Title: Blood and Anesthetic

Chapter: 19

~~~~~~~~~~~

The week after Melanie’s death, people were somber, voices were hushed and daily tasks were carried out slowly to make them last longer and fill empty hours. They had nine people take their names off the raid party lists and Dean spent most of the time shut up in his cabin, refusing to see anyone. Those he did see usually emerged with tight lips and the beginnings of a foul mood.

Castiel trudged along the perimeter fence for hours every day, searching for the means of passing information that he and Jo were both sure was there. It was something simple, something obvious, something they’d not considered. He knew it and maybe if he’d been quicker about finding it, the spy would be caught and Melanie would still be alive.

He cried every night, half expecting Melanie to come through the beads and ask what he was sad about. She’d been good about that, about trying to cheer him up.

“Cas, we’ve been out here for hours.”

“You can go back if you want.” He walked across the footbridge, then returned to the railing and leaned against it, staring at the road outside the fence. The wood of the railing was rough against his palms.

It pissed him off that they’d found nothing and Nina was going to get away with it. He knew in his gut that it was her. If they didn’t catch her, she’d continue to tip off the people outside and they’d lose even more people. Why? What was her reason for it? He couldn’t understand why someone would do what she was doing. She had relative safety in the camp. She had food, water, clothing, a semblance of normal society. What had caused her to give away information?

Cas scanned the woods on the other side of the road with a long, sweeping glance. Something simple….

“No, I said I’d stay with you today and I will.” Jo joined him, slipping an arm around him and resting her cheek against his arm. “I’m out of ideas. I’m so out of ideas my brain hurts.”

In a burst of temper, he kicked one of the posts, dislodging a piece of wood. He kicked again. It plopped into the water and he watched it swirl and bob and disappear into the drain that led the overflow pond water out into the stream.

Cas blinked, head turning, tilting a little to the right.

Water. Disappear.

His heartbeat quickened, an idea forming. “Jo.” Cas patted the pockets of his cargo pants. He pulled out a condom, still wrapped in a bright colored package, held it up for her to see, and arched a brow. “I think I know how.”

“Honey, I know you know how,” she returned in a teasing tone, curiosity in her eyes.

“No, not that.” He moved from her embrace, left the bridge and went to the water, crouching down and pointing to the drain. “I think this is how she does it. This drain, it takes the water away from the camp, right?”

“Yeah.” Her lips parted, understanding of his train of thought showing in her eyes. “Cas….”

“Keep watching. Does it come out the other side of the fence and go under the bridge at the road?” He dropped the brightly colored package into the water, followed it with his eyes as it went into the drain, and heard Jo’s pleased exclamation a few seconds later. He grinned, returning his attention to her. “Just stick the info in something that’ll fit through the drain, keep it dry and still float, like an empty pill bottle or something and there you go. All they have to do is watch for it.”

“Cas, you’re a genius! Why the hell didn’t we think of that before?”

“Because we were expecting something sophisticated. Even Dean was.” His grin faded in degrees. “But how is she getting the information?”

“We’ve been over that too. Again and again to ad nauseam. While we’re pretty sure it’s her, there’s no proof, no sign of wrong doing.”

Cas rejoined her on the bridge, treading slowly across the wooden planks, his boots thumping. “Something simple again. Has to be. Some way she wouldn’t get caught or wouldn’t fear getting caught.”

“Like what?”

“Who has access to the information ahead of time?”

Jo listed off everyone in the management team. Cas thought about it. The answer was there, he knew it. It was all coming together in his mind and he couldn’t force it. If he forced it, it wasn’t going to coalesce into anything coherent. So he waited, letting the names swirl in his thoughts like the piece of wood had swirled in the water. Who had what information and when?

“Not you, or me, or….” Suddenly, it was blindingly clear. Cas began to laugh. “Yes! Yes!” Turning, he picked Jo up, swung her around and planted a noisy kiss on her mouth. “I am good, Jo. I am so good it’s a sin how good I am.”

“I’ll agree you’re good,” She said, grasping his arms and smiling up at him. “Wanna put me down and share in what context you’re referring to?”

Putting her down, he shook his head. “No. You’re going to have to wait for the big reveal.”

“Okay, Columbo.”

“I don’t really understand the reference,” he admitted, “but this time I don’t care. I need you to tell Chuck that Dean wants a raid tomorrow. Help him pick a place that has plenty of good places to hide outside, but don’t tell him that’s what you’re doing. Get the lists of what we need and take the lists and location to Dean.”

“Then what?”

“You go have a relaxing evening with Maggie or Alexis or someone.”

“Cas. I’m not letting you do this by yourself.”

“I want you out of the way in case something goes wrong. Please. Humor me. I can’t lose you and Melanie both in the space of little more than a week.” He could see she wasn’t happy about being sidelined on this matter, but after a little convincing, she agreed to do it.

“I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do and I know what she’s doing, too.”

He watched Dean’s cabin with binoculars like Dean had once watched his, saw Jo go inside and return a few minutes later. She headed off towards Maggie’s cabin. Cas settled in to wait. If he was right, Nina would be along in a couple hours.

~~~~~~~~~~

In his nightmare, Dean saw Sam before him, only it wasn’t Sam at all, it was Lucifer, smug and taunting.

“You’re a failure, Dean, but I don’t need to point that out, do I? You start things you can’t finish. It’s like a broken record with you, skipping over and over the same sorry section. All your life you’ve been a failure.”

He tried to fight him and couldn’t make contact, flailing about, helpless in the twilight landscape.

“Couldn’t finish high school, had to get a GED. You started relationships that failed and continue to fail because of you. Take Jo for instance. She’s a fine woman, got a body on her that doesn’t quit and she’s smart, too, a real good catch. But you’re so scared to feel something meaningful that you sabotaged any chance of anything with her. You’re a dumb SOB, Dean. If you’d treated her even halfway decently she never would have left. You treated her like crap and now she’s slutting it up with Castiel. And I do mean slutting. The things she lets him do…. Quite a number you did on her. She accepts his behavior as normal because of you. Did you realize that?”

He watched Lucifer pace in slow strides, graceful in a way Sam never had been. In these nightmares, the words were always the same variations of the theme of failure. Sometimes Lucifer talked about how badly Dean had failed Sam.

“You even started the Apocalypse very obligingly for the angels, then couldn’t finish it like they wanted you to. You left them hanging, Dean. You left the world hanging. Not that I’m complaining about that one, mind you. You must admit it’s one of the highlights in your list of failures -- from a certain point of view.” He smiled a gentle smile, waving a hand to punctuate his next words. “And this whole saving people thing? Ludicrous. Croatoan will reach you all eventually. All these people? They’re just walking corpses. All you’re doing is delaying the inevitable, and failing your way through that.”

“You’re lying,” he spat.

“Am I? I don’t need to lie. Think about it. Think about…” He tilted his head back, gaze drifting upwards to the dreary sky and back down to Dean. “Melanie. Yes, think of her. Now there’s a gigantic failure in your big quest to save people.” He tsked, shaking his head. “You got her killed. Such a shame. She’d become like a daughter to you and you were like a father to her those last months. She wanted so badly to please you. It’s the reason she worked so hard towards independence. You wanted it for her and she tried, but you let her go on that raid and got her killed. You cared for her. How could you do that to her? It’s all your fault she’s gone.”

“It wasn’t my fault! Get out of my head!”

“It was your fault. You put her in danger.”

“No….”

Lucifer laughed. “Oh, I do like you Dean Winchester. How can I not? You set it all in motion to begin with.”

“I didn’t know,” he protested in a moan.

“Ignorance is no excuse.” He put his hands in his pants pockets, brows raising. “Be seeing you soon. And…Sam says ‘hi’.”

Dean woke with a gasp, shaking and sweating, certain it hadn’t been a dream. Lucifer had just paid him a visit.

It registered immediately that there were people in his cabin and he scrambled from his bed, reaching for his gun. Only when he had it pointed at the intruders did he notice the scene before him. Nina was gagged and bound to a chair in the center of the room. Cas sat slightly to one side, a booted foot propped by her hip and a gun across his lap, waiting with an air of utmost patience for Dean to wake fully and speak.

Dean rubbed a hand across his face. His head felt encased in cotton and he peered as Castiel with a frown. “Cas?”

“Good morning, Dean.” The reply was offensively cheerful, Cas’s smirk a hair shy of smug.

“What’re you doing here at the ass crack of dawn?” He put his gun aside. “And what’s she doing here? Gave her the heave-ho weeks ago.”

“You know, I got to thinking. How would a woman like Nina go about getting information like that? I mean logically? You, me, Yeager, Jim, Chuck, Jo. We’re really the only ones, right? The ones with the info? The ones she’d have to get the information from?”

“Yeah.” Reaching for his robe, he drew it on and sat on the end of his bed, watching Nina struggle against her bonds. She looked both terrified and angry, a red welt across one cheek and bruises along her arms. Had Cas done that to her?

“I won’t touch her with a ten-foot pole, Yeager can’t stand her, Jim doesn’t see any woman but Alexis, Jo hates her, and Chuck…. Well, Chuck and she have a love-to-hate each other thing going.” He stretched a little. “Then I thought about it a little more. The locations we target aren’t given out until we’re going out the gates.”

“That’s right.”

“So who has the locations before that?” His smirk deepened into a self satisfied grin. “You and Chuck, my friend, and she sure as hell wasn’t banging Chuck for months.”

Dean tried to make sense of Cas’s words. “You don’t think that I --”

“No, no of course not. How’s your head, Dean? Feeling woozy?”

“A little,” he admitted.

Cas fished a bottle from his pocket and held it up. “One dose of this in your food or drinks and you’re pretty cooperative, going right to sleep after, oh, say half an hour or forty minutes. She liked to have a drink right away, didn’t she?”

“Usually.” She’d pour them a drink or let him pour one and sometimes they didn’t bother with glasses. Other times she had those tiny bottles with her.

“When you were down for the count, she had all the time she needed to copy the info. There’s your first how, Dean. She already admitted it all to me. Now, do you want to hear how she got it outside the camp, or would you rather hear the lovely present I’ve got ready for you?”

He saw the delight in Cas’s eyes, his gaze glittering with fervent satisfaction and nodded. “By all means tell me what this present is. I’m all atwitter with anticipation.”

Cas put his foot on the floor and leaned forward, arms on his thighs. “The scavengers. They’ll be ready for you, Dean. Sitting ducks like we usually are. I had Jo arrange it. This raid…it’s fake. They know we’re planning on being at the location at two this afternoon, which gives you time to take a team, get in place, and wait for them to show up. Kill them all and then we deal with Nina. Them first, then her so there’s no one left.”

“When did you get so bloodthirsty?”

His features hardened, the tiniest bit of regret flitting across his face, his voice holding a trace of bitterness. “It’s how you win a war, isn’t it? Kill the enemy? Well, they’re the enemy and they’ve had no compunction against killing us. Give them hell, Dean.” Raising back up, he glanced at Nina. “I’ll stay here and guard her. Make sure she’s alive for the trial.”

“Good work, Cas.”

“I thought so.” His brows raised. “You said to get answers, correct?”

Dean did recall yelling at him to do that. “You delivered.”

“I usually do.”

By nine, Dean had his team on the road. They had plenty of time to ready this part of the trap Cas had worked out.

~~~~~~~~~~

Jo looked out at the crowd. Men, women, and children all clamoring for Nina’s blood, salivating over her coming death. Because of her plotting, those people had lost family and friends, and while her death wouldn’t bring them back, it was justice.

Dean had called a public forum after returning from the slaughter of the scavengers.

Jim told her it was a slaughter, too. While he’d hung back after the initial shots in order to cover everyone else, Dean had gotten right in there, killing until there was only one left, then demanding to be taken to the scavenger’s camp. They’d killed them as well. Dean’s team had exterminated an entire camp of people and Jo wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She understood the reason for that and knew what would happen if any were left alive, but was it right? Was it morally right?

How far had they sunk into the gray areas of morality and how much further would they go? How much further would Dean and Cas go, for she knew Cas had suggested it to begin with. Jo had never thought either man would condone killing an entire camp of people. Surely not all of the scavenger camp had known about the attacks?

“I’m open to suggestions,” Dean called out. “What do we do with her?”

Nina’s involvement had been chronicled, from her drugging Dean to her method of relaying the information. She’d even admitted to slipping the drug into the cup by Dean’s bed the previous evening before he’d returned to his cabin. His habit of pouring a slug of whiskey into whatever liquid was there in that cup was well-known to her. She knew he’d do it like he did every night.

Dean’s fury at that was undeniable and Jo saw his hands clench into tight fists during that part of her testimony.

Nina knew she was going to die. She knew that nothing she said was going to stay that and so she was brutally honest in what she’d done, laying it out in precise orderly steps, though her voice quivered and she became so pale that Jo thought she was going to faint.

Jo sensed the crowd gathering their hatred together. She could almost see that hate like a black seething cloud above them. Demanding a lynching would be next. She stepped forward, hurrying to give her suggestion and hoping it’d be taken. “Just shoot her. Right here, right now. Put a bullet in her and be done with it. Dump her body outside the fence a ways.” It was a sensible decision, quick and easily handled.

Dean looked at her, a sneer of contempt pulling his lips and sarcasm in his voice. “And that’s an appropriate punishment? Really, Jo? Did you not lose as many friends as the rest of us?”

Cas’s hands were on her arms, dragging her back against him, pulling her behind Jim and Emily so she was out of Dean’s line of sight. His voice was at her ear, barely loud enough to be heard over the angry din her suggestion garnered. “Do you really think anyone’s rational enough for sensible action? Take a look at them, Jo. They want her blood and Dean’s going to give it to them.”

“It’s not right. Just get it over with. It’s sadistic to drag it out. It’s not justice, Cas, it’s being mean to be mean, hurting because she hurt us.”

He didn’t deny it. His arms went around her, keeping her from moving forward, imprisoning her against his body. Jo twisted, unable to break free. He wasn’t going to let her get in the way of what was being planned.

She saw Alexis push through the crowd, voice strident and hard. “Take her out to a hot zone and shove her out the back of the truck.”

The suggestions got bloodier and bloodier, Nina’s face paling further, but in the end it was decided to let her out near a zone and make her walk into it under threat of a firing squad.

Jo wondered how many of them would ‘accidentally’ fire.

Cas held on to her until all but Dean and the bound and now gagged Nina remained. Only then did he release her slowly. Jo moved away from him and towards Nina, skirting by Dean and not quite making it past him. He grabbed her arm, hand gripping tightly and pulling her to him.

“You got a problem, Jo?”

“You drew it out deliberately. You riled them up.”

Something shifted in his eyes and right then, Dean wasn’t a man she even wanted to know. “She needed to squirm.”

Jo wrenched her arm from his grasp, gasping a little when his fingers pinched before releasing her fully. “Dick.”

He shook his head. “And how would you have handled it, hmm? A quick shot without letting anyone have their say? Please. She needed to feel the fear, to hear just what these people think of her actions. Am I having her skinned alive like Emily suggested? Am I letting them tie her up and light her on fire? No. I’m taking her out near a zone and letting her out.”

“And who’s going to shoot her in the back as she walks away?”

“That’s not the plan.”

“But you know it’ll happen.”

“So what if it does? Who here is going to cry for that? You? Are you going to cry over Nina? Seriously?” He raked his gaze down her and back up. “It’s like I don’t really know you anymore.”

She could say the same about him.

She and Cas spent the night guarding Nina, taking turns at the door. Jo made sure she got a final meal and tried to coax her into getting some rest. Nina refused.

“It’s not like I won’t rest forever after tomorrow,” she reasoned.

“Why did you do it, Nina? Did you even have a reason? I don’t understand why you’d do something like that. You had a life here, a decent one compared to out there. Why jeopardize it?”

She leaned over a little, glance flicking to Cas as though making sure he was too far away to listen. “He picked me personally, sent me here for that purpose, Jo. Told me to find Dean Winchester, seduce him, and send out any information that might potentially cripple his efforts to survive. He was very specific on how I was to behave to get and keep Dean’s interest and said I was to do both as long as I could. If I got caught and they asked me why, I was to say that Sam told me to. Said it with a little grin, like it was an inside joke. I don’t know who Sam is, but obviously it was supposed to mean something to Dean.”

Jo knew who. Sam? It had to be Lucifer. “You don’t know who Sam is? Dean never mentioned him?”

“Not in my hearing, but then we never were much for that getting-to-know-you small talk. I know a lot about what he likes in bed and very little otherwise. It never seemed too important to really get to know him outside the bedroom. Why? Who’s Sam to him?”

Jo didn’t answer the question, trying instead to understand what Nina had just told her. If Lucifer knew their location, why hadn’t he come in and wiped them out? What was he waiting for? “But why even do what he wanted? Did he promise you something?”

“He said my reward for doing this would be more than I could ever imagine.”

“You do know you’re going to die tomorrow, right? There’s no reward, Nina. He lied.”

Nina shrugged. “My job is done. I did what he asked of me and I will be rewarded. He promised and I believe him. I may not get my reward here on earth, but I will on the other side. He said so. He was so beautiful, Jo, so powerful. How could I not believe him with the things he showed me?”

She wouldn’t say another word, apparently hanging on to that promise Lucifer had made to her. Jo almost felt sorry for her for that.

The morning was bright and clear, a team of fifteen taking Nina out towards a hot zone. Jo hadn’t wanted to go, riding with them only because Dean told her to. He wanted her there as a show of leadership solidarity after her ‘unreasonable’ suggestion the previous day, claiming that it would protect her against any backlash if she at least appeared to be going along with Nina’s punishment. How her suggestion had been in any way unreasonable was beyond her.

Jo got out of the truck and shut the door. Dean came around and stood beside her while two men went to get Nina from the back of the other truck and the rest of the men and women lined up on the road.

He crossed his arms and leaned down to speak in her ear. “All nice and civilized, Jo.”

“So far,” she admitted. “Except for yesterday.”

“The people didn’t want nice yesterday. They wanted to voice their frustration and anger and have the illusion they had a voice in her sentence. I gave them that.”

“I thought yesterday was about making her squirm.” She raised a brow at him.

He returned the gesture, “Maybe it was about all of that,” then stood up tall once more.

Nina was dragged around the back of the second truck and shoved towards them. Her wrists had been freed of the handcuffs. “You’re going to just leave me out here,” she asked, looking up at Dean.

The line of men and women raised their guns. Jo could see the desire to shoot Nina on their faces.

Dean leaned back against the truck. “Sure am. You think anyone here gives a damn about you? You got good men and women killed for no reason.”

“Please,” she pleaded. “At least give me a way to protect myself against the Croats. A knife, something.”

“No dice, sweetheart. Get walking.”

She turned and began to walk, her steps slow and dragging. Jo saw her shoulders hunch and looked away, hating how Dean and the others were dragging this out. They should have just shot her and been done with it, but no, the camp wanted her to suffer before she died.

It was Alexis who snapped, taking several steps forward, aiming, and firing before anyone would stop her. Nina went down with barely a sound, lying still and facedown on the blacktop, shot in the back like Jo had predicted. When Alexis turned to them, her mouth was trembling. “She deserved hell sooner rather than later. I hope they tear her soul apart.”

Dean moved to her, taking the gun from her. “Oh they will. Believe me, Alexis, they’ll work her over until there’s nothing left and then they’ll put her back together and start all over. They’ll keep breaking her until there’s nothing to break.”

“Good.”

Jo wept a little in the truck on the way back, not for Nina, but for the people she knew and the way they’d all changed. She kept her face averted and turned away so Dean wouldn’t notice. She didn’t care to hear the sort of mocking words that she knew would leave his lips.

Everything was changing.

There was no escaping that death was everywhere now. Even the fish in the lake a little ways down the highway had all died, floating to the surface of the water, stinking up the air.

Under the constant tension and threats from the outside, the carefully cultivated structure of the camp began to crack. The optimism that everything was going to get better faded, strain showing in the set of shoulders and in worried faces. The survivors they did find were now more hardened than the original ones. There were no good times coming, no rescue from their lives.

Even the children stopped laughing -- what few children there were.

She watched people go about their daily tasks with an air of hopelessness. The general overall mood was despair. Lucifer had to be eating it all up and relishing what he’d accomplished. Jo still wondered why he didn’t come for them. What was his plan? Was it the same one Dean and the others had enacted on Nina -- to let them twist and turn and suffer until the very bitter, terrible end of it all?

While still a refuge, the camp was showing it’s worn state. The buildings needed paint and not all of the needed repairs got done. The grass was mowed only occasionally and many of those feel-good normal activities that had been in place months earlier were gone. There were no more movies for children or Saturday night campfires as a group. Things like that became solitary endeavors.

It was as though Melanie’s death heralded in a new era, one where innocence was completely gone and there was only the growing dark around the edges of their lives to look forward to.