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Sam had been raining for three days. On his face. Though he didn't know it. Droplets running down the passenger side window, Baby eating the red road; shadows tearing down over onto Sam’s neck, shirt, shoulder where he and god were joined. Cornfields. On their way to a funeral in Kentucky they shouldn’t even go to.
Donut? Dean asks. Kid needs more carbs, way he’s burnt from witching it up, from talking all night to heaven and hell.
Sammy gives him a look and shifts, swigs from a bottle of water.
Not sure this is a good idea, Dean says, for maybe the fiftieth time.
You said that, Sam says.
Barns, rolling by. One in particular, black as a bible.
***
Here’s the thing:
It's not really a case, it’s a break. From: dreams of other worlds, vamps, werewolf bros; monsters of their own making.
Here’s the thing--they just want to get away clean. From destiny or anything like. Asshole god. Dimensional shifts. Dying and coming to life. All of that shit. All of it.
Sure, Rowena said, on the phone from hell (sort of), you can have all that, and this’ll help.
What’ll help, Sam asked her. She was on speaker (sort of) and Dean was all ears. He could hear her shaking her head from the iron throne.
Samuel, Rowena said, it’s a ghost town, sure, but it’s also a funeral.
For an…eater of sins, Sam says, and it’ll be good for us, you say.
What are we, the cleanup crew now, Dean mouthed.
She was a witch, and a hunter too, Rowena said, and you know what you do then, don’t you boys? You pay your respects.
Sam’s nodding, prodding his shoulder tenderly with his free hand. There they are, witch-to-witch, Dean thought, or some shit like that--communing.
Ask your friends, those magical hunter twins, if you don’t believe me, Rowena said.
Well you are the Queen, Dean said out loud. He could hear her smiling from the iron throne.
***
Sam thinks god is weak. He always has, in a way, but this time it’ll be his downfall, Dean says. But he helps Sam convince his ghost girl, his new Eileen with her mouth and her hands even quicker than before, to stay in the bunker with Cas while they drive out.
Blue Heron, Kentucky, Sam says, scrolling the map, old mining town with not much left, really. Phantom structures; a museum. Stragglers out of the hills and a hunter-witch and her cove full of sins. Della, her name is, or was, of the Ashcrafts. Most of them dead.
Rowena said it’d be good practice, Sam says. He’s finished the green thing he was drinking a mile back, the taint of it still on his mouth.
Practice for what? Dean says, catching other people's crap?
More like, Sam says, absolving it so their stories can …
Like erasing all their bad endings? Dean says.
Something like that, Sam says. He’s explained. Pretty much everything, the practice of sin-eating from Europe to Appalachia, outcasts paid to consume what the dead still carried. All of that and still—
We got jack on Jack and god and you know, the godhole, Dean wants to say, but Sam looks, well, looks the way he does when he’s slipping into hope.
They’ve rolled all the way from fields to hills, I-64 outta Louisville, county roads, Big South Fork of the Cumberland. Lights on the mountains here, souls of men lost at war, or under the earth.
Dean has never loved it, this part of the country (but for the apple cake), but his brother connects, settles in the four-o-clock shade of these hollers.
Such a romantic, Sammy, Dean says, means: you brood, in a way that is far too simple to give meaning to either of them. But: comfort in taking back the tropes. Coldish, but there.
***
Della Ashcraft had a son, two of them actually but only one alive, the ghost of the other shining and his sins piled neatly in the corner of the bible-black barn. Brothers, everywhere they look.
Jacob, the living one, says: good to see hunters here, Winchesters no less.
No surprise they’re known; they’re used to that by now, but still, this place—mineworks, mystery spot candidate–wasn’t even a ghost town, was a ghost of a ghost town, Dean said, and Sam actually laughed.
Della’s house is a crumble garlanded with angel’s trumpet, the bloodred kind; boards weathered, cracked, faint haint blue on the ceiling of the porch. Pyre in the back. Ghosts and folk just hovering by. The dead son, Eli, faintly corporeal.
This is weird, Dean says, glances over his shoulder where Baby shines in the pullout. Who the hell knows the state of the veil at this point, or how spirits act here as opposed to well, everywhere else.
Sam’s talking to a woman, age impossible to guess, in boots and jeans and a black hoodie knit thick with signs. Buds tucked in her pockets, maybe for the pyre. Impressive brows. Della’s sister, Sam says, whose name (of all things) is Ruby, down from Troublesome Creek.
It’s Ruth, actually, she says, but nobody calls me that.
Sister Ruby, Dean says, gives Sam a look, isn’t that the place where—people turned blue from inbreeding, er, a genetic disease, he’s gonna say, or he would have said it years ago, when he was rougher around the edges of things.
Yeah, Sam says, and it’s not like Ruby (Ruth!) doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Ashcrafts were always a strange family, she says, drawn to the weirdest places in these hills, sites of transgression, you might call ‘em, and it’s not like you don’t know about those.
We’ve sinned a few times, in our time, Dean says, and she laughs.
Rowena said you’d make yourselves useful, she says.
Sam here just brought someone back from the dead, Dean thinks about saying, but doesn’t.
My sister, Ruby says, was a hunter, and a witch, and when people died round here she cleansed ‘em, but you already know that. Even her second son, Eli, who …
We saw him, Dean says.
What do you need us to do, Sam asks.
Ruby reaches into her pockets, pulls out a canister, a vial or two, a snip of green; hands them over and steps in close.
Nothing too difficult, she says, for the two of you. Supercharged salt, ash, a few other things, and yeah, tiny bit of blood of the god-linked child. She points in the direction of Sam’s wound, then changes course, fanning her hands to encompass them both.
Godlinked children, men, plural, whatever, she says.
What, me too? Dean asks.
Of course, Ruby says, didn’t think I’d have to explain soul magic to the Winchesters.
They used to think they’d never be clean. Then they didn’t care. Who knew the state of their…souls. Who knew with all the dimensional hoodoo that had gone on. Who knew.
Sam says, it’s like we’re …
The cleanup crew, Dean says, and there it is. Sammy rolls his eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitches up.
All you gotta do, Ruby says, is stand watch on the guests, and catch the sins when they, you know, wake up.
What, Dean says.
You’ll know when you see it, says Ruby.
***
Who knew that catching sins is like shagging flies.
Or: not exactly, but here they are in a diamond of salt, bloodlit by the barn, magic a-thrum like the big show, arms out for the thumping dark of trangressions alive. Not for long.
Jesus, Sammy, Dean yells. Della’s pyre is hot, her sons and her sister shedding a few tears, hunters here and there, hands-off so Winchesters can work.
Jacob said a few words before they lit it up:
My mother exorcised plenty besides…
Known in these hills and beyond, but …
Also loved.
So far beyond granny magic, someone shouted, and there was laughter.
Here they are in the salt, letting the dark sluice through them, their hands, their hips, their ribs, all the bodies they got and then some.
Sam! Dean shouts. Sam’s shoulder looks a little glowy.
Eli, the ghost son, swivels in the ether as a pointy bit of cloud threads, arrowlike, through Dean’s left scapula.
It freaking hurts.
Dean! Sam shouts back, leaps to him clutching at darkness two-handed, eyes to Dean’s footwork, the shuddering ground.
Some of the other hunters have their arms out too now. There’s power alright. Like a storm that won’t quite break.
Dean’s hand goes to his shoulder and Eli subsides, sinks. Flames shimmer up.
Jacob’s calling their names.
***
There are big sins and small ones, things people thought god cared about--but of course, he didn’t.
Winchesters know that, Dean tries to say.
He who is without sin, Dean thinks.
Dean thinks of Aesop, how he told Sammy about god helping those who help themselves. Such kids they were then.
Dean thinks of the towns around here, No Business to Lost Cove, resonating with the word of their lostness.
Something about coal mines being good places for ghosts.
Dean? Sam’s saying. One of his arms slips, comes up round the back of Dean’s jacket.
Ruby (Ruth!) is standing by, prodding Dean’s shoulder with a tattooed hand.
Ow, crap! he shouts, I—
You zoned out for minute there, Sam says. There’s a bit of char on his shirt, just above the god-wound.
Hmm, Ruth says to Dean, you got one to match now. Or close enough. Why don’t you—
They’re looking around, at each other, at the circle and the gray sky and the ghosts and the folk.
The pyre’s still burning, the mourners still standing, the air gone still.
A flight of doves (rain crows! Ruby shouts) bursts from the roof of the bible-black barn.
***
Ruby (Ruth!) and Dean are shoulder-to-shoulder on Della’s back porch, watching the fire, Sammy working the faint wreck of the yard, picking up a cigarette butt, saying hello to someone he knows.
Yep, Ruby, says, the earth was sinned against here long ago, and it’s not like—well, not like anything’s gonna clear away all that. But, she adds, they’ll be fireflies, moonshine, whatever turns your crank.
Dean laughs, looks at Sam shaking out water from a cloth, shaking out hair like a dog trotting upslope, land of buck and pheasant and ginseng.
Your brother’s got some witch in him, Ruby says.
Yeah … think I’m OK with that, Dean says. Ruby hooks him a beer, strange label, strong stuff good for swigging like creekwater sucked up.
How’s the shoulder, Ruby says.
Hurts good, Dean says.
You’ll do fine, Ruby says, and then looks closer.
Ah, she says. Her look is what: pity, something else?
What, Dean says.
Don’t worry, she says, not like you two'll be apart for long.
Portentious, Dean says.
My middle name, Ruby says, I’d tell you what my sister’s was, but she’d probably come back and kill me.
How—Dean says, and for the moment he really wants to know: how can you be a witch, a hunter, even a ghost, all at once, how do you hold all that and not get lost, but there isn’t a good way to say it. It’s a question Sam might ask better but Sam is smiling, taking it all in like the mission that it is. The Ashcrafts seem to have it all worked out.
You’ll do fine, Ruby says.
Dean takes another swallow.
Don’t think it’ll rain much more this week after all, Ruby says.
***
Sammy looks tired, but there it is in the shoulders, the way he keeps himself from going under. They’re leaning on Baby’s hood for a last look when Dean realizes he doesn’t even know how Della died. Sam whispers that he asked, though, that Ruby said she was past the age that anyone counted anymore, even in this neck of the woods, and that it was time to go, and that (well) she wasn’t sure what choices her sister had made for her afterlife, but she’d know very soon.
What does that mean? Dean says.
Means she chose and she’s at peace, Sam says, I think. Less likely for a hunter than for a witch, but who knew.
Dean looks at him, thinks how they back-and-forth like piano keys, dark and light, down and up, keep each other from sinking; these hollers and coves.
You’ve always scared me Sammy. You’ve always made me light up.
My work here is done, Dean says, and Sam looks back at him, pleased and arch at once, and they climb in, pull out onto the dirt.
Here’s the thing: Sam is good. His brother is good and if he’s in the world it’ll always be good too. No matter what god has to say about it.
Couple of miles out they pull over and Dean's says he’s fine and clean and nurses his shoulder with something that Sam says is arnica.
Good diner south of Danville, Sam says, best apple cake in the state maybe. Maybe a motel, too.
*
They next morning they circle back to Della’s old barn before they get on the interstate.
Dean takes a selfie of them there, because there weren't ghosts around anymore and the yard was dotted with wild buds and green as a heaven they could get behind. Texts it to Sam in the car, steering one-handed while Sam scowls at him half-assedly for doing that. In the image there they are, with the black wood against their backs and the sky breaking clean along the dove-sunk roof.
Brothers, smiling without sin.