So last chapter. I hope everyone enjoyed the story. let me know what you think as I kinda really do live for reviews! hugs, Ember
Chapter Thirteen
"Kill you?" Devin narrowed golden-brown eyes on me, and then with a laugh he shook his head. "I don't want to kill you, Dean. If I did, don't you think you'd already be dead?"
"No, you'd rather kill everyone I care about." Throat constricting painfully, I nudged my head toward Sam and Bobby - both dead because I'd killed some damn Shifter's brother - dead because I'd failed to save them. "Well, you win," my knees wobbled, threatening to buckle as I took a tentative step toward him, hoping to provoke him into killing me, "there's no one left . . . you an' that other sonuvabitch took everyone from me." Lips curling into a scowl, I looked him dead in the eyes, wanting him to know the next words I spoke were more than just a mere threat. "So either you kill me or so help me God, I'll make you suffer in ways you can't even begin to imagine."
"I highly doubt that, Dean," he scoffed with a dismissive wave of his hand. "As I have born witness to some truly imaginative ways in which one human could make another suffer. But you could give it your best shot, not that it'll do you any good, although I'm up for it if it'll make you feel any better."
"So you are a demon?" I asked as I took another step toward him.
His eyes narrowed to mere slits, studying me closely for several long moments, and then he shook his head. "No, I've just been around long enough to witness man's inhumanity toward man." Glancing down at Sam, he lifted a hand and lightly brushed my brother's hair away from his closed eyelids. "You're a dying race, Dean . . . an' I was foolish enough to risk everything to make you see it for yourself before it's too late. But knowing everything that's to come, you'll still make the wrong choice."
"So instead of giving me any sort of chance to prove you wrong, you kill my brother and Bobby?"
"Bobby?" With a quirk of his brow, he hooked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the fallen hunter, "Why would I harm Bobby? Like any good soldier, he has much work left to do before this war ends in a bloodbath."
Ducking my head to the side, I looked around him to where Bobby lay slumped against the wall. His eyes were now nothing more than hollowed out black masses, so I had no real way of knowing if he meant that he killed the shifter instead of Bobby, but my gut instinctively warned me not to give in to hope. Hope is for people who spend their Sunday's kneeling in church before an altar filled with candles, not for someone like me who's seen what lurks in the darkest of places.
"The shifter?" I still asked, and cursed under my breath for having risen to his bait.
"I see the doubt in your eyes," he chided, clucking his tongue in admonishment. Within a blink of an eye, he was at my side, pressing two fingers against my forehead. "That's the problem with humans, they can't believe in something without seeing it with their own eyes."
Pressing my eyelids close against the onslaught of images running through my head in reverse motion, I wavered on my feet, nearly collapsing, but Devin gripped hold of me, and held me upright as what he was trying to show me came into focus. As with all the other things he'd shown me, the vision of the shifter knocking Bobby unconscious, handcuffing and locking him in the basement before taking on his form, seemed so real it knocked the breath from me. And the truth was I wanted to believe it - wanted to believe I hadn't screwed up so badly it cost Bobby and Sam their lives.
"There," he released his hold on me, and took a backward step, "do you believe me now?" he asked, and then with a short laugh, he added, "no, of course you don't - Winchesters don't believe in anything but hunting - God, how hollow must your soul be if you only live for that?"
"What the hell are you?" I asked as I tried to shake off the sick feeling welling up in the pit of my stomach.
"I'm the concept that you and your family dance around," he responded evasively, and disappearing in a wisp of billowy white smoke, he reappeared at Sam's side once more. "I hold more power in my one hand than all your pathetic demons combined, and yet you still refuse to acknowledge my presence."
Searching my mind, I tried to figure out what kind of creature would be more powerful than multiple demons, but drew a blank. Pursing my lips, I shook my head as I splayed my hands out to the sides. "Umm . . . yeah, I've got nothing."
"Would it help matters if I told you my real name is Michael - would that ring any bells for you? Or am I just wasting my time here?"
"Michael," the name fell from my lips like a dead weight, knowing of only one Michael who would possess the kind of power he spoke of. "As in the Archangel Michael?"
"No, as in Michael the pizza delivery guy from Pizza Hut." Aggravation edging his tone, he rolled his eyes. "Twenty minutes or less or your next pizza's free . . . I have that kind of power, Dean."
"So I should probably take your attempt at sarcasm as a yes then, right?"
"You see the problem with free will," Michael went on to say, ignoring the possibility that I might really be looking for further confirmation, "is a person's responses to any given situation are so hardwired by personality traits that even if given a preview of the outcome of their actions, they will still make the wrong choices." Once again he glanced down at Sam, and gently grazed his fingers along the bruises on his face. "It's unfortunately inevitable - destiny."
"I'm not gonna let you kill my brother to prove some kind of fucked up angel point that people are screwed because there really is no such thing as free will."
With a shake of his head, Michael laughed. "I'm afraid you've already proved my point in spades, Dean." Michael turned his back on me, leaned in and whispered something in Sam's ear, and as he did, I took the opportunity, bent down and snatched up the gun I'd dropped on the ground. "You're not seriously going to try and shoot me are you?" he asked without turning back to look at me. Then lifting his head, he placed two fingers on Sam's forehead. "I can promise you things would not go well for your brother if you did."
"I want my brother back," I leveled my gun on his chest, knowing it probably wouldn't kill him, and more than likely would piss him off, but I couldn't back down, not with Sam's life on the line. "An' I'll do whatever the hell I have to do to make sure he lives."
"I know you will - and that's exactly what will end up tearing you apart." The smile slipped from his angelic face as he shifted to look at me once more. "There is nothing more I can show you, Dean . . . no more words I can think to say . . . your fate is sealed as is Sam's - and for what it's worth I am truly sorry."
As he finished speaking several things happened almost simultaneously, Michael raised a hand and uttered words in a dialect I couldn't understand, my brother disappeared within a thick hazy fog, and I fired my gun, hitting the angel squarely in the heart. A burst of brilliant light ripped through the hole I'd made in his chest, shot outward, slamming into me with the force of a speeding freight train. The last thing I saw before my head connected with both the door and the outer wall in the hallway were two smoky gray angel wings, and then everything went black.
SNSNSNSNSN
"Earth to Dean, come in, Dean." Sam snapped his fingers two inches from my face, and startled from the daze I'd fallen under as I watched the heavy snow blanket the ground outside, I blinked and looked up at him.
"Huh? Were you saying something, Sammy?" Scratching at the back of my head, I glanced around the motel room, momentarily wondering how we had gotten there, and feeling as if I'd forgotten something very important.
"Oh, don't try an' pull that crap, Dean," Sam huffed, snatching the keys off the table. "I won the coin toss so I'm going out to get dinner."
As he threw on his jacket and headed for the door, the unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach subsided to be replaced by sheer protective instinct. "Give me the keys," I ordered as I grabbed my leather jacket off the chair, and followed him to the door. "I'm going with you."
"Seriously, Dean, I think I can handle going to get dinner by myself," Sam nearly whined, but still reluctantly turned over the keys, pressing them into my hand with another huff before he stalked out of the motel, and made his way through the snow to the Impala.
Although I knew he was a great driver - hell, I'd been the one who taught him, so how could he be anything else - my gut still flip-flopped at the thought of letting him go out alone in the blizzard, and I've always trusted my gut where Sam's concerned. "I'm not doubting your driving ability, little brother," I said as I slid behind the wheel of my car and shut the door behind me. "I was just going stir-crazy in that motel room, and thought we could get dinner an' maybe catch a movie."
"What movie?" he asked suspiciously, folding his arms over his chest, preparing to brood if it wasn't some chick-flick movie instead of an action packed thriller.
"Your choice." I inwardly groaned, hating the idea of actually having to watch any movie my brother might pick, but knowing I'd rather watch a million sappy movies than let Sam go alone to get dinner. For whatever reason, I just knew to the very core of my being that if I'd let him walk out the door by himself, it would be the last time I saw him, and it rattled me in a way that nothing ever had before.
"Alright." He settled himself in his seat, satisfied he'd be getting his way on at least one thing, and the lopsided grin that pulled at the corner of his lips told me he was happy I'd decided to go with him. "Thanks, Dean," he uttered as we pulled out onto the road and headed toward town.
"For what?" I cast a brief glance in his direction, and then returned my sights to the road ahead.
"I dunno." He shrugged. "It's just when I was . . . I had this really bad feeling that something was going to happen, an' then when you offered to come with me - it just disappeared."
"An' you still were gonna be stubborn and go alone if I didn't say something?" My grip tightened on the steering wheel. If we'd both been having the same feeling, there had to be something to it, and once again I felt as if I was missing something important. "You know, Sammy, if something ever happened to you, I don't know what I'd do . . . so don't ever purposely put me in the position where I might have to find out."
Sam bit pensively at his lower lip for several very long moments, and then shifted in his seat to look at me. "Dean, if something ever did happen . . . if I died on a hunt or something, you've gotta promise me you wouldn't do something stupid."
"Stupid in what way?" I asked, although I already knew what he was going to say before he even responded.
"You know what I'm talking about, so don't play dumb . . . if I ever died, I don't want you making any deals to bring me back . . . just let me go, okay?"
Turning my head, I met and held his gaze for several moments, before looking back out the front windshield. "What do you want for dinner?" I asked instead of responding, not about to make that sort of promise to him.
"I'm serious, Dean."
"I know you are, Sammy, and if it makes you feel any better than I promise not to do anything stupid if something happened to you." Sure we both knew my promise for what it really was - a lie, but in true Winchester tradition, we pushed it aside, happy in the knowledge we wouldn't have to bring it up again. "So what do you want for dinner?" I asked once more, easing up on the gas pedal as we came upon a hitchhiker traveling in the same direction as we were heading.
Sam glanced at the foolish man holding his jacket tightly to him as wind and snow whipped around him in a flurry, and then looked to me. "It's freezing out, Dean; maybe we should pull over and give him a ride?"
"Are you out of your mind?" My eyes rounded incredulously that he would even consider picking up a stranger in the middle of a blizzard. "I mean there's gotta be a million movies out there about some crazy guy picking up a homicidal hitcher, and that's the last he's ever seen or heard from again - an' I bet damn well if I hadn't come with you, you'd've pulled over for him, too - wouldn't you have?"
"I dunno," he shrugged, sheepishly lowering his sights to rest on his hands, "I might have."
I shook my head in amazement. "You know what, Sammy, that's never gonna happen, and do you wanna know why?" I hesitated as I looked through the rearview mirror, and saw the man look up at me with gleaming golden eyes. My breath left me in a rush as he smiled and gave a curt nod before disappearing in a flash of brilliant white light. I should have stopped. I knew the thing we passed was supernatural in nature, and was definitely our kind of problem - the terrifyingly real visions of the death and destruction it would bring to everything and everyone hammered that into my head with startling clarity, but for once I just kept driving, and didn't look back. "Because I'm never letting you take my car out alone in bad weather ever again."
"You're such a jerk."
"Bitch."