And We Are Ashes: Chapter 8, Part 1
Nov. 29th, 2007 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thecatevariWell, I don't think I'm going to make it, but that doesn't mean I'm going to quit. It's frustrating. I'm not panicky, I'm not depressed about it, but I am disappointed. I had--have--things at stake in my psyche for doing NaNo this year and it's disappointing if I don't make it. I know you'll tell me to be kind to myself, that there were and are mitigating factors...and this is all true. But that's exactly WHY I wanted to do it this year. So let's just see what the next couple days bring. I don't have to work Friday...maybe I can make a miracle.
40,138 / 50,000 words. 80% done!
Today's Word Count: 1,783
Current Total Word Count: 40,138
Estimated Total Word Count: ~100,000
What's bad: Well, my word count, obviously. I got derailed in a big way between the new job and Thanksgiving and I just don't know if I can recoup. If I can, it won't be tonight.
What's good: I really love this story and--for all its deplorable lack of smut, I do think it's a good story to tell.
What pleases me: Dean doesn't really know a lot about demons. From what his mom always said, actual demon possession is pretty rare and on the occasions that they heard of one, his mother had always steered clear, a restriction that's laughably clearer to him now. What he does know of demon lore is conflicting—what they are, what they can do, their powers. So Dean's not sure how much of what happened to him was an evil dream, cast into his head by the demon and how much was real.
He hurts, but not as much—he imagines—as he would if the demon had really peeled his skin back like a grape's to expose the muscles, tendons and blood vessels. His body isn't burned, melted, seared, the sweet-horrible reek of it something that exists only in his mind. He has both his eyes, his tongue, his testicles, the phantoms of pain that lingers in them only that—ghosts. His memories of them being smashed and torn away from his body have no physical anchor, nothing to say this really happened.
Dean picks up a corner of the blanket and scrubs his skin hard, the dull pain of abrasion better than the memory of agonies he can't do anything about.
Previous parts can be found here
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dean hurts too much to really sleep.
Instead, it's only uneasy dozing, shambling from dream to dream with ugly spans of disoriented wakefulness between like beads on a string. Despite that, he doesn't notice Juliet slipping into his room until her slight weight bows the left side of the mattress with a sighing creak of springs.
Dean's eyes snap open like they're wired and he starts to bolt upright only for her deceptively strong hands to catch on his shoulders, urging him back down. She slithers over him, sharp knees pinning his hips down through the blanket.
Though he expected this, it doesn't change his bone deep sense of disgust, skin crawling at her touch. He struggles up against her solid weight, reaching up to grab her thin wrists and force her away from him. It aches in his bruises and half-healed cuts, but even those few inches of distance are worth it. "Don't."
Her laugh is nothing at all like his mothers, deeper, throatier, cold even in its amusement. She tosses her hair back, blue eyes flashing. "Always so surly, Dean. You'd think you'd be nicer. After all, we are family." She writhes against his legs, breasts jutting up at him.
"All the more reason for you to get the fuck out of my room, you crazy bitch." He'd be lying if he said he wasn't afraid of Juliet—though he would say exactly that, if asked—but he's less afraid of her, crazy as she is, than he is of the demon.
He knows Juliet fucks the demon, alongside her periodic attempts to get in his pants. It's a toss up which is more revolting. Just being in the same room with the demon is enough to make his skin crawl. The thought of banging one, letting it touch him, makes him want to puke. The thought of Juliet touching him is much the same.
Of course his stomach's been in knots pretty much nonstop since he left Jericho to follow the demon and find out the truth about his mother's family but he supposes he's brought that on himself.
Finding out that the McCoys really are responsible for his father's death hasn't changed all that much, though. Not as much as he thought it would, the bitterness of that truth burning in his mouth like the taste of his own blood. There's the dull ache of knowing his mother lied, that she kept the truth from him—and Sam, but mainly him—all this time, letting him think that she didn't know what happened. And there's the crueler uncertainty of having to wonder if his mom could've saved his dad, if she'd been honest about who she is, where she came from. Or, even more evanescent, if his parents could have found a way to save John together.
Dean's spent more of his life without his dad than with him, but the loss still aches so deeply. The thought of having those years with his father, to be able to sit and talk with him about girls, and baseball and stupid shit like that. To be able to sit down with the man and have a beer and just…get to know him, one dude to another…
Yeah. That hurts.
But otherwise, a demon's a demon, shitsucking spawn of Hell, and Dean could spend the next half of forever in boiling water with a mountain of soap and wire scrubbers trying to clean the filth of the things he's seen and done off of him. Dean's always known he's no saint and, after all the stuff he's done to keep his mom and Sam safe, he guesses he's going to Hell anyway, but this is the closest he's ever felt to ironclad confirmation that it's true, along with an tardy and ironical awareness of how relatively trivial his sins were before.
But there are limits.
"I just want to make you feel better." Juliet pouts. It's a disconcerting expression on a face that looks so familiarly like his mother's. The thought just makes him feel ill all over again. For her part, Juliet flexes her wrists and body to eel closer to him, though she doesn't try to pull out of his punishing grip. "Don't you want to feel better? I can help you. He hurt you real bad."
"It."
Juliet blinks at him, pushed out of seductress mode by real confusion. "What?"
"It's not a 'he', it's an 'it'." Dean jerks sideways and tumbles her off the bed in an undignified sprawl of pale limbs and felted blanket.
"Ow! Fucker!" Juliet struggles to untangle herself from the coverlet's folds.
If he cuts down to it, Dean doesn't even know if her interest in him is actual interest or merely another effort on the demon's part to keep him both biddable and off-step. He wouldn't put it past Azazel and for all her bravado now, Juliet's as scared of the demon as he is. But when you get down to brass tacks, Dean doesn't understand Juliet's motives at all; why she's sided with the demon against her family, against his family…against all humanity, if it comes to it. He wonders if she's really stupid enough to believe the demon's slick promises of wealth and power and infinite pleasures.
Are you stupid? he wants to scream at her. Do you know what it will do, if it gets the power it's asking for? A human with demonic powers at its beck and call?
But these are not things he can say.
It amuses him to think of what Sam would say to him, that Dean's finally learned to keep his mouth shut.
Mostly he can't bring himself to think of Sam at all.
So what he says instead is, "Get out of here, Juliet. I wouldn't fuck you with its cock."
Juliet tosses her tousled hair back from her face again, chilly anger drawing her deceptively sweet features tight. "You know, Dean, if you were half as smart as your brother, you'd realize that I can be your ally in all of this—an ally that you badly need." The corners of her lips curl up in a look that's not a smile. "Of course if you were half as smart as little Sammy, you wouldn't be in this position, would you? Someone else's cat's-paw?"
Dean doesn't know what the hell is a cat's-paw, but he has to remind himself pretty strongly that he doesn't hit women. Well. Not if he can help it, anyway. (It was just that one time. And she totally had it coming.) And not if they're human. Though whether Juliet is entirely human is really anyone's guess.
He swings his feet out of the bed, feeling entirely too naked in her presence. Of course, Winchester luck, Juliet's standing on his jeans. His mom would say it was his own fault for leaving his clothes on the floor.
Dean thinks he'd give just about anything to hear her bitch at him like that just one more time.
"If you were half as smart as Sammy, someone might want you for you, Dean, instead of just what you can do for them," Juliet continues, radiating smugness from every pore as she gets to her feet. Dean averts his eyes from her naked body, focusing instead on the dried blood crusted between the lines of his knuckles. The demon had dragged them all the way to Saginaw, Michigan, hot on the trail of another boy, a boy like Sam; a McCoy boy-child that had somehow been hidden away from notice all these years. Like Sam.
When the demon found the boy Max dead…
If you'd asked Dean, he would've been sure he'd felt like he was going to die before. Who in their line of work hadn't felt that way a time or two, facing down something huge and terrible with more claws than brain cells? But at that moment, standing over the strangely shrunken body of Max Miller in that narrow and forbidding house that reeked sourly of bone, brain, blood and bile. In that moment, watching the demon's face twist and change in ways that no human's face can manage, a rubber mask that covers unspeakableness. In the moment that it turned on him, inhuman and seriously pissed the fuck off…
Dean really thought that was it. Just…it. The end. Finito. Corpse City.
Dean doesn't really know a lot about demons. From what his mom always said, actual demon possession is pretty rare and on the occasions that they heard of one, his mother had always steered clear, a restriction that's laughably clearer to him now. What he does know of demon lore is conflicting—what they are, what they can do, their powers. So Dean's not sure how much of what happened to him was an evil dream, cast into his head by the demon and how much was real.
He hurts, but not as much—he imagines—as he would if the demon had really peeled his skin back like a grape's to expose the muscles, tendons and blood vessels. His body isn't burned, melted, seared, the sweet-horrible reek of it something that exists only in his mind. He has both his eyes, his tongue, his testicles, the phantoms of pain that lingers in them only that—ghosts. His memories of them being smashed and torn away from his body have no physical anchor, nothing to say this really happened.
Dean picks up a corner of the blanket and scrubs his skin hard, the dull pain of abrasion better than the memory of agonies he can't do anything about.
He doesn't even notice when Juliet winds down and leaves in disgust.
***
"So what now?" Sam lets the rusty water run from the tap while he dry swallows a couple naproxen. In the mirror, he looks crumpled and half-dead, dark circles under his eyes that a goth would envy and his hair lying flat and listless to his skull except for the pointy cowlicky bits at the ends. He looks past his own reflection to his mother, seated on the end of her bed and rubbing lavender oil into her scalp and temples. The scent of it fills the small room, too strong for him in his current state, nearly sickening.
Finally, tired of waiting for the water to clear any more, he tips his tumbler under the flow and lets it fill. The water is deliciously cold, running over his fingers, sliding down his throat. He rolls the chilled glass over his forehead, down his cheeks, the brief relief from the heat of his own skin almost orgasmic. It pushes the nausea back a little, though Sam still feels pulpy and overstimulated. Too much has happened today. And for every question he's had answered, there are dozens more behind it, making his head ache and his stomach churn.
Mary smoothes her hair behind her ears, though she has to know as well as he does that it won't stay there for longer than it takes for her to take a handful of breaths. Of course, it never stops her, a gesture as much a part of her as the worn and thinning band of gold on her left hand. "Well, first thing, we both need to get some sleep." She pulls the vial of oil from between her crossed feet and twists the lid on tight. "We're both pretty useless. In the morning, we need to haul ass to Manning, Colorado."
The word tugs sluggishly at his memory, but Sam can't place why and he's too tired to go hunting after the memory. "What's in Colorado?"
"Daniel Elkins," Mary answers succinctly, leaning back to set the vial on the nightstand. She rolls off the bed and gets to her feet, only a slight wince betraying her soreness.
Sam has half a mind to leave it at that. He's not in a mood to play any more reindeer games with his mom and the lure of the old, sagging mattress and over bleached linen is strong. But he's got a lifetime of fighting for every inch of ground with her and the logjam of all his questions pushing him from behind. So he just rolls his eyes, collapses on his bed and asks, "And who's Daniel Elkins?"
Mary lifts her arms up over her head, fingers interlocked, and arches her back, stretching luxuriously. Then she folds forward at the waist, breathing herself into the bend until her forehead touches her shins. By the time she straightens again, Sam doesn't think he's going to get an answer. But she says readily, "Daniel Elkins is a hunter. Specializes in vampires."
"I thought vampires were a myth," Sam says automatically, tugging the pillows under his head.
Mary spreads her hands as she twists slowly left and then right. "Apparently not."
"You never mentioned them."
A shrug. "No point. They're extinct as far as I know. Guys like Elkins have been hunting them for a long time."
"Okay, so if we're not interested in vampires, why are we interested in Elkins?"
Mary sighs and settles on the edge of her bed again. "Because Elkins is the key to making all of this stop. Or…really Elkins' gun."
"What does that mean?"
"It was one thing to find out why the family—the McCoys—have been killing all the boys like you and Max Miller. But the point has always been to find a way for you to be free, Sam. To make sure that the McCoys will leave you alone. Forever." Mary's eyes are dark, serious as she looks at him; Sam finds himself pinned in place by it. "And that means killing the demon." Sam opens his mouth to speak and she shakes her head, cutting him off before he even starts. "Not exorcising it, not sending it back to hell, Sam. Killing it."
"Can you kill a demon?"
"With Elkins' gun…or really, Samuel Colt's gun, yeah, you can." A faint smile lifts the corners of her mouth.
"Samuel Colt," Sam repeats. He sits up, suddenly too restless to just lie there. "Like. The Samuel Colt? The gun maker?"
Mary nods. "I don't really know how much of it's true; it's all gotten garbled and mixed up with myth and lies. I'm not sure how much I really believed in it until Dean sent us the coordinates to Roosevelt and I found the diary of a hunter hidden there."
"That's why Dean sent the coordinates?" Sam's not sure how he feels about that but his belly gives a strange twist, not quite nausea. After telling Sam not to trust Mary, he's been working with her the whole time? What sense does that make? "You knew that when we went there?"
"No." Her tone is emphatic, though quiet. Mary hugs her shoulders; Sam tries and fails to fight down his guilt at the gesture. "No, I knew Dean had to be leading me—us—there for a good reason, but I honestly didn't know what it was until I found the diary."
"And the diary told you Elkins has the Colt."
"Had," Mary corrects. "Daniel Elkins was found dead—mauled to death—four days ago."
"Hence the need to go rushing up there." Sam nods in understanding.
"Hence the need to go rushing up there," Mary agrees. "The stories say the Colt can kill anything, Sam. Anything. Even that which otherwise can't be killed."
"How did Elkins get his hands on it?"
"He got it from the hunter from the Roosevelt diary, who gave it to him for safekeeping just before he was committed." Mary shrugs, pensively biting her lip. "But where the hunter got it from…I don't know. The diary doesn't say."
"And we don't really know if it'll work. If it'll kill the demon."
"No." Mary looks down at her hands, one cupped inside the other in her lap. Then she looks up, her gaze still piercing in its intensity. "But it's worth a shot. If it means that there's even a chance that all of…this…" she moves her shoulders, "could be over, it's worth it. It's worth anything."
Today's Word Count: 1,783
Current Total Word Count: 40,138
Estimated Total Word Count: ~100,000
What's bad: Well, my word count, obviously. I got derailed in a big way between the new job and Thanksgiving and I just don't know if I can recoup. If I can, it won't be tonight.
What's good: I really love this story and--for all its deplorable lack of smut, I do think it's a good story to tell.
What pleases me: Dean doesn't really know a lot about demons. From what his mom always said, actual demon possession is pretty rare and on the occasions that they heard of one, his mother had always steered clear, a restriction that's laughably clearer to him now. What he does know of demon lore is conflicting—what they are, what they can do, their powers. So Dean's not sure how much of what happened to him was an evil dream, cast into his head by the demon and how much was real.
He hurts, but not as much—he imagines—as he would if the demon had really peeled his skin back like a grape's to expose the muscles, tendons and blood vessels. His body isn't burned, melted, seared, the sweet-horrible reek of it something that exists only in his mind. He has both his eyes, his tongue, his testicles, the phantoms of pain that lingers in them only that—ghosts. His memories of them being smashed and torn away from his body have no physical anchor, nothing to say this really happened.
Dean picks up a corner of the blanket and scrubs his skin hard, the dull pain of abrasion better than the memory of agonies he can't do anything about.
Previous parts can be found here
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dean hurts too much to really sleep.
Instead, it's only uneasy dozing, shambling from dream to dream with ugly spans of disoriented wakefulness between like beads on a string. Despite that, he doesn't notice Juliet slipping into his room until her slight weight bows the left side of the mattress with a sighing creak of springs.
Dean's eyes snap open like they're wired and he starts to bolt upright only for her deceptively strong hands to catch on his shoulders, urging him back down. She slithers over him, sharp knees pinning his hips down through the blanket.
Though he expected this, it doesn't change his bone deep sense of disgust, skin crawling at her touch. He struggles up against her solid weight, reaching up to grab her thin wrists and force her away from him. It aches in his bruises and half-healed cuts, but even those few inches of distance are worth it. "Don't."
Her laugh is nothing at all like his mothers, deeper, throatier, cold even in its amusement. She tosses her hair back, blue eyes flashing. "Always so surly, Dean. You'd think you'd be nicer. After all, we are family." She writhes against his legs, breasts jutting up at him.
"All the more reason for you to get the fuck out of my room, you crazy bitch." He'd be lying if he said he wasn't afraid of Juliet—though he would say exactly that, if asked—but he's less afraid of her, crazy as she is, than he is of the demon.
He knows Juliet fucks the demon, alongside her periodic attempts to get in his pants. It's a toss up which is more revolting. Just being in the same room with the demon is enough to make his skin crawl. The thought of banging one, letting it touch him, makes him want to puke. The thought of Juliet touching him is much the same.
Of course his stomach's been in knots pretty much nonstop since he left Jericho to follow the demon and find out the truth about his mother's family but he supposes he's brought that on himself.
Finding out that the McCoys really are responsible for his father's death hasn't changed all that much, though. Not as much as he thought it would, the bitterness of that truth burning in his mouth like the taste of his own blood. There's the dull ache of knowing his mother lied, that she kept the truth from him—and Sam, but mainly him—all this time, letting him think that she didn't know what happened. And there's the crueler uncertainty of having to wonder if his mom could've saved his dad, if she'd been honest about who she is, where she came from. Or, even more evanescent, if his parents could have found a way to save John together.
Dean's spent more of his life without his dad than with him, but the loss still aches so deeply. The thought of having those years with his father, to be able to sit and talk with him about girls, and baseball and stupid shit like that. To be able to sit down with the man and have a beer and just…get to know him, one dude to another…
Yeah. That hurts.
But otherwise, a demon's a demon, shitsucking spawn of Hell, and Dean could spend the next half of forever in boiling water with a mountain of soap and wire scrubbers trying to clean the filth of the things he's seen and done off of him. Dean's always known he's no saint and, after all the stuff he's done to keep his mom and Sam safe, he guesses he's going to Hell anyway, but this is the closest he's ever felt to ironclad confirmation that it's true, along with an tardy and ironical awareness of how relatively trivial his sins were before.
But there are limits.
"I just want to make you feel better." Juliet pouts. It's a disconcerting expression on a face that looks so familiarly like his mother's. The thought just makes him feel ill all over again. For her part, Juliet flexes her wrists and body to eel closer to him, though she doesn't try to pull out of his punishing grip. "Don't you want to feel better? I can help you. He hurt you real bad."
"It."
Juliet blinks at him, pushed out of seductress mode by real confusion. "What?"
"It's not a 'he', it's an 'it'." Dean jerks sideways and tumbles her off the bed in an undignified sprawl of pale limbs and felted blanket.
"Ow! Fucker!" Juliet struggles to untangle herself from the coverlet's folds.
If he cuts down to it, Dean doesn't even know if her interest in him is actual interest or merely another effort on the demon's part to keep him both biddable and off-step. He wouldn't put it past Azazel and for all her bravado now, Juliet's as scared of the demon as he is. But when you get down to brass tacks, Dean doesn't understand Juliet's motives at all; why she's sided with the demon against her family, against his family…against all humanity, if it comes to it. He wonders if she's really stupid enough to believe the demon's slick promises of wealth and power and infinite pleasures.
Are you stupid? he wants to scream at her. Do you know what it will do, if it gets the power it's asking for? A human with demonic powers at its beck and call?
But these are not things he can say.
It amuses him to think of what Sam would say to him, that Dean's finally learned to keep his mouth shut.
Mostly he can't bring himself to think of Sam at all.
So what he says instead is, "Get out of here, Juliet. I wouldn't fuck you with its cock."
Juliet tosses her tousled hair back from her face again, chilly anger drawing her deceptively sweet features tight. "You know, Dean, if you were half as smart as your brother, you'd realize that I can be your ally in all of this—an ally that you badly need." The corners of her lips curl up in a look that's not a smile. "Of course if you were half as smart as little Sammy, you wouldn't be in this position, would you? Someone else's cat's-paw?"
Dean doesn't know what the hell is a cat's-paw, but he has to remind himself pretty strongly that he doesn't hit women. Well. Not if he can help it, anyway. (It was just that one time. And she totally had it coming.) And not if they're human. Though whether Juliet is entirely human is really anyone's guess.
He swings his feet out of the bed, feeling entirely too naked in her presence. Of course, Winchester luck, Juliet's standing on his jeans. His mom would say it was his own fault for leaving his clothes on the floor.
Dean thinks he'd give just about anything to hear her bitch at him like that just one more time.
"If you were half as smart as Sammy, someone might want you for you, Dean, instead of just what you can do for them," Juliet continues, radiating smugness from every pore as she gets to her feet. Dean averts his eyes from her naked body, focusing instead on the dried blood crusted between the lines of his knuckles. The demon had dragged them all the way to Saginaw, Michigan, hot on the trail of another boy, a boy like Sam; a McCoy boy-child that had somehow been hidden away from notice all these years. Like Sam.
When the demon found the boy Max dead…
If you'd asked Dean, he would've been sure he'd felt like he was going to die before. Who in their line of work hadn't felt that way a time or two, facing down something huge and terrible with more claws than brain cells? But at that moment, standing over the strangely shrunken body of Max Miller in that narrow and forbidding house that reeked sourly of bone, brain, blood and bile. In that moment, watching the demon's face twist and change in ways that no human's face can manage, a rubber mask that covers unspeakableness. In the moment that it turned on him, inhuman and seriously pissed the fuck off…
Dean really thought that was it. Just…it. The end. Finito. Corpse City.
Dean doesn't really know a lot about demons. From what his mom always said, actual demon possession is pretty rare and on the occasions that they heard of one, his mother had always steered clear, a restriction that's laughably clearer to him now. What he does know of demon lore is conflicting—what they are, what they can do, their powers. So Dean's not sure how much of what happened to him was an evil dream, cast into his head by the demon and how much was real.
He hurts, but not as much—he imagines—as he would if the demon had really peeled his skin back like a grape's to expose the muscles, tendons and blood vessels. His body isn't burned, melted, seared, the sweet-horrible reek of it something that exists only in his mind. He has both his eyes, his tongue, his testicles, the phantoms of pain that lingers in them only that—ghosts. His memories of them being smashed and torn away from his body have no physical anchor, nothing to say this really happened.
Dean picks up a corner of the blanket and scrubs his skin hard, the dull pain of abrasion better than the memory of agonies he can't do anything about.
He doesn't even notice when Juliet winds down and leaves in disgust.
"So what now?" Sam lets the rusty water run from the tap while he dry swallows a couple naproxen. In the mirror, he looks crumpled and half-dead, dark circles under his eyes that a goth would envy and his hair lying flat and listless to his skull except for the pointy cowlicky bits at the ends. He looks past his own reflection to his mother, seated on the end of her bed and rubbing lavender oil into her scalp and temples. The scent of it fills the small room, too strong for him in his current state, nearly sickening.
Finally, tired of waiting for the water to clear any more, he tips his tumbler under the flow and lets it fill. The water is deliciously cold, running over his fingers, sliding down his throat. He rolls the chilled glass over his forehead, down his cheeks, the brief relief from the heat of his own skin almost orgasmic. It pushes the nausea back a little, though Sam still feels pulpy and overstimulated. Too much has happened today. And for every question he's had answered, there are dozens more behind it, making his head ache and his stomach churn.
Mary smoothes her hair behind her ears, though she has to know as well as he does that it won't stay there for longer than it takes for her to take a handful of breaths. Of course, it never stops her, a gesture as much a part of her as the worn and thinning band of gold on her left hand. "Well, first thing, we both need to get some sleep." She pulls the vial of oil from between her crossed feet and twists the lid on tight. "We're both pretty useless. In the morning, we need to haul ass to Manning, Colorado."
The word tugs sluggishly at his memory, but Sam can't place why and he's too tired to go hunting after the memory. "What's in Colorado?"
"Daniel Elkins," Mary answers succinctly, leaning back to set the vial on the nightstand. She rolls off the bed and gets to her feet, only a slight wince betraying her soreness.
Sam has half a mind to leave it at that. He's not in a mood to play any more reindeer games with his mom and the lure of the old, sagging mattress and over bleached linen is strong. But he's got a lifetime of fighting for every inch of ground with her and the logjam of all his questions pushing him from behind. So he just rolls his eyes, collapses on his bed and asks, "And who's Daniel Elkins?"
Mary lifts her arms up over her head, fingers interlocked, and arches her back, stretching luxuriously. Then she folds forward at the waist, breathing herself into the bend until her forehead touches her shins. By the time she straightens again, Sam doesn't think he's going to get an answer. But she says readily, "Daniel Elkins is a hunter. Specializes in vampires."
"I thought vampires were a myth," Sam says automatically, tugging the pillows under his head.
Mary spreads her hands as she twists slowly left and then right. "Apparently not."
"You never mentioned them."
A shrug. "No point. They're extinct as far as I know. Guys like Elkins have been hunting them for a long time."
"Okay, so if we're not interested in vampires, why are we interested in Elkins?"
Mary sighs and settles on the edge of her bed again. "Because Elkins is the key to making all of this stop. Or…really Elkins' gun."
"What does that mean?"
"It was one thing to find out why the family—the McCoys—have been killing all the boys like you and Max Miller. But the point has always been to find a way for you to be free, Sam. To make sure that the McCoys will leave you alone. Forever." Mary's eyes are dark, serious as she looks at him; Sam finds himself pinned in place by it. "And that means killing the demon." Sam opens his mouth to speak and she shakes her head, cutting him off before he even starts. "Not exorcising it, not sending it back to hell, Sam. Killing it."
"Can you kill a demon?"
"With Elkins' gun…or really, Samuel Colt's gun, yeah, you can." A faint smile lifts the corners of her mouth.
"Samuel Colt," Sam repeats. He sits up, suddenly too restless to just lie there. "Like. The Samuel Colt? The gun maker?"
Mary nods. "I don't really know how much of it's true; it's all gotten garbled and mixed up with myth and lies. I'm not sure how much I really believed in it until Dean sent us the coordinates to Roosevelt and I found the diary of a hunter hidden there."
"That's why Dean sent the coordinates?" Sam's not sure how he feels about that but his belly gives a strange twist, not quite nausea. After telling Sam not to trust Mary, he's been working with her the whole time? What sense does that make? "You knew that when we went there?"
"No." Her tone is emphatic, though quiet. Mary hugs her shoulders; Sam tries and fails to fight down his guilt at the gesture. "No, I knew Dean had to be leading me—us—there for a good reason, but I honestly didn't know what it was until I found the diary."
"And the diary told you Elkins has the Colt."
"Had," Mary corrects. "Daniel Elkins was found dead—mauled to death—four days ago."
"Hence the need to go rushing up there." Sam nods in understanding.
"Hence the need to go rushing up there," Mary agrees. "The stories say the Colt can kill anything, Sam. Anything. Even that which otherwise can't be killed."
"How did Elkins get his hands on it?"
"He got it from the hunter from the Roosevelt diary, who gave it to him for safekeeping just before he was committed." Mary shrugs, pensively biting her lip. "But where the hunter got it from…I don't know. The diary doesn't say."
"And we don't really know if it'll work. If it'll kill the demon."
"No." Mary looks down at her hands, one cupped inside the other in her lap. Then she looks up, her gaze still piercing in its intensity. "But it's worth a shot. If it means that there's even a chance that all of…this…" she moves her shoulders, "could be over, it's worth it. It's worth anything."
