Chapter 12: A Day In The Life
Her screams tore out of her throat like an animal desperately escaping a burning cage. They leaped up against the walls of the unfinished house and fell back to the floor, echoing over and over until they died. Only to be replaced by the next shriek.
"I DON'T KNOW! I SWE-EAR!" she yelled, a slight rasp to the sound as her throat tore.
"I think you do," Sam replied calmly, reaching into the Devil's Trap and slicing another red line in the woman's right arm.
"PLEAAAASE! STO-O-OP!"
"I'll stop once you tell me the truth," he lied. He folded his arms to indicate he didn't intend to cut her anymore. For now. Ruby's knife remained visible, sticking out from his torso like a silver and red flag.
Taking deep, gasping breaths, the woman, Miranda, tried to calm herself. "But I swear, on my life, I don't know! I only met him once, it was only one night, it –" Her own sobs cut her off.
"Then tell me everything you do know." On the surface Sam's voice sounded casual, almost friendly, but there was an undercurrent of danger that chilled Miranda's blood.
She took a moment to swallow her tears and then tried, yet again, to explain. "H-He just c-came up to me at this bar –"
"What bar?"
"McLaren's, near Winchester, Las Vegas! He-He said his name was Winchester, that he as good as owned the town."
Sam smirked.
"So, so we got to talking, and – and I, I th-thought he w-was cute." Miranda sobbed, trying valiantly to keep calm enough to speak. "So w-we went up to my hotel room – I w-was on vacation." She shifted in the chair as she sucked in a breath, trying to alleviate the ropes' pressure on her reddening wrists. "So we go up to my r-room, right, and we – it was j-just, just sex okay? That was – was it, I swear!"
Sam considered.
"You're lying."
Miranda's face screwed up in misery and a fresh wave of terrified sobs wracked her thin frame. "Noooo," she moaned, "I swear! That was it – he wasn't e-even there when I woke up!"
Sam's eyes drifted to the deep bruises just visible against the dark skin of the woman's cleavage, framed in a V by her white blouse.
"Did he do that to you?" he said, gesturing to the discoloured skin.
She dipped her chin, sniffing loudly. "H-He was r-rough," she whispered fearfully.
Sam nodded, thoughtful. "Where is he now?"
"I don't know!"
"I think you do."
"I don't!"
"Stop lying," he growled warningly.
"I'm not! He just said I w-was beautiful and i-if I wanted a" – she hiccoughed – "drink, and then we went up t-to my room! A-all he s-said was that a n-night with a woman was food for the s-soul, and then he l-laughed – but he ne– he never told me where he was going! I swear to God!"
Sam stared evenly into the deep brown eyes, shining with tears.
"Alright," he said, and Miranda sagged with relief. "I believe you." And he stepped forward into the spray-painted Devil's Trap and stabbed her through the heart, twisting the knife to slip unhindered between her ribs. She let out one brief gasp of horror, jerked, and slumped in the chair.
No orange flash of demon fire, Sam noted. Huh. So she wasn't a demon, then.
Shrugging his indifference, he untied her and carried her to the basement of the house. He squirted lighter fluid over the corpse, struck a match, and left the body to burn as he gathered his things and left the windowless shell. The 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 he'd 'liberated' from a parking lot in St Joseph, Kansas, was waiting in the dark by the curb. He'd been driving one of the Men of Letters' cars for a few weeks, a lime green '50s Ford Thunderbird. It was a nice car, but its decades spent unused and untreated in the forgotten garage had taken its toll. The deep burgundy Camaro with its twin black stripes decorating the hood and two hundred and ninety horsepower engine was far better suited to a hunter on a mission.
Flinging his bag through the open window, he pulled the door open and sank onto the upholstered seat. Letting out a long, aggravated sigh, he sat a moment, parked outside one of the hundred soon-to-be houses in this latest 'Salvation Springs' or whatever was claiming to be creating the perfect home to live and raise your kids.
Sam snorted.
Jamming the key into the ignition, he started the rumbling engine and drove off, back to the highway, the police scanner he'd stolen resting on the passenger seat half-hidden under his bag. The occasional voices that broke through the static would be comforting, if they weren't always the wrong voice.
Castiel had promised to keep in touch, and yet Sam hadn't heard from him in two weeks, not since the fight. He'd stopped praying a few days after that, sick of sending his words out into the nothingness of night, never receiving a reply.
Screw Cas.
He wanted to walk out and leave Sam to fight alone? Fine. He didn't need him. He'd already followed Dean's trail across eight states by himself. He'd find him soon enough.
He was closing in.
It was easy, really. Just follow the bodies. Sam had lost count at two hundred and forty-seven due to a concussion and an exploded warehouse in California. He'd been out of it for days.
As he drove, his thoughts turned almost automatically to his hazy understanding of what Dean was up to. For the first few weeks, once he'd cracked Dean's almost unique demonic omens, he'd traced his brother to six definite crime scenes, and suspected he'd been involved in several other catastrophes. An airline's worth of planes had malfunctioned inexplicably, crashing down on land and sea alike. The only thing that connected all the planes was that they were had all embarked on international flights when they were brought down. Most of the passengers and crews had died, but there were a handful of survivors. Sam had interviewed them under the classic guise of an insurance mook. When they'd finally stopped blubbering long enough to tell him what they saw, they all reported the same thing, after some careful, doe-eyed persuasion. All of them had thought they'd seen black smoke at some point on their journey, not long before the oxygen masks burst out of the ceiling.
A factory that specialized in pies had been ransacked. Workers killed, dozens of fresh pies reduced to crumbs. Sam couldn't suppress a snort of laughter whenever he remembered that one. The stench of sulphur had mixed with the aroma of the various flavours of pies. The resulting odour was enough to make several of the police officers puke. Which helped the smell, of course.
But still, after weeks, Sam had no idea what Dean was doing. He suspected Crowley was just showing him the wonderful new world of demonhood, letting him go wild or something. But if there was any pattern or design to the carnage, he couldn't see it. Everything was in pieces, too small to fit together into a cohesive whole.
He'd tried summoning Crowley almost every day since he disappeared from the bunker dungeon. The fact that he still hadn't figured out how that happened only stoked the fire of Sam's frustration. He assumed Dean had done it, somehow.
He needed a break. God, he needed a break. Just one solid clue, one helpful hint and he could make some form of progress, but it had been a month and nothing.
He'd interrogated over a dozen demons, some of whom, like Miranda, turned out not to be demons after all. There was a hole dug in the earth behind the bunker filled with their ash. None of them had given him anything usable. The girls Dean screwed never knew anything. Apart from the fact that Dean had scared them, he hadn't exactly been a gentleman during their time together – Sam shuddered at the descriptions a few of the girls had given. Way too much detail for a brother to hear. But apart from being a complete ass to his bed buddies, they knew nothing. A few seemingly innocuous remarks here and there that stuck out for some reason – like a night with a woman being food for the soul, for example. He didn't know why, but that sounded deeper than some cheesy pick up line to Sam.
He hadn't had much more luck with the demons he'd tortured. Most were terrified, fleeing the new Lord of Demons, as one of them had said. When asked why Dean was considered a 'Lord of Demons' of course, they'd never say. He'd only caught three demons that'd been following Dean so far. They'd rather die than talk. Sam hadn't obliged them that choice. Each of them had told him something before he ganked them. Just nothing useable.
The radio squawked in the seat beside him, and Sam turned his head sharply to see it. Cas?
"All units near West Maule Avenue, we have a 211 in progress, please respond."
Armed robbery. Not his problem.
Sam drove on, keeping as firm a hold on his thoughts as he did on the steering wheel. Fists clenched, knuckles white. God, he felt he hadn't had a rest in years.
Which wasn't exactly untrue.
He pulled into the motel parking lot with drooping eyelids. Once inside his room, he flung his bag gracelessly on the spare bed, the shotgun inside clinking against the flasks of holy water. Rubbing a hand over his eyes and stifling a yawn, he checked the salt lines at the windows, vents, and the half-circle arcing just beyond the reach of the front door's swing. He pulled off his shirt and collapsed onto the soft(ish) mattress, facing the door.
He'd chosen the bed farthest from the door. It would give him a few extra milliseconds to react if someone or something burst through it in the middle of the night, if he was sleeping. Which he usually wasn't. The vacant bed was strewn with half-read Men of Letters files, coroners' reports, general research, and his laptop, still tracking all demon omens in the US.
This was the eighth – or tenth? – motel he'd stayed at since leaving the bunker, and each time he'd ordered a room with two queen beds automatically. He kept forgetting he didn't need two beds anymore. He had convinced himself that it was worth paying the extra bills – he never knew when Dean would be back, needing a place to crash.
It was stupid, he knew, but the sight of the empty bed made the dull ache in his heart he spent most of his time trying (and failing) to ignore seem more acute.
God, he missed Dean.
In many ways, this was worse even than when Dean had been in Hell. Sam had tortured himself imagining what was being done to Dean every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every month he'd been down there. The loneliness and guilt had almost killed him. If Ruby hadn't been around, it probably would have.
When Dean had vanished to Purgatory, Sam had gone out of his mind with unanswerable questions and a desperate desire to just run. He still shuddered to think what would have happened to him if he hadn't run over that damn dog and met Amelia. He wondered if he ever would have stopped.
Even back when he'd been away at Stanford, a lifetime ago, whenever he'd missed his older brother he'd known he was safe – well, as safe as a hunter ever was – with their dad. Besides, back then there had been so many wonderful distractions. Lectures, assignments, tests, friends ... Jess. His heart shuddered painfully.
This ... this was different. This was worse. Sam couldn't rest knowing what Dean had become. A demon. The thing they had spent their entire lives hunting, even if they hadn't known it. The thing that had infected Sam, murdered their parents and how many friends. The one monster above all the Winchesters loathed.
Dean was one of them. Dean was a demon.
His eyes had been black.
Pain twisted like barbed wire around Sam's heart as he remembered that unnatural sight. Still out of breath from running, he'd stood beside the Impala and watched his brother's bright green eyes turn darker than dark, blacker than black. So deep and absolute they seemed to almost suck the light from the coming sunrise.
Seeing those eyes in that face ...
If Lucifer had thought of that he could've saved himself a lot of trouble.
And the Impala. If Sam had needed proof that Dean wasn't in control, that was it. Dean would never, never so much as scratch that car. That car was their home. Their family had grown up that classic Chevy.
And Dean – no, the demon in Dean – had destroyed it, almost beyond recognition. Sam's heart had buckled along with the screeching metal.
He'd used the Thunderbird to drag the lump of twisted scrap into the garage, safely tucked away from the elements. Dean was gonna want to fix her up when he got back.
Got back. Sam snorted. He was acting as though Dean had just gone off on vacation or something. If only.
Gradually, Sam's beehive mind began to slow. His thoughts became more sluggish and infrequent. Without quite knowing when, he drifted off into an uneasy sleep.
Dreams of murdering Kevin had been replaced by a new nightly terror.
He stood in the corner of his old nursery, Azazel's yellow eyes burning like twin fires in the darkness beside him. He saw his six-month-old self stretching in the crib. A figure seemed to materialize out of the shadows, standing over the tiny baby. The face was obscured, and the sight of the silhouette set Sam's heart to a terrified gallop.
The wrist extended. The blood flowed into baby Sam's mouth, infecting him with evil. Azazel laughed beside him, a deep, throaty chuckle.
Mary appeared. Still sleep-heavy, she spoke to who she assumed was her husband. The dark man shushed her and she disappeared again and Sam wished ferociously that this time she would not come back.
But she did. Every night she did.
Sam watched as she reached forward in a futile attempt to get to her youngest son. The silhouette's arm shot out and she was thrown back against the wall with a low thump. Sam stared, horror struck, as she was forced slowly to the ceiling, as the blood began to spread on her nightgown.
The silhouette was suddenly lit by the sourceless light of dreams. Sam saw the spikey hair and the familiar jacket. He turned slowly to face Sam and every night, for the most fleeting of seconds, Sam would feel a relief so profound it hurt. Dean was here! Dean would save them! But then the thing that had been his brother would smile, the eyes consumed with blackness and Mary's scream rent the air apart and Sam's anguished yell would join the piercing shriek and fire would engulf the world, their flames scorching and his brother would laugh and –
Sam jerked awake, drenched in sweat, panting.
For a few moments he lay as still as his heaving lungs allowed. Terror and pain old and new thundered through him. He rode it out, trying to think only of the air whooshing in and out of his open mouth. Slowly the effects of the dream drained away, leaving him more exhausted than he had been before his sleep.
Too restless to lie down, he got up and took a shower, washing the remnants of the nightmare down the drain. He spent longer than was strictly necessary under the weak jets of too-hot water. He tried to focus on the sensation of the water running over him, tracing each tiny rivulet with his mind. He breathed slowly and kept his eyes closed, letting the water sluice over him and thud down into the tub, the sound amplified in the small washroom.
Feeling calmer, he left the sanctuary of the shower. The shirt he'd worn the day before had thin lines of blood all over the front, so he dug out a fresh one and buttoned it up.
The laptop dinged shrilly.
Pausing on the second-last button, Sam leant forward on the bed and pulled the computer towards him. A flashing window had popped up on the screen, over the paused video of Dean beating a liquor store employee to death, signalling the confirmed –
Sam's lips pulled up in a fierce smile.
Confirmed demon omens converging, large scale, only about eighty or so miles away. Either one hell of a gathering, or, more likely...
"Dean," he whispered to the empty room, the smile growing. "I've got you."