Episode Seven
"Sanguis Sanctus"
Chapter Five
"Okay, so Detective Warner gets transferred the day after he talks to Dean. It's a little crazy to think that's a coincidence, right?" Kevin said.
Crowley shrugged, grinned bright. "No such thing when it comes to these boys. So what're we thinking, Scooby? Warner's the bad guy?"
"He wasn't there when Sam went to talk to him the night before he vanished. He told Dean he had a family emergency."
"Again with the coincidences."
"And then even though it says he transferred the day after Dean talked to him, he took the afternoon off the day Sam went missing."
Crowley shook his head. "Well if he is the bad guy, he's no criminal mastermind. If Sam hadn't called Dean to say he wasn't coming back, this guy would be the first person on the rack."
Kevin ate his burger absent-mindedly. "Okay. So this cop's involved. Maybe Sam was right thinking Warner was keeping the real Feds off the case. Maybe Sam got too close and Warner had to take him out."
"Why not just kill him?"
"Um. Maybe because no one wants Dean Winchester on their ass?"
"Good point."
"Okay. I'm gonna have Charlie run down this Frank Warner guy. Tomorrow, we oughta follow Sam's footsteps." He tapped the notebook. "Every person Sam was due to interview that morning."
"Got a working theory?"
"Do you?" Kevin put his burger down, scowled. "I thought you were here for your brains."
"Half a brain, remember?"
"Well?"
Crowley looked off. Pressed his lips together. "If Sam's been taken, as you say, how can there be sightings of him, the ones Deano's looking into?"
Kevin shrugged. "A shapeshifter maybe-"
"Kev." Crowley looked uncomfortable. "There's more to those sightings than Dean wants us to know about, but I happen to know - they couldn't have been a shapeshifter. Had to have been Sam."
Kevin frowned. "And you were gonna say something, when?"
"When I had to. It's a matter of Sam's personal private business, and you know how fussy he gets when it comes to his privacy."
"And you know this... how?"
Crowley opened his mouth to answer.
Kevin put a hand up. "Wait. Do I want to know? Do I need to know?"
"I dunno. Do you? It's probably in those books somewhere."
"Is it important to the case?"
"It could be."
Kevin looked at his laptop, unhappy. On the one hand, Sam's privacy had been something Kevin defended, especially once it was clear that Sam was dealing with serious, heavy stuff and had been for a long time. Being crazy, having suffered the way he had, tortured - stuff Sam didn't need other people knowing about unless he told them.
But on the other hand, Dead Sam didn't care about his privacy, right?
"Okay. How do you know it could only have been Sam? The abridged version, okay?"
Crowley nodded, serious as Kevin had ever seen him. He took Sam's stuff personally too, Kevin remembered. He was practically a worshipper at the Church of Sam.
"I have it on good authority," he said cagily, like he was picking and choosing how to tell Kevin without telling Kevin, "that those sightings of Moose are actually the sites of a certain kind of exorcism that only Moose can do. You remember he was briefly psychic?"
Kevin nodded. "Charlie mentioned."
"Well. This is a thing he can do. Only him."
"If he can do some super special exorcism, why doesn't he do it all the time?"
"Squirrel frowns on it," Crowley said. "It's psychic, therefore it's not natural, and anything supernatural has to go down."
Kevin made a face. "Practically everyone we work with is supernatural in some way. I mean, I'm a prophet. You're the king of hell-"
"Bad example, Deano's not my biggest fan, but I see your point." He shrugged. "Guess it's different when it's Sam. Anyway, Sam doesn't do it anymore. Until now, I guess."
Kevin slumped in his chair. If those sightings really were Sam, then what was he even hoping to find here? "I don't want to give up."
"Me neither."
"I still think something doesn't add up here."
"Me too."
"I mean why would he take everything from the motel room but then leave the car for Dean at the last interviewee's house?"
"I don't know."
"So we're staying to check this out."
"I'm with you."
"Okay." Kevin nodded. Then he frowned at Crowley. "Stop agreeing with me. It's creepin' me out."
"Hey man!" called Trent from his front door. "You don't wanna know about the vampire chick?"
Dean raised his brows at Cas. Turned on his heel. "The what?"
"The vampire chick. Isn't that what you wanted to ask this guy about?"
Dean looked around, up and down the street. Heaved a breath, came back up to the guy's front door. "What about a vampire chick?"
"Okay, so I woke up, right, and she was there, and she was like, right there. Talking to me like, scared. And then she looked pissed like, she knew who I was but I didn't know who she was, and then she was like-"
"Why do you think she was a vampire chick?"
"She wanted my blood, man."
Dean rolled his eyes. So, vampire chick was probably the bitch on the phone, maybe not a demon herself, but running out for demon blood take-out for Sam. Maybe she was another hunter. Either way.
"Know where she went?"
"No man. I didn't want to. She had like, vampire eyes. And vampire teeth."
O... kay, so maybe not another hunter. And probably not an actual vampire either, considering this guy wouldn't know a real one if it bit him on the neck. But she was something.
Great. Leave it to Sam to shack up with a monster. Again.
Kevin sat at the table in their motel room and stared at the notebook, willing the puzzle pieces to come into focus.
"What if they're all in on it together?"
"That's a theory," Crowley acknowledged.
"Why do you want to believe so bad that Sam just ditched us?"
"I don't. I just want to make sure we're following the right trail here, biscuit. For your theory to work, someone's got to have been watching Moose the whole time, they'd have had to be waiting wherever they thought they could get him alone, had another conspirator in easy distance, two bodies who weren't out of place in the neighborhood. All in the time it took for Harriet Housewife back there to wash her face and come out of her house."
"That's not such a long leap, if someone has resources."
"Well it's not demons. I'd have heard about it."
Kevin held his breath a moment in thought. "Okay. Go with me here. Sam and Dean are investigating these murders. None of the arcane markings make sense with any one monster, the organs that got harvested weren't the same for each victim... Are you seeing where I'm going?"
Crowley raised a brow. "I think so, but I'd like to hear you talk a little more about organ harvesting. Very stimulating. To my... thought process. Go on."
Kevin rolled his eyes. "So, what if it's like, a bunch of different monsters who all need something different from the victims, and they kinda... pool their resources. Fewer victims, the police are baffled and write the multiple murders off as copy cats, the Feds don't get involved. Hunters who pick up the trail are confused because they can't pin down any one monster."
"A monster coalition."
"Yeah." Kevin shrugged. "Is it possible?"
"Maybe. Let's see the police files again."
Kevin shoved them to Crowley and pulled his buzzing phone out of his pocket. "Hey Charlie. Got anything for me?"
"Wow, you totally sound like a pro."
"Shut up."
"Roger, Agent. Okay, so Natalie Smith exists, as in she's a person. But she hasn't been seen in months. She had some problems with the police, ran off. They haven't been looking too hard for her."
"And this Frederick guy?"
"He also exists, theoretically. But no one I've called can confirm they've actually seen him go in and out of his apartment and his landlord isn't picking up."
Kevin frowned.
"Okay, thanks. I'll call you if I need anything else."
They hung up and Kevin tried to relax, get into tablet-mode. He'd been getting good at it, a sort of zen space where the symbols arranged themselves into some kinda sense. He sorted through the files, the images - something that helped him focus was writing, drawing symbols. Before he'd really realized what he was doing, he had half a page of symbols gleaned from the photographs of the bodies. No wonder Sam and Dean had hit a dead end with them; they didn't seem to have anything in common except maybe... the idea of holiness. But that was half the symbols out there when you boiled them down, so.
Holiness, or purity, or like... kingliness. Rulership. Or leadership? Salvation? Well, either way, he buckled down and copied the rest of the symbols onto his page with more intention, letting himself drift into it. Even without the tablet, it seemed like he'd gotten the hang of getting into that kind of heaven-headspace. Too soon, the symbols were done, littered across his page dense, twice over, and he frowned. Pulled over Sam's statement of the night before he went missing, and started to reconstruct the ring he saw on the guy Frederick's finger.
When he was done, he looked at it. Stared. Nothing about it made sense. He turned it upside down-
"Holy crap."
He recognized some of the symbols from the demon tablet. They didn't make sense in context and maybe the guy was just some kind of occult fanatic who had no idea his symbols were real, but still-
"Hey. Does this mean anything to you?" He turned his notebook around and shoved it at Crowley.
Crowley looked at it for a long moment, blinking in what Kevin thought was confusion. He turned it around, sideways, tilted his head, blocked out parts of it with his thumb, blocked out other parts, squinted at it, for so long and so comedically that Kevin blew out a frustrated breath and reached to take it back, fuck off Crowley, you don't have to be an ass about it, but then Crowley said:
"Um. This isn't - it doesn't make sense."
"What?"
"This is Lucifer's bloody symbol, but the rest of the thing doesn't make any sense. It's like someone who doesn't speak infernal tongues has tried to reconstruct something out of whatever they read in a book."
"So like, this guy's just an occult weirdo who found a bunch of stuff to threw it together so he could look cool?"
Crowley looked doubtful. "Probably."
"Probably? What else could it be?"
"I'm not sure."
"What if Warner's the wrong direction? What if the guy Sam ran into that night with this ring is actually the thing they were hunting?"
Crowley frowned at Kevin in thought. "The boys get a little too close, and when they split up, the bad guy goes after Sam how? By staging a little domestic?"
"They were both in on it, maybe?"
"She made a police report and everything, gave them her boyfriend's real name."
"A boyfriend no one can confirm having seen in weeks. What if they were establishing identities to stay under hunter radar?"
"And just happened to start carving up bodies in the most gratuitously hunter-catnip way possible?"
Kevin shrugged. "Maybe they couldn't help themselves."
Crowley made a face.
"Well what's your theory?" Kevin demanded.
Crowley pressed his lips together.
"You don't have one, do you. You think he's gone off, left us."
"Don't get bothered, darling-"
"I thought you agreed with me. Why did you even come-"
"And let you go off hunting on your lonesome?"
"That's why you came?"
"No. No, it's not," Crowley said, serious. "If you're right, then of course we need to do whatever we can to find Sam and bring him home. If you're right, I want to help. I just happen to think it's a biggish if."
Kevin closed his eyes a long moment. Strangling Crowley in a broiling blood rage wouldn't help anyone. And he probably couldn't do that anyway. Breathe deep, Tran. In and out.
"Say Sam hasn't just up and left us," he said. "You aren't helping him by just thinking up ways I'm wrong about it, are you? So come up with some theories about what could really be going on here, or go home."
Crowley gazed at the floor, mouth moving in chastised thought.
"Well? Are you with me?"
Crowley nodded, didn't meet his eye. "Yeah, yeah I'm with you." He looked up. "Of course I'm with you."
"So give me a theory."
Crowley chuckled. "Let's see. Deadly Duo stalk Sam and attempt to take him out, but Sam manages to run them off one-handed-"
"He runs the guy off."
"Right, right. Takes the lady to the police station where she makes a full report-" He stopped, made a face. "I suppose if she were trying to make applesauce out of rotten apples-"
"That's not a thing-"
"They went after Sam, but failed. She might present it as a domestic, give out her man's real name and address for some realism. They've had these personae for a while, so she knows it'll check out, at least on the surface. They wait for the next time Sam's alone and this time, manage to take him out." Crowley frowned. "Why not just kill him and deliver him to Dean to gloat? Why not use him to lure Dean to a location where they can kill him as well?"
Kevin was nodding. "And why stage these exorcisms only Sam can apparently do? Why fake phone calls? How - Oh my god, is there such a thing as mind control?"
Crowley raised a brow. "Theoretically, Abaddon could- but Sam's tattoo protects against that."
"Unless they removed it."
"I don't think it's Abaddon."
"What if she's taking out demons who don't side with her."
"Hang on-"
"What if-"
"Okay. I'm not trying to contradict you here, but we're getting a little far afield. What's the connection between whatever these monsters are and Abaddon? She isn't usually one for using lesser creatures to do her dirty work. She'd have shown up in a swirl of over-dramatic smoke and done it all herself. Sam would have never gotten away the first time if she was involved."
"You don't know that. Sam's taken care of her before."
"Oh I know," Crowley agreed. "But he's not quite the focused little drone he was then. He's running on fumes these days, even moreso than in that church."
"So then what?"
"Honestly? I don't know."
"Okay," Kevin said, standing. He reached for his bag, started shoving things into it. "I'm gonna go talk to the witness."
"Gives me chills when you talk like you know what you're doing, really."
There weren't any signs of monster activity in the area. No missing people or pets, no strange deaths. They'd have never come to this town if it weren't for the strange burnt out marks in the ground that meant demon exorcism. But there was nothing here, just a tiny town surrounded by cornfields.
But Dean was nothing if not thorough, so before striking out for the next site of demon exorcism, he and Cas blanketed the little town with questions. But of course, the vampire chick had probably left with Sam, and Sam wasn't likely to have allowed her to snack, so it wasn't surprising that they didn't find any reports of strange activity in the area.
That was one thing, at least. Sam shacking up with another monster chick meant one more monster who wasn't going to be acting on her urges. Sam might have been way off the reservation, but he was still Sam.
Still, they asked around. The demon had been here for a reason, Sam and vamp chick had been here for demon blood, the demon must have been doing something to draw attention to itself - something didn't add up.
Dean sighed and slammed himself back into the chair at the motel room table, throwing his head back. This shit was frustrating.
"You're frustrated."
Dean looked up. "Always perceptive."
"You've tracked Sam before."
"There weren't any reports of stolen cars leaving Lincoln. He isn't using any of his aliases. His GPS is turned off. Charlie said when she tried to hack the system to turn it on remotely, he'd had some kinda security thing put on preventing external apps from accessing his phone or something, I don't know. She was workin' on it, but that doesn't even matter now because apparently his phone is completely off." Dean took a drink from his beer, aware he was rambling. He glanced at Cas and away.
"You aren't telling me something."
"You're getting good."
"Dean. Please. If it's about Sam-"
"No, it's not about Sam." Not really, anyway. But it was clear now that Sam had been clued in on Dean's little deal with Abaddon by someone who vamoosed him right out of there on the spot, no stolen car required.
Cas didn't need to know about Abaddon, but-
"Sam's runnin' around with someone, right? Someone who can vanish him around from place to place."
"Yes?"
"But it can't be this so-called vampire chick, because no monster can do that, can they?"
Cas frowned. "A demon who didn't want Sam to drink from her for some reason?"
"So Sam and vamp-chick and/or demon-prude hunt down this Trent guy for some go-juice for Sammy-"
"And once they have it, Sam exorcises the demon and they leave." Cas looked troubled.
"Yeah. I guess."
"But Trent didn't see Sam, only this woman."
Dean studied the tabletop, shook his head. "I don't know, man. Maybe there'll be something at the next place."
Cas nodded, started to take off his jacket.
"No, no, leave it on. I wanna get out of here asap."
"Dean, we drove all morning, we've searched all day. Shouldn't we-"
"We aren't stopping until I find Sammy, and that's final. You wanna go home, catch a bus. I'll buy you the ticket."
Cas frowned. "No, I'm with you. Of course I'm with you."
He looked dead on his feet, but it didn't matter. Dean was going to find Sam. No matter what.
They were on the road ten minutes later. On the road and on their way out of town to New Junction, South Dakota - no rhyme or reason other than it was the next most recent sighting. There was no pattern, there was no driving distance logic at play, because when a demon was your co-pilot, you didn't care about shit like that.
It was eight in the evening. Another hunt, they'd have stayed and headed out the next day, but this wasn't another hunt. So with the late evening summer sun in his eyes, Dean eased them out, speeding along the backroads beside the muddied fields. He tried not to see Sam in these half grown stalks, cornsilk or wheat, green and growing, reaching for sun and destined for a great height, destined for something, warm and tan and of the earth, working hands and summer heat.
"I miss him," Cas said.
Dean looked over, lowered his brows. "Aw come on, don't-"
"I worry about him."
"Cas, you can't just - you don't just say-"
"Maybe you should."
Dean swung his gaze back to the road, rolled his eyes in disgust. Guy didn't have the first clue how to be human-
What the fuck-
He pulled over, staring at an electrical pole on the side of the road.
"I didn't mean now," Cas said.
"Shut up." Dean watched the pole as he got out of the car. Looked around. A couple of houses dotted the flat landscape. At the top of a hill-ish not-really-a-hill, a big big house, and Dean remembered the sort of halfway house the town was so proud of, and he put his fingers on the strange symbol carved into the pole. "What the-" He couldn't recognize it. Maybe it was hobo markings. But it looked demonic, it looked like the way Hell felt, and he knew how Hell felt. This thing spoke in his bones.
"Cas-"
Cas was already at his shoulder, shaking his head. "It's infernal. But it doesn't mean anything."
Dean frowned. Took out his phone and said a quick prayer. He wasn't good at the whole texting pictures of shit thing, but he thought maybe Charlie could do some research.
Kevin turned from the sidewalk up the path to the Hopkins' front door, fiddled with his tie. It was a cheap thing - he hadn't worn a suit of any kind in like two years and it was itchier than he remembered. But he wasn't that nervous cello player anymore. He felt taller, on a mission. And this was the last place anyone had seen Sam before that first phone call saying he wasn't coming home for a few days. Crowley was at his elbow, looking nervous.
"Calm down," Kevin said.
"Oh I'm calm. This is baseline paranoia, pocket pet. How do you think I've stayed alive all this time?"
"I figured it was the cockroach DNA," Kevin said, and knocked on the door.
"You wound me," Crowley muttered as the door opened.
"Mrs. Hopkins?" Kevin said. "We're from the Bureau, um, looking into, uh, following up on a-"
"You spoke with Agent Carter a couple of weeks ago," Crowley said. "Well, Agent Carter's gone missing since then."
The woman looked stunned. "Missing?"
Kevin refrained from kicking Crowley. He thought there was supposed to be an element of obfuscation with this kinda stuff. And Crowley just comes right out and says the thing. Gawd. "You're the last one to have seen him, far as we can figure," he said. "Can you tell us-"
"Come in, come in."
Kevin looked around her living room briefly, trying to figure out what Sam would have made note of, what he might have picked out as clues for the case they'd been trying to solve here.
"Like I said. You're the last one to have seen him."
"I thought it was odd, but I called the number on the card he gave me and he told me he had to go unexpectedly."
"So he just left."
Mrs. Hopkins nodded. "He'd just asked if I'd like to come out to lunch with him, um, continue our interview. I. I think he was being kind. I haven't." She pressed her lips together and glanced up at the mantel, where pictures of her daughter were still displayed. Kevin frowned.
"Sounds like something Sam would do," he said and smiled a little at her.
She collected herself, then smiled back. "A neighbor said she saw something, just before I came outside to meet up with him. I just remembered it. She said she hadn't seen the man I was asking about, because someone had collapsed on the sidewalk and Laura Whitt and Stan Gill rushed him to the hospital in Laura's van." She thought for a moment. "But Stan's been on vacation, he just got back. She was probably mistaken-"
"You're just now thinking that was odd?" Crowley asked.
"Well, I did call Agent Carter's number when I didn't see him waiting. We talked. That was before Missy told me someone had collapsed and been rushed away. I assumed he was fine. And then his partner came and got his car later that day. I suppose it's possible he wasn't seriously ill and just didn't want to worry me..."
Kevin frowned. Made some notes in his notepad. "Okay. Um." He looked at Crowley. "I think that's all we need for now?" Crowley nodded just a little. "Let me give you my number in case you think of something else that seems odd, okay?"
"Okay. What are you thinking happened? Do you think - the same people who killed my Emily-?"
"We don't know."
"Well I hope you find him," she said. "He was so understanding. I got the idea he knew what it was like to lose someone."
Kevin nodded. God, understatement. He turned to go. This was a bust. No, no strange men, no strange women, no strange behavior from Emily or her friends, no recognition of the symbols-
"Hang on. What about this-" He shoved most of what he was carrying into Crowley's arms and shuffled through his notebook for the image of the ring he'd recreated from Sam's report. "Have you seen this design anywhere?"
She took it from him, turned it upside down and back. Kevin thought he saw a kind of confused recognition, and then the light dawned-
"That's - it's his class ring." She looked up. "The detective I spoke with, the lead on Emily's case. That's his ring."
Kevin went cold.
"Where'd you get this?" Charlie said, goggling at Kevin's drawing.
"The guy who tangled with Sam the night before he went missing was wearing this ring. Sam described it in his statement. But-"
Charlie shoved a printout at him. "Check it out."
Kevin frowned. "Where'd you get this?"
"Dean texted it to me."
"Holy crap."
"Yeah."
"Okay, well there's more. This ring was ID'd by the mother of the last victim as a ring the detective was wearing."
That, she looked up at. "Holy wow. The detective who mysteriously wasn't in the office when Sam was getting punched. That explains that. So."
"So, it was a trap? To grab a hunter? I mean it's off Fed radar, but it's weird enough a hunter would show up to check it out. They try to grab Sam that night but fail to overpower him. I guess they succeeded at the Hopkins' house?"
Charlie frowned. "Holy wow. Okay, so to add even more weird, I started digging into this symbol-"
Kevin dropped into a chair. "I know, there's nothing. I think the guy made it up-"
"There's not nothing. It's just that the only places you can find it are private forums. You can tell if there's a protected entry if you use a cached search function from this labs extension I happen to have-" She winked at him. "I happen to know the chick who wrote it."
"Know her, or know her?"
She just grinned and waggled her head a little, smug. "Anyway, a little hacking here, a little more or less legal snooping there, and yahtzee, I found matches, lots of matches, all over the country. Check it out." She tapped a few keys, then turned the screen to him.
Pictures, of fields with big canvas event tents, the symbol here and there, posts from users. The posts themselves were still cryptic, like even though they were posting in super sekrit forums, they were still paranoid. Well, okay. Point taken. But anyway.
"Okay, so what are we looking at?"
"I dunno. But these tents pop up all over the place. And look." She pulled the laptop back and alt-tabbed to a map with overlays. "The red are those demon/Sam sightings. The blue are those tents."
"There's a tent sighting everywhere there's a Sam sighting," Kevin said. "There's a lot more tents though."
"Yeah. And, I think I got the location of the next tent sighting from one of these super vague and unhelpful posts."
"You did? Well what are we waiting for?"
"Nothing," Charlie said, kicking back with a grin. "I texted Dean the address just before you showed up."
"Text him again."
"What? But-"
"Charlie, this is a cult."
Dean stood at the edge of the field in which the tent had been erected and put his phone on silent. It was seven am. It'd rained overnight again, in this dry dusty summer, and now he understood how the crops were growing so well when the rest of the country was in drought.
He'd watched them from a distance. The town had been quiet, no monster signs, no strange deaths. Monsters on best behavior. Because their fucking leader was coming.
It was a fucking cult.
Sam. What are you doing, Sam? Dean had seen a family of ghouls, still wearing whoever they'd last eaten, tramp into the tent in their best clothes. A vampire clan. An old rugaru. Dozens of them.
The blood in him sang for their necks. Purgatory vibrated in his bones.
But he waited, he waited.
Sam. Sammy. What are you doing, Sam? Even with Dean breathing down his neck, he hadn't been able to help himself. There were two more exorcisms since Sam had hung up on him the last time, and half a dozen more false-starts that didn't end in exorcism, just the singe of a circle's edge before Sam had gotten spooked and quit.
Leading a trail right to him. Of course, Sam wouldn't have known they'd find out about that symbol. And now it was clear the monsters had told Sam about Abaddon, recruited him to their cause, whatever that was, and although their first altercation had gone really wrong, their second hadn't, and-
Leading a trail right to him, right to him, Dean frowned. So sloppy, Sammy. Maybe a cry for help, maybe a sign Sam knew he was in over his head, Sam knew he needed help, Sam had forgiven him and found himself unable to get out of whatever terrible thing he'd done - he does those things when Dean fails him, when Dean dies on him, when Dean leaves, Sam does these things, Sam can hardly be blamed for spinning off into space when the thing he'd grounded himself to in the Lucifer days couldn't be counted on.
-these are Lucifer days.
It was all his fault, his fault, not Sam's, and he had to remember that. Because if he went in there guns blazing, he'd lose Sam for good.
"Are you thinking the same thing I am thinking?" Cas said.
"Probably not."
"Oh."
"What if I can't get him back?" Dean said, soft like maybe if Cas didn't hear, didn't answer, they didn't have to talk about it like it was a real possibility.
"You can. He left a trail leading you right to him," Cas said.
Dean frowned in surprise. "Guess I was thinking the same thing you were," he muttered. Then he thought: He left a trail leading you right to him, and he thought Sammy, what are you doing? and he thought, Sam would never, no matter how angry he was, do something like this, not unless the world was at stake, and it wasn't, it wasn't. So.
Sam left a trail right to him. Sam was leading them right to him. Sam was fricking lighting up a neon sign pointing right at him, come get him, get him please-
Guns blazing it was, then.
Dean and Cas came up on the dull white event tent after most of the people had gone in an some kind of organ had started up. A song, and then a man's voice saying "Rise for our King," and the assembled crowd repeated in chorus, "We rise, oh King."
"Thank you," Dean heard, and looked at Cas with wide eyes. That was Sam. What the fuck? he mouthed, and Cas shrugged. There was a rustle through the speakers as a microphone changed hands and Sam continued, the pace of formality, of ceremony, a call and response that felt like relief somehow. Sam, low, sedate - forced, maybe? - and then the congregation.
"As was written." As was written.
"He who walks the Path." He who walks the Path.
"Shall lift us out of Shadow." Shall lift us out of Shadow.
"And into Smoke." And into Smoke.
"What the hell does that mean?" Dean muttered to Cas. Sam's voice shifted into a sort of melodic incantion. The congregation sang along. Dean raised a brow.
Cas frowned. "It's infernal, but again. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Just blood. Purity. Lift." He looked at Dean in some surprise. "Purgatory?"
"All right, enough Hooked on Phonics. Ready?" Cas nodded, and Dean pulled aside the flap and his mouth went dry.
Inside the tent, the fold up chairs were filled with monsters. Big fans blowing the hot air around, some small relief from the muggy heat coming up from the wet ground beneath them. Dean remembered this. Years ago, when Sam had stupidly traded someone else's life for Dean's. At the front, there was a large decorated chair, ribbons woven across it, where Sam sat watching the ground in front of him while the man who'd introduced him gave some kind of sermon. He smiled, this soft smile Dean hadn't seen in years, genuine if quiet joy, and when he looked, Dean saw children on the floor there, picking through a basket of fresh cut flowers, weaving them into a silver circlet. The man at the mic started talking about hope and growth and salvation-
No. No. Sam-
The men at the back were easy kills. Silent blades, laid down gently. But a woman in the back noticed when her husband jerked away from her hand, opened her eyes wide at Dean and clasped her hands over her child's face, shook her head no no please and Dean hesitated. Monsters, they were all monsters, even this woman. Even this child.
And in that space of hesitation, she screamed.
Dean stabbed her through the throat, but the damage had been done. He whirled on a man who came after him. Cas across the way was doing his best to keep up. Screaming came from all sides, women, children, men, monsters all - but Dean could only think in flashes of red and white and black and shine, the slick shine of blood, the slide of his blade through flesh, nevermind that they were monsters, nevermind that they ran and begged, and in the end, he was standing before Cas, his hand tangled in the hair of a little girl who stood petrified, not even crying she was so frightened, and Dean looked at Cas, and then down at the girl, the ribbons in her hands, a crown for Sam's head, her King-
Dean shoved her away and she ran for the tent wall.
Sam stood, he watched Dean like Dean was the monster here, Dean with blood on his hands and face.
"Sam," he started. "Sammy, what-"
"You don't understand," Sam said, stepping backward on the dais.
"So explain it to me," Dean said. He'd been sure he was wrong. He'd convinced himself to trust in Sam. He wasn't wrong, goddammit. He wasn't wrong this time. "Explain it to me, Sammy," he said again. "Please, dammit. I'm listening. I'm here. Whatever's happening, whatever this is, we will figure it out."
Sam just stared at him, like he couldn't believe anything Dean was saying. And that hurt, but okay, fair point. But it was different this time. Dean took a step forward, hand out, but Sam just shook his head and stepped back again, looking off behind Dean-
-At the bloodied bodies, some of which just looked like nice people in their church clothes, murdered as they sat peacefully worshipping - damned fucked up, but from Sam's perspective, his brows up, his breath fast as he took in the devastation and he looked at Dean again, shook his head just so-
Dean stepped forward again, beseeching. "Sam-"
"He was right about you. I can't believe it. He was right." Sam put his hand out to the side, stepped back again away from Dean, this look of terror on his face, and from the wings of the little stage came a young man who watched Dean warily as he reached for Sam's arm, and as soon as they made contact, both of them vanished.