Chapter 26
I woke up very slowly and rather luxuriously in the bed by myself. Rolling over and squinting at the red numerals on the clock on the nightstand, I realised why I was by myself immediately. Well, okay, not immediately. It took a couple of seconds to actually process the numbers first.
Eleven thirty.
Given the bars of sunlight that were pouring through the half-closed blind slats over the floor and the rumpled ball of covers at the end of the bed, I figured that meant in the morning. There was no question that the sleep-in had been good, having had hardly any sleep at all through the hours of darkness.
I could probably spend a bit of time here smugly telling you how relaxed and limp I felt after the night's exercise, but I'll give it a miss. I will say that my sense of impending doom had fled with the generous influx of endorphins and when I sat up and stretched, the only thing on my mind was food and figuring out how put a stop to the various threats to humanity without having to leave the cabin.
Of course, breakfast for everyone else was long over by the time I got downstairs. In fact, aside from Lauren sitting in the living room on her own, I couldn't even see anyone else. Making a fresh pot of coffee and grabbing a couple of eggs, I pottered around in the kitchen, dragging my sock-encased feet over the floor and wondered absently about the wood supply for the open and closed-in fires that warmed the cabin.
Coincidentally, my musings were in fact answered by the return of the three hunters, as Bobby's truck pulled up out front and there was an alarming banging and crashing as he, Dean and Sam threw cut logs from the back of the truck onto the porch. It was a good thing whoever built the cabin had had the foresight to build it strong.
I poured a second cup of coffee and wandered over to the sofa, dropping onto it next to Lauren and leaning forward to look at the notes and files she had spread around herself.
She looked up, her eyes crinkling up in amusement. "Late night?"
"What makes you ask?" I shot back dryly, sitting down and looking at what she was reading. "Where are you up to?"
"Since Cas never went ballistic on Heaven, and Crowley let the levis out, can we safely assume that a lot of these outlines aren't happening?" she asked, looking down at the pages.
I looked through the pile she'd set aside. Sam's hallucinations being passed to a newly restored Cas. Garth and the Japanese alcohol demon. Bobby learning to be a ghost.
"I guess," I said uncertainly. Most of these had been written before I'd been chucked back into my world. In fact, I thought, the beginning of the season had been written or at least outlined before I'd been pulled through to here in the first place. Otherwise the writers or writer or whoever it was who seeing this stuff would've made changes. The season itself had been jerky and all over the place, was that because things had been changing here faster than they could keep up? I couldn't think of another reason, at least, not without several more cups of caffeine in my system.
"Castiel gave Sam a vial of his blood before we left," Lauren said. "Bobby thinks that the summoning spell will still work for Crowley, and he has a lead on the first vampire, and they already have the bone of a person as light as the leviathan are dark," she continued slowly. "Which just leaves us with what you've noted about the tablet. That cutting off the head will leave the body to flounder."
"Okay," I agreed cautiously, wondering if it was just a lack of sleep or if I'd lost some brain cells in the night. I wasn't sure what she was getting at.
"Given that the – uh – writers in your world didn't see a lot of the changes that have happened in the last few months, how accurate do you think that is?"
Ah. The penny dropped. It was a darned good point. A really, truly good one. And I didn't know.
She looked at me and I looked back at her and we both knew that there was only one way to find out that for sure.
"Roman got the tablet right at the end of the season," I said, looking down into my half-empty cup. "The Leviathans had Frank's hard drive and one of his employees was cracking it so there was someone on the inside of Dick's organisation who was at least familiar with the levis."
"Can we contact this person?" Lauren asked me, flipping through the outlines until she came to the Charlie episode. "We have a name. Charlene Bradbury?"
"It's an alias, but yeah, I think it'll be a starting point if we're discreet about it," I said, trying to remember the details of the episode. There'd been so many references and asides and callouts to a whole bunch of movies that a lot of the details of the plot had skipped by me.
The cacophony ceased against the outside wall and the door opened, Dean, Sam and Bobby stomping inside, all three layered in plaid shirts and coats, pulling off tough ranch gloves and glowing slightly red from the exercise.
"You two look glum," Bobby remarked as he walked to the coffee pot and poured himself a cup.
"There's a slight hitch," I told him, and all three men turned around to look at me. "We're going to need the tablet after all."
"Why?" Dean inched around Bobby and pulled two beers from the fridge, lobbing one to Sam. "We got the info it's got."
"Except for one piece," Lauren corrected him, moving over as Sam came to sit beside her. "The tablet says that if you cut off the head, the body will flounder –"
"But given how much everything changed, it's possible that's not right," I cut in, looking from Dean to Bobby as they sat down around the low table that was covered in files and books. "I mean, there's at least a fifty-fifty chance that the writers didn't want to continue with the leviathan story line and they changed what the tablet said to end it with Dick's death."
"What happened at the end of the final episode?" Bobby asked, leaning forward to look through the outlines.
"Cas held Dick and Dean stabbed him with the bone," I said, my face screwing up a bit as I tried to remember every detail of that scene. "Dean and Cas got sucked into Purgatory when Dick started to vaporise and then Crowley showed up and took Kevin, leaving Sam by himself in the room."
We'd been over this before. Dean hadn't been all that worried about Purgatory, having been in and out once already but Cas had looked a little worried when he'd heard the outline. I tried to explain that due to the writing, neither hunter nor angel seemed to have their wits about them, both just hanging around in the blast zone in a very uncharacteristic kind of way.
"Crowley said that his demons would take care of most of the leviathans, but he didn't say how –"
"So maybe they lose some of their mojo when the leader disappears?" Bobby asked.
"It's possible, especially if the Leviathan function something along the lines of an ordered society, a 'queen' or leader and tiers of workers?" Lauren suggested.
"How do we get this tablet?" Dean asked, cutting through the speculation with a typical one-track intensity. He was sitting on the arm of the chair I was in, and smelled rather appealingly of spruce and pine and sweat.
"Roman gets it sent from the dig to his corporate headquarters," I told him, reminding myself that the honeymoon-period of this relationship was not likely to last too long given the whole end of the world scenario and all that involved.
Bobby got up, going to the small rolltop desk in the corner of the room. He rummaged about under the lid for a moment or two and turned around, a shallow, large box in one hand.
"Alright, this is what we used to summon Crowley before," he said, crossing the room and handing it to Sam. "You need to get his blood and where he thinks that vamp's at. Lauren, where's that binding spell for the Alpha?"
"In the basement," she said, getting up as well and heading for the narrow door under the staircase. "We have all the ingredients except for rowan, you'll need to get the berries from a health food shop, I think."
"Crowley might just kill us," Dean remarked mildly.
"I don't think so," Sam said, looking at the spell. "He pulled the demons off us for a reason, and the outlines did support that, his confrontation with Roman not going all that well."
"When do you want to go?"
There was an edge in his voice and Sam looked up, his brow wrinkling a little at whatever he saw and recognised in his brother's face.
"In the morning, we'll just head east."
"Yeah, good," Dean said, and the edge had gone. Sam glanced at me as Lauren came back into the room. One dimple deepened fractionally and I looked blandly back at him. He had his own reasons for not wanting to leave straight away and they weren't that dissimilar from his brother's.
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
Incredibly, the rest of the day was spent almost normally. It started snowing around mid-afternoon and after helping to fill every wood-box the house contained, I went down to the basement with Lauren to talk to Monty about Purgatory and the levis.
One corner of Rufus' basement had been turned into a kind of guest room, with a bed, armchair, table by the wall and chair, the whole area warmed by a very old-fashioned bulbous iron furnace with a boiler that provided rising heat to the cabin and hot water. In a button-down shirt and sweater vest, Monty was sitting in the armchair reading when we came in. He looked up questioningly, tucking a bookmark in between the pages as he closed the book.
"What can I help you with?"
Cas was supposed to have returned him to Purgatory when we got back, but Monty seemed to be in no hurry. He was working his way through Eleanor's diaries, and making corrections in some of her files, a contribution to our cause, he'd told Bobby.
"What can you tell us about the Leviathans?" Lauren asked, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. I sat at the chair next to the table and pulled out a notebook and pen.
Monty laughed softly. "Well, the story is that they were God's first experiment with multi-cellular organisms," he said with a shrug, leaning back in the chair and pulling an old-fashioned pipe from his vest's pocket. "They were – are still, I suppose – voracious, greedy, amoral creatures who are only interested in species domination, eating and reproducing." He tapped the pipe bowl on the stone floor and refilled it, looking at Lauren with a cocked eyebrow. "Much like the other viral species on this little planet."
"Do they have a hive mentality?"
"Not really," Monty told her. "Not that structured. They are a single organism, I believe. Similar to the quaking aspens."
"Quaking aspens?" I repeated, brows shooting up.
"Oh yes, the trees are clones, having a single root system below ground and multiple trunks above," Monty said earnestly, looking around for a match. "The Leviathan are genetically structured in the same way, a single root, multiple clones, and possibly a reason that they are able to clone others from a single DNA sample as well, having the ability in themselves, as it were."
"So if we could kill the 'root' then the rest would die?" Lauren asked, passing the box of matches from the nightstand.
"Ah, well, there's the rub, isn't it?" Monty said, lighting the pipe. "Did every Leviathan come through the gate? Is what is on this plane now a breakaway system? Is it a new organism with clones from an original root? All good questions."
"And you don't know?" Lauren asked him, a slight edge to her voice.
"Well, of course not, my dear," he said, staring down at the bowl of the pipe which had gone out. "I was in her world for the last I-don't-know-how-many years. They didn't get out of Purgatory there."
"Well, thanks for your time," I said, putting my notebook with its three lines on trees away again.
"Anytime, happy to help," he said, picking up his book as we got up.
"Back to the books?" I asked Lauren as we climbed the steps back upstairs.
She looked around the cabin with its boxes and boxes of books stacked everywhere.
"Probably be quicker to just steal the tablet from Roman," she replied disgruntedly.
Dean was sprawled across the sofa, watching the tv set in the corner. Sam was improbably curled into the biggest armchair and reading. Bobby was nowhere to be seen.
"Where's Bobby?" I asked, stopping by the sofa and looking at Dean.
"Old man's nap," he said, shifting his legs and sitting up. "Let's go out tonight."
"What?" It's not like he started speaking another language, it was just…unexpected.
He got up, ignoring Sam's soft snort from the other side of the table and pushed me toward the stairs. "Out, you know, a few drinks, dinner…" he trailed off as we climbed the stairs.
"I think he means a date," Lauren clarified as she walked past.
I thought about it. I'd once started a sort-of relationship with a guy at work, and it'd taken four months to actually go on a date. At least he was thinking about it a bit earlier. "Sure, why not."
"All right."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
We left an hour later, Bobby's truck slipping and sliding down the snow-covered road on the particularly tight bends.
"Are we going to be able to get back?" I asked him, clinging to the doorframe as we slid sideways for several feet before Dean eased the truck back onto the curve and around the bend.
"We'll get a room," he said, the concentration on his face contradicting the blithely unconcerned tone of his voice.
Now I was beginning to understand the push for going out. I'd brought the single dress I owned, the uncrushable black cocktail dress, and I was wearing it, along with some densely opaque stockings and a thick wool coat. Dean's eyes had lit up, just a little when I'd emerged. For his part, he was wearing the new jeans, green shirt and new jacket, so I guess he had somewhere other than a bar'n'grill in mind. One thing about living with other people twenty-four-hours a day, seven-days-a-week that you don't get from watching it on a tv show is the occasional need to just look at some different faces, different wallpaper, different upholstery fabric even.
"Did you get hold of Frank?" I asked, mainly to take my mind off the ever-increasing detail of my visions of ending up down the mountainside.
Dean shook his head. "Tried three times, phone's out."
His tone was crisp and matter-of-fact but under that I could hear the worry. Frank wasn't quite all there, all of the time, but he wouldn't have cut a line of communication without a good reason.
We bumped down the final hundred yards of the gravel road and Dean made the turn for Kalispell, taking our speed up to sixty despite the poor visibility.
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
I have to say, I didn't really expect it but maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. On a date, Dean turned into a complete gentleman.
There was one restaurant in town, with an attached quiet bar, and we sat there, waiting for a table for nearly an hour, just talking about…well, nothing, really, and everything. Childhood, some of which I knew about, a lot of which I didn't. School. Hunting. Jim Murphy. Caleb. The times their father had dropped them off with Bobby and gone on a hunt, either on his own or with other hunters. Growing up with my aunt and uncle and cousin. Anecdotes from different times, different lives completely.
"What did Caleb do?" I asked, aware that I'd had two glasses of wine, was feeling warm and flushed, and could not have removed my gaze from his face to save my life.
"A lot of stuff, mainly he hustled military gear from his service buddies," Dean said. He was relaxed and that was why I couldn't keep my eyes off him. No wary look in his eyes, no holding back, his gaze was as frank as mine was, and he looked…comfortable…which was…amazing.
"He got a shipment of mines, from some base down south, turned up with it when we were at Bobby's one day," he grinned, shaking his head. "Told Bobby my dad had asked for them and told him to bring 'em there, Bobby was ready to shoot them both."
The waitress must have liked his smile as well, because we got terrific service as she showed us to a table by the window, fussing around him and making sure his silver and linen was exactly lined up. She gave up after a couple of minutes, though, because we were still talking, hadn't really stopped and he wouldn't look at her as he recounted a story about Sam and a stray dog and trying to hide it in a box in the back seat of the Impala, his father asking suspicious questions the whole way from Indiana to Kansas.
"Sam washed that poor damned mutt three times on the drive, in some kind of girls' shampoo that stunk the car out," Dean said, his eyes bright with the memory. "Dad kept looking around and asking what the hell the smell was."
If I hadn't already been head over heels, it would only have taken that evening.
I haven't got the slightest recollection of what we ordered or what turned up or what we ate. We were there until closing, and it was as easy as pie. You know I told you that the person you most want to talk to, is often the most difficult to get the words out with? I was wrong. It was all the usual getting-to-know-you stuff, well, interspersed by a lot of reminiscing about things I was pretty sure most people would have run screaming from, but it was natural and all the questions, those itty-bitty questions that pop into your head and are usually never answered, they all came to me and he answered them, and asked me the same sort of things – about music and movies, about what I ate when I was five and what I wouldn't, best memories and worst memories and I don't know, those six billion things you have to know about a person when you really want to know them, I guess.
"Uh, sir, we're closing now," the waitress, whose name tag said that she was Alice, said apologetically.
He looked up at her in surprise and then down at his watch. "Right, crap, sorry," he said, getting up and grabbing his coat, taking mine from the back of the chair and helping me into it as he handed Alice a card from his wallet and we walked to the bar.
"Think we'll find a motel open now?" he asked me in a low voice as we waited for the card to come back.
If it were me, I'd have said no, no way. That's just the way my luck runs. I'd have headed back for the cabin, gotten stuck halfway up and would have frozen to death in the truck and been found in the spring thaw. Dean, however, had some little luck card up his sleeve. We got into the truck and drove about five hundred yards and there it was, neon-pink against the black sky, blinking on and off – 'Vacancy'.
I laughed as he pulled in with a knowing smirk and stopped in front of the office. They had one room left, the clerk had told him. He drove the truck around the main building to the back and parked it in the single free parking slot and we got out, my heels skating on the thin glaze of ice over the concrete walk, my expression frozen in some oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-die rictus before he caught me.
Inside it was about the usual for cheap motels that were still open after midnight in small towns. There was a big queen-sized bed. Two nightstands. One sofa. One armchair. A table and three chairs. An open door led into a postage-stamp-sized bathroom and the wall to the right of the doorway held a long counter with kitchen facilities.
I walked in, took off my coat and immediately felt a deluge of shyness. Don't ask me why. It felt like a first date, I guess. A great first date with someone you definitely want to spend more time with, except we already were. Spending time together, I mean. A lot of time together. As well as other things. Dean must've taken in the situation when he locked the door and turned around and saw me because he smiled.
"I had a wonderful time," I blurted out and his smile got wider.
"Is that your way of saying goodnight?"
"No, I – I just –" I waved my hand around vaguely, unable to even think what I'd wanted to say.
"Told you I wasn't a jerk," he said quietly, that smile still playing around his lips. He walked over to me and looked down. "You didn't believe me?"
His arms went around me and his fingers slid over my back, finding and easing down the zipper of my dress slowly as he leaned close, his mouth soft and demanding and completely sure of what he was doing. I have a weakness for take-charge kind of men. It goes straight to my knees.
On the up-side, I wasn't feeling shy any more. On the down-side, I couldn't breathe. You know the phrase, takes your breath away? Not just romantic trash-talk. Really happens. Not breathing also makes you very light-headed.
There are definitely times when the world just disappears, takes a vacation, stops functioning, I don't know what to call it, but I could feel it just not there any more. The room we were standing in remained, and it all narrowed down to just this place, just this time and absolutely nothing else. No Leviathans. No demons. No angels or monsters or ghosts or warded cabins in the woods or political campaigns or corporations trying to turn the human race into niblets…or anything. I couldn't remember the smells of citrus or strawberries, probably because there were none in that room and therefore they no longer existed.
And making love…a kind of saccharine and coy and over-used term that doesn't begin to convey the real McCoy anyway…is as different from having sex as…as…eating real, Belgian chocolates is from eating non-sweetened Fair Trade chocolate. I know, I know, what a crappy analogy. Being light-headed on account of not being able to breathe does that to you.
If a fairy or something had shown up then and asked me what I wished for…it would've been to make that night last forever. No more world. No more worries. When I asked Dean what he'd wish for later, he shook his head, his expression regretful but serious.
"I have to do my job," he said, his arms tightening around me. "But I'd've asked for time off," he added, his mouth brushing over my temple. "Time like this, on a regularly scheduled program."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
We got back to the cabin at eight a.m. and Sam was waiting for us next to the beaten-up SUV Dean had stolen from somewhere a few days before. It did have the bonus of having a tape deck and more-or-less working stereo in it.
"End of the world, saving people," Sam said caustically as we got out of the truck. "Family business? Any of this ringing a bell, Dean?"
Giving him a wide, relaxed grin, Dean shrugged. "I'm here, aren't I? Don't go thinking that wasn't a monumental sacrifice for the greater good."
"Hmmph." Sam turned away and went to talk to Lauren who was standing on the other side of the car.
"This isn't going to take that long," Dean said, walking around the truck to me.
"Famous last words," I told him, frowning. "Don't challenge the powers that be."
"Okay," he agreed with a faint smile. "We have to do that more often."
"If you insist," I said, sliding my arms under his coat as he got closer.
"Hell, yeah, I do." He didn't let that kiss go on too long and I got a very brief glimpse of something like regret when he stepped back, half-hidden under a smug smirk. I couldn't help but wonder if all the interruptions would make the whole unbearability thing last longer, or if it would end up making things more perfunctory quicker. You know what I'm talking about, right? The first few months of a new relationship, insatiability for everything, yada yada. One of the girls I'd known back in my old life used to break up with guys as soon as she thought that part was over, just to get it again with someone new.
I walked to the porch steps as they got into the car, Lauren meeting me at the top and we watched them drive off, the chunky tyres throwing a small rooster tail of powder snow up behind them.
"Good night?" Lauren asked as we turned for the door together.
"Great night," I said. "Yours?"
"Very athletic."
I snorted at the remembered scenes from the show, trying to knock the sticky powder from the bottom of my single pair of snow-unsuitable heels. Lauren glanced back and shook her head.
"Just take them off and leave them next to the stove," she advised. "I'm dying for breakfast."
Bobby looked up as we came in, a glint in his eyes hidden immediately by the shadow of his cap.
"Can we get back to work now?"
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
"Hey, you two!" Bobby called from the living room. It was just before dinner time and I turned away from the stove as Lauren came up from the basement. "Look at this."
On the tv set, Dick Roman was standing in front of a podium, surrounding by the press. "– it gives me great pleasure to announce that our new cancer research lab is up and running and we're anticipating some real breakthroughs in gene-therapy treatment for sufferers of this terrible disease worldwide –"
"Mr Roman, what do you say to allegations of food poisoning in your Jersey Biggerson's restaurant chain?"
"Those allegations are completely unfounded, Mr – uh – Peters," Roman said, his eyes as flat and disinterested as a snake's. "We stand by our quality code for all our enterprises."
"Mr Roman!" Another reporter shouted from the back. "I hear that your dig in Jordan was successful?"
Roman's eyes narrowed as he stared at the man and I felt an instant flush of alarm for the reporter, wondering if he was going to get munched for breaking news that Dick obviously didn't want public.
"That's right, the team's found some unique and priceless historical artefacts so far," Roman said in a cool tone. "We'll be giving more information on that when the findings have all been verified, of course."
"Mr Roman –"
Bobby hit the Mute button and turned to look at Lauren and I. "Cancer research?"
"Food additive research," I said. "That must be the building in Wisconsin."
"How do we find out about this tablet?" Lauren looked from Bobby to me, one brow lifted.
"Easiest way would probably be to call the international couriers as one of Dick's staff and make enquiries," I said distractedly. "If that doesn't work, then checking the flight schedules of whatever private planes he has available."
"Good idea," Bobby said, looking at Lauren. She nodded and went to the laptop. Bobby turned back to me. "What Monty was sayin' about the levis – do we even need to check the tablet?"
"To be honest, Bobby, I don't know," I said uncertainly. "I'd hate to be wrong about this."
"Good point."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
"Bad news," Dean said, his voice clear but tinny over the phone's speaker.
Bobby sat on one side of the table, Lauren and I on the other, the phone in between us.
"Thrill me," Bobby said sourly.
"Crowley wouldn't give up his blood until we've got the others'," Sam said.
"Balls."
"Got the location for the alpha vamp," Dean added. "North Dakota so we'll be back in a day or so."
"Somethin'," Bobby allowed ungraciously. "Looks like Roman's getting the tablet sooner rather than later. We've been trying to find out how he's bringing it into the country and when but so far no luck."
"If Monty was right, then trying to get the tablet might be more trouble than it's –"
Bobby cut Sam off. "Even it's mostly right, we still don't know how the damned levis work. Do they lose abilities? Do they drop dead? The tablet should say more about that at least."
"Yeah, alright," Dean said, after muttering something to his brother. "We'll let you know where we are as soon as we're done with the alpha."
"Right."
Bobby reached out for the phone, his hand hovering over it when Sam spoke again.
"Dean, about what we were talking about before, I know exactly what you mean. I just meant to say that I think it's great you're in love, man."
"I didn't say that," Dean's voice came over the speaker, loud, clear and somewhat defensively. "What I said was that –"
"Guys, still on the speaker," Bobby said, his growl drowning out what Dean had said.
"Doesn't mean that it's not," Sam said, just as loudly. Bobby stared at the phone fixedly. "I mean, you gotta take a risk –"
"SAM! DEAN! You're on speaker, idjits!" Bobby roared at the phone.
There was a moment's tense silence then the line died and Bobby grabbed his phone, picking it up and shoving it in his pocket as he got up from the table. He was careful not to look over the table at either Lauren or me and he stomped away for the basement door.
Lauren and I sat there, mouths hanging open. She recovered before I did, looking at me.
"Well, I guess that's good news, huh?"
I turned to look at her, hearing the tendons in my neck creak. I didn't know what to say to that. He hadn't really said anything himself at all.
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
Personally, all I could think about was the way the vampire had smelled, when it had grabbed me. In the show, the Alpha Vampire was sophisticated, chilling, frighteningly intelligent and completely predatory. I liked the character a lot – when I didn't have to face him in real life and more relevant right this minute, when I didn't have to think about Dean and Sam facing him in real life.
On the sofa, Lauren had curled herself into a ball at one end and was ostensibly reading. Actually, she was chewing her fingernails as she re-read the same page over and over. I could tell that because she hadn't turned a page in fifteen minutes. I knew the exact time because although I was holding my own book, I hadn't turned a page for god-knows-how-long either but the last time I'd looked at my watch had been fifteen minutes ago.
Bobby exhaled noisily from the table. "They'll be fine. How 'bout fixing us something to eat, Therese?"
"Not for me," Lauren said quickly, looking up.
"I'm not all that hungry either, Bobby –" I started to say and he snorted.
"Look, they'll be fine, I'm tellin' ya," he said, looking from me to Lauren. "Your outlines'll tell ya that, Therese."
"They've been wrong –"
"We can't trust those –"
Lauren and I started to protest at the same time and Bobby raised his hands. At the same moment, his computer beeped imperiously and he walked over to the desk, muttering something about emotional females and too much oestrogen.
"Ah, for god's sake," Bobby muttered as he stared at the screen. "Balls!"
"What?" I put the book down gratefully, struggling out of the depths of the sagging armchair and going to stand behind him. An email was on the screen. An email from Frank Devereaux.
- Sam and Dean, if you're reading this, I'm dead...or worse. This e-mail was sent because some prince is trying to hack into my hard drive right this second. So unless it's you, you got trouble.
My drive is full of compromising info. Your new aliases, hangouts, where you stored your car... -
I skimmed through the rest. "Tracker? He put a tracker on his system?"
"Looks like," Bobby said, pulling out his phone with an unnecessary yank. He dialled Dean's number.
"Where are you?"
There was a moment or two of silence as Bobby stared at the screen. "Yeah, we got it. How long?...Alright…Yeah, yeah, I'll tell them, just get your asses back here, pronto," he grumbled and hung up.
"Where are they?" Lauren asked, unfolding herself from the sofa and walking around the table.
"'Bout eight hours out," Bobby said, still looking at the email. "They got the blood, they're still in one piece and they've got Meg with them."
"Meg?" Lauren looked at me quizzically.
"She's a demon," I explained shortly. "But without Cas, how'd Meg find them?"
"Seems she knew where the alpha was as well," Bobby said tersely, pulling a bottle of whiskey from the drawer of the desk. "She's offering a deal."
"What?"
"Not that kind of deal," he said, looking at me as he capped the bottle and picked up his glass. "She wants to kill Crowley. She's offering her assistance in taking down Roman and Crowley both."
I looked at the table top and tried to remember what side angles, if any, Meg had had in the show. Just Cas, I thought, rubbing a hand over my forehead as if I could rub some clarity into my memories.
"Neither of you seem to think that this Meg is all that trustworthy?" Lauren sort of asked, looking from Bobby to me.
"Well, that'd be because she's not," Bobby growled, swallowing his whiskey. "She's the demon who killed John and Caleb and Jim; she gave the order that damned near crippled me for life."
In more ways than one, I thought, remembering the scene.
"In the show, she was different, Bobby," I said, remembering her earnest speech and when she killed the angels. "Lucifer being back in the cage, and missing out on torturing Crowley. She doesn't betray anyone."
"That's on a tv show in another world, Therese," Bobby reminded me unnecessarily. "One that we're finding more and more friggin' holes in every time we look around."
I couldn't argue with him on that. "The cabin's warded."
"Meg broke through a trap before," he said, pouring himself another glass of whiskey.
"Yeah, she did, but she couldn't after Azazel died," I remembered. "Why would that be?"
"Do I look like the demonology handbook?"
I walked around the table and went to the kitchen. I wanted to cook suddenly. It would give me something productive to do while I tried to work out why that suddenly seemed so darned important.
Scurrying around the cupboards, I dragged out vegetables and started chopping them up. I didn't think I'd ever go beyond the very basics but it was calming in a repetitive, Zen-like way.
The big question was…what had changed. Meg had busted out Bobby's living room trap with relative ease, calling up some kind of spell to do it. She'd never done it again, at least, not that we saw on the show. Could she still do it or had that spell been a one-off?
By the time everything had been chucked into a pot and shoved in the oven, I'd realised that the big question hopefully wasn't going to be about Meg, but about Charlie. On the show, she'd triggered Frank's booby traps and sent the email. Through the GPS software in Frank's hard disk drive, beeping its position to the satellites overhead, Sam and Dean had found its location. Roman's headquarters. That bit we already knew. But was Charlie – well, Charlie? – in the real world? This world? I mean the show had wanted Felicia Day mainly. How much of Charlie was going to be like that?
I sighed. Probably not all that much. And even if she was the world's best hacker, would she believe in the contents of Frank's hard drive? Having seen hundreds, if not thousands, of better hoaxes on the net?
I told myself to shut up and stop second-guessing everything. It wasn't helping and it was knotting up my stomach that had finally started to unknot with the news that the Winchesters had gotten in and out of the vampire's lair safely. Maybe I should buy shares in Tums? It was a sure bet that it wasn't going to get any easier.
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
It was three a.m. when the headlights hit the bedroom ceiling and swung across the room, disappearing at the wall. The sound of the engine died a moment later and I was happy to give up the whole self-delusional process of pretending I was sleeping. Nothing says mental health like pretending to yourself that you're doing something you know very well you're not.
I grabbed a housecoat and took the stairs two at a time, pulling up short in the living room as a woman, not tall, rather sharp-featured, followed Dean inside and stopped just past the threshold, looking down at the rug. Bobby got up from the sofa and smiled coldly at her.
"Meg."
"Is this any way to welcome an ally?" she asked, apparently rooted to the spot.
"We're getting picky about our allies," he told her.
"Dean...," she said in a warning voice. Dean shrugged, pulling off his coat and dumping it on the chair as he saw me at the foot of the stairs.
"Not my house," he tossed back over his shoulder.
I couldn't help the fast look-over I gave him as he stopped in front of me, and I looked back up to his face guiltily, expecting to see impatience or exasperation. I was surprised by a slightly amused warmth in his eyes.
"Told you we'd be fine," he said quietly, standing close.
"Am I supposed to believe everything you say?" I asked him.
"Hey, trust me," he said, turning a bit toward the kitchen, sniffing exaggeratedly. "Any of that left over?"
"Plenty." I drew in a deep breath and waved my hand at the table. "Sit down."
Meg stood glowering by the door as Sam and Dean sat down at the table and Lauren got them a couple of beers and I dished out the only slightly-overcooked stew and cut up enough bread to mop up the sauce.
"Alright," Bobby said, sitting on a chair at the table backwards, facing the demon. "Let's hear it."
"All I care about is killing Crowley," Meg said, folding her arms across her chest.
"Why?"
"Look, I'm simpler than you think. I've figured one thing out about this world – just one, pretty much. You find a cause, and you serve it. Give yourself over, and it orders your life," she said, staring at him. "Lucifer and Yellow Eyes – their mission was it for me."
"So, what?" Dean asked through a mouthful of bread. "We should trust you because you wanted to free Satan from Hell?"
"I'm talking 'cause', douchebag, as in reason to get up in the morning. Obviously, these things shift over time. We learn, we grow," she explained with a shrug. "Now, for me currently, the cause is bringing down the King. And I know we'll need help to do it."
"Crowley ain't the problem this year," Bobby said acidly.
Meg looked from him to Dean then to Sam. "When are you gonna get it? Crowley's always the problem!" She shook her head. "He's just waiting for the right moment to strike."
I blinked a few times. I'd heard that speech before. "How are we supposed to help you kill Crowley?"
She turned her head and looked at me. "And who the hell are you?"
"I'm the player to be named later," I said, suppressing the internal giggle at finally being able to use that line. "Does it matter?"
"You're not from here," she said slowly. "And I'll just bet you're the one Crowley's looking for."
"Shut up, Meg," Dean and Sam said in deep, warning unison.
She looked at them, half-smiling. "Don't worry, boys. I know what I'm supposed to do. And it isn't screw with Sam and Dean or their friends."
"You have the only working summoning spell for Crowley," she said, her gaze moving slowly around the room. "He wants the Leviathan dead as much as you do, so for the moment, he's willing to deal. When he's met his end of the bargain, you step aside and let me do what I have to do."
"And what help do you give in return?" Sam asked, leaning back in his chair, his gaze flickering over to me for a second. I gave the smallest headshake I could manage. I had no idea of what Meg might suggest. This bit wasn't in the episodes.
"I don't know how you heard of the tablet," she said, standing straight. "But did you know that there are three?"
I finally got that old saying about hearing a pin drop. There was zero doubt that the demon had gotten everyone's attention. I guess it shouldn't have been such a surprise, both Cas and Crowley had known about them, maybe Azazel's daughter had better contacts in Hell than anyone'd thought.
"Pristis, Daemon and Angelus," Lauren said, with perfect timing, her voice dry.
Meg nodded, smiling. "The demon tablet is in Hell. Crowley has it. I can get it. And I know where the Angel tablet is as well."
"And that would be a help to us, how, exactly?" Dean questioned.
"The Leviathan tablet has the full instructions on killing them, capturing them, opening and closing Purgatory as well as a helluva lot of history on that whole beginning of Time era," Meg said, her tone caustic. "What do you think the others have on them?"
Two thunderous silences in ten minutes. It was quite an achievement.
"Can't see that works in your favour," Bobby said doubtfully. "Either way."
"I told you, my cause is simple." She looked at him. "And closing the gates of Hell would achieve it just as well as anything else."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~
Dean paced up and down the living room behind the sofa. "It's a trap, right?"
"Even if it is, we get rid of the levis and deal with Meg and Crowley later," Sam argued. "And we're still in front."
They'd broken the demon circle and let Meg go two hours ago, and we'd – or rather everyone else – had been debating the pros and cons of believing her proposal ever since. Dean had painted over the break and it was intact again but no one was closer to a consensus.
"Gotta hit!" Bobby said, leaning over the keyboard of his computer, his face all lit up. "Roman's got a flight out of the country in four hours, special priority."
"You have a destination and return?" Lauren asked.
"No, I can't get clearance to see that," he said, his voice flattening instantly. "Sonofabitch's got more'n thirty buildings in fifteen cities in the country – we're not gonna be able to track it remotely."
"No," Dean said, making up his mind. "No, we need someone on the inside who can get into his private files."
Bobby's phone rang and he answered it absently. "Singer Auto…who is this?"
There was a short beat of silence, then Bobby said disbelievingly. "Frank?"
Sam's laptop pinged and he turned from Bobby to look at the screen, a stream of data being sent by an anonymous user rapidly filling the desktop.
Bobby turned to look at him. "Frank says he's sending you stuff?"
Sam nodded and Lauren got up and went to the table to sit next to him, both of them staring at the files being downloaded.
"Yeah, we're getting' it," Bobby said into the phone. "What the hell, Frank?"
He listened for maybe two minutes, then put down the phone. Dean leaned on the back of the sofa and waved a hand at him.
"Well?"
"Says he got out about thirty seconds ahead of Roman's muscle, had to leave most of his stuff behind," Bobby summarised. "He's out of the country and won't be coming back anytime soon. He had a backup and that's what he's sent to you."
Dean glanced at me, rolling his eyes. "Guess that rules out Frank as a way to get our mugs off the fed databases."
"What is that stuff?" I asked Sam, leaning over the back of the sofa to see.
"Good question," Sam said, randomly opened the files as they downloaded. "Info of the levis, most of it stuff he's already passed on."
"Look," Lauren said, taking over the mouse. "Business records, from when they took over Roman Enterprises. This at least has all their business details…and employee details…" She opened more files. "And banking details…money movement…the dig location…correspondence and communications until last week…"
Dean moved to the table, leaning over Sam's shoulder. "Alright, that's enough for us to get going. We talk to this Charlie and see if we can find an angle to get the info on the tablet's location, and ETA."
"Uh, in the episode, Charlie's a girl and quite idealistic –" I offered hesitantly. We were once again totally off-script and my brain was giving a very good impersonation of scrambled eggs.
"Terry's right," Sam said. He turned to Lauren. "Can you make sense of all of this?"
"If you can give me a couple of days," Lauren said cautiously.
"Dean, you, me and Terry need to get going," Sam said, pushing the laptop around to Lauren as he got up. "Headquarters is Chicago; we can be there and get the tablet as soon as it comes in."
"Terry's not going," Dean said with a frown. "You heard Meg, Crowley's looking for her."
"And he won't find her if we're on the move, but we will need her to talk to this Charlie and explain the situation if she hasn't bought the leviathan crap Frank had on his drive."
"Why wouldn't she listen to us? To you," he qualified, seeing Sam's brow crease up. "If not me."
Lauren laughed and looked at us. "Civilian faced with you three, I know who I'd find least threatening." Waving a hand at the files still covering the low table next to the sofa, she added, "Besides, from those we know you two aren't Charlie's type."
~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~