AUTHOR'S NOTE: Still trying to update as often as possible now that I have a functioning computer. Madame Natasha is a Tarot reader from Christopher Moore's books, but I love him and he needs to be included here.
Set Pre-SPN Satanpocalypse, Post-Ghost Story, with flashbacks circa Storm Front. This particular tale takes place during (and is written in the same style as) the events of Unfinished Business.
This chapter is set after Ghost Story.
"I don't think she likes me."
Dean unlocked the motel room and turned on the light before they stepped into the room. When you're the guy who deals with the things that go bump in the night, that's just common sense.
Sam tossed his messenger bag onto the kitchenette table. Their digs were near the University of Chicago, a cheap motel that took cash without question, the room done in faded teal and olive green, filmy amber glass and those godawful crackled mirrors veined with fake gold.
But it was clean. Mostly.
"I don't think any cop in the history of ever has liked you." His brother sat down and booted up his laptop.
"Maybe so," Dean loosened his tie and flopped down on the nearest bed, which gave up a gasp of dust that smelled like stale Cheetos and a few different smoky residues that varied in legality. "But the beer at that bar was frigging heavenly."
Sam frowned. "That place was just one stray shot away from the Cantina scene in A New Hope."
They had met Murphy for lunch at a place she picked; Mac's, a basement tavern that was like the post-apocalyptic version of Cheers. The steak sandwiches had been delicious, although he hadn't seen any dessert on the menu. Or an actual menu - she had just rapped on the bar and ordered three of 'the usuals.' Hand-carved scenes from Old World fairy tales, running the gamut from Disneyesque to the grimmest end of Grimm, decorated wooden pillars scattered through the room. The few concessions to modernity were canned Cokes and one mysterious lettered sign that read "ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY."
The atmosphere had been...strange. When the ex-cop walked in, the murmur of voices from the patrons died away to something low and tense. They sat at the bar and she had watched the goings-on behind them in the mirror as they ate.
It stayed quiet for their entire meal, and Dean had gotten the feeling it had been half out of begruding respect, half fear. Possibly mostly fear.
The ageless, bald bartender had gruffly told her it was 'on the house,' but she left cash next to the till on the way out.
Afterward, they had gone over everything she had compiled on the Black Court vampire (Dean was determined to come up with a cooler name for that) while she gave them an 'insider' tour of the city and called in a few favors – at an occult bookstore in a seedy neighborhood near the college, another at a weird house with stone gargoyles in the yard. Maybe the strangest stop had been an upscale salon on the Gold Coast, where the rotund Tarot reader in the adjoining coffeeshop offered to tell the fortunes of Agents Merry and Pippin.
That was how Murphy had introduced them before she stalked behind a heavy curtain to "talk to Tomas."
"But you don't have to be psychic to tell those names are bogus," the large, bald man in the cherry-blossom kimono had said sweetly. His pentagram scalp tattoo was as shiny as his lavender painted nails, and the plaque on his table read Madame Natasha. "You're fucked, boys. Double fucked."
"Who is this 'Tomas' guy, anyway?" Dean demanded. A Shakira remix was blasting over the sound system, and combined with the smell of girly hair products, ruined coffee and gossipy laughter, it was downright assaulting to the senses.
"A very busy man, sweetheart," Madame Natasha smirked, flipping over the Lovers, the High Priestess, Death, on his black velvet tablecloth before he shuffled them back into the deck. "Are you sure you don't want a reading, Agent? I'm very good."
Thankfully, Murphy had chosen that moment to slip around the corner again, slightly flushed and clutching a thumb drive. "Let's roll, hobbits."
Sam had thought it was funny, but Sam was literally a giant nerd.
"Hey, do you remember seeing a number for a Captain Jack Murphy in here?" Dean thumbed through the pages of his father's journal and yawned. "Something about the Thirteenth Precinct. They might be related."
Sam shrugged, leaning back on two chair legs as he stretched. "I don't think there is a Thirteenth anymore."
Before Murphy had dropped them off at the bar, they had stopped at an odd building in a residential neighborhood – a looming stone fortress in the middle of a row of big boardinghouses. A brawny guy with a mohawk, braids in his gray-blonde beard and runes inked up and down his arms traded her a huge, heavy duffel bag for a crate of beer. A handful of similarly-dressed guys came out, muttering to one another in a foreign language.
Murphy apparently knew the guys. She talked to them in English and haltingly in their own language, and pointed toward a keg in the trunk of her car and several old bottles of scotch. They produced another, heavier bag.
"What are in those, you think?" Dean asked Sam in a whisper as one guy dropped the duffel in Sam's arms - he gasped and doubled over. Dean smiled broadly and waved. The guy smiled back and hefted the crate of beer onto his shoulder and carried the keg in his other hand. Another grinned at Sam, and tried to open one of the bottles of scotch with his teeth before someone took it away.
"Who the hell are these people?" Sam hissed back as he heaved the duffel bag into the Honda's now-empty trunk. "White supremacists?"
The tattooed guy opened one of the bottles, took a long pull before he offered it to her and said in thickly accented English, "Karrin. What's with the suits?"
"Interns." She drank, not much. "You didn't forget the essentials this time?"
"Everything as promised. And a little extra." He winked. "You coming to the party? We need somebody to pour beers..."
Murphy flipped him off as they got in the car.
Dean was almost certain those guys weren't white supremacists, but he was sure the bags were filled with ordnance. Lots of it - cordite has a certain smell.
He kept turning through the journal's pages - he was also sure he had seen the info for a CPD Captain Murphy in there somewhere, on an old business card or something.
"Huh," said Sam. "It says here our sergeant retired right after that terrorist attack on the Bureau building here last year."
"Yeah, 'terrorists.'" Dean made air quotes around the word. "Because terrorists can climb down walls headfirst and tear out throats with their bare hands. That entire incident report read like a bad slasher flick."
His brother turned in his chair, interested. Dean rolled to the edge of the peacock feather-printed bedspread, reached into the dented mini-fridge for a beer and explained,
"Bobby got a hold of one of the real incident reports. Good stuff."
Sam's brows knit together but he didn't say anything.
He shut the journal and set it aside. "Wait, are you researching her, now?"
"They pulled our freaking FBI files, Dean," Sam said after a moment as he scrolled through another tab. "This is interesting. Lieutenant Murphy ran the Special Investigations division for like, forever, and had a supernatural consultant. Special Investigations, that's the weird stuff. X-Files stuff."
"A consultant, like a psychic or something? Most of those are just con artists."
Sam sat up a little straighter in his chair as he read. "Get this – dude was a private investigator who straight-up advertised as a wizard. In the phone book."
Dean sat up, too. "That is weirder."
"Gets better. Their closed-case rate was higher than the...uh, some of the non-weird departments. Before she got demoted."
"That the guy?" He nodded at the screen, a black and white photo from a newspaper, dated more than half a decade ago. It was definitely her, the same unamused expression, though her hair was styled in a wispy ponytail and she wore S.W.A.T. type gear. She standing next to the same guy in the picture he had seen in her house, the one on the table with the rosary. There was crime scene tape in the background. The tall guy wore a long black Doc Holliday coat and it looked like someone had recently tried to break his face for him. "Of course she likes you better than me. Woman clearly has a type."
His brother frowned.
"Tall, dark and weird," Dean pointed with his bottle of beer. "It's like real-life Scully and Mulder."
"Buffy and Angel?"
"Velma and Shaggy?"
"I thought we were Velma and Shaggy." He threw his bottle cap at Sam. "So what happened to him?"
"What do you mean?"
"Just a hunch." Dean stood up, drained what was left of his beer and threw the empty in the trash. "Did you see that little table in her living room? Had a picture of that guy on it. A candle, prayer card. Not the kind of thing you do for somebody who's around. There were some books, a guitar case - they were the only things in the house with any dust on them at all. Those weren't hers."
Sam nodded slowly. He clicked a few times, scrolled, then read, "Okay. Says here the guy was shot last year. Assassinated, uh... big bullet, long-range, out at the harbor. Fell into the lake and the body was never recovered." He sucked in a breath through his teeth. "Oh."
"No wonder Sarge is all sunshine and rainbows."
"You think they were..." Sammy wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. Not one of his talents.
"Dunno." He shrugged. "But I know how I'd feel if somebody sniped my Mulder."
Sam rolled his eyes.
Dean kicked the back of his chair. His brother probably didn't remember, but they had stayed here once before, years ago. In a different room, but the crappy heavyhanded decorations had been the same - he had realized after they had checked in. Their dad had dropped them off for the weekend once, with instructions not to leave the room. Like that was going to happen. Not during the hottest part of summer, with the Field Museum and the lake and the aquarium and legendary pizza within walking distance. Hell no.
Okay, so it had been a really long walking distance, but still.
Sam turned toward him, pensive. "You think he was the real deal, this wizard guy?"
They had dealt with witches, who were disgusting...and admittedly pretty powerful, given the right incantations. They had met real psychics and hoodoo men, people who could actually talk to the dead...
"I dunno. Folks who get offed like that... it usually happens like that for a reason." Dean shrugged. "Ask her if you want. I'm not gonna risk getting my ass Krav Maga'd over it."
His cellphone buzzed in his pocket. The business cell. He checked the number, then answered.
"Hello," he grinned, putting it on speakerphone, "you've reached the offices of Douchewaffle and Douchewaffle, Incorporated. How may I direct your call?"
Sam rolled his eyes again.
He got a brief laugh from Murphy that sounded like it wasn't entirely humorless. Progress.
"Hey, I think we may have found where they holed up. I did some triangulation with what our sources gave us, pretty sure they're in a condemned hotel." She rattled off an address and Sam unfolded a map, marking off the location in the middle of the red dots that signified the locations of the bodies that had been found.
"It's always a condemned something."
"Right. I'll have my guy go stake out the address tonight."
"Sam and I can do that," Dean said, reflexively.
"Oh, no. I don't want them to know we're coming. I'll send my guy. He can get in and out without anyone knowing."
"...How?" asked Sam.
A long, long silent moment passed before she spoke, but he could hear what was happening on the other end of the line anyway - the momentary war that wages inside everyone who tries to hold on to both secrecy and a soul-deep compulsion to tell the truth.
Karrin snorted. "Technically-speaking, he's not human."
"Not human. Okay," Dean said, blinking hard. "You're going to have to be a little more specific than that."
"He's a non-corporeal entity." She paused. "I kind of...inherited him. He's an annoying little perv, but excellent with recon. Just...trust me, we've done this before."
The brothers stared at each other, it was clear that she wasn't going to back down, and that this was all they were going to get.
"Okay." Sam said as he ran a hand through his hair. "Okay. What other information do you have that might be. Uh. Pertinent."
"Well," her tone turned dark, "we might run into their matriarch, this witch called Mavra."
Dean had to grin. "You can say 'bitch'. We're all grown ups here."
She sighed. "I mean an actual witch. Does the disappearing-thing, disembodied voice-thing, mind-control, spellslinging. All that crap."
"And you think she might be there?"
"There's a distinct possibility. I was talking with one of my contacts tonight and the fact that some of those bodies were eviscerated like they were points to-"
"Anthropomancy," Dean set the phone down on the map. "Somebody's trying dirty divination."
"Most likely Mavra. She's the nastiest thing around. And she doesn't like me, personally. Tried to kill me and my partner with a flamethrower, once."
Murphy paused. "Usually it's the other way around."
"Right."
"We'll have more to go on tomorrow. If you guys still want in, there's one of those awful restaurants on the way out of town on 31 South. Meet me there at eight tomorrow morning and bring your gear."
"You mean Biggersons," Sam said, nodding.
"Yeah."
"Alright, see you then," Dean said to dead silence. She had already hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket.
Sam was already disassembling his gun to clean it. "You're just going to let her call all the shots?"
"Dude," Dean said, getting another beer from the mini fridge. "You don't talk back to Buffy."
to be continued...