lt_indigo

lt_indigo

<<  First | <  Previous || Masterlist || Next  > | Last  >>

Dean wasn’t quite sure where he was when he woke. For one, Sam wasn’t snoring away like a chainsaw in the next bed, and the linens smelled clean and fresh. The room didn’t smell of stale tobacco and the other miscellaneous funky odours that typically came with motel rooms or the hunters’ shacks they had been holing up in recently.

It took him a moment to remember what had happened yesterday: the whole craziness with Sam and Cas and the locked ward; God stepping in and throwing Dean back two and a half years, to the aborted end of the apocalypse, to change the course of history. Cas being whole and well and juiced up and taking on Raphael on a level playing field, with Gabriel as backup. Dean being left behind with Gabriel’s munchkin of a vessel and the pair of them being swept up by Missouri, taken home with her and fed.

The sun was peeking over the horizon, flooding his well-appointed bedroom with warm pink light. He had slept more than long enough and he had plans today; plans involving Missouri’s wreck of a car. And it would be nice if he could get a head-start on that before she could tell him not to.

.oOo.

As things turned out, Missouri had plans for them that didn’t involve Dean fixing her car or Ellie taking apart her faulty toaster, both of which they had managed to do before Missouri even got out of bed. Not that she seemed particularly ungrateful for either of these things, once she realised exactly what they were both doing at opposite ends of the newspaper-strewn kitchen table. In fact, she seemed touched by their thoughtfulness even as she despaired at having one end of the table covered in meticulously laid out electrical gubbins and the other in equally meticulous parts of her car’s engine.

“It needed doing,” was Ellie’s only comment.

Dean felt the need to elaborate on his self-assigned task: “The car would have crapped out on you inside a month. Damn thing’s not safe to drive.”

“How long you going to be?” she asked, her voice that same gentle tone as ever as she clutched her bowl of cereal to her bosom rather than setting it anywhere on the table’s surface. “Because we got a vampire nest wants clearing out sometime.”

Tools were suddenly set down at both ends of the table, two pairs of eyes suddenly fixed upon their host.

“How big?” Dean asked warily. Taking on a vamp nest solo was suicide, but one or two were manageable.

“Five, or thereabouts,” Missouri said. “It’s difficult to tell – they come and go. Took them a while to work out there weren’t any hunters here any more, but when they did, the vampires moved back in.”

“Five’s doable, between the two of us,” Ellie said. “Although… I hope you’ve got a spare blade, Dean: Gabriel didn’t really think this through before ditching me here.”

He turned his gaze to her, mystified.

“What? The Van Helsing thing didn’t give it away?” she teased. “Or is this some macho thing about girls being hunters?”

Dean winced at that, because he hadn’t actually been thinking that at all, but now that he was, girl hunters just didn’t tend to survive as long. It sucked, but it was true. He didn’t actually know of any who were still alive. Maybe that Tamara from years and years ago, whose husband had died, but no others.

“Or is it just because I don’t look as badass as you?”

There was definitely some truth in that: she looked like freaking Tinkerbell, with that blonde hair scraped up into some messy kind of bun thing to keep it out of her way while she was working on the toaster. Now she wasn’t hauling an archangel around, there was something of the Disney princess about her, all little and delicate and breakable next to the big burly princes of the world.

Then he remembered how she had pulled him to his feet with so little effort the previous evening, and how she had said that her great-granddad – Gabriel’s son – had been the last one in their family with any mojo, ‘until her’. So she was a bit supernatural after all, and Dean had seen plenty of things smaller than her that were perfectly capable of handing him his ass. Admittedly they were all faeries, but it basically proved that size didn’t matter when it came to badassery in their line of work: faeries were vicious little bastards and from the look on her face, he was beginning to believe that Ellie might very well be too.

“You taken on a vamp nest before?” He picked up the gasket he had been cleaning, trying to keep it looking casual, and therefore hopefully sounding it too.

“Not for a while,” Ellie admitted. “Even I’m not stupid enough to take a whole nest on solo. Last time would have been a little over four years ago, just before Mum died. But I took a lone vamp down a couple of months ago, so I reckon I’ve still got it.”

The shit-storm at the Elysium Fields had been about two weeks before the apocalypse, if Dean was remembering right (and given that Cas had been missing for one of those weeks, he remembered pretty fucking vividly), so Ellie hadn’t had her archangel hitchhiker, rocking all his mojo at that point. That could only mean she had been hunting on her own, by her own wits and training and any of her own super powers.

“Couple hours good for you, then?” he suggested. That would give him enough time to put Missouri’s engine back in functional order, if not perfect for the time being, and give them time to track down the address in time for noon. Midday was always the best time to take on vamps, since early morning or evening gave them plenty of long shadows to flee into. Having the sun directly overhead kept the sneaky little bloodsuckers neatly contained.

Ellie frowned at the parts of toaster in front of her, including the one in her hand that she was inspecting particularly closely. “Should be plenty of time: it was just a couple of crispy wires shorting against each other, Missouri – it’ll work as good as new once I get it back together.”

Dean watched in amazement as she poked at a wire until it slid free from the circuit board easily. She snipped a replacement from the reel Dean kept in his toolkit and deftly stripped the casing from the ends. He was really baffled when she snipped a short length of the solder that was inexplicably still in there even though the iron had crapped out on Dad almost ten years ago, and he leaned over to try and work out what she was doing. She popped the new wire into the vacant hole and poked at it again. He was amazed to see that she was prodding a bead of liquid solder around with her bare fingertip, positioning it just right to hold the new wire, before taking her hand away and letting it solidify.

She blushed when she realised Dean was staring, and gave a self-conscious shrug. “I feel I should be making a joke about being ‘hot stuff’.”

“Can’t imagine it’s useful anywhere else,” Dean said, not really knowing what else to say to that.

“I don’t really feel the cold when I can generate my own little furnace,” she said with a shy little grin, still apparently conscious of her casual exhibition of power. Or just the attention, Dean didn’t really know. “And it’s not just heat; fire too.”

“Okay, that I see a use for,” Dean said with a grin. “Ghosts must be a walk in the park for you.”

That seemed to sort out the embarrassment; now Ellie was grinning openly at him. “Oh yeah, working that one out made salting and burning a much easier job. And vamps aren’t all that fond either, turns out.”

“That seems sensible,” Missouri commented. Her attention was on them, but she had moved from the table to put a new pot of coffee on and that was occupying her hands. “You’re bright and hot, and vampires are cold, dark souls. You too, Dean: your aura is bright as the day out there.”

Dean couldn’t help but wonder what his aura had looked like when he had been a vampire for those awful few hours. He had still felt more or less himself, but he had never undergone that final part of the change, never given in to the temptation to feed.

“Oh, don’t you go giving yourself dark spots you don’t need,” Missouri scolded. “You focus on what’s here and now: you’ve got useful things to do, your brother will be just fine, and your sweetheart will be back before you know it.”

This side-tracked Dean from wondering about his aura and got him worrying about exactly what Missouri and Ellie had talked about the previous night, when he had turned in early and prayed good and long to Cas, telling him exactly where they were, that they were safe and simply letting him know that Dean was thinking of him. It had been nice, just being able to pray to Cas without worrying if they were being overheard, or traced by Cas’ asshole superiors, or if Cas could in fact hear them in the first place. Because he had done a lot of that between Cas disappearing into the lake and him reappearing as Emmanuel; desperate, aimless prayers just begging Cas to be okay.

And now that would never happen. It might haunt Dean’s nightmares until the day he kicked it, but he would never have to watch Cas transform into that god-awful creature in front of his eyes, start bleeding black and wade out into the reservoir near Sioux Falls. Because Cas wasn’t going to make the deal with Crowley. He didn’t need to now that he had enough mojo to take on Raphael by himself, and he had Gabriel as backup. Purgatory would remain safely closed, the Leviathans still held prisoner inside.

Dean might well take a couple of weeks off once Sammy was back safe. A beach somewhere, maybe? He deserved a vacation after the last few years.

.oOo.

Just to truly rub salt into a wound Dean even hadn’t realised was there, the vamps had set up their nest in the abandoned Campbell house. He could barely even bring himself to walk up those same steps as he had done four or two or thirty-seven years ago, because memories of his mom were coming back to haunt him, of the sorrow and desperation on his mother’s beautiful face, the shock on his grandmother’s, of Azazel using his grandfather (who probably deserved it, even then) to decide Sammy’s destiny ten years before he was even born.

“Dean?” Ellie said quietly, his consternation clearly obvious.

“I’m fine,” he said quickly, giving himself a little shake to bring himself back to the here and now. As if it were just that easy to shake off the past.

“Okay.” Ellie nodded without hesitation, but her eyes were too shrewd as she slid around the side of the house. She was letting him take his escape route from memory lane without comment, without prodding like Sam would do. He hoped she wasn’t just saving the prodding for later on, when they weren’t on a job, because he wasn’t sure he could handle anything like that right now. He was keeping enough secrets as it was, with him not having been quite as upfront with Cas and Gabriel as he might have been as to the exact chain of events that had led to Cas being catatonic in the locked ward at the Northern Indiana State. He might have, in fact, neglected to mention the small issue with being the vessel for all the twisted Purgatory souls, or the Leviathan, or cracking Purgatory in general, or how Sam had gotten out of the Cage and the issue of his Wall. Gabriel had given him a look like she knew there was more to it than he was saying, but Cas seemed to have taken Dean’s word at face value. It was such a difference, how much this Cas was willing to trust him, in stark contrast to how Cas had been in that year between Dean starting hunting again and the cracking of Purgatory.

Dean was still keeping all that a secret, and intended to carry on keeping it. He didn’t want to burden anyone else with the knowledge. Especially not Cas, because the poor guy didn’t need that on top of everything else right now.

And that was something else he could do with not thinking about right now, since he had a job to do, and he was doing it with a partner he had never worked with before, someone he had no idea about the experience level of, no matter what she said: she didn’t look old enough to have taken down a nest two years ago, as she had said back at Missouri’s breakfast table. But he had to trust that she would have his back at least half as well as Sam would.

Dean’s phone vibrated in his hand, the screen lighting up with Ellie’s massively long, British cell number. She was in position at the back door, and that was their pre-arranged signal so that they could burst through both doors simultaneously and work their way towards each other, taking out any vamps along the way.

And boy did they; Missouri’s estimate of five had been a little… off. It looked like the vamps had been having a house party. There were three in the living room alone, snoozing safely on sofas behind the thickly-draped windows, and from the scuffling sounds he could hear, Ellie was facing at least one other in the kitchen: he had no chance of any help from her anytime soon. Dammit, he should have staked out the place properly rather than relying on anyone else’s intel – even Missouri’s. Then again, given there were no stories about murders or missing persons in the morning paper, maybe the party was planned for tonight, and he and Ellie had got here just in time.

Dean took out the first one easily – a behemoth that looked as stupid as it was big – as it was still staggering up from the couch closest to the door. The second was a touch more on the ball and took a couple of punches before the third got in on the action and grabbed Dean from behind. Miss Nineteen-Eighties, with the black leather jacket and enormous back-combed blonde hair spat blood on the floor and grinned at him as the other guy grabbed his wrist and squeezed until he dropped his favourite machete.

“This one’s real cute,” she said gleefully. “Shall we keep him?”

Oh, this was not going to end well, was it? Dean really didn’t want to have to go through that horrendous cure again and feel like he was puking his entire digestive system up for hours upon hours.

“No offence, Bonnie,” he drawled, hoping to at least distract them for long enough that Ellie might be able to help him, “but, been there, didn’t take. Guess I’m just too pretty to hide from the sun.”

Next thing he knew, the arm around his throat was slackening and there was an ominous gurgle from the vamp holding him. Then Ellie was there, his spare machete in one hand, and an angel blade in the other. Both looked like they had seen some action.

“Dean, were you really flirting with Bridezilla here?” she asked, wielding both blades casually enough but giving him enough blatant cover to grab his own blade from the floor.

“Hey, she was about to turn me! You want…?” he gestured with his blade.

“All yours,” she said graciously.

He swung, his aim true, and took the baffled vamp’s head off while she was still staring at her friend. It was only as he turned that Dean worked out why: the guy still had his head.

“Funny things, angel blades,” she said casually. “They kill pretty much anything.”

Dean looked sideways at her, keeping his main focus on the stairs. “Not everything,” he said, remembering Eve and the Leviathans: the blades hadn’t made so much as a dent in them, and their shape didn’t really lend them to casual beheadings.

“Take your word for it,” she said, easily enough, her attention also elsewhere; specifically, on the clatter of feet that Dean heard pounding their way up the cellar stairs maybe a second later. And then, just perfectly, the vamps upstairs seemed to get their act together too and stormed down. There were three from the upstairs, and Dean took the head of the first before she had even had a chance to reach the bottom, but Ellie was standing in front of what seemed to be a tide of the freaks, pouring in from the kitchen. They were freaking surrounded, cut off from both doors by bloodsuckers. Fortunately, the other two from the stairs didn’t seem like the sharpest tools in the shed, and quickly got themselves dazzled by stepping into the bright patch of sunlight falling through the open front door. God, he loved the thick ones: he took their heads easily enough and turned to see what the skinny was with Ellie.

She was more stabby than slashy, the angel blade skewering into a vamp even as he turned. She was swinging with the machete, but it wasn’t nearly as effective, especially from her height. But the kid moved like a pro. In fact, she moved like Cas in a knife fight. He guessed that kind of made sense in a way, but he really wished that she had Cas’ smiting ability, because that would be really kick-ass right about now. He waded in beside her, swinging with all his strength at the vamp who was trying to sneak past without losing any vital body parts. Dean took him out, but two of the suckers jumped Ellie at once, tackling her to the ground. Two more – the last two – rushed Dean. He managed to get a good slice at one, taking a significant chunk of arm, but still, this was going to be it. At least they had taken a good number of them down: Dean had taken five vamps himself, and Ellie at least four. Nine between them: having Sam instead couldn’t have improved on that any. He glanced over at his partner, sorry this was going to be over already before they really had a chance to find their feet together, only to see a bright flare of light flash from her skin. He flinched, slamming his eyes shut instinctively: he had worked enough jobs with Cas to know how that kind of thing went. There were screams and the hands holding him disappeared. Dean rolled over and up onto his feet without even opening his eyes. When he did, he found there were three vamps still alive: the two that had been holding him were dazed, their eyes bleeding but not burned away; the third was being straddled by Ellie, her angel blade coming down into his heart.

Dean took out the closest vamp to him, knocking him to the floor and shoving his machete through its throat. When he looked up, the last one was keeling over, the angel blade sticking out of her chest. Ellie, still astride a dead vamp, looked about ready to drop herself, but she had obviously still had enough in her to throw the blade. If Dean was honest, he probably looked as bad as she did – vamps really took it out of you – but he had enough left to grin at her. They had done it.

<<  First | <  Previous || Masterlist || Next  > | Last  >>