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Sam is watching videos of the earth turning itself inside out, vines twining up and out and around, choking all in their way and wake.
Eco-horror? Dean says: what, I read.
Reality TV, Sam says.
The future is a fieldful of invasives; their souls in doubt, their bodies too.
*
All the way down I-24, Sam thought about souls. Thought about trestles and time travel and fairy crosses. Immigrant graves on Native land, ammonites, swamp gas, homegrown water monsters, and, as Dean says, just people, people are crazy.
What’s it gonna be this time.
After all the bullshit with Mom, and Lucifer, and the POTUS, and …Death, Dean wanted a pie-shop road trip, but he actually wanted a case more, so they pointed themselves straight outta the Midwest, mostly South, where something is eating folk outside of Athens, sucking them into overgrowth and spitting out their bones.
Lotta plants are carnivorous, Dean muses, catches the exit to 75, Venus flytrap, pitcher plant, bladderwort…
Yeah, Sam says, but--
Sam’s hungry and doesn’t know what that means, except:
It don’t take a genius to know that we—we violent humans, all of us-- deserve to be devoured.
*
The motel has UGA paraphernalia and tourist brochures for botanical gardens, a zoo, a ghost tour, and a tree that owns itself.
The Clarke County law is unimpressed with the FBI buddy act and thinks despite all evidence to the contrary that Earl and Darnell Black are involved in the disappearing and the bone-spitting. Apparently because they liked hellraising, whoring, and handjobs in the backseat of Blue and Clara Something-or-Other’s shiny new Ford F-150.
Go and see their mother; happened on her property, the sheriff says, or at least it did the first two times.
There’s more? Dean asks.
Gonna be, the sheriff says.
Sam gets some kind of feeling in his …spine, he guesses, a kind of a…
germination, a weird unfurling.
On the way to the parking lot, Dean catches his elbow, way he does.
You alright, Dean asks, look like you could use a drink.
Dean’s Sammy senses have not changed.
He still drives like he was born to it.
*
Letitia Black, mother of Earl and Darnell, lives in a tumbledown with a sagging roof and a porch that had once wrapped around, but hadn't since, she says, the boys tried to evict a skunk from under it with a blowtorch. Earl and Darnell's daddy is long gone. The yard’s overrun with honeysuckle, crape myrtle, foot-a-night vine. The kudzu seems… appropriate, she says, as there’s clearly no controlling things that grow up at Letitia's house.
Yeah, those boys don’t got souls, she says, but that’s not the problem. That’s not why you’re here.
We’re here 'cause two people got picked clean like fried chicken, Dean says, on your property.
Letitia sighs, shifts in the doorway: one of ‘em was my neighbor, and the other one was the guy who worked for him, doing the mowing and the pulling and the cutting.
Like, the weed-whacking? Dean asks and Sam elbows him.
I was gonna get him to come over anyway, Letitia says, but seems like he helped himself, couldn’t resist trying to clean up this—
Craphole, the dude walking up through the vine says, and these must be the brothers, one with a slicked-back pony, the other high and tight, but the same angular faces, whipcord bodies, and shit-eating grins.
Letitia sags a bit.
Boys, she says, this is the…
Ma, high and tight says, that ain’t the FBI.
Those are the Winchesters, says ponytail.
*
Dean’s open-mouthed WTF and Sam’s sideeye give way to a sitdown on Letitia’s porch, with lemonade and hooch and a porch-worthy dialogue about demons, hunter gossip, six or seven drinking establishments, the Black brothers’ weed business and …who in the hell knows what else. But at least Earl (ponytail) and Darnell (high and tight) don’t ask Sam what it’s like to go there.
Look, when Ma bought this place off Farm Flip we didn’t expect much, Earl says, but…it’s been home enough.
Problem is, Darnell says, that bog in back is too acidic now, the soil is too …
Fucked with, Earl says, freaking pesticides.
And we can’t burn it on account that’ll piss it off, Darnell adds.
So, the shit’s just gone feral? Dean says, what works for weed just don’t cut it for other things?
There’s a reason they call it foot-a-night vine, Letitia says.
Dean clinks a wary glass with Darnell and gives Sam a look over the rim that says bro timeout, that says,
don’t get weird, Sam.
On the way back to the motel, Sam feels his way though the weirds, the wilds, the weapons, like, for when the monster is the whole world. When it’s the earth. When it’s in the water, but not like with Leviathans.
When it’s everywhere and it’s all our fault.
*
You’re getting weird, aren’t you, Dean says in the morning, but he’s been playing the angles, talking it through with Sam in ways he never used to when they were kids.
By noon, a black truck pulls up in the motel lot, kicks up a little dirt for good measure. A babe in vegan leather climbs out. Two babes, actually.
You said you needed a witch, Alicia says.
Or two, says Max, and winks; goldcat gaze, Florida panther and Canada lynx.
Don’t you ever shut that shit down, Alicia asks.
Max smirks and catches at her waist; she smacks him light and flips him a sign.
You called the Doublemint twins, Dean says to Sam, but he doesn’t sound pissed.
They were a state away, Sam says.
The twins roll their eyes but look … open to side-hugs, maybe, should they choose that route.
Well Rowena’s kind of done with us at the moment, Sam almost says, but really that isn’t it. Something like: it does need to be two of them, one a natural witch like Rowena, the other well, reluctant to mess with the order of things. Alicia did tell him once she wasn’t like her brother, wasn’t born to it but could still hear the magic calling, rushing; river at her hearing’s edge.
Thought you were done with us after Jael and all, Alicia says.
There’s a silver bough, maybe juniper, twisted round her neck, and the feather of a crow.
We need you to negotiate with some weeds, Sam says.
*
Sam gets eaten, before too long. It had to happen. He was just too open to it, he would have said, had he the time.
It happens in the pale moonlight before he and Alicia can really get underway with the four directions, before Max can lay down, in the ether, their intent to do no harm, before Dean can devise a shortcut with a lighter and a machete.
Sam goes dark except for the buzzing in his bones. Sam goes back to the elements of himself, in a to-earth-we-return kind of way unknown, most of the time, to hunters.
We go up in flames, not down in the dark. Our bones incinerate; sunset calcium flame.
It hurts, what Toni did. Mom. The abandonment. The long time behind bars. Too much pain and too easy to be nothing; no, to be something else entirely, a hollow growing thing, a twining, all phloem, that consumes.
*
Sammy! Dean is shouting, tugging at him, slapping his face and brushing, brushing; cascades of red-damp dirt.
You’re back, Max says, arch and rattled at once; hands dark with dirt and with herb.
Offered to feed it Earl and Darnell, Alicia is saying, but it…wasn’t necessary in the end.
Darnell winces. Earl leans over, hands Sam a glass of tea and slinks off.
What in the hell was all that, Letitia says, did it work?
Max gives her a look.
From the ground, surrounded by vine gone quiet, Sam can almost hear Alicia thinking, almost--
Does a bear crap in the kudzu?
And Dean laughing.
*
Later, back in the motel parking lot, Alicia catches Sam’s arm and says something quick-like, a blessing to keep the roots from his hair.
I heard something, Alicia says, when I was …negotiating with the weeds. I don’t think Max did, though.
What was it, Sam asks.
A warning, sort of, she says, directed at me, kind of --
Before too long you’ll all be in the ground. You’ll be twig and vine too. You, especially.
She looks a little shaken. Her hands make branches of shadows. Her hands cup, nepenthes, the pitcher plants; nepenthe, the fix of forgetting.
*
Later, Max and Alicia pull out from the lot with bellies full of coffee and vegan meatloaf and Sam and Dean stop at Letitia’s to see …what’s what.
Letitia encompasses the yard with both palms: Think I’m gonna turn this into a night garden, if this shit’ll let me. Tobacco, jasmine, moonflower…
Yeah, better ask it first, Dean says.
Wise, Sam says.
Earl and Darnell stand around, rib each other about the state their souls.
Later, Sam and Dean drive into Athens and visit the tree that owns itself; old, old oak, or its descendent, with rights to the land; eight feet on every side, the plaque says.
Dean shuffles his boots a bit:
Were you really gonna …you know…
What, let it all consume me? Be free of all this?
Yeah, Dean says, yeah.
Sam’s spine has more fire than it’s had in awhile. He thinks of the witch twins with their hands on the wheel and how Dean might kick it and unbrood, most of the way though a sweet tea and chicken-on-waffle and maybe some fries.
Not this time.