordinates to this place, we'll figure it out-"
"Wait, scratch that, I think I might have found something" Jody cut Sam off, coming across a handwritten footnote at bottom of the page she was looking at. "There's not listings of his living descendants, but there's one of his great great grandmother, a woman named Abilene Rosenbaun, says here her first husband died in a "dishonest" way, her marriage was annulled, and she married Parker M. Richmond in 1853. But there's a part in the footnote how there was some smear against the Richmond name concerning Abilene, so in order to avoid ostericiation in society this Parker guy swapped out his last name for his middle name-Maxfield. They were mostly a generation of teachers-" Jody paused, like a fact had suddenly struck her. "Including the most recent, a Microbiology Major from Duke now a professor at Whitmore College of Arts and Sciences."
"How far is that plantation from the school?" Sam asked Jody, he saw the shift in Stefan's face at the information he had just overheard.
"About a forty minute drive almost completely through rural wooded areas, easy to move things out in the dead of night without anyone noticing."
"Thanks," Sam felt the air go from combustible to an explosion and he felt the heat of it licking at skin. "We'll call you later."
"You better. You boys be careful understand? There's no way in hell I can keep up a house this size."
"We will." Sam hung up the call.
"That's the place," Stefan said. "The plantation house, that's where Wes took Damon."
"It's close enough," Sam agreed. "No one to see the ins and outs-"
"No it's not that," Stefan cut him off "I was there."
Dean and Sam's gazes met each other in the open air, the look they reserved for when they discovered something that sounded insane, but couldn't be written off because of what they knew.
"Before Virginia seceded from union Damon and I used to visit Parkesburg every summer with our father," Stefan said this in a way that made it clear he wasn't saying it for the benefit of Sam or Dean. "He was friends with a woman named Abilene Rosenbaun; she had one of the largest tobacco plantations in the state- He's there."
"So what are we doing?" Matt Donovan asked.
Dean snuck a glance at the kid like he'd forgotten he was there, "We're not doing anything kid, you and your rabid Apple Dumpling Gang are all going home and thinking about what you've done, we," Dean waved a the air in-between him and Sam. "are handling this."
"And you're planning to do that by disregarding the one reliable source who the exact location Maxfield's torture dungeon?" Katherine's voice was condescending, like she was reprimanding a toddler for a mistake with biting sarcasm. "Funny, I thought hunters were supposed to be smart."
Dean felt his anger reach the lip of his threshold and spill over it. "Alright, you know what?" He pulled out his silver plated Colt and cocked it at Katherine. "I can't kill you with this, but I promise I'll make it hurt like a bitch if you don't shut your mouth!"
"You want to rescue all those innocent little humans the Augustines are turning into vampires for personal gain, and Stefan wants Damon back minus the vivisection. So maybe we should work together on that?" Katherine's voice was haughty, taunting, like she had spent a lifetime of getting what she wanted.
"What kind of deal are we talking about?" Sam asked.
"What the hell Sam?!" Dean cut his brother a look like he was crazy. "What are you, crazy?"
"It's not like it's the first deal you ever struck with a vampire Dean," Sam's words were hard, like a mallet hitting granite. "I don't see why it should be a problem."
Dean felt like Sam had struck him in a direct blow, one that came at him so quickly he was caught off guard. "Seriously? We're doing this now?"
"There isn't going to be a later, so it might as well be now." Sam returned, using the words to cut his brother through like a knife blade. He hated himself for it, but at the same time, he didn't. Because the betrayal he felt was deeper than the Marianas Trench. He saw Dean give him a heated, angry, wounded look. And he didn't allow himself to stare at it for long, because otherwise he would be forced to analyze the part of him that still hurt to put such a look on his brother's face.
Dean lowered his bead on Katherine at the same time Sam looked her way. "What kind of deal?" Sam asked her.
Katherine Pierce had this way of looking amused that was balls-scraping-the-pavement-cocky. But instead of delivering it this time, her look was seriously as death. "You come with us to Augustine Headquarters-"
"You're part of an inner circle of vampires," Sam cut her off, testing her motives like he would test a live land mine. "Why would you trust me?" For the first time in almost nine years, Sam didn't say trust us, and he felt that shift like a rock falling on his foot.
"Here's the thing, I don't trust you,'" Katherine clicked her heeled boots over to Sam. He towered over her, but she had a superiority that more than made up for her lack-of-even-in-heels-height. "But trust isn't an issue when I'm using you to an ends. The Augustine Project isn't exactly partial to treating Vampires as anything other than science experiments, but if we had a couple of hunters with us, especially the one with such a stunning charitable donation record to the cause as you." Katherine looked Sam up and down like she was appraising the price of a particularly ratty chair. "It's our gold membership into the front doors."
Dean cocked his head to Katherine this time, his face scrunching into confusion, going from her to Sam. "What is she talking about?"
"We need to move," Katherine cut in, like Dean was an unruly kindergarten student. "We've already wasted too much time."
"Sam-" Dean snapped, ignoring Katherine like she wasn't even there.
"She's right," Sam snapped back. "We need to go-" He began to move past Dean, wincing on the pain from the bullet graze in his leg. But he found his path blocked by Dean's hand gripping his forearm.
"I'm not asking her, Sam," Dean insisted, his voice red hot, tired. Tired of arguing with his brother, tired of the whole damn mess. "You're the one who just preached about there not being a later, so let's hear it?"
The words Sam wanted to say to his brother choked their way up his windpipe, in the end he swallowed them back down. The words he wanted to say, and the ones that he didn't.
Dean felt the silence like it was something alive. "Fine. We'll do it your way then." He released Sam's arm and Sam jerked it from him at the same moment so it was hard to tell who pushed away harder.
"Parkesburg is over two hours from here Agent," Katherine returned to Sam, her snark cut into both him and Dean like a knife to already open wounds. "You and your brother have plenty of time to talk in the car."
"We don't know for sure that Maxfield's has Damon in Parkesburg," Elena retorted.
"Are you really that naive Elena?" Katherine snarled at her double like her words could rip her head off and spit it out bloody. "Stefan was there when this place had just barely had its bricks set in mortar, are you so full of Damon that you can't see anything above him?"
There was a heated moment between Elena Gilbert and her mirror image that most likely would have ended with one of them dead. But it was stopped from coming into fruition by Stefan grabbing Elena's arm and pulling her back from Katherine.
"That's enough," Stefan growled to Katherine. "What you said goes both ways," He stared her down, then Elena.
xxxxxXxxxx
Dean wasn't exactly thrilled with the prospect of having Vampires riding inside his car. He'd sooner hand an angle blade, handle first, over to Crowley and wait for torque of bloody pain. He walked down to where he had pulled the Impala on the chipped concrete beside Matt Donovan's pickup truck. Donovan himself followed behind, who besides Sam, was the only human Dean was leading to, whatever the hell it was they were calling this.
The sky outside had turned the bright orange of mid-afternoon, and across the street from Mystic Grill people were walking around, shopping, eating, oblivious to it all.
The driver's side of the Impala was splashed with a splatter of dust like someone had thrown a bucket of it upon her black surface from a passing car.
Katherine Pierce took one look at the Impala and a scowl caught her face like a hook on her bottom lip. "Seriously? Ever heard of taste?"
"I still have my gun Vamperella 2," Dean returned. No one insulted his girl. More powerful beings had tried, including, angels and a Destroyer Hindu Goddess, and Dean took none of it. "So how about you get in the damn car?"
"I'm not riding in that hunk of junk," Katherine snapped like she had been asked to eat a pile of dog shit. "If Elena came here on her own, her little Sport's Cooper is parked somewhere, so I'm going for Option B."
"What makes you think that I would want to ride anywhere alone with you?" Elena snapped.
"Two words: Damon Salvatore."
"Bite me Katherine," Elena punctuated each word slowly. "Also two words."
"Here's two more words," Dean cut in. "Shut up," he glared at Katherine and Elenea when they both glared at him. "Alright Edward Cullen's with me, Sam rides shot gun with Vampire Katherine and her less annoying shadow."
Katherine glared at Dean like he asked her to chew milk. "What if I changed my mind because I remembered how I'm allergic to smug superiority?"
"Then you're walking," Dean punctuated the words by opening the back door with a squeak. He avoided Katherine's scowl and opened the trunk of the Impala, pulling a machete from the depth of the green army duffel with 7 inch long hammered steel serrated blade and a handle worn with fingermark indentations on the birch wood.
Katherine eyed the blades like they was plastic. "You know Vampires can kill faster than knives?"
"But not faster than hunters," Dean retrieved a second such machete from the duffle before closing the trunk on the bag. He walked towards the driver's side door with the blade out, not fully pointed on any of the vampires, but not completely on the ground either "You and your friends behave, and these stay under the seats, we clear?"
"That goes for you both too," Stefan rounded on Dean and stared him down like he was imaging what Dean tasted like with his insides on his outsides. "If we're calling a temporary truth, then we have to mean it, at least temporarily."
The vampires' in front of him all eyed the blades, and Dean knew that if they wanted too, they could easily have just tried to kill him and take the weapons. But they didn't and whether it was out of fear, or out of a begrudging lose holding to their halfcocked "deal" struck moments earlier, it didn't matter. Either way, Dean wasn't about to analyze the situation for horse's teeth.
He held one of the machettes out to Sam. "Make sure she follows close behind, no pit stops for food." He gave a nod over to Elena who shot him a look that would have been a scowl had she been the kind of person/vampire to do so.
Sam took the machete from Dean, the wood settled into his hand like well kneaded Play-Dough. There was a brief moment when it felt like another time, in a clearing beside an abandoned bridge by an industrial wayside in the days following Lucifer's release from the Cage. Then Sam blinked, and the weight of the present crushed the memories of the past.
"Let's go then," Sam moved towards Elena Gilbert's little Mini Cooper parked up against the Mystic Grill's back wall without invitation.
A handful of yards away Dean opened the Impala door and Stefan Salvatore climbed inside looking as thrilled to be riding with Dean as Dean was to be riding with him.
Matt Donovan watched them all, Hunters and Vampires, particularly the vampires, like they were insane. "You're not serious about this?" his eyes darted to Elena.
"Matt listen, I need you to go back-" Elena stepped over to the blonde teen. "Tell Jer what's going on. But tell him not to come after us."
Matt didn't look happy about what Elena had said at all. "Elena I'm not letting you wander off alone with a bunch of Hunters!-" The look Matt gave Sam and Dean was as volatile as it could be given what they were and what he wasn't.
"Stefan's with me," Elena returned. "I'm not alone-"
"Stefan isn't-"
"I mean it Matt!"
Elena's hiss was audible. Sam watched the Vampire stare down her friend with a ferocity that towered over her small physique the way he towered over her little sports car.
"No one else is getting involved okay?" She placed a hand on Matt's forearm, her eyes pleading. "Please, just go-" She turned, the heels of her boots crunched in the gravel of the road. She pulled out the keyless remote to her car and unlocked it.
Through all of this Katherine Pierce rolled her eyes like it was an idiot side show. "I can't listen to this anymore," She opened the passenger side door and flipped up the black leather seat, climbing in behind it, then poked her head out a moment later like a gopher at Sam. "You joining me handsome?"
Sam's response to this was to flip the seat back hard on Katherine's legs, and retract the seat all the way back, to which she gave an audible complaint. He ignored her as he crammed his 6'4" frame into the tiny car, shutting the door behind him.
Elena appeared in the driver's seat across from him a second later. She closed her door, sealing Sam inside with two Vampires who looked exactly alike.
Elena cranked on the engine, which was almost silent compared to muscled engine of the Impala. She affixed Sam with a piercing look. "Can we trust your brother?"
Sam felt every moment of the stare that went completely beyond superficial. "You can," He kept the inflection out of the word where he wanted to place it, because being locked in with two vampires iwas not a place to divulge what he was really thinking.
Elena pulled out behind the Impala, oblivious to Sam's internal arguments, following the black car with a Vampire and Sam's brother, inside it.
xxxxXxxxx
Both sides of the road were a line of trees. Towering Pitch Pine, and Hemlock that dwarfed fat Cypress Trees blew past the the Impala in silence through the rolled up windows. Sunlight streamed in over the passenger seat, which instead of holding Sam, held a vampire, who stared straight ahead, tapping an enormous gaudy silver ring against the window with bullet-like noises.
Dean gripped the wheel also staring straight ahead, only occasionally stealing glances at Stefan Salvatore. One hand was on the wheel, the other was tight on the machete that rested in-between them on the bench seat like a barrier.
They had been driving like this, Vampire and Hunter, for nearly an hour, following a route from the GPS on Dean's phone because Stefan hadn't given him any directions. The landscape had probably changed from the days the vampire had last been there, but Dean suspected more it was due the fact that said vampire was being a dick.
The heavy tapping of the ring continued on the window pane. Dean's hand grip the machete handle tighter; he wanted to use the blade just to shut the damn noise up. "Hey, knock it off!"
Stefan didn't shoot Dean a withering glare, he shot him a death glare. And Dean shot him one right back; the silence that followed was bloody.
"So how do you know this place is still standing?" Dean retorted. "According to you, you haven't been there since you were human during horse and buggy days. How do you know it hasn't been plowed over into mini malls, plowed into other mini malls by now?"
"Because it hasn't," Stefan answered back like that answer explained everything. "We've already established how much we don't trust each other- but apparently a creepy mad scientist is vivisecting my brother-" He removed his eyes from staring into the tree line and stared at Dean instead, "and as someone who has a brother maybe you could wrap your head around the idea that I wouldn't waste my time lying to you."
Dean clenched his jaw so tightly that it felt like his teeth were being pounded into dust. Every vampire he met and had subsequently killed was a self-serving dick; and this one was exactly the same. But there was something in Stefan's growl like tone that made Dean resist the urge to make a bleeding fountain out of his neck with his blade- and that something was the constant references to his brother.
"So I take it you and your brother are close."
Stefan shot Dean a look like he was borderline neurotic for asking that. "We're not friends, Dean, there's no need for pretend pleasantries."
"It's called conversation," Dean returned. "I thought you were from the age of tea and mundane talking and did that sort of thing."
"Are you close to your brother?" Stefan's question was eerily deadpanned, like he'd drunk a Soprano for breakfast at some point and some of the mob mannerisms had transferred over.
Dean blew off the remark with anger. "Man you're a cocky-son-of-a-bitch. Alright, fine- Why don't you tell me about what gave you your little schizoid episodes ticks back at your mansion because I'm not buying the whole 'car accident' thing your Barbie-Girl friend was spewing. A Vampire doesn't dislocate bones because his side airbag deployed."
"And why would I tell you?"
"Because it's my car!-" Dean snapped. "I'm not above slicing your hands off to kill the silence. But one of my rules for granting temporary amnesty to a vamp is that you answer one of my damn questions!"
There came a dry sounding kind of laugh that for one brief moment sounded so much like Sam the Dean had to resist the urge to throw out a quip that Sam would retort to.
"A two-thousand-year old Immortal Witch staked me and left me to drown for three months in a quarry." Stefan said this almost like a dare, a challenge for Dean to one up him.
Which Dean could have done a millions times over: 40 years in Hell, a year in Purgatory. But Stefan was right, they weren't friends, at best they were enemies in a truce, and Dean wasn't going to give him anything real back to his bating.
"Sounds like it hurt like a bitch."
Stefan dry laughed again.
"What?!" Dean was more frustrated about the fact that this vampire had dared to take Sam's place in the Impala and sound so much like him than about anything that the laugh actually implied. Sam could hate him forever, but that didn't change what he was to Dean. It made Dean want to kill Stefan strictly on principal.
"You have no idea much you sound like Damon." Stefan's face shifted to something, almost resembling human. His dark eyes moved over Dean like he was appraising him. "You know we're not as different as you would imagine, Dean."
"Yeah, we're friggin' frat buddies," Dean returned, not knowing, or wanting to know where this whole conversation was going.
"I spent nearly a century and a half hating my brother for what he did to my life," Stefan went on, basically ignoring Dean completely. "But I've never been able to hate him completely-"
"Alright, enough," Dean snapped. "You said it," he waved at the air in between him and the vampire. "We're not friends, so don't think your touchy feely emo shit is going to get me to see you as anything other than what you really are-"
"How about what you are?" Stefan threw back. "According to Katherine, your brother sold out a bunch of humans to be turned into vampires for science experiments."
"You shut your mouth about my brother!-" Dean gripped the knife and had it pinned against Stefan's left wrist. "I'm not kidding about you losing a hand!"
Stefan glared at the blade on his arm, like he was going to declare their truce off at the same time that Dean was. But before either Vampire or Hunter could act on their thoughts Stefan's eyes lost focus like he was staring at the inside of his eyeballs, both of his hands shot up to grip his head like he wanted to tear into his skull.
"Hey, hey!" Dean yelled at the Vampire when he jerked into the window once, then hard enough a second time to crack the glass. "What the hell are you doing?"
xxxxxXxxx
"This is stupid!" Katherine's voice blared into Sam's ears from the backseat with a shrillness that mirrored scraping an enormous ball bearing against a cheese grater.
Sam had done his best to ignore her, but it was like trying to ignore a splinter stuck in your eye. The gunshot wound at his leg had opened again from the tight quarters he found himself in inside the Mini Cooper. A line of red blood snaked its way down his jeans; it had been flowing steadily like this for the almost two hours they had been driving. The pain wasn't unbearable, he had worse; but it was still a relentless throbbing that he could have lived without.
Sam pressed his palm over the blood stain to staunch the flow, keeping his eyes on both vampires to avoid any attacks to his open wound.
Katherine jerked out from in-between the seats cutting off the satellite radio mid-Top 40's hit. She stared at the blood trickling in between Sam's fingers. "I'm no doctor, but I've been around long enough to know when a wound is festering."
"I'm fine," Sam snapped, trying to turn his leg away from Katherine's glaring stare.
Katherine drew closer to Sam and sniffed at his leg. "Smells like the beginning stages of gangrene."
"I said shut up!" Sam barked, snapping his head back to face the vampire. It had taken longer than he would have liked to remember the last time he had seen her face. In that dive in Chicago where he dragged her out to the street to a waiting van. He had stood there and watched as nameless men load Katherine into the van's cargo hold, waving off the offering of a wad of twenties because he felt the bribe was too small. And that was it, he left with Samuel and didn't look back.
Until he met up with a similar van without Samuel a state and a hunt over, and another one after that, and Sam had a few more catches to give away in the dead of night. And the bribes were much, much bigger. And Sam had no soul, so he had no objections. Vampires were parasites, and being paid to eradicate them was still eradicating them.
"She's right," Elena cut into Sam's memories like a pair of scissors. She swiveled her head to him, she was identical to Katherine in looks, except one. Katherine's eyes were old, cynical, angry. Elena still had vestiges of a human being under all the vampire. "It's not getting any better on its own. I can help you-" she took one hand off the wheel and bit into the flesh of her wrist with a sharp 'snap' of her fangs, holding out the bleeding flesh to Sam.
And in that one gesture, no matter how human Elena's eyes looked, Sam was instantly reminded that she was still a vampire.
"Sweet Little Elena Gilbert," Katherine snarked. "My methods aren't as pure as my goody-goody counterpart- if you die Sam, then we lose easy access to get Damon out."
Sam stared at the blood trickling down Elena's wrist, and he was somewhere else, in an alleyway, a nameless hotel room, sucking black blood from Ruby's wrist, her arm, her – "I said I'm fine." he snapped to the mirrored image of the bitch behind him.
The sound of a ringing phone shoved any counter arguments back down everyone's throats. Sam reached into his jacket Dean's name lighting up the Caller ID. He flipped his phone open. "What is it?"
There came a thudding sound like something heavy was hitting the dashboard of the Impala, then the door, then the windows.
Sam's sense went on hyper alert at the noise. "What the hell is going on?"
"Interview with a vampire is spazing out-Like full on war zone flashback!-"
The loud crunch of glass breaking ripped away at Sam and exposed the raw nerves underneath. And Sam forgot that he was angry and hurt because of the actions of his brother. "Dean!-"
"What's happening?" Elena had obviously been listening in on the conversation. A wing of dark hair flew out in her movement to turn her head to the phone. "Stefan-"
This time it sounded like the glass shattered, and the next sound was something that Sam recognized from years of hearing it over and over again.
The sound of a steel blade cutting through the air.
"STEFAN!" Elena screamed so loudly next to Sam it felt a hole had punched through his ear drum.
"Dean!"
"That's it!" Katherine leaned over the seat again, and in another instant Sam felt Elena's wrist shoved into his mouth, her blood sliding down warm in between his teeth.
The car jerked in a hard, angry swerve to the right, a horn blared angrily at them, and rush of wind jerked the car left.
Elena yanked her arm from Sam's mouth and tried to get the car back under control, twisting the steering wheel like a pretzel.
The road was smooth, too smooth like highly polished glass; the tires of the Mini Cooper could barely find traction to stop. The afternoon sun slanted like knives into windows as the car swerved to right itself on the road.
The sunlight was thrown into black ahead of them as the tailgate of the Impala jumped at them from the windshield at only a 15 foot distance ahead of them.
Elena slammed on the brakes, but the Mini Cooper's momentum was still going 65 miles an hour. Sam snatched the wheel from her and turned the car a hard right into a slopped ravine with overgrown grass, a line of sentry power lines, and evergreen trees. The front tires hit the ravine hard before the car tilted sideways and stopped.
Elena's head was flung forward and back from the jerking of the car, and there was a moment when her hands and Sam's hands rested on the wheel.
Sam could hear her heavy breathing in his ears like it was a pounding heartbeat.
The inertia of the car took a moment to settle in Sam's stomach, but once it did he tasted the saltiness of blood staining his mouth. He jerked back to Katherine, who had a line of blood trickling down from the left side of her forehead.
Katherine reached up a hand to wipe at the blood off her hairline, but didn't acknowledge it any more than that.
Sam took one moment to glare every ounce of hatred he had in him at Katherine before he slammed the car door open stepping out onto the grass that slanted at a 45 degree angle from the ravine.
"Sam?" Dean's voice and the squeak of the Impala door fought each other for a yell into the cold air.
Sam stumbled up the grass incline and coughed once but nothing came out. He shoved a finger down his throat, choking, then vomited hard all over the slanted grass.
"Sam!" Dean was now less than half a foot away; he reached out and hauled Sam up by the canvas of his jacket. "Hey, hey!"
Through the pounding in his ears Sam heard as Elena called out Stefan's name, but it was all background noise as he coughed harder to encourage his vomit to come out. He heaved once more and stared down at the wet regurgitation on the grass, it was slick, and completely clear. He beat his hand against his knee angrily.
"Sam!" Dean's voice was insistent, demanding. "What? Talk to me!"
Sam raised the barrel of his hostility from off the ground and aimed it point blank at the face of Katherine Pierce. "What the hell did you do?" Sam spat at her.
"I saved your life," The blood on Katherine's skin glowed as red as night shade berries. She eyed the puddle of vomit on the grass. "You can't purge off Vampire blood sweetness. It's fast acting-" her breath blew out as a haze of smoke in the sunlight. "I told you, if you die, you won't be of any help to us-"
Sam grabbed Katherine by her wrist and pinned her against Elena's car, bending her body almost completely backwards over the roof of the Mini Cooper. "You sick. bitch!"
"Sam, Sam!" Dean grabbed Sam by his arms, yanking him off of Katherine. Not because he had suddenly decided to care for her; but because they were too exposed on the roadside in broad daylight for what looked like an attack on a human woman. "Hey!- Look at me! That's enough!"
Sam jerked himself out of Dean's grasp, angry at Katherine and his brother in equal measure. He turned away from the scene, and it was only then that he noticed that Dean had a leaking of blood down his neck, and he was grasping his machete that was coated in a stain of blood all along its sharp edge.
Across the divide from one Vampire to another, Stefan stood beside Elena, a jagged gash ran along the latter Vampire's shoulder, cut clean through his shirt and his mouth was stained in blood. Sam stared at where the blood began on Dean's neck, and where it ended in the Vampire's mouth.
Dean didn't acknowledge the blood that clung into the short hairs on his head like sticky jam. He swept the knife around the group of vampires circling him and Sam, ending the machete's momentum with its blade pointed squarely at Katherine. "You try anything with my brother again you self-serving scank and this deal is going to end bloody starting with your jugular!" he took a predatory step towards her. "You got that?"
Katherine stared Dean in the face, not coldly, but with an understanding that was so ancient that it was more calculating than feeling. "I always get threats." Her dark heavily eye-lined eyes stared up at him, then batted over to Elena. "What's your problem?"
"Are you serious?" Elena's voice was shrill beside Stefan Her boots crunched on the grass, avoiding the puddle, but eying it like it was about to illustrate her next words. "You could've killed us!"
"You're a vampire Elena, you can't die in a car crash," Katherine said this like she was bored, looking up Sam like she had done the very first time he came across her. But unlike that time he could not clinically analyze away the way her eyes stripped him apart like she was deboning a chuck roast. "And Sam here would've died with vampire blood in his system, it was all calculated-"
Sam's rage boiled over and spilled into hot, billowing steam. "Don't give me any more of a reason to kill you!"
"Alright, here's wants going to happen," Dean swiped at the blood on his skin, transferring the blood stain to the handle of his machete as he switched the weapon from his right to his left hand, pulling out his Colt. He swept silver gun around the lot of vampires. "The next one of you to pull a vamp trick gets this emptied into his face, and this," he waved the machete at them. "lopping of what's left."
Dean was standing in ring of vampires that could easily snap his neck if they wanted too. But Dean had tortured and killed dozens, hundreds of dozens of creatures worse than this small vampire faction. And if it came down to it, he would not let the end come about without three dead vampires on the roadside.
"Now get in your damn car and let's go," Dean waved at the sideways Mini Cooper with his gun. He didn't wait for the approval of the blood suckers in front of him, and started to move back towards his Impala.
And he was stopped by Sam's hand on his arm. "Dean-"
Sam had barely talked to him outright in the last week, so Dean was almost not able to process what Sam was doing. But then he felt the way Sam jerked his arm, the pull going forward towards something in front of them.
A halo of sunlight blinded Dean in the first few seconds he turned towards the road they had yet to drive on. It swayed like a wave back around and into a group of white pine trees, a hemline of power lines hugged the curves of the road.
A moving dot emerged over the first wave of the sun weathered asphalt. As the dot drew closer it grew from blackness into a shape swathed in leather and denim walking towards them; not casually, but like a guard on duty.
The man's face was smooth, unmarred by any facial hair, or any hair at all except for thin eyebrows above dark eyes. His clothes stunk like he'd washed them in a swill of rain water and the dirt of the forest floor. But the look he gave Sam and Dean pierced through any other exterior aspects meant to draw an image of intimidation.
"Gentlemen," The, Vampire the one known to Sam and Dean as the Alpha Vamp, stared them over like he imaged what they tasted like with their veins emptied into his mouth. "This is an unexpected treat."