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anactoriaTitle: Take Me To The Bridge
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
anactoria
Characters: Dean, Sam, Cas, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Animal cruelty.
Word count: 23,000
Summary: It’s supposed to be a routine hunt. A few farm animals mutilated, a few towns over. It sounds like the work of some two-bit demon—just another day at the office for two experienced hunters and an angel.
But this case is closer to home than it seems. Before long, Dean is in the clutches of a dangerous spirit, and Sam and Cas must try to end an ancient family feud before the whole town—and Dean—gets caught in the crossfire.
Dean stares, and Sam heaves a sigh. He isn’t exactly thrilled at this particular turn of events either. He came back to the motel room hoping against hope that he’d be able to rule it out. The mutilated horses; the mutilated horse figurine he dropped back at the bunker. But nope: here it is.
Of course their first job back in the field wasn’t going to be something straightforward. That would just be too much to ask.
“You sure about this?” Dean asks, after what feels like a lifetime. “Because me and Cas ran into a witness back at the diner. Said she spoke to Spalls last night. He was talking shit about calling his brothers and sisters, only he doesn’t have any. Figured it might be one of Cas’s rogues.”
Cas stands half a pace behind him, looking befuddled—but, befuddled being Cas’s default state half the time, that doesn’t give Sam much idea what he thinks about the whole situation. He gives a cautious nod when Dean is done talking, but doesn’t offer an opinion.
“I’m sure,” Sam says, and swivels the laptop around so that Dean can read the screen. “Plenty of monsters have brothers and sisters. I don’t know what this one is yet, but I do know it’s our responsibility.”
It’s a Facebook page. Sam doesn’t recognize the name of the owner, but they’re local. He’d put money on their being a friend of Mrs. Sefton’s.
He lets Dean scroll down the page, and watches his expression freeze as he hits the photographs at the bottom, obviously taken on somebody’s phone. A sunny green field, and two dead horses lying in the ground. Ears and tails hacked off, flies swarming their bloodied eye sockets. There’s a building clearly visible in the background, and it isn’t the Sefton ranch.
FIND THE SICK PERSON WHO DID THIS!! screams the caption, in angry red caps. Maybe Dean isn’t gonna be joining PETA anytime soon, but he still grimaces as he shoves the laptop back at Sam.
“Okay,” he says, “so we know this happened somewhere else too. Also that it’s gross.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t tell us anything. Could still be a rogue angel gone nuts. Maybe he was possessing some other poor sucker before he grabbed Spalls.”
“Look at the text,” Sam tells him. “Where the pictures were taken.”
Dean takes the laptop back, peering at the names of the towns. Red Cloud. St Paul. Greeley.
Sam watches the penny drop; watches Dean’s face turn grim. “This leads straight up 281.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Starting from Lebanon.”
“Anything south of us?”
“Nope.” Sam taps the screen with a fingertip. “And look at the date. First one was last Monday.”
Dean looks at him. “We didn’t do anything last Monday. We haven’t done anything for weeks. You’ve been playing librarian in the basement since I got that crap off my arm. Hell, even I haven’t done anything dumber than introducing Cas to Plants Vs. Zombies.”
“And scaring the shit out of me while I was holding a creepy artefact of unknown origin,” Sam reminds him. “A creepy artefact of unknown origin shaped like a mutilated horse.”
Dean looks at the screen again. “Crap.”
“Yeah, that about covers it.”
“So, you think something got out when you dropped it.” Dean frowns a little. “But it was already broken, right?”
“Maybe not.” Sam sighs again. “It was missing its ears, right? And its tail. I figured that they must have snapped off before the Men of Letters stashed it away, but with what Mrs. Sefton said, and now these photographs—maybe it was made to look like that. Maybe it means something.”
Dean makes a face. “Well, whatever it means, our freak of the week’s been trying for a life-size reproduction.”
“And there’s no way that’s a coincidence.”
“Nope.” Dean sounds tired, and Sam knows he’s feeling it too. The old, too-familiar curl of guilt down in the gut; the reminder that everything they touch turns to shit. Including, apparently, finding themselves in charge of the supernatural motherlode.
The moment Sam figured it out, it felt inevitable. They’ve rarely had time to actually sit back and take stock of everything since those first few weeks in the bunker. The one stretch of downtime they have gotten in the last couple years—after they managed to get Dean undemonized—they spent out on the road, keeping carefully away from familiar places. The wounds were still too raw to be tended at home, the memories echoing down the corridors like ghosts.
Still, Sam’s always thought—maybe sometime. Always sometime; always in the future; always when whatever clusterfuck they’re dealing with right now is done and dusted. But sometime. He’ll learn everything the Men of Letters knew and use it to really help, figure out something that will actually change the game instead of pinballing helplessly from one disaster to another.
Cataloguing the rest of the stuff in the bunker wasn’t even supposed to be the beginning of that. Just laying the groundwork. Getting things ready, Turns out he didn’t even have to get started to screw it up.
“So,” Dean says, “any leads on what we’re dealing with?” and Sam snaps out of it.
There’s no time for wallowing in guilt. Whatever’s possessing Joe Spalls may be sticking to animal cruelty right now, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t move onto killing people eventually. They need to do damage control.
“Not yet,” Sam tells him. “It would help if I could take another look at the figurine. Maybe figure out what the inscription is.” He looks at Cas. “Any chance you could—?”
“Of course.” Cas takes the proffered door key—the bunker being angel-warded, he can’t just zap straight inside; has to use the front door like everybody else—and vanishes with a flutter of air.
Sam gets to his feet, stretching out the ache in his back and limbs. Dean tugs his tie loose and then steals the single chair. He sits there for a couple seconds, drumming his fingers on the table-top, before he reaches into his inside pocket. He pulls out a hip flask, tips a healthy slug into Sam’s half-drunk coffee, and takes a mouthful.
“Dude,” Sam protests, but it’s half-hearted. He still isn’t far enough from all the fears of the past few months to get genuinely pissed about this stuff. Dean being an ass—a regular, annoying-brother kind of an ass—is still an almost-welcome surprise most of the time.
Dean shrugs and raises the mug in a mock toast. “Guess we should know better’n to take vacations, huh?”
He says it lightly, still smiling, but there’s a tang of bitterness to it. Like maybe he wants to needle at Sam until Sam comes out and actually asks him what the hell happened to sand between our toes, to wanting a life outside of killing monsters. Then they can yell at each other and get separately drunk and never speak of it again.
Sam doesn’t rise to it. “Guess you should know better than to sneak up on people who are actually working,” he shoots back.
He realizes it was the wrong thing to say when the smirk drops off Dean’s face and he takes a gulp of booze-laced coffee. When he puts the mug back down, his expression is stiff and sad.
Sam’s saved from any more double-edged banter by a disturbance in the air that heralds Cas’s reappearance in the middle of the room, the wooden horse figurine in his hands. He’s peering at the inscription, lips moving as he sounds out the words. They’re all strange, guttural vowel sounds that Sam isn’t a hundred percent sure the human voice is supposed to make.
“You understand it?” he asks. “I couldn’t figure out the language. I mean, the script is Roman, but it isn’t Latin, or—”
“It’s Old Welsh,” Cas tells him, with a frown.
“Huh.” Sam feels a little flame of hope leap up in his chest, and does his best not to let it take hold. Maybe they can figure this out, put a stop to whatever’s going on before anybody gets hurt. But there’s no guarantee. “Can you read it?”
“Yes.” Cas is still frowning. “But the inscription isn’t familiar to me.” He touches a word with the tip of his finger. “This here means horse. This means white raven. But—this is pagan lore. Nothing biblical. Nothing to do with Heaven or Hell. It’s from a different order of existence to angels or demons.” His shoulders sag. “I’m afraid I’ve never come across it before.”
----
The announcement puts Dean in a shitty mood, and soon enough he ditches the ceremony of Irishing his coffee and just ensconces himself on the furthest motel bed with the other laptop, swigging straight from the flask and exuding a toxic miasma of grouchiness.
Sam gets that they need to stop this thing, he really does—but at the same time, they’ve been in way direr straits than this with way less to go on. Spalls hasn’t even harmed any humans yet, and that’s a big tick in the plus column compared to most of the jobs they work.
Still, it’s forcing them to sit and think, and that’s one thing Dean seems determined to avoid at all costs.
That’s probably a bad thing. Ninety percent of their existence is bad things. So Sam tries to quiet the part of him that wants to imagine this might, eventually, lead somewhere good. That thinks maybe Dean is so determined to work and drink and not think because if he lets himself, he will remember all the things he said before he got rid of the Mark. The stuff about this not being all he wants out of life. Cas didn’t relay all of that conversation to Sam, but the parts he got were enough to tell him that somewhere in there, Dean wants the same things he does. A life that’s more than an endless stream of crap; a light at the end of the tunnel.
Sam pushes the idea away. Dean’s still sulking, and Sam can tell it isn’t the kind of sulk that eventually works itself up into a revealing angry outburst. It’s the kind of sulk that just sits there festering, turning the room airless, until they find a lead or a body or something to force them into action.
Cas is less grouchy, but no more helpful. After a blink-of-an-eye zap around town that turns up jack on Spalls, he perches at the bottom of the other bed and zones out, the way he does when he’s tuned into angel radio and concentrating hard.
Sam glances over, just once, out the corner of his eye. Cas blinks out of his trance long enough to shake his head, then spaces out again.
Suppressing a sigh, Sam turns back to the computer.
He pokes around online, sifting through bits and pieces of lore about horses and birds. He sips vending machine coffee to keep himself going until his shoulders ache from hunching over the laptop screen, Cas has quit angel radio in favor of Tom and Jerry, and Dean has quit his silent sulking in favor of bitching about Tom and Jerry. And eventually, Sam lands on a name that pings him as vaguely familiar.
Juliette Birch. Sam frowns to himself, repeating the name inside of his head and trying to figure out whose voice he remembers hearing it in. He can’t seem to get hold of it, and he’s just about ready to dismiss as his mind playing tricks on him when it swims into view in his mind’s eye.
An address book, probably bought sometime in the seventies and well-thumbed since. Chickenscratch handwriting. Bobby’s.
Sam sits up in his chair, stretching out his shoulders with a pop.
Dean looks over at him, eyes widening, suddenly alert: like a terrier scenting a rat. “You got something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Sam clicks on the name and Juliette Birch’s profile page blinks up on the screen.
The website belongs to the history department of some British university. Professor Juliette Birch joined the department as Reader in Comparative Mythology in 1995, it reads. Her most recent book, Shifting Territories: Nation, Space and Boundary in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, is published by University of Wales Press. She has supervised PhDs on subjects including medieval storytelling practices, translating Welsh history…
Sam scrolls down past the potted biography, the photograph of a smiling middle-aged woman in a floaty cardigan and an obnoxiously purple necklace sitting in a vaguely institutional-looking office. The bookcases behind her are neat and ordered, and there’s a potted chrysanthemum on the windowsill.
She doesn’t look like someone Bobby would know. But it’s the only lead they have.
Sam glances at the time display in the corner of his laptop screen and does a little quick math. Birch is in the UK, and it’s late evening there, a little after ten. She won’t be answering her office phone. Maybe he’ll strike lucky, and she’ll turn out to be the kind of workaholic who can’t resist checking her email one last time before bed. He clicks Compose Message.
Dean is still looking at him, expectant. “So?” he says.
“I found a page for one of Bobby’s old contacts,” Sam replies as he types. “Nobody we know, but it sounds like she might actually be able to translate this thing. I’m sending her a message now. That’s the good news.” He presses Send.
“And the bad news?”
“She’s on the other side of the pond. No home contact number. We’re just gonna have to wait and hope she picks it up before tomorrow morning.”
Sam turns back to his inbox, just in case a reply has appeared in the couple seconds since he sent the email. Nothing.
Dean scowls. “Well,” he says. “We can sit here on our asses watching reruns and waiting for Professor McGonagall to send you an owl—” Sam raises an eyebrow. “What?”
Sam spreads his hands. “Nothing.”
“Screw you. Anyway, like I said. We can wait around, or we can go find Spalls before whatever’s possessing him hurts anybody.”
“Dean,” Cas puts in. “I already searched. He wasn’t anywhere in town.”
“Yeah, well, a lot can change in a couple hours.” Dean gets to his feet, grabbing the suit jacket he discarded at the foot of his bed sometime mid-sulk. “You guys coming or what?”
“Or what,” Sam says, and stays in his chair. “We should wait until we know what we’re dealing with here.”
“Wait until some poor sonofabitch ends up dead, you mean.”
Sam looks up from the laptop and finds Dean glaring at him. Sam glares right back.
Dean ignores him, grabs his car keys, and makes for the door.
Sam gets to his feet. “Hey,” he says. “How much did you have to drink?”
Dean scowls. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, no.”
Cas stands up. “I can drive,” he offers, and Dean turns the scowl on him.
“Dude, no way. I’ve seen your car.”
Cas opens his mouth to reply, and Sam groans and snaps the laptop shut. The last thing he needs is a sniping match. “I’ll drive,” he says, standing up. He meets Dean’s eyes, keeping his expression firm. “C’mon, hand ‘em over.”
He’s expecting to have to argue at least a little, but after a second’s hesitation, Dean shrugs and tosses him the keys.
Sam breathes out. Small victories.
----
They start back at the Sefton ranch, because it isn’t like they have a better starting-point. Spalls—or whatever’s wearing him—is probably long gone from the bar he was seen at last night, and if whatever-it-is is laying low, it won’t head back to his mom’s place. Plus, it’s possible the horse mutilations have some ritual significance, even if it isn’t mentioned in any lore book Sam’s read before. If they were part of some plan, then maybe their monster will come back to the scene of the crime.
That’s Sam’s theory, anyway, and he manages to talk Dean around to it after a few minutes’ bickering. Or maybe it’s just that he’s driving, so Dean doesn’t have a choice.
Mrs. Sefton actually has pretty tight security. The yard is lit with bright white spots that switch on when Sam tosses a stick in over the gate, making both him and Dean blink and shield their eyes, and there’s an expensive looking alarm system on the stable block.
Of course, Spalls probably knew the code, so it didn’t do Mrs. Sefton—or the horses—much good.
It means they can’t just walk in, though. Even Cas zapping inside could make the lights come on again. Instead, they inch around the perimeter fence and find themselves in a grassy field. It’s damp underfoot, a steady, depressing drizzle having started up sometime while they were holed up in the motel, and Cas grumbles under his breath about how he remembers now why flying is so much more convenient, his dress shoes slipping on the wet grass.
The second time it happens, he goes over and lands on his ass with a thump. There’s a snort of laughter, and Sam manfully suppresses a smirk while Dean points and sniggers. Cas scowls up at him and demonstrates a surprisingly improved grasp of the basics of modern American cursing.
“Here,” Sam says, taking pity on Cas and offering a hand to help him up. Cas takes it.
“Thank you, Sam,” he says, once he’s upright, and aims a thunderous look at a still-smirking Dean.
Sam grins. Then something catches his eye and he looks back down at the turf. The spot where Cas slipped. The grass is flattened, and not just by somebody falling on it for a couple seconds. There’s a kind of indent in the ground, like something heavy stood there for at least a couple hours.
Or lay there.
Sam frowns, and lets the beam of his flashlight slide over the patch of grass.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s—definitely a horse-shaped indent. There’s discoloration on the grass that just looks like dark shadows in the weak light of the flashlight, but Sam would put money on it being blood.
The edge of the beam catches something else, a little way off. Sam motions to the others to follow and sets off toward it.
Another patch of grass, same as the first. And another a little way beyond that.
There were three horses. This is definitely where the thing possessing Spalls carried out its sick little ritual.
Or arranged it, anyway. Sam’s pretty sure the horses weren’t just left to lie where they fell down. The shapes make it look like they were all in the same position. Arranged as if they were running, heads stretched out in front of them.
The same posture as the horse figurine from the bunker. And they’re all facing the same way.
Sam glances up, to see if Dean and Cas are getting this. From the intent, serious look on Cas’s face—and the fact that Dean’s quit mocking him about his little tumble—he figures the answer’s yes.
“What do you think?” Sam asks. “Is there some kind of—pagan significance to this? Where does the sun rise around here?” He cranes his neck and glances up at the sky. The constellations might give him a clue if he could only see them, but the cloud cover is thick and dull.
“Could be,” Dean says. “Or it could be directions.”
Cas nods gravely. “The woman at the diner said he talked about calling to his brethren,” he says. “Maybe this is a beacon.”
“Or a map.”
They follow the horses’ heads, which is so ridiculously gangster movie that Sam might laugh about if this was some other hunt. If he had any idea what they’re dealing with here. If he could go more than a couple minutes without thinking about Dean and how determined he seems to be to throw himself back into—well, throwing himself at whatever comes their way like he doesn’t give a crap if he lives or dies. Like everything Sam went through to save him meant nothing.
So when Dean stops short, holding up a hand, in front of the treeline behind the Sefton ranch, Sam almost walks right into the back of him.
He kills the flashlight and narrows his eyes, following Dean’s gesture and peering into the gloom between the trees.
There’s somebody there.
Sam squints at the figure in the trees. It’s too dark to see much. White guy, average height, wearing heavy-duty boots and work clothes. He looks like somebody who might work on a ranch. It has to be Spalls.
There’s a faint, silvery light playing around him, so weak that it takes Sam a moment to register it. It looks like it’s coming from Spalls’ eyes.
He glances in Dean’s direction. Nods, and then they’re moving toward the guy—keeping low, fanning out to surround him as best they can with only three men. The ground under the trees is soft and mossy. Sam flinches when a twig cracks under his boot and Spalls’ head shoots up—but he doesn’t seem to see them, because after a couple seconds he goes back to gazing off into the distance.
The first sign that something’s wrong is a thud to Sam’s left.
He turns at the sound, sees Cas on the ground at the foot of an old, thick-trunked tree.
Sam glances to the other side, sees Dean looking wide-eyed in the same direction. He shakes his head at Sam’s questioning look: he didn’t see what knocked Cas out, either. Sam narrows his eyes, peers into the dark between the trees.
And then the clearing is full of people.
Or—not people. Figures. They shine the same unearthly silver as the light in Spalls’ eyes, and they surround him, almost like they’re keeping him shielded. Cas blinks his eyes open and gets to his feet, angel blade slipping into his hand, murder in his eyes—but the figure nearest him just turns her back and faces Spalls.
There are three of them. A woman in a long dress like something out of Charlie’s Moondor game, and two guys with serious beards. There’s a bird sitting on the woman’s shoulder. Something like a crow, only white. They stand in a circle around Spalls, looking in at him.
One of the guys steps forward, holding out a hand. His expression is soft. He says something Sam doesn’t understand. Then it’s like a switch flips and he’s hearing the guy’s voice inside his head, a lilting unfamiliar accent saying, Come with us. Come home.
Spalls glowers. “Where is he?” he demands. His voice is harsh and rusty. “Where is Brân?”
The other guy doesn’t reply, just raises his eyes to the trees.
There’s a rushing in the air. A feeling like something huge coming from all directions at once. Sam whirls on the spot, not sure where to look.
Dean’s doing the same thing, turning and turning, wild-eyed. Cas looks up, white-knuckling his angel blade.
But nothing comes. Just that heavy feeling in the air, like inevitability.
Dean shakes himself, then scowls and moves forward. Sam shakes his head, mouths, No, what are you doing? but Dean ignores him. He steps into the ring of glowing figures.
“Listen, pal,” he says to Spalls. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or what you think you’re looking for. But that poor bastard you’re riding shotgun with? You’re gonna let him go.”
There’s a moment of absolute silence.
Then Spalls and the three figures turn to look at him in perfect sync, without a sound.
Spalls cocks his head. It’s a not-quite-human gesture, a little like Cas when he was newer to the world, only this isn’t just curiosity. It’s sharp. A bird of prey lighting on something small and scuttling.
These are not the affairs of mortals. Or of angels.
Spalls’ lips are moving, but the voice is inhuman. It resonates like it’s coming from somewhere huge and full of echoes.
You will learn what happens when you do not leave us be.
That, Sam’s pretty sure, should be their cue to split. But Dean just stands there, looking back at Spalls. Not glaring anymore. His eyes are wide, and it’s like he’s frozen in place.
Sam starts forward. He sees Cas have the same thought at the same moment. There’s a flutter of wings, and Cas vanishes and then reappears behind Spalls.
He’s too late.
Spalls’ body collapses to the ground as a rush of silver tears itself out of him, hangs in the air for a moment, and then reassembles itself into the figure of a man.
It makes straight for Dean.
“No!” Sam yells. His voice falls flat in the wooded enclosure.
The silvery figure closes the short distance between himself and Dean. Dean doesn’t move. The figure reaches out to him. Steps into him.
Pale light shines from Dean’s eyes.
“No,” Sam says again. His voice comes out as a whisper.
There’s a sound like galloping hooves, and he and Cas are alone among the trees.
Chapter 3
Author:
anactoriaCharacters: Dean, Sam, Cas, OCs
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Animal cruelty.
Word count: 23,000
Summary: It’s supposed to be a routine hunt. A few farm animals mutilated, a few towns over. It sounds like the work of some two-bit demon—just another day at the office for two experienced hunters and an angel.
But this case is closer to home than it seems. Before long, Dean is in the clutches of a dangerous spirit, and Sam and Cas must try to end an ancient family feud before the whole town—and Dean—gets caught in the crossfire.
Dean stares, and Sam heaves a sigh. He isn’t exactly thrilled at this particular turn of events either. He came back to the motel room hoping against hope that he’d be able to rule it out. The mutilated horses; the mutilated horse figurine he dropped back at the bunker. But nope: here it is.
Of course their first job back in the field wasn’t going to be something straightforward. That would just be too much to ask.
“You sure about this?” Dean asks, after what feels like a lifetime. “Because me and Cas ran into a witness back at the diner. Said she spoke to Spalls last night. He was talking shit about calling his brothers and sisters, only he doesn’t have any. Figured it might be one of Cas’s rogues.”
Cas stands half a pace behind him, looking befuddled—but, befuddled being Cas’s default state half the time, that doesn’t give Sam much idea what he thinks about the whole situation. He gives a cautious nod when Dean is done talking, but doesn’t offer an opinion.
“I’m sure,” Sam says, and swivels the laptop around so that Dean can read the screen. “Plenty of monsters have brothers and sisters. I don’t know what this one is yet, but I do know it’s our responsibility.”
It’s a Facebook page. Sam doesn’t recognize the name of the owner, but they’re local. He’d put money on their being a friend of Mrs. Sefton’s.
He lets Dean scroll down the page, and watches his expression freeze as he hits the photographs at the bottom, obviously taken on somebody’s phone. A sunny green field, and two dead horses lying in the ground. Ears and tails hacked off, flies swarming their bloodied eye sockets. There’s a building clearly visible in the background, and it isn’t the Sefton ranch.
FIND THE SICK PERSON WHO DID THIS!! screams the caption, in angry red caps. Maybe Dean isn’t gonna be joining PETA anytime soon, but he still grimaces as he shoves the laptop back at Sam.
“Okay,” he says, “so we know this happened somewhere else too. Also that it’s gross.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t tell us anything. Could still be a rogue angel gone nuts. Maybe he was possessing some other poor sucker before he grabbed Spalls.”
“Look at the text,” Sam tells him. “Where the pictures were taken.”
Dean takes the laptop back, peering at the names of the towns. Red Cloud. St Paul. Greeley.
Sam watches the penny drop; watches Dean’s face turn grim. “This leads straight up 281.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Starting from Lebanon.”
“Anything south of us?”
“Nope.” Sam taps the screen with a fingertip. “And look at the date. First one was last Monday.”
Dean looks at him. “We didn’t do anything last Monday. We haven’t done anything for weeks. You’ve been playing librarian in the basement since I got that crap off my arm. Hell, even I haven’t done anything dumber than introducing Cas to Plants Vs. Zombies.”
“And scaring the shit out of me while I was holding a creepy artefact of unknown origin,” Sam reminds him. “A creepy artefact of unknown origin shaped like a mutilated horse.”
Dean looks at the screen again. “Crap.”
“Yeah, that about covers it.”
“So, you think something got out when you dropped it.” Dean frowns a little. “But it was already broken, right?”
“Maybe not.” Sam sighs again. “It was missing its ears, right? And its tail. I figured that they must have snapped off before the Men of Letters stashed it away, but with what Mrs. Sefton said, and now these photographs—maybe it was made to look like that. Maybe it means something.”
Dean makes a face. “Well, whatever it means, our freak of the week’s been trying for a life-size reproduction.”
“And there’s no way that’s a coincidence.”
“Nope.” Dean sounds tired, and Sam knows he’s feeling it too. The old, too-familiar curl of guilt down in the gut; the reminder that everything they touch turns to shit. Including, apparently, finding themselves in charge of the supernatural motherlode.
The moment Sam figured it out, it felt inevitable. They’ve rarely had time to actually sit back and take stock of everything since those first few weeks in the bunker. The one stretch of downtime they have gotten in the last couple years—after they managed to get Dean undemonized—they spent out on the road, keeping carefully away from familiar places. The wounds were still too raw to be tended at home, the memories echoing down the corridors like ghosts.
Still, Sam’s always thought—maybe sometime. Always sometime; always in the future; always when whatever clusterfuck they’re dealing with right now is done and dusted. But sometime. He’ll learn everything the Men of Letters knew and use it to really help, figure out something that will actually change the game instead of pinballing helplessly from one disaster to another.
Cataloguing the rest of the stuff in the bunker wasn’t even supposed to be the beginning of that. Just laying the groundwork. Getting things ready, Turns out he didn’t even have to get started to screw it up.
“So,” Dean says, “any leads on what we’re dealing with?” and Sam snaps out of it.
There’s no time for wallowing in guilt. Whatever’s possessing Joe Spalls may be sticking to animal cruelty right now, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t move onto killing people eventually. They need to do damage control.
“Not yet,” Sam tells him. “It would help if I could take another look at the figurine. Maybe figure out what the inscription is.” He looks at Cas. “Any chance you could—?”
“Of course.” Cas takes the proffered door key—the bunker being angel-warded, he can’t just zap straight inside; has to use the front door like everybody else—and vanishes with a flutter of air.
Sam gets to his feet, stretching out the ache in his back and limbs. Dean tugs his tie loose and then steals the single chair. He sits there for a couple seconds, drumming his fingers on the table-top, before he reaches into his inside pocket. He pulls out a hip flask, tips a healthy slug into Sam’s half-drunk coffee, and takes a mouthful.
“Dude,” Sam protests, but it’s half-hearted. He still isn’t far enough from all the fears of the past few months to get genuinely pissed about this stuff. Dean being an ass—a regular, annoying-brother kind of an ass—is still an almost-welcome surprise most of the time.
Dean shrugs and raises the mug in a mock toast. “Guess we should know better’n to take vacations, huh?”
He says it lightly, still smiling, but there’s a tang of bitterness to it. Like maybe he wants to needle at Sam until Sam comes out and actually asks him what the hell happened to sand between our toes, to wanting a life outside of killing monsters. Then they can yell at each other and get separately drunk and never speak of it again.
Sam doesn’t rise to it. “Guess you should know better than to sneak up on people who are actually working,” he shoots back.
He realizes it was the wrong thing to say when the smirk drops off Dean’s face and he takes a gulp of booze-laced coffee. When he puts the mug back down, his expression is stiff and sad.
Sam’s saved from any more double-edged banter by a disturbance in the air that heralds Cas’s reappearance in the middle of the room, the wooden horse figurine in his hands. He’s peering at the inscription, lips moving as he sounds out the words. They’re all strange, guttural vowel sounds that Sam isn’t a hundred percent sure the human voice is supposed to make.
“You understand it?” he asks. “I couldn’t figure out the language. I mean, the script is Roman, but it isn’t Latin, or—”
“It’s Old Welsh,” Cas tells him, with a frown.
“Huh.” Sam feels a little flame of hope leap up in his chest, and does his best not to let it take hold. Maybe they can figure this out, put a stop to whatever’s going on before anybody gets hurt. But there’s no guarantee. “Can you read it?”
“Yes.” Cas is still frowning. “But the inscription isn’t familiar to me.” He touches a word with the tip of his finger. “This here means horse. This means white raven. But—this is pagan lore. Nothing biblical. Nothing to do with Heaven or Hell. It’s from a different order of existence to angels or demons.” His shoulders sag. “I’m afraid I’ve never come across it before.”
The announcement puts Dean in a shitty mood, and soon enough he ditches the ceremony of Irishing his coffee and just ensconces himself on the furthest motel bed with the other laptop, swigging straight from the flask and exuding a toxic miasma of grouchiness.
Sam gets that they need to stop this thing, he really does—but at the same time, they’ve been in way direr straits than this with way less to go on. Spalls hasn’t even harmed any humans yet, and that’s a big tick in the plus column compared to most of the jobs they work.
Still, it’s forcing them to sit and think, and that’s one thing Dean seems determined to avoid at all costs.
That’s probably a bad thing. Ninety percent of their existence is bad things. So Sam tries to quiet the part of him that wants to imagine this might, eventually, lead somewhere good. That thinks maybe Dean is so determined to work and drink and not think because if he lets himself, he will remember all the things he said before he got rid of the Mark. The stuff about this not being all he wants out of life. Cas didn’t relay all of that conversation to Sam, but the parts he got were enough to tell him that somewhere in there, Dean wants the same things he does. A life that’s more than an endless stream of crap; a light at the end of the tunnel.
Sam pushes the idea away. Dean’s still sulking, and Sam can tell it isn’t the kind of sulk that eventually works itself up into a revealing angry outburst. It’s the kind of sulk that just sits there festering, turning the room airless, until they find a lead or a body or something to force them into action.
Cas is less grouchy, but no more helpful. After a blink-of-an-eye zap around town that turns up jack on Spalls, he perches at the bottom of the other bed and zones out, the way he does when he’s tuned into angel radio and concentrating hard.
Sam glances over, just once, out the corner of his eye. Cas blinks out of his trance long enough to shake his head, then spaces out again.
Suppressing a sigh, Sam turns back to the computer.
He pokes around online, sifting through bits and pieces of lore about horses and birds. He sips vending machine coffee to keep himself going until his shoulders ache from hunching over the laptop screen, Cas has quit angel radio in favor of Tom and Jerry, and Dean has quit his silent sulking in favor of bitching about Tom and Jerry. And eventually, Sam lands on a name that pings him as vaguely familiar.
Juliette Birch. Sam frowns to himself, repeating the name inside of his head and trying to figure out whose voice he remembers hearing it in. He can’t seem to get hold of it, and he’s just about ready to dismiss as his mind playing tricks on him when it swims into view in his mind’s eye.
An address book, probably bought sometime in the seventies and well-thumbed since. Chickenscratch handwriting. Bobby’s.
Sam sits up in his chair, stretching out his shoulders with a pop.
Dean looks over at him, eyes widening, suddenly alert: like a terrier scenting a rat. “You got something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Sam clicks on the name and Juliette Birch’s profile page blinks up on the screen.
The website belongs to the history department of some British university. Professor Juliette Birch joined the department as Reader in Comparative Mythology in 1995, it reads. Her most recent book, Shifting Territories: Nation, Space and Boundary in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, is published by University of Wales Press. She has supervised PhDs on subjects including medieval storytelling practices, translating Welsh history…
Sam scrolls down past the potted biography, the photograph of a smiling middle-aged woman in a floaty cardigan and an obnoxiously purple necklace sitting in a vaguely institutional-looking office. The bookcases behind her are neat and ordered, and there’s a potted chrysanthemum on the windowsill.
She doesn’t look like someone Bobby would know. But it’s the only lead they have.
Sam glances at the time display in the corner of his laptop screen and does a little quick math. Birch is in the UK, and it’s late evening there, a little after ten. She won’t be answering her office phone. Maybe he’ll strike lucky, and she’ll turn out to be the kind of workaholic who can’t resist checking her email one last time before bed. He clicks Compose Message.
Dean is still looking at him, expectant. “So?” he says.
“I found a page for one of Bobby’s old contacts,” Sam replies as he types. “Nobody we know, but it sounds like she might actually be able to translate this thing. I’m sending her a message now. That’s the good news.” He presses Send.
“And the bad news?”
“She’s on the other side of the pond. No home contact number. We’re just gonna have to wait and hope she picks it up before tomorrow morning.”
Sam turns back to his inbox, just in case a reply has appeared in the couple seconds since he sent the email. Nothing.
Dean scowls. “Well,” he says. “We can sit here on our asses watching reruns and waiting for Professor McGonagall to send you an owl—” Sam raises an eyebrow. “What?”
Sam spreads his hands. “Nothing.”
“Screw you. Anyway, like I said. We can wait around, or we can go find Spalls before whatever’s possessing him hurts anybody.”
“Dean,” Cas puts in. “I already searched. He wasn’t anywhere in town.”
“Yeah, well, a lot can change in a couple hours.” Dean gets to his feet, grabbing the suit jacket he discarded at the foot of his bed sometime mid-sulk. “You guys coming or what?”
“Or what,” Sam says, and stays in his chair. “We should wait until we know what we’re dealing with here.”
“Wait until some poor sonofabitch ends up dead, you mean.”
Sam looks up from the laptop and finds Dean glaring at him. Sam glares right back.
Dean ignores him, grabs his car keys, and makes for the door.
Sam gets to his feet. “Hey,” he says. “How much did you have to drink?”
Dean scowls. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, no.”
Cas stands up. “I can drive,” he offers, and Dean turns the scowl on him.
“Dude, no way. I’ve seen your car.”
Cas opens his mouth to reply, and Sam groans and snaps the laptop shut. The last thing he needs is a sniping match. “I’ll drive,” he says, standing up. He meets Dean’s eyes, keeping his expression firm. “C’mon, hand ‘em over.”
He’s expecting to have to argue at least a little, but after a second’s hesitation, Dean shrugs and tosses him the keys.
Sam breathes out. Small victories.
They start back at the Sefton ranch, because it isn’t like they have a better starting-point. Spalls—or whatever’s wearing him—is probably long gone from the bar he was seen at last night, and if whatever-it-is is laying low, it won’t head back to his mom’s place. Plus, it’s possible the horse mutilations have some ritual significance, even if it isn’t mentioned in any lore book Sam’s read before. If they were part of some plan, then maybe their monster will come back to the scene of the crime.
That’s Sam’s theory, anyway, and he manages to talk Dean around to it after a few minutes’ bickering. Or maybe it’s just that he’s driving, so Dean doesn’t have a choice.
Mrs. Sefton actually has pretty tight security. The yard is lit with bright white spots that switch on when Sam tosses a stick in over the gate, making both him and Dean blink and shield their eyes, and there’s an expensive looking alarm system on the stable block.
Of course, Spalls probably knew the code, so it didn’t do Mrs. Sefton—or the horses—much good.
It means they can’t just walk in, though. Even Cas zapping inside could make the lights come on again. Instead, they inch around the perimeter fence and find themselves in a grassy field. It’s damp underfoot, a steady, depressing drizzle having started up sometime while they were holed up in the motel, and Cas grumbles under his breath about how he remembers now why flying is so much more convenient, his dress shoes slipping on the wet grass.
The second time it happens, he goes over and lands on his ass with a thump. There’s a snort of laughter, and Sam manfully suppresses a smirk while Dean points and sniggers. Cas scowls up at him and demonstrates a surprisingly improved grasp of the basics of modern American cursing.
“Here,” Sam says, taking pity on Cas and offering a hand to help him up. Cas takes it.
“Thank you, Sam,” he says, once he’s upright, and aims a thunderous look at a still-smirking Dean.
Sam grins. Then something catches his eye and he looks back down at the turf. The spot where Cas slipped. The grass is flattened, and not just by somebody falling on it for a couple seconds. There’s a kind of indent in the ground, like something heavy stood there for at least a couple hours.
Or lay there.
Sam frowns, and lets the beam of his flashlight slide over the patch of grass.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s—definitely a horse-shaped indent. There’s discoloration on the grass that just looks like dark shadows in the weak light of the flashlight, but Sam would put money on it being blood.
The edge of the beam catches something else, a little way off. Sam motions to the others to follow and sets off toward it.
Another patch of grass, same as the first. And another a little way beyond that.
There were three horses. This is definitely where the thing possessing Spalls carried out its sick little ritual.
Or arranged it, anyway. Sam’s pretty sure the horses weren’t just left to lie where they fell down. The shapes make it look like they were all in the same position. Arranged as if they were running, heads stretched out in front of them.
The same posture as the horse figurine from the bunker. And they’re all facing the same way.
Sam glances up, to see if Dean and Cas are getting this. From the intent, serious look on Cas’s face—and the fact that Dean’s quit mocking him about his little tumble—he figures the answer’s yes.
“What do you think?” Sam asks. “Is there some kind of—pagan significance to this? Where does the sun rise around here?” He cranes his neck and glances up at the sky. The constellations might give him a clue if he could only see them, but the cloud cover is thick and dull.
“Could be,” Dean says. “Or it could be directions.”
Cas nods gravely. “The woman at the diner said he talked about calling to his brethren,” he says. “Maybe this is a beacon.”
“Or a map.”
They follow the horses’ heads, which is so ridiculously gangster movie that Sam might laugh about if this was some other hunt. If he had any idea what they’re dealing with here. If he could go more than a couple minutes without thinking about Dean and how determined he seems to be to throw himself back into—well, throwing himself at whatever comes their way like he doesn’t give a crap if he lives or dies. Like everything Sam went through to save him meant nothing.
So when Dean stops short, holding up a hand, in front of the treeline behind the Sefton ranch, Sam almost walks right into the back of him.
He kills the flashlight and narrows his eyes, following Dean’s gesture and peering into the gloom between the trees.
There’s somebody there.
Sam squints at the figure in the trees. It’s too dark to see much. White guy, average height, wearing heavy-duty boots and work clothes. He looks like somebody who might work on a ranch. It has to be Spalls.
There’s a faint, silvery light playing around him, so weak that it takes Sam a moment to register it. It looks like it’s coming from Spalls’ eyes.
He glances in Dean’s direction. Nods, and then they’re moving toward the guy—keeping low, fanning out to surround him as best they can with only three men. The ground under the trees is soft and mossy. Sam flinches when a twig cracks under his boot and Spalls’ head shoots up—but he doesn’t seem to see them, because after a couple seconds he goes back to gazing off into the distance.
The first sign that something’s wrong is a thud to Sam’s left.
He turns at the sound, sees Cas on the ground at the foot of an old, thick-trunked tree.
Sam glances to the other side, sees Dean looking wide-eyed in the same direction. He shakes his head at Sam’s questioning look: he didn’t see what knocked Cas out, either. Sam narrows his eyes, peers into the dark between the trees.
And then the clearing is full of people.
Or—not people. Figures. They shine the same unearthly silver as the light in Spalls’ eyes, and they surround him, almost like they’re keeping him shielded. Cas blinks his eyes open and gets to his feet, angel blade slipping into his hand, murder in his eyes—but the figure nearest him just turns her back and faces Spalls.
There are three of them. A woman in a long dress like something out of Charlie’s Moondor game, and two guys with serious beards. There’s a bird sitting on the woman’s shoulder. Something like a crow, only white. They stand in a circle around Spalls, looking in at him.
One of the guys steps forward, holding out a hand. His expression is soft. He says something Sam doesn’t understand. Then it’s like a switch flips and he’s hearing the guy’s voice inside his head, a lilting unfamiliar accent saying, Come with us. Come home.
Spalls glowers. “Where is he?” he demands. His voice is harsh and rusty. “Where is Brân?”
The other guy doesn’t reply, just raises his eyes to the trees.
There’s a rushing in the air. A feeling like something huge coming from all directions at once. Sam whirls on the spot, not sure where to look.
Dean’s doing the same thing, turning and turning, wild-eyed. Cas looks up, white-knuckling his angel blade.
But nothing comes. Just that heavy feeling in the air, like inevitability.
Dean shakes himself, then scowls and moves forward. Sam shakes his head, mouths, No, what are you doing? but Dean ignores him. He steps into the ring of glowing figures.
“Listen, pal,” he says to Spalls. “I don’t know what’s going on here, or what you think you’re looking for. But that poor bastard you’re riding shotgun with? You’re gonna let him go.”
There’s a moment of absolute silence.
Then Spalls and the three figures turn to look at him in perfect sync, without a sound.
Spalls cocks his head. It’s a not-quite-human gesture, a little like Cas when he was newer to the world, only this isn’t just curiosity. It’s sharp. A bird of prey lighting on something small and scuttling.
These are not the affairs of mortals. Or of angels.
Spalls’ lips are moving, but the voice is inhuman. It resonates like it’s coming from somewhere huge and full of echoes.
You will learn what happens when you do not leave us be.
That, Sam’s pretty sure, should be their cue to split. But Dean just stands there, looking back at Spalls. Not glaring anymore. His eyes are wide, and it’s like he’s frozen in place.
Sam starts forward. He sees Cas have the same thought at the same moment. There’s a flutter of wings, and Cas vanishes and then reappears behind Spalls.
He’s too late.
Spalls’ body collapses to the ground as a rush of silver tears itself out of him, hangs in the air for a moment, and then reassembles itself into the figure of a man.
It makes straight for Dean.
“No!” Sam yells. His voice falls flat in the wooded enclosure.
The silvery figure closes the short distance between himself and Dean. Dean doesn’t move. The figure reaches out to him. Steps into him.
Pale light shines from Dean’s eyes.
“No,” Sam says again. His voice comes out as a whisper.
There’s a sound like galloping hooves, and he and Cas are alone among the trees.
