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Jo sighs as she tosses the satchel that holds her laptop across the center console before sliding heavily into the driver’s seat.
She runs a hand down her face, frowning to herself as it shakes. She presses the fingers of her good hand against the deep, jagged scar that makes her momma cringe every time she sees it. Pin and needle numbness tingles under her skin after just a few seconds of pressure, and Jo glances at the time on her watch. Sure enough, she’s been in the library a solid 6 hours past the time she should’ve taken her pills with lunch.
That’s one thing she hadn’t anticipated about hunting, she thinks as she pulls out of the parking lot and heads towards the Miller house. Nobody warns you that for every moment of salting and burning, every silver round or bloodied blade, there’s at least a few hours spent bent over birth and death records, old newspapers, and the kind of dusty books that make the librarian look at you strangely.
Still, Jo can’t imagine doing anything else. Every life she saves or soul she puts to rest settles something in her own; each one makes her feel a little less helpless.
Everyone starts hunting for more or less the same reason: they’ve seen the monsters hiding in the dark. The specifics vary from hunter to hunter, but each story has that same fearful, first-time flavor and ends with the inability to let go.
Jo saw her first monsters on a cold afternoon in late spring, the year she turned 11. She hasn’t stopped being scared since.
She’s had multiple surgeries to attempt to repair the damage done to her hand. The severed artery was sewn back together—Jo still remembers the feeling of her life leaking out of her with every pump of her heart—and they reattached the nerve ends, too.
After a year passed with only sluggish regeneration of the nerve, they told her she’d never regain full use of her hand. Another surgery to perform a tendon transfer at least partially corrected the look of her clawed fingers, made her less of an obvious oddity to the other kids at school, but she’s never regained feeling in the smallest of them and her grip is so weak she can barely hold a pen without shaking, let alone aim a gun.
Despite the time it took to recover physically, to re-learn how to write and shoot and even wipe her own ass left-handed, she’d still take that over the hell of the ongoing psychological recovery.
They’d kept her at the hospital even after she was healed enough to leave, because she’d wake up screaming every time they forced her into a sedated sleep. Momma sent her to a psychiatrist for a while, but Jo couldn’t say anything more than ‘I don’t remember’ each time the woman asked her to describe what happened, to go back to that day. She says it enough times that it almost becomes true, too.
Eventually she stopped going altogether because there’d been no sense in paying to sit there, talking about nothing, when momma was already struggling under the expense of Jo’s surgeries and the hospital stays, the months of physical therapy afterwards. Not to mention the medications.
She digs around in the backseat for her bag once she’s parked, searches out the bottles and blister packs of pills inside. She grabs just the yellow capsule of generic gabapentin and swallows it down with a grimace at the temperature of the water that’s been sitting in the heat of the car all day.
The anticonvulsant helps to manage the chronic pain of nerve spasms, and the little bottle of oxy in her duffel is there for when the pain is peaking and unrelenting. There’s also sleeping pills so she can actually rest a few hours each night, and anti-anxiety meds to help her function past the fear of the things she sees in her dreams when she does.
The building knot of vague, indescribable unease in her stomach says it’s nearly time for the melt of an Ativan under her tongue and what passes for a night’s sleep. She has the sick, slithering sensation of eyes on her as she makes her way slowly up the walk.
This case has had her on edge for days. Recently widowed housewife drives the business end of a kitchen knife straight through her eye and out the back of her head, right in the middle of cooking dinner for her and her stepson. A few days before, her brother-in-law loses his head in a freak accident, apparently while investigating a stuck window. All in the span of less than a week after her husband comes home from work with a six pack in the front seat and sits in the garage with the motor running, doesn’t even crack one of the beers before he supposedly commits suicide.
The only survivor of the Miller family is Max, who seems appropriately grief-stricken when questioned, but has felt off from the start. Max has this look in his eyes every time Jo speaks to him about his family, this distant, painful look of something wrong that hides just under his mask.
She hasn’t found anything to indicate any kind of supernatural involvement, despite the strange circumstances and the feeling she gets from Max, though, and she’ll be happy to put Saginaw in her rear-view soon. There’s something in this city that’s kept her paranoid, makes her take a careful look around once she reaches the front step, running suspiciously narrowed eyes over the shadows beginning to form in the early evening light.
She’d promised—when all the ordering, bargaining, and finally begging her not to go hadn’t changed Jo’s stubborn mind—that she’d be careful.
But careful means nothing when the sound of the doorbell ringing is met with a cry from inside.
The way the unlocked door opens easily under her hand should have set off alarms in her head, but she’s solely focused on the guttural sounds of pain that draw her further into the house, pushing through the doorway with her gun drawn. She’s already in the living room before rotten egg sulfur stink invades her senses and she takes a too-late, reflexive step back.
There was nothing demonic about this case. She’d made sure; she always makes sure.
Every piece of furniture in the room is heaped in a pile of torn fabric and splintered wood against the far wall, like it was swept up in the path of a breaking wave. There’s just one heavy chair left standing in the middle of the room, now, and Max is cuffed to it by his wrists and ankles. Max whose blue eyes are bloodshot and wide with the force of the otherworldly screams somehow still tearing their way up a throat that is split open.
Fast, shallow breaths are barely able to force themselves around the panicked fluttering of Jo’s pulse in her throat. She tells herself to wake up; she tells herself to run. But there’s no drop into screaming wakefulness and her legs are frozen by the icy fear pounding through her veins as Sam Winchester lifts his bloodied face from Max’s neck.
He pins her with the same dark, empty eyes that haunt her dreams, that tell her to look, but now they’re glowing, glowing yellow-gold and hazy with sparks like an electrical storm.
She knows Dean is behind her even before he drops one hand on her hip, plucks the gun from her numb fingers with the other, because Sam is smiling at him with that bloodied mouth, the way Sam could only ever smile for him.
“Well, isn’t this a nice surprise,” Dean says near her ear.
His hands are guiding her further into the room, to where Sam is standing in a puddle of Max’s blood. She finally manages to take a breath that feels like more than just a sip of oxygen, feels all her muscles tense in utter refusal to go quietly, digs her heels in and lashes out with her elbow.
Dean releases her hip with a small grunt of surprise as the blow connects, and Jo turns just far enough that she can slam her fist hard into the corner of his mouth, uses enough force that it knocks his head sideways.
She slips her knife out from its sheath on her belt, is holding it tight with a shaking hand when he wipes the blood from his split lip with the back of his wrist, whips around to look at her with insanity peeking out through his wide, sparkling eyes, manic and violence-starved.
Someone’s been practicing, he says to Sam, who responds with a twisted parody of what a laugh should be. That cold edge of menace on his face—the curl of his lips some fool might mistake for a grin—makes her heart beat hummingbird-quick where it pounds against her ribs.
Go on, then, he says with an indulgent smile, hauls Max’s lifeless corpse out of the chair by the slick meat that was once his throat, one-handed like he weighs nothing at all, and drops him carelessly to the floor. We’ve got time.
She doesn’t stand a chance and she knows it; she was doomed as soon as they fixed their eyes on her. He circles her, stance low and predatory, like he’s tapping into some primal thing evolution forgot to take from him, and his delighted expression promises pain. She’s armed this time—both with a blade and the ten years of training between then and now—but she’d give anything not to feel like a scared little girl right now.
It’s almost laughable how easily he snatches her hand out of the air when she tries to bury the knife in his chest. Under her own scream, she can hear the sound of her wrist cracking as he twists it up towards her forearm. He doesn’t let up, bends it impossibly further while he applies agonizing pressure to the joint of her elbow with his other arm until she goes to her knees.
She knows it’s over when she hears the metallic clang of her knife hitting the floor across the room after Dean pries it from her white-knuckled grip and tosses it over his shoulder.
He darts forward so fast—faster than he should be able to, fast enough that she knows he could have destroyed her three times over by now—and she can’t even try to defend herself before his hand is tangled firmly in her hair, yanking her forward so the softness of her midsection meets the punishing force of the bent knee he’s driving into it. She’s choking and moaning, ready to be sick from the pain in her stomach when he spins to put himself behind her, winds his arm across her neck to grip her shoulder. Her chin’s propped on his elbow as he hooks his other arm under one of her knees, hauls it up painfully high enough that she can’t get either of her legs to the floor, can’t do much more than thrash in his hold as he carries her towards the chair where Sam is patiently waiting.
She’s drawing blood with her shaking hands as she claws her nails deep into Dean’s arm in a final, frantic attempt to pull free.
Still not much of a challenge, he says as he drops her heavily into the chair.
“Sorry to disappoint,” she bites out, pained and from between clenched teeth. The cuffs he snaps on despite her struggles are still wet where Max must have pulled against them until the skin of his wrists were raw and bloody.
He chuckles, patronizingly taps the fingers of an open hand against her cheek instead of a fist.
“Think I liked you better when you were sweet on me,” he says with that plush-mouthed grin she once thought was charming.
She thinks about spitting right in his face, because she’s going to suffer anyway and she might as well earn it, but then Sam appears in front of her. His eyes are still glowing even as the yellow fades from them. Jo has to choke back an instinctive whimper as she looks at where Max’s blood is drying on his chin.
He’s holding her knife, and she doesn’t remember seeing him move to get it from where Dean threw it, doesn’t remember seeing him move at all.
“William Anthony Harvelle,” Sam says, slow as he traces his finger over each of the engraved initials on the handle. Jo shudders to hear that name cross those lips, wants nothing more than to drag that blade deep across his throat just to stop him ever saying it again.
He smirks at her like he knows just what she’s thinking. His finger runs up higher, over the edge that is sharp enough that it parts his skin—just slightly, not deep enough to make him bleed the way he deserves.
“Y’know,” he says, low like a secret as he moves to stand at her side. “I can’t think of too many times I felt closer to our father than the night he told us how your daddy died. How that hellspawn tore him open, left him with his guts in his hands, choking on his own blood, in so much pain he was beggingfor the bullet by the time dad finally put it through his skull.”
Dad did have some great stories, Dean says with a wistful sigh at her other side, smiling over at Sam the way Jo used to smile when she thought of happy memories of her dad.
All she can think of now is what his screams might have sounded like, his blood-filled mouth praying for death, how many seconds, minutes he suffered before it finally came.
Yeah. Yeah, he did, Sam says, tenderness in it making that awful voice all the worse. He cups his brother’s cheek with one hand, pulls him in for a kiss over Jo’s head. He slicks his thumb over the gash in Dean’s lower lip, follows it with his tongue when Dean groans and drags him closer with a hand in his hair.
“But that was a mercy killing,” Sam says, pulling away when both their lips are swollen and blood-smeared. He drags the tip of the knife down Jo’s bare shoulder to her elbow, tracing the blue lines of veins under her skin. “And that’s a concept we don’t have much use for.”
Could send her back in pieces, like the others, Dean suggests idly, twisting the ends of the hair at Sam’s neck around his fingers where’s he’s still holding him. It’d kill Ellen.
Sam leans into the touch and hums noncommittally, scraping over Jo’s scar like he wants to flay her open and dig around inside, explore the full extent of the damage he left behind.
If we’re going to kill Ellen, I want to see her face when we do it, he says.
He crouches low to put his face level with hers, the full force of his gaze no less terrifying now that the golden glow is gone from his eyes, filled instead with cruelty as he draws the spine of the blade over her wrist.
Guess we’ll just have to send her back missing a piece instead.
She thinks back to the last thing her momma said to her the day she walked out of the house with a duffel slung over her shoulder, daddy’s hunting knife at her hip and determination in her eyes.
"Mark my words, Joanna Beth,” she’d said as she hugged Jo tight and pressed her cheek to the top of her head, breathed in the smell of her hair like she might never see her again. “This can only end in tears."
The last thing Jo thinks before the screaming starts, before she begs for the end like her daddy did, is that momma was right.