A/N: Thanks to I'mNotCleverLol for the review! I hope you like this chapter too~ Thanks to all for reading and putting up with me haha...sigh. Such long expositions. Oh, well. We'll get to the good part eventually...

CHAPTER THREE

SAM WINCHESTER

Sam winced tiredly in the lonely four-person dining booth at Carbondale's local protectorate pub. Only a few staggered drunks were present, and none of them were even part of the protectorate. Rather, they appeared to be bedraggled coal miners from further south. They probably lived in the slum near their workplace, harboring a loving wife and two-point-five children. Maybe one of them had a dog. Sam had always wanted a dog. But, they were expensive, and he didn't have time to care for anything like that on the road.

He sighed and spun his glass of water around in circles on the rugged wood tabletop. It left behind a thin residue of darker spotting; condensation from the bottom of the glass. Sam was never one for drinking, especially not alcohol, and today he didn't really feel like drinking anything at all. The glass cast a clear shadow over the two sets of silverware on either side of the table, wrapped in dingy red napkins and tied with a leather strap. Sam hadn't even ordered food.

"Hey," A taught female voice greeted, very business-like and brisk, yet full of honey and dripping with attitude. Sam glanced up from the table and met the shadow-brown eyes of a shorter, tan woman. Her outfit was form-fitting and warm; her hair was a tangled wisp of black. She had distractingly large pink lips. "What are you so glum about, guy?"

Sam laughed half-heartedly and looked away, staring once more into the glass of water in his hand. Maybe it held the answers he so desperately wanted. "Nothing," He responded to the stranger, "Nothing at all. Just family issues."

The woman slid into the seat across from Sam and placed her hands on the table in one quick movement, leaning slightly forward with trained care. She didn't frown, but she didn't smile either. It made her all the more menacing.

"You can tell me," She insisted, "I have no one to tell."

Sam glanced at her in slight humor. She tipped her head.

"Name's Ruby," She introduced.

"Sam," He spit out through gritted teeth, "Sam Winchester."

Ruby's overlarge lips pricked upward in amusement. She grabbed the fork from her silverware arrangement and spun in between her forefinger and the wooden tabletop, still grinning, laughing even. She gave Sam a devilish glance.

"Sammy," Ruby chuckled, "Little Sammy Winchester."

Sam looked up, shadows flitting in his eyes. In the strange lighting of the pub, they appeared brown. But they could be green too, like his brother's, in a different scene. Or sometimes slightly blue. They were subjective—it all depended on the way you looked at them.

"How'd you know my last name?"

"Word spreads fast on the plains," She said simply, "You just have to know who to ask."

Glancing around, Sam leaned in closer. The pub was quiet and he'd have to do the same.

"What are you?" He breathed, barely a whisper, "You're a beast, aren't you? Werewolf, hybrid, vampire…something else?"

Ruby stopped spinning her fork. She glanced up at Sam's pressing expression in a brief lull, thinking to herself, playing with her own expression in obsessive gestures of perfection. Sam reared back, gripping the edge of his side of the table with both hands.

"Sam, don't you know a demon when you see one?"

When Ruby lunged at him, knocking them both to the ground, she brought the table too. The booth toppled completely over, quickly shoved to the side in the clamor. Ruby's hair caught in Sam's mouth and he spat it out, only to reveal the silvery metal surface of the fork's prongs pushing dangerously close to his eye. He ignored the astonished screams of the other pub patrons and grabbed Ruby's wrist, swinging her arm around, knocking her in the gut with his knee. She gasped smally, but went right back at it. The fight was equally balanced. Sam's strength matched Ruby's dexterity to a T, and no one could get the upper hand on the other for quite a while. Ruby kept jabbing at Sam with the fork, switching hands to throw him off, and Sam kept throwing precisely-aimed kicks and punches. He had her pinned down at one point, but she threw him off with a twist of her legs and they began an awkward crawl along the floor. Sam slid backwards, grabbing the foot of a stray chair and throwing it at Ruby, who rolled out of the way and managed to get a hold of Sam's ankle. Grunting, she pulled herself up and stuck her only handhold with the fork. The utensil embedded up to its base. Sam clenched his teeth in pain.

Ruby clambered on top of Sam again, smashing her fist into his jaw before he could react. A table behind him clattered noisily, sending a glass crashing to the floor. Ruby took one of the shards in her practiced hand, raising it into the air. Sam covered his face, but the blow never came. Apparently, somewhere between the initial quarrelling and the chair being thrown, the barkeeper had grown tired of the destruction and grabbed a shotgun from behind the bar, which he promptly used to blow Ruby's shoulders out. The blast rattled Sam's bones. Ruby fell limp on top of him, and the glass shard rolled to the side. He pushed her corpse away and, gasping, took the offered hand of the barkeeper and tried to regain his breath.

"Thanks," Sam windedly gasped to his rescuer, "You saved my ass back there."

"No problem," The barkeeper spat, running a hand through his thick beard and slinging his shotgun over his shoulder, "She was scarin' away business, anyway. You protectorate draggin' your work home with you now?"

Sam shook his head in disbelief. "I guess so."

"Well," The barkeeper pointedly glanced around his pub, disapproval shining in his light grey eyes. The place was a mess—booth toppled over, glasses shattered, chairs probably broken. "Try to keep it clean next time, okay, kid?"

"Sure thing," Sam panted. He leaned over, coughing, pressing his fists against his buckled knees. In his left ankle, the fork stuck out like an extra appendage. Below his feet, Ruby's dark blood curled over the dirt floor. Sam grimaced at both. The fork hurt like hell, but could easily be removed and patched up. Ruby, on the other hand, would take much more work. He knew that she'd wake up eventually, even with a blow like that. He'd have to take her somewhere safe and tie her up—maybe the shed behind the junkyard. Except, that was miles away, and Dean had taken the bike with him to Founder's City. Sam sighed in exhaustion.

He wished Dean were here.

…

An hour and some stitches later—sloppy stitches, because they had been sewn in the back of a moving horse and carriage—Sam's injuries had been tended to and Ruby had been safely deposited in the middle of the plains. If she came back—when she came back—Sam could handle her. He limped back to the junkyard after tipping the man who steered the carriage and collapsed in the tiny shack that Dean and him had built the summer prior. Their dad had helped with the roof, but that was all. Everything else, the hanging bunks, the shifty table, the three raggedy chairs, had been lovingly crafted by Sam and Dean. He grabbed a knife from one of the bunks and slid it into his jacket. Then, Sam lilted into the chair marked with his initials and pulled forth a heavy, leather-bound book engraved with the same symbol on his jacket patch. The symbol of the protectorate. And, also, his dad had mentioned once, the symbol of an underground, monster-hunting organization called the Men of Letters. But that was long ago, years before Sam was born.

Sam flipped open the front cover and leafed through the table of contents. A small, burning, oil lamp flickered dully overhead, providing meager light to read by. The bestiary listed the known monsters alphabetically. D…D…D…D for djinn, D for dogs, D for devas, D for…there it was. D for demon. Written in the screwy hand of his awful excuse for a father. Sam flipped to the designated page and followed the text with his fingers. Pictograms lined the paper. Weakening sigils, the annotations read, used in the old world to capture demons. However, since new world demons and old world demons weren't the same monster, the sigils didn't have the same effect.

Sam read through the entire article in under five minutes, then he spent the extra time to read it over again, just to be sure of the details. There was a can of black paint used to touch-up Dean's motorcycle out back, so Sam went around and brought that inside, bolting the door shut with the hardly usable handmade metal lock, and began to draw symbols on the walls. He had to glance back at the bestiary every now and then, making sure he painted each stroke exactly how it was pictured, but he was pretty confident in his handiwork. It took him only fifteen minutes to draw everything. When he finished, Sam stood back and admired his new, dripping wall of warding symbols. The black paint gleamed in the faint moonlight that filtered through the holes in the roof.

"I think that's good," Sam said aloud to himself.

"I think you did a knock-up job," A female voice answered him from outside. Sam startled grabbing the knife from his pocket. The voice scoffed. It was Ruby's voice. "As if that would stop me. I'm out here." A portion of her face appeared between two slats of sheet metal that made up the north wall. It twisted in an ungainly grin. "Hey there, big boy. Think you could let me in, or am I gonna have to do the honors myself?"

"What are you doing here? I thought I put you in the middle of the plains—there's no way you could travel that fast."

Ruby verbally rolled her eyes. "You underestimate me. I'm afraid we got off on the wrong foot, Sam."

"Really?" Sam smirked, though he didn't feel very humored at all. The stitches in his ankle still stung from his fork-inflicted wound. "You tried to gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork."

"I know," Ruby apologetically said, "And I'm sorry, okay. But I had my orders, and not everyone in that restaurant was there for the drinks, got it? I'm here to make you a deal, if you would kindly unlock the door."

"What kind of deal?"

"Let me in and I'll tell you."

"What," Sam scoffed, lowering the knife slightly, stepping forward, but still keeping his guard up, "You can travel an hour's distance in thirty minutes, but you can't snap off a piece of rebar and an old door hinge?"

"I was trying to be courteous," Ruby sharply spat, "But if you insist, Sam, I'll break down your door."

"Fine, hold on," Sam agreed grudgingly, "Let me unlock the door."

"Thank you."

"I wish I could say no problem."

He opened the creaking wooden door for her and she strode in, taking a quick look about her surroundings with piqued interest.

"I like what you've done with the place," Ruby commented, gesturing to the pungent paint slathered across the multicolored walls, "Your artwork is cute, Sam, but it's wrong."

"Wrong?"

"Yeah," Ruby pointedly insisted, "Wrong. You have to seal those symbols with demon blood to have the same effect. Like…" She spread open one of her hands, palm-side up, and dragged it along one of the sharper metal edges lining the wall. Blood leaked around the point. Ruby pressed her hand to one of the black paintings and doubled over, groaning, "Like this…"

Sam raised an eyebrow, confused as to why this woman—who had stabbed him not two hours ago—was helping him ward off her own kind. She returned his skepticism with a sly grin, chuckling to herself and wiping her now bloodied palm on the leg of her jeans.

"Why are you doing this?" Sam chanced.

"Because I've got a big heart," Ruby deadpanned, rolling her eyes, "What do you think, Sammy? I do things because it benefits me. I thought that cooperating with Lilith and Azazel was beneficial. But, it's not. So, here I am."

"Lilith?" Sam questioned, "Azazel? Who the hell are they?"

"The leaders of this little lemonade stand," Ruby explained. She walked around to Sam's table, dragged her fingers through pages of the bestiary, tapped a few sentences, made a face. "They think they're big stuff, you know. I don't really like it. And don't even get me started on Michael. If anyone's cocky around here, it's him."

"Michael?"

Ruby shot Sam a withering look. "Coach of the other team," She said, "You know, big bad boys with wings? Juiced-up bird-hybrids?"

"Angels?"

"If you wanna call them that, sure. But they're hardly angels."

Sam blew a gusty breath between his teeth, falling backwards into his brother's chair. He pulled his hair out of his face and stared up at the ceiling. The night sky filtered palely through, tinted pink with the coming dawn. Stars were winking out in the wispy clouds.

He muttered, "So, it's true. They're all back, and my dad wasn't crazy…" Sam shot up out of his seat, eyes fluttering wide open with sudden realization. "My dad wasn't crazy. And if he wasn't crazy…"

"Keep goin', Sam, you're getting closer…" Ruby warned warmly.

"If my dad wasn't crazy," Sam concluded, "Then there's only one thing that they could be looking for."

"Bingo," Ruby murmured.

"The phoenix," They both said in unison.

Sam started up again, grabbing a duffle off the hook on his way out of the shack. Ruby followed closely after, uninvited, uncaring.

"I've got to warn Dean."

…

By two o'clock, Ruby and Sam were halfway to the halfway mark, fifteen miles outside of Carbondale, just east of the Crystal Pools. Taking the journey on foot tore at the flimsy soles of their shoes, burned the bottoms of their feet. Trekking up and down the rolling hills quickly wore down their stamina. The sun glared through the thinned layers of the atmosphere with intensity, burning into the back of Sam's leather jacket.

"Don't you have a carriage?" Ruby panted, "A horse? Anything?"

Sam sighed, "We have a bike, but Dean took it with him when he left for Founder's City. I didn't think I'd have to follow."

"No, you just didn't think."

He chuckled darkly, "Maybe."

"Hey, Sam," Ruby mentioned casually, vaulting over a thick steel rod embedded in the slope of a particularly large crest. She patted its rusty surface in appreciation and ran up beside her traveling partner, still trying to find her running legs. And, for that matter, her running lungs. "We should pair up in the next city. You and I, we'd make a great team."

"You mean, like," Sam scoffed, "Like a bond? What makes you say that? You tried to kill me last night, Ruby."

"I know."

"And?"

"And, I said I was sorry," She shrugged, "It's the truth, Sam. You and I, we weren't made to be alone. We'd work better together. You're a hunter, I'm a special, together we're a bond. It's simple."

"Last time I had a bond, it didn't turn out too well," Sam muttered sadly.

"You mean Jess?" Ruby asked him. But, she didn't wait for any answer before rattling off, "Sam, I know all about her. And, honestly, what were you thinking? A bond with two hunters? Two specials I can understand, but two hunters is never a good idea, and it never ends well."

"Shut up, Ruby," Sam growled.

Despite the fact that Sam constantly told his brother that he didn't care anymore, and he honestly tried not to care, Sam cared immensely about Jess's death. It was unnecessary; the entire event had been branded into his memory, hot as fire. Hot as the fire.

They'd been conducting what he thought was a routine summoning spell, just north of The Block. Jess and Sam stood together on one side of the table and Dean stood with their father on the other. And then their dad added something strange to the mix. The whole inn went up in flames, and Jess went with it. Sam and Dean escaped with little more than burns and scratches. They hadn't seen their father since. Sam wasn't sure which made him madder—that Jess had paid for his father's obsessiveness with her life, or that his dad hadn't stuck around to take the blame. He didn't even apologize.

More than a year had passed since that day, and Sam still couldn't let it go.

By late afternoon, the sun had sunk halfway into the horizon, and the plains had cooled substantially. A harsh wind blew through the unprotected grasses. Sam and Ruby covered their faces with their arms to buffer its impact. Carbondale vanished from the low skyline behind them. Far, far ahead, Founder's City and its river-water reservoir reared into view. The moon waxed in a fattened crescent; plump for the slaughter. They'd arrive at the city line by midnight, at the latest.

"We're getting close," Ruby rubbed her hands together, both for warmth and anticipation, "I can't wait to check in to a nice inn and just kick back my feet and—ugh—just take off my shoes. I never thought I would say that."

"What, you never walk anywhere?" Sam snorted.

"We usually hijack merchant caravans," Ruby sighed, "Or, we take lots of breaks."

"Well, I guess that makes sense."

"Are you calling me lazy?"

"Maybe a little."

"I can still kick your sorry ass."

"I know you can."

Sam halted in his tracks. Ruby paused at his left elbow, peering ahead with her eyes ablaze. They stood atop the crest of a large hill, the wind in their faces, the line of the moon-shaped city tentative and shadow-covered at their feet. Beyond that lay the forest, in all its ugly glory.

The forest glowed. It smoked, reflected as wisps and tendrils and bursts of flashing blue in the eyes of two onlookers, standing miles away on top of a hill.

"I've seen bigger," Ruby commented lightly.

Sam just shook his head. The Shadowlands were on fire—a hot, airy blue inferno that lit the outer bulge of the city in a halo of holy light.

Then, there was nothing.

Sam felt the blast before he saw or heard it. The force knocked him back a good ten feet, slamming into his chest with the force of a rampant horse. His eardrums hammered in his head, threatening to burst his skull wide open. Suddenly, Ruby didn't matter. It didn't where she was, or where Jess was, or dad or Dean.

There was nothing.

Nothing but the high-pitched scream of the explosion and a bright blue light.