Better Review – Lady is a witch-hunter with moderate psychic abilities. Her only quest in life is to kill of the coven of witches that cursed her when she was a teenager, and get as many good times in as she can before she dies from her curse. This is her story.
Author's Note – Skip this if you don't care, but I think there are a few important things you may want to know before we continue. This story will have no Wincest, but it will have gushy moments with Dean. As many as I can respectably put in. While Lady is psychic, she is NOT one of Azazel's psychic children. First few chapters are to introduce Lady to the Winchesters, stick around though and she'll find a couple of witches to introduce you to as well. If you read, even if you aren't into the story, drop a review or send me a message. Let me know what turned you off.
May 22nd 1997, Las Vegas, Nevada
John Winchester drove down the Las Vegas strip as his boy Dean looked with wide eyes at the neon boobies that were lit up even during the day and Sam looked down blushing. John snapped his fingers to get Dean's attention, "Hey, check that phone. See if Bobby called."
"It hasn't rang," Dean said, not averting his eyes.
"I don't trust the stupid thing," John muttered at the bulky car phone.
"Sam's the only one who knows how to work it," Dean said, craning his neck to keep the biggest and best sign he had seen so far in view as they drove past it.
At eighteen Dean's hormones were still off the chart and with their close knit family he had little to no embarrassment over looking where he could and when he could. John wasn't sure if he should be worried about Dean's obsession with the opposite sex or Sam's embarrassment over it. Sam was four years younger than Dean, and while too logical to consider girls 'icky' he wasn't really showing the same curiosity that Dean had at his age. When Dean was fourteen it was all John could do to keep the kid away from the Casa Erotica channel at the motels they often stayed at. Dean had settled down after finishing puberty and channeled that excess energy into chasing the real thing. It was surprising how charming his eldest son could be when it came to women at only age eighteen.
John pulled the car into a lot with empty spaces and got his mind on the job. He had worse things to worry about than Dean's hormones spiking with the ads for escorts and nude posters plastered to half of the buildings they walked past or Sam's red face at the same thing. "Watch for pick pockets," John warned as they reached the sidewalk. "And don't pick pocket anyone," he added, giving Dean a sharp gaze. Dean had gotten pretty good at it, but he hadn't taught Dean to do it as a way to get easy cash. It was, unfortunately, a skill that came along with picking locks and generally sneaking around. Necessary for some of the work they did, but he was trying hard to make sure his kids understood right from wrong. When the right time to do that was, and that when they wanted to binge on junk food it was not the right time. Las Vegas, the Sin City, was a tourist hub that had attracted all kinds of cons that were much better than his kids and himself. They were amateurs on a street of pros who suckered Midwest honeymooners out of thousands of dollars every day. They needed to stay sharp, keep their heads down, profiles low, and mind on the hunt. He'd trained his boys well, but he wasn't about to stop drilling the lessons in now.
"Wow," Dean lost his focus and his eyes nearly popped out of his head as a woman wearing very little walked towards and then past them on the sidewalk, giving Dean the slightest glance.
"Hey, pay attention," John nearly growled at him. "What was the address again?" John knew where they were going, what route they needed to take to get there, he just needed to test Dean to ensure he had his focus.
"I think we're here," Dean said, his head following another scantily clad woman that John was pretty sure was a working girl. He thumped Dean on the back of the head and Dean immediately looked at him. There was no guilt in his eyes, but the focus returned, "Sorry."
It was shortly before noon when John and his sons walked into a dumpy hotel with a small casino attached to it. Bobby met them in the lobby and they waited as John paid for a room for the rest of the week.
"I really appreciate you coming down to give me some back-up," Bobby said as they walked up the steep steps to the second floor.
"You are sure it's a black witch?" John asked, he was looking through a folder that Bobby had put together while he had been investigating strange things in the area. "Thunderstorms in May aren't that unheard of."
"I think the thunderstorms were just a fluke. Wait until you see the abandoned mine shaft that exploded," Bobby said. "In a ball of blue fire."
"Doesn't propane make fire burn blue?" Sam asked.
"That's right," Bobby said. "But this was different. It would have taken thousands of gallons of propane to keep the flame blue for as long as it burned. Of course they are saying some sort of natural gas leak, even when there was no source of it for miles all around."
"You are right, all the signs are here. And it's a full moon tonight," John said. "It's witchcraft. Find them yet?"
"Not sure. I've been racing this witch all week. I have a few ideas, I think we'll need to split up if we'll get them all checked out before sundown. Got a map marked out in my car, whenever you are ready."
"I'm ready now," John said. He had managed to sleep a few hours while Dean drove through the night. "You two stay here."
Sam plopped down on the bed farthest from the door, stretching out and yawning before closing his eyes. Dean looked at what the motel offered and some leaflets of local escorts before picking up the phone to order a pizza.
After eating Dean finally got some sleep. He had been awake most of the night driving so his father could sleep and be ready to help Bobby. It was after ten at night when he woke up, one of the neighbors at the hotel were going at it and banging the bed against the shared wall. Sam was awake and had turned the television volume up to block out the sounds while his face went red and he kept a large book on his lap.
Dean had books he should be reading, too. He was supposed to be studying for his GED so he didn't have to worry about the upcoming school year. He was sick of hopping from school to school, staying a few weeks or maybe a few months at a time. But Sam was only fourteen, when their father decided where they would be when fall arrived they'd be continuing that pattern with Sam. Dean almost wished the hunt Bobby and his father had found came a few months later, it may have meant he'd get a chance to join in while Sam was in school. But no, he was on Sam duty.
It wasn't like Sam was really a kid anymore. At fourteen and he was only a few inches shorter than his older brother. They both had been on hunts with their father over the years, even helped their father hunt down a werewolf. Dean thought a werewolf was a hell of a lot more dangerous than some black witch that the older men were handling. A lot of sacrificed animals, a few ominous satanic symbols spray painted on abandoned buildings. To be honest it sounded like a lame cult of stupid teenagers acting out, which was what the local police thought.
But Dean had been taught better than to believe what law enforcement usually determined to be causing strange things. Sure, there were several bogus jobs over the years since he took a more active role in helping his father. Sometimes a flickering light really was just bad wiring. Sometimes an upside down pentagram really was just a dickhead teenager trying to rebel against his parents. Sometimes, sure. But this case was serious. It was hard to tell just how nasty a black witch was until you got your hands on their cookbook of spells, and since witches were just human's tapping into unnatural forces it was damn hard to tell one apart from the rest of the herd. And Las Vegas was a great place for a witch to hide, strange things happened here on a daily basis.
The neighbors made one large racket before falling silent. As much as Dean wanted to pick on his little brother as he walked awkwardly into the bathroom he let it go. He was bummed out about not being able to assist on the hunt, even if he had been too tired to manage it. And bummed out that he was in the city where every possible vice a man could have was available for the right amount of money and he was stuck babysitting his brother in a cruddy hotel.
Sam went back to reading his book as Dean watched the television until they heard the jingle of keys work their way into the lock. Dean grabbed the pistol he had loaded on the nightstand and watched the door as John walked in. Dean checked to make sure the safety was on the pistol as he moved to sit on the edge of the bed he would again have to share with Sam now that their father had returned. A glance at the clock told Dean it was four in the morning, his father had been gone almost a whole day.
John Winchester looked at Dean first. Dean's eyebrows were up and curious, but he wouldn't ask how things went just yet. He'd let his father take a breath and have a drink. Sam barely looked up from the book he was reading. It was a large book, some textbook that hadn't been returned when they fled one of the previous towns they had stopped in for a hunt no doubt. He frowned a bit, all they had was the Impala and they really didn't have room to keep storing all that crap.
John shrugged out of his button down shirt and threw the bloody thing into the garbage before he looked into a pizza box. There was only one slice left, but it didn't look too old. Right then he wasn't hungry, in fact the pizza sauce oozing out of the sides made him feel like he could never eat again. He opened the cooler and grabbed a beer. Dean was good at making sure the cooler stayed stocked with ice when they didn't have a room with a fridge. There were sodas for the kids, but John always had a six-pack waiting for him. Only there was a beer missing. His eyes went to Dean again who was looking at the television intently. John shook his head and cracked open the beer on his way to the bathroom.
Dean wasn't stupid, far from it. There was no way he thought he could get away with stealing a beer. John just wondered if Dean was trying to get away with it, or if he thought he was entitled to it. On one hand John didn't tell him drinking was bad. How could he do that when after every hunt he needed the alcohol to calm him? And there were a few times when Dean had rightfully earned a cold brew.
John finished in the bathroom and said, "Think it's smart to be drinking when you are supposed to be watching your brother?" Dean looked at him with wide hazel, nearly green, eyes. Mary's eyes. That boy looked so much like his dead wife that it could break John's heart at times. This wasn't one of those times but he was too tired to get in a real good shout to attempt to discipline his eldest son. "When I'm not around you don't touch it, got it?"
"Yes, sir," Dean said immediately. Dean seemed to take in his father's mood and decided enough time had passed since he entered. His first question, "You get hurt?"
John shook his head, "No, not me. Bobby and I got the witch, she won't be causing any more problems."
John sat at the small table in the corner with his beer and wrote in his journal, still in the bloodstained clothes. Dean was finally off Sam duty but instead of testing his father to see if he could get the car for a few hours to check out the city he was at the coin-laundry across the street so they could all have some clean clothes. John had just finished his last entry when Dean came back into the motel room weighed down by two bags of fresh-smelling clothes. He let the bags drop between the beds before stretching out beside Sam on the bed they shared, looking as if he had just worked several long hours of manual labor. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the television.
John felt the fatigue begin to settle in hard but before he got some sleep he wanted to get the grime and gore washed off. He grabbed a clean set of clothes and before stepping into the bathroom he said, "Dean, the last one's for you. Good job, son."
Dean looked at his father with surprise, and the moment the bathroom door was closed he grabbed the last beer in the cooler and popped the top off. Dean had been ready to crash himself, even though all he had accomplished since his father had been away was catching up on watching TV and sleeping. Sam was already snoring on his half of the bed. To avoid waking his little brother he sat at the table under the only lamp that was still lit and opened his father's journal. He flipped through the cramped writing, not reading just glancing at pages and letting a sense of pride fill him as he took a longer drink of the beer. The pages started becoming blank and he went backwards to the last entry. There was a roughly drawn symbol at the top left before the chicken-scratch his father wrote with started. Dean knew most of it, the signs Bobby had pieced together and filled them in on earlier. The strange electrical storms, animal sacrifices, occult symbols and an arson where the flames were blue instead of orange. Dean skipped all of that to read how his father had killed the witch.
We reached the sight, the epicenter of it all. It took me two seconds to realize we weren't prepared for what we were walking into. An important lesson to never underestimate the most disgusting monsters of all, humans. The witch was in the middle of a ceremony, sacrificing a girl. She was screaming and fighting hard, and when she saw Bobby and me she screamed for help twice as hard. I shot the witch, no hesitation. As powerful as they were they really are still human. But whatever the witch was up to didn't end by killing her. There was a shock-wave so rough that it knocked me down and left me deaf and blind for a few moments. For a moment I was afraid she had managed to get enough of the ritual off to unleash whatever it was she was doing, but Bobby is sure it was just a backlash of energy from interrupting her. The little Lady that had been the witch's sacrifice was in bad shape, her wrists were slashed to bleed her dry and she had been right in the middle of that backlash. We got her to the hospital and made sure she was going to be okay. Bobby found the witch's cookbook and is torching it now. He wants to stick around until the kid wakes up, see if she can talk about what happened and make sure she gets back to her parents okay.
Dean finished the last of the beer as his father stepped out of the bathroom. John gave him a once over before getting into his bed. "I want to leave around noon, got a call about something in Delaware while I was out," John said.
Dean closed his father's journal, "Is that girl going to be okay?"
John let out a heavy sigh, "She's going to survive," was all he could say and even that wasn't certain. She had lost a lot of blood and who knows what other damage the witch had done to her. Even if she recovered from her injuries there were going to be scars, mental and physical. "She was a tough little thing, a real fighter. She was so young, Dean," John said roughly. "Fifteen or sixteen, maybe. Just how many other girls did that bitch kill before we got her is what I want to know."
Dean saw the haunted look in his father's eyes that came out after a few beers and a rough hunt. "Good job, Dad," he said, getting into his half of the bed and settling in. Sam's legs were sprawled out under the covers and Dean had to kick them off of his side. He rolled onto his side so his back was to his brother and he was facing the wall, but sleep didn't come quickly.
He imagined what the witch may have looked like. He saw her as an ugly hag, but in reality he knew that evil things came in all shapes, sizes and levels of attractiveness. The woman probably looked average, a real Jane Doe, but in his mind he pretended she was easy to spot as a villain. Curly black hair and wicked dark eyes. Sacrificing children and cutting their wrists. He imagined Sam being sacrificed or even himself, but then he smiled to himself. Nothing like that would ever happen to them. Because they knew. Because they protected each other. When the things in the dark lurked in the shadows looking to pick off the weak they were there to stop them. They stalked other people's nightmares.
Dean had a comfortable warm feeling from the beer and bit of haze in his mind as he fell asleep. His dreams came vividly and mixed until he was the one stopping the evil witch with wild black hair. There was a girl about his age with pretty blonde hair and dark blue eyes, screaming for help. Without hesitation he killed the witch to rescue her. "I got you. You are safe," Dean told her in his dream as she held herself tight to him before the dream went from sadistic witches to something out of the Casa Erotica.
As the sun rose and the Winchesters slept in preparation to depart later in the day Bobby Singer was in a Las Vegas hospital room. There was a small teenage girl, her face and lips were deathly pale from blood loss but the machine she was hooked to kept beeping steadily. A dark fuzz of hair was on her head, Bobby wasn't sure if that was the style she liked or if cutting her hair had been part of the witch's ritual. "Sir, are you her father?" a nurse asked.
"No, uh, I'm one of the guys that brought her in. Just wanted to make sure she's okay," Bobby said roughly, giving the nurse a pleading look. "It's okay if I stay 'til she wakes up, right?"
The nurse frowned a bit as she said, "I'm sure she'd want to thank you for saving her from that madwoman, but..."
"I won't cause any problems," Bobby assured her.
"Okay, but just for a while," the nurse said as a beeping from the hall had her turning to leave. "I'll be back to check in."
Bobby watched the girl for a long time until finally her eyelids opened to reveal pale gray-blue irises. She looked around warily, obviously scared and skittish. "Hey, you're safe," Bobby said quietly, wanting to keep her calm and avoid the nurse from interrupting them. "You remember me?"
She took a few breaths and seemed to relax a bit, "Yeah. You were one of the guys that got me out of there."
"Yeah, that's right. My name is Bobby," he said. He had been the one to hold her, keeping her warm while trying to stop the bleeding as John drove like hell to get her to the hospital. He had tried to keep her talking and awake during the ride, had spoken to her in a soft voice to keep her calm as she threatened to die in his arms. "You said your name was Lady in the car, is that right?"
"Yeah, that's what everyone calls me," she said. "What day is it?"
"Friday," Bobby answered. They had spent most of Thursday rushing to find the witch and all of the early morning hours rescuing Lady from the witch.
"No, the date," Lady asked.
"Uh, twenty-third," Bobby answered.
Lady let out a shaky breath and closed her eyes, "Month?"
"May," Bobby said after a few moments.
A small noise squeaked in the back of her throat as tears slid out from the closed lids. "I was there since March." She sucked in a few shaky breaths as Bobby stared at her with wide shocked eyes. "I'm sorry," she said in a thick voice as she struggled to hold back the sobs.
"Jesus Christ," was all Bobby could gasp. Almost two months of being there.
She wiped the tears from her face and looked everywhere but at him, "They said they had to wait for the blue moon."
Bobby looked at her until her eyes finally landed on him, "They? The woman had...friends?"
Lady nodded. "A lot of them."
"Oh, you are awake," The nurse said, walking to Lady's side immediately and putting two fingers on her wrist and taking her pulse. "Sir, I need to ask you to wait outside."
"Uh...one minute," Bobby said, digging through his pocket. "Lady, I'm going to give you my phone number. Whenever you feel up for it I want you to give me a call."
Bobby was drained, physically and emotionally, as he stepped into the hot desert sun. He used the phone in his car to call John's motel room. After a few tries John answered sleepily, "Hello?"
"It's me. We got a problem," Bobby said. "The girl said the witch had friends. We have a whole coven, not just a lone witch but a whole damn coven."
"Here?" John asked, sounding more alert.
"Not sure, I couldn't stay in the hospital," Bobby said. "I'm going to come back and talk to her after she gets some rest. You still planning on checking into that haunting in Delaware?"
"Someone needs to," John said. "It doesn't sound too bad, maybe I can send Dean by himself."
"No," Bobby said quickly. Dean was a sharp kid, but he was just a kid. Maybe he was eighteen, but he was still a kid to Bobby. Dean could probably handle it, but a kid shouldn't have to deal with this sort of stuff. Kids Dean's age should be chasing girls and playing football, kids Sam's age should be playing video games and having their first kiss, and poor girls Lady's age sure as hell should spend months being tortured by a witch. "No, you head on over there. Lady's pretty messed up, I'll try to get some sense out of her and I'll let you know what I find out in a few days. Just try to hurry up in Delaware in case I find something."
"Yeah, I'll get the boys up and we'll leave soon," John said before hanging up.
When Bobby showed up later that afternoon Lady looked ten times better. Color had returned to her face and lips. "Hey," he said, sitting down. He suddenly wondered if he should have brought her something, like flowers or balloons. The room was horribly bare but it was probably better than what she had the past few months. "You look better."
She gave him a half smile, "Just about anything would be an improvement I bet."
Bobby looked anxiously out the door and back at her, "Listen, kid, I'm not really supposed to be here since I'm not your family, but I was hoping you could tell me a bit about what happened."
"You aren't a cop," she said. "They've been in and out of here a dozen times already."
"No, I'm not a cop," he admitted. "But I do help people. And chances are I'll believe everything you can tell me about what happened. Even the craziest parts."
Lady moved uncomfortably on the hospital bed, "The cops say it was some weird cult. Charles Manson stuff. But it wasn't. It...it was real. Real weird."
"Real witchcraft," Bobby added, and her eyes widened. "Yeah, I know. That woman was a witch."
Lady looked at her hands, "Not sure if I should be relieved that someone else said it before I did, or if I should just start screaming like I'm insane now."
"I'd really appreciate it if you didn't scream," Bobby said in a low voice.
Lady swallowed hard and tears threatened her eyes again, "I know a lot of magic tricks. I could pull a card out of someone's ass if you offered me enough money, but these weren't tricks." Lady held her right arm up and pulled at the bandage. Before Bobby could tell her she shouldn't do that she lifted it enough to show him a tattoo he hadn't seen under the blood that morning. "They put this on me. One of the first things they did to me." Just below the ugly red gash that was sewn shut was tattoo of the moon in three visible phases. The waxing and waning half-moons had their backs to the full moon in the center. The witch herself had the same mark. "Uh…at first they were real friendly. Me and a few of my friends used to hang out with them. They showed us things…things I couldn't figure out. And then one night they wouldn't let us leave. Anytime we got too far away from…that place…" Lady looked like she might choke on her own tongue for a moment before she could continue. "Anytime we tried to run, we just couldn't. There were three of us. I think I was the only one who lived after they did this. They did other things...at the same time...and..." Bobby braced himself for the tears to start, for the sobbing and crying that would probably draw a nurse in and force him to leave again. But Lady just took a few breaths and continued. "I counted eleven of them. They were never all together. They fought quite a bit. They kept saying things about territories and boundaries. Um, one they called Ian was from Oregon and he was arguing with a woman who was in Washington. That she was too close to him. The one you killed was Ananda, she said she'd been fighting to keep Las Vegas for years from someone named Gardner, I don't know if I ever saw him. Some of them acted like friends, but I just remember a lot of fighting."
Bobby pulled out a pocket-notebook and began to write what she said down. "You're doing real good, kid. Real good."
Lady gave names that she could remember, only a first or a last, never both. A few other states that she remembered being mentioned, and anything she could think of to say until Bobby had filled half a dozen small sheets of paper. Lady was still shaken up and went back and forth a few times but he had gotten less information from adults who hadn't been through a fraction of the trauma.
"I should go before the nurse catches me," he said. "Are your parents on their way?" Lady, for the first time since he had entered, became speechless. "They have called your parents for you, haven't they?"
"Uh..." Lady looked away and mumbled something he couldn't make out.
"What?" Bobby asked.
"I don't have parents," she mumbled slightly more coherently. "I am my own."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Bobby said, feeling even worse for the girl. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen," she lied. Bobby gave her a daring look and she admitted, "Sixteen."
"You have to have someone. Is there anyone I can call for you? If they can't make it here I'll go get them and bring them to you if I have to," he said. No one should be alone after going through what she had been through. If she was going to make any recovery that could lead her into becoming a fully functional human being again she'd need someone to help her.
She shook her head, "No. No one."
"You still have my phone number?" he asked, and she nodded. "You ever need anything, kid, you call that number and I'll do whatever I can."
"Hey, uh, Bobby?" Lady said as he neared the door. "I spent an hour talking to you and I don't...I don't know why I even told you any of this. Are you just fucking with me or do you really believe this?"
Bobby thought it was a fair question and after everything she seemed strong enough to hear the truth. "Yeah, I believe in it. And I'm not the only one. There are others like me, like my friend John who was there. We know it's real, and we do our damn best to keep it from hurting people. We try to protect them and save them from things like that. It ain't easy, but it has to be done." Lady looked at him, again speechless as she had to process the truth. Bobby heard the soft and fast footsteps that were no doubt the nurse making her runs, "Take care of yourself, kid," he said sincerely before slipping out of the room to avoid the nurse spotting him. He hoped she could take care of herself, since according to her that was all she had.