Stole Soul Picnic 13/14
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Chapter 12
Empiricism vs. Empire
The man chuckled. “Not quite the Dean you remember.”
“I barely knew you,” Samuel returned, surprising Gwen. “Not that I could forget what happened in ’73, but even so. And a lot can change in thirty-odd years.”
“Precisely. More than you can possibly know. Unless, of course, your employer—”
“I work alone, in case you forgot.”
“That’s not what we’ve heard.”
“That’s also not what we see,” added the second man, his voice equally distorted.
Samuel frowned. “You must be my namesake.”
“Must I?” Dollars to doughnuts, that had been accompanied by a sardonically raised eyebrow.
“In any case, the fact that I’m not currently alone doesn’t mean—”
“Samuel. We know.”
Samuel shut up.
“But you apparently need some information from us.”
“What? No, no, I just... wanted to invite you back into the family business.”
The first man—Dean?—snorted. “Sure. Because you work alone.”
“And to ask you—”
“The Men of Letters are off limits. You’ll get nothing from us on that score—what we know, what we think, nothing. Because it’s so classified, not even the NSA knows.”
“But,” the second man—Sam?—continued before Samuel could object, “we can give you something else—information you actually need.”
Samuel frowned. “Go on.”
The guy who might or might not be Sam held up a hand. “First. Our price for this information is that you stop looking for us and for the Men of Letters.”
“Fine,” Samuel agreed... a little too readily, Gwen thought.
The guy who might be Dean turned to his companion and said something in a language Gwen had never heard before. The other man—she was just going to call them Sam and Dean for convenience!—replied in the same language.
“Well?” Samuel demanded.
The two men turned back to the camera. “The Mother of All has returned,” Dean said.
Samuel swallowed hard. “I’d heard rumors. Eve.”
“So she calls herself,” Sam replied. “That is not her true name.”
“What is her true name?”
“Unimportant. What matters is that she possesses a psychic connection to all her offspring. And she has commanded them to turn, not to slay. Her purpose is to deny human souls to Abaddon.”
It was just as well that Gwen wasn’t supposed to know anything about Abaddon at all. This was the first she’d heard of the demon trying to collect souls, and she couldn’t have hidden her shock.
“What’s more,” Dean continued, “she is aware that someone is torturing monsters for information, in search of a way into Purgatory. She’ll stop at nothing to ensure that such knowledge remains hidden.”
Finding a way into Purgatory, a repository of souls. Chuck hadn’t hinted that that was what Samuel was up to, and Samuel had been diligent about covering his tracks where the family was concerned. All Chuck had said was that Samuel was working for Abaddon. Gwen felt sick.
For his part, Samuel couldn’t help paling but asked, “Why would anyone want into Purgatory?”
Sam leaned forward a little, though not enough to reveal his face. “Abaddon is trying to garner the power of as many souls as she possibly can to fuel an army that will release Lucifer and restart the Apocalypse.”
Dean nodded. “Any soul will do, human or monster. And all monsters are doomed upon their deaths to spend eternity in Purgatory. Abaddon covets that power source.”
And Samuel was helping her get it. Gwen found herself wishing that he’d been in that van instead of Christian or Johnny. The real Christian had probably died on a hunt a few weeks back, when he’d been shot and the demon claimed it had been just a graze, but Johnny was just a redshirt, following Samuel’s orders without question simply because he was family. He hadn’t deserved to die.
“Eve knows Abaddon’s desire,” Sam went on. “Her goal is to take as many souls out of circulation as possible, lock them away in Purgatory where Abaddon presumably can’t get at them. Once they’re turned, she doesn’t care how quickly they die.”
Samuel straightened in alarm. “So if she knew, say, the location of a place where monsters were being interrogated....”
“Chances are, she’d destroy it,” Dean answered. “If they’re dead, they can’t talk, and they’re also safe from anything Abaddon might do to their souls.”
“But it’d be a quick destruction,” Sam added. “She wouldn’t want her children to suffer.”
Samuel sat back and ran a hand over his mouth. “Tell me the truth, boys,” he said after a moment. “Why are you telling me all this? If you know something....”
“What we know about you matters less to us right now than saving the lives of innocent humans. We’re in the business of saving people—hunting things just happens to be the way we do it.”
Samuel nodded slowly. “If... if that’s so... come back and work with me.”
“No,” they chorused.
“I could track you down, you know. I could even classify you as a threat to the very innocent civilians you say you want to help. See, I’ve heard some things about you two as well.”
At that, two more men stepped into frame, flanking Sam and Dean. These men remained standing but were in enough light that their arms were visible—in more ways than one. The white man on the left bore a black wrist brace and a P-90; the man on the right had brown skin, a tribal tattoo, vambraces, and a fearsome-looking but unfamiliar pistol on his hip.
“You don’t want to do that, Mr. Campbell,” said one of the newcomers, his tenor voice quiet, dangerous—and undistorted.
“What the hell...” Samuel breathed.
Dean’s chuckle was still distorted. “Don’t try to figure it out. You’ve never seen our like before.”
“Wh—how do you know?”
“That’s classified,” growled a second new voice, lower than the first and also undistorted.
“And this conversation is over,” stated the first newcomer, and the call abruptly ended.
Samuel took a deep breath and let it out again. “Well, that was enlightening. Wish you two hadn’t heard it, but I’m sure you’ll trust me to decide what the rest of the family should know.”
Gwen sighed. “I didn’t know what they wanted, honest. They just said they wanted to talk to you.”
“There’s got to be a way to verify what they said. I can’t even be sure they were really Sam and Dean....” Samuel trailed off, staring at the computer screen but not really looking at it.
“We’ll go,” Mark said and gathered up the laptop before Samuel even registered that he’d spoken.
“What? Oh. Fine. I’ll... see you later. Just keep all this under your hats, will you?”
“Sure,” Gwen agreed.
Samuel nodded and went back to thinking hard.
Mark and Gwen beat a hasty retreat and didn’t speak to each other until they got back to the basement. Then he retrieved the whiskey bottle and shot glasses that were stashed in the bottom drawer of the desk, and she gratefully drank the shot he poured for her.
He downed his own and breathed, “What the hell....”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Them beacons.”
“Monsters don’t work on subspace. But I’d bet cash money the rest of it’s true.”
“Was they really....”
“Sam and Dean?” She shook her head. “Hell if I know. But if they’re with my brother, the one thing I do know is, he’ll never tell me.”
“Classified.”
“Classified,” she agreed and held out her glass for another shot.
Meanwhile, Castiel stood outside a seemingly normal yet heavily warded cabin in the Cascades, trying very hard not to let on how revolted he was by what Menva had already done there in the course of adapting to her new corporeal form and testing and honing her powers. It was at least a mercy that the girl whose body she’d stolen had suffocated on the toxic volcanic fumes even before her corpse reached the lava in the crater of Mount Rainier. There were some things no human should witness.
Castiel couldn’t have killed Menva if he wanted to, of course. Her powers easily neutralized his, and she was standing just inside the open door to speak to him, thus staying behind the layer of anti-angel warding. But as it happened, his stated purpose was not to kill but to negotiate. Not that she was in a particularly diplomatic mood, but the attempt was necessary.
“Don’t lie!” she snapped. “I felt my children suffering, and then I felt their lives snuffed out in an instant. Don’t tell me the angels had nothing to do with it!”
“It was not our doing,” he repeated, choosing his words carefully to convey strict truth—just not all of it. “Perhaps Abaddon seeks to deny you worshippers on this plane, or perhaps she grows impatient with the speed of the search for your realm.”
“My realm?! This is my realm, the one your Father robbed me of! My prison is no kingdom—it is eternal torment where my children fight constantly and there is nothing new to learn!”
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “All we ask is that you stop this plan to turn all of humankind into your children. By withholding innocent souls from Heaven, you risk arousing my Father’s ire once more.”
She huffed and started to close the door.
“And there are those among the Host who would rather God didn’t know what’s been happening lately.”
She paused and pulled the door all the way open again. “What are you saying?”
“We’re not your enemy. Humans are not your enemy. And your current strategy seems very much like that of the Replicators when they attempted to defeat the Wraith by destroying human worlds.”
Her eyes blazed, and her fists clenched. “How dare you compare me to those mindless machines!”
“They were not mindless. Neither are you. I’m simply asking you to attack your true enemy directly. This scorched-earth approach may push more hunters and even angels into Abaddon’s camp. And that would mean disaster for your children.”
She looked at him closely for a long moment, her ire cooling as she considered the wisdom of his words. Then she nodded once. “I will think on it.”
He bowed and left, making his way above Earth’s atmosphere to the bridge of the General Hammond, which was both cloaked and hidden from the senses of demons and monsters by wards devised by Gabriel and Ash. “How was that?” he asked Carter, handing her the hidden microphone he’d carried.
Carter smiled. “I think you sold it, Castiel. But we’ll find out soon enough whether she bought it. Mr. Singer’s at the SGC working on a way to patch the life-sign data we’ve collected through to the Men of Letters’ computer so that both of us can track monster activity with greater sensitivity. And then there’s this,” she added, pointing to a display that showed a strong orange life sign at the Campbell compound.
“Abaddon,” he realized.
She nodded. “Showed up about five minutes ago. Samuel’s probably filled her in on what Salim and Dishon told him, and I’d be willing to bet the reason she’s still there is that they’re arguing about whether he’s going to keep working for her.”
“Let’s hope John Campbell’s death gives him sufficient pause.”
She paused herself. “Yeah. Would have waited for John to leave the building once the beacon signal stopped moving, but we’d barely gotten the coordinates when someone destroyed the beacon. We couldn’t risk word getting back to Samuel; Gwen’s cover would have been blown. And the place was EMF-shielded somehow; we couldn’t get a lock on him to beam him out.”
He sighed. “You’re sure Menva and Abaddon won’t consider the possibility of the Asgard beam?”
“Positive. Menva doesn’t know that Earth made contact with the Othalla Asgard, let alone received weapons from them. And Abaddon knows it’s a ship-based weapon but won’t be able to find us with the new wards. As far as she knows, the only Earth ship in this part of the galaxy is the Sun Tzu, and it’s twenty light-years away.”
“All right, then. Now we wait.”
The wait lasted four months of Earth time, during which life in Pegasus and most of the Milky Way returned to a more guarded version of normal. Many Wraith queens chose to stake out the Milky Way edge of Pegasus, but the attempted invasions ceased for the moment as Abaddon turned her attention away from (inter)galactic conquest to focus on “retaking” Earth from Menva. At the same time, thanks to the slightest nudge from a certain Trickster archangel, Menva began capturing demons and running truly diabolical experiments on them in an attempt both to pay back the torture of her creations and to search out a potential weakness in Abaddon. Abaddon retaliated by ordering that average monsters be slaughtered and only Alphas captured.
With a bit of stage management from the outraged Ancients, ensuring that the two sides crossed paths with a higher frequency than random chance, the conflict quickly escalated into a full-scale war worthy of a Peter Jackson movie. Chicago, in particular, fell prey to turf battles the likes of which the Windy City hadn’t seen since the end of Prohibition. Keeping hunters and civilians out of harm’s way became a full-time job into which Henry and Josie threw themselves without hesitation, and Bobby and Rufus returned to the bunker to help them track the action and dispatch hunters to hunts that weren’t likely to end up on the front lines, especially routine salt-and-burns. The angels likewise did their best to save as many human lives as they could. As for the Campbells, Samuel found himself unable to leave Abaddon’s service for reasons he wouldn’t or couldn’t explain, but he told the rest of the family enough to justify his granting them permission to stop working with him. Gwen and Mark quickly jumped ship and teamed up with Bobby and Rufus instead. Some foolhardy lone-wolf hunters still got themselves killed or captured, though, and with one side requiring blood to live and the other reveling in wanton destruction, some civilian deaths were inevitable.
But so was a showdown between Abaddon and Menva. As attrition rates skyrocketed, the collision course became locked in firmly enough that Raphael could carefully drop Abaddon’s location to Menva and vice versa and let the two parties do the rest. Initially, each side tried to assassinate the other’s leader, with no success. After about the fifth attempt, however, Menva had enough data on demons to be able to create a messenger that could survive long enough to take Abaddon a request for parley. Abaddon tried to kill it, failed, and sent it back with her acceptance.
Shortly thereafter, George Hammond walked into the Heavenly Roadhouse and called over the din, “Ash, there’d better be popcorn left.”
Behind the bar, Ash laughed and tossed Hammond a beer and an unopened bag of freshly-popped popcorn. Hammond nodded his thanks and went to find a seat among the raucous crowd of hunters, angels, and friends gathered around the giant flat-screen TV that Gabriel had set up to display the upcoming showdown, a video feed that would also be displayed at the SGC and in Atlantis. No sooner had Hammond sat down, however, than the man next to him straightened to attention instinctively.
“As you were, son,” he said with a smile, forestalling a salute. “Understand we owe your boys a world of gratitude for their service.”
John Winchester returned the smile. “Understand my boys owe your people a world of gratitude for the help and the home.”
“One good turn deserves another, not that I had much to do with it.”
Mary Winchester leaned forward to see past her husband’s shoulder. “The Stargate program wouldn’t be what it is without your leadership, General. You probably have more to do with where Sam and Dean are than we know.”
Hammond raised his beer to her. “Thank you, ma’am.”
The sound of footsteps suddenly came from the TV, causing the Roadhouse crowd to fall silent. Menva, who had abandoned her host’s dirty nightgown in favor of a flowing white chiton, entered the meeting room with dragons flanking her and shapeshifters and werewolves guarding her from behind. “Stay close,” she ordered. “Don’t make a move unless her guards attack first. But whatever happens, leave Abaddon to me.”
“Yes, Mother,” her guards chorused.
“That’s creepy,” John muttered.
Mary shushed him.
A moment later, a black-leather-clad Abaddon strolled in with her own guards, looking around the room appraisingly. “Angel-proof,” she stated. “Nice touch.”
Menva looked surprised, but only for a moment. “No sense in letting anyone interrupt.”
Abaddon chuckled. “No. No sense at all. Especially not your minions.” She snapped her fingers, and all of Menva’s guards dropped dead.
Menva snarled, and all of Abaddon’s guards exploded in flashes of orange-gold light. “I thought we were here to talk.”
Hammond opened his bag of popcorn and offered some to John.
“Oh, by all means!” Abaddon returned as the two queens began to circle each other. “After all, we have so much in common. I really don’t see why you and your subjects insist on standing in my way.”
“You have subjects,” Menva snapped. “I have children. I am nothing like you, Destroyer. I give life; you only take it.”
“Don’t make me laugh! You twist human souls into something God never meant them to be, same as me. You just paper over it by claiming you’re making something new. Well, newsflash, sister: your science fair pets serve Lucifer’s purpose just as well as my kind does.”
“Lucifer! You think I’d ever bow to that jumped-up twit? I am a goddess!”
“You are a ghost!”
“What does that make you?”
An angel sword flashed in Abaddon’s hand, but Menva shot it away with a bolt of lightning. Empty-handed, Abaddon lunged at Menva, and the two grappled with each other in what might look like a cat fight but for the massive thunderstorm it caused outside the building. Yet just when it seemed they were about to reach the point of a death blow, each pulled at the other... and suddenly their lifeless corporeal forms fell away as a column of whirling yellow light and black smoke spun up out of them, through the ceiling, and out of sight.
The angels, the Ancients, and everyone who’d worked for the SGC in life leapt to their feet with a roar of victory.
“What just happened?” Mary demanded.
“Stalemate!” Hammond declared.
Caltus turned around and explained, “Abaddon and Menva have thrown each other into another plane of existence, where they’ll be locked in eternal combat until the real Apocalypse happens.”
“That’s how Oma Desala got rid of Anubis,” Hammond added, “and Morgan le Fay did the same thing to Adria.”
John frowned. “That doesn’t tell us anything, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Caltus stated before any more verbal barbs could be thrown. “The point is, they’re both gone for good. The war’s over.”
Now it was the hunters’ turn to cheer.
At the SGC, where the occupants of the bunker had gone to watch the showdown with their friends in the Stargate program, it was all Henry could do not to sob in relief. Abaddon was defeated. The Letters were safe, and so were the boys. The nightmare was over.
Except that it wasn’t.
Everyone who’d died was still dead—Millie, John, the elder Letters. Henry was still stuck in another century. He was still remarried and expecting another child. And none of that could be undone.
Struggling to get a handle on his emotions, he slipped out of the conference room into the hallway. But he’d only managed a couple of ragged breaths before he noticed Raphael standing in the doorway to Landry’s office.
“You have visitors,” Raphael said and beckoned Henry toward the office.
Henry swallowed hard, steeled himself, and walked into the office, not sure what to expect. He halfway thought it might be the boys. But he froze with his mouth hanging open when he turned at Raphael’s direction and saw the last people he would ever have expected to see.
“Millie? Johnny?”
Millie smiled. “Hello, Henry.”
So did John as he nodded once. “Pops.”
“What... how....”
“Raphael brought us down to talk to you. Said he still owes us.”
Millie stepped forward and put a cold hand on his arm. “I’m not angry, darling. We know what happened, why you disappeared and why you remarried so quickly. It’s not like I pined once you were gone. Sure, it hurt, but I found a good man in Lawrence and married him.”
A tear slid down Henry’s cheek. “H-how long after....”
“A couple of years. But I hadn’t known him nearly as long as you’ve known Josie. And I knew all along you still loved her.”
“I... I never meant....”
“No! Oh, no, darling, I know you were never unfaithful. I never thought that. You’ve just been in a difficult situation these last few months. And things like that happen.”
“Not like you’ve had a hell of a lot of choice in the matter, either,” John added. “I know what that’s like, trust me.”
Henry looked at him. “You’re not mad?”
John huffed. “Hell, Pops, I spent too much of my life mad at you for no reason. And I had my share of slip-ups after Mary died—even had a kid from one of ’em. Didn’t tell ’em anything. Thought I was keepin’ ’em safe.” He shook his head. “Instead, I got ’em killed.”
“You couldn’t know, John,” Millie stated.
“I should have. But I was too wrapped up in worrying about Sammy to realize any hunter’s family is endangered by what he does, no matter how he tries to shield their innocence, give ’em normal.”
Henry couldn’t help chuckling at that. “Guess you come by it honestly, huh, Sport?”
John ducked his head and smiled a little, much like Sam and Dean did when embarrassed.
“I do love you both. I always have, and I always will.”
“We know,” Millie and John chorused.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t love your new family just as much,” Millie continued. “Love’s not a zero-sum game.”
Henry tried to swallow down the lump in his throat and nodded. “And John, I’ll... I’ll do my best to do right by your boys.”
Now it was John’s turn to chuckle a little. “They’ll probably outlive their cousins’ grandkids, at this rate. But... would you do one thing for me, s-something I left too long, forgot ’til it was too late?”
“Name it.”
“When you see the boys again... tell ’em I’m proud of ’em.”
Henry sniffled and nodded. “Sure. I’ll do that.”
“Goodbye, Henry,” Millie said, squeezing his arm. “Go live well. We’ll see you on the other side.”
“Just not too soon,” John rumbled, a twinkle in his eye belying his gruffness. “Bye, Pops.”
“Goodbye,” Henry breathed.
And then he was alone.
Even as he swiped a tissue from the box on Landry’s desk, he felt the sharpness of his grief and guilt ease. This was closure, he supposed, and it was surprising how much it helped. His losses still made him ache, but at least... at least he knew Millie wasn’t hurt by his moving on.
Once he’d regained his composure, he stepped back out into the hall, determined to find Josie. They’d inadvertently been avoiding each other the past few months—work had legitimately taken up almost all of their waking moments and exhausted them too deeply to do more than eat and sleep when they weren’t busy, but they hadn’t made time for each other in the rare lulls between storms. That needed to change. Maybe he hadn’t had much choice in the timing of everything, but he would have married her eventually. As it was... well, there was no reason to only ‘make the best of it.’ He wanted to make it the best.
But suddenly he realized that she’d left the conference room shortly after victory was assured, and he had no idea where she’d gone. Looking around, he saw that the hall dead-ended in one direction, but at the corner at the other end of the hall stood a young blonde lady in nondescript civilian clothes—grey sweater, tweed skirt, black-rimmed glasses—cradling an open book in her arms. He’d never seen her before. She seemed to be waiting for him, though, and as he walked toward her, she pointed down the next corridor.
“What....” he began.
“You’re looking for your wife,” she answered quietly. “She’s down that hall.”
Puzzled, he started to turn the corner but glanced down at the lady as he passed. His height allowed him to see over the top of the book, and though she pressed it to her chest, she didn’t do so fast enough to prevent him from seeing that the text was all in handwritten Greek and that between the pages rested a bookmark woven of golden thread. He paused, staring at her.
“Go to your wife, Mr. Winchester,” the Fate ordered gently and vanished.
The soft sound of crying pulled him out of his shock. Sure enough, just where the Fate had pointed him, there she was, standing alone with her back to him, trying to cover her tears with one hand while the other rested on her growing belly. Josie. His best friend.
His wife.
His pregnant wife.
He walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hi,” he breathed.
She sniffled and turned to him, her eyes troubled. “Henry, I....”
“Shh.” He wiped the tears from her chin and kissed her. “I’ve missed you, sweetheart.”
The fear cleared from her face then, and she let him pull her into a warm hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“So am I. But it’s over.”
“I love you so much....”
“What say we start over from here, now, today?”
She pulled back a little. “How do you mean?”
“Josie, my love, will you marry me?”
She giggled. “We’re already married, silly.”
He smiled. “I just had to say it.”
“Well, then I guess I ought to say yes, shouldn’t I?”
He kissed her again and felt not the slightest twinge of guilt.
Meanwhile, in Atlantis, the initial jubilation had subsided enough that Woolsey was just beginning to take suggestions on how to notify the rest of the galaxy that the danger was past. But the discussion was interrupted by a klaxon and announcement of “Unscheduled offworld activation!”
Everyone charged out of the conference room just in time to see what looked like a data crystal slide through the Gate, somehow bypassing the Gate shield, before the wormhole disconnected. There was a long moment of wary silence in which no one approached the Gate, but the object just lay on the ground, inert.
Finally, McKay produced a handheld scanner to get what readings he could from it remotely. “I’m not picking up any kind of energy signature,” he reported.
Woolsey nodded once. “All right. Proceed with caution.”
Blaster at the ready, Ronon accompanied McKay as the scientist approached the object. McKay punched some commands into his scanner and made speculative noises, but finally he said, “Yeah, it... looks like it’s just a data crystal.”
“Dr. Zelenka,” Woolsey asked, “would you please bring Dr. McKay a firewalled computer to read the crystal?”
Zelenka nodded and left to get the requested computer as McKay cautiously picked up the crystal and brought it back to Stargate Ops. At Sheppard’s suggestion, his team, Woolsey, and the Winchesters met Zelenka in a lab and watched as McKay plugged the crystal into the firewalled laptop’s crystal reader attachment. Once McKay called up the crystal’s contents, a list of twenty or so sets of coordinates appeared on the laptop’s screen, followed by a string of text that wasn’t Wraith or Ancient.
“What’s it say?” Ronon asked.
“It’s Asgard,” Sam said quietly. “It basically means, ‘You’re welcome.’”
But Zelenka was looking at the coordinates. “Aren’t those....”
“Worlds at the edge of the galaxy,” McKay answered.
Woolsey asked the Daedalus and the Apollo to investigate, since they had remained in Pegasus because of Earth being more or less quarantined. When Caldwell and Ellis returned, they reported that the worlds were all intact... but the Wraith hives that had been in orbit around them weren’t.
Next
Empiricism vs. Empire
The man chuckled. “Not quite the Dean you remember.”
“I barely knew you,” Samuel returned, surprising Gwen. “Not that I could forget what happened in ’73, but even so. And a lot can change in thirty-odd years.”
“Precisely. More than you can possibly know. Unless, of course, your employer—”
“I work alone, in case you forgot.”
“That’s not what we’ve heard.”
“That’s also not what we see,” added the second man, his voice equally distorted.
Samuel frowned. “You must be my namesake.”
“Must I?” Dollars to doughnuts, that had been accompanied by a sardonically raised eyebrow.
“In any case, the fact that I’m not currently alone doesn’t mean—”
“Samuel. We know.”
Samuel shut up.
“But you apparently need some information from us.”
“What? No, no, I just... wanted to invite you back into the family business.”
The first man—Dean?—snorted. “Sure. Because you work alone.”
“And to ask you—”
“The Men of Letters are off limits. You’ll get nothing from us on that score—what we know, what we think, nothing. Because it’s so classified, not even the NSA knows.”
“But,” the second man—Sam?—continued before Samuel could object, “we can give you something else—information you actually need.”
Samuel frowned. “Go on.”
The guy who might or might not be Sam held up a hand. “First. Our price for this information is that you stop looking for us and for the Men of Letters.”
“Fine,” Samuel agreed... a little too readily, Gwen thought.
The guy who might be Dean turned to his companion and said something in a language Gwen had never heard before. The other man—she was just going to call them Sam and Dean for convenience!—replied in the same language.
“Well?” Samuel demanded.
The two men turned back to the camera. “The Mother of All has returned,” Dean said.
Samuel swallowed hard. “I’d heard rumors. Eve.”
“So she calls herself,” Sam replied. “That is not her true name.”
“What is her true name?”
“Unimportant. What matters is that she possesses a psychic connection to all her offspring. And she has commanded them to turn, not to slay. Her purpose is to deny human souls to Abaddon.”
It was just as well that Gwen wasn’t supposed to know anything about Abaddon at all. This was the first she’d heard of the demon trying to collect souls, and she couldn’t have hidden her shock.
“What’s more,” Dean continued, “she is aware that someone is torturing monsters for information, in search of a way into Purgatory. She’ll stop at nothing to ensure that such knowledge remains hidden.”
Finding a way into Purgatory, a repository of souls. Chuck hadn’t hinted that that was what Samuel was up to, and Samuel had been diligent about covering his tracks where the family was concerned. All Chuck had said was that Samuel was working for Abaddon. Gwen felt sick.
For his part, Samuel couldn’t help paling but asked, “Why would anyone want into Purgatory?”
Sam leaned forward a little, though not enough to reveal his face. “Abaddon is trying to garner the power of as many souls as she possibly can to fuel an army that will release Lucifer and restart the Apocalypse.”
Dean nodded. “Any soul will do, human or monster. And all monsters are doomed upon their deaths to spend eternity in Purgatory. Abaddon covets that power source.”
And Samuel was helping her get it. Gwen found herself wishing that he’d been in that van instead of Christian or Johnny. The real Christian had probably died on a hunt a few weeks back, when he’d been shot and the demon claimed it had been just a graze, but Johnny was just a redshirt, following Samuel’s orders without question simply because he was family. He hadn’t deserved to die.
“Eve knows Abaddon’s desire,” Sam went on. “Her goal is to take as many souls out of circulation as possible, lock them away in Purgatory where Abaddon presumably can’t get at them. Once they’re turned, she doesn’t care how quickly they die.”
Samuel straightened in alarm. “So if she knew, say, the location of a place where monsters were being interrogated....”
“Chances are, she’d destroy it,” Dean answered. “If they’re dead, they can’t talk, and they’re also safe from anything Abaddon might do to their souls.”
“But it’d be a quick destruction,” Sam added. “She wouldn’t want her children to suffer.”
Samuel sat back and ran a hand over his mouth. “Tell me the truth, boys,” he said after a moment. “Why are you telling me all this? If you know something....”
“What we know about you matters less to us right now than saving the lives of innocent humans. We’re in the business of saving people—hunting things just happens to be the way we do it.”
Samuel nodded slowly. “If... if that’s so... come back and work with me.”
“No,” they chorused.
“I could track you down, you know. I could even classify you as a threat to the very innocent civilians you say you want to help. See, I’ve heard some things about you two as well.”
At that, two more men stepped into frame, flanking Sam and Dean. These men remained standing but were in enough light that their arms were visible—in more ways than one. The white man on the left bore a black wrist brace and a P-90; the man on the right had brown skin, a tribal tattoo, vambraces, and a fearsome-looking but unfamiliar pistol on his hip.
“You don’t want to do that, Mr. Campbell,” said one of the newcomers, his tenor voice quiet, dangerous—and undistorted.
“What the hell...” Samuel breathed.
Dean’s chuckle was still distorted. “Don’t try to figure it out. You’ve never seen our like before.”
“Wh—how do you know?”
“That’s classified,” growled a second new voice, lower than the first and also undistorted.
“And this conversation is over,” stated the first newcomer, and the call abruptly ended.
Samuel took a deep breath and let it out again. “Well, that was enlightening. Wish you two hadn’t heard it, but I’m sure you’ll trust me to decide what the rest of the family should know.”
Gwen sighed. “I didn’t know what they wanted, honest. They just said they wanted to talk to you.”
“There’s got to be a way to verify what they said. I can’t even be sure they were really Sam and Dean....” Samuel trailed off, staring at the computer screen but not really looking at it.
“We’ll go,” Mark said and gathered up the laptop before Samuel even registered that he’d spoken.
“What? Oh. Fine. I’ll... see you later. Just keep all this under your hats, will you?”
“Sure,” Gwen agreed.
Samuel nodded and went back to thinking hard.
Mark and Gwen beat a hasty retreat and didn’t speak to each other until they got back to the basement. Then he retrieved the whiskey bottle and shot glasses that were stashed in the bottom drawer of the desk, and she gratefully drank the shot he poured for her.
He downed his own and breathed, “What the hell....”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Them beacons.”
“Monsters don’t work on subspace. But I’d bet cash money the rest of it’s true.”
“Was they really....”
“Sam and Dean?” She shook her head. “Hell if I know. But if they’re with my brother, the one thing I do know is, he’ll never tell me.”
“Classified.”
“Classified,” she agreed and held out her glass for another shot.
Meanwhile, Castiel stood outside a seemingly normal yet heavily warded cabin in the Cascades, trying very hard not to let on how revolted he was by what Menva had already done there in the course of adapting to her new corporeal form and testing and honing her powers. It was at least a mercy that the girl whose body she’d stolen had suffocated on the toxic volcanic fumes even before her corpse reached the lava in the crater of Mount Rainier. There were some things no human should witness.
Castiel couldn’t have killed Menva if he wanted to, of course. Her powers easily neutralized his, and she was standing just inside the open door to speak to him, thus staying behind the layer of anti-angel warding. But as it happened, his stated purpose was not to kill but to negotiate. Not that she was in a particularly diplomatic mood, but the attempt was necessary.
“Don’t lie!” she snapped. “I felt my children suffering, and then I felt their lives snuffed out in an instant. Don’t tell me the angels had nothing to do with it!”
“It was not our doing,” he repeated, choosing his words carefully to convey strict truth—just not all of it. “Perhaps Abaddon seeks to deny you worshippers on this plane, or perhaps she grows impatient with the speed of the search for your realm.”
“My realm?! This is my realm, the one your Father robbed me of! My prison is no kingdom—it is eternal torment where my children fight constantly and there is nothing new to learn!”
He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “All we ask is that you stop this plan to turn all of humankind into your children. By withholding innocent souls from Heaven, you risk arousing my Father’s ire once more.”
She huffed and started to close the door.
“And there are those among the Host who would rather God didn’t know what’s been happening lately.”
She paused and pulled the door all the way open again. “What are you saying?”
“We’re not your enemy. Humans are not your enemy. And your current strategy seems very much like that of the Replicators when they attempted to defeat the Wraith by destroying human worlds.”
Her eyes blazed, and her fists clenched. “How dare you compare me to those mindless machines!”
“They were not mindless. Neither are you. I’m simply asking you to attack your true enemy directly. This scorched-earth approach may push more hunters and even angels into Abaddon’s camp. And that would mean disaster for your children.”
She looked at him closely for a long moment, her ire cooling as she considered the wisdom of his words. Then she nodded once. “I will think on it.”
He bowed and left, making his way above Earth’s atmosphere to the bridge of the General Hammond, which was both cloaked and hidden from the senses of demons and monsters by wards devised by Gabriel and Ash. “How was that?” he asked Carter, handing her the hidden microphone he’d carried.
Carter smiled. “I think you sold it, Castiel. But we’ll find out soon enough whether she bought it. Mr. Singer’s at the SGC working on a way to patch the life-sign data we’ve collected through to the Men of Letters’ computer so that both of us can track monster activity with greater sensitivity. And then there’s this,” she added, pointing to a display that showed a strong orange life sign at the Campbell compound.
“Abaddon,” he realized.
She nodded. “Showed up about five minutes ago. Samuel’s probably filled her in on what Salim and Dishon told him, and I’d be willing to bet the reason she’s still there is that they’re arguing about whether he’s going to keep working for her.”
“Let’s hope John Campbell’s death gives him sufficient pause.”
She paused herself. “Yeah. Would have waited for John to leave the building once the beacon signal stopped moving, but we’d barely gotten the coordinates when someone destroyed the beacon. We couldn’t risk word getting back to Samuel; Gwen’s cover would have been blown. And the place was EMF-shielded somehow; we couldn’t get a lock on him to beam him out.”
He sighed. “You’re sure Menva and Abaddon won’t consider the possibility of the Asgard beam?”
“Positive. Menva doesn’t know that Earth made contact with the Othalla Asgard, let alone received weapons from them. And Abaddon knows it’s a ship-based weapon but won’t be able to find us with the new wards. As far as she knows, the only Earth ship in this part of the galaxy is the Sun Tzu, and it’s twenty light-years away.”
“All right, then. Now we wait.”
The wait lasted four months of Earth time, during which life in Pegasus and most of the Milky Way returned to a more guarded version of normal. Many Wraith queens chose to stake out the Milky Way edge of Pegasus, but the attempted invasions ceased for the moment as Abaddon turned her attention away from (inter)galactic conquest to focus on “retaking” Earth from Menva. At the same time, thanks to the slightest nudge from a certain Trickster archangel, Menva began capturing demons and running truly diabolical experiments on them in an attempt both to pay back the torture of her creations and to search out a potential weakness in Abaddon. Abaddon retaliated by ordering that average monsters be slaughtered and only Alphas captured.
With a bit of stage management from the outraged Ancients, ensuring that the two sides crossed paths with a higher frequency than random chance, the conflict quickly escalated into a full-scale war worthy of a Peter Jackson movie. Chicago, in particular, fell prey to turf battles the likes of which the Windy City hadn’t seen since the end of Prohibition. Keeping hunters and civilians out of harm’s way became a full-time job into which Henry and Josie threw themselves without hesitation, and Bobby and Rufus returned to the bunker to help them track the action and dispatch hunters to hunts that weren’t likely to end up on the front lines, especially routine salt-and-burns. The angels likewise did their best to save as many human lives as they could. As for the Campbells, Samuel found himself unable to leave Abaddon’s service for reasons he wouldn’t or couldn’t explain, but he told the rest of the family enough to justify his granting them permission to stop working with him. Gwen and Mark quickly jumped ship and teamed up with Bobby and Rufus instead. Some foolhardy lone-wolf hunters still got themselves killed or captured, though, and with one side requiring blood to live and the other reveling in wanton destruction, some civilian deaths were inevitable.
But so was a showdown between Abaddon and Menva. As attrition rates skyrocketed, the collision course became locked in firmly enough that Raphael could carefully drop Abaddon’s location to Menva and vice versa and let the two parties do the rest. Initially, each side tried to assassinate the other’s leader, with no success. After about the fifth attempt, however, Menva had enough data on demons to be able to create a messenger that could survive long enough to take Abaddon a request for parley. Abaddon tried to kill it, failed, and sent it back with her acceptance.
Shortly thereafter, George Hammond walked into the Heavenly Roadhouse and called over the din, “Ash, there’d better be popcorn left.”
Behind the bar, Ash laughed and tossed Hammond a beer and an unopened bag of freshly-popped popcorn. Hammond nodded his thanks and went to find a seat among the raucous crowd of hunters, angels, and friends gathered around the giant flat-screen TV that Gabriel had set up to display the upcoming showdown, a video feed that would also be displayed at the SGC and in Atlantis. No sooner had Hammond sat down, however, than the man next to him straightened to attention instinctively.
“As you were, son,” he said with a smile, forestalling a salute. “Understand we owe your boys a world of gratitude for their service.”
John Winchester returned the smile. “Understand my boys owe your people a world of gratitude for the help and the home.”
“One good turn deserves another, not that I had much to do with it.”
Mary Winchester leaned forward to see past her husband’s shoulder. “The Stargate program wouldn’t be what it is without your leadership, General. You probably have more to do with where Sam and Dean are than we know.”
Hammond raised his beer to her. “Thank you, ma’am.”
The sound of footsteps suddenly came from the TV, causing the Roadhouse crowd to fall silent. Menva, who had abandoned her host’s dirty nightgown in favor of a flowing white chiton, entered the meeting room with dragons flanking her and shapeshifters and werewolves guarding her from behind. “Stay close,” she ordered. “Don’t make a move unless her guards attack first. But whatever happens, leave Abaddon to me.”
“Yes, Mother,” her guards chorused.
“That’s creepy,” John muttered.
Mary shushed him.
A moment later, a black-leather-clad Abaddon strolled in with her own guards, looking around the room appraisingly. “Angel-proof,” she stated. “Nice touch.”
Menva looked surprised, but only for a moment. “No sense in letting anyone interrupt.”
Abaddon chuckled. “No. No sense at all. Especially not your minions.” She snapped her fingers, and all of Menva’s guards dropped dead.
Menva snarled, and all of Abaddon’s guards exploded in flashes of orange-gold light. “I thought we were here to talk.”
Hammond opened his bag of popcorn and offered some to John.
“Oh, by all means!” Abaddon returned as the two queens began to circle each other. “After all, we have so much in common. I really don’t see why you and your subjects insist on standing in my way.”
“You have subjects,” Menva snapped. “I have children. I am nothing like you, Destroyer. I give life; you only take it.”
“Don’t make me laugh! You twist human souls into something God never meant them to be, same as me. You just paper over it by claiming you’re making something new. Well, newsflash, sister: your science fair pets serve Lucifer’s purpose just as well as my kind does.”
“Lucifer! You think I’d ever bow to that jumped-up twit? I am a goddess!”
“You are a ghost!”
“What does that make you?”
An angel sword flashed in Abaddon’s hand, but Menva shot it away with a bolt of lightning. Empty-handed, Abaddon lunged at Menva, and the two grappled with each other in what might look like a cat fight but for the massive thunderstorm it caused outside the building. Yet just when it seemed they were about to reach the point of a death blow, each pulled at the other... and suddenly their lifeless corporeal forms fell away as a column of whirling yellow light and black smoke spun up out of them, through the ceiling, and out of sight.
The angels, the Ancients, and everyone who’d worked for the SGC in life leapt to their feet with a roar of victory.
“What just happened?” Mary demanded.
“Stalemate!” Hammond declared.
Caltus turned around and explained, “Abaddon and Menva have thrown each other into another plane of existence, where they’ll be locked in eternal combat until the real Apocalypse happens.”
“That’s how Oma Desala got rid of Anubis,” Hammond added, “and Morgan le Fay did the same thing to Adria.”
John frowned. “That doesn’t tell us anything, and you know it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Caltus stated before any more verbal barbs could be thrown. “The point is, they’re both gone for good. The war’s over.”
Now it was the hunters’ turn to cheer.
At the SGC, where the occupants of the bunker had gone to watch the showdown with their friends in the Stargate program, it was all Henry could do not to sob in relief. Abaddon was defeated. The Letters were safe, and so were the boys. The nightmare was over.
Except that it wasn’t.
Everyone who’d died was still dead—Millie, John, the elder Letters. Henry was still stuck in another century. He was still remarried and expecting another child. And none of that could be undone.
Struggling to get a handle on his emotions, he slipped out of the conference room into the hallway. But he’d only managed a couple of ragged breaths before he noticed Raphael standing in the doorway to Landry’s office.
“You have visitors,” Raphael said and beckoned Henry toward the office.
Henry swallowed hard, steeled himself, and walked into the office, not sure what to expect. He halfway thought it might be the boys. But he froze with his mouth hanging open when he turned at Raphael’s direction and saw the last people he would ever have expected to see.
“Millie? Johnny?”
Millie smiled. “Hello, Henry.”
So did John as he nodded once. “Pops.”
“What... how....”
“Raphael brought us down to talk to you. Said he still owes us.”
Millie stepped forward and put a cold hand on his arm. “I’m not angry, darling. We know what happened, why you disappeared and why you remarried so quickly. It’s not like I pined once you were gone. Sure, it hurt, but I found a good man in Lawrence and married him.”
A tear slid down Henry’s cheek. “H-how long after....”
“A couple of years. But I hadn’t known him nearly as long as you’ve known Josie. And I knew all along you still loved her.”
“I... I never meant....”
“No! Oh, no, darling, I know you were never unfaithful. I never thought that. You’ve just been in a difficult situation these last few months. And things like that happen.”
“Not like you’ve had a hell of a lot of choice in the matter, either,” John added. “I know what that’s like, trust me.”
Henry looked at him. “You’re not mad?”
John huffed. “Hell, Pops, I spent too much of my life mad at you for no reason. And I had my share of slip-ups after Mary died—even had a kid from one of ’em. Didn’t tell ’em anything. Thought I was keepin’ ’em safe.” He shook his head. “Instead, I got ’em killed.”
“You couldn’t know, John,” Millie stated.
“I should have. But I was too wrapped up in worrying about Sammy to realize any hunter’s family is endangered by what he does, no matter how he tries to shield their innocence, give ’em normal.”
Henry couldn’t help chuckling at that. “Guess you come by it honestly, huh, Sport?”
John ducked his head and smiled a little, much like Sam and Dean did when embarrassed.
“I do love you both. I always have, and I always will.”
“We know,” Millie and John chorused.
“But that doesn’t mean you can’t love your new family just as much,” Millie continued. “Love’s not a zero-sum game.”
Henry tried to swallow down the lump in his throat and nodded. “And John, I’ll... I’ll do my best to do right by your boys.”
Now it was John’s turn to chuckle a little. “They’ll probably outlive their cousins’ grandkids, at this rate. But... would you do one thing for me, s-something I left too long, forgot ’til it was too late?”
“Name it.”
“When you see the boys again... tell ’em I’m proud of ’em.”
Henry sniffled and nodded. “Sure. I’ll do that.”
“Goodbye, Henry,” Millie said, squeezing his arm. “Go live well. We’ll see you on the other side.”
“Just not too soon,” John rumbled, a twinkle in his eye belying his gruffness. “Bye, Pops.”
“Goodbye,” Henry breathed.
And then he was alone.
Even as he swiped a tissue from the box on Landry’s desk, he felt the sharpness of his grief and guilt ease. This was closure, he supposed, and it was surprising how much it helped. His losses still made him ache, but at least... at least he knew Millie wasn’t hurt by his moving on.
Once he’d regained his composure, he stepped back out into the hall, determined to find Josie. They’d inadvertently been avoiding each other the past few months—work had legitimately taken up almost all of their waking moments and exhausted them too deeply to do more than eat and sleep when they weren’t busy, but they hadn’t made time for each other in the rare lulls between storms. That needed to change. Maybe he hadn’t had much choice in the timing of everything, but he would have married her eventually. As it was... well, there was no reason to only ‘make the best of it.’ He wanted to make it the best.
But suddenly he realized that she’d left the conference room shortly after victory was assured, and he had no idea where she’d gone. Looking around, he saw that the hall dead-ended in one direction, but at the corner at the other end of the hall stood a young blonde lady in nondescript civilian clothes—grey sweater, tweed skirt, black-rimmed glasses—cradling an open book in her arms. He’d never seen her before. She seemed to be waiting for him, though, and as he walked toward her, she pointed down the next corridor.
“What....” he began.
“You’re looking for your wife,” she answered quietly. “She’s down that hall.”
Puzzled, he started to turn the corner but glanced down at the lady as he passed. His height allowed him to see over the top of the book, and though she pressed it to her chest, she didn’t do so fast enough to prevent him from seeing that the text was all in handwritten Greek and that between the pages rested a bookmark woven of golden thread. He paused, staring at her.
“Go to your wife, Mr. Winchester,” the Fate ordered gently and vanished.
The soft sound of crying pulled him out of his shock. Sure enough, just where the Fate had pointed him, there she was, standing alone with her back to him, trying to cover her tears with one hand while the other rested on her growing belly. Josie. His best friend.
His wife.
His pregnant wife.
He walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Hi,” he breathed.
She sniffled and turned to him, her eyes troubled. “Henry, I....”
“Shh.” He wiped the tears from her chin and kissed her. “I’ve missed you, sweetheart.”
The fear cleared from her face then, and she let him pull her into a warm hug. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“So am I. But it’s over.”
“I love you so much....”
“What say we start over from here, now, today?”
She pulled back a little. “How do you mean?”
“Josie, my love, will you marry me?”
She giggled. “We’re already married, silly.”
He smiled. “I just had to say it.”
“Well, then I guess I ought to say yes, shouldn’t I?”
He kissed her again and felt not the slightest twinge of guilt.
Meanwhile, in Atlantis, the initial jubilation had subsided enough that Woolsey was just beginning to take suggestions on how to notify the rest of the galaxy that the danger was past. But the discussion was interrupted by a klaxon and announcement of “Unscheduled offworld activation!”
Everyone charged out of the conference room just in time to see what looked like a data crystal slide through the Gate, somehow bypassing the Gate shield, before the wormhole disconnected. There was a long moment of wary silence in which no one approached the Gate, but the object just lay on the ground, inert.
Finally, McKay produced a handheld scanner to get what readings he could from it remotely. “I’m not picking up any kind of energy signature,” he reported.
Woolsey nodded once. “All right. Proceed with caution.”
Blaster at the ready, Ronon accompanied McKay as the scientist approached the object. McKay punched some commands into his scanner and made speculative noises, but finally he said, “Yeah, it... looks like it’s just a data crystal.”
“Dr. Zelenka,” Woolsey asked, “would you please bring Dr. McKay a firewalled computer to read the crystal?”
Zelenka nodded and left to get the requested computer as McKay cautiously picked up the crystal and brought it back to Stargate Ops. At Sheppard’s suggestion, his team, Woolsey, and the Winchesters met Zelenka in a lab and watched as McKay plugged the crystal into the firewalled laptop’s crystal reader attachment. Once McKay called up the crystal’s contents, a list of twenty or so sets of coordinates appeared on the laptop’s screen, followed by a string of text that wasn’t Wraith or Ancient.
“What’s it say?” Ronon asked.
“It’s Asgard,” Sam said quietly. “It basically means, ‘You’re welcome.’”
But Zelenka was looking at the coordinates. “Aren’t those....”
“Worlds at the edge of the galaxy,” McKay answered.
Woolsey asked the Daedalus and the Apollo to investigate, since they had remained in Pegasus because of Earth being more or less quarantined. When Caldwell and Ellis returned, they reported that the worlds were all intact... but the Wraith hives that had been in orbit around them weren’t.
