The Lightning Strike

The snow was everywhere, like frosting on a cake and glittering like sugar too whenever the hazy moonlight appeared from behind a cloud, long enough to catch it. It crunched underfoot, something about the silence made it echo through the street. A few stray flakes drifted amongst the azure of the night, dancing and gliding before hitting the concrete. The street itself wasn’t disguised by Christmas, it was a pretty dismal place. That’s right, it’s Christmas. Did I forget to mention that? Sorry, December sort of crept up on us, that and I don’t pay a lot of attention to holidays. They don’t seem to fit the puzzle these days. The presents and the big smiles, the roaring fires that we didn’t have, the money we didn’t have to go crazy on turkey. It just…didn’t fit, so I forgot about it.

Until this year that is.

It was late, and dark and we were creeping through some back alley. Me and Dean that is. He swore to me that it was a short cut. Nisha and Sam were back at the motel room asleep. It wasn’t Christmas yet, almost, but not quite, but the air reeked of it you know? The good cheer and all that old shit. Dean and I had been out trying to find gifts, no luck so far. Turns out there wasn’t a lot you could get for three other people with little over fifteen bucks between us. So we returned from this top secret mission disappointed. I walked beside him silently, my hands were shivering in the pockets of my jacket and he was the same, I noticed as I glanced over to him. We were both quiet, and the silence was uncomfortable. Particularly as there was the metaphorical elephant in the room, as it were. I’d tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t talk about it, what was I supposed to do with that? He wouldn’t let me tell him that I loved him and he wouldn’t allow himself to tell me the same. So now were playing denial and silence and it was starting to get to the stage of being a samey tune already.

We wound up walking through some park. The path that cut through the grass was engrained with a mosaic of footprints in the snow. Dean and I were still silence, that was until he did something strange. He stopped walking all of a sudden, just ground to a complete halt and held his hand out to me. I rose an eyebrow at that.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

He didn’t answer me, just kept his hand outstretched in silence. I sighed and decided to indulge whatever little game this now was by taking his hand. He just wrapped his fingers around my palm and held onto my hand and we began walking again, hand in hand like a real couple. It felt weird, but quickly seemed to adjust into something…right, I guess. Like that’s how it should have been all along. I didn’t dare speak, I didn’t want to ruin this. I just stayed quiet and looked ahead, feeling the frigidity in his snow bitten fingers against my own. This continued for a while, I mean, we almost got to the end of the park without incident. I’d just been thinking to myself about how nice this was, how I was starting to feel those girly butterflies in my stomach and I was grinning to myself when I felt the cold, wet slap of snow strike me across the cheek and immediately Dean’s grasp around my hand released as he took a huge leap back from me. I paused for a moment, processing what had just happened. My jaw tightened when I realized I’d just been hit in the face with a snow ball, and looked to my right to see him grinning at me in that ‘Oh yeah, it was me’ way.

“WOO-HEEE. Is that steam I see coming off of you Misha? Damn, you’re so mad you could melt the snow right off of you,” he taunted like an eleven year old boy.

Naturally I gave into the bate and crouched to scoop up a chunk of snow that I was so going to stuff down his throat any second. Couldn’t he just let me have my nice, romantic moment? I didn’t have them a lot, I didn’t allow them a lot, and he had to go and ruin it with a fucking snow ball. Just as I’d got a nice handful of freezing snow I felt something collide into me, admittedly only with playful force, but enough force to knock me flat on my back into the snow. It was Dean. He had me pinned in the snow and he was looking down at me with a broad grin, his face half obscured by shadow. I could see his breath flooding into the frigid air like a plume of smoke from a chimney. There was another silence in this one, only this one was kind of apprehensive on my part. He was so unpredictable. I just rose an eyebrow slowly, pointedly.

“What the fuck are you doing? Are you some kind of masochist? Because I’m about to kick you in the gonads any second.”

His grin only widened.

“Don’t you think death threats are a little redundant?” he asked, leaning closer.

“That’s not funny.”

“Not even a little?” he was so close to me now that I could feel his breath prickle against my skin.

“Not. Even. A. Little,” I replied flatly.

He’d been about to kiss me, I assume, but I just smirked and pressed one hand against his chest before wriggling out of his grasp and getting to my feet. I dusted the powdery snow off of my jeans as he looked back at me, thoroughly annoyed.

“I’m sorry? But what kind of girl do you think I am? I don’t get naked for just anybody, and I definitely don’t get naked in public snow drifts.”

That said, I turned my back on him and walked off back to the motel room.

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“So, where are we going?” I asked.

It was coming up to mid morning, I’d glanced at the neon letters on the Torino’s dashboard clock to check that since I tended not to have a great sense of time. The sun was leaking in through the window, it was pretty low in the sky and glaring at us through the windshield, so I’d lowered one of the visors down to block it from my view.

“Michigan,” Nisha replied, eyeing me. I mean that sort of stare she had that made me feel I was suddenly under a microscope. It made me kind of nervous, so I frowned back at her.

“What?”

“Where’d you go last night? I woke up and you weren’t in the room and so I went over to Sam and Dean’s room, and Dean was missing too.”

“We went for a walk,” I replied with a shrug. “He wanted to go and see if we could find presents. He wants to have a Christmas this year, something about Sam being a Scrooge and so I had to go with him and blah blah blah. We didn’t find any presents, the gas stations that were open at that time were pretty pricey.”

Nisha just stared at me.

“You waited until one in the morning to go ‘shopping’ for presents?”

I shifted uncomfortably.

“What’s the case in Detroit?” I asked, avoiding answering her question. Nisha just sighed and rolled her eyes, shuffling through some police reports she had on her lap.

“A man went missing. He was playing the Santa bit for Christmas eve I guess, amusing his kids or whatever. Something dragged him up the chimney.”
I stared back at her.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Genuine evil Santa shit.”

We pulled up to a very typically suburban looking house, once our pleasant morning run through the city was over with. Naturally, the mother was really distressed, we pulled our FBI agents gig (again with the damned pencil skirts) and we did the usually trick of asking questions and appearing to ‘cover all the angles’. Sam checked the chimney with Nisha whilst Dean and I got a little information about the woman’s husband’s personality and lifestyle. He seemed incredibly, painfully average to me, actually. Finally though we were done with asking question and Sam and Nisha emerged from the living room of the house. We turned and left the porch, heading back towards the cars.

“Find anything?” Dean asked.

“Oh, we found something alright. We found something that landed in my hair and is going to scar me for fucking life,” Nisha hissed back and Dean just looked bewildered. Sam held up something, small, white and mildly bloody in his fingers.

“Is that a tooth?” Dean asked.

“That’s right. It looks like he really did take a trip up the chimney,” Sam replied.

“…But, there’s no way a grown man could fit inside a chimney,” I added uneasily.

Sam glanced at me. “Not in one piece, no.”

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After that we headed back to the motel we’d rented on our way into town. I was sitting on the floor with my legs crossed, devouring some really sickly candy bar that he’d gotten from the machine just outside the door in the hallway. There was a spread of pictures and clippings on the bed in front of me, mostly of devil-like figures. Nisha was sitting on the end of the coffee table, reading through an old book from the trunk of the Impala. I glanced at the room. There was an incredibly eye offending yellow wallpaper plastering the walls, it was decorated with these Mrs. Rogers style flower patterns. It would have been nice had I not felt like I was sitting on the set for a bad 70s sitcom. There was a main living space, where the was a table and some chairs and a small television, then two doors went off into two really small rooms with a bathroom to the right. It wasn’t bad and it was the first time we’d all been able to share a room together. Nisha didn’t really like the thought of being in an open space with Dean, especially when trying to change in front of him. Apparently she didn’t want to watch him watch me change, because that would have been ‘too awkward’.

“So, was I right?” Dean asked, planting himself in a chair by Sam.

“No, Dean, it wasn’t a serial killer chimney sweep,” Nisha replied with a roll of her eyes.

Dean paused, looking a little dejected and kind of disappointed. Sam, who was typing on his computer pulled up a web page filled with some lore from Pagan mythology, before he interrupted the impending argument.

“This is going to sound a little crazy…” Sam added.

“Oh c’mon,” Dean replied with a grin. “What could you say that could possibly sound crazy to me?”

“Well, I think we might be dealing with some kind of anti-claus,” Sam replied, and I rose an eyebrow at that. That did sound kind of crazy, even for us. “There’s all kinds of lore around about Santa’s brother going a little nuts and instead of handing out gifts at Christmas, he punishes people.”

“So that’s the theory we’re going with? Santa’s evil brother? Santa doesn’t have a brother, Santa doesn’t exist” Dean babbled.

“Yeah, I know. You’re the one that told me that, remember?” Sam replied.

“Yeah, ANYWAY,” Nisha interrupted with an definitive roll of her eyes. “Never mind the debate about the existence of Santa. If there’s a lot of lore on it, I’m going to take a WILD assumption and figure there must be something behind it.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Dean replied. “I did a little digging, turns out both victims visited the same place before they died.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, mouth full of candy. “Where’s that?”

I wish I hadn’t asked.

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We wound up going to some ‘Christmas wonderland’ place. The kind of place that turned Christmas creepy, in my mind anyway. It was pretty sad looking too. In the middle of some freaking field, it was freezing cold, the sky was a flat grey and the crisp soil was treacherous underfoot. It was the most pathetic excuse for a Christmas attraction I had ever seen. A lick of paint was the least it needed to look jolly. In fact, I thought it’d be better of if it were shut down completely.

The four of us walked through the mud. I had my hands in my pocket and glanced around warily. If two victims had been here before they died, there was a favourable bet that it probably had something to do with their deaths. We didn’t have coincidences. Not in our line of work.

“Why the hell are we here again?” I asked, dodging some guy that was dressed in a deer costume and a couple of really loud kids that ran passed us.

“We’ve been over this Misha. You’ve gotta’ put your fear of men dressed as Santa’s to one side. This is investigative work, gotta’ be done,” Dean replied.

“Cute,” I replied flatly.

“Seriously? Focus, guys,” Nisha interrupted, glancing to the small red ‘grottos’ around us that were dropping a part. Santa’s Village really creeped me out. “So, we’re dealing with an Anti-Claus that hangs out at a pathetic excuse for a Christmas village? Nice.”

“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Dean replied with a shrug. “Speaking of, we should have one this year.”

“No thanks,” Sam replied with a snort.

“Why not? We’ll get a tree, lights, eggnog…the whole shebang” Dean replied.

“Yeah, when did you appoint yourself as Scrooge, Sammy?” Nisha asked with a grin, linking her arm through his.

“Look, Christmas has never exactly been a Hallmark memory for me. I don’t know what childhood Dean is talking about but…just no, okay?”

Nisha paused and we all went silent for a second.

“Alright Sam…it’s ok, just…alright,” she replied softly.

Dean and I went to look around for a while, leaving Sam and Nisha alone. Something about the looks on Sam’s face just seemed sort of…distant all of a sudden and after the little freak out over the thought of us having a Christmas left me and Nisha to separating them for a while. Sometimes they got across each other something fierce and they needed…well, they needed a time out, to put it bluntly. Dean and I walked together, in silence as usual and he pulled the lights from one of the Christmas trees dotted around whilst no one was looking. I swear, he has such nimble fingers. He had that row of lights wound up and shoved inside his pocket before I had much time to blink. I rolled my eyes at him.

“You’re such a thief,” I replied with a smirk.

“Thanks, and you’re pretty,” he replied, like calling him a thief was some kind of amazing compliment.

We walked a little further, and I dodged more children and some other guy dressed as a reindeer and I glanced at Dean in time to see him glancing back over his shoulder carefully, looking back to where we’d walked. After he’d done ‘checking’ whatever it was he was checking he took my hand again like before, only this time I allowed it with less suspicion since there wasn’t any snow around.

“Why do you constantly check if we’re by ourselves?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Like before you’ll actually dare to be close to me?”

Dean shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t really want Sammy to see me this way. I don’t like the thought of him thinking I’m vulnerable…or you know, whatever.”

I frowned at him a little. “You’re so weird, Dean.”

He just grinned at that.

“So what’s with Sam and the whole Grinch gig? I never had him pegged for being the type of guy to hate Christmas.”

Dean just shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess holidays just remind him of how rough we had it growing up. Dad was never around, Christmas was hard to get through that when Christmas is all about family sticking together. I mean, damn, I don’t remember many Christmases when he was there, you know? It’s rough on a kid.”

I just nodded a little. “I get that.”

Shortly after that we headed back to Sam and Nisha. Sam explained some nonsense about the ‘anti-Claus’ having a limp and smelling like sweets. Apparently, and also creepily, this thing smelled like sweets because it was easier to lure children in. So our next stop in Santa’s Village was to find Santa himself. He headed over to some drunken old guy who sounded as creepy as he looked. There was a brief incident in which Sam seemed to incriminate himself as being a potential pervert by saying we’d ‘come here to watch’. Yeah….the elf girl who’d asked us if our kids had come to see Santa wasn’t too impressed by that little gem. Interestingly, and about the only thing that was interesting about this place, was the fact that when fat, drunk and bearded hopped of his little Santa seat he had…yes, you guessed it, he had a limp. Unfortunately, that meant that we were going to have to actually investigate this guy, which also meant we’d have to spend an incredibly uncomfortable night in the car with a lot of coffee.

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We’d been sitting in the Impala for several hours, and I was freezing. I’d agreed to leave the Torino back at the motel, because, well, two cars parked outside this dump of a trailer was just going to look even more suspicious. We were sitting across from some dilapidated old shack that this ‘Santa’ called home. Sam and Nisha were in the back seat, Nisha had fallen asleep against Sam’s chest and they looked all cosy. Lucky them. I was sitting in the passenger seat beside Dean, swigging vaguely warm coffee out of a plastic cup whilst Dean kept his gaze on the trailer.

“What time is it?” he yawned broadly.

“Two minutes on from when you asked me that two minutes ago, Dean” I replied, handing him the thermos flask full of coffee. “Drink some coffee and wake up.”

We sat in silence for a moment before a scream radiating from the trailer made us look up. Didn’t help the fact that the whiskey scented Santa was peering through the window suspiciously and then closed the curtains on us. The four of us bolted from the car (Nisha having been rudely awakened at this point) and we ran to the trailer. Dean kicked down the door with considerable force and what followed was a scene that was so awkward I never want to relive it again. Ever. We busted in on Santa watching some Christmas porno, drinking whiskey and the whole place smelled like piss, honestly. Plus, drunken Santa Claus didn’t seem to happy that we’d broken down his door and interrupted his porn viewing. Dean’s solution to this? Pretend we were carol singers. He just started singing Silent Night, incredibly off key and he didn’t actually know the words but it kept Claus ‘jolly’ so we went with it until we’d backed out of the place and run away back to the car.

“What was THAT?” I asked and he shrugged.

“I was improvising!”

Sam sighed. “I guess he wasn’t our guy.”

“Really Sam? You think not? What gave it away? Was it the Christmas porn….OR THE CHRISTMAS PORN?” Nisha snapped, horrified by what she’d seen. After all, no human being should have to see Santa jack off. Especially when they had just woken up from a nap.

We made a fast exit after that. A. Fast. Exit.

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That night we’d gotten back to the motel room. The first night in fact that Nisha had spent with Sam. This time she insisted, since we (and by that I mean Nisha and I) could technically still be in the same room and her have some privacy with Sam, she had insisted she sleep in Sam’s bed. They’d been together for at least a month or so now, or was it longer than that? Like I said before, I lose all track of time with this life style. Anyway, that left me with Dean. He was standing over by the bedroom door with a huge smirk that spread across his face like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. I rose an eyebrow at him, throwing a shirt at him before I barged passed him.

“Forget it, I’m still pissed at you for throwing a snowball in my face the other night,” I replied with a saccharine smile and disappeared into the bedroom. He grumbled something, I didn’t hear what, but followed me soon after.

The next morning we managed to find, with Sam’s abilities on the computer, that another disappearance had been reported and shockingly it was the same as the other two reports we’d found. Some guy dragged up the chimney by an evil Santa. Naturally, we pulled out our professional looking outfits and headed over to the house where the incident had happened to ask questions and poke around.

“And you didn’t see the attacker?” Dean asked.

The woman just shook her head and explained that whoever had dragged her husband out of bed, kicking and screaming, had hit her and knocked her out. Her son had said something about ‘Santa taking daddy up the chimney’ and that confirmed that we were at the right place and had stumbled across our next victim. This thing had now worked it’s way through three people, we needed to work faster and figure what it was and kill it before anyone else died.

“And…where did you get that wreath?” Sam asked and I blinked.

“Excuse me?”

“Just…curious.”

Then we left.

“Why didn’t you ask her about her shoes, Sam? I saw a couple of nice handbags in the hallway too.”

“We’ve seen those wreaths before, Dean, at the other victim’s houses.”

“I know…” Dean replied. Unconvincingly by the way. “I was just testing you.”

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We headed back to the motel yet again, briefly taking a detour to stop at some greasy burger joint to pick up some greasy burgers. I had fries and a shake. Lunch accomplished, we got back to our room where Sam immediately got onto the phone to Bobby. It was getting ridiculous how lost we were with this. None of us knew what we were dealing with, not for sure anyway. Bobby always had the answer to everything. I loved that guy like some kind of father figure, even though we’d only met a few times, we bonded fast. Being in the hunting world with people did that to you. I guess the empathy of it created strong ties with certain people.

“So, what did Bobby say?” I asked Sam, as he clasped shut his cell phone. Sam sighed and rubbed the back of his head awkwardly.

“That we’re morons. Those wreaths were made out of Meadowsweet. It’s used in Pagan sacrificial ceremonies and it basically acts as chum to the gods. Attaching meadowsweet to anything will lure a God straight for you, it’s like waving around a neon sign saying, please come kill us.”

I cringed. A pagan god? Oh that was going to be fun.

“So, what do you suggest we do now?” Nisha asked, idly eating one of her fries.

“We go to the store that sold the wreaths,” Sam replied.

Apparently the wreath was from the store in the town that specifically sold Christmas related goods. It was only open once a year, and we figured it’d be the first place to start. It was our only lead and I was starting to get agitated with this already shitty Christmas. I wanted it to be over already. So we headed to the store like we planned. Inside it was like something out of a sugar coated movie. There were giant pretend candy canes around the place, pretend snow, a lot of pine cones and fairy lights and other stuff you’d find in Santa’s grotto.

“Hi, I wonder if you could help us?” Dean asked. “See, we were at the Walsh’s last night playing Jenga and well…since then he hasn’t shut up about this damn wreath they had over there. Tell him about it,” he went on, slapping Sam on the shoulder playfully.

“…It was yummy,” Sam replied.
Nisha and I both stared at him. I know he was put on the spot and everything, but yummy? Wreaths weren’t edible.

“I sell a lot of wreaths, boys.”

“I know that, but, this one was really special. It had green leaves and white buds on it, it might have been made out of…Meadowsweet?” Sam asked.

“Well, aren’t you a fussy one?” the store owner replied, much to Sam’s disagreement.

Dean smirked and nodded. “He is, isn’t he?”

I nudged Dean in the ribs and glared at him. This was so not the time for this kind of shit, we were trying to conduct a serious investigation.

“Well, I know the one you mean and I’m fresh out. You boys will have to go and see Madge Carrigan, she ere made the wreaths. Said the wreaths were so special that she just gave them to me for free.”

I frowned a little. Meadowsweet was rare and expensive. It seemed odd to just give away wreaths of the stuff for free. I had a feeling we’d be paying Madge Carrigan a visit pretty soon.

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After spending most of the day walking around, staring at various Christmas items and dragging Dean away from the candy canes they had on offer, the four of us wound up back in the motel room again. Dean collapsed into one of the seats, I leaned against the coffee table and Nisha sat beside Sam on the sofa by the television. We were exhausted but we seemed to finally be getting on top of this job. All indications seemed to point to this Madge Carrigan woman and hopefully soon we’d figure out the final pieces to this puzzle and move the hell on.

“So, Sam,” Dean began, eyeing his brother for a moment. “When do we get the eggnog? Today really made me feel the Christmas, tingly mood.”

“Dean, will you drop it? I’m not talking about this. With everything that’s going on, I can’t do Christmas this year. I can’t pretend everything’s fine when it’s not.”

Dean sighed and rolled his eyes. “I’m going to go lay down.”

He stood up and wandered off into the bedroom. I paused, and bit my lip, before standing up and immediately following after him. I walked inside our room, and saw him lying down on his back, staring at the ceiling idly. I crept across the room and lay next to him on my side, looking at him quietly for a moment.

“What’s going on with all this Christmas stuff, Dean?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “What do you mean? Despite what Sam said, our Christmases weren’t always traumatic. I just want one this year, what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothings wrong with it, it just seems odd. You haven’t ever expressed a deep rooted love of Christmas before that’s all.”

“Yeah, well…this is my last one.”

I fell silent at that.

“I want something, if it’s the last one I get.”

“I know that,” I replied quietly. “We’ll figure something out.”

He looked at me for a moment in silence, and he turned onto his side and got closer again, his fingers touched my neck and down to the collar bone and I shuffled closer to him and put my arms around his shoulders. This closeness felt good, and it was rare, because as you can probably tell Dean isn’t much for closeness. Well, not for the sake of being close at least.

He’d been about to kiss me when there was a knock at the door and I heard Nisha’s voice.

“Stop whatever you’re doing and get out here, we’re going to pay the Carrigans a visit and nip this in the bud.”

Dean groaned. “Seriously? She’s interrupting us again?”

He pointed at me and looked at me seriously. “I’m calling I.O.U, Misha.”

I just smirked and got off the bed and headed back out into the living room area with Sam and Nisha.

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We paid Madge a visit as planned. Pulling up to her house, I’d parked the Torino and stared in something that was a mix between awe and horror. That house was the most dedicated house to Christmas that I have ever seen. I’m pretty sure there was also some tape playing carol songs on the lawn too. Snowmans, inflatable Santas, reindeer, giant candy canes, you name it and it was there. We got out of our cars and walked up to the house. Meeting them was like talking to a living breathing Christmas card. Both Madge and her husband were dressed in matching sweaters, Madge even said ‘fudge’ instead of fuck for Christ sake. It was horrible. After we got back, and I’d been about to give up on this case, Sam did some research into the previous ‘death by chimney’ incidents that had taken place in Seattle. Guess who’d lived there then? Madge and husband. Yeah…I knew she was trying to hard.

“So, we thinking they’ve got a pagan god hidden underneath their plastic covered couch?” Dean asked.

Sam shrugged. “I dunno, but what I do know is that we’ve got to check them out.”

“Great, this is shaping up to be one hell of Christmas already,” I sighed.

“So, Bobby said ever green stakes would kill them, right?” Nisha asked, lifting one of the stakes that Dean had been carving.

“Bobby’s sure,” Sam replied.

With that in mind, we waited until night fall and then headed back to the Carrigan’s home.

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We approached the house, the Christmas songs were still playing in the background and obviously I couldn’t help but find that ironic. I squeezed passed Sam and Dean and quietly fumbled in my pocket on the lonely porch for my lock pick. I found the thin slip of cool metal and lodged it into the lock, crouching, I peered into it and twisted the pick a couple of times before hearing the satisfying click of the lock releasing. I smirked to myself, and reached up to pull the door handle down and open the door with a soft creaking noise.

The four of us crept inside, I had a stake in one hand held firmly and a flash light in the other. Inside, the house was just as demented as the outside. I silently wondered if they just left the Christmas shit up all year and never took it down. The couches were actually covered in plastic too, just like Dean had joked earlier. We kept creeping around, but there seemed to be no sign of Mr and Mrs Rogers anywhere. Everything was just eerily quiet.

I was looking at some weird decorations around the fireplace when Sam called us over. He’d found a peculiar door leading off from the kitchen that I managed to again pick the lock from. It lead down it a dank, dark basement and I had to cover my mouth with my hand because the smell was over powering. It smelled…rotten. Down the mildew covered stair case, I heard a squeak ahead as Nisha stepped in something that squelched unpleasantly. Sam gripped her by the wrist and dragged her away from it as he shined the flash light on it. It was human remains, a steaming pile of flesh and bile by the looks of it. At least we now knew what that smell was (I was happier in my blissful ignorance as it happens) and we now had solid evidence to prove that Madge and her pipe smoking husband were hiding some kind of Pagan miscreant.

I was standing next to Dean, like, right next to Dean. What? Basements filled with severed body parts disturbed me, that and they brought up some unpleasant memories that I liked to keep locked away somewhere in my subconscious. I turned around and saw the back of Sam, with Nisha beside him. A shadow in the corner caused my eyes to widen and I yelled out as Made appeared out of no where, smacked Nisha to the floor with one strike and gripped Sam around the neck and lifted him to pin him against a wall.

“SAMMY!” Dean yelled and ran towards them with his stake ready.

It was then that the husband stepped out and gripped Dean’s wrist, twisting it sharply and then he thrust Dean’s head into the opposing wall. He locked gazes with me and began to stride forwards at a determined pace, I had the stake ready but by the time he got to me he’d knocked it out of my hands. I felt alone, everyone else was unconscious. With one swift and unrelenting blow to the face, everything went black for me and I just about felt my body hit the ground before passing out.

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I don’t know how long we’d been out cold, but I felt my eyes flutter open to be greeted with the darkness of their dank basement again. I squinted and I could vaguely make out the crumpled form of Nisha on the ground in front of him, but the boys were both gone. I guess they were the main course and we were dessert for later. I crawled over to Nisha and rolled her over, shaking her gently.

“Nisha, Nisha, wake up!” I yelled desperately.

Her brow creased into a pained frown and she sat up, holding her head, just about managing to open her eyes as she looked at me.

“My fucking head….”

“They took the boys,” I replied. “We need to get the fuck out of here so I can tear those mother fuckers limb from limb.”

“You take one limb and I’ll take the other and we‘ll both tear them to shreds,” Nisha replied, her jaw clenching.

I managed to stand at that point and gripped Nisha’s wrist and helped her get to her feet. We spent a while pacing the basement. I was stuck for ideas and so was she, until we happened to notice a strange patch of moonlight leaking in to form a square patch on the floor, seemingly from no where. I frowned and glanced at Nisha and she seemed to have the same look on her face. We usually were on the same wave length and got the same idea pretty fast.

I stalked the width of the basement to come to a stack of steel shelves. Nisha joined me and the two of us pressed our hands against the blood soaked metal and pushed it with all the strength that we could muster. It toppled to one side and revealed a squat window, just big enough for us to squeeze through. I smirked and crouched putting my foot through the glass and shattering it with one kick. The two of us snuck out and headed around the front of the house again where we’d first broken in. I glanced into the living room that was opposite the kitchen and I could just about see Dean and Sam strapped to chairs. Beside them was a table filled with all kinds of ritual shit, and the two lunatics were beside them wielding knives and ritual cups. Suddenly it all dawned on me. They weren’t hiding a god. They were the gods themselves. Great. I was at a loss, obviously they’d taken our stakes and so some ‘improvisation’ as Dean called it was going to be necessary. I looked across the doorway to the Christmas tree in their living room. It was an ever green tree. If Nisha and I could break a sharp enough piece off it each, then we could use that.

We snuck into the living room whilst the lunatics were busy lecturing Sam and Dean about how powerful they were ‘back in the day’. I rolled my eyes and knocked tore a branch from the tree, so did Nisha. The tree fell over causing a spectacular noise. Just what we wanted, a diversion to get them away from the boys. As the tree crashed to the floor, lights and all, the Pagans came flooding out of the kitchen and into the living room, looking around this way and that, frantically. Nisha and I doubled back through the hallway, back through the back door, through the kitchen and back on ourselves into the living room until we had silently arrived behind the Pagans. With one swift kick I’d taken out Madge’s legs and driven the branch of the Christmas tree through her back and out through the front of her chest and Nisha had done the very same to Madge’s counterpart. They both crumbled to the ground, oozing blood but neither of us paid that much attention and immediately headed back into the kitchen to free Sam and Dean.

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Back at the motel, we’d been busy. By that I mean me and Nisha and Sam. Dean had gone out to the gas station down the street and we took this opportunity to convince Sam that we should have a Christmas. Sam headed out briefly to the store and came back with a brown paper bag filled with Christmas decorations. Mostly a ‘merry Christmas’ sign and tinsel. We plugged in the fairy lights Dean had stolen from the creepy Santa’s Village place earlier and the scene was set.

Shortly after the door opened and Dean stepped in, looking a little confused but he couldn’t suppress a grin at the three of us standing there in our newly made Christmas scene.

“What’s this?” he asked.

I smirked. “Christmas, obviously.”

The evening progressed and we sat around the table. Sam had bought eggnog and topped it up with extra whiskey, to Dean’s taste. The four of us exchanged gifts from the gas station, well, except Nisha had actually spent a week and a half making her gift to Sam herself. It was this bracelet, it was a brown leather bracelet and she’d woven it all together for him herself. Dean bought Sam porno mags, of course, Sam bought Nisha a kittens calendar and I bought Dean the biggest packet of peanut M&Ms ever. We spent a long time talking, reflecting mostly on our lives and how the four of us had all bonded and what a crazy road it had been so far. What a crazy road it would be, but none of us talked about the inevitable. The fact that next Christmas…it would be three of us and not four.

Eventually though, we called it a night. Sam and Nisha disappeared off to their room and Dean and I went into ours. He was sitting on the bed, taking off his boots, obscured by shadow. I was standing in the doorway of the en-suite bathroom brushing my teeth and watching him silently. He took off his shirt and I saw the shadows wash across his muscles, emphasizing each crevice and each shadow of his skin. I leaned into the sink to finish brushing my teeth and then wandered out, crawling up the bed on hands and knees to lean against the pillow. He turned, suddenly, and watched me with something I thought looked like anxiousness in his eyes.

“Hey, Misha?”

“Yeah?”

“You know a while back, and you said you wanted to talk, and I wouldn’t let you?”

I blinked a little and shuffled back down the bed to sit beside him on the end of it.

“I wanted to talk now,” he replied.

“…Okay.”

“I know what you were gonna’ tell me. I don’t deal well with that kind of stuff, something in me just…never has been, but now, now that I’m running out of time I realize I can’t afford to be that way. I can’t go to hell Misha and not tell you…and not hear you say it back. I have to hear you say it back,” he went on leaning towards me.

I knew what he was talking about and so it poured from me without control and without shame, as it happened.

“I love you,” I said it with a sort of desperate gasp, like my head had been held under water for such a long time and now I was finally breathing again.

“I love you,” he replied with a dark, gruff grunt and then he forced me back with one forceful and desperate kiss. Only this time there wasn’t the excuse of snow and there wasn’t any interruption. Just me and him in the dark.