Anonymous Review Replies!

ValorieDevore: Great, now I've got that song stuck in my head! XD But glad you liked the cameos and thanks for the comment! :P

Jaime: (blushes) Aw, thanks! Happy to hear you've enjoyed it, and merry Christmas to you, too!

Ariskari: Ah, yeah, that might be a bit of a problem...let's hope Sam and Dean are a bit more understanding than Hastur and Alastair?^^°

Chapter Eight: From the Frying Pan Into the Holy Fire

They found them at the lake.

"There! Like the crazy man said!" Dean hissed, coming to a halt in the same bushes he had watched the demon earlier from. Now there were more people in the park than yesterday, but their targets, one in a black suit and one in a tweed coat, were clearly visible, feeding ducks. "Is that the one you think might be an angel?"

"Yeah," Sam nodded. "The strange bookseller." He cocked his head. "But seriously, right now the two of them look more gay than supernatural. Over here in Europe they make a difference between the two, I think."

"Funny," Dean replied dryly. "So, we go over there now, or what?"

"I guess," Sam said, straightening up. "Though I'm not sure what we have against the angel currently. So far, he's only made me tea and then put us to bed."

"He tried screwing with our minds, Sammy," Dean reminded his brother, stepping out of the foliage. Then something seemed to occur to him and he paused. "That tea wasn't poisoned, was it?"

"It was chamomile."

Dean shook his head. "Same thing."

And that was all they could say, because before they had even taken another step in the direction of the angel and his partner, Alastair had suddenly materialized. And he had brought company.

In an instant, two pairs of hands had grabbed the black suit, while a third demon pressed a hand on what both of them recognized was an angel-dispelling rune hastily smeared onto a tree, which let the bookseller scream and vanish along with the rest of them.

"What the- Alastair?!" Dean could only stare, Sam's simultaneous, much louder "NO!" drowning out the name of his brother's torturer in hell as their prey escaped. The younger Winchester had stumbled forward a few steps, but could also immediately see it was useless, so he stopped and turned around to his brother with frustration clearly written on his face.

"Right." Dean nodded grimly. "That's enough. We need to find them." He looked back at Sam. "Time to call our back-up."

xxx

Crowley woke up. This was especially unsettling as he couldn't remember having decided to go to sleep.

And.

Well.

Probably also unsettling because he had woken up tied to an upstanding torture rack.

Crowley groaned quietly.

His arms twitched, but he could already tell that this was useless. Both his wrists and ankles were encased in metal cuffs chained to the metal frame, spreadeagling him, while binding runes etched into them made sure he was as weak as a kitten trussed up like this.

Anthony J. Crowley started classifying this situation as A Bit Not Good.

"Crawly. How lovely of you to join us," A far too familiar voice said, and Crowley's head snapped up to see Hastur approaching. To be fair, he didn't look like Hastur, having once again taken possession of a human (for some reason an evil-looking old granny – Crowley supposed Hastur simply wasn't very good at aiming when it came to possessions), but because the more powerful demon now wasn't even trying to conceal his aura any more, Crowley still recognized him instantly.

"We hope you find the accommodation to your standards," Hastur suggested with a leer he probably thought looked properly evil, but which was missing teeth. Crowley wasn't sure whether he was cringing now because of the fear a pissed-off duke of hell should invoke, or simply cringing because the line was so clichéd.

"Actually, it'ss 'Crowley' now," he managed instead, a little nervous hiss coming out despite his best attempts at remaining calm.

"So he is actually calling himself Crowley. Interesting. A little...megalomania perhaps, hmm?" A second man – well, man-shaped being – had appeared behind Hastur, and Crowley allowed himself a little groan as he saw the man's coal-black eyes, indicating a human demon. Again not good. Mostly because while demons that had once been angels still adhered to certain standards, but humans turned demons were basically as nutty as a fruitcake.

"Hello," the tall, lanky man greeted Crowley, his voice raspy and deep as an unsettling grin spread on his gaunt face. "I'm Alastair. I'll be the one prodding and cutting, stripping your flesh off your bones and tearing your innards out of your holes, that sound of flayed, wet skin flapping will be just like music, hmm, see, until your mortal coil stops thrashing and bleeding, despite me digging, and then I'll take you down to hell, where I'll continue to play your sinews like an instrument, just to hear you sing, and we can do that, ooooh, so many times down there..."

"Hi," said Crowley weakly.

"You're right," Alastair's dark sunken eyes seemed to gleam now as he looked back at Hastur. "This one will be interesting. Nothing like, well, younger demons today. Taking them apart wasn't nearly so...satisfying."

"Okay, look," Crowley's voice was now a bit higher and there was a way the demon squirmed in the torture rack that already suggested that not all of his joints might have been human. "There's a way to talk about this, isn't there?"

"Ooh, look, and I haven't even touched you yet," Alastair smiled with something that was approaching some horrible perversion of glee as he stepped forward, his hand running down Crowley's side like a butcher would test the firmness of a pig half hanging on meat hooks. "Words won't help you, my lovely. Screams might..." he paused. Then he set the point of his knife below Crowley's throat. "But I don't think so."

"You should've known you wouldn't be able to run from me forever, Crowley," Hastur smiled as he stood behind the human demon. He was attempting to visibly gloat, a feat only made difficult by the fact that he had to obviously squint through his granny glasses to recognize the stuff even only a metre in front of him. Crowley for his part was already instinctively trying to twist away from Alastair's touch, like a snake that knew someone was about to draw its fangs and had already seen the pliers.

At Hastur's words he turned his head with an effort. "Maybe," he said. "Nothing wrong with getting a good head start, though."

Alastair laughed. "Ohh, wonderful. Beautiful. I do so like victims with humour. It's so wonderful to get them to the point where the sheer pain erases their sense of funny, as their skin parts and the blood runs out...when the laughing turns to crying. To hear them beg instead of joke, until their throats are too hoarse from the screaming. What do you think could make you stop laughing, Crowley, hmm...?" he asked, indicating a trolley that another demon servant had just wheeled inside. Crowley eyed the instruments on it with rising panic. Apart from some decidedly human inventions to make each other's lives miserable, and some implements Crowley was sure he hadn't seen since the days of the Spanish inquisition, the table also held syringes, various assortments of salt, holy water and even an angel sword. And while Crowley knew that none of those things save the sword if applied correctly and the holy water would be able to kill him, he also knew they would all hurt like...well, hell.

He surveyed their surroundings again, but there was nothing that looked like it could help him. They were in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, the kind he had suspected only existed in American TV shows, and even though there were blind windows with daylight filtering in, he had no illusions that probably no one was around to hear him scream.

At least they had let him keep his shades. Maybe that would mean they at least wouldn't mock him for closing his eyes so he wouldn't have to see what came next.

Crowley wondered whether he would ever see Aziraphale again when the point of the knife first pierced his skin.

And then they shot open again abruptly when a loud crash announced that one of the windows had just been violently shattered and a lot of shouting indicated that something exciting was happening right now.

"Az-!" Crowley had almost shouted his friend's name, but the word stuck in his throat when he recognized the new arrivals.

They weren't his angel.

They were the two completely insane Americans that had been stalking him all day.

"YOU!" One of them, the compact one, pointed at Alastair. "You're supposed to be dead!"

"Hello, Dean. You shouldn't trust your little brother's addict powers so much," the demon smiled. "Takes more, oh, so much more than a human playing at being the antichrist to kill me."

"We're going to put you back into hell, Alastair," the taller one snarled.

"Oh, please do," the demon replied. "I haven't played with any of the people you failed to save in such a long time..."

And then the one called Dean screamed and flung himself forward into the fray, and Crowley couldn't help but wonder whether there was some kind of backstory here that he was missing.

xxx

The warehouse was now an open war zone. And Crowley was a very unhappy fixed point in it since he was still tied to his torture rack.

"Dean! Catch!" The taller man shouted, simultaneously flinging some sort of knife at his partner, who caught it as if they had practiced that maneuver many times, and then thrust it into the chest of the goon on top of him who sort of went glowy and then collapsed and died. In fact, all three of the possessed humans Alastair and Hastur had brought with them had by now suffered similar fates. Crowley really squarely blamed them for that, because they seemed to keep coming at the two young men one by one instead of ganging up for once, and really, that was stupid. Alastair had retaliated by flinging the taller human against a wall, but had to dodge the one called Dean coming at him with the knife. Hastur himself wasn't doing anything useful, because his human form had lost their glasses in the excitement and that meant that the duke was now setting random things on fire, but otherwise not interfering much in the fight.

"Hey, Alastair! Remember this?!" the young man who had been flung against the wall was already back on his feet and now splashing an entire bottle of water with a rosary in it at both remaining demons. Crowley gave a sort of strangled, panicky noise and executed a very interesting maneuver in his bindings that should not have been possible with a human spine to avoid the few drops that splashed in his direction.

Alastair and Hastur, as it turned out, were not so lucky.

Crowley winced a bit in involuntary sympathy at the screaming.

"No! Sam, stop them!" Dean yelled as soon as a cloud of black smoke erupted from the mouth of the old woman, before briefly descending on Alastair and, somehow enveloping his form, letting it vanish and then disappear through the cracks in the floor.

Crowley suddenly became keenly and immediately aware that this meant that now he wasn't trapped with two demons hell-bent on revenge on his poor body, but instead trapped with two freaks who seemed to be hell-bent on something at least and he had no idea what that was.

They turned on him as soon as Hastur and Alastair had disappeared.

"Ah! Ah! Watch where you're splashing that stuff!" He shouted at them as soon as one of them – Dean - had raised the holy water bottle now at him. "Look! I'm totally harmless here," he tried to convince them, wriggling a bit awkwardly in his binding restraints.

Dean narrowed his eyes. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't just pour this all over you anway."

"My...Old Worlde charme?" Crowley tried.

When that only seemed to produce two very non-impressed Americans, Crowley quickly tried to keep talking instead." Look, I've had this body for more than 200 years!", he protested. "Surely you couldn't want to destroy those cheekbones?" he asked, looking at the taller one in slight hopefulness.

"That body belongs to somebody, buddy." Dean pointed out, coming one step closer and gripping Crowley by the lapel. Now the demon couldn't help but finally scowl.

"Yeah, to me. I had it custom-made and I happen to be very fond of it after four centuries."

There was a pause as both humans seemed to consider this, a small glance between them perhaps suggesting that this wasn't something they had expected. Crowley decided to take that as his chance.

"I am one of the good guys, you know?" the demon sounded vaguely hopeful. "Well. Technically," he added.

"Will you shut up." Dean finally rubbed a hand across his face. "Sammy, let's get a proper devil's trap drawn around this guy. I don't trust these bindings." Turning to Crowley, he added: "And you, you know what? Who wears sunglasses inside? Douchebags, that's who."

There was scarcely little Crowley could do as Dean grabbed his shades ungently from his face, but he did find it interesting (and slightly worrying) that they both took a little breath at the sight of his eyes, but then almost immediately seemed to relax somewhat again, not all that surprised. Crowley once again wondered who on Earth had just managed to save/catch him here.

The one called Sam recovered first. "Pretty boastful, pretending to be one of the good guys walking around with those eyes, if you ask me," he said.

"They're my eyes. Can't do anything about them, Sammy," Crowley replied, narrowing them. But that reply seemed to have been the wrong choice. The taller man's gaze instantly grew cold.

"My brother calls me Sammy," he replied flatly. "You don't."

"...okay. Touchy," Crowley said, trying to regain a more jovial tone. "But, listen, I'm really not-"

"You can save your breath," Dean cut him off as Sam began painting what Crowley recognized as a crude, but efficient verson of a devil's trap around him with a spray can. "We weren't planning to gank you. Yet."

Crowley couldn't say he liked the sound of that last word there much. And the question of 'Then what do you need me for?' seemed to be pretty much written on his face.

Because now the two brothers grinned in a way that made Crowley unsure of whether being in their custody was anywere better than being in Hastur's and Alaistar loving care.

Dean smiled at him brightly.

"You, honey? You're bait."

To be continued...

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals :P