Anonymous Review Replies!
Guest: Sure, looking forward to it! :D Hope you like!
me (you?): Ahh, of course they would have saved him! Everybody knows when it comes to demons, the Winchesters are loving and compassionate, and - yeeeeeah, maybe they wouldn't have. :P But thanks for your review! Get ready for more Crowley-saving action in 3..2...!;)
yourself: You bet it will be! :D Thanks for commenting! :)
Chapter 3: EX-GERMINATE!
"So...I hear you're good at torture."
"You have heard correctly," Alastair replied, regarding Duke Hastur steadily. The human demon was still wearing the last vessel he had inhabited, a tall, wiry man with thinning foxbrown hair and a smile that would have made anyone but another demon sick.
"I may have been...out of the picture for a while due to some, ah, inconveniences, but I am still very much the most skilled purveyor of pain around these parts. To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Hastur had to admit it, even the way the demon spoke was enough to make you want to avoid contact with him. He would be dam – blessed if he let any of that show on his face, however.
"There is someone I'd like you to try your skills on."
"Oh?" Alastair asked, and the way his face spread into a smile now uncannily reminded the duke of something nuzzling at dead meat in the Savannah. "Who?"
"A demon named Crowley," Hastur replied and Alastair's expression changed from predatory to disbelief.
"What?! That punk-ass crossroads demon that most of the time used to be drunk off his arse? I don't know whether you noticed, your grace, but he is currently slightly higher on the food chain than both of us."
"What?" Hastur frowned. "I'm not talking about any crossroads demon. I'm talking about our field agent in the British Empire!" He paused. "Though the drunk-of-his-arse-bit sounds about right."
"The British...?" Alastair began, then stopped. Right. The torture expert reminded himself that most of the higher demons did not spend that much time on earth as such and therefore could be a bit behind in current events. He cocked his head.
"So...we're talking about a different Crowley, then? Not that upstart?"
"I have no idea who you are talking about, but the one I'm referring to is one of the original Fallen, like me," Hastur replied, though saying that last bit out loud seemed to actually be physically painful for him. Some more explanations followed, mostly concerned with treachery against Hell, a completely ruined apocalypse, and antichrists not being what they used to be. It ended with Hastur's unlucky stint as a waitress in a small café in south London, and when he was finished, the gears in Alastair's head had already started turning (possibly crushing some innocent victims between them).
"I see," the demon said, leaning back against the table. "The chance to torture an angel who chose to Fall. That sounds interesting."
"Yes, but first I need to kill him to drag him back to hell, and I want long, long hours of utter terror for him leading up to that event. I just don't want to get burnt in the process again," Hastur said, the last bit coming out somewhat plaintive. Alastair gave an unholy grin.
"There is no need to worry. I know exactly what we'll do."
"You'll go to Earth instead?"
"Oh, no, no, no, your Grace." Alastair smiled. "The proper way is you don't do the dirty work yourself. At first you use...agents."
xxx
"Okay. What the hell. Demons in town? Here?" Sam asked. The two brothers were now walking along the streets of London once more, having briefly stopped off at their hotel to change their soaked clothes. "Do you think this is a case?"
Dean snorted. "In my opinion, Crowley probably just put out a revenge hit on us. I mean, dude's gotta be pissed after we dug up his bones. Nothing we can't handle." He pointed at the piece of paper in his brother's hand. "What are we looking for again, anyway?"
Sam, who previously had taken more than ten minutes to explain to his older brother the meaning of the long and complex botanical nomenclature written down on the list he was holding, sighed.
"A bunch of flowers, Dean."
"What does Bobby want with that?"
"I think they're the ingredients for a batch of hex bags he wants to prepare for a group of hunters up north," Sam replied, looking again at the text message from their older friend. "And since he seems to be really happy to have his soul back, he decided to show his gratitude by sending us shopping."
"Some gratitude," Dean grunted, but there was no real malice behind it. Ever since the old hunter had all but adopted the two brothers when their own father kept dropping them off at his place, there were only few things the two wouldn't have done for him if asked.
"So why are we shopping for a bunch of weeds in London?"
"I think some of them are illegal in the US. Anyway, this is the address he gave us," Sam said, coming to a stop in front of a store that looked large, but a bit neglected and run-down.
Dean's eyebrows rose a bit as he noticed a black classic Bentley parked outside, despite there being no parking space anywhere. For some reason, it seemed to him as if he had been seeing a lot of them in the last 24 hours, but he wasn't exactly sure whether it was the same one, or a lot of Londoners just had money and taste in cars.
The bell above the door jingled as the two brothers entered, but other than that, the store was almost eerily quiet. This was especially strange as it also seemed far larger than the exterior had suggested, the pale winter sun filtering through a skylight, and two paths of terracotta stone disappearing into what seemed like a veritable maze of plants on display. With all the greenery surrounding them and the warm, humid air - probably due to the artificial lily pond in the middle of the sprawling shop - it felt, in fact, a bit like as if they had stepped out of London and into the jungle...
And Dean couldn't help but feeling that somewhere in it, there was something on the prowl.
He shook off the odd notion and instead stepped further into the store, looking around for a shopping assistant or something. Beside him, Sam was scanning the list again.
"Okay, so the first thing we're supposed to get is a plant called..."
"Right," his brother replied, though Sam could tell he wasn't even listening. Not that Sam could blame him - truth to tell, the odd, jungle-like shop was kind of giving him the creeps as well, his hunter's instinct already screaming at him to leave.
"Let's just get the plants and go, Dean."
"Okay...," the older Winchester replied, craning his neck because he thought he had seen someone else in the shop, just behind a thick row of potted ferns and other plants of the sort cats enjoyed devouring. But the guy had been wearing a black suit, he thought, so definitely not a shop assistant. Where was everybody, anyway? How big was this store? Then something else caught his attention.
"Sam?" Dean asked, but the younger Winchester ignored him, instead also looking around for some customer service. Finding a shop assistant would be a first priority because if the store was really this large, they could be here for hours, and Sam had no intention of letting that happen.
"Uh, Sam? There's-"
Behind him, Dean was talking again, but Sam had already taken a few steps forward, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of someone else inside. "Hello?" he called into the general direction of the interior of the shop, but there wasn't any reply, the silent wall of green foliage seeming to swallow all sound. Sam even wondered whether some of the leaves had just moved -
"Dammit, Sam!"
The taller man let out an annoyed sigh. "What is it now, Dean? Seriously, can't you be quiet and focus for a minute? Because I think something definitely is wrong here," Sam said, turning around.
It was at this point that he noticed that Dean had a moving green vine wrapped around most of his forearm, and despite his struggling ultimately seemed to be losing a fight against a begonia.
As Sam's eyes widened in amazement, the flower just continued to enthusiastically crawl upward, clearly aiming for the hunter's throat. Dean momentarily stopped tugging to free himself from the floral fiend, and took a moment to stare at his brother.
"You think, Sammy?!"
xxx
Crowley was used to terrifying his plants. He wasn't used to them trying to avenge their botanic brethren.
"What the-?!" the demon hissed and pulled back, his eyes behind the sunglasses glowing a hellish red as he tore at the flora with slightly more than human strength. What was happening? A moment ago, he had simply been looking for a cactus. Now he was staring with huge yellow eyes at a sort of rose that had curled up like a snake and managed to hiss at him while rattling a thorny tail.
Crowley knew he had a reputation among plant shops in the city. Aziraphale once had told him he'd wanted to buy Crowley a poinsettia for a Christmas present, only to find out it had thrown itself off the table when he left it alone for a moment, apparently preferring suicide to a life in the demon's apartment. But actually attacking was a different approach altogether.
Crowley snarled and tried to summon up hellfire, but that didn't seem to impress the plants much. Were they controlled by a demon themselves, then? A palm tree tried to fall on top of him and the demon dodged it at the last second, also evading most of the pansies that were now hurling themselves off the shelves at his head.
"Ow! Stop it! Ow!"
The store had been curiously empty ever since he had entered ten minutes ago. He had only heard the door bell jingle once since then, two men coming in, but Crowley had been too busy to really notice anything about them, because right after that, the plants had started to attack.
Now Crowley was attempting to simply will himself out of the store, but could feel that he was definitely being repelled. No demon magic possible, then. Which meant that he either had to be standing in a devil's trap, or a more powerful demon was blocking him. In the absence of any paint store utensils in the area, Crowley was definitely leaning toward the latter alternative.
He swallowed. Now he could feel vines wrap around his torso before he could slip away, ensnaring him, and slight panic set in as he suddenly realized that the vines were wet and slimy. And belonged to a water lily. And it was now distinctly dragging him toward the pond in the shop, obviously harbouring herbaceous dreams of being a floral Cthulhu one day.
Foregoing any pretence of dignity now entirely, Crowley started flailing, his shades flying off his face as a liana went straight for his eyes and only narrowly missed them. The demon didn't even notice, scrambling to find even the tiniest purchase on the floor before he would be sleeping with the koi. Somewhere on the other side of the pond, there was a little splash, but there were still too many moving plants growing out of the water and hanging from the ceiling for him to really see what was happening. The thought shot through Crowley's head that there had been two other people in the store, too, and briefly wondered whether the splash had been them getting dragged into the pond, but also found himself unable to care very much. He was losing ground, inch by inch and was very likely going to be drowned, and how was he going to explain to the office the need for a new body then?
And then, just before the water could make contact with Crowley's skin, suddenly the vines tensed up and then flailed upwards, releasing him, before just as suddenly going limp and and flopping back to the floor. Crowley's head snapped around, trying to find out what had happened, only to have his eyes become even larger as he realized the whole pond suddenly seemed to be steaming. The plants in contact with the water were flailing before dying, and then turning black and curling in on themselves, even while the battle in the other parts of the store still seemed to be going strong. Apparently, the two hapless humans were putting up quite a fight. But what was going on with the pond...? Crowley pulled himself onto all fours and crawled up to the water's edge cautiously. He bent over it, peering into the murky depths...and then scrambled back as fast as he could with a strangled hiss as soon as he caught a glimpse of a rosary bobbing over to his side.
It was still a lily pond.
Just now it was filled with holy water.
Crowley bleached just a little as he involuntarily imagined just what his fate would have been had he been dragged into that.
Behind the foliage, someone yelled something along the lines of "Dean! The knife is working!" but Crowley at this point really didn't care about any sort of cutlery and its effects. He needed to get out of this shop. Dashing past a row of menacing shrubbery, he was only vaguely aware of the two flailing tourists a couple of metres away. One of them glimpsed into his direction and the demon nearly paused, but then the orchids advanced behind him, and Crowley therefore booked it, Bentley leaving with screeching tires.
xxx
"The holy water works, too!" Dean yelled back at his brother who, was slashing at the plants with Ruby's knife, the flora turning blackened and dead wherever the blade cut. But even so, there were simply too many opponents, the brothers being pushed further and further back, having been cut off from the door. Since the demon-killing knife was working, Dean had tried out the holy water on a whim, using whatever was available and now was splashing buckets of it over shop interior, when something caught his eye that let him stop dead.
Namely, another pair of eyes, glancing his way just for a split second through the foliage, and then they were already gone. A pair of very yellow eyes, in a human face. The man they belonged to had dashed through the door, slamming it forcefully shut and nearly tearing the damned bell off its handle. The older Winchester cursed, trying to get away from the tulips gnawing at his boots, and was about to chase after him, when...
"DEAN!"
He turned around just in time to see his brother, who had been engaged in a deadly battle with a batch of daffodils, now spread-eagled against the wall, wrists and legs securely tied with ivy, the knife useless on the floor. The forget-me-nots were hopping towards him in their pots, ready to attack.
Dean swore under his breath as he had to turn his back to the escape route of the man in black and instead hurled the bucket with holy water with all his might.
xxx
"Demon...plants? I mean, like...plants," Sam said for what felt like the umpteenth time, though it didn't seem to make any more sense to him now, either. It was about twenty minutes later that the brothers sat in the parked Impala again, having pulled up to a hold a block away from the killer plant shop. Sam was busy trying to dry himself with a packet of kleenex (but still smelled like holy swamp water), and Dean was still fishing flower petals out of places that were never have meant to have flower petals in them.
"We've had demon bugs before," the older Winchester pointed out.
"Yeah, but I doubt London has been built on a Native American holy ground," Sam retorted, stuffing the last of the tissues into the ash tray. "And anyway, those back then were curse bugs, not demon bugs."
"Whatever. The knife worked, the holy water worked, I'm calling demon."
Sam looked at him. "You think Crowley's still out to get us?"
Dean shrugged. "Maybe. But..."
"But what?" Sam prompted him when the older Winchester didn't continue.
Dean took a breath. "But maybe it isn't Crowley. Maybe it has something to do with that Bentley."
"The Bentley?" Sam asked, sounding about as equally incredulous as when the discussion had been about possessed plants.
"That Bentley or the guy driving it," said Dean grimly. "I think I saw it at the café this morning, too. But also..." the older man paused a moment. "I saw the guy who drove away with it, Sam. He had yellow eyes."
"What?"
His younger brother was looking straight at him now, and Dean could see how carefully he was trying to control his expression. "Not like...?" Sam began, but didn't need to finish the question. Just as the hellhounds were burnt into Dean's memory, his younger brother would likely never forget the demon that had made him drink his blood before going on to kill their mother.
"...no. Not like him." Dean swallowed and then forced his mind away from the memories, gripping the steering wheel that felt reassuringly solid under his fingers, trying to focus on the present situation. "That thing's eyes were all yellow, not just the iris. And vertical pupils. Like a cat. Or a snake."
"...okay," Sam breathed out and nodded.. "Fine. But if it isn't Crowley...maybe you were right. This could be a case."
The tension broken, Dean snorted. "Could be a case? Dude. I had to save you in there. You were losing a fight, Sammy. Against a potted sunflower."
Sam glowered at him.
"Jerk."
Dean grinned. "Bitch."
And with that, the Impala sprang to life and rolled out and back toward London, "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet" playing as the two world's best hunters and one demon in a Bentley sped towards the city, while at the same time in Dis after a failed assassination in a plant shop, literally all hell was breaking loose.
To be continued...
New season of Supernatural not far away now! (Though I doubt the storyline will be in any way as silly as this...:p) I recently even met a Crowley cosplayer, who was brilliant (even if I doubt it's easy to be recognized as one outside of Discworld conventions...) Thanks for all your comments, they're what makes fandom fun. :D If you read, please review!