List of Precautions Taken
1 rope, soaked in a salt and holy water mixture, laid out in a 600 m di. circle with cabin in the middle and buried 6 in. underground
At least 300 Enochian sigils, worked into the bark of trees within the rope
2 m di. devil's trap, worked in iron and buried 6 in. underground in front of back door
All doorways and window frames painted with salt and holy water mixture
1 m di. devil's trap, in black light paint, in front of bedroom door
72 Enochian sigils, in black light paint, on bedroom door
38 Enochian sigils, in chalk, drawn in a circle around bed
3 1 m di. devil's straps, in black light paint, in front of each ordinary cell
1 line of graveyard (goofer) dust laid underneath jamb of bedroom door
1 line of goofer dust laid underneath sash of bedroom window
1 glass ampoule of holy water kept in nightstand
1 box of iron nails kept in nightstand
1 handgun, loaded with six silver bullets, kept under bed
1 sawed-off shotgun, loaded with salt rounds, kept under bed
½ cup of dead man's blood kept in refrigerator
1 syringe kept in refrigerator (taped to dead man's blood)
1 pitcher of holy oil kept under desk
1 lighter kept on desk
1 machete kept in desk drawer
1 handgun, loaded with 6 hollowpoints, kept in desk drawer
1 premade Molotov cocktail kept in desk drawer
42 Enochian sigils, in black light paint in a circle around desk
Cabin-wide black lighting system
Last maintenance performed 05/02/2004
- Personal journal of Sam Winchester
The porch started creaking – loudly – about five minutes after Sam managed to fall asleep.
That was what it felt like, at least. Weighed down by the blankets that covered his bed and heavy with the warmth of the space heater, he groaned, rolled over, and buried his face in his pillow. He was unpleasantly reminded of Dean's chain-rattling phase, his efforts to keep him awake all night, even though he'd only been out of sleep for a few seconds here. And only because it'd startled him. It was an old wooden building, and he tended to be used to it making all sorts of noise.
A particularly loud creak rolled through the cabin, even making it past the foam that padded his door. Sam yawned into the soft down of his pillow, eyes closed. Probably the wind. No, it sounded like somebody was walking around out there, which meant a deer had stepped up onto the porch and was licking the salt off of his windows. There'd been a time, a few years ago, when he would've scrambled out of bed and rushed to the front windows to see a deer. But he'd seen a lot of deer. They all looked the same. And he wanted to go back to sleep.
He was pretty close to achieving that after a couple of minutes, creaking and all. He was starfished out over his mattress with his left hand shoved up under his pillow, which happened to be the most comfortable position for him at the moment. A warm tingling feeling was spreading through him. His breathing was even, and his heart rate was slow.
Then someone kicked the door in.
The sound of splintering wood and screeching metal was like an explosion in Sam's ears. He bucked, struggling out from underneath the blankets and covers of his bed, and tumbled to the floor. He somehow managed to land on his feet, and clenched his teeth to ignore the spike of pain that the impact sent up his leg. He dropped to his knees then and shoved a hand under his bed, scrabbling uselessly past stacks and stacks of journals, until his fingers finally closed around the smooth wooden stock of a shotgun. His thumb ran over the pentagram that he'd etched into it as he pulled it out and heaved himself back up into a standing position, using the mattress for support.
Sam stumbled to his closed door, gun hanging from his left hand, and slapped his right one down onto a plastic panel that held two light switches. One controlled the light in his room, and he'd left it its original white. The other he'd painted black. That was the one he hit.
Someone in the main room of the cabin swore, so loudly that Sam could hear it over the thundering of his own blood. He yanked his door open, shotgun coming up as he fell back on training that had started when he was five years old – and felt a lot like swearing himself.
The runes on his door were still in perfect shape. But of course they were; he hardly ever touched the outside of his door. They were glowing a brilliant, obvious green in the purple light. The devil's traps that he'd put down on the floor, on the other hand, were a very different story. Paths had been worn right though the center of them by his own feet, over three years of walking through them without repainting or even checking up on them. They were useless.
As stupid as he'd been, though, there was no time to beat up on himself now. There were four people in the cabin, scattered around the large main room. Three men and one woman, with the hard-edged look of Special Ops or CIA field agents about them, dressed in black with conventional (guns) and supernatural (silver blades) weapons hanging from webbed belts around their waists. Sam knew a tactical team when he saw one. And when the closest one's head whipped towards him unnaturally fast, black eyes glittering, he knew what they'd come for, too.
Demon commandos. Now he'd officially seen fucking everything.
His thoughts flew to the knife in the closet. Damn it, he should really start keeping that thing closer to his bed. Was it worth the time that it would take to grab it? Or should he just charge out there and try to defend the contents of his two occupied cells with nothing more than a salt-filled shotgun?
The decision was pretty much made for him. The closest demon lunged at him with an aggressive snarl, and Sam instinctively slammed the door shut. There was a loud thud and then a howl of pain, and the wood shook but held. No black smoke crept in around the edges, either. The Enochian sigils on the door had been originally meant to keep aggressive or rogue angels out, but it didn't work half-bad on demons.
Muscle memory led Sam to the closet in the darkness of his room, and to the rack that the knife rested in, behind his clothes. He crossed the floor again, opened the door with his shotgun hand. The demon practically fell at him, a K-bar knife in what must have been his dominant hand, and Sam's knife came up, too. A line of fire drew itself across his forearm as he sank his dagger into the soft part of the demon's stomach, right underneath his sternum. The K-bar clattered to the floor. The demon froze. Red-white light sparked and flashed through his body as his corrupted soul burned away, and then the vessel went limp, sliding off of Sam's knife and thumping to the floor.
The other three demons had apparently been standing right behind him, and now they were staring down at him. Sam knew that he had less than a second. So he thumbed back a hammer and emptied one barrel of his shotgun into all three of them. They caught it perfectly, right across their torsos, and they screamed.
They must have had a plan before they came in. Either that, or they were psychic, because the two men suddenly drew back without a word, hugging their salt-filled chests, while the woman stepped up and bared her teeth. They glowed a bright purple in the black light, just like the shine on her solidly ebony eyes. She suddenly took a swing at him, and he barely managed to dodge. He caught sight, meanwhile, of the two men hurrying along the wall that held all of his cells.
"Knight Dantalion," one called, voice steady and perfectly businesslike.
"Yeah. Over here," Dean replied. Chains rattled as he stood up and probably walked to the front of his cell.
Dantalion?
"Just don't touch the gate. It's made of iron," Dean continued. The female demon tried to hit Sam again, and this time, he blocked her punch by swinging the barrels of his shotgun at her fist. He heard bones crack, and she cried out as steam rose from her skin. The barrel was steel, and demons liked that only a little more than they liked iron. He saw the two male demons where they were now standing in front of Dean's cell.
"It's locked," one of them said. The female demon went for a gun in her belt, a compact little handgun, but Sam stopped her by bashing her hand again.
"Yeah. No shit, Sherlock." Her foot, in a combat boot, snapped up, and Sam swung backwards. He would have fallen if he hadn't dropped the knife to grab his doorframe. And the steel toe still grazed his chin.
"Where's the key?" one of the Black Ops demons demanded. A fist slammed into Sam's stomach before he could pull himself back upright, and he doubled over, sinking to his knees. He couldn't believe that he hadn't felt anything rupture inside of him.
"I don't know," Dean answered. Sam's eyebrows drew together. What the hell was he talking about? There was no way he couldn't know that the keys were on Sam himself, since he'd seen him unlock the door to his cell about a hundred times. But he stopped worrying about that when the female demon delivered a powerful double-handed punch to the back of his head. He felt himself slump to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"You're weak," he heard the demon hiss. "Your wards were pathetic."
It was starting to turn into a theme. Every monster that hurt him calling him weak.
"Tasha," called the demon who'd been asking Dean about the key. Struggling, Sam pulled back the other hammer on his shotgun. "Kill the hunter and search his body. His room, too. We can't break iron bars and Dantalion is bound."
"Thanks for noticing," Dean said, rattling his chains. Sam heard the female demon draw her handgun with a sigh. He had fallen on his shotgun. Both barrels were pointing at her ankles in their boots. He pulled the second trigger as she aimed.
The leather of her boots – and a lot of the flesh underneath them – was torn apart in a spray of salt and blood. Her feet flew out from under her, and Sam wasn't sure if his ears were ringing because of the roaring blast of the shotgun or because of her screams. She hit the ground. She hit the body of the one demon Sam had already taken out, actually. He let go of the shotgun (useless now, except for as a club), pushed himself up with a hand that was now free, and drove his knife down between her shoulder blades. The muscles were thick, hard to get past, and he only barely avoided her ribs. But he killed her.
Two sets of boots hit the floor right next to Sam as he pulled his knife out of Tasha's body. He cried out as a hand buried itself in his hair and cruelly yanked his head back to expose his vulnerable throat.
"Hunter trash." A knife found the fluttering stream of his jugular. "Did you really think that you could keep a Knight of Hell in a cage? That you could beat us?"
"Whoa, whoa, hey, don't kill – " Dean began, but Sam heard him only the very back of his mind as he glared blurrily up at the demon holding him and bellowed, "Exorcismus te – "
Both demons shrieked and teleported backwards, letting go of him. Knife still in his hand, Sam heaved himself back into his room with a heroic effort, head swimming, stomach aching, arm stinging.
"Why could you possibly not want us to – " the demon who had tried to kill Sam demanded testily.
"Where the hell is that fucking – " the other one started.
Sam dragged his door closed, cutting them both off, and then collapsed against it. He somehow managed to turn so that his back was to it, then rubbed at his face. His hand came away damp with sweat and, probably, tears, too.
He closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the foam that made his room soundproof (though only to noises of a certain frequency, apparently), panting heavily as he tried to catch his breath and force the pain to fade from his body. The back of his head had still been pretty sore from where Nadia smacked it into the floor; skull bruises took a ridiculously long time to heal. Being punched there had kickstarted a nausea-inducing headache. Though some of that nausea might be from the fact that he'd been hit in the stomach, too.
At least they hadn't done anything to his stupid leg. That actually felt good, for once.
Sam gave himself about two minutes to recover, then reached up, wrapped a free hand around the doorknob above him, and used it to life himself. He needed to either kill these demons or run them off before they figured out how to spring Dean without a key – Dantalion the Knight couldn't be set loose.
He was right, though. Jeez. He does have a stupid name.
Sam limped over to the closet, grabbing another sawed-off and snapping salt rounds into it. A handful of extras went into the pocket of his sweatpants. He had to get out there, he had to get rid of the demons…he had to protect Vaughn. A sudden chill raced up his spine. He'd completely forgotten about the wraith. And the door to his cell wasn't locked. He needed to get him out of there and into the bedroom, safe, while he got everything cleaned up and set up hasty wards just in case the demons who were out there right now had backup. He wouldn't put it past them, since they were rescuing a Knight of Hell. And they looked like something out of a goddamn videogame.
He threw his door open, and only saw one demon. That one was dumping out all his desk drawers and rummaging through the contents, but he looked up when Sam stepped out of his room, and then he was directly in front of him with a K-bar of his own in his hand. Sam was ready, though. The shotgun was already raised to eye level, and his finger was already on the trigger. A barrel of saltshot caught him full in the face. And, at that range, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between salt and metal. The demon crumpled, most of the front half of his head splattered all over the floor, the other two dead demons, and Sam himself. The blast brought the one remaining demon running. That was the first time that Sam noticed the door to Vaughn's cell was open, because the demon had come out of it. The blood on his hands and arms shone black in this light.
"Castigli!" he called. A fog of shock had wrapped Sam's senses, but now he looked down, where the faceless demon had started to move. He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and tendrils of black smoke began to tease themselves free of the ruined brain and bone of his vessel's head.
"I don't think so," Sam said, and dropped like a rock, putting all of his weight behind his knife. It sank to the hilt in the demon's neck, as easily as if he'd been stabbing butter – except for the wet, meaty crunching sound of it. Those fingers of smoke fell to the floor like liquid and disappeared as the rest of the demon died inside of his faceless vessel,
Sam straightened, breathing hard. His shirt was matted to his chest with gore, and his hair to his scalp. His face and arms were covered with pieces of person. He could taste blood in his mouth, was sure it'd gotten into the cut on his arm, so he really hoped that the guy whose head he'd just blown apart had been clean.
None of what was on him was warm. The vessel had already been dead when he shot him.
He turned to look at the last demon, whose own bloody hand automatically flew to the gun on his hip. Sam gestured to Vaughn's cell, dark, with his shotgun, and asked, "What'd you do to the kid in there?"
The demon blinked black eyes, then grinned, wickedly. There was nothing but excited malice on his face. "Why don't you come over here and take a look?"
"Hey," Dean warned, from inside his cell. "Hey, look. Whatever your name is." Sam began to move, walking across the floor. "Get outta here, and come back later." His footprints were sticky-sounding, with the blood that covered his soles. "This guy is one crazy son of a bitch. Trust me on this. Didn't you see what he did to your three buddies over there?"
The last demon didn't turn to look at Dean, but his lip twitched up into a sneer as he spoke to him. "Don't tell me that the very last Knight of Hell is afraid of a human hunter with only one good leg."
"I'm telling you – " Dean started, but he didn't get to finish, because the demon that Sam was facing down drew his gun with inhuman speed and shot at him. He lunged to the side (it probably would have missed him anyway, he realized), and the bullet buried itself in the narrow section of wall between the bedroom and bathroom doors.
His leg screamed in agony where he'd landed heavily on it, but there was no time to give it a breather, because the demon had adjusted his aim and his finger was tightening on the trigger again. Sam didn't think. Just acted to keep a small piece of lead from burying itself in his guts. He hurled the knife in his hand, sending it spinning end over end towards the demon. His aim was really terrible (he'd practiced archery and chain-fighting, but never knife-throwing), since the thing clattered to the floor about a yard shy of its target, but it had the intended effect. The demon flinched, and he didn't shoot.
Salt sprayed across him. Most of it got him, specifically in the stomach and thighs, because Sam really wasn't that far away. He started screaming and swearing blue murder, body jittering with pain, and he aimed at Sam again with his stupid European-made handgun, but Sam was close enough now to tear it out of his grip and toss it out of his reach. Then he clubbed him across the face with the barrels of his empty shotgun, feeling his nose and cheekbone break under the powerful blow. The demon went down, and Sam went with him, because of the arms that he threw around his legs. They wrestled on the ground in a smear of blood, salt, and gunpowder. A knee suddenly struck Sam's ribs with demonic strength behind it, and he yelled in pain before choking, suddenly, unable to breathe. It had knocked the wind out of him. And probably cracked his ribs, too, from the way that it felt.
The demon must have realized he'd managed to hurt him, because he began to batter mercilessly at that spot. Blackness thudded around the edges of Sam's vision as he dug his fingernails into the crack between two floorboards and dragged himself forward like that. It was hell on his ribs, and the rest of his body, too, but in seconds, he'd snatched up the knife. He flipped himself over onto his back, grabbed the demon by the throat, and, screaming, began to stab.
The first one, in the stomach, did the job. But Sam kept going after that, unable to stop himself. Chest, belly, shoulders, face – cold blood fountained down onto him every time he ripped the knife out of the demon's increasingly-damaged flesh, and he screamed, a war cry of grief and fear and rage. Both the movement and the sound he was making made his ribs sear with white-hot pain, but he didn't stop until his arm had run out of strength.
He lay on his back as he pried open cramping, sticky fingers and let the knife fall to the floor again. The demon was dead weight on top of him. He was exhausted, but he could only take shallow breaths to replenish himself because of the agony of his ribs. He closed his eyes. The black lights made him dizzy.
"Sam?" Dean's voice, hushed, came after about fifteen minutes. "You…" He hesitated, as if thinking about what to ask, then finally settled on, "…alive?"
Sam didn't answer. With a breathy groan, he shoved the demon's dead vessel off of himself, then once again rolled over onto his stomach. Slowly, painfully. Pathetic whimpers trickled out of him as he dragged himself to the open door of Vaughn's cell, then latched onto the frame and began to pull himself up with it. It hurt. He didn't have the strength for it. He did it anyway.
"Vaughn," Sam rasped, once he was standing. His throat was raw and dry. "Vaughn."
He didn't get in answer, but then again, he hadn't expected one. There had been so much blood on the demon's arms. And a knife made of silver dangling from his belt, when he first arrived.
Sam knew what he'd find, as he stumbled across the cell and collapsed onto his knees next to the cot. But he touched the sodden covers anyway, fumbled through them until he found a cold, limp hand, held onto it tightly. He checked the pulse. A reflexive action. There wasn't one, of course.
He had left the door unlocked. He had never repainted the devil's trap in front of his cell.
"I'm sorry," Sam whispered. "I'm so sorry."
"Sam," Dean called again, this time with a note of command in his voice. Once again, Sam didn't answer him.
"Vaughn," Sam said numbly, and his fingers brushed against something hard, protruding from the wraith's wrist. His spike. Had he tried to fight back? Had he managed to stab the demon before he died? Sam hadn't seen any holes on him, but he hadn't exactly conducted a thorough physical examination while furiously stabbing him to death.
Vaughn's hand slipped away from his, and then the concrete was cold and solid beneath him. His eyes had fallen closed at some point. Dean was still calling his name, pretending to be concerned now, but he didn't have to worry about it, because it was fading away into silence. His last thought before he fully lost consciousness was that his whole world was wet and sticky now, and smelled like metal.