Sam Winchester's Guide to Blood Magic, or How the Rockies Were Made - Part 8

[badbastion]

Chapter 15: Sam Winchester’s Guide to Occult Combat

Dean let himself be moved, boneless in Sam's embrace, and yet time eddied around them---a gun firing, pockets of conversation yet to be, the rush of seawater---with the melancholy reminder that this was temporary. That soon this too would be ripped away from him.

"Sam," Dean rasped, "Whatever happens here, whatever happens to me, it's important that---"

He never got to finish the sentence.  Glass shattered and a brick skittered across the floor.

Dean's face tightened.  Several somethings giggled in the street, like a chorus of plugged toilets.

"Stay here."

He slid out from under Sam and noiselessly lifted the gun from his jacket and flattened himself beside the window with one finger on the curtain.  He turned white.

"Sam," he said, managing to keep his voice flat, "It's time to go."

Sam rose. He was ready; clear-minded, calm and rested and from the few moments they'd had. Moving quickly but not rushing, he slid his shirt and belt on and hoisted their weapons bag. He was aware of the strange laughter and shuffling outside, aware of the way Dean was watching him, but he continued on, strapping a machete to his thigh and tucking a gun into his belt.

"You take such good care of me, Dean," he said, feeling power well up in him again, strong but without that bitter, acid edge of overload. He motioned with his head. "Now, move."

When Dean took a few steps sideways from the window, another brick came flying through, landing with a thump in the glitter of broken glass. Sam made a gesture with his hand, quietly spoke a string of words, and the furniture in the room rose to rearrange itself, mattresses floating against the window to cover it, table and chairs sliding into place to buttress them.

Dean gaped, taking a wary step back, then shut his mouth.  "Right."

Shrugging into a holster, Dean strapped guns and ammo and a flashlight over his cotton shirt with the jacket concealing most of it, not liking how dark it had gotten outside.  "I counted forty, with more waiting in the buildings across the street," he said, checking to see if he had a round in the chamber, "And not one of them looked like they were meant to be walking on two legs.  We’ll take the fire escape to the roof, if we pick off enough..."

Dean turned the knob, but the door would not open.  "The hell...?"

“It’s locked?” Sam asked.

“Yeah.”

Sam knelt by the gun bag, rummaged through and came out with a screwdriver. “Here,” he said, tossing it to Dean. “Get the hinges.”

Dean caught the screwdriver and was about to start when the whole frame started leaking gray goo like curdled milk, sizzling and eating a hole right through the floor.

Taking a deep, chest-expanding breath, Sam squared his shoulders. “Stand back,” he said to Dean. “Get ready.”

Dean moved behind Sam, gun in hand.

Sam raised his hand and moved his lips, and the door exploded outward from its frame.

It bowled over a group of the pale creatures, trapping them beneath it. Their spindly legs twitched, and they let out ear-piercing, gurgling cries.

Sam and Dean glanced at each other, eyes battle-ready, then rushed the gaping hole of the door and the narrow exit created by the gap in the attackers. Dean turned left, always the driver’s side. Sam took his place at Dean’s back and faced right. The unnatural creatures swarmed them, their pale eyes round and wet as poached eggs glowing in the early darkness, their many-jointed fingers reaching for the brothers.

Sam heard weapons fire behind him, and he spread his hands toward the onrushing creatures and spoke a garbled sentence. Unleashing the dark, slippery power felt like victory in itself.

The first wave fell backwards, unconscious, knocking over many of their kin, and the second wave were sent flying even more forcefully, a dozen of them landing with a metallic bang sprawled on the Impala, arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles.

“You good, Dean?” Sam asked, clenching and unclenching his fists to limber up his fingers.

A shot rang out and a creature's head sprayed across a storefront window. Dean reloaded without even looking. "Yeah, let's get the hell out of here."




They headed north, bodies sliding off the hood of the car as they backed out, and didn't get two blocks but an electric pole had been knocked down, cables whipping in the wind.  Another mob rushed them from the side, smashing the glass and pulling Dean through the driver window.

"Damn it!" Dean shouted, his gun jamming and more creatures on the way.

Sam shot after him, barrelling through the driver’s side door to get to Dean. In his need to save Dean, he momentarily forgot that he was anything but hunter’s instinct and muscle; he tore the machete from his thigh and slashed at the creature who clung to Dean, cutting clean through its shoulder and neck. Then he sliced through the other half-dozen attackers just as brutally. Bones cracked and black ichor spewed, stinking droplets splattering his face.

He grabbed Dean by the forearm and hauled him to his feet, swiveling his head. They were coming from all directions, the pale, jointed things being joined by hulking, slimy beasts with tiny heads and knuckles that nearly brushed the pavement.

“New gun,” he reminded Dean, elbowing the duffel on his back. They could do this, and he could take them on if he were being attacked on only one or two fronts, but they were everywhere. He thought that he and Dean could fight through the thinnest group to the east, but they needed time.

As he felt Dean lift the bag over his head, he closed his eyes and dug deep, rummaging through his mind.

There.  He sucked sickly-sweet power into his bones, opened his eyes, shot his hands down toward the ground and yelled, and a wave of shimmering darkness spread in a ring around him, washing over into their pursuers and spreading.

The creatures’ movements slowed to a crawl, as if they were moving through thick, viscous black slime.

Dean kicked dead bodies out of his way and stood up and surveyed the frozen tableau.  The interstate was just beyond the next three traffic lights, with more things climbing out of manhole covers like an upset ant hill. "There's hundreds of them," he whispered, "How in the hell...?"

He spat a bloody mouthful on the ground and unlocked the trunk.  "Damn I hope this works."

Pulling out something halfway between a bullhorn and a boombox, Dean spent a minute hooking the machine to the roof with rope and said, "Sam, you drive for a bit, I think I got something to clear the road."

Back in the car, Dean brushed away broken glass and ran a long extension cord from the car roof to the tape player, with something Sam couldn't quite see gleaming under his right arm.  "Let's get around this."

A word shoved the nearest black-bloodied corpses away, their bodies dragging across the concrete. With an impatient flick of his wrist Sam sent glass shards scattering from the driver's seat onto the street, then he climbed in beside Dean.

"You ready?" he asked. He got his answer when Dean grinned at him and pushed play on the tape player, and Blue Oyster Cult pumped out of the speaker roped to the roof, the bass shaking the whole car.

Sam grinned back and put the car in drive. Music thumping, Sam made a right turn. The creatures were beginning to speed up now that the spell was wearing off. Sam thrust his hand out of the window and made a wide gesture that cleared the monsters out of their path in a tangle of bodies that slammed into the nearest buildings.

Meanwhile, more creatures howled behind them, claws out and frothing acid at the mouth, when suddenly the guitar solo began and they clutched their skulls, the music expanding their brainpans until their eyes bugged and they popped like bloody champagne bottles.  A few worms survived, crawling out of neckholes into sewer grates, but soon nothing was left standing and the waterfront, their only way out, glittered nearby.

"Cut the headlights," said Dean, hand on Sam's arms, head turning toward a distant moan, "Do you hear that?"

Sam turned off the lights, engine idling.  The moan echoed high and low from under the street, call and response, more voices adding to the mix.  Something shuffled in the dark.

Dean's breath plumed in the cold.  "It's getting closer," he whispered, staring through the darkened windshield, "It's here."

Sam turned on the headlights.  The bodies were gone.  The worms were gone.  Only great splashes of blood remained, with a pink mound of scar tissue in the middle of the road that, if Dean watched it long enough, moved up and then down again.  As if it were breathing.

"Oh shit drive Sam."

Concrete crumbled under its weight.  The street split, setting off a wave of car alarms.  The thing peered into the Impala's headlights and uncurled itself, a fifty-foot torso with no face or legs and arms that stretched the length of the block, dragging itself toward the Impala with a horrible moan from its mouthless head.  Sam yanked the steering wheel to the right.

"I got it, I got it!" Dean shouted, peeling off his jacket, holster stretched across the back of his shoulders, "Cut through the alley!  There's a bridge on the other side!"

Sam wrenched his head around and went into reverse, trash cans flying as Dean snapped two rounds in his shotgun and planted one buttcheek on the open window and took aim and punched a hole where the torso's eyes ought to be.  A stream of pink pulp sprayed out the back of its head, but it did not slow down, and Dean cursed as the wound sealed up.

"We gotta split up," said Dean, spying a gas station by the waterfront and jumping out of the car with a duffle bag, "Finish off anything left in town, I've got Pinkzilla.  Take surface streets and meet me on the other side of that bridge."

Sam peeled away, driving in parallel one street over. He went slowly for two blocks, catching sight of Dean between buildings until he didn't any more, then he turned left.

The streets were deserted. Power surged under his skin begging to be used, thrummed with a rhythm that seemed to come from the city itself, making him grind his teeth and squeeze hard on the steering wheel. After a few blocks the constant backdrop of alien language squirmed in his head, clashing painfully with the music, so he hit Stop on the tape player.

Now there was only the purr of the Impala's engine echoing down the street.

And now there were pale creatures peeking their heads out of alleyways, clawing up out of broken windows.

Sam didn't know he was smiling when he swung his legs out of the car and stood. He throbbed inside, brittle and cold, and he welcomed the first onslaught.

Raising his hands, he called out words that he hadn’t used in Dean's presence, fearing they'd affect him as well. They tasted like poison on his tongue, but felt sweet spewing out of his mouth. The approaching fish-men yowled before their spines cracked, torsos snapping backwards so that their heads nearly touched the ground before they crumpled.

More fish-men rushed him. They exploded in place, black ichor splattering the pavement and the storefronts. Sam's nose tickled, and he tasted the familiar, slick copper of blood in the back of his throat. He wiped the string of blood from his nose with his fingertips, then flicked it onto the ground.

He marched forward. The fish-men were approaching cautiously now, but still approaching, and he reached a hand out, squeezed it into a fist and plucked a word out of his head. The creatures fell to the ground, twisted, their bones crushed to shards inside their misshapen sacks of skin.

Blood dripped down over his lips and chin and onto his shirt. The street was empty. He kept walking, leaving cracks in the pavement wherever he stepped.

There; a murmuring, scraping sound. He turned his head to see a small army of the slimy, tiny-headed things he'd noticed before creeping between two buildings toward him, and this time he knew he was grinning when he looked at them. He turned to face them head-on, set his feet apart and raised his hands, then brought them together hard, his voice booming down the streets and shaking windows in their frames. Sickly sweet seawater sung in his veins, and the buildings on either sides of the creeping mass crashed together, smashing the monsters between tons of brick and mortar and steel. Huge cracks in the pavement snaked out, curving to avoid Sam.

His shirt was warm with the flow of blood from his nose, and he reached a hand up to swipe it away. Cool metal touched his face, and he looked down at the ring on his finger.

Dean's ring. His pulse slowed as he thumbed it, slowed again as he wondered how Dean was doing, brief worry crossing his mind.

An explosion sounded to the east, and he looked to see a fiery column lighting up the sky. Heart picking up speed again, he raced to the car. It was time to get his brother.

As outnumbered as Dean was, the music played on in his head, pumping his arms, bouncing from car roof to car roof as the giant torso pulled buildings down around it in an effort to trap him.

"Just...a little...closer..." Dean hissed, not daring to look over his shoulder as he sprinted over the bridge, cables snapping as the giant torso, predictably, followed.  Past the gas station, past anything like human habitation, Dean knelt behind a tree and unzipped his duffle, drenched from running the last few blocks uphill.

"You like me so much," said Dean, shouldering the rocket launcher, "Let's see you eat this."

The blast flattened his hair, the gas station erupting in a small mushroom cloud that grew and grew until Dean backed away, afraid it might touch him, but then the fire sucked inward and the creature raised its arms to the sky in two long tendrils of flame, the bridge collapsing beneath it, and it dropped into the waves below.

Dean's chest heaved, dropping the rocket launcher.  It was done.  It was over.  The Impala squealed to a stop beside him, and seeing Sam was safe Dean sank to his knees on the grass and shut his eyes, heart hammering.  "I think..." he swallowed, catching his breath, "I think we're clear Sam."

Click-click-click.

Dean looked up.  Three little girls in ties and short-sleeve shirts watched him through rifle sights, barrels hovering inches from his face.  Tattoos shifted across their arms as if seen through a heat haze.  "Wgah'nagl fhtagn Dean Winchester?"

He nodded, hands up in surrender.  Around the corner came a station wagon pulled by eight doubled-over fish creatures, a boy pulling in the reins with a cowboy whoop.  The girl looked at Sam and motioned to the car.  "K'yarnak shtunggli gof'nn."

As the brothers climbed into the foul-smelling station wagon, Dean noticed that Sam was not quite as he'd left him; his pupils were contracted into tiny pinpricks, and there was blood crusted around his nose and lips, and coating his teeth when he smiled.

Sam said something unintelligible to him that made the tattoo on his back feel tight against his skin as two of the girls climbed into the back seat and slammed the doors, hinges creaking. Sam shook his head as if to clear it.

Dean felt the cold metal of a rifle barrel press against the back of his skull.  “Gotha athg stell'bsna mnahn!  Chtenff n'gha!” said the girl triumphantly, but then Sam said something in quiet reply and she backed off, mouth trembling.

"They say she’s waiting for us," Sam said, his voice deeper, thicker than usual.

Chapter 16: The Church

They pulled up to the empty field on Main Street, unchanged though perhaps the moonlight looked a little more angular to Dean.  To Sam however...

Dean's eyes slid over to him.  "What?  There's nothing there."

In the previously vacant lot stood a church, the stone columns and carvings familiar. It seemed to vibrate like a tuning fork, setting up an answering hum in Sam’s bones.

“Dean, that’s the church!” Sam said, turning his face to his brother, looking more normal now that he had another piece of the puzzle. “The one from the Lovecraft drawing!”

Dean looked again, but was prodded out of the car by one of the girls.  "I don't see any church."

"You cannot thee becauth you don't know the wordth!" she lisped, with a pronounced Cthuvian accent, "Our wordth are your thingth, your buildingth, your world!"

Dean turned to Sam.  "So how come you can see it?"

Sam stared at him for a few seconds. “Because I know the words, Dean,” he said simply, the deep tug still in his voice. But then he circled the station wagon, shooting a brief, hungry look at the panting fish-men from the sides of his eyes, and stood next to Dean.

When Sam looked at Dean, the tiny pinpricks of his pupils seemed to vibrate. “Do you remember in the desert, when we said the words? Do you remember any of them?”

"No, no I don't, and I don't get any of this...thingness of words business," said Dean, imagining the word 'church'  falling out of his mouth in steel ten-inch letters and landing heavily in the grass.  He took Sam's hand, cold power humming through him.  "Hey man, you don't look good, are you still with me?"

Sam’s shoulders fell an inch as he breathed out, relieved by Dean’s touch though he hadn’t known he’d needed it. “Yeah, I’m still with you,’ he said, the words truer as he said them. The power of words was still in him, whether they were the arcane ones he spoke to destroy, or the plain English he used to talk to his brother.

He squeezed down on Dean’s warm hand. Feeling a muted arc of electricity pass between Dean’s palm and his own, he had an intuition. He pointed. “Look now. See anything?”

Dean's eyes flared.  "How...?"

He put his hand on the translucent fence, a lumbering house of seven gables overgrown with ivy now superimposed against the empty field.

"I don't like this," said Dean, mouth right against Sam's ear while the children drew starfish people on the sidewalk with chalk, "Why toss fifty-foot soldiers at us and then roll out the welcoming committee to bring us here alive?"

In the adrenaline rush of the fight, Sam hadn’t yet fully considered this. He stared up at the church, aware of the ichor and blood on his clothing, thinking of all the bodies strung out in their dust.

The first thought that came to him was a dark one, and he shook it off. You were supposed to die in those attacks. She only wanted me.

But then he guessed, “It was a test. She wants me, she wants us, for something, but not if we can’t handle ourselves.” There was more to it, as well; Sam had a feeling she wanted Sam primed for something, all juiced-up and ready to go. Which he was. But he refrained from saying this to Dean, wanting to protect Dean from that thought. Wanting to protect Dean from the knowledge that if Sam wanted to right now, be could wipe the whole city off the map with a single word. “We handled ourselves. Let’s go find out what she wants.”

The door opened on a sparsely furnished hall with heavy beams and candles burning in the high ceiling, long wooden table flanked by two rows of straight-back chairs.  Children in oversized suits and dresses sat at attention, the bottom halves of their bodies masked in shadow. No stained glass, no altar, no iconography of any kind signifying its purpose, except for the woman standing at the far end of the table with an open book in her hand.  Dean shivered in a cold sweat.

"Who are you?" he asked, struck by her alien beauty, her porcelain skin and hair spilling over her shoulders like black foam.  It would have been easier if she'd been ugly.

She said nothing.  Her mouth hung open, frozen as a mannequin, the only sound she made like a circling wasp far back in her throat. Dean snapped his fingers in front of the children's faces, nothing.

Swallowing his fear, Dean walked up to her, the buzzing growing louder.

"Lady?"

Something crawled out of her mouth, a black-winged fly as big as his thumb with long feelers and a pink pinched face at the end. Lovecraft's face.

It leapt onto Dean's cheek.  "Behold, the prophecy is made flesh!" it buzzed, "One soul with two names shall lay the salt-bourne low with word and fire, and the Dreamer shall claim his crown!"

Dean slapped it away, staring at Sam. "What the hell...what is he talking about?"

The tidal pull was strong here, dark magic ebbing and flowing in Sam’s veins, and it made it hard to concentrate but for Dean’s warm hand gripping his. “One soul,” he said meaningfully, squeezing Dean’s fingers gently and trying to keep his gaze away from the priestess’s face. “But who’s the Dreamer supposed to be?”

He looked around, studied the weather-worn interior of the church, the open, glass-less windows. Outside the landscape was all gray sand and sky, as far removed from wet New England as you could imagine.

“Take a look at the walls,” he said, and he dragged Dean along with him to study foot-tall words etched on the flat surfaces. The Lovecraft bug followed, perching on Sam’s shoulder. Familiar words and phrases leapt out at him, things he’d read in crumbling journals in the Bunker and in motel rooms on the way here. “Look familiar? It’s HPL.”

It might have been the flickering candles, the way the walls bulged like baby octopuses dragging themselves under the wallpaper. "I can't read it," said Dean, positively clinging to Sam's arm now, "What's it say?"

Sam unshouldered his duffel bag and pointed to a passage above eye-level. "There. One soul with two names; that's what the bug said."

He scanned the walls, looking for something more concrete. The letters seemed to tremble as he read them, slipping back and forth from English to angular Cthonic script. "In the destruction of the Dreamer will be borne the Dreamer again." Sam's body trembled at this, the dual words for Dreamer setting up a buzzing feedback in his head.

It was coming together all too clearly, and yet Sam struggled to fight it. He twined his fingers around Dean's, feeling the metal bite of the ring. He touched the wall, tracing letters, and a jolt sizzled through him, power pulsing thick and slimy enough to make him nauseous and effervescent with it at the same time. "The Dreamer and His Consort are destined by the stars of many universes to sleep beneath the seas, shaping the world with their minds until the time comes to rise again and reign."

The buzzing in the room grew louder, more organized, as the children joined in tritone harmony until a much higher fourth tone met in the center on the dog-whistle edge of perception. The woman had not budged yet long umbilical shadows stretched from her to the children, their faces losing definition until one girl collapsed, the front of her head as featureless as bread dough.  Whereas Sam...

Dean looked down.  The front of the church had been muddy, yet he saw only one set of tracks.  Sam stared mesmerized at the walls, his feet hovering an inch above the floor, the dead girl's face pressing from under the skin on the back of his neck in a silent scream.

"Oh you bitch..." Dean hissed, releasing Sam to cross the room and land a punch in the priestess's face that should have loosened her back teeth.  If the children hadn't stopped him first.

Their little fingers scrabbled at his clothes, thin and short but far too strong. He felt himself being pulled back, his recently-healed shoulder twisting painfully in its socket and his boot being wrenched from his foot.

“NO,” Sam said, voice booming in the church, dust shaking down from the rafters. Struggling, Dean turned his head to see Sam’s eyes blazing cold, power visibly sizzling off him like heat off a July sidewalk.

“Stay still, Dean,” Sam said, voice echoing off the walls. “I don’t want to hurt them.”

Sam swiped a hand down the back of his neck and then made delicate gestures with his fingers, neat little puppeteer flicks that plucked the children that Dean couldn’t even see any more off of him, one by one. Sam’s intense gaze was leveled at the priestess, whose small, sharp teeth were bared in a grin right back at Sam.

At this, the children all lined against the wall with their backs facing out.  The woman's book fell with a bang, as loudly as a door being shut.  "Bless-ed, bless-ed, bless-ed art thou.  Behold I have a gift," said the children in unison, a piece of chalk in the woman's outstretched hand, "I have your true names."

She drew a word on the table.  Her eyes glowed and the prophecy melted from the walls and streamed toward Sam, crowding his skin until he became a living book, but only the woman's chalk word hung in the air before Dean, and he couldn't even read it. 

Part 9