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Killing a demon is impossible, Rodney had said. But you can exorcise them from their host and send them back to hell. That’s simple. Throw holy water at the host, shove them into a devil’s trap, recite the prayer.
Simple.
Rodney had left out the part where demons had freakin’ telekinesis.
So John was pinned to the wall of a thrift store in Schuyler, Nebraska while Sam, Dean, and Vala chased the purported demon with supersoakers loaded with holy water. They were playing a game of cat and mouse through the aisles and shelves, ducking and weaving like pros. Sam and Dean, however they’d been trained in their respective service branches, had been trained to hunt together, moved like a well-oiled machine, no need for words. Vala was a pro herself, but she still coordinated her movements with the Winchesters via the radio system, which Rodney, Lorne, and Miko ran from the giant tour bus parked outside.
All of this John could ruminate on while he was suspended against the wall by an invisible force. He felt totally useless. He couldn’t even talk.
Miko began, “If you just recite the -”
“Busy here,” Dean snapped. He popped up over a display of antique dolls, fired a shot.
There was an inhuman roar of pain, a rising of smoke, but Sam cursed. “He slipped me again.”
There were several devil’s traps strategically placed around the store (i.e. spraypainted by Lorne, quickly and expertly, and at odds with his quaint suit and bowtie), but the demon refused to go near any of them.
John attempted to squirm free, but it was no use. The demon was damn powerful. When they’d arrived in the town, Sam and Lorne had interviewed the chief witness, a woman who claimed her husband was acting erratic. Both of them had been professional but compassionate, and they’d left the woman’s house armed with a photo of the man and a little plastic baggie full of homemade cookies.
They’d split up to check the man’s favorite haunts, with orders not to engage until at least three of them were assembled. All of the man’s favorite haunts had proved fruitless, but there was a street market, and demons could jump hosts, and Sam, Vala, and Lorne had all spotted the man at the same time.
John had seen the moment each of them froze, turned, zeroed in on the same man at the same time. He’d spotted the man, too, not because he recognized the man’s face from the wife’s photo - but because he could see its true face. And he’d frozen at the sight of it. All his life he’d seen those faces, and he’d never realized what they were.
It was Sam who’d shouted Christo! and the man - tall, dark-haired, lean - had turned and darted into this damn thrift store.
And now...this.
“Put me on speaker,” Lorne was insisting over the radio. “As long as he can hear the exorcism, it doesn’t matter if he’s pinned down or not.”
“As soon as we try that, he’s going out the window - and through one of us to get there,” Dean hissed. He eased around the display of dolls, but the demon was already gone. John couldn’t even see him.
“Where’s John?” Rodney demanded. “He’s not responding to comms.”
John’s really not cut out for this gig, John thought. Afghanistan was far less insane than Nebraska.
Sam said, “Demon’s got him pinned.”
“While he’s running around playing tag with you?” Miko asked.
“He’s powerful,” Vala murmured.
And then Dean said, “Hey Sammy, remember that time in that abandoned warehouse in Chicago?”
“You want to summon a daeva?” Sam hissed, didn’t protest the nickname.
“No! What about - that time at that cemetery on Halloween,” Dean tried, and Sam said, “Okay. Got it.”
“What are you doing?” Rodney asked, suspicious.
Sam straightened up, hands raised in a gesture of surrender, supersoaker nowhere in sight. “Hey now,” he said, “we don’t want to hurt you. We just want to rescue your host. If I had a herd of swine, I’d say have at it, but -”
The demon was on Sam in a flash, arms locked around his neck, ripe for the neck-breaking. The demon’s eyes flared golden, and John was confused, because Rodney had said demons’ eyes flickered black.
The man was in his forties, tall and lean, handsome above the horror that was his true face. His predatory smile was frightening instead of charming. He pressed his nose to Sam’s hair and inhaled.
“Sam Winchester, the boy with the demon blood,” he said.
“What?” Miko demanded over the radio.
Dean popped up, supersoaker aimed right at the demon. “That line is getting really, really old,” he said. “And having demon blood doesn’t make a guy a demon. Having a demon in your body makes you a demon, though.”
“And Dean Winchester, the boy meant to be an archangel’s vessel.”
John shuddered. When the demon spoke, it sounded like he spoke with a dozen different voices, not all of them human, growling and crunching and burning the words.
“Nope. Angel condom isn’t my destiny.” Dean grinned, all bravado. “There’s no such thing as destiny. Exorcizamus te, omnis immundis -”
The demon snarled and lifted his chin, and suddenly John wasn’t the only misplaced wall decoration. Dean managed one curse before his voice was stolen from him too.
Sam’s brow was furrowed, a vein in his temple throbbing, and John saw black smoke start to trickle out of the demon’s nose.
But the demon inhaled deeply, sucking the smoke back in. “None of that, boy,” and he tightened his grip on Sam’s neck.
Vala rose up, hands raised in surrender, supersoaker also nowhere in sight.
And the demon raised his eyebrows, lifted his head, and he looked...pleased. “Qetesh,” he said.
“Not anymore.” Vala swallowed hard. “I thought I recognized you, though, Ba’al. It’s been a long time.”
“Centuries, hasn’t it?” The demon practically purred.
“Did she just say Ba’al?” Lorne demanded.
“Not nearly that long.” Vala’s expression turned steely.
Miko squawked, “No, Lorne, come back!”
One of the side windows crashed open, and there was Lorne, looking completely incongruous in his suit and bowtie, armed with a supersoaker, broken glass glinting in his hair.
“You,” Ba’al said. “Came back for more punishment? Going to let me have your other eye?”
“She’s not Qetesh anymore.” Lorne opened fire.
Ba’al roared, steam rising off of him. Vala yelped and ducked out of the way. She came back up with her supersoaker, opened fire. Ba’al screamed and writhed, but he didn’t release his grip on Sam. Sam planted, gripped Ba’al’s arm, and executed a perfect judo toss. Then he picked up Ba’al and literally dropped him into the nearest devil’s trap.
And John and Dean fell off the wall.
John scooped up his supersoaker and moved into position with the others, aiming right at Ba’al.
Lorne was reciting the exorcism with breathtaking speed and precision, syllables tripping off his tongue, consonants sharp in the air, and smoke was rising off of Ba’al’s body, but he was grinning, and he spat out a stream of latin, and the devil’s trap broke.
The entire building shifted, and the floor cracked in half, right through the devil’s trap.
Ba’al flicked a hand at Lorne, sent him flying back out the window.
Miko screamed.
Ba’al leveled Sam, Dean, and John with a snap of his fingers, and he advanced on Vala. Vala fired her supersoaker at him again, but Ba’al snatched it out of her grip with his damned demon telekinesis. He crossed the room and closed his hand around her throat, his other hand clenching her jaw, and he parted his lips, like he was going to kiss her. Only a tendril of black smoke curled out of his mouth and toward Vala and -
John didn’t think. He drew his gun, and he fired, three neat shots, tightly grouped, right into Ba’al’s torso. Heart and lungs. He didn’t die, because he was a demon. But the smoke stopped right before it reached Vala’s open mouth.
Vala wrenched herself free, gasping.
And then Lorne was climbing back through the window. Ba’al extended a hand toward Lorne, but nothing happened.
Lorne reached out, placed a hand on Ba’al’s shoulder, the gesture almost companionable, but his gaze was sorrowful. Then he reached into his suit and drew a knife. The blade had arcane markings down its length.
“Evan,” Vala protested, but Lorne said, “He’s dead anyway.” And he plunged the knife into Ba’al’s gut.
John stared as a lightning storm went off under Ba’al’s skin, and then Ba’al collapsed to the floor.
“I wondered where that had gone,” Dean said.
Lorne knelt, cleaned the knife on the dead man’s shirt. “This is mine. You have your own.” And he sheathed it somewhere inside his suit jacket.
Rodney and Miko burst through the front door.
“What the hell happened?” Rodney demanded.
Vala pointed at John. “He shot the host.” Her tone was sharply accusatory.
“The demon was going to jump into Vala,” John said. “Or strangle her. The exorcism didn’t stop him, and he broke out of the devil’s trap. What was I supposed to do?”
“Did you know it was Ba’al?” Miko asked.
“As soon as I saw him,” Vala said.
“Why didn’t you warn us?” Rodney asked.
Vala glanced at Lorne. “You recognized him.”
Lorne lifted a hand to his glass eye absently. “I couldn’t be sure, having only met him once before, and then with ordinary sight.”
Vala fixed John with a look. “Never, ever kill the host.”
“I -”
“The host is still in there,” Vala said. She spun on her heel and strode out the broken window.
A state police officer in a black uniform stepped into the room. “What the hell happened here?”
Rodney hissed at Lorne, “Spin this.”
Lorne reached up, brushed the glass out of his hair, and then he was wearing a calm, polite expression. He went to speak to the police officer. What happened next John didn’t quite understand, but it seemed to involve Lorne talking fast and doing something that looked like sleight of hand, and then the police officer looked a little dazed, and he nodded, holstered his weapon, and walked back out of the store to keep onlookers back.
Sam and Dean knelt, covered the corpse respectfully.
Miko and Rodney headed out to the bus, Miko to fake up the documentation Lorne needed to square things with the local LEOs, Rodney to do complicated Rodney things.
In the bus ride back to the bunker, Vala wouldn’t look at John, wouldn’t talk to him.
Sam sat beside him. “So, first demon hunt.”
“I feel like I screwed up something pretty badly.”
“A lot of old demons pretended to be old gods,” Sam said. “From ancient times. The scary ones. Ba’al. Moloch. Ashtaroth. They had names - not their true names, never their true names - and they reinvented themselves over and over again, moving from culture to culture, drawing more followers, encouraging more atrocities.”
“Qetesh?” John asked.
Sam nodded.
“So Vala -”
“Has been alive a lot longer than anyone really likes to think about,” Sam said. “A passenger, a prisoner in her own body, while a demon rampaged.”
John wanted to ask about Sam’s having demon blood, and Dean having a connection to an archangel. Instead he said, “So, no one told me demons have telekinesis.”
Sam winced. “Right. Rodney’s lore lessons tend to be less lore, more hunting protocol. Demons can be killed - that knife Lorne has will kill a demon, but the host also dies, so we don’t use it unless the host is already dead. If you want real lore, Dean and I can fill you in. If you want to feel like your brain is going to explode, talk to Lorne and Miko.”
“The more I know,” John said, “the less likely I am to do something like I did today.”
“Your first hunt’s always a rough one.” Sam smiled ruefully.
John eyed him. “How long have you been hunting?”
Sam sighed and closed his eyes. “All my life.” Then he opened his eyes, offered John one of his dimpled smiles, clapped him on the shoulder, and went to sit next to Dean, who was driving.
John glanced over his shoulder and saw Vala curled up on the couch. Lorne sat beside her, talking quietly, but she didn’t look at him, and she didn’t reply. She looked - stark. Hollow. Like she’d been the one John had shot instead of the strange man.
Miko and Rodney were at the table, clacking away at their laptops.
John thought of the demon’s face, of how many he’d glimpsed all his life and not known, and wondered at the ignorance he’d lived in, and what he might have learned, had his mother lived.