Abbadon – Knight of Hell, known in the Vulgate as king of an army of locusts. Chosen of Lucifer. From the Hebrew for destruction.
John wakes up in the morning stiff from an unfamiliar bed. He's grateful to get his own room and not be sleeping on the couch like Seth, but Bobby must get his mattresses at a used discount store.
It's still early, and the boys are sleeping. Which isn't surprising, considering Sammy almost fell asleep into his supper last night, and Dean had the task of keeping up with his brother all day. John walks down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he can already smell the coffee. As he pours himself a mug, he can hear voices coming from Bobby's office — one of the few rooms in the house that has a working lock — so he knows where the others are at least. He takes his mug with him and walks down the hallway.
"No, we can't summon him here," Seth says even before John reaches the door. "What are we gonna do? Bargain? Demons deal in souls."
John freezes halfway down the hallway and becomes very aware of Bobby's squeaky boards.
"You said we can kill it." Bobby speaks low and rough, like he's trying to whisper but failing.
Forget freezing. John rushes for the door and yanks it open.
"I don't have—"
"Kill what?" John cuts right through Seth's sentence and makes both Seth and Bobby jerk in their chairs as they face the door.
Good to know he still has some skills.
"You can kill a demon?" He pins Seth with a demanding look he's learned entirely from dealing with his boys.
"There are ways," Seth says slowly, "that you can kill a demon instead of exorcizing it." He glances at his hands and swallows hard. "There's a ritual to cleanse one, too, but—"
John isn't interested in cleaning up something from the Pit.
"You can kill a demon?"
Doesn't Seth understand that he's supposed to give more information than that?
Seth scrubs his face with both palms and digs his nails into his scalp. When done with that, he sits back in his chair and looks at Bobby instead of John.
"I need a weapon," Seth says. "Something specific, and I don't have any of them."
"So get them!" John's knuckles are tight around the coffee mug that he's almost surprised he's still holding.
"That's what I'm trying to do!" Seth snaps back. He surges forward in his chair, but he stops short of getting to his feet. His shoulders sink again, and he looks between Bobby and John. "There's a hunter in Colorado, Elkins. He mostly deals in vampires, I think."
"Vampires don't exi—"
And there's Seth rolling his eyes again. God, John can't imagine trying to raise the man as a teenager. He has enough trouble with Sammy.
And Seth does have a point. John wouldn't have thought that demon hierarchies existed a month ago, not to mention Knights of Hell.
"Fine." He exhales gustily and tries not to roll his eyes right back. "What about Elkins?"
"He has a gun made by Samuel Colt, with … some help." Seth's eyes dart to one side, but John can't find whatever he's looking at. Doesn't matter, anyway. "The bullets can kill almost anything supernatural. It's not strong enough to descend into Hell, but it will take care of any Yellow-Eyed Bastard."
John's fingernails clink against the coffee mug.
"Who said anything about yellow eyes?"
John is taking in all the information he can from Seth, but he knows that he hasn't told Seth exactly how he got into hunting.
"You did." Seth stares at John for so long that his eyebrows seem to sink down into a frown without any other movement in Seth's face. "You weren't exactly subtle with the questions."
John has got to look at that previous-law-enforcement theory he had again.
"Fine," he says again. "So we go and get the gun?"
Seth's eyebrows fly halfway up his forehead.
"You?" His voice is at least half an octave higher than it should be. "No. You wanna tell me you're the soul of diplomacy?"
John gets the feeling that Seth is laughing at him.
"Are you telling me I can't—"
"Oh, will both you idjits shut up." Bobby suddenly stands up, making both Seth and John look at him. "I'm going."
"Bobby?"
And for some reason, this is the thing that surprises Seth so much that all the tension floods from his limbs and leaves him sagging in his chair.
"You said we need a way to contain this blasted demon before we kill it," Bobby says, with one meaty finger pointing directly at Seth's face.
"Yeah."
"So we need this panic room you've been talking about."
Something shifts in John's brain with an almost audible click. He had thought the panic room was a throwaway idea. Seth had something like that in his bomb shelter, so Bobby wanted one for his paranoia-based house. It couldn't serve a more express purpose. Only that sounds like a very good plan. Keep the demon contained with something like what John only glimpsed last night on Bobby's table.
"Iron walls blessed with salt, devil's traps on all the walls," Bobby keeps talking as he backhands a gesture towards his own walls. "Sounds like a pretty good prison for a demon."
"So you build the panic room," says Seth. "I'll go—"
He starts to stand up, but Bobby just turns and walks to an old roll-top desk against one wall of the room.
"From what you told me, it isn't just Yellow Eyes that's after John," he says.
John frowns at Seth and tries to figure if this is new information. He does still need to look up if Meg is an actual demon name, and she's probably not the actual demon with yellow eyes instead of black. If that means there's more than one demon after him, John needs to get his shit together, and fast.
"You got more research than I do, and John needs that info." Bobby nods at John as he places a large tome on the roll-top. "Besides, I don't trust this bozo to knock holes in my walls."
John rolls his eyes. He sees Seth chewing on his lips like he's trying desperately not to smile, but John's completely justified because Bobby always gives him a hard time. It's just not usually so light-hearted. Giving him grief about John's construction skills is a lot different than chewing John out over a hunt.
"I know a few hunters, real old school," Bobby says. "Exactly the type who'd know where Elkins hides out these days."
He pulls out a thin black book — the kind Dean would make a hundred dirty jokes about — from his desk drawer. Seth stands up with him and drops the book in his lap back on the cushy chair he had been sitting on.
"You're gonna leave us alone in your house?" he asks as one corner of his mouth lifts up. "You sure you wanna come back to what we could do to it?"
Bobby strides back toward the open door that John is halfway blocking. He pauses long enough to slap Seth on his bicep.
"I trust you, kid," he says.
And Seth just melts while his eyes go wide enough to make him look like a little kid. His mouth gapes in surprise, but he looks more like he got surprised by how much someone likes him. Bobby doesn't say anything about that — maybe Bobby doesn't see it — and brushes past John and out the door.
John slurps at his coffee, cooled off by now so that he already needs a warm-up. Seth ducks his head down to stare at the book he left on his chair. John doesn't even want to touch what Seth thinks of Bobby, but he can see the younger man looking up to Bobby as a fellow man of research and dusty, old books.
"I still want Sam and Dean to put in some work," he says, because he really does. As much as it's summer and a game or two of catch can't hurt, John needs them to learn the things that are going to protect them.
"I was planning on teaching Sam more Enochian." Seth lifts one shoulder into something that's almost a shrug. He doesn't tilt his head down like Bobby does, though. "It's a whole language."
"Sure." John nods. That's pretty much what he had in mind. Not the whole language bit, but he knows there must be more than just one symbol because he saw Seth's journal. "But Dean gets that, too."
Seth nods.
"Okay."
He leaves his book where it is and picks up a stack of papers instead. The one on the top is graph paper, and John recognizes it from last night. Walking over to Seth, John sips on more coffee and glances over what he can see of the plans. The room is sketched out to be pretty small, just about nine feet by nine, and there's more detail around the materials and the symbols than the actual measurements.
"Have you ever done construction before?" Seth mutters at John over his shoulder.
John drinks his coffee.
"Not since I owned my own house," he says, because he's not actually going to say that Mary was the last one who asked him to do anything resembling home repair.
She had wanted a front porch, and John only got as far as cutting the boards and nailing his thumb a dozen times before he decided they had the money to pay professionals for this kind of thing.
"You?" Just for that he turns the question on Seth.
Seth huffs a little as his mouth turns into a half-smile.
"I think I'm better at tearing things down," he says.
Well, this should be interesting.
o0O0o
"You have to measure, then cut."
John closes his eyes and clearly pictures throwing the metal mallet in his hand directly at Seth's head.
"I know the rules," he says when the picture is complete. "I'm not an idiot."
Seth stands with his hands on his hips, hovering over the lengths of iron rods gathered from around the salvage yard, and glowers at John in return. That picture of a hammer sailing into his head isn't really helping John that much.
"You know how to do it right, why don't you start on the cutting?" John tosses his hammer down towards the pile. It hasn't been helping much with getting the screws out of the rods they've already found. "I think I have a book to read through, anyway."
"You can't leave me with all this work!" Seth throws out his hands like John is leaving him alone with a strigta.
Before John can argue more — and despite how much he wants to — Dean jogs out of the house and up to the pile of iron next to Bobby's basement entrance. Sammy is following after, stuffing a piece of toast in his mouth as he runs.
"Hey, Dad." Dean grins and shrugs in his loose T-shirt like he wants to show off his muscles. "What about that reconnaissance?"
John glares at Seth when the other man looks gobsmacked at the very question. He doesn't want his boys to even crack the cover of that demonology text, no matter how helpful Dean thinks he can be. Sammy stares at the three men — almost-men in Dean's case — with his cheeks stuffed full of bread as he chews slowly. John presses the tips of his fingers against the pad of his thumb and rubs them together slowly.
"I was just going inside to take a look at what we got," he says slowly, like this has been the plan all along. "Why don't you two help out Seth with this stuff while I get started."
John smacks Dean on the shoulder and pushes Sam forward so both of them know that this is where he wants them. Seth's eyebrows go up as he looks at his two new helpers, then he looks right at John with his eyebrows drawn down into a total bitch face. John tries not to gloat too hard.
"Dad, we can help you, too, right?" Sammy asks. "Seth showed me how to read his books last night."
John can't help glaring at Seth. If that man has gone behind John's back and started his sons on demonology—
"You're not fluent yet," Seth says with a roll of his eyes. "There's a lot more sigils you don't know."
John bites on his tongue but doesn't say anything about the books or what he's going to look at.
"You guys start here, and then we'll go from there." He pats Sammy on the shoulder to reassure him.
"Dad."
"Help Seth," John orders before Dean can even start his question.
He turns on his heel and starts marching to the door of the house before Sammy can start with his own questions or Seth can start complaining in front of the boys. Seth's probably staring at him with a dirty look by the feeling John gets at the base of his scalp, but soon he hears Seth ordering Dean to take up one end of a metal bar, so there's nothing to worry about.
Once inside, John heads straight for Bobby's study and pulls out the ancient book that Seth had given him the day before. The text is aged, like calligraphy, inside the book, but John can still read the large letters that make the book seem like a dictionary. He turns to the M's and starts running his finger down the pages. There's nothing for Margaret, but he wasn't really expecting there to be. When he gets further down the entries, he sees the name Megaera.
"In Greek mythology," he reads, "one of the Furies, called Grudging."
There's a hand-written note in the margin after that short description:
Daughter of Azazel.