And We Are Ashes: Chapter 8, Part 3
Nov. 30th, 2007 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thecatevariHOLY CRAP, I DID IT! I mean, of course, the story isn't finished, but I did it! I wrote 50,000 in thirty days. I didn't fail! I mean, don't get me wrong. I really don't think that my entire being would have been invalidated if I hadn't finished NaNo this year, but sometimes you just have something to PROVE. To yourself, to the world. I still have so much anger and so much unresolved emotional baggage about this year. Anger as much about what the doctors did to me as much as the cancer. And along with my "normal" body and "normal" life, I've been struggling really hard just to get my MIND back. Chemotherapy stole my memory a lot of days. It stole my creativity. It made producing a dozen words agony, let alone 50,000. And I just...I couldn't wallow, you know? I had to focus on getting through it, making do, looking forward, looking up. So I forced myself to write and I forced myself to not let this beat me down. And part of that, part of the stuff I needed to get through and to to get back to normal was Nano. I'd done it for the last two years and I'd WON for the last two years and losing this year... It just would've been a big disappointment. Because then it would be The Year I Had Cancer AND Failed Nano.
But I didn't fail. I didn't finish, but I didn't fail. And that's all right. That's mighty damn good. It's kind of making me rewrite my plans for December (omg, it's going to be crazy), but it's good. I'd even venture so far as to say it's great.
50,241 / 50,000 words. 100% done!
Today's Word Count: 4,049
Current Total Word Count: 50,241
Estimated Total Word Count: ~125,000
What's bad: Dead Man's Blood. Man. Seriously. If it was not for the fact that I NEED the Colt, I would've blown this episode off. The thing that I find really amusing and interesting about writing this is that I tend to watch episodes with a pretty high Willing Suspension of Disbelief. But when I'm trying to make sense of the episode for narrative purpose, some of this stuff is just KILLING ME. Skin. OMG, I love Skin, it's one of my favorite episodes, but trying to "fix" Skin almost broke me. Hopefully I did some good things with Dead Man's Blood. The other "bad" thing (for a given value of bad) is the family dynamics. In my mind, there was supposed to be a lot more...resentment, suspicion and misunderstanding and instead the Winchesters are banding together against all external threats and I don't know if I'm going to be able to sell the ending if they keep this crap up, dammit. STOP BEING SO HARMONIOUS!
What's good: Watching the Winchesters band together against all external threats. Also, I like the way Mary handled the vamps a HELL of a lot better than the way John did. There's a reason John was a sniper and that's trufax.
What pleases me: Sam tries to guide Dean into the back seat and Dean balks.
"No way am I sitting in the back seat, dude," Dean says indignantly, pushing back against Sam's insistent hands.
"Dean—"
"I'm the oldest, I get the front!"
"You're concussed."
"Even concussed, I'm still the oldest."
It's Sam's turn to sigh. "My legs are longer."
"Yes, but they're not older," Dean says with incontrovertible logic.
Previous parts can be found here
"Why do I have to be the bait?" Sam doesn't want to sound like a pouty twelve year old, but he darkly suspects that he does, relegated to the sidelines like a little boy.
His mother's eyebrows lift up, though she doesn't look up from the dish of viscid dead man's blood or the arrows she's carefully dipping in it. Her hair is braided back from her face and the black roots and threads are more obvious, though they weren't really subtle before. His own work of checking over the compound crossbows finished, Sam glances over at Dean, wondering if Dean's noticed, if he knows what it means.
Not that Sam's one hundred percent that he knows what any of this means.
There's so much he still wants to talk about. Except that he's the only one who seems interested in talking about any of it.
"Because Mom's too old, I'm too pretty and you've got little baby Bambi written all over you," Dean answers, carefully dribbling more of the reeking blood into little tranq dart vials.
"I'm bigger than you," Sam points out. "And taller."
Dean snorts, face twisting with disbelief. "No way in hell are you…"
"You're the bait for the same reasons I've been warning you about all this time," Mary interrupts, finally putting the latest arrow aside to dry on paper towels. She finally looks up, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans. "Because you shine just that extra little bit to all the things crawling in the dark and that should include vampires."
Should? Sam thinks, his fingers tracing endlessly over the composite of one of the bows' stock.
"Look, I can do it if Sam can't…" Dean begins.
"I can do it," Sam answers hotly. "How hard is it for me to stand there and wait for a vampire to try and bite me?"
"You're the one that's bitching about having to—"
"I wasn't bitching," Sam protests, though he suspects he was, at least a little bit. "I was asking a perfectly reasonable question about tactics."
Dean snorts again, somehow managing to layer even more disbelief into the sound.
"Both of you, quit it," Mary snaps. She dips another arrow into the dish of blood, stirring it lazily. There must be some kind of preservative in it, because it's not clotting. "I swear, the two of you aren't together longer than thirty seconds and already you're bickering."
"It's not bickering."
"That's right," Sam jumps in.
Dean continues. "It was a very important debate."
"Which should be, in no way, mistaken for anything as childish as bickering."
"I mean, we're not children, Mother," Dean says loftily. "Really."
"If I wasn't up to my elbows in blood already," Mary says, "I'd smack the both of you."
***
The cold from the ground is seeping slowly through the layers of Mary's clothes and she flexes her fingers in her fingerless gloves, afraid they won't be responsive enough when it comes time to shoot. Not that she really has to be a sharpshooter for this, she supposes.
They're not far from the barn that headquarters Luther's band of vampires and as far as anything Dean, Bobby or anyone else can tell her, they haven't fed since killing Elkins' five days ago. Vamps don't need to feed every day—and generally won't, from what she recalls, dim as that may be—but five days is pushing it and, aside from their need for sustenance, the vamps she's run into seem to enjoy the thrill of the kill as much as any actual eating.
Sam has the Impala's hood propped open and is ostensibly tinkering around with the engine. Mary hopes that he doesn't take his role so far as to actually touch anything under the hood, since he's never shown a speck of John or Dean's aptitude for car repair and she'll just kill him if he fucks up her car.
She wishes she hadn't had that last thought, about killing him.
Though she's let Dean talk her into using himself as a lure once or twice in their hunts, she's never let Sam do it and she doesn't know why it's different, but it is, watching him through the bow's scope with her heart beating dully and painfully against her ribs.
Most of the time when she looks at Sam, she sees the man he's becoming, tall, strong and oddly shy but with a core of strength in him that makes her glow like a sun with pride. But there are other times—like now—when she looks at him and all she can see is the fat, dimpled toddler that learned to walk in an endless succession of motel rooms, holding up his arms and offering his brilliant, open smile in return for nothing more than her love and a quick cuddle thrown in for lagniappe.
She knows how good, how fast, she and Dean are. She knows that Sam shouldn't really be in any danger and that he's perfectly capable of handling himself in the seconds it will take for them to get to him. But she's also been a hunter—and before that, a McCoy—for too long to entirely believe such slick assurances. All she has to do is think of Bill Harvelle to know how fast things can go to shit.
She's loathe to take her eyes off Sam for even a second, but she's conscious of Dean off to her left and higher along the ridge, covering Sam on the angles the Impala blocks for her. She's conscious, as well, of her own deceptive sense of well-being, the giddy relief of having both her boys alive and well and working together as a team. It's a feeling that can easily lead her astray; nothing's resolved and neither Sam nor Dean is safe in the least, certainly not at this moment in time. She tries to bury the feeling, the way she's buried so many others, but after months of worry, it's proving more difficult than she thought.
Under her woolen cap, Mary's scalp itches and crawls with sweat, annoying but ignorable. She hates hats and if her hair wasn't as bright as the full moon and it wasn't colder than Aunt Juneau's heart out here, she'd never bother with it. She blinks—and though her eyes weren't closed for longer than a second, when she opens them again, Sam is not alone.
She can't hear what the vampire—she assumes it's the putative Kate, skanky in skin-tight jeans and an open leather jacket—says to Sam, nor can she hear Sam's answer, other than the rumble of his voice in the stillness of the night. Training her eye on the scope she picks another two vamps out of the darkness, both men.
Kate is too close to Sam and the angle's wrong for her arrow to do more than glance off; there's nothing she can do when the vampire punches Sam but she can tell from the flex and roll of his body that he's not really hurt. Kate latches both hands on Sammy's face and lifts him to his feet again.
Mary breathes out softly through her nose, forces herself to be calm and tries to remember everything John ever taught her about shooting.
The ironical thing is that she'd hated it when John had pushed her into learning to shoot. She didn't like guns, didn't trust herself with them and, though the McCoys never settled things by force of arms that she knew of, it reminded her too much of the person she was trying heart and soul not to be.
"John…no." She tries to pull out of his grip, only to have his arms tighten around her.
"Mary…yes," John insists, though there's no force behind it other than the words themselves. His hands slide down her arms to cover her fingers, curved around the gun's butt. "I'm working long, crazy hours right now and it's driving me crazy, thinking you and Dean might not be safe."
"We live in Lawrence, John," she answers, amused despite herself. "What are you expecting? Gang bangers and hop heads?"
"Bad things can happen anywhere, Mary," John answers seriously and if she turns her head, she knows she'll see that shadow in his eyes, the one that means he's thinking about the war. "Don't you ever think they can't. You and Dean…you're all I've got. If anything happened to you…"
Mary snuggles back into the teardrop of his arms around her with an extra wiggle of her hips promising things for later. "Okay, John. Okay. Nothing's going to happen to us. Now show me what to do."
Her eyes stinging a little with pent up tension, Mary inhales again and on the exhale, she lets the arrow fly. It hits not quite center mass, but Mary doesn't give herself time for congratulations, slapping another arrow into the channel even as she hears the soft zip of Dean firing from his position.
When she looks through the scope again, the second male vamp is down and Kate's starting to turn, enough space between her and Sam's body for Mary to feel more confident about the shot. She fires again and waits just long enough for it to hit (right between Kate's shoulderblades, thank you very much) before she slings the bow on her back and jumps down the incline in several unsteady bounds, her aching body protesting every movement.
A moment later, the male vamp hits the dirt.
"I just bought this shirt," Kate is complaining mildly to Sam, voice slurring as her teeth start to descend from her gumline. "Barely even stings."
"Give it time," Mary answers, though her eyes are on Sam, taking in the bruise starting to darken up his jaw. He's breathing hard, but he nods to her inquiring look and Mary feels her chest unclench a little, breathing a little easier. A rustle of dead leaves and then Dean's at her side, crossbow pointed in Kate's direction though he has to know as well as Mary does that the dead man's blood is already working through Kate's system.
"Kind of old for them, aren't you?" Kate snipes. Then her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses. Sam takes a half step forward like he's going to catch her, but in the end he lets her fall. Kate hits the dirt with a solid thud, rolling bonelessly.
Mary looks at Dean and nods; Dean nods in return and pulls the machete he's got slung on his back and turns to where the male vamp is sprawled out.
"Help me get her tied up and in the car," she says to Sam. "If she so much as twitches, you stick her again."
"Yeah." Sam turns and goes to get the chains and shackles from the Impala's trunk.
Mary pulls her knife from the sheath shoved down the back of her pants and eyes the unconscious Kate speculatively.
***
It doesn't take Luther long to call. "You're dead, you know that? I'm going to find you and rip your head off so fast you'll get to watch your body die."
"Nice to meet you, too," Mary says mildly. She tosses another dart in Kate's general vicinity. Though Mary wasn't really aiming at her, the vampire ducks and then snarls at Mary, teeth extended and her eyes flashing like a cat's in the weak light. "Since you're calling, I'm assuming you have some interest in getting your little chickie back."
They'd left the number of the disposable cell on a scrap cut from Kate's leather coat with the ashes of the male vamp's body—sans head, which they took with them and burned elsewhere.
"Fuck you," Luther spits. "I have your scent now, bitch. I'll find you and I'll—"
"But you won't do it fast enough to keep me from killing Kate," Mary interrupts, tired of the vampire's bluster.
"Luther?" Kate screams, straining against the chains toward Mary and the phone. "Luther, baby, is that you? Luther, this crazy bitch poisoned me with dead man's blood…" Mary throws a new dart, one of the ones actually anointed with dead man's blood, and hits Kate in the shoulder despite the vampires efforts to twist out of the way. "Luther, you gotta save me, Luther…" Kate's shouts trail off into mumbles and finally, her head hangs loosely on her neck, long hair hiding her face.
On the other end of the line, Luther is screaming in thwarted fury and frustration, half of it wordless, the other half split between threats against her and promises to Kate that he'll get her out of there if it's the last thing he does.
"Shut up!" Mary barks into the phone. Her headache is back in full force and between the two vampires' caterwauling she feels like her brain is ready to ooze out her ears. To her surprise, the vampire does, though not without a snarl strangely like a pit bull's. "Believe it or not, I really don't give a shit about you or your woman, Luther," she says, keeping a cautious eye on Kate despite the jolt of blood. "So if you don't act an ass about this, there's no reason for anyone to come out of this anyway but happy."
"But…you…" Now Luther sounds confused. "What do you want?"
"I want the Colt."
"No," Luther says but even on their short acquaintance Mary can tell it's automatic and not a thought out answer. "The d…" He cuts himself off abruptly.
"You have to ask yourself what's more important to you here, Luther. Delivering that gun like a good little dog or getting your woman back." The door opens, admitting Sam and Dean with bags of burgers whose scent make her faint with sudden, cramping hunger. She waves them silent and their eyes go from the semi-conscious Kate still tied safely to one of the office columns to the tacky orange cell in Mary's hand with quick understanding. "You vamps mate for life, don't you?"
Luther does some more cursing and screaming at her, but that's just him working around to what Mary already knows: he'll make the trade. She's sure he'll try to double cross her somewhere along the way and for all her boredom with the banality of his threats, she has to remember that both he and Kate are dangerous beyond measure…but he'll make the trade.
***
Luther the vampire—and that's just never going to stop being funny, if you ask Dean—is a youngish dude with floppy hair that puts Sam's emo locks to shame and hard, dangerous eyes. "Where's Kate?" Luther demands roughly, his pale fingers tattooing on the Colt's wooden butt.
Sam reaches into the Impala and drags Kate out, one hand on the chains and the other wound tight into her hair.
Luther takes an involuntary step forward, his three vamp bodyguards moving with him, and Sam flashes blade, the edge of it dull and stained with more of the dead man's blood. "Don't," their mom warns from the Impala's other side, holding her crossbow steady on Luther.
"Kate, you all right?" Luther calls, twitchy where he stands. He sounds actually worried about her and Dean has to wonder if this is really going to work. His mom's assertions that Kate would mean more to the vampire than the gun seemed like grade-A bullshit, along with that whole thing about vamps mating for life…
For life? Seriously? I can't think of a girl I could put up with for that long?
…but he probably should've known better than to doubt Mary.
"Dead man's blood," Kate says tautly, her head bent back at an angle that looks painful even to Dean, hidden all the way up on the ridge. Her voice trembles, just a little and Dean feels another spurt of disgust at the two of them, monsters playing at lovers.
"Son of a bitch," Luther swears, hands fisting and his buddies growl like a chorus of dogs.
"We just want the Colt—Elkins' gun," his mom says, her voice level and cool. "Fair trade."
"You can't shoot us all." Luther tosses his girly hair out of his eyes, standing tough despite the situation. "Anyway, it's just a gun."
"I don't want you," his mom answers easily. "And I think we both know that's not 'just' a gun. Demons don't hire vamps as couriers for just any old gun."
Luther bares his teeth. Like Kate's they're thin, crooked things that remind Dean of a shark. He tries to imagine the two of them kissing and then quits before he makes himself sick. "You're a dead woman, you know that? Yeah. If we don't get you, the demon will, bitch. You and your boy toy here."
Sam's chin comes up at that, jaw hardening and he wrenches Kate's hair a little harder.
Mary sighs. "Just put the gun on the ground or Kate goes first."
"All right, all right. Just don't hurt her." Luther does, a slow, languid squat, his eyes never leaving Mary.
"Now kick it to me and back the fuck up."
"No way," Luther objects. "The minute you have the gun, the kid here'll waste Kate."
Mary makes a gesture, small and easily ignored. Dean fires his rifle, the tranq dart hitting the closest of Luther's henchmen in the neck. The vamp cries out, startled and he slaps his neck, pushing the needle deeper into his skin. Dean's grinning like the top of his head's going to come off and chambers another dart.
Luther looks toward where Dean's hidden and then back at Mary, his face a careful blank. The vamp Dean hit collapses and the other two glance uncertainly from him to Luther to Mary, the desire to flee radiating from their bodies like bad cologne.
"And if you don't give up the gun, my boys and I will waste every one of you," Mary promises, crossbow still steady as rock balanced on her forearm. "And then we'll still take the gun with us. We can all still walk away from this, Luther. Don't fuck this up."
Luther's pissed. Dean can see it in every line of his skinny body from Luther's clenched jaw to his clenched fists to the stiff blockiness of his posture. Dean expects he can't blame the vamp, if it was him…
Dean never even sees the guy—guys?—that drop on him, coming up on him in eering and utter silence. They rip the rifle from his hands and smash him across the jaw so hard he thinks it might be broken, and surely hard enough that he's seeing stars and butterflies as they haul him to his feet and drag him roughly down the ridge.
The vamps that jumped Dean haul him up close to the others, his boot toes dragging in the dirt and barely touching ground. They all stink, the vamps, not just the rotten metal smell of old blood, but also some serious BO and Dean retches a little in his throat, pretty sure he's got a concussion at the least.
"Dean, you okay?" Mary calls and Dean does his best to nod, afraid he'll really and truly throw up if he opens his mouth to talk.
"I think it's time to renegotiate terms," Luther says, sounding smug and pleased with himself.
"I don't," Mary answers curtly.
Dean doesn't really have the words to say what happens next and he's not sure how much of it is his concussion anyway, but his mom drops the crossbow (Never drop your weapon, Dean) and puts out her hand like she does when Dean's holding out on giving her change back from a gas or food run.
The Colt flies up from the ground like a damned Jedi mind trick and by the time Dean follows its trajectory from the dirt to her hand, Mary's already firing. The sound of it is thunderous, strangely louder than what Dean's used to and there's a flat little puff of smoke. Dean flinches, but, in front of him it's Luther who jerks like a fish on a line, staggering back.
"Luther!" Kate screams, like in a bad movie.
Luther the vampire falls and, hanging from the grip of the vamps holding him, Dean sees his face, strangely colored and lit from within, like lightning going off under his dead skin. His mother's shot is dead center to the brain pan, a ragged and bloodless black hole just above Luther's nose and even with his head about to slide of his shoulders, Dean feels that prickle of pride.
His mom is a badass.
"Let my son go," Dean hears his mother say and suddenly, no one's holding him up anymore, his arms smarting from where there used to be fingers. Dean staggers forward a bit and then catches himself before he can fall. He looks, but the other vamps, Luther's friends, are gone. Well, except for the one still passed out in the dirt. Dean pulls himself together and walks a steady if erratic line over to Sam and his mom.
"What do we do with her?" Sam asks, still holding Kate, who's fallen to her knees, sobbing and scratching at the ground, trying to reach Luther's body.
Kate's face comes up, pointy, pale and livid, teeth extended and looking like nothing human. Dean belches, feeling his stomach turn.
Mary sighs, looking tired. "We let her go."
Dean turns his head to look at her, surprised. "She could come after us." Dean knows his mother knows this, but he feels the need to point it out anyway since no one else is. "She probably will."
"She won't." Mary sounds absolutely certain.
Kate makes a savage little noise in her throat, though she doesn't contradict Mary verbally. She doesn't really have to. Mary keeps looking at them, though, steady as anything and after a moment, Sam shoves her away, hard. Kate scrabbles away from them, halfway across the clearing before she gets to her feet to flee into the woods.
"You killed her lover," Sam points out and Dean makes a note to himself to tease Sam about that later. Christ. Lover. "And her friends. What makes you think she won't come after us?"
Sam comes up next to Dean and puts and arm around his shoulders, turning and then propelling Dean toward the Impala. Dean's got half a mind to shake Sam off, but he's not totally certain he wouldn't fall on his ass doing it, so he lets himself be pushed, making a note to tease Sam about that, too, the big punk.
Mary sighs again as she climbs into the driver's side and tosses the gun in the middle of the seat. It doesn't look like much, old and worn down. It sure doesn't look like enough to be the object of twenty-two years of hunting. "I think she won't have time. The demon's going to be looking for Luther's people to show up with the Colt and when they don't, it's going to go looking for them. I'm just hoping that they'll distract it long enough to buy us enough time."
Sam tries to guide Dean into the back seat and Dean balks.
"No way am I sitting in the back seat, dude," Dean says indignantly, pushing back against Sam's insistent hands.
"Dean—"
"I'm the oldest, I get the front!"
"You're concussed."
"Even concussed, I'm still the oldest."
It's Sam's turn to sigh. "My legs are longer."
"Yes, but they're not older," Dean says with incontrovertible logic.
Sam makes a face but he climbs into the back, bumping his head on the ceiling and his knees on the seat. Dean gives him time to grump it out, swaying gently and then climbs in the front himself. The seat sighs familiarly under him and Dean leans into it, the familiar smell of car enclosing him. These are his perks, dammit.
"Enough time for what?" Sam asks, when they've pulled out onto the road, back on track to get to the highway. "And don't you fall asleep, Dean."
Dean flips Sam the bird.
"What?"
"You said you hope the vamps distract the demon long enough…long enough for what?"
"Long enough for us to go home," Mary answers.
But I didn't fail. I didn't finish, but I didn't fail. And that's all right. That's mighty damn good. It's kind of making me rewrite my plans for December (omg, it's going to be crazy), but it's good. I'd even venture so far as to say it's great.
Today's Word Count: 4,049
Current Total Word Count: 50,241
Estimated Total Word Count: ~125,000
What's bad: Dead Man's Blood. Man. Seriously. If it was not for the fact that I NEED the Colt, I would've blown this episode off. The thing that I find really amusing and interesting about writing this is that I tend to watch episodes with a pretty high Willing Suspension of Disbelief. But when I'm trying to make sense of the episode for narrative purpose, some of this stuff is just KILLING ME. Skin. OMG, I love Skin, it's one of my favorite episodes, but trying to "fix" Skin almost broke me. Hopefully I did some good things with Dead Man's Blood. The other "bad" thing (for a given value of bad) is the family dynamics. In my mind, there was supposed to be a lot more...resentment, suspicion and misunderstanding and instead the Winchesters are banding together against all external threats and I don't know if I'm going to be able to sell the ending if they keep this crap up, dammit. STOP BEING SO HARMONIOUS!
What's good: Watching the Winchesters band together against all external threats. Also, I like the way Mary handled the vamps a HELL of a lot better than the way John did. There's a reason John was a sniper and that's trufax.
What pleases me: Sam tries to guide Dean into the back seat and Dean balks.
"No way am I sitting in the back seat, dude," Dean says indignantly, pushing back against Sam's insistent hands.
"Dean—"
"I'm the oldest, I get the front!"
"You're concussed."
"Even concussed, I'm still the oldest."
It's Sam's turn to sigh. "My legs are longer."
"Yes, but they're not older," Dean says with incontrovertible logic.
Previous parts can be found here
"Why do I have to be the bait?" Sam doesn't want to sound like a pouty twelve year old, but he darkly suspects that he does, relegated to the sidelines like a little boy.
His mother's eyebrows lift up, though she doesn't look up from the dish of viscid dead man's blood or the arrows she's carefully dipping in it. Her hair is braided back from her face and the black roots and threads are more obvious, though they weren't really subtle before. His own work of checking over the compound crossbows finished, Sam glances over at Dean, wondering if Dean's noticed, if he knows what it means.
Not that Sam's one hundred percent that he knows what any of this means.
There's so much he still wants to talk about. Except that he's the only one who seems interested in talking about any of it.
"Because Mom's too old, I'm too pretty and you've got little baby Bambi written all over you," Dean answers, carefully dribbling more of the reeking blood into little tranq dart vials.
"I'm bigger than you," Sam points out. "And taller."
Dean snorts, face twisting with disbelief. "No way in hell are you…"
"You're the bait for the same reasons I've been warning you about all this time," Mary interrupts, finally putting the latest arrow aside to dry on paper towels. She finally looks up, rubbing her hands on the thighs of her jeans. "Because you shine just that extra little bit to all the things crawling in the dark and that should include vampires."
Should? Sam thinks, his fingers tracing endlessly over the composite of one of the bows' stock.
"Look, I can do it if Sam can't…" Dean begins.
"I can do it," Sam answers hotly. "How hard is it for me to stand there and wait for a vampire to try and bite me?"
"You're the one that's bitching about having to—"
"I wasn't bitching," Sam protests, though he suspects he was, at least a little bit. "I was asking a perfectly reasonable question about tactics."
Dean snorts again, somehow managing to layer even more disbelief into the sound.
"Both of you, quit it," Mary snaps. She dips another arrow into the dish of blood, stirring it lazily. There must be some kind of preservative in it, because it's not clotting. "I swear, the two of you aren't together longer than thirty seconds and already you're bickering."
"It's not bickering."
"That's right," Sam jumps in.
Dean continues. "It was a very important debate."
"Which should be, in no way, mistaken for anything as childish as bickering."
"I mean, we're not children, Mother," Dean says loftily. "Really."
"If I wasn't up to my elbows in blood already," Mary says, "I'd smack the both of you."
The cold from the ground is seeping slowly through the layers of Mary's clothes and she flexes her fingers in her fingerless gloves, afraid they won't be responsive enough when it comes time to shoot. Not that she really has to be a sharpshooter for this, she supposes.
They're not far from the barn that headquarters Luther's band of vampires and as far as anything Dean, Bobby or anyone else can tell her, they haven't fed since killing Elkins' five days ago. Vamps don't need to feed every day—and generally won't, from what she recalls, dim as that may be—but five days is pushing it and, aside from their need for sustenance, the vamps she's run into seem to enjoy the thrill of the kill as much as any actual eating.
Sam has the Impala's hood propped open and is ostensibly tinkering around with the engine. Mary hopes that he doesn't take his role so far as to actually touch anything under the hood, since he's never shown a speck of John or Dean's aptitude for car repair and she'll just kill him if he fucks up her car.
She wishes she hadn't had that last thought, about killing him.
Though she's let Dean talk her into using himself as a lure once or twice in their hunts, she's never let Sam do it and she doesn't know why it's different, but it is, watching him through the bow's scope with her heart beating dully and painfully against her ribs.
Most of the time when she looks at Sam, she sees the man he's becoming, tall, strong and oddly shy but with a core of strength in him that makes her glow like a sun with pride. But there are other times—like now—when she looks at him and all she can see is the fat, dimpled toddler that learned to walk in an endless succession of motel rooms, holding up his arms and offering his brilliant, open smile in return for nothing more than her love and a quick cuddle thrown in for lagniappe.
She knows how good, how fast, she and Dean are. She knows that Sam shouldn't really be in any danger and that he's perfectly capable of handling himself in the seconds it will take for them to get to him. But she's also been a hunter—and before that, a McCoy—for too long to entirely believe such slick assurances. All she has to do is think of Bill Harvelle to know how fast things can go to shit.
She's loathe to take her eyes off Sam for even a second, but she's conscious of Dean off to her left and higher along the ridge, covering Sam on the angles the Impala blocks for her. She's conscious, as well, of her own deceptive sense of well-being, the giddy relief of having both her boys alive and well and working together as a team. It's a feeling that can easily lead her astray; nothing's resolved and neither Sam nor Dean is safe in the least, certainly not at this moment in time. She tries to bury the feeling, the way she's buried so many others, but after months of worry, it's proving more difficult than she thought.
Under her woolen cap, Mary's scalp itches and crawls with sweat, annoying but ignorable. She hates hats and if her hair wasn't as bright as the full moon and it wasn't colder than Aunt Juneau's heart out here, she'd never bother with it. She blinks—and though her eyes weren't closed for longer than a second, when she opens them again, Sam is not alone.
She can't hear what the vampire—she assumes it's the putative Kate, skanky in skin-tight jeans and an open leather jacket—says to Sam, nor can she hear Sam's answer, other than the rumble of his voice in the stillness of the night. Training her eye on the scope she picks another two vamps out of the darkness, both men.
Kate is too close to Sam and the angle's wrong for her arrow to do more than glance off; there's nothing she can do when the vampire punches Sam but she can tell from the flex and roll of his body that he's not really hurt. Kate latches both hands on Sammy's face and lifts him to his feet again.
Mary breathes out softly through her nose, forces herself to be calm and tries to remember everything John ever taught her about shooting.
The ironical thing is that she'd hated it when John had pushed her into learning to shoot. She didn't like guns, didn't trust herself with them and, though the McCoys never settled things by force of arms that she knew of, it reminded her too much of the person she was trying heart and soul not to be.
"John…no." She tries to pull out of his grip, only to have his arms tighten around her.
"Mary…yes," John insists, though there's no force behind it other than the words themselves. His hands slide down her arms to cover her fingers, curved around the gun's butt. "I'm working long, crazy hours right now and it's driving me crazy, thinking you and Dean might not be safe."
"We live in Lawrence, John," she answers, amused despite herself. "What are you expecting? Gang bangers and hop heads?"
"Bad things can happen anywhere, Mary," John answers seriously and if she turns her head, she knows she'll see that shadow in his eyes, the one that means he's thinking about the war. "Don't you ever think they can't. You and Dean…you're all I've got. If anything happened to you…"
Mary snuggles back into the teardrop of his arms around her with an extra wiggle of her hips promising things for later. "Okay, John. Okay. Nothing's going to happen to us. Now show me what to do."
Her eyes stinging a little with pent up tension, Mary inhales again and on the exhale, she lets the arrow fly. It hits not quite center mass, but Mary doesn't give herself time for congratulations, slapping another arrow into the channel even as she hears the soft zip of Dean firing from his position.
When she looks through the scope again, the second male vamp is down and Kate's starting to turn, enough space between her and Sam's body for Mary to feel more confident about the shot. She fires again and waits just long enough for it to hit (right between Kate's shoulderblades, thank you very much) before she slings the bow on her back and jumps down the incline in several unsteady bounds, her aching body protesting every movement.
A moment later, the male vamp hits the dirt.
"I just bought this shirt," Kate is complaining mildly to Sam, voice slurring as her teeth start to descend from her gumline. "Barely even stings."
"Give it time," Mary answers, though her eyes are on Sam, taking in the bruise starting to darken up his jaw. He's breathing hard, but he nods to her inquiring look and Mary feels her chest unclench a little, breathing a little easier. A rustle of dead leaves and then Dean's at her side, crossbow pointed in Kate's direction though he has to know as well as Mary does that the dead man's blood is already working through Kate's system.
"Kind of old for them, aren't you?" Kate snipes. Then her eyes roll back in her head and she collapses. Sam takes a half step forward like he's going to catch her, but in the end he lets her fall. Kate hits the dirt with a solid thud, rolling bonelessly.
Mary looks at Dean and nods; Dean nods in return and pulls the machete he's got slung on his back and turns to where the male vamp is sprawled out.
"Help me get her tied up and in the car," she says to Sam. "If she so much as twitches, you stick her again."
"Yeah." Sam turns and goes to get the chains and shackles from the Impala's trunk.
Mary pulls her knife from the sheath shoved down the back of her pants and eyes the unconscious Kate speculatively.
It doesn't take Luther long to call. "You're dead, you know that? I'm going to find you and rip your head off so fast you'll get to watch your body die."
"Nice to meet you, too," Mary says mildly. She tosses another dart in Kate's general vicinity. Though Mary wasn't really aiming at her, the vampire ducks and then snarls at Mary, teeth extended and her eyes flashing like a cat's in the weak light. "Since you're calling, I'm assuming you have some interest in getting your little chickie back."
They'd left the number of the disposable cell on a scrap cut from Kate's leather coat with the ashes of the male vamp's body—sans head, which they took with them and burned elsewhere.
"Fuck you," Luther spits. "I have your scent now, bitch. I'll find you and I'll—"
"But you won't do it fast enough to keep me from killing Kate," Mary interrupts, tired of the vampire's bluster.
"Luther?" Kate screams, straining against the chains toward Mary and the phone. "Luther, baby, is that you? Luther, this crazy bitch poisoned me with dead man's blood…" Mary throws a new dart, one of the ones actually anointed with dead man's blood, and hits Kate in the shoulder despite the vampires efforts to twist out of the way. "Luther, you gotta save me, Luther…" Kate's shouts trail off into mumbles and finally, her head hangs loosely on her neck, long hair hiding her face.
On the other end of the line, Luther is screaming in thwarted fury and frustration, half of it wordless, the other half split between threats against her and promises to Kate that he'll get her out of there if it's the last thing he does.
"Shut up!" Mary barks into the phone. Her headache is back in full force and between the two vampires' caterwauling she feels like her brain is ready to ooze out her ears. To her surprise, the vampire does, though not without a snarl strangely like a pit bull's. "Believe it or not, I really don't give a shit about you or your woman, Luther," she says, keeping a cautious eye on Kate despite the jolt of blood. "So if you don't act an ass about this, there's no reason for anyone to come out of this anyway but happy."
"But…you…" Now Luther sounds confused. "What do you want?"
"I want the Colt."
"No," Luther says but even on their short acquaintance Mary can tell it's automatic and not a thought out answer. "The d…" He cuts himself off abruptly.
"You have to ask yourself what's more important to you here, Luther. Delivering that gun like a good little dog or getting your woman back." The door opens, admitting Sam and Dean with bags of burgers whose scent make her faint with sudden, cramping hunger. She waves them silent and their eyes go from the semi-conscious Kate still tied safely to one of the office columns to the tacky orange cell in Mary's hand with quick understanding. "You vamps mate for life, don't you?"
Luther does some more cursing and screaming at her, but that's just him working around to what Mary already knows: he'll make the trade. She's sure he'll try to double cross her somewhere along the way and for all her boredom with the banality of his threats, she has to remember that both he and Kate are dangerous beyond measure…but he'll make the trade.
Luther the vampire—and that's just never going to stop being funny, if you ask Dean—is a youngish dude with floppy hair that puts Sam's emo locks to shame and hard, dangerous eyes. "Where's Kate?" Luther demands roughly, his pale fingers tattooing on the Colt's wooden butt.
Sam reaches into the Impala and drags Kate out, one hand on the chains and the other wound tight into her hair.
Luther takes an involuntary step forward, his three vamp bodyguards moving with him, and Sam flashes blade, the edge of it dull and stained with more of the dead man's blood. "Don't," their mom warns from the Impala's other side, holding her crossbow steady on Luther.
"Kate, you all right?" Luther calls, twitchy where he stands. He sounds actually worried about her and Dean has to wonder if this is really going to work. His mom's assertions that Kate would mean more to the vampire than the gun seemed like grade-A bullshit, along with that whole thing about vamps mating for life…
For life? Seriously? I can't think of a girl I could put up with for that long?
…but he probably should've known better than to doubt Mary.
"Dead man's blood," Kate says tautly, her head bent back at an angle that looks painful even to Dean, hidden all the way up on the ridge. Her voice trembles, just a little and Dean feels another spurt of disgust at the two of them, monsters playing at lovers.
"Son of a bitch," Luther swears, hands fisting and his buddies growl like a chorus of dogs.
"We just want the Colt—Elkins' gun," his mom says, her voice level and cool. "Fair trade."
"You can't shoot us all." Luther tosses his girly hair out of his eyes, standing tough despite the situation. "Anyway, it's just a gun."
"I don't want you," his mom answers easily. "And I think we both know that's not 'just' a gun. Demons don't hire vamps as couriers for just any old gun."
Luther bares his teeth. Like Kate's they're thin, crooked things that remind Dean of a shark. He tries to imagine the two of them kissing and then quits before he makes himself sick. "You're a dead woman, you know that? Yeah. If we don't get you, the demon will, bitch. You and your boy toy here."
Sam's chin comes up at that, jaw hardening and he wrenches Kate's hair a little harder.
Mary sighs. "Just put the gun on the ground or Kate goes first."
"All right, all right. Just don't hurt her." Luther does, a slow, languid squat, his eyes never leaving Mary.
"Now kick it to me and back the fuck up."
"No way," Luther objects. "The minute you have the gun, the kid here'll waste Kate."
Mary makes a gesture, small and easily ignored. Dean fires his rifle, the tranq dart hitting the closest of Luther's henchmen in the neck. The vamp cries out, startled and he slaps his neck, pushing the needle deeper into his skin. Dean's grinning like the top of his head's going to come off and chambers another dart.
Luther looks toward where Dean's hidden and then back at Mary, his face a careful blank. The vamp Dean hit collapses and the other two glance uncertainly from him to Luther to Mary, the desire to flee radiating from their bodies like bad cologne.
"And if you don't give up the gun, my boys and I will waste every one of you," Mary promises, crossbow still steady as rock balanced on her forearm. "And then we'll still take the gun with us. We can all still walk away from this, Luther. Don't fuck this up."
Luther's pissed. Dean can see it in every line of his skinny body from Luther's clenched jaw to his clenched fists to the stiff blockiness of his posture. Dean expects he can't blame the vamp, if it was him…
Dean never even sees the guy—guys?—that drop on him, coming up on him in eering and utter silence. They rip the rifle from his hands and smash him across the jaw so hard he thinks it might be broken, and surely hard enough that he's seeing stars and butterflies as they haul him to his feet and drag him roughly down the ridge.
The vamps that jumped Dean haul him up close to the others, his boot toes dragging in the dirt and barely touching ground. They all stink, the vamps, not just the rotten metal smell of old blood, but also some serious BO and Dean retches a little in his throat, pretty sure he's got a concussion at the least.
"Dean, you okay?" Mary calls and Dean does his best to nod, afraid he'll really and truly throw up if he opens his mouth to talk.
"I think it's time to renegotiate terms," Luther says, sounding smug and pleased with himself.
"I don't," Mary answers curtly.
Dean doesn't really have the words to say what happens next and he's not sure how much of it is his concussion anyway, but his mom drops the crossbow (Never drop your weapon, Dean) and puts out her hand like she does when Dean's holding out on giving her change back from a gas or food run.
The Colt flies up from the ground like a damned Jedi mind trick and by the time Dean follows its trajectory from the dirt to her hand, Mary's already firing. The sound of it is thunderous, strangely louder than what Dean's used to and there's a flat little puff of smoke. Dean flinches, but, in front of him it's Luther who jerks like a fish on a line, staggering back.
"Luther!" Kate screams, like in a bad movie.
Luther the vampire falls and, hanging from the grip of the vamps holding him, Dean sees his face, strangely colored and lit from within, like lightning going off under his dead skin. His mother's shot is dead center to the brain pan, a ragged and bloodless black hole just above Luther's nose and even with his head about to slide of his shoulders, Dean feels that prickle of pride.
His mom is a badass.
"Let my son go," Dean hears his mother say and suddenly, no one's holding him up anymore, his arms smarting from where there used to be fingers. Dean staggers forward a bit and then catches himself before he can fall. He looks, but the other vamps, Luther's friends, are gone. Well, except for the one still passed out in the dirt. Dean pulls himself together and walks a steady if erratic line over to Sam and his mom.
"What do we do with her?" Sam asks, still holding Kate, who's fallen to her knees, sobbing and scratching at the ground, trying to reach Luther's body.
Kate's face comes up, pointy, pale and livid, teeth extended and looking like nothing human. Dean belches, feeling his stomach turn.
Mary sighs, looking tired. "We let her go."
Dean turns his head to look at her, surprised. "She could come after us." Dean knows his mother knows this, but he feels the need to point it out anyway since no one else is. "She probably will."
"She won't." Mary sounds absolutely certain.
Kate makes a savage little noise in her throat, though she doesn't contradict Mary verbally. She doesn't really have to. Mary keeps looking at them, though, steady as anything and after a moment, Sam shoves her away, hard. Kate scrabbles away from them, halfway across the clearing before she gets to her feet to flee into the woods.
"You killed her lover," Sam points out and Dean makes a note to himself to tease Sam about that later. Christ. Lover. "And her friends. What makes you think she won't come after us?"
Sam comes up next to Dean and puts and arm around his shoulders, turning and then propelling Dean toward the Impala. Dean's got half a mind to shake Sam off, but he's not totally certain he wouldn't fall on his ass doing it, so he lets himself be pushed, making a note to tease Sam about that, too, the big punk.
Mary sighs again as she climbs into the driver's side and tosses the gun in the middle of the seat. It doesn't look like much, old and worn down. It sure doesn't look like enough to be the object of twenty-two years of hunting. "I think she won't have time. The demon's going to be looking for Luther's people to show up with the Colt and when they don't, it's going to go looking for them. I'm just hoping that they'll distract it long enough to buy us enough time."
Sam tries to guide Dean into the back seat and Dean balks.
"No way am I sitting in the back seat, dude," Dean says indignantly, pushing back against Sam's insistent hands.
"Dean—"
"I'm the oldest, I get the front!"
"You're concussed."
"Even concussed, I'm still the oldest."
It's Sam's turn to sigh. "My legs are longer."
"Yes, but they're not older," Dean says with incontrovertible logic.
Sam makes a face but he climbs into the back, bumping his head on the ceiling and his knees on the seat. Dean gives him time to grump it out, swaying gently and then climbs in the front himself. The seat sighs familiarly under him and Dean leans into it, the familiar smell of car enclosing him. These are his perks, dammit.
"Enough time for what?" Sam asks, when they've pulled out onto the road, back on track to get to the highway. "And don't you fall asleep, Dean."
Dean flips Sam the bird.
"What?"
"You said you hope the vamps distract the demon long enough…long enough for what?"
"Long enough for us to go home," Mary answers.
