Becoming Human – Up In Flames
So I just have a bit of a side note. This story really wasn't supposed to be this dark. I swear it wasn't. Okay, so that's kind of a lie. Everything I write is at least a little dark. But it wasn't supposed to be *this* bad. Somehow I turned my back and shit got ugly. Things are kind of heavy at the moment, but they'll start looking up within the next few chapters. Especially when Gabriel gets around to showing up.
For the Gabriel lovers out there, there is no Gabriel in this chapter. Though I recently rewatched Hammer of the Gods with some friends, and now I have a desperate need to write more Gabriel, because he's just so freaking awesome, so he may show up ahead of my schedule (stupid trickster never doing what he's supposed to…).
Anyway, much love to you all, and thank you all for the wonderful reception the first two chapters have been given! I hope this one doesn't disappoint!
~InK
…
New York in early September was nothing short of awful. The air was still hot and heavy, bearing the last traces of summer humidity, and moving around anywhere outside was like trying to walk through warm molasses.
Dean actually considered himself lucky that most of their searches took them underground, away from the oppressive humidity.
Sam had been missing for nearly six months.
Six months.
Six months during which anything could have happened to Dean's little brother. Six months of fervent searches and dead-ends to try and gank the sons of bitches that had taken him. Six months of worry and anger and long nights and cold take out and silence because somehow, the absence that had once been filled by Sam's near constant questions and chatter seemed too loud for either Winchester to overcome. Neither of them even knew what to say to each other, the weight of their missing son and brother almost unbearable as the days went on and there was no sign of their Sammy.
Their latest lead had taken them into New York, where they had scoured the sewers and found the shifter's lair.
It was wearing John Winchester's face.
John had knocked out his doppelganger and helped his son secure the thing to a series of metal pipes.
As they waited for it to regain consciousness, Dean paced agitatedly, trying to understand why the shifter would be wearing his dad's face, and the only answers he was coming up with were churning in his stomach like acid.
Sam would have fought like hell if anyone had come into that room. Odds were, he could have gotten off at least two rounds from the gun beneath his pillow before the shifters got him, and there was a silver knife on the bed stand he hadn't even had the chance to reach.
These shifters weren't that good, which meant that they had gotten the drop on Sammy. They'd surprised him.
And there were only two people in the world that Sammy would have let his guard down around.
Beside him, John was leaning against the wall, his expression blank, but Dean knew that his father was coming to the exact same conclusion that he had.
"Long time no see, Winchester."
Dean whirled around to glare at the shifter that was wearing his dad's face.
"Where's my brother."
"So impatient," the shifter grinned. "Didn't daddy ever teach his good little soldier any manners?"
John placed a comforting hand on his son's shoulder, and pulled him back.
"Where's your friend?" he asked.
"Elsewhere."
"Where's my son?"
The shifter smirked, an expression that so did not belong on John Winchester's face.
"Honestly?" the thing asked. "I have no idea."
"What the hell did you do to him you son of a bitch?" Dean snarled. There was already a silver knife in his hand, and he was about a second away from carving up this bastard and sending him to hell on the slow road, but the look his father sent his way was enough to hold him back. For now.
"Keep looking," the shifter grinned up at the two men. "You'll never find precious little Sammy, and it's all your fault."
John smiled grimly, a silver blade glinting in his hand. Dean blinked – he hadn't even seen his dad draw the weapon.
"I'd beg to differ," John growled, and drew a slow, precise line of blood along his doppelganger's arm. "Now, once more. Where. Is. My. Son."
The shifter screamed as the knife dug cruelly into its flesh but the scream tailed off into a bout of pained laughter.
"Running as far and as fast away from his daddy and brother as he can," the shifter mocked, and Dean's eyes narrowed. "Poor Sammy, whose dad and brother don't want him anymore, whose only family tied him up and tortured him like he was some supernatural freak! Do you want to hear about how much he bleed when his daddy cut into him, how he begged his brother to stop hurting him, how he cried when you-"
The shifter never finished. John stabbed the thing through the chest with bloody murder etched into every line of his face.
"Dad?"
John paused and turned, leaving the knife buried in the shifter's body. His heart was beating a thousand times faster than normal, trying to break out of his chest. Every word the shifter had spewed at him felt like a knife, digging into his skin and drawing blood. He deserved it too, for leaving Sam on his own, for abandoning him and giving the shifters the perfect opening to hurt his son.
John knew what had happened to Sammy now, and it was like swallowing acid. He stared over at his oldest son, who looked so damn lost – as lost as John felt – and realized that he needed to pull it together because Dean was on the way to a major breakdown.
"It was Sam's blood," Dean said hesitantly, finally admitting to himself what he'd known since he opened the door to the motel room. John nodded wordlessly.
"They were wearing our faces when they did it too," Dean said finally, looking down at the Shifter. "Fuck."
And without warning, Dean turned and slammed his fist into the metal walls of the sewer, the ringing of metal almost obscuring the sickening crack of bone.
Slowly, he pulled himself back under control, his breath coming in deep gasps as though he'd just gone three rounds with a really angry spirit.
"All this time, Sammy's been on his own, all alone, thinking we did that to him."
It was brutal, and horrible, but now that they knew the score, they would be much better equipped to handle the damage control.
"We'll find him," John answered, finally finding his voice. He turned to look down at the Shifter, grabbing his silver knife from inside the thing's chest. "We'll find Sammy and set him straight."
Dean wanted to believe his dad. He really did. But this was Sammy, his Sammy, his little brother, and the kid was missing, hurt and alone and confused, and lost. Who knows what could have hurt him in the six months he'd been gone?
It was like the world was ending.
Sammy thought that Dean hated him. Deans little brother thought that he was trying to kill him.
"Son of a bitch!" Dean shouted into the silence. "Son of a fucking bitch!"
There were tears in his eyes – though he would deny that fact until his dying day – and he was shaking, losing control, losing hope, losing strength; really, just losing it.
"God damn it!"
No, it was worse than the world ending, Dean thought. His little brother thought Dean was responsible for fucking torturing him.
Nothing was ever going to be able to make this right, because even if they found Sammy and explained everything, the kid had still suffered. It had still happened, and shit like that left scars that cut even deeper than the physical wounds that accompanied them.
….
San Francisco, California.
Sam loved San Francisco. The sun was shining, and the city shone with a kind of inner energy that was infectious.
Fall was on its way, but the air was barely even chilly. The weather was absolutely perfect, and Sam found himself praying that he could find a hunt here so that he could stay a while.
He was living rough, but the nights were nowhere near as cold as some of the nights he'd had in Wyoming, or crossing the Midwest. He'd been warm most nights camping out in the Tahoe forests, and crossing into Sacramento, but here in San Francisco, Sam felt really free. The weight of his past didn't hang on his shoulders so heavily here.
There was something big in San Francisco, which is how Sam justified the temporary insanity that led to him actually paying for a motel room, and creating a home base. He told himself he just wanted a few nights sleep in a real bed, with a warm shower, but it was more than that. He wanted to stay here for as long as he could, and having a base made it that much more official.
Sam had stopped in San Francisco because something was causing house fires. Two apartments and a house had gone up in flames – raging, violent flames that had just happened to only touch a single building, and had died out on their own after the building was burnt to ash. Nothing firemen did could quell the flames until they'd turned every inch of the buildings to ash. All three had absolutely nothing in common at first glance; they were in different parts of the city, owned and managed by different people and companies, and no families lived spread across the three buildings as far as Sam could discover.
The only thing they had in common, as far as Sam could tell from his preliminary research, was that there was a child under one year of age in every one of the buildings when they burned.
Kind of like the Winchester household when it had burned down the night Sam had been six months old.
What had originally caught Sam's attention was the fact that the fire department had suggested that the pattern of the fire's spread seemed like arson. Indeed, witness reports indicated that the fire had spread as though gasoline had been used to fuel it. The cops, however, were baffled because there was no evidence of any accelerants at the scene.
Definitely something supernatural, Sam decided. He needed somewhere private where he could collect notes and try and find out what was going on here, because it wasn't going to be a simple salt and burn. That was his primary justification for getting the hotel room, though having a bed to sleep on at night did help with keeping his mind clear and focused on the hunt. Plus the hotel had a complimentary breakfast, where Sam could eat his fill. Knowing that he would get at least one good meal a day was bracing, leaving him free to worry about the monster he was hunting.
For the moment, however, he stood there in the plain motel room, memories washing over him.
His mind wandered back to a hundred other hunts started this same way. An empty motel room, and the first thing John would always do? He'd put up a map. He'd plot the places where supernatural events had been confirmed, and try and work out a pattern.
Then they'd visit the crime scene, the morgue, get pictures.
And once they knew whether it was a monster or a ghost, they'd hit the books, see what they could dig up on local lore. Maybe a serial killer had been executed in the building where pretty blondes were going missing. Maybe a child had been murdered by abusive parents, and was coming back for revenge.
As the hunt went on, pictures and diagrams and newspaper articles would continue to plaster the walls, alongside blow up printouts from library computers from rare occult texts until nothing was left but John's numbers and bits of string tying incidents together, and suddenly the whole hunt would just unlock all it's secrets, and they'd go after the supernatural son of a bitch and make sure that it was permanently six feet under.
These blank walls made Sam's heart ache from the familiarity and the loneliness. Unable to bear the wave of emotions that threatened to overwhelm him, Sam locked the door and headed for the library to go find out what was causing houses to randomly burst in flames.
Might be a while to figure out what's causing this, Sam told himself. It was completely, one hundred percent, genuine bullshit, but he liked San Francisco and it wasn't like he had anywhere else to be.
…
A trip to the library confirmed some of the assumptions Sam had made.
He'd picked apart the details of all three buildings, trying to find any correlation between them. His original assessment of the situation had been correct: the only thing they had in common was the fact that in every instance, a child under the age of one had lived (and died) in that house.
Sam's face frowned in concentration as he double-checked his findings. Something was bugging him. What if this wasn't just some random supernatural haunting?
What if this was the same creature that had dropped an atomic bomb in the middle of the Winchester family was behind this? It wasn't that much of a stretch… houses with young kids going up in flames…
This could really be whatever killed Mary. The demon - and Sam knew that that had been John's prevailing theory on the issue when The Incident had occurred. If it was... shit. Sam was going to be way out of his league, and completely unprepared to face what was coming.
He might be facing the creature John Winchester had been hunting down for more than a decade.
The reason John thought Sam had demon blood in his veins.
The reason his former family hated him.
Sam had no illusions that either John or Dean would forgive him just because he'd killed the creature responsible for killing their wife and mother, but maybe it would let him forgive himself.
Maybe.
The same day he decided to take on this hunt, Sam also bought a new cell phone. He hadn't wanted to keep anything on him that Dean or John might be able to track, but this phone, bought with an alias that he'd never used, would be nearly impossible for them to find.
He couldn't rely on payphones to make the kind of calls he needed to be able to make, and eventually he would run into a contact like a police officer or a mortician that he might want to be able to contact him with new developments.
...
A week and a half later, Sam had run out of leads to chase down on his supernatural arsonist and still had no idea what could possibly be responsible for the fires. Two more buildings had burned down with the same MO that Sam had identified: spreading as if some kind of accelerant had been laid down, but no trace of the gas or whatever was used to start the fire. Both houses had children under the age of one living there. And each time, the fire burned itself out as soon as the one building was toast, not so much as roasting the sides of the houses next to them.
This was weird.
"What the hell is going on?" Sam muttered, rubbing his temples and staring down at the newspaper article announcing yet another fire.
What kind of monster could set fires like this? Sam had considered and discarded a dozen theories, but aside from a demon, there wasn't anything that could control fire like this. But why was it doing this? What was the pattern? Was it just randomly selecting houses with little kids in them to burn down for kicks?
He'd interviewed the three people who had managed to get out of the fires alive, but they had relatively little to tell him. Most had been asleep when the fires were set, and hadn't seen anything that might point him to something even vaguely resembling a lead on the demon Sam was almost sure was responsible.
It was just by chance that he noticed the article that was squared away into a tiny chunk of the page, a missing person's poster put in by some rich kid's parents. Sam frowned. Why did that sound so familiar?
He grabbed yesterday's paper and perused it until he found the article he had been thinking of. It was a missing person's ad for Jerome Adler, 17, who had gone missing while out with his friends.
And it wasn't the first. For the last two weeks, there had been people – all young men –going missing.
Sam was beginning to develop a painful headache.
"Seriously?" Sam groaned, laying his head down on the table. San Francisco must need it's own personal hunter, because there were now two creatures on the playing field: a pyromaniac and a kidnapper.
Excellent.
"Are you kidding me?" Sam asked the newspaper in front of him, his head still resting vertically on the table. "One hunt at a time, please!"
He wanted to just pretend he hadn't noticed the pattern. Maybe it was just some psycho behind the guys going missing. But something told Sam that it was more than that.
Besides, with no leads on his arsonist, Sam decided that he might as well see what he could find out about this kidnapper. It might not be anything supernatural, really. It could just be some human preying on the young men, but given no better option, he decided to try and do something productive.
…
That was how Sam found himself standing in an abandoned building, staring at a pile of corpses. The police had found the place just that morning, and they had matched the bodies to several of the missing persons reports.
All of the bodies belonged to young men, all fitting the pattern of the men who had gone missing, about half a dozen, all told. From the looks of the remains, which were all in various stages of decomposition, all of them had died particularly violent deaths.
Authorities were absolutely baffled, because six perfectly healthy, psychologically stable young men had apparently decided to bash each other to death for no reason but their own entertainment. Sam's gut screamed that something supernatural was responsible, but he'd never heard of a creature that could do anything like this.
Awesome.
Sometimes Sam really, really hated his life.
So Sam decided to search the local hospitals, see if anyone had been admitted very recently with some pretty violent injuries.
He came up with three leads. Two of them were victims of muggings, and Sam crossed them off his list, feeling frustration rise in his chest. He wanted this case solved so that he could go back to staring angrily at the wall where he was marking up the locations of houses that were burning down, and trying to make heads or tails of what the damned monster was doing.
The third lead was a man named Andre Jamison. Eighteen years old, Andre had gone missing a week before and had been found a few blocks from the warehouse Sam had found, nearly dead.
Sam grit his teeth, hoping that this would actually be worth his time, and dressed as a candy stripper at the local hospital, and went to go visit the man. Aside from having been beaten half to death, Andre was apparently also currently being held under observation in the psych ward, which was generally a good sign that he was on the right track hunting the supernatural.
"She was perfect," Andre whispered. "Everything I ever dreamed of."
"And she bashed your head in?" Sam asked, motioning to the bandage surrounding Andre's head.
"No," Andre told him. "She set all of us lose, told us to fight for her, so that we could be with her, forever. So that we could spend an eternity together."
Sam's eyebrows rose.
"Wait, you guys did that to each other?" he asked incredulously. "For some woman?"
Andre nodded.
"So some random dude bashed your head with a fire poker in to hit home base with a hot chick," Sam shook his head. Sometimes he wondered if people weren't completely insane.
"They've done three surgeries so far," Andre said miserably. "They had to take out part of my skull and replace it with a metal plate."
Sam winced.
"Bad deal man," he said. "But hey, at least it's a story to tell the chicks, am I right?"
Andre snorted, but he did seem to cheer up at that idea.
"Still, I think I did some bashing of my own," Andre muttered. "We all went completely fucking psycho, I'm telling you!"
Sam smiled in sympathy. This was definitely something supernatural, and he wished he could do something to get this guy out of a psych ward – he wasn't crazy, that was for sure. But then again, it might do him some good to work through the trauma of having his very will being hijacked by some mythical broad.
"Where did you meet her anyway?" Sam asked. He didn't know if this creature would hunt in the same area every night, but it might be a good place to start.
This was definitely a hunt. A hunt within a hunt.
Sam's head hurt.
…
It was a siren.
An honest to god siren, like from the old Greek stories.
Sam had spent his afternoon in the library, and what he kept coming back to was Andre's line about the woman being 'perfect', combined with the whole idea of her making men fight each other for her affection. Sirens used to lure soldiers to come close to their island so that they would dash themselves to death against the rocks, heedless of the danger.
It would be just like a siren to enthrall a bunch of men and watch them bashing each other to death over her. From what Sam could tell, sirens were serious attention whores, with a healthy dose of extra crazy self-esteem issues on the side.
So he was now exactly one step further along with the hunt for the missing men,
Sam just had absolutely no idea how to kill it.
After a day wasted on fruitless leads, Sam swallowed his pride and called Bobby, because the man was like a walking encyclopedia of the Supernatural.
"Hey Bobby," he said, leaning against the wall in his motel room.
"Sam," Bobby said, and Sam could hear relief there. "You alright boy?"
"I'm surviving," Sam said. His heart clenched painfully.
"You alright?"
John's hands were steady as they searched for the gash on Sam's torso. "Just keep breathing Sammy, you're fine. I've got you. I've got you."
"You calling me from prison again?"
Sam let out a half-hearted bark of laughter.
"Nah, I'm on a hunt," he said. "Siren. A pretty nasty one too. She's seducing men and making them fight to the death over her."
"Sounds like a siren alright," Bobby growled. "What you calling me for, anyway?"
"Well, I've looked through the lore I've got here in the local library, and I've searched every book I could find front to back. Nothing I could find has got anything reliable or definite on how to kill it. I figured you'd either know or have the right books to find out, because I've tapped every resource I've got."
"You do know those puppy-dog eyes don't work over the phone, right boy?"
"Please Bobby?" Sam asked. "I'm asking nicely, and a bunch of people are gonna bite it real soon if I can't kill her."
"Fine, give me a couple hours, I'll see what I can find."
"Thanks."
"You're still on your own, ain't you?"
"What about it?" Sam asked, his voice lowering into a defensive growl.
"I think you're an idjit, and I think you need to have a serious talk with your daddy about whatever he's done-"
"Don't."
Sam's voice was a predatory hiss.
"Just – don't," he continued, and if his voice broke just a little bit, he decided to ignore that. "Just – let me know when you have an idea on how to kill this thing okay?"
"Don't think you can get away with hiding the truth from me forever boy," Bobby said warningly, and a muscle in Sam's jaw clenched furiously as he hung up.
Three hours later, Bobby came through with the answer: a bronze dagger dipped in the blood of someone being held under the Siren's song.
"Just so we're clear," Sam said. "I have to hunt down a siren that is catching guys and forcing them to fight each other to the death, somehow get my hands on a bronze dagger, get some of the blood of one of the violently brutal men under her spell, and somehow stab her with it."
"Sounds about right boy."
"Sounds like a Monday," Sam muttered. "Great. I already have an idea of where its hunting grounds are, I'll just see if I can track it."
"You do that, but be careful Sam," Bobby said seriously. "I'd feel better if you had someone backing you up-"
"Because I can't do it, right?" Sam asked. "Because I'm not good enough, is that it? I can't even handle a hunt on my own, I'm that much of a failure?"
"Don't you put words in my mouth boy," Bobby said, his voice taking on every inch of the older man's considerable authority. "Siren's are nasty creatures, and you better watch yourself like a hawk to make sure you don't get infected. They're not the kind of creature any hunter should take on without backup."
"Well, there isn't backup available," Sam replied. "So preferences aside, I'll make do."
"What about-"
"I swear if you mention John or Dean one more time-"
"What the hell is going on with you Winchesters?" Bobby demanded, interrupting Sam's near tirade before he could get started. "Your daddy aint answering his cell, your brother's isn't even in service anymore, and you're talking like you couldn't give a rats ass about them-"
"I don't," Sam lied through his teeth, ice cold and without even a hint of emotion. "Later Bobby."
He could almost imagine Bobby's hiss of frustration as Sam hung up the phone once again. He sighed.
He needed to go find a bronze dagger, and then he needed to go find himself a siren.
…
In the end, Sam found a bronze dagger at an old pawnshop. He hefted the thing in his hands a few times, testing its weight. It was strong, and it felt solid and comfortable in his hand. It was a good hunting tool.
Sam's next stop was the diner where Andre had been picked up by the siren. He knew it was a stretch, but he figured he might canvass the place, see if there were any chicks coming on strong to some lonely men, and see what he could do about it.
By his count, this was victim number six on the siren's second rotation, so her big showdown would be going down tonight – or within the next twenty-four hours. That meant that he had to kill the thing tonight, before anyone else got hurt.
The diner that Andre had told Sam about turned out to be pretty swanky, with low, romantic lighting, and a mahogany paneled bar against one side of the room. Each table had a red tablecloth and a candle giving it it's own individual circle of light.
Sam scoped out the bar quickly, reading the lay of the land with a look, just like he'd been trained to do every since he'd been introduced to the world of hunting.
Immediately, he had two possibles – the pretty blonde girl over by the bar, flirting shamelessly with one of the bartenders over some fruity drink, and a couple that was twisted around each other in one of the back booths.
Sam was leaning towards the latter. This siren was clever, that was the only way she could keep hunting in the same grounds over and over again. She would keep to the shadows, not let anyone get a great look at her face.
Besides, the woman at the bar was keeping a good distance from the waiter, never touching him or even leaning very close. She was flirting, but Sam doubted that she was aiming to bring the man home with her.
So he focused on the couple in the back.
Sam picked a table where he could keep an eye on things in the restaurant.
Half an hour later, Sam was still waiting for one of the couples to make their move. Just as he was wondering how much longer this would take, the man from the booth in the back stood, looking kind of doe eyed. The girl was watching him with a seductive smile from the booth.
She's going to make her move, Sam thought. He fingered the bronze dagger in his coat pocket. He'd need to stab the man before he killed the siren. She pulled the man in close for another kiss, leaning against the side of the booth, and Sam made his move, walking deliberately across the room.
That was when everything went to hell.
He ran headlong into a passing waiter, toppling her over next to the couple just as the man was taking a small velvet box out of his pocket.
Vaguely Sam heard the confused, desperate question from the man who was still trying to retain some semblance of control over the night that had just turned into a disaster.
"Will you marry me?"
Okay, this woman was so not a siren, and Sam had just inadvertently ran headlong into one of this couple's most intimate moments. They were just overly affectionate, not a huntress after her prey.
"I'm so sorry!" Sam said, blushing, and getting up as fast as he could, running for the exit.
That wasn't a siren. Which meant –
The waiter. He was the one the siren had been targeting, and the attractive blonde at the counter had been the monster.
Sam ran out front in time to see the waiter getting into a car with the gorgeous blonde.
"Son of a bitch," he hissed.
Without even thinking about it, he smashed the window of the nearest car and had it's engine running just as the waiter was pulling out of the lot. Sam tailed the car, knowing that the siren wouldn't lead her victim very far away. The warehouse had been within a reasonable walking distance to the diner, so he figured her next battleground would probably be close too.
He wasn't wrong. Less than ten minutes later, the car he was tailing stopped in front of a residential house. Sam wondered what the siren had done with whoever had originally owned the building.
As the car parked, Sam went on to circle the block, parking a good distance away and returning on foot, fighting the urge to keep one hand on the bronze knife in his pocket.
Once he found the house again, he went around back, breaking the lock on the door with a controlled shove. He slipped in through the door into a dark kitchen.
Someone was talking, a soft, lilting voice from a room nearby. Sam crouched down and glanced around a corner. There was a spacious living room, with five men standing around, faces slack. The gorgeous blonde from the bar had one hand tangled in the hair of the sixth man, stroking it like he was some kind of pet.
Sam fought the urge to wretch.
"So here's what you're going to do for me," she said, a seductive smirk creeping over her features. "I want you to work out all your frustrations on each other, and whoever wins gets to have me. Forever."
She licked the side of the man's face, and Sam cringed.
"But we're going to make this interesting," the siren continued, abandoning the sixth man and wandering between the other five, touching here, stroking a bit of skin there…
"You each have one minute to find a place to hide inside this building," the siren said. "I'll give the signal, and then the fight will begin, just like a game!"
The siren giggled.
Crazy bitch, Sam thought. In the wake of his disgust came the realization that she was scattering the men under her spell, and he was standing right in the way that some of them might run.
Thinking quickly, Sam was coming up with the beginning of a plan. As quietly as possible, he backed out of the kitchen and into a dining room. He hid behind the doors.
His heart was racing. If the siren got him… there was no backup coming, no escape. He would have one shot at the siren, and he might not even get that if she suspected something was up before he could sneak up on her. He could die tonight, enthralled to the siren, his will subsumed to hers...
Please god, Sam thought. Don't let me die here. I don't want to die as some bitch's puppet. That is not how I want to go out.
He heard a scuffle as the six men under the siren's spell began searching for places to hide out until the siren started their fight. One of them edged into the dining room, looking around. He hadn't yet glanced behind him, and Sam capitalized on that advantage.
John Winchester had taken the time to show both Dean and Sam the best places on the human body to strike to quickly and quietly incapacitate an opponent. With a hunter's line of work, you never knew when you would need to knock out a nosy guard, or get a civilian out of the way.
Sam had the perfect angle, and he hit a pressure point in the man's neck, hard enough to put him out for a few minutes.
Sorry dude, Sam thought to the guy, and cut him across the arm with his dagger, liberally coating the blade in his blood.
So far so good.
Sam dragged the unconscious body into a dark corner and traced his steps back towards the living room where he had last seen the siren.
From somewhere Sam couldn't identify, a bell rang.
A few rooms over, Sam heard a grunt and a yell, signifying that at least two of the siren's targets had found each other. He heard the violent sound of fists hitting flesh, and inched closer to the doorway, looking for the siren.
She wasn't in the living room anymore.
I'm a fucking moron.
That was all the realization Sam had time for, because less than a second later, he was bowled over from behind, slamming painfully into the floor. The wind was knocked from his lungs, but Sam had taken worse hits, and twisted himself around in time to kick out, getting the man under the siren spell off of him. He scrambled to his feet, but the other guy was just a second faster and twisted Sam around, throwing him into the wall. Sam fought, but the guy grabbed his wrist, twisting painfully until Sam was forced to let go of the only weapon he had that was worth a damn against a siren.
Before he could react, the man had turned Sam back around and had him by the neck, a keen blade pressed tightly into his jugular.
The siren and two of her pets were standing on the other side of the room. She didn't look angry, just pensive, as though she was considering what to do with the little hunter that had stumbled upon her game.
Sam swallowed.
I'm sixteen and I'm going to die.
That cold fear twisted inside of him. Sam had to do something – anything - to save himself, but his weapon was three feet away, kicked across the room by the assailant currently holding a knife to his neck.
"A hunter," the siren said softly. "You were foolish to come here."
"I'm sorry, did I interrupt your foreplay?" Sam asked with an unrepentant smirk. "Terrible shame, really."
"You mock me, but you have absolutely no idea-"
"Yeah, yeah, I have no idea, you get high off of the idea of people willing to die for you, I should pity you because you're so starved for attention and can't get laid without drugging a dude. Lady, I've heard every variation of the 'you just don't get me' speech that could possibly exist, so either shut up and kill me or let me go and give me my knife back."
The siren considered him. She didn't seem very angry at his sarcasm, which was a bit unnerving. It just washed over her.
"Such big, brave, words, from such a… little… hunter," the siren replied softly. "You know, you'd almost be worth keeping-"
Sam felt a faint wave of nausea wash over him, and struggled faintly. The knife at his neck dug in a little, drawing blood with a slice of pain that Sam barely even processed.
I can't die like this.
"But I think I have a better use for you. Jason, Ryan, Tyler, why don't you bash our friend's skull in? He wants to stop us from being together, and you know how much I want to be with you."
Sam was thrown to the ground violently, and before he could even process his freedom, the three men were laying into him, kicking, punching, hitting with everything they had.
Sam yelled in pain as he felt the blows rain down on him. He needed to even the score.
He struck out from the ground, and heard the satisfying crack of a tibia that told him one of his opponents was down for the count.
Sam used his position to his advantage, shooting upwards and hitting one of the men in the jaw with the top of his head. It hurt like hell for Sam as well, but it was just one more painful injury.
Which made it one on two, a trained fighter versus two mindless zombies.
Desperately, the glanced around, retreating as the other two advanced. His knife was nearby, just a foot to his left, near the table. The siren saw his glance.
"Don't let him get the knife!" She shrieked. Both men dived for Sam, who ducked and rolled, stretching out his hand –
One of his opponents kicked the knife away, and it clattered until the table. On his knees, Sam crawled towards it. His foot was grabbed, and he felt himself being dragged backwards. Sam kicked out desperately, knowing that the siren wouldn't give him another chance, and his fingers were just brushing the side of the knife –
There!
Sam's hand closed over the closest part of the blade – which happened to be the sharp edge – and he pulled it towards him, letting the opponent drag him into the open.
With his left hand, Sam delivered a solid hook to the man's jaw, and then he rolled away from the two men. With seconds to go before they caught up, Sam oriented himself, sighted his target, and threw.
The knife landed squarely, striking the gorgeous blonde in the stomach with a satisfying thud just as one of the men slammed Sam into the floor again.
The siren screeched as it died, it's own venom pulsing through its veins and poisoning it.
"What the hell?" the man on top of Sam asked, staring down at him. He looked at his raised fist, poised to strike Sam's already bruising face, and he scrambled back, looking stricken.
"Oh god, what have I done?" the man whispered. His previously blank face contorted with fear and horror. The man's light brown hair was mussed, the freckles across his nose distorting with his facial expression.
"It's okay," Sam groaned, pulling himself to his feet. "Not your fault."
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry-"
"It wasn't your fault," Sam said clearly, trying to get his thoughts in order. He needed to get out of here. The police would ask questions, questions about where he lived and who his parents were, and Sam wasn't in any shape to escape police custody anytime soon.
When one of his other opponents groaned, Sam remembered that they'd been fighting too. There were dead and injured men here – he assumed that the other three victims were dead, or the siren would have shown up with them, as well.
Struggling to his feet, Sam found a phone on the kitchen table (because the last thing he needed was for the police to trace his phone number) and dialed 911.
"I'm at a house on Vincent street," he said calmly. "421, I think. It's got blue shutters and birds of paradise outside. There are three men dead, and three others who need an ambulance, now. I think there was some kind of a fight."
"Sir-"
Sam hung up, and surveyed the room. None of the three men here were gravely injured enough that he would need to stay and give them any emergency medical attention this second. As far has he could tell, the one in the most danger was the guy with the broken tibia, and he'd be fine. It was a clean break, and the likelihood of a full recovery was high.
"Help is coming," he said. "Just… stay here. Try not to die."
As he staggered out of the room, he paused beside the siren's corpse, feeling vindictive and exhausted. He leaned down and removed his knife, wiping it on his pants.
He didn't know what else he might need a bronze dagger for, but if he ever came up against a siren again, Sam would be ready.
He left, limping down the sidewalk as quickly as he could.
…
It had been almost a week since Sam had killed the siren, and he was back to banging his head against the wall and driving himself to the point of near insanity trying to track his arsonist down. He was about ready to scream himself hoarse from the frustration. Ten buildings had caught fire so far, and Sam wanted to end this already.
That was when he checked out the Tuesday morning edition of the local paper.
He had a new lead.
Kathleen Harris had survived a fire – one of the first victims to do so – and was staying at her aunt's house a few blocks away from her own home. She had a four-month-old daughter that she had managed to save from the flames, and her husband had been away on business for his bank.
What got Sam really excited was that Kathleen had been awake when the fire had started, and she'd been standing at ground zero when this whole thing went down.
Which meant that unlike any of his other survivors, she must have seen something.
If whatever demon responsible for killing Mary Winchester was around, Kathleen Harris would have seen something to confirm it.
Finally, he had something to go on.
…
"Where did you say you were from?"
"I'm an intern with the Police," Sam said, blushing and looking down and shuffling his feet as Kathleen Harris looked on. "The boss told me to go back and spot check all the interviews that the cops did, just to be sure nobody missed anything. I think he just wants me out of his hair for a bit."
And… bingo. The woman smiled and let him in, patting his shoulder in sympathy as he passed.
Really, sometimes it was just too easy.
"So, tell me, did you notice anything unusual in the neighborhood before the fire started?" Sam asked.
"Well, I'll tell you what I told your colleague when he stopped by," Kathleen said with a bright smile. "I think that fire must have been electrical or something, because I was woken up right before the fire started. All the lights on the block were switching on and off, going absolutely nuts."
"Right," Sam said, nodding sagely. "Did you notice any weird smells that day?"
Kathleen frowned.
"Why do you ask?"
"Well, the boss has some theory about a sulfur compound being used to set the fires," Sam said, rolling his eyes. "Did you smell any rotten eggs, anything like that?"
"Sulfur, huh?" Kathleen asked, closing her eyes and thinking back. "I remember waking up and thinking that we must have burned a wire out in one of the walls, because the room smelled like ozone. Really fierce, too, like we'd burned out all the electronics in the house at once with some major power surge."
"Ozone," Sam repeated. "Like burning wires, you said?"
"Yeah," Kathleen replied, nodding her head. "I remember it pretty well – I mean, my dad used to be an electrician, and whenever I visited his work, he'd always smell like ozone. I'm sure. Like I said, it was probably just some kind of electrical failure on our grid, but I appreciate you guys looking into this."
Sam smiled in sympathy, patting her shoulder.
"Did you notice anything else?" he asked, his stomach sinking with realization. "Uh, cold spots maybe?"
"You know, I think I did," Kathleen sad thoughtfully. "I thought maybe our air conditioner was on the fritz. All night I just kept running into random places that were freezing cold. I guess my house was just one massive walking mechanical failure, huh? I'm just glad I got my baby out alive. Let me tell you, her cribs going to be in my bedroom for every day of the foreseeable future too."
Sam smiled weakly, but as he left, his mind was in overdrive.
Whatever this was, it wasn't a demon. It was a spirit. A really powerful, extremely vengeful spirit, but just a spirit. A regular salt and burn. He just needed to find out whose bones he should burn.
And so he went back to the library, barely responding to the smile and wave the on duty librarian had shot him.
What he needed to do was to look into the history of San Francisco and see if there had been any outstanding violent deaths that might produce a relatively psychotic, baby-murdering arsonist of a ghost. He'd been following the wrong kind of leads before, looking for a demon. But now that he knew what was causing the fires, he could narrow down his search to find it.
Sam was disappointed. Weeks of research, all the hope he had carried at the thought that he might find the thing that had torn apart his life and John and Deans family… and he was just on the trail of some stupid spirit.
Some stupid spirit bound to San Francisco, one that was almost definitely not responsible for the death of Mary Winchester.
Obviously, he had missed something. Sam examined newspapers from the last two decades, and realized that this had happened before, sixteen years ago. And then again, sixteen years before that. And again before that, too, stretching back about five decades.
Sam frowned in concentration as he studiously took notes.
So this spirit was burning down about a dozen buildings over the course of a few months every sixteen years. Not all of the early fires were very well documented, but Sam was already connecting the dots, looking for violent deaths relating to fires.
From there, it only took about an hour of searching through newspaper stacks from the fifties before he finally found a viable suspect.
Her name was Paulina Freely.
She was a sixteen-year-old girl, which would fit in with the sixteen-year cycle of fires. She died in a fire. Well, a rash of fires, really, during the 50's – fires that she herself had most probably caused. She had been a sociopath and a suspected arsonist that had killed dozens in flames that she herself had created. After she had died, the fires stopped, which seemed damning enough for Sam.
Paulina Freely had been burned to dust in the last fire that she had set while still breathing, but apparently the chick had cut off her own leg at some point beforehand. From what Sam understood, there had been a fire in Paulina's home when she was only six months old, and her right leg had been badly charred. With no way to regain the use of her unsightly leg back, Paulina had chopped it off at the age fifteen, getting rid of what she saw as a useless appendage.
Sam made a face, looking down at the newspaper clipping from 1954. He could feel a serious headache coming on, because this whole case had surpassed 'weird' a few miles back and dived straight into unbelievably creepy.
Sam rubbed his temples as he examined the research that was laid out before him on the motel bed. This girl was just buckets of crazy. Apparently her whole motive for setting fires in the first place was to get revenge for the fire that had permanently maimed her. And now she was lashing out because of her death.
Awesome.
It was almost sunset as Sam left the library and headed for his motel. Paulina Freely's leg had been buried in a grave in one of the local cemeteries (which, in Sam's opinion was a bit bizzare, given that the leg must have been seriously decomposed long before Paulina had actually died).
Maybe she'd hid the thing in her closet or something.
So not going there, Sam winced and wished he could un-see the mental image of the teenager keeping her burned appendage next to her umbrella in a stand next to the door.
Less than half an hour later, he was back in the motel, arming himself to salt and burn Freely's remains and finally be rid of this public menace.
Then the wall behind him exploded.
Sam was thrown into the nearest wall, hitting it violently as he felt a wave of unbearable heat wash over him. When he finally managed to get his eyes open and his ears to mostly stop ringing, he could see the rising flames engulfing the entire motel room.
Moving quickly because there was a bottle of kerosene hidden under his bed, and if the fire got to it before Sam had managed to escape…
He'd be toast. Literally. Fried long pig.
Move! Sam's brain screamed as the fire raged. He looked around, catching his bearings and pulling himself to his feet as fast as he could. Smoke burned in his lungs, and his eyes were tearing from the heat. He could smell burning wood and fibers and prayed to god that he wasn't on fire.
The door was right in front of him. Sam grabbed for the handle, but the metal burned his skin.
Sam screamed as his hand blistered an angry red color. He tried to work through the pain and turned to face the door. He kicked at it once… twice…
The door didn't budge.
He wasn't going to make it.
He kicked again, desperately, with all his might.
The window shattered on the other side of the room. It was a three-story drop to the ground, and Sam wouldn't have even considered it if he weren't desperate, his lungs filling up with dark smoke and heat.
Stay here and definitely die… jump and I only maybe die… what is this ghost bitch's problem anyway?
Hoping against hope that he still had time before the kerosene ignited, Sam pulled his mattress off the bed and threw it out the window. It landed with a solid thump, and Sam hoped that it was enough to give him a higher chance of walking away from this.
Without pausing to reconsider or doubt himself, Sam leapt through the open window.
The gas ignited.
Sam hit the mattress hard, his body bounced once, but his second landing was hard, straight onto the asphalt. His body scraped painfully against the ground, tearing skin from his arms and legs as he went sprawling over and over.
And then, just like that, the world came to a stop.
Sam lay there gasping for breath, closing his eyes to try and alleviate the feeling that he was still on some kind of twisted marry-go-round.
He'd lost everything. All the knives, the guns, the salt, his only change of clothes, his rations…
"Son of a bitch!" Sam yelled up into the crackling flames, finally pulling himself to his feet.
All he had was the container of salt already in his pocket, the hotel matchbook, a small container of kerosene that had been tucked into the waistband of his jeans, the clothes on his back, and about five dollars stuffed in his sock.
He trekked to the graveyard on his own, issuing a mental stream of curses at the night, at the burned down motel, at the damned ghost, and at the fucking world in general.
"You are one fucked up, disturbed, psychotic child, you know that?" Sam demanded of the bones he had finally managed to dig up. One fucking human leg, extra crispy, coming right up!
"Rest in peace and good fucking riddance," he grumbled, dumping his container of kerosene onto the bones, followed by as much salt as he dared. The final touch – the hotel matchbook – sent the whole mess up in flames.
"Great, now what?"
…