Chapter 2

"So you're the Hounds' Great White Hope," Dean said as he poured from the pitcher of beer the waitress just left, then pushed it towards Sam.

"Pretty much." Sam filled his own glass.

"Said the Aztecs to Cortez." Dean answered, in lieu of a more conventional toast.

"Thanks for the resounding vote of confidence," Sam shot him a sour look.

"Sorry, but come on," Dean leaned forward, dropping his voice. "June used the word messiah in relation to that prophecy. You gotta admit that's goin' way over the top."

"Messiah as in the original meaning; rescuer and liberator," Sam said. "I don't have a Christ-complex."

"Never entered my mind," Dean assured him. He snagged a piece of cornbread from the basket. "So, Hunter Joshua, I get. But what's a Caleb?"

"The Boy Wonder to my Batman." Sam's smile was back.

"Sam. I'm Batman. I'll always be Batman."

"Just be glad I'm not gonna insist on the tights."

"Good, because they probably don't make 'em in your size and I'm bowlegged." Dean took a sip of his beer. "The world is not yet ready."

Sam grimaced. "It'll never be ready. Anyway, Caleb was Joshua's best friend and right-hand man, his partner in espionage."

"That's cool. I can wear that across my chest," Dean nodded. "But what does all this mean for us? What are we expected to do?"

"Lead the Hounds, and hook up as many of them with Hunters as we can." Sam stated that like the headline of a manifesto.

Dean could feel his eyebrows shoving at his hairline. "We've got angels, demons and most of the country's cops breathing down our necks. I don't know about you, but I don't have time in my schedule to pencil in being Scout-master and match-maker for a handful of flea-bitten shapeshifters!"

Sam leaned forward himself then, folded elbows on the table. "That's exactly why we need to make time for them. We shoved a huge monkey-wrench in Hell's hostile takeover scheme. If we weren't at the top of every demon and monster's hit list before, we are now. We can use some help here."

"We don't need them. We've gotten along all our lives without the aid of Hounds."

An odd expression crossed Sam's face. "Are you sure about that, Dean? Until we met June, we didn't know Hounds still existed. It's gotten me thinking. How can we be so sure we weren't often aided by people we never even knew were watching?"

Every hair on Dean's body tried to stand straight up as he considered the implications of an entirely undetectable species operating alongside those he'd known, acting according to societal rules that were largely alien to his way of thought. A society, like that of angels and demons, which could their lives in ways he could hardly imagine now.

He shoved his cornbread aside, the residual flavor going bitter in his mouth. "I'm sure because we never got much help dropped on us out of the blue, with or without your little pet."

"But it has happened," Sam pressed.

"Coincidence, that's all. Besides, other Hunters are—" Dean protested, before Sam cut him off.

"Are being picked off faster than new ones are coming on board. Things keep going the way they have the last couple of years, it's not the Hounds that are going extinct first, Dean, it's Hunters. But to be really useful, the Hounds need to be paired with Hunters, and most Hunters will keep on ganking them as monsters if someone doesn't intervene. . ."

"That someone being you," Dean gritted. "Sammy, why does it always have to be you?"

"Why not me?" Sam shrugged. "I don't know about you, but I'm enough of a control freak that if there's going to be some apex Hunter, I sure as hell want that Hunter to be you or me. I don't trust anyone else enough to do the job."

The earnest, resigned, dutiful tone of Sam's voice chilled him. Sam doing what Sam thought he had to do hadn't worked out well for him or the whole damn world lately. And pointing that out would dump this entire conversation into the crapper and push the handle.

"But is it what you want?" Dean made sure his emotions matched the compassionate tone of his question. "Sam, you got shoved back into hunting when you did your damnedest to make a break for normal. You got commandeered and snowed into the whole demon-blood deal. None of it has ever been your free choice, not really. It's all been rock and a hard place, damned if you do, double-damned if you don't. I don't want to see you forced into something else that's gonna eat your life."

He reached across the table to brush Sam's hand with his own, the pitcher serving as a cover for that intimacy as the full link flared up between them. "She's not worth your life. I'm not worth your life. Never again."

"This is my choice," Sam answered. He glanced down at their hands but he didn't pull his away. "Sure, I didn't know all the angles when I made it, but even if I did, I'd do exactly the same thing."

"So you really want this, for yourself. This whole Your Highness, grand poobah gig?"

Sam chuckled. "I wouldn't call it that, but yeah, I do."

"I thought normal was the grand prize for you." Dean watched his face intently, despite the emotional inside info flowing through their completed link. "Dog King is about as far from normal as it gets."

Sam leaned back in his chair, which brought their bond back down to vague baseline as Sam broke contact. Even though every inch of his brother radiated relaxed confidence, Dean wasn't sure he trusted his brother's honesty that far, not yet.

"June's done some good, for me, anyway," Sam said, spreading his hands. "She's helped me accept that this is my normal. And you know what else I've accepted? That my role as Joshua isn't some ego-trip, Dean. Hundreds of demons burst through that Hell-gate. If we can rally the Hounds around us, unite the Packs, and influence other Hunters to accept bond-partners, the odds will be in our favor for once. We'll kick every one of those black-eyed bastards right back down into the abyss."

Obviously, Sam and his talking dog had been giving this way more thought than he was comfortable being left out of. "And they all lived happily ever after," Dean snapped. "Since you've been planning this out behind my back for God knows how long, hand me logistics, a battle plan, not some doggy bedtime story."

Sam leaned back in. "Give me a fuckin' break, Dean," he growled, his voice soft enough to barely carry across the table, though his offended anger crossed the distance loud and clear. "Since St. Mary's, I haven't done anything behind your back but take a leak. This isn't anything June and I have planned out without you, but you're right, I have thought about this."

"Then do share, please."

"I'm surprised you haven't seen this first," Sam answered, the words clipped and curt. "It's a pretty obvious extrapolation, now that we've seen June in action. Think about it, Dean: How much easier would our lives be if we didn't have to skulk around the edges all the time? If we had a whole lot of people we could turn to—people trained like freakin' special ops? People who know a damn lot about what we fight, who can give us information and shelter and pull official strings, who are willing to take orders from us like we're minor deities."

"That." Dean stabbed a forefinger onto the tabletop as if he was pinning down Sam's words, his eyes fixed on his brother's. "That right there is what's skeeving me out the worst. You know exactly what happens to minor deities, Sam."

"Am I coming across like I believe I'm some kind of demi-god?" Sam snapped.

Sam's eyes blazed into his for a beat, then Dean dropped the mutual stare.

"No," Dean admitted. "But back at Matthews' bar, you were being treated like you are."

"And you're afraid I'm going to start believing it myself," Sam finished for him, his voice far flatter than his emotions.

The arrival of the waitress with mammoth slabs of fragrant meat saved Dean from having to answer that one right away. A mutual silence stretched for several long minutes, until they both came up for air and refills.

"Call your dog," Dean said.

Sam looked up at him, expression unreadable. "Why?"

"We need to figure out exactly what we're dealing with here. If we've been handed an army, we damn well better figure out how to rally the troops."

-oOo-

June arrived back at the motel room scant minutes after they did. She stepped inside then turned back to fasten the deadbolt.

"Wait, where's Matthews?" Dean asked.

She frowned at him like he was exhibiting signs of a serious head injury. "Out in his car, why?"

"Can we trust him?" Sam asked instead.

"I trust him," she answered.

"Call him back before he gets too far," Sam told her.

Hers was not to question why, obviously, because she flipped open her phone, dialed, and then spewed syllables that sounded like a cross between a barking dog and a wookie horking up a hairball. She snapped the phone closed. Apparently, Hounds weren't big on parting rituals. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Strategy planning," Sam said.

-oOo-

"Jim, have a seat," Dean added, tugging out one of the chairs at the battered dinette set before dropping onto one himself. "You too, Strongheart."

"Can we count on your full support, and that of your Pack?" Sam asked Matthews as soon as they were all gathered around the table.

"Implicitly," Jim agreed with a nod, and no enlightenment on his face.

"You said you're leader of Memphis Prime. How many other Packs are in the area?"

"One," he answered, "Memphis Secondary, but it's subordinate to Prime. Altogether, a hundred-twenty Fighters at your service."

That meant Matthews wasn't including pups, civilians and geezers in that head-count, Dean realized with a jolt of suspicion. Sam looked equally disturbed by that revelation.

"I thought you guys were almost extinct!" Dean split a scowl between Jim and June.

"We were," June answered and Jim nodded agreement. "Up till my parent's generation, when we suddenly started multiplying like rabbits."

"An apocalyptic prediction, as was the prediction that the Joshua would appear," Jim added.

"And the first batch of those puppies are hitting maturity right about now," Dean surmised. "Just in time to be grunts in the final boss-fight."

Jim glanced at June, who gave him the royal nod. "Yes," he leaned forward, looking between Dean and Sam as he spoke. "But any Hounds who dare reveal themselves are still exterminated as just another shape-shifting monster. It's gone on that way so long, some of us have given up looking for the Joshua and Caleb to appear. False teachers are springing up, more and more, proclaiming that the prophecies are just myths we told ourselves so we could keep going, after Hunters turned against Hounds. Their blasphemous lies are turning Pack against Pack, even setting bonded mates and litter-sibs against one another."

"So some furry Martin Luther's gonna hike his hind leg and piss his manifesto on the doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Mange," Dean scoffed. "Why should we give a crap?"

Jim drew back, his jaw tensing and eyes narrowing, before he dropped that hint of a challenge along with his gaze. His shoulders rounded and he seemed to become smaller somehow. "The heretics also teach we should fight only under command of our own kind, and only for the protection of our own kind."

Dean rounded on June. "What the fuck, June! You didn't think this was something we need to know?"

"I didn't know it had become so widespread," she answered, wide-eyed and blanched. "The Southern Louisiana Pack is staunchly traditional. Besides, I was pretty much bottom rank there, and Barnabas is so devout, he would ruthlessly suppress even gossip about heresy in other Packs."

Great. They'd been counting on her as the authority on all things Hound and she was clueless as a rock. She shrank under his stare almost as much as Jim, but with an offended pout. Rank has its privileges, after all.

"How many local Packs are behind us as Joshua and Caleb?" Sam asked Jim.

"Memphis, of course," Matthews answered. "The Appalachian Coalition takes in most of southeastern Tennessee, North Carolina and upper Georgia, and they're rigidly traditional. There's three Packs in Florida and their leadership is solid, and conventional. You convince them you're the Joshua, and you'll have no problem with Appalachian or Florida. The Atlanta Pack is on the fence. I know their Pack leader well and he's completely amoral. He'll swing whichever direction gives him the most leverage."

"What about the Dallas Triad?" June asked.

"Their Prime Leader, Greg Kendall, is one of our own." Jim gave a smile that truly earned the adjective 'wolfish.' "If Dallas Secondary and Tertiary aren't on the straight and narrow, I'll lean on him till he leans on them. So you can count on Dallas."

"Then with the possible exception of the Atlanta Pack, we can assume we have the entire southeastern quadrant behind us?" Sam surmised.

"Yes, that's a safe assumption," Jim agreed.

Dean did some quick mental multiplication, using Jim's Pack as the average. "I don't think there's that many Hunters in the entire country."

And they sure weren't that organized. Hell, most of them were so paranoid, they weren't even on speaking terms. "We need to call Bobby. Like, yesterday."

Sam was feeling just as awed and overwhelmed, but not showing a trace of it. Dean wondered if the dogs could smell it, though. He nodded to Dean. "As soon as we have more information."

Turning back to Jim, he went on. "How can we make contact with the area Pack leaders? We can't afford to leave it to chance any longer."