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A truant finds home
and a wish to hold on
But there’s a trapdoor in the sun—Pearl Jam, “Immortality”
Cyrus Styne, like many people who died suddenly, refused to believe that he was dead. Why should he? He had good reasons to think he was still alive.
First of all, he was only nineteen years old. He was perfectly healthy. He went to college. He had two term papers due in three weeks. Healthy nineteen-year-old college students didn’t just die. Okay, some did of course, but it was rare. Like, really, really rare. Most nineteen-year-olds lived to see twenty. So if you thought about it, the odds were against him being dead.
Secondly, he couldn’t remember what killed him. He remembered the scary guy listening to him pleading for his life, looking into his eyes, and putting up his gun, but that was all. And Cyrus could swear that the guy, scary as he was, wasn’t going to shoot him. He was sure of it, even though the man had taken out Roscoe and Eldon without a second thought. Cyrus had gotten through to him; he saw it in his eyes—just for a moment, but he saw it.
Thirdly (and this was the most important point), Cyrus was still here—here being the weird and wonderful Batcave-like structure that he and his brother and cousin had broken into. He was still here, cowering against the steps that led to the telescope at the back of the room with his eyes tightly shut, while Scary Guy beat the crap out of a new arrival—a deep-voiced man who you could imagine, if he were an actor, playing a World War II general, or the head of an international spy ring, or maybe even God.
Cyrus wasn’t dead because how could you be so afraid for your own life if it was already gone?
He could hear the punches landing—hell, he could feel them reverberating in the air—and feared that all was lost for the deep-voiced guy when he heard a final swish and thunk, like an executioner’s blow. He suppressed a cry and heard Scary Guy’s parting words: “Next time I won’t miss.”
The room was deathly quiet. He opened his eyes warily; it was hard to focus; he must have lost his glasses. He reached up and felt for them; strangely enough, they were still perched crookedly on his nose. He straightened them and the scene in front of him became clearer. There was the giant pile of books ready for torching. There were the rudely-handled chairs and tables, shoved to the sides of the room. Cyrus peered around the books. He could glimpse his brother Eldon, fallen like a tipped-over toy soldier; he knew that his cousin was not far away.
Listening in the silence, Cyrus hesitantly rose to his feet. The deep-voiced man was lying on his back, and next to him an extraordinarily shiny dagger impaled the top of a large book. He wore a dark suit and a tan trench coat; his face was badly bruised and bloodied, and Cyrus wondered if he was a particularly unlucky and/or incompetent FBI agent.
The man opened his eyes and took a deep breath, then stood up and surveyed the room. Cyrus opened his mouth, ready to speak, but the man’s eyes swept past him as though he weren’t there. Cyrus blinked and raised a hand in a feeble wave, but the guy paid no attention to him. The man’s eyes became riveted to a spot on the floor, and he shook his head, looking distressed.
“Hey,” Cyrus began. His voice was weak and cracked. Trench Coat Guy did not respond, and Cyrus cleared his throat and tried again. “Hey, um, sir.” His mild Louisiana accent, which he had been successfully subduing for years (much to his father’s annoyance), lilted from his lips again, surprising him. “Sir, do you need help?”
Trench Coat Guy ignored him, and Cyrus exclaimed angrily, “Well, I do, okay? Sir? Could you at least look at me? I know you’re not deaf.”
The man still did not look at him, but only stepped forward, looking at the same spot, and knelt. He seemed to be handling something; there was a soft rustling and then a muffled thump. Cyrus moved around the side of the book pile which blocked his view and stared down at the man, who bent over a figure lying on the floor like a paramedic attending to a patient.
Cyrus saw his own body, limp and unmoving, with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead and a look of wide-eyed shock on his face, the same look that he must be wearing now. I could have sworn, he thought, that he wasn’t going to shoot me. And he felt not so much angry as confused.
Trench Coat Guy reached out and placed two fingers just above the bullet hole and shut his eyes in concentration. He looked a little like a priest giving a blessing. After a moment he sighed deeply. “Useless,” he muttered to himself. “I’m sorry,” he said to the body. “You were just a boy.”
“I’m nineteen,” Cyrus objected. For a moment he thought that the man had heard him, for he looked up quickly and squinted in Cyrus’s direction. Then he bent over the body, closed the eyelids over the blank, shocked gaze, and left the room. Cyrus watched him run up the stairs to the front door, surprisingly spry for a guy who’d just had the tar whipped out of him, and then he was gone.
Cyrus drifted closer to the body and stared down at it. He did, in fact, look like a boy, a kid, but now that his eyes were closed he seemed almost peaceful. Cyrus saw his glasses lying askew nearby; he tried to pick them up but his fingers passed right through them. He straightened up and looked around the room in helpless bewilderment.
It was only then that he began to process the notion that he might actually be dead. He tried to touch the glasses again; same thing. He got up and tried other things: a book, a chair, an old-fashioned telephone. Nothing. He began to panic, and he thought that if he could just get back into his body he might come back to life.
It was no use. His body was as inanimate as a chair—he could occupy the same space as it, but he couldn’t get back inside. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, and began to cry. He half-expected his brother and cousin to rise up laughing at him, saying it was all a joke, a great big joke on the wimpy little freak of the family. And if they did, then this time Cyrus would actually be relieved and not mind Eldon’s satisfied smirk or Roscoe’s raucous guffaws.
He turned his head to look over at his brother’s body. “Eldon?” he said. “Are you here too? Roscoe?” Hell, they might still be pulling a prank on him, even if they were dead. He wouldn’t put it past them. “Eldon!” he shouted, not bothering to keep the fear and desperation out of his voice. Eldon delighted in elaborate hoaxes, loved being the one to reveal the trick, to ridicule him mercilessly and then in the next moment to comfort him, drawing him close, tapping him under the chin and crooning, “You got to toughen up, little boy. Now don’t worry, don’t you know that nothing bad’ll happen to you while I’m around?” And Cyrus knew that it was all kinds of fucked up, but in that moment he would have done anything to hear his brother answer him.
There was no answer, and Cyrus lay looking up at the ceiling, alone.
*****
He lay on the floor for what seemed like a very long time. He didn’t know how long. It was impossible to tell the time of day inside that underground Winchester compound, and Roscoe had smashed all the clocks they had seen. It might have been hours, a whole day and night, or more. He wondered if Scary Guy—Dean Winchester, he reminded himself, his name was Dean Winchester—or Trench Coat Guy would ever come back, at least before the bodies began to rot. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, he sang to himself. It was gonna stink pretty bad in here, he supposed. It was about then that he noticed that he could no longer smell anything, anyway.
He didn’t get hungry, nor thirsty. He was glad he couldn’t feel the hardness of the floor; that would have been really uncomfortable. So there were some advantages to being dead (and apparently a ghost). He could still hear—though after Trench Coat Guy left, the only sound in the place was the low off-and-on hum of a refrigerator—and he could still see. He memorized the pattern on the ceiling and read all the titles on the book spines within his line of sight. He avoided looking at his brother and his cousin.
As he lay there, he grew calmer, and as he grew calmer, he began to be bored. So this is death. Not a lot of fun. He thought of the boy he had killed (tortured, his mind reminded him, you tortured him too) and hoped fervently that he was not stuck in the horrific operating room of the Styne mansion, looking at his own mangled corpse. It would have been better if Cyrus had turned the knife on his own father instead. He’d still be dead, of course, but at least he’d have a clearer conscience.
Cyrus sat up suddenly. He could hear footsteps on the landing high above him, and voices drifted down to the library. He recognized the voice of Trench Coat Guy.
“—need your help to move the bodies. I’m afraid they’re still there.”
Two men walked down the stairs. Trench Coat Guy led the way, but the other—a very tall, long-haired man who shared Dean Winchester’s taste for flannel—pushed past him hurriedly. He carried a stack of thick blue plastic tarps in his arms, and he stopped short just before the entrance to the library and seemed to look straight into Cyrus’s eyes.
“Cas—oh, God,” he exclaimed, tossing the tarps to one side. Cyrus rose to his feet and shrank back as the tall guy rushed toward him. He was really, really tall, all leg, and he looked like a guy who was at the absolute end of his rope. He surveyed the room briefly, but his eyes returned quickly to Cyrus’s body at his feet. He knelt beside it, his face twisted in distress, and bowed his head.
Trench Coat Guy stood in the doorway. He had recovered remarkably well from his beating, so well that Cyrus couldn’t see any traces of injury to his face. “Sam,” he said gently. “This is not your fault.”
“This one was just a kid, Cas,” Sam said. “Just a kid.”
“I’m nineteen,” Cyrus whispered.
“Yes,” said Cas. “He was a Styne. They were all Stynes.”
Sam hit the floor with his fist, hard. Cyrus flinched. “Look at him, Cas—he was what, sixteen?”
“Nineteen,” Cyrus said again, a little louder. Christ, did he really look so young?
Sam pressed his lips together and looked up at the ceiling. Cyrus knew the expression well from his own face. Trying not to cry. Please don’t, he wanted to say. I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve anyone’s tears.
“How could he…” Sam began, and then Cyrus realized that the tears were not for him. Sam abandoned the rest of his sentence, shaking his head, then turned to look Cas straight in the eye. “I don’t care what it takes, Cas; we’re doing the spell.”
Cas nodded silently, then picked up a blue tarp. “We should, uh—”
“Yeah. Yeah,” Sam agreed briskly. He got to his feet, then bent down again. He held up Cyrus’s glasses. “Were these his?”
“I don’t know,” Cas answered. He stepped closer to Sam, and for a moment they stood looking down together, like mourners at a funeral. Cas held the tarp stiffly out in front of him, like an odd parody of a soldier ready to present a war widow with a folded flag, and Sam delicately balanced the glasses, as though they were a crown or a votive offering, on the fingers of both his hands.
“I think they were.” Sam straightened the arms of the glasses and set them carefully on the body’s face.
“Thanks,” said Cyrus, though he knew they couldn’t hear him.
Sam took the tarp from Cas’s hands. “Let’s get to work.”
Sam and Cas lifted the corpses of Eldon and Roscoe onto blue tarps and rolled them up tightly. Sam rid himself of his jacket and turned up his shirtsleeves; he worked with a quick efficiency that showed how familiar he was with such a distasteful task. Cas followed Sam’s instructions and remained in his trench coat the whole time. Together they hauled the bodies out of the room one at a time, not through the map table room and up the stairs but down a side hallway.
Cyrus tried to follow them and discovered that he was unable to get out of the library. It wasn’t like a force field holding him back, more like a growing tiredness and weakness that left him struggling to move. He supposed that he was stuck near his body and felt a sharp unwillingness to leave the place. It was familiar now, and he didn’t want to have to haunt whatever random patch of ground they buried him in.
They put Cyrus’s body not in a blue tarp, but in a white canvas painter’s dropcloth. In contrast to the quick and rough way he’d handled the other two, Sam arranged his limbs with care and even smoothed his hair down before wrapping the cloth around him. Cas stood by while Sam did this and stepped forward when Sam was finished, ready to help him lift.
“It’s okay,” said Sam. “I got him.” He gathered the body up, cradling it against his chest like he was carrying a sleeping child to bed, and got to his feet. He shifted the bundle in his arms, and Cas stepped back with a strange look on his face, pitying but at the same time almost awed.
Cyrus took a last look around the trashed room, remembering it as he had first seen it with a thrill of joy and longing, instantly loving the rows of books, the lamps, the polished wood, everything, before Roscoe and Eldon had set about destroying it. Cyrus cursed himself for being a weak coward who’d been too afraid to break with his terrible family. If he had stood up to them, he might have prevented this atrocity. But now he was dead and being carried off and he’d never see the place again.
Cas and Sam walked out of the library into the hall. Cyrus trailed after them, but once again he could not get out of the room. Baffled, he watched them until they were out of sight, then drifted back to the place where his body had lain. Whatever ties he had to it were evidently gone.
He crept back to the steps at the back of the room, sat on the floor under the big telescope, and because he could do nothing else, he waited.
*****
Sam returned alone after a long time. This time he didn’t come into the library, but went down a different hallway. Cyrus could make out some far-off sounds of a door closing and later, water running. But it was almost as quiet as when there was no one there. Much later he could hear Sam in a closer room, a kitchen, he guessed, from the clinking of dishes and silverware. Then nothing again.
This place was not Cas’s home, apparently. It made sense, for Cas looked like the kind of guy who lived in a hotel room and ate the same room-service meal every night. Cyrus knew now at least that Cas was not an FBI agent, incompetent or not, but he still had no idea what connection the man had with the Winchesters. He hoped he’d come back, though, and then Cyrus would at least be able to hear some conversation.
Cyrus spent his hours examining every object in the library. Occasionally he tried to touch a book or a chair again. His hands still passed right through things; he wondered why he couldn’t move through the walls or the floor. Or the ceiling, for he had found that he could fly—well, float about in the air at least—and this pleasant discovery amused him for some time.
He was floating around when Sam came in with a couple of buckets and an assortment of cleaning products and set to work soaking up the splashes of gasoline and scrubbing the blood off the floor. When that was done, Sam turned his attention to the books and other objects that Eldon and Roscoe had piled up for destruction. He took the photos into his big hands with special care and set them aside, along with Dean’s albums and shirts. Then he sorted through the mound of books, putting the clean ones back on the shelves, and boxing the ones to repair. Some were obviously totally ruined, but he seemed reluctant to part with any of them, and Cyrus didn’t blame him.
Cyrus hovered at Sam’s elbow, wishing he could help. Sam would sometimes open a book and look over its pages, and Cyrus eagerly read as much as he could. It was amazing stuff, and Cyrus longed to be able to open the books himself and devour them all.
In the middle of this project, Cas returned. Together, he and Sam put the door at the top of the stairs back on its hinges, arranged the tables and chairs in their original places, and restored order to the library. Cas never once took off his trench coat, and Cyrus was positive he had not changed his clothes since the last time he had seem him. Maybe he had multiple copies of the same outfit, hanging in the closet of his hotel room where he ate the same meal every night.
He and Sam talked from time to time, about someone called Rowena and someone called Crowley, but mostly about Dean Winchester—not the present-day Dean Winchester who was God-only-knew-where and evidently the epicenter of all their problems, but a kinder, gentler Dean Winchester of bygone days, whom Cyrus found hard to reconcile with his memory of the frightening, stone-faced man with a gun.
Cyrus learned that Dean Winchester liked cheeseburgers, Led Zeppelin, and Casa Erotica porn movies. That he was an excellent mechanic and had made hustling pool into an art form. That he had once tried to shoot a talking pigeon. Cyrus could readily believe these things (maybe not the talking pigeon, though).
What he couldn’t quite believe was that Dean Winchester would surprise his brother with tickets to a Jayhawks game and spend two days driving hell bent for leather to get them there on time. That he loved LARPing (“The costumes,” Sam said. “I know it’s all about the costumes.”). That he made Sam watch the Bellagio fountain show with him at least once a night, every time they went to Las Vegas.
It was all very intriguing. Maybe Sam had some sort of Stockholm-Syndrome view of his brother that made him delusional about Dean Winchester’s real personality. Then Cyrus remembered the flash of compassion in the man’s eyes as he had begged for his life, and how he had felt so sure, in that instant, that Dean wouldn’t kill him. Had that been real? The real Dean Winchester?
Sam put the last book into a box and straightened up. The room looked almost the same as it had done when Cyrus first saw it. “That’s good enough,” Sam said. “I just didn’t want Dean to come back and find it…” he trailed off with a little shrug.
Cas nodded, but his silence seemed to say something else to Sam, who said with defiant finality, “He’s coming back.”
Sam and Cas left Cyrus alone in the library. He didn’t see much more of them for a while. Cas went away to “check on Rowena” at Sam’s request, and Sam made a couple of trips outside, returning with bags of unknown objects which he carried off to other rooms. Cyrus overheard bits of phone conversations, Sam asking people if they had any news of Dean.
And Cyrus heard Sam, pacing around the library, leave a message in a trembling voice: “Dean, please. Just talk to me. Just…please.”
Shortly after that, Sam left the building with Cas.
They didn’t come back.
*****
Cyrus was alone again. Sam had left the lights on, so at least he wasn’t in the dark, but it was very quiet. Cyrus didn’t mind being alone—he had preferred it, most of the time, when he had been alive, content to linger under his father’s radar as the mediocre and superfluous youngest son. He’d had two friends in high school, both of whom had left Shreveport upon graduation for places as far away as they could get: UCLA for one, Boston College for the other. Cyrus, of course, had been doomed to stay under the thumb of his father and the rest of his family.
He had chafed and fumed; he had even made elaborate plans to travel to Los Angeles and change his identity, but deep down he knew that he was well and truly stuck. You couldn’t quit the Stynes; that was made abundantly clear by the many tragic deaths that dotted the family history: gun-cleaning accidents, car wrecks, drownings, overdoses, and lonely suicides. Presumably they had all been rebels or incompetents, though some of the suicides were probably genuine.
Cyrus, though, wanted to live, so much so that he’d been willing to sacrifice both his integrity and his dignity. Maybe that was why he was still hanging on, a feeble ghost who didn’t even have anyone to haunt, who never wanted to haunt anyone in the first place.
All he wanted to do was read the books, the tantalizing books whose spines and covers he looked at all the time. There was a large, heavy tome on one of the library tables. Sam had left it open at the beginning of a chapter called “The True Method of Dispatching the Witch and Dispelling Evil,” and Cyrus had read the two pages he could see over and over again, even though the print was tiny and the wording archaic and difficult to parse. He tried, every time he came to the bottom of the page, to turn the leaf over.
He read the page hundreds of times, and every time his fingers would simply pass right through the book. Until the time that it didn’t. The time that he felt the paper, solid under his thumb, and watched his fingers finally, finally slide under the page and lift it up and over.
That was the beginning. At first he could move only one page at a time, but after a while he could manage two, then several. He could shift the curtains in the telescope room a little, roll a pen across the table. He was able to make the lights flicker for an instant, and one day, by accident, he found that he could cross the threshold into the map room.
He was getting stronger, that was apparent. Would he eventually become a full-fledged poltergeist, throwing cutlery, leaving the faucets running, writing “red rum” on the walls? He didn’t feel inclined to do any of these things, and in any case, there was no point in doing so. The place was empty, except for him.
He thought, more than once, that perhaps this was his own personal hell. Only it didn’t feel that bad, now that he could touch things. He turned the pages of Sam’s witch book back to the beginning and read it all the way through. He explored the map room and eventually made his way down the corridors. He found Dean Winchester’s bedroom—so he presumed from the old record player and stack of classic rock albums. It had been hastily tidied. A little farther down, around a corner, Cyrus drifted into Sam’s room, which was still mostly in disarray from the hands of Eldon and Roscoe. Sam had evidently not done more than right the furniture and clear a path on the floor.
If he had been able to, Cyrus would have put the room in order, sweeping up the debris from the smashed television, making the bed properly, gathering up the scattered books and items of clothing and tucking them into place on the shelves and in the drawers. It would have been the least he could do in apology to Sam, who was constantly on his mind. Where was he? Had he found his brother?
Cyrus found a small photo in the jumble of Sam’s books. He surmised that it had fallen out from one of them, maybe had been used as a bookmark. In it, a teenaged Dean had a hand on the shoulder of an almost unrecognizably young Sam. Dean was caught as he turned toward the camera, eyebrows raised, the beginnings of a smile forming on his face. Sam was looking up at Dean, eyes rapt and expectant.
Cyrus felt a sharp jab of recognition: as a kid he had often looked at Eldon the same way, back when Eldon was still funny and sweet and Cyrus’s ally against their father and that asshole Jacob, whom they both despised. Back before Eldon had started to act like a real Styne, to study Cyrus with doubtful eyes, and to temper whatever affection he showed with equal parts pity and scorn.
Eldon had taken him aside just before they left for the Winchester hideout and literally dried his tears. Cyrus quietly let him. “Hey,” Eldon said, “you did a good job back there. I know you’re not cut out for this.” He laughed, not unkindly. “Daddy wants you to be a surgeon; I don’t think that’s gonna happen, is it?”
Without thinking, Cyrus leaned into the comforting curve of Eldon’s encircling arm. “Look,” Eldon said gently, “after Dad’s out of the picture, when I’m in charge, you won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I promise.”
Cyrus pulled away and turned to gaze up into his brother’s face. He just wants to make sure I back him and not Eli, he thought. “Why are you telling me this?” he whispered. It came out as a hiss. You don’t need me. I’m weak. I’m a liability. You’ll get rid of me the moment it suits you, won’t you?
Eldon blinked at him, and for an instant he looked surprised and hurt. Then he smirked and shrugged. “I got a soft spot for you, I guess,” he drawled. “Little brother,” he had added, before shouting for Roscoe to hurry up.
In Sam’s bedroom, Cyrus reached out for the photo of the Winchester brothers. He lifted it up and stared into Dean’s eyes. Poor Sam, he thought, and he carefully laid the picture down in the middle of Sam’s empty desktop. It felt like an act of condolence.
*****
Once, when Cyrus was nine years old, he was furtively playing a video game in his bedroom late at night when he heard his brothers’ voices outside the door. He didn’t have time to put down the controller before the door opened. Jacob stood silhouetted in the doorway with Eldon behind him.
“Hey, look at this,” said Jacob with fake heartiness. “See, here’s the little troublemaker stayin’ up late. How you doin’, little Cy?”
“I’m turning it off now,” said Cyrus.
“Well, that’s a good boy.” Jacob turned to Eldon, who hung back in the hall. “Ain’t he a good boy, Eldon?”
“Yes,” Eldon answered shortly, obscured by shadows. “Good night, Cy. Let’s go, Jacob.”
Jacob’s response was to swing around and grab Eldon, hauling him into the room. “Not yet, not yet. I want you to get a good look at our baby brother.”
Eldon’s face was pale and strained. Cyrus clutched his own arms and whimpered, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. We’re just checking on you,” Jacob said, smiling. “Making sure you’re safe, right, Eldon?” His smile turned predatory. “We’ll always make sure you’re safe, won’t we, Eldon?”
“You have made your fucking point,” Eldon whispered.
“Language, Eldon, language. Little pitchers, hmm?” Jacob looked back at Cyrus. “Night, Cy,” he said breezily as he left the room.
Eldon came over to sit on Cyrus’s bed. He nudged Cyrus’s arm and picked up the game controller. “I’ll play you one game, then you gotta go to sleep, okay?” he said, as though Cyrus had asked him to. He sounded almost normal again.
“Why did Jacob—” Cyrus began, but Eldon cut him off cheerfully.
“Eh, he’s just being weird again.” Eldon lowered his voice. “Just being a dick again.”
Cyrus giggled. “A dick,” he whispered daringly.
“Don’t you say that in front of Daddy,” Eldon warned.
“I know,” said Cyrus. Then he bragged, “I know all the bad words.”
“Do you?” said Eldon, impressed. “Well, let’s hear ’em, then.”
Cyrus could still remember how Eldon had laughed so hard he could barely inform him that “britches” was not a bad word.
A couple of days later Eldon stole the keys to Jacob’s new car and took Cyrus for a joyride that lasted almost two weeks. They were caught just outside Savannah. When they got home, no one ever mentioned the incident to Cyrus again, and Eldon’s laugh never sounded the same as it used to.
*****
When the Winchester brothers came back, they made quite a racket in comparison to the quiet background hum of the place that Cyrus had begun to think of as home. Cyrus was in the kitchen trying (and failing) to lift a cup when he heard their voices rising from the corridor that led, he knew, to the gigantic garage full of vintage vehicles.
“…would have been easier for you to come in the front door—”
“And down the stairs, with crutches, Dean?”
“Jesus, you’re such a baby. It’s only a sprain; you don’t need crutches—”
“What, I should crawl everywhere, then?”
“I just meant you can lean on me for a few days, that’s all, Sammy.”
Their voices quieted down then. Cyrus hesitated a little before gliding down the hall to Sam’s room. It was one thing to overhear them from a distance, another thing to eavesdrop. But Cyrus had been alone for a very long time, and he’d grown tired of it. And he’d always been nosy. He looked in through the open doorway.
Sam was sitting on his bed with a pair of crutches leaning next to him. His right foot and ankle were wrapped up, and his right hand was bandaged. Dean was gathering up books from the floor as he talked.
“You’re lucky you didn’t sprain your wrist, too,” he said, heedlessly shoving an armful of books onto a shelf. “God, you went down really hard; I thought…” His voice rose in pitch, and he stopped abruptly. He bent down to pick up more books, and Sam leaned over and touched his arm.
“You don’t have to do that,” Sam said. “I’ll take care of it later.”
“No, I want to,” Dean objected.
“Well, do it later then,” said Sam. “Just sit down for a minute, Dean; we’re home.”
Dean dropped the books onto the desk. The little photo fluttered to the ground; he picked it up and broke into a grin. “Hey,” he said, holding it up as he sat next to his brother, “look at us dorks.”
Sam grabbed the picture. “My God,” he said. “I haven’t seen this in—where’d this come from?”
“It was on the desk. Probably fell out of one of your books.”
Sam stared at Dean. “No, wait—you’re sure it was on the desk? Before you put the books down?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because that desk was on its side—I set it upright but I didn’t put anything on it.”
Dean frowned. “Weird. Then I guess it wasn’t there before—must’ve come out of one of the books.” He reached for the photo in his brother’s hand. “I remember this—your little girlfriend took this, didn’t she? That last summer we spent with Bobby?”
Sam laughed. “She wasn’t my girlfriend. I had a massive crush on her, but she was in love with you.”
Dean peered at him skeptically.
“She hung out with me for weeks, just to get close to you, you know,” Sam continued.
“I didn’t know; really?”
“I didn’t know either, until the day we left. Then she confessed everything and gave me a note to give to you—I said I would—”
“Oh, you loser!”
“—but I didn’t, so I got my revenge in the end,” Sam finished, grinning.
“Pathetic,” Dean proclaimed. “Did you read the note?”
“Yeah, it was full of little hearts and other unspeakable things.” Sam nudged Dean in the arm and took back the picture. He studied it with a faint, nostalgic smile on his face. He glanced up at his brother’s face and back to the photo as though comparing them.
“Bobby gave me this,” he murmured. “I thought I lost it.”
“Well, if you did,” said Dean, “you got it back.”
*****
Sam healed quickly, and Dean seemed a little disappointed about that. Dean was in full mother-hen mode for a week or so, and it was easy to see that he was in his element. He was so different from his Scary Guy persona that Cyrus could hardly believe he was the same man. Now a paragon of the ideal big brother, this was the Dean whom Sam had been desperate to reclaim, and Cyrus understood that the transformation was somehow Sam’s doing.
Dean busied himself with cleaning Sam’s room and keeping Sam fed and off his feet. Sam protested, but only a little, and the two of them spent a good deal of time parked on Sam’s bed together, watching episodes of Gunsmoke (Dean’s choice) and Planet Earth (Sam’s) on YouTube with Sam’s tablet propped between them, while Cyrus lurked in the doorway and contemplated them like a documentarian observing wildlife.
They sat next to one another on the bed like two shipwreck survivors on a tiny desert island—each one jealously guarding his space, but glad of the other’s company nonetheless. Cyrus could tell that they were used to close quarters, and that the territorial disputes of a shared bed space had been hashed out between them long ago. He picked up from their conversations that they had spent most of their lives living out of motel rooms, and he could imagine the two of them as young boys grudgingly relinquishing control of the tv remote by turns, the elder using the force of noogies and a raised voice, while the younger employed the persuasion of whining and his ultimate weapon, tears.
Dean reminded Cyrus of Eldon sometimes, with certain loud, blustery turns of phrase like “Shut up, you’re driving me crazy,” “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and “Give me that, you dork,” though the words sounded much less harsh, affectionate almost, coming from Dean. Sam was subtler and wittier, delivering his barbs casually, Parthian fashion, at the ends of conversations. In spite of this constant back-and-forth, one thing was clear: they were happily companionable together, and Cyrus envied them.
He was pretty sure that the Winchesters had no idea he was there, though he made every effort to leave them clues. It was hard when you could barely move a sheet of paper. He could pick up nothing heavier than a postcard, and though he tried many times, he couldn’t lift a pen to write anything, either. Worse still, he found that even these feeble abilities were dampened when he was in the actual presence of the brothers—he put this down to nerves, or whatever equivalent to nerves that the disembodied dead have. So there was no chance of him levitating a playing card in front of their eyes, something he was sure they would not ignore.
Cyrus was a lousy poltergeist.
His attempts to alert them to his existence were limited to leaving whatever loose bits of paper he could find in various prominent places around the bunker. This never led to anything more than a shrug on the brothers’ part, though once he raised a little consternation when he managed to place a leaf of romaine lettuce on Dean’s pillow. (Dean thought this was one of Sam’s arcane snipes at his eating habits and decided to pointedly ignore it.)
Several weeks after the Winchesters returned, Cyrus was no closer to getting the brothers’ attention than he had been at first. Sam spent most of his time engrossed in books, transcribing texts and taking copious notes. He occasionally arranged these papers in complex patterns across the tables of the library, but Cyrus could never bring himself to disturb them much.
Dean was preoccupied with scouring news sites on the internet and keeping their car—a sharp-looking classic Chevy Impala—in top condition. Cyrus no longer thought of him as scary, but he preferred to watch him from a distance. He spent most of his time shadowing Sam and reading the same things he did, and in a strange, lonesome way, Cyrus became their unseen, unseeable roommate with a routine of his own.
*****
When Sam was out of the bunker, Dean would sometimes belt out a tune. He was a much better singer than he let on to Sam. He was, in fact, capable of hitting all the notes he attempted, and his voice sounded surprisingly dulcet as it bounced off the walls in the corridors. His choice of songs at these times seemed to belie the taste displayed by his record collection—Cyrus was charmed by his rendition of “Hey Jude” and unaccountably moved by an absent-minded but soulful crooning of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream.”
This was the man who had shot him.
Once, after an early-morning doughnut run, Dean returned bearing half a dozen chocolate-glazed doughnuts, a day-old coffee cake (“It was half-price!”), and much to Sam’s horror, a battered guitar case containing a decent acoustic six-string which Dean claimed to have picked up at a yard sale for twenty bucks.
“Saturday morning yard sales?” Sam admonished, gazing glumly at the instrument in Dean’s hands. “That’s one step away from antiquing, dude.”
“Oh, shut up,” Dean said mildly.
“You don’t even know how to play,” Sam objected.
“I learned a little at that boys’ home. Remember Robin?”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “You spent your time with her learning how to play the guitar? Right.”
Dean smiled enigmatically. “What?” he asked as Sam smirked at him expectantly.
“I’m just waiting for the inevitable fingering jokes.”
The two of them dissolved into adolescent giggles and a little shoving match that ended in some discordant twanging and spilled coffee. Dean sighed reminiscently, “She played mostly Pearl Jam.”
“Lucky you.” Sam’s voice was perfectly neutral and his face inscrutable.
Dean eyed him sideways, then shrugged. “What can I say, it was 1995.” He strummed the guitar strings lightly. “Twenty years, Sammy. How did we get so old?”
I never even made it to twenty, Cyrus thought.
Dean put the guitar away, and as far as Cyrus knew, never took it out again in front of Sam. But Cyrus heard him tuning the strings and practicing in his room when Sam was out. In time he could turn out a slow, doleful performance of “Nothingman” that made Cyrus’s throat ache with sympathy.
Cyrus would sit nearby as Dean played, reedily harmonizing with him on the chorus, and if Cyrus were to compile a list of things he wished he could tell Sam about, this one would be right at the top.
Also up there would be Dean’s half-drunk middle-of-the-night soliloquies, delivered in the silence of the library.
“I haven’t forgotten about you.”
Cyrus froze. He’d been studying a page of the notebook that Sam had left open on the table, and he hadn’t heard Dean approach. He looked up to see Dean standing in the doorway, right on the spot he’d been when he had fired the gun.
Dean took a step closer. He wore a loose gray bathrobe and carried a dark beer bottle. “Cyrus Styne,” he said. He was addressing the air, just above the place where Cyrus had been standing when he’d been shot. “That was your name, right? I looked you up. Found your Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter—not a lot to see.”
Cyrus tried unsuccessfully to remember what his last tweet had been.
“Nineteen years old. Solid-B student at a pricey private college in Shreveport. Chemistry major.” Dean lifted the beer to his lips and took a swig. “Just starting out. And then bam, snuffed out like a candle. Disappeared. Now you and your brother and cousin are suspects in the worst multiple homicide case in Louisiana history.” He sat down and drained the bottle, then set it on the table with a regretful look. “Sammy hides the good stuff from me nowadays. Thinks I don’t notice, but I do.” He sighed. “Prolly for the best.”
Cyrus moved opposite Dean and stared at him, fascinated.
“You reminded me of Sammy, you know?” Dean murmured. “Cute little nerd with pretty eyes and too much hair.”
Cyrus was half flattered, half appalled.
“ ‘I hate my family,’ ” Dean went on, with a small bitter laugh. “But all kids say that, don’t they?” He bowed his head. “They all say that,” he repeated, and gathering his robe tight around himself, he rose and made his way out of the room.
*****
Sam never sang when alone, nor did he drink and have conversations with imaginary dead people. He was silent, studious, and wrote a lot—sometimes tapping on his laptop, but mostly on paper. Cyrus knew, on an instinctive level, that he and Sam would have clicked if they’d met while Cyrus was alive. And—he could admit it now since it wasn’t going to happen—Cyrus would have had a little man-crush on him as well.
Eldon had called the Winchesters “hunters” and emphasized that they were bloodthirsty barbarians out to destroy all secret knowledge like the Stynes’. From what Cyrus had seen, nothing was further from the truth. Sam clearly loved the books in the library, and Cyrus was always glad of the opportunity to read over his shoulder.
Sam was alone one morning while Dean was doing the grocery shopping. He sat at one of the library tables, engrossed in a history of the Spanish Inquisition, and Cyrus contentedly read along with him. He was hovering so close to Sam that eventually he felt as though he were reading through Sam’s eyes themselves. When Sam came to the end of a chapter and stretched, looking up the ceiling, Cyrus did too.
But then Sam closed the book and began to rise from his chair, and Cyrus, who despite not having a body still moved around as though he occupied one, tried to get out of the way.
He felt himself lurching upward, out of his own control, and try as he might, he could not move back and away as he wanted to. He attempted to twist sideways, but his upward trajectory continued until things started to look weird from that angle. He was too high up—about the level of Sam’s head, he realized.
Cyrus found himself looking down, and when he saw Sam’s hands holding the book instead of his own empty ones, he knew that something was seriously wrong. He was, in fact, seeing through Sam’s eyes, seeing exactly what Sam saw.
The realization was unsettling and a little embarrassing. Had he glommed onto Sam so thoroughly that he’d become some kind of ghostly parasite?
Sam leaned down to replace the book on a low shelf. Cyrus could feel the strands of hair falling against Sam’s cheek as he tilted his head, the texture of the wood under Sam’s fingers as he touched the edge of the bookcase, the pull of his shirt’s fabric against his skin as he stretched out his arm. More than that, he could feel the warm physicality of blood flowing, muscles moving, lungs expanding—all the rushing, trembling, twitching beats that galvanized living flesh, and that he had not realized he had missed.
Somewhere in the background was the buzzy activity of Sam’s mind.
Cyrus, stilled by caution, watched through Sam’s eyes as Sam straightened up and looked over the rows of books. Sam ran his fingertip along the spines, and there squashed between two large volumes was a small blue book with a familiar title. Go back, Cyrus thought, and Sam paused as though he had heard him. He hooked a finger into the top of the blue spine and pulled. It was a compact early 20th century edition, cloth-covered with gilt lettering:
Mary Wolstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein
or, The Modern Prometheus
Sam stared at the little book, then looked back at the shelf in confusion. “What?” he said under his breath. He held the closed volume in his hand for a moment, then opened it. He paused to glance over the small print, his eyes moving rapidly down the words, then he flipped through more pages until he found the passage he was apparently searching for, about three-quarters of the way into the book at the beginning of Chapter 20:
I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.
He, and Cyrus with him, read the words twice, then Sam shivered a little and quickly shut the book. He replaced it on the shelf and found the volume he’d originally been looking for, but stood for a long time without opening it, clearly still ruminating on the sentence he’d just read. Cyrus couldn’t guess why Sam would identify with Shelley’s Frankenstein, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with Dean.
He’d become familiar enough with Sam to know that there was nothing about his psyche that didn’t have something to do with Dean.
*****
Two hours later, Cyrus was convinced that he would be stuck shoehorned into Sam’s body forever. He had absolutely no clue how to free himself, and he had tried everything he could think of. All his efforts had as little effect on Sam as Cyrus’s early attempts to move stuff in the physical world. Sam remained ignorant of Cyrus’s intrusion, though there was a moment or two when Cyrus thought he might be close to the edge of Sam’s consciousness. Sam appeared to be somewhat distracted from his current task of reading from two different old Latin texts and consulting a dictionary in between. Cyrus, who didn’t know Latin, was beginning to feel a little seasick from the rapid back-and-forth motion of Sam’s eyes.
Sam paused in his reading, opened a notebook, and reached for a pen. He sat tapping it absently against the paper as he looked at the texts again. As Sam brought the pen close to the paper, Cyrus bent his concentration on the muscles of Sam’s hand, yanked at the tendons of Sam’s fingers, and awkwardly managed to scrawl a single word.
Sam lifted the pen just after Cyrus formed the last letter. His eyes slid from his book to his notes, and he stiffened.
hello
It looked loopy and drunken under Sam’s neat block letters, but it was readable. Sam let out a soft breath of air, and blinked. Then he swallowed hard and whispered, “Crap.”
Cyrus winced; this was not the reaction he’d hoped for. He moved the pen again, and this time Sam watched his hand write.
sorry
Sam made a sound like a mirthless laugh. His breath quickened as he surveyed the room, his eyes darting from object to object. They settled on his phone, just out of arm’s reach. “Spirit writing,” he said aloud.
That sounded about right. Cyrus wrote yes.
Sam stared at his hand. “Who are you?” he asked.
Cyrus was growing tired. It was hard to control the pen. He attempted “Cyrus” but the result was a squiggle that looked nothing like writing.
“I can’t read that,” Sam said apologetically.
Cyrus sighed heavily. He was so close. Cyrus. Cyrus. My name’s Cyrus.
Sam gasped, dropped the pen and gripped the edge of the table. “Oh fuck,” he whispered. “Cyrus Styne?”
Cyrus was stunned. Can you hear me? he ventured.
“Yes. I can hear you,” Sam answered.
Wow, said Cyrus.
“Are you Cyrus Styne?” Sam asked again.
Yes.
Sam seemed to have been rendered speechless.
I—I’m sorry about all this.
“You’re—sorry?” Sam sputtered.
Yeah, I seem to be kinda…stuck, or something.
“Cyrus,” said Sam slowly, though Cyrus could feel his brain whirring at top speed, “you don’t need to do this.”
His words gave Cyrus an odd sense of déjà vu until he recalled, with a shock, that it was the last thing he’d said to Dean, Scary Dean who now seemed like an unreal, half-remembered nightmare, in that very room. At a loss, he exclaimed, I—no. No! I’m not trying to hurt you, or anything like that.
Cyrus could feel, in all the little movements of Sam’s brow, his mouth, and especially his eyes, Sam’s tension and confusion; he could sense Sam’s mind focusing and calculating. Cyrus tried to squeeze himself as small as possible.
“What do you want?” Sam asked.
Cyrus paused. He wanted to get out of Sam, of course, but now that he was actually speaking to him, he realized there was a lot more he wanted. He had not prepared himself for conversation with a Winchester; it had never occurred to him that it would ever be a possibility.
I—I died here, he began lamely.
Sam’s breath caught a little. “Yeah,” he said, and Cyrus knew that there were tears in his eyes.
I’m dead, Cyrus said, and— He could feel his own tears starting. He stopped to compose himself. And I was alone for a long time, and then you guys came back… He didn’t know where this narrative was going, so he simply asked, Can you help me?
Sam’s demeanor changed at these words. Cyrus saw a mental image of himself lying lifeless on the library floor, looking incredibly small and childlike, and he knew that the vivid memory was Sam’s own. Sam’s voice was gentle as he answered, “If I can, I will.”
I don’t know what’s going on, Cyrus told him. I’ve been hanging around here since I died, and this never happened before.
“Since you died,” Sam repeated. “That—that was months ago.”
Was it? It’s hard to tell in here.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Sorry, go on.”
Anyway, Cyrus continued, this morning I was reading over your shoulder and somehow I got, I don’t know, tangled up with you. Like I can see out of your eyes, and I can sort of control your right hand a little if I concentrate real hard.
“This morning?”
Just after Dean left.
At the mention of his brother’s name, Sam grew tense again. “Dean,” he repeated.
Yeah. Your brother. Sorry, I know it’s weird but I feel like I know you guys.
“Right,” said Sam. He took a deep breath, and added, “The thing with Dean—he’s not—it’s a long story, but—he’s changed, really.”
I know. I mean, I believe you.
Sam was quiet for a moment. “Cyrus, what do you remember—”
He stopped as the door of the bunker opened on the landing above the stairs. “Hey,” said Dean cheerfully. “You’re in luck, Sammy, they had your favorite beer in stock again.” He wrangled his grocery bags down the stairs and onto the map table, then poked his head in at the library door.
“Dean.” Sam only spoke one word, but the tone of it made Dean look serious in an instant. He took a quick look around the room, then focused on his brother expectantly.
“The bunker’s haunted,” said Sam. “It’s Cyrus Styne.”
Dean’s eyes widened. “No fucking way.”
“No, really.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Not exactly—”
“What the hell are you doing, just sitting there? Get the shotguns and—”
“It’s too late for that,” Sam interrupted. “He’s already here.”
“Where?”
“Uh, in me.” Dean stared at Sam blankly, and Sam sighed. “He’s possessing me. Sort of.”
“What?” Dean yelled.
“Dean, shut up,” said Sam. “You’ll scare him.”
No, it’s okay. I’m not scared of him, Cyrus assured him.
“No?”
What can he do to me? I’m already dead.
Sam let out a little chuckle. “True.”
Dean looked aghast. “Are you talking to him?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. Is he—I mean, how—” Dean sputtered.
“I don’t know, Dean, he’s just in here.”
“Well, kick him out, for Christ’s sake!”
“What do think I’ve been trying to do? He’s like…a slippery fish or something, I can’t get a grip on him.”
“Oh, my God,” Dean groaned. “Sam, this never ends well.”
What’s he talking about?
“Let’s just say stuff like this has happened to me before.”
You’ve had dead people occupying you?
“What are you telling him, Sam? Sam!”
“Calm down, Dean, it’s okay. He’s harmless. No offense,” he added to Cyrus.
“Like hell.” Dean stared at his brother uneasily, then jabbed his index finger at him. “Stay there.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m gonna call Cas, and I don’t want him listening.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Just get some salt, Dean.”
Dean said angrily, “Goddammit, Sam, this is serious.”
“Of course it is,” Sam snapped back. “I should know, I’m an expert at being possessed, remember?”
Dean blanched visibly, opened and shut his mouth, then turned on his heel and left the room.
“Shouldn’t have said that,” Sam muttered ruefully.
I’m so sorry, Cyrus said.
“He’ll get over it.”
You guys… Cyrus paused. You guys are really close.
Sam replied, rather cautiously, “Yeah.”
It’s nice, Cyrus said simply. You’re lucky.
Sam blinked. “I guess we are,” he said.
What are y—, Cyrus started to ask, but he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps, and Sam turned as his brother bounded into the library.
“Shut your eyes, Sam, this is gonna sting,” said Dean, raising a sawed-off shotgun and pointing it at Sam’s chest.
A flood of panic washed over Cyrus, and in an instant he burst outward with a wordless shriek. In front of him, Dean was flung violently backwards into a bookshelf. The shotgun flew out of his grasp and landed at Cyrus’s feet. He kicked it to the other side of the room.
“Don’t hurt him!” Cyrus yelled. The shout echoed off the walls, and for a split second Cyrus confronted the face of a man literally seeing a ghost. That wide-eyed expression of shock was replaced by a set look of calculation that made Cyrus take a step backward, and it was only then that he realized that he was no longer occupying Sam.
“Dean,” said Sam in a warning tone, quickly placing himself between Cyrus and his brother. His breath was visible in the air. He waved a hand, signaling Dean to back off, and spoke to Cyrus. “He won’t hurt me. It’s just salt. Okay?”
Cyrus nodded slowly, then looked beyond Sam at Dean, who rose to his feet again. Dean looked so distressed that Cyrus wondered if he was a particularly horrific phantom; he raised his fingers to his forehead, but he found no trace of a bullet hole or blood. As his ghostly adrenaline faded, he felt himself relaxing again, and he faced Sam.
“Why—” he began, but Sam looked disappointed.
“Shit,” said Dean. “He’s gone.”
Sam wheeled on Dean and snapped, “I didn’t mean to shoot me with the fucking salt! Did you even stop to think how you’d look running up with that shotgun?”
Dean threw up his hands angrily, then stooped to pick up the gun. He stood with his back to his brother for a good count of ten, then turned back to say stiffly, “I’m sorry.” He sighed. “Do you think he’s still around?”
“He’s got to be, since you didn’t blast him.”
“And he’ll be pissed, too.”
Sam cocked his head appraisingly. “I don’t think so. He was listening to me, and he didn’t look mad, just—surprised, when he disappeared.”
“He’s getting madder, though, and it won’t be long before he can throw us around the room.”
“He’s not, though—getting madder. You scared him. He’s not violent, Dean.”
“Sam, there’s a reason he’s still here. I killed his entire family—I killed his brother right in front of him, and I shot him while he was begging for his life.” Dean paused. “He was crying, Sammy.”
Sam was quiet. Cyrus could tell that this was the first he had heard his brother speak of the incident. “It’s possible that he doesn’t remember how he died.”
Dean nodded. “Yeah. What did he say to you?”
“He was—” Sam lips twitched in a small, perplexed smile. “He was very apologetic, actually. Polite. Kinda sweet. About as far away from vengeful as you can get. He said he’s been here ever since…” he trailed off, and both he and Dean looked at the spot where the body had lain.
Dean tugged at a handful of his own hair. “You salt-and-burned him?”
“Of course. All of them.”
Dean heaved a deep sigh. “Well, we’ll dig him up and try again. Or it could be the blood on the floor, or hell, he was wandering around in here for God knows how long before I showed up, there could be a hair or something anywhere—”
“Okay, wait,” Sam interrupted. “Let’s not do all that just yet. He’s not angry, Dean, I swear. He’s lost.”
“So…?”
“So let’s talk to him first. I think we can get him to move on.”
Move on where? thought Cyrus. He rolled Sam’s pen off the table to get their attention.
“Cyrus?” said Sam.
Cyrus flipped a page of Sam’s notebook. “Cyrus, there’s something holding you here, not letting you move on. Is it…the way you died?” Sam asked.
No amount of ruffling paper could adequately express what Cyrus was trying to convey, which was mostly I don’t know and I have no idea what you mean by moving on.
Dean stared at Sam’s notebook and loudly whispered, “Is that all he can do?”
Jesus. Was Cyrus was the wimpiest ghost ever, even counting Caspar? He couldn’t even manage the classic rap once for yes and twice for no.
Sam shrugged. “We could try a Ouija board, but…”
“God, that takes forever, and what if the kid’s not up to it?” Dean moaned.
Sam reached for his phone. “I’m gonna call Cas. He can get Oliver Pryce and bring him back here.”
“Who?”
“Oliver Pryce, he’s that psychic guy who helped us get a hold of Bobby.”
“I thought you said he was a recluse.”
“Yeah, but he likes Cas,” Sam said. “He’ll help us. Hey Cyrus,” he added, “don’t worry. We’ll figure this out.” He smiled in Cyrus’s general direction, but Dean gripped his shotgun tightly and insisted that Sam hold an iron crowbar while they waited.
*****
Cas looked a little wearier than he had the last time Cyrus saw him, but he was otherwise unchanged. He was accompanied by a slight, bald man wearing glasses and carrying a lumpy plastic shopping bag.
“Ah,” said the little bald man, peering around the library appreciatively. “I remember this room well. Always liked those lamps.”
“Dean,” said Sam, “This is Oliver Pryce. Mr. Pryce, this is my broth—”
“Yes, I know, I know. Dean Winchester, former bearer of the Mark of Cain.” The psychic glared at Dean through his thick glasses and added irritably, “And you’re right, I don’t look anything like Whoopi Goldberg.” Dean lowered his head meekly, squirming, and Sam smothered a laugh. Then Oliver Pryce squinted directly at Cyrus. “And that’s your guy, I presume.”
Cyrus stood rooted to the spot. “You can see me?” he asked.
“You’re right there, aren’t you? ’Course I can see you.”
“So can you make him…manifest to us?” Sam asked quickly.
“Don’t see why not.” Oliver rummaged in his bag and extracted a small ornate silver bowl, a couple of vials of nameless liquid, and several ziploc bags of herbs. He set about concocting a mixture, pausing once to throw out the comment, “Yes, I’m sure a sloth could do it faster, Mr. Dean Winchester, but would it get it right? I think not.” Sam laughed out loud at this.
Oliver took a piece of chalk from the bag and leisurely drew a few symbols on the library table. Finally, he lit a series of candles.
“We don’t have to hold hands,” he explained suddenly, glancing up at Sam, “because we’re not summoning this one: he’s already here.” He poked at the mixture in the bowl, held it up with both hands, and intoned a short spell.
Cyrus felt a surge of energy run through him. He gasped, clutching at a chair, and it moved under his touch. When he looked up, Sam, Dean, and Cas were staring at him. The psychic looked like he was in a trance, eyes closed, still holding the bowl.
Sam smiled at him. “Cyrus,” he said.
“You can call me Cy,” said Cyrus, shy with the sudden realization that they could all hear him now.
“Cy,” said Cas, “why are you here?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Cyrus, feeling like a lost kid on the first day of school. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”
“When you died,” Cas continued, “did no one come to guide you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you remember dying?” Cas asked, and both he and Sam darted quick glances at Dean.
Dean stood very still, with his lips slightly parted. “No,” Cyrus answered. “Honestly, I don’t. I remember talking to you—” he indicated Dean, who looked at the floor, “and then the next thing I remember is, I was at the back of the room and you guys were fighting.”
Dean raked a hand through his hair and left it there. Cyrus went on. “Then, uh, you left. But I was still here.” And though he could sense no disapproval in his audience, he felt like a truant child trying to explain himself to the authorities. His throat closed up, and his lip trembled a little. “I, uh, saw myself on the floor. So I know how I died. And that’s it. I mean, I’ve just been here ever since.”
“My God,” said Sam softly. He looked so sympathetic that Cyrus felt a sudden wild impulse to fling himself into him again. Sam noticed his agitation and bent forward a little. “It’s okay,” he reassured Cyrus. “I understand. If you have to, it’s okay.”
“Sam!” Dean objected, and Sam flashed an angry scowl at him.
“It’s okay,” Sam repeated. Dean pressed his lips together in an irritated line and half-shrugged.
“Don’t fight,” Cyrus pleaded. “I’m all right.”
Dean turned his annoyance on Cas. “How could this happen? He was—I killed him before I killed Death and that whole…fiasco, so why didn’t his reaper find him?”
Cas, with all eyes on him, shrugged elaborately. “Heaven’s been under excellent management, but these things happen sometimes.”
Sam and Dean made little hmph-ing noises, but Cyrus stared open-mouthed. “Heaven. Heaven? Heaven is real?”
“Yes,” Cas answered tranquilly. “I’m an angel, and I can tell you that heaven is real. It is my natural home, and will be yours too.”
Cyrus blinked a little and sat down on the nearest chair. He gaped at Cas in undisguised dismay—if he’s an angel then the universe is more screwed up than I think—until he remembered his manners. “Okay,” he said politely and unenthusiastically. “Okay.”
Sam sat on the corner of the table next to Cyrus’s chair. He raised a hand as though to pat Cyrus reassuringly on the arm, then lowered it when he remembered that he couldn’t. Cyrus looked at up at him anxiously. “What—what’s a reaper?” he squeaked.
“Just a guide, an angel guide. Nothing to be afraid of,” said Sam.
Dean began to hum “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Sam gave him a narrow-eyed glower that should have turned him to stone, and he stopped. “Oh, come on,” he protested. Cyrus smiled. “See? Cy’s got a sense of humor, unlike some people.”
“Wait,” said Cyrus. “Did you say you killed Death? What does that mean?”
“Ah,” said Dean. “That—that’s a long story, and it turned out to be a big clusterfuck, anyway…”
Sam reached up and touched his brother’s arm; as Dean looked down at him a silent and unreadable exchange occurred, and the tension between them evaporated.
“Well, then,” resumed Dean, “we get him a reaper, and everything’s fine, right, Cas?”
Cas frowned. “Possibly. But there must a reason he’s stuck here and not in the veil.” He turned to Cyrus and explained rapidly, “The veil is a buffer zone between earth and heaven. Normally we’d expect an errant soul to wander the veil, not the earth, unless he or she’s haunting a particular place, which is what you seem to be doing.” He sounded like a doctor, one who was notably lacking in the bedside manner department.
“Well, can you take him?” Dean asked Cas.
“I’m not a reaper,” Cas replied, shaking his head.
Cyrus, meanwhile, was coming to a slow and unwelcome realization. “If heaven is real, then hell is too.”
It was not a question, but Sam, after exchanging glances with Cas and Dean in turn, answered, “Yes.”
“Then maybe—maybe I’m supposed to go there?” This was a question, and Cas replied to it promptly.
“No,” he said, “if that was the case you’d already be there.”
“Like Eldon?” It was not a new thought, but it was strangely painful to say it out loud. Cas and the brothers stared at him, frowning as his face twisted and he pressed his hand against his mouth.
“I loved him,” Cyrus burst out at last. His eyes overflowed with the tears that had always come so readily to him. “I know what he did—I know what he was—but he was still my brother,” and he gulped back a sob. “I always loved him. But he didn’t know it. Maybe if he did, he wouldn’t have—”
Dean stood in front of him suddenly. “Don’t,” he said quickly, almost sharply. “Don’t think that. You’ll drive yourself nuts with all the what ifs.” He looked Cyrus in the eyes. “Don’t,” he repeated, exuding an older-brother authority that Cyrus responded to instinctively, and Cyrus nodded like an obedient child.
Sam made an impatient noise. “Let him talk, Dean,” he reproached.
Cyrus shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said.
Dean said slowly, “What I want to know is, why—why aren’t you mad? At me, I mean. You have every reason to be.”
Cyrus said simply, “Because you were right. I’m a monster.”
Dean looked intensely pained. “You were an innocent kid.”
“Was I? You don’t know that. You don’t know what I’ve done.” And Cyrus told them about the kid he had butchered under his father’s tutelage.
Sam and Dean immediately talked over each other in a jumble of protests. “You weren’t—that’s not—your father would have killed you—” They spoke so rapidly it was almost comical.
Cas’s voice broke through their jabbering. “Cyrus,” he intoned, “if you believe you are unworthy to enter heaven, let me be the one to assure you that you are not.” He paused and frowned. “Not unworthy, I mean.”
“Do I get a full refund, then, or are you just going to give me a hotel voucher and a seat on the next flight out?” Cyrus asked, deadpan.
Cas was nonplussed, but Sam and Dean smiled.
“Can’t I stay here?” Cyrus addressed the question to Cas, then turned to Sam and Dean and added wheedlingly, “I’ll stay out of your way, respect your privacy, everything.”
He already knew the answer before Cas said in a distant bureaucratic manner, “That’s not possible, I’m afraid.” Sam explained that all spirits trapped on earth would eventually deteriorate and become unstable, violent, a danger to the living.
“Yeah, I figured something like that,” Cyrus sighed when Sam had finished.
“It won’t be that bad, Cy,” Sam said gently.
“Yeah, but you’ve never been dead,” Cyrus muttered, hanging his head. “How would you know?”
A strange silence settled, during which Cyrus looked up to see Sam and Dean grimacing at one another and Cas shaking his head vehemently. “What?” Cyrus asked.
“Nothing,” said Sam. He leaned forward a little and hunched over to look into Cyrus’s eyes. “Listen, Cy—you trust us?”
Cyrus involuntarily glanced over at Dean, and immediately wished he hadn’t when Sam amended, “You trust me?” and Dean half-turned away.
Cyrus gave a tiny nod.
“You’ll be happy.”
“How? Do I drink from the Lethe?” Cyrus asked, and Sam’s face lit up at this classical reference.
“It’s exactly the opposite, in fact,” said Sam. “You’ll live in your memories—only the best ones.”
Cas exclaimed in dismay, “Sam! These are—I think they’re called ‘spoilers’.”
Dean let out a small choked-off laugh, but Sam was undeterred. “You’ve got some good memories, don’t you? We all do.”
Cyrus closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. “You’ve got to let go of all this,” said Sam.
They were all silent for a long moment, and then Cas said, “I’ll go and get him a reaper.”
Cyrus opened his eyes. “Maybe you don’t need to,” he said. He stood up and pointed at the wall behind the bookshelves.
They all looked in the direction he indicated. Cas was the first to turn back to him. “I don’t see anything.”
Sam and Dean appeared puzzled as well.
“It’s a door,” said Cyrus.
*****
It was a door he recognized—a car door. Cyrus smiled at Sam. “I think you’re right. I’ll be okay.”
“Happy,” corrected Sam softly, and Cyrus nodded.
“And you?” asked Cyrus.
Sam was slightly taken aback. He shrugged. “ ‘Call no man happy before he dies,’ ” he murmured flippantly.
“Sam, I don’t know what you did,” said Cyrus. He studied Dean, who was hanging back near the unmoving figure of Oliver Pryce. “But whatever it was, it was worth it. And deep down, you believe it, don’t you?”
Sam, too, looked at Dean. He smiled faintly. “Yeah.”
“Well, then,” Cyrus said, and Sam’s smile grew broad enough to produce a dimple.
Dean walked over to stand next to his brother. “I’m sorry I shot you,” he told Cyrus abruptly.
Cyrus winced a little. “I know,” he said awkwardly. “Don’t—” he stopped and waved his hand in a vague dismissive gesture. Sam slipped his arm around his brother’s shoulder, and Dean gave him a startled glance. Cyrus gazed at them approvingly and more than a little wistfully.
“Hey, Dean,” he said. “Let him hear you sing.”
Dean blinked at him, and Sam looked from Dean to Cyrus with his eyebrows perked up with curiosity. “I’ve heard him sing,” he told Cyrus with a wry half-smile that expressed exactly what he thought of his brother’s musical ability. Cyrus shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You really haven’t.” He cast a last look around the library and at the Winchesters, then turned to Cas, who was squinting at him from across the room. Cas nodded encouragingly.
“Thank you,” Cyrus said, and taking a deep breath, he reached for the door handle. As he opened it a low, purring sound, like a well-tuned engine, filled his ears, and he thought he heard Dean’s voice say, “Wow.”
*****
He’s in a car with his brother Eldon.
Cyrus remembers this. He’s nine years old. Eldon is nineteen. The car is Jacob’s brand new black Porsche Boxster. The top’s down, and the sun shines bright on the two of them. Eldon’s laughing as he drives, drumming his hands against the steering wheel, and there’s dried blood under his fingernails.
Cyrus knows what to say. He remembers this.
“Where are we going, Eldon?”
“Anywhere you want, little boy,” his brother replies. He reaches over to ruffle Cyrus’s hair. “We’re on a road trip, you and me.”
“Won’t we get in trouble?”
“Nope. Not us. Nothing can touch us,” Eldon says. There’s a note of hysteria in his laughter.
“But Daddy—”
“It’s okay, Cy,” Eldon interrupts. “Nothing bad will happen to you while I’m around. Now, where do you wanna go?”
“Anywhere?” Cyrus feels the same thrill he felt at the age of nine.
“Anywhere, baby,” says Eldon.
“Kennedy Space Center?” Cyrus asks hopefully, and his brother turns to give him a smile so full of appreciation and warmth that Cyrus feels like he might explode with joy.
“I thought you’d say Disneyworld,” Eldon chuckles.
“We can go there on the way back,” Cyrus proposes excitedly.
Eldon speeds up to pass a truck. “Do you want to go back?” he asks deliberately, and Cyrus is stunned by the bold and unheard-of possibility that this implies. We don’t have to go back.
“No,” Cyrus answers ardently. “Do—do you?”
Eldon glances down at the blood under his nails. He shakes his head. “No,” he says, and now Cyrus sees what he didn’t see when he was nine: the redness in his brother’s eyes and the traces of tears on his cheeks.
“Maybe we won’t,” Eldon says. “Maybe we won’t.”
Cyrus looks up. High cirrus clouds streak across the sky overhead, and the car is racing along so fast it feels like they’ll lift off at any moment. “We’re free,” he says.
“Free as a bird, little brother,” agrees Eldon. “We’ll be able to fly.”
And Cyrus laughs as he raises his hands into the rushing air.