ratherastory (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratherastory) wrote2010-09-06 07:27 pm
ratherastory) wrote2010-09-06 07:27 pm
Entry tags:
Not the Demons You're Looking For (20/24)
Part 19
Part 20
In spite of his assurances to Andy, Sam wasn't sure at all about leaving Dean behind. He kept telling himself that it was just a cold, that it wasn't even the first time he'd been sick. Far from it. Dean specialized in sinus infections. It was just that Sam hadn't seen him this sick since his last year of high school, when hunting and final exams had taken their toll and confined him to his bed for a week, where he'd driven both John and Sam to distraction. Dean was a terrible patient at the best of times, and he'd been bored, feverish and irritable, until finally John had dragged him to a clinic where they'd prescribed heavy-duty antibiotics to clear up the infection, and he'd finally been able to go back to school. Since then? Sam could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd seen Dean get so much as a sniffle, and although he had no way of knowing what had happened in the four years he was away at Stanford, he was pretty sure that Dean hadn't been sick during that time either.
He hesitated, debated with himself, finally decided that Dean would be more annoyed with him for staying and mother-henning him while leaving a civilian in danger. If anything came up in the meantime, he could count on Andy to call him, he was quite sure of it. Andy was a reliable kid, and even if he was a little wet behind the ears, taking care of someone with a cold wasn't exactly rocket science, even if it was Dean. So he left Andy with a couple of last-minute instructions on how to deal with Dean at his worst, most of which was friendly advice not to let himself be bullied, and slid behind the wheel of the Impala, pushing back the seat to accommodate his longer legs. Dean would bitch, but then Dean always bitched when he so much as touched his beloved baby, so that would be nothing new.
The rain had redoubled, and Sam was pretty sure there ought to be a flood warning in effect. How on earth could it rain non-stop for two days at this rate? It wasn't natural. Actually, come to think of it, it probably wasn't natural. At this point, he was past feeling fear about the whole impending demon-induced-doom thing, and the thought just depressed him. God, what a week this was turning out to be. He parked the car outside of Lesley's house, pulled his jacket over his head and made a dash for the front porch. He stood, dripping water, and shook his head like a wet dog before ringing the doorbell.
Lesley pulled open the door seconds later. She'd pulled her hair up into a messy bun at the nape of her neck, and her hands and the cuffs of her pants were white with salt. “You're back! Thank God. You're by yourself?”
Sam bit back a sigh. Maybe one of these days someone would take him seriously without his big brother to back him up. “Yeah. Dean's pretty sick, and Andy said he'd keep an eye on him for me.”
“Right. He was in pretty bad shape before. Will he be okay?” She stood back, opening the way for him, and he stepped in, noting the line of salt across the threshold immediately.
“Yeah, I think so. If he's not better by tomorrow I'm taking him to a clinic. Uh... you started already. That's good. But we should spread the salt thicker.”
“I ran out.” Lesley looked stricken, and Sam grinned.
“Are you kidding? Dean and I stockpile the stuff. I'll get it from the car.”
He brought in two of the large bags of rock salt they kept in the trunk, not unaware of how odd it must look to an outsider that two of the things they were always sure to have on them were rock salt and lighter fluid. Then there were the dry matches (always a necessity in case the Zippo lighter was lost or out of commission for some reason), and the veritable arsenal of weaponry on top of it all. There was a reason, he thought wryly, that they kept most of it in a secret compartment under the main compartment of the trunk.
Steven was sprawled on the living room floor, pushing a toy train around on the carpet and narrating what appeared to be a complex story to himself about what the train was doing. He looked up as Sam came in. “Mom says you're going to play a game with us.”
Sam put down the two bags of salt. “Uh, yeah, sure. Do you like digging in the sandbox, Steven?”
Steven shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. It's raining, though.”
“Do you have a shovel?”
“Yeah. Mom keeps them in the closet.”
“Okay, well, your mom has given us permission, just this once, to play like there's a sandbox in the house.” That caught the boy's interest.
“In the house?”
“That's right. Only we're going to do it with salt instead of sand, and there are a couple of really, really important rules, or else we have start over. Are you good at following rules?”
The kid gave him a solemn nod. “Uh-huh. My teacher says I'm really good at it.”
“Awesome. How about we go get your shovel and get started, then? We'll have a race with your mom, see who can get done first.”
Steven scrambled to his feet, excited at the prospect of being allowed to make a mess inside the house with his mother's blessing. He showed Sam to the hall closet, where there was an assortment of plastic pails and shovels in bright yellows, reds and greens. The kind of stuff regular kids took to the park in order to dig in the sandbox, the kind they took to the beach and built sand castles with before jumping into the salt waves and building up an appetite for the sandwiches their parents packed in a picnic basket. Sam fought down the twinge of guilt as he filled a yellow bucket with rock salt and showed Steven how to painstakingly pour a salt line across the door thresholds, how to make sure every windowsill was properly covered in salt, leaving no room for a supernatural being to cross over.
“Okay, Steven. You're in charge of this section,” Sam said, lending as much solemnity to his voice as possible. “I am going to go see how your Mom's getting on, and then I have to finish up the game with some pictures, but you're doing the most important part here, so we're counting on you to finish it all, got it?”
Steven nodded, brown eyes staring earnestly up at him. “Is Dean going to come back and play with me too?”
Sam quirked a smile. “No, I'm afraid not. Dean's pretty sick, so he's in bed resting.”
“Okay.” Obviously being sick in bed was something Steven had no trouble wrapping his mind around, and Dean had already been sick when they'd been there earlier that day.
He trotted upstairs, found Lesley in Dylan's room, liberally spreading what was left of her bag of salt along the windowsill in the bedroom. Dylan was awake and cooing in his crib, kicking his feet in that odd frog-like way that small babies have. He really was cute, Sam had to admit, pausing to smile into the crib. Dylan's small fists came up, waved in the air, tiny fingers stretching up toward the mobile.
“How's it coming?”
She straightened, smoothed out her sweater, heedless of the white streaks she left on the material. “Uh, fine, I guess. You? Where's Steven?”
“Still playing with the salt in the living room. I'm going back down in a second. I've had an idea, though. You must have water-based paints, right? For Steven? Gouache paint?”
She frowned. “Yes. Why?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I thought of a way not to wreck your floors. I have to paint some symbols, something that'll trap the demon if it gets in. Where do you keep the paint?”
“In the studio in the back room. There's a small pine cabinet. Do you want me to show you or can you find it?”
“I think I can manage, thanks. I brought you an extra bag of salt.” He left the bag leaning in the doorway, hurried back down the steps, pausing to make sure Steven was still safe and cheerfully scooping salt onto the floor by the back door. He even managed not to feel too guilty about passing on the salt-the-threshold game to a new generation. With any luck, this would be the only time Steven and his family would ever have to play that particular game.
Painting the devil's traps took a lot longer than Sam anticipated. Normally he had Dean to help him with this stuff, and by the time he'd finished with the downstairs he had decided that he'd never known a house to have so many freaking windows. His knees were bruised and aching, his back felt as though it was on fire, and he had to stop and crack his neck every few minutes to prevent his whole spine from seizing up. This definitely wasn't a job for someone of his height. It was well past dark, and Lesley had long since stopped what she was doing to get Steven fed, bathed, and put to bed, clad in blue footie pajamas with —what else? Sam grinned to himself— trains on them. That meant that he was left to finish up the prep work on his own, and while he had no objection to doing it per se, he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling since he'd had since making the decision to come back early and help Lesley turn her house into the equivalent of a demon-proof fortress.
He was putting the finishing touches on the devil's trap on the kitchen floor, his hands covered in red finger paint that looked uncomfortably like blood, painting careful swirls with a child's plastic brush, when his cell phone rang.
“Hey, Sam? It's Andy.”
“Andy?”
“Yeah, look,” the worry was palpable in Andy's voice. “Uh, Dean kind of—”
Anxiety made his chest constrict. “Is he worse?”
“No, no he's fine. He just... he got worried, so I thought I'd call so you can talk to him, okay?”
Sam could only imagine the state Dean had worked himself into in order for Andy to call, always worried when his kid brother was out of his field of vision for too long. He sighed, rolled his eyes.
“Okay, why don't you put him on and I'll talk to him? Everything's fine, here, you don't have to worry.”
“Yeah, okay. Hang on, I'll give him the phone.” Sam heard him talking to Dean, his voice tinny and far away. “He's fine.” Dean came on the line, his voice a hoarse croak, barely audible.
“Sab?”
“Dean, what's wrong?” Sam felt his own anxiety ratchet up several notches at his brother's tone.
“You okay?”
“I'm fine. It's taking longer than I thought to get things secured here. Seriously, are you okay?” He didn't like the sound of his brother's voice. Maybe they'd have to get Dean to a doctor before the next day, and mentally he began reviewing what I.D.s they had that were still valid, whether or not they could manage to swing the expense without any insurance to speak of.
“Yeah. Look... sobethig's dot right. I'be got a bad feelig, ad I hate it whed I get bad feeligs, it dever beads adythig good. Are you dearly dode?”
“What do you—” There was a crash from upstairs, the unmistakable tinkle of breaking glass. He heard the baby start to cry, and felt his stomach twist, his blood run cold.
“Dean, I have to call you back.”
He could hear Dean still yelling at him as he sprinted up the stairs, but there was no time to answer. He almost tripped on the landing, staggered off-balance toward Dylan's room, where he saw the window hanging off its shutters, glass littering the floor. A figure stood a few steps past the doorway, its coat buffeted by the wind and rain. Lesley was pressed up against the far wall, clutching Dylan to her chest, trying to twist away.
“No! You can't have him!”
The vision was coming true, same as the others. “Hey! Leave them alone!”
The figure turned, and Sam caught sight of a flash of yellow, a wolfish grin. “Well well well, if it isn't Sammy Winchester. I've been waiting for you.”
Part 21
Part 20
In spite of his assurances to Andy, Sam wasn't sure at all about leaving Dean behind. He kept telling himself that it was just a cold, that it wasn't even the first time he'd been sick. Far from it. Dean specialized in sinus infections. It was just that Sam hadn't seen him this sick since his last year of high school, when hunting and final exams had taken their toll and confined him to his bed for a week, where he'd driven both John and Sam to distraction. Dean was a terrible patient at the best of times, and he'd been bored, feverish and irritable, until finally John had dragged him to a clinic where they'd prescribed heavy-duty antibiotics to clear up the infection, and he'd finally been able to go back to school. Since then? Sam could count on the fingers of one hand the times he'd seen Dean get so much as a sniffle, and although he had no way of knowing what had happened in the four years he was away at Stanford, he was pretty sure that Dean hadn't been sick during that time either.
He hesitated, debated with himself, finally decided that Dean would be more annoyed with him for staying and mother-henning him while leaving a civilian in danger. If anything came up in the meantime, he could count on Andy to call him, he was quite sure of it. Andy was a reliable kid, and even if he was a little wet behind the ears, taking care of someone with a cold wasn't exactly rocket science, even if it was Dean. So he left Andy with a couple of last-minute instructions on how to deal with Dean at his worst, most of which was friendly advice not to let himself be bullied, and slid behind the wheel of the Impala, pushing back the seat to accommodate his longer legs. Dean would bitch, but then Dean always bitched when he so much as touched his beloved baby, so that would be nothing new.
The rain had redoubled, and Sam was pretty sure there ought to be a flood warning in effect. How on earth could it rain non-stop for two days at this rate? It wasn't natural. Actually, come to think of it, it probably wasn't natural. At this point, he was past feeling fear about the whole impending demon-induced-doom thing, and the thought just depressed him. God, what a week this was turning out to be. He parked the car outside of Lesley's house, pulled his jacket over his head and made a dash for the front porch. He stood, dripping water, and shook his head like a wet dog before ringing the doorbell.
Lesley pulled open the door seconds later. She'd pulled her hair up into a messy bun at the nape of her neck, and her hands and the cuffs of her pants were white with salt. “You're back! Thank God. You're by yourself?”
Sam bit back a sigh. Maybe one of these days someone would take him seriously without his big brother to back him up. “Yeah. Dean's pretty sick, and Andy said he'd keep an eye on him for me.”
“Right. He was in pretty bad shape before. Will he be okay?” She stood back, opening the way for him, and he stepped in, noting the line of salt across the threshold immediately.
“Yeah, I think so. If he's not better by tomorrow I'm taking him to a clinic. Uh... you started already. That's good. But we should spread the salt thicker.”
“I ran out.” Lesley looked stricken, and Sam grinned.
“Are you kidding? Dean and I stockpile the stuff. I'll get it from the car.”
He brought in two of the large bags of rock salt they kept in the trunk, not unaware of how odd it must look to an outsider that two of the things they were always sure to have on them were rock salt and lighter fluid. Then there were the dry matches (always a necessity in case the Zippo lighter was lost or out of commission for some reason), and the veritable arsenal of weaponry on top of it all. There was a reason, he thought wryly, that they kept most of it in a secret compartment under the main compartment of the trunk.
Steven was sprawled on the living room floor, pushing a toy train around on the carpet and narrating what appeared to be a complex story to himself about what the train was doing. He looked up as Sam came in. “Mom says you're going to play a game with us.”
Sam put down the two bags of salt. “Uh, yeah, sure. Do you like digging in the sandbox, Steven?”
Steven shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. It's raining, though.”
“Do you have a shovel?”
“Yeah. Mom keeps them in the closet.”
“Okay, well, your mom has given us permission, just this once, to play like there's a sandbox in the house.” That caught the boy's interest.
“In the house?”
“That's right. Only we're going to do it with salt instead of sand, and there are a couple of really, really important rules, or else we have start over. Are you good at following rules?”
The kid gave him a solemn nod. “Uh-huh. My teacher says I'm really good at it.”
“Awesome. How about we go get your shovel and get started, then? We'll have a race with your mom, see who can get done first.”
Steven scrambled to his feet, excited at the prospect of being allowed to make a mess inside the house with his mother's blessing. He showed Sam to the hall closet, where there was an assortment of plastic pails and shovels in bright yellows, reds and greens. The kind of stuff regular kids took to the park in order to dig in the sandbox, the kind they took to the beach and built sand castles with before jumping into the salt waves and building up an appetite for the sandwiches their parents packed in a picnic basket. Sam fought down the twinge of guilt as he filled a yellow bucket with rock salt and showed Steven how to painstakingly pour a salt line across the door thresholds, how to make sure every windowsill was properly covered in salt, leaving no room for a supernatural being to cross over.
“Okay, Steven. You're in charge of this section,” Sam said, lending as much solemnity to his voice as possible. “I am going to go see how your Mom's getting on, and then I have to finish up the game with some pictures, but you're doing the most important part here, so we're counting on you to finish it all, got it?”
Steven nodded, brown eyes staring earnestly up at him. “Is Dean going to come back and play with me too?”
Sam quirked a smile. “No, I'm afraid not. Dean's pretty sick, so he's in bed resting.”
“Okay.” Obviously being sick in bed was something Steven had no trouble wrapping his mind around, and Dean had already been sick when they'd been there earlier that day.
He trotted upstairs, found Lesley in Dylan's room, liberally spreading what was left of her bag of salt along the windowsill in the bedroom. Dylan was awake and cooing in his crib, kicking his feet in that odd frog-like way that small babies have. He really was cute, Sam had to admit, pausing to smile into the crib. Dylan's small fists came up, waved in the air, tiny fingers stretching up toward the mobile.
“How's it coming?”
She straightened, smoothed out her sweater, heedless of the white streaks she left on the material. “Uh, fine, I guess. You? Where's Steven?”
“Still playing with the salt in the living room. I'm going back down in a second. I've had an idea, though. You must have water-based paints, right? For Steven? Gouache paint?”
She frowned. “Yes. Why?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I thought of a way not to wreck your floors. I have to paint some symbols, something that'll trap the demon if it gets in. Where do you keep the paint?”
“In the studio in the back room. There's a small pine cabinet. Do you want me to show you or can you find it?”
“I think I can manage, thanks. I brought you an extra bag of salt.” He left the bag leaning in the doorway, hurried back down the steps, pausing to make sure Steven was still safe and cheerfully scooping salt onto the floor by the back door. He even managed not to feel too guilty about passing on the salt-the-threshold game to a new generation. With any luck, this would be the only time Steven and his family would ever have to play that particular game.
Painting the devil's traps took a lot longer than Sam anticipated. Normally he had Dean to help him with this stuff, and by the time he'd finished with the downstairs he had decided that he'd never known a house to have so many freaking windows. His knees were bruised and aching, his back felt as though it was on fire, and he had to stop and crack his neck every few minutes to prevent his whole spine from seizing up. This definitely wasn't a job for someone of his height. It was well past dark, and Lesley had long since stopped what she was doing to get Steven fed, bathed, and put to bed, clad in blue footie pajamas with —what else? Sam grinned to himself— trains on them. That meant that he was left to finish up the prep work on his own, and while he had no objection to doing it per se, he couldn't shake the uneasy feeling since he'd had since making the decision to come back early and help Lesley turn her house into the equivalent of a demon-proof fortress.
He was putting the finishing touches on the devil's trap on the kitchen floor, his hands covered in red finger paint that looked uncomfortably like blood, painting careful swirls with a child's plastic brush, when his cell phone rang.
“Hey, Sam? It's Andy.”
“Andy?”
“Yeah, look,” the worry was palpable in Andy's voice. “Uh, Dean kind of—”
Anxiety made his chest constrict. “Is he worse?”
“No, no he's fine. He just... he got worried, so I thought I'd call so you can talk to him, okay?”
Sam could only imagine the state Dean had worked himself into in order for Andy to call, always worried when his kid brother was out of his field of vision for too long. He sighed, rolled his eyes.
“Okay, why don't you put him on and I'll talk to him? Everything's fine, here, you don't have to worry.”
“Yeah, okay. Hang on, I'll give him the phone.” Sam heard him talking to Dean, his voice tinny and far away. “He's fine.” Dean came on the line, his voice a hoarse croak, barely audible.
“Sab?”
“Dean, what's wrong?” Sam felt his own anxiety ratchet up several notches at his brother's tone.
“You okay?”
“I'm fine. It's taking longer than I thought to get things secured here. Seriously, are you okay?” He didn't like the sound of his brother's voice. Maybe they'd have to get Dean to a doctor before the next day, and mentally he began reviewing what I.D.s they had that were still valid, whether or not they could manage to swing the expense without any insurance to speak of.
“Yeah. Look... sobethig's dot right. I'be got a bad feelig, ad I hate it whed I get bad feeligs, it dever beads adythig good. Are you dearly dode?”
“What do you—” There was a crash from upstairs, the unmistakable tinkle of breaking glass. He heard the baby start to cry, and felt his stomach twist, his blood run cold.
“Dean, I have to call you back.”
He could hear Dean still yelling at him as he sprinted up the stairs, but there was no time to answer. He almost tripped on the landing, staggered off-balance toward Dylan's room, where he saw the window hanging off its shutters, glass littering the floor. A figure stood a few steps past the doorway, its coat buffeted by the wind and rain. Lesley was pressed up against the far wall, clutching Dylan to her chest, trying to twist away.
“No! You can't have him!”
The vision was coming true, same as the others. “Hey! Leave them alone!”
The figure turned, and Sam caught sight of a flash of yellow, a wolfish grin. “Well well well, if it isn't Sammy Winchester. I've been waiting for you.”
Part 21