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It wasn’t that he saw any indication that made him think they knew he was there. It was more the woman who was handling the children, how she kept glancing around suspiciously. She already gave him bad vibes. All of it really gave him bad vibes. It wasn’t as though Delta hadn’t done this before; Nat keeping watch over the families of the kids who had been taken, watching for other mischief or any communications that might give them more insight, and Coulson nearby, in the command vehicle, the voice in his ear, watching the feed from Clint’s button cam for images of the kidnappers and traffickers to run again the SHIELD database.
What made this different was that they had identical kids to replace the kidnapped ones with. It was bizarre.
None of the kids were twins on record, and the kidnappers seemed to appear to devour them with their eyes. Not like a pedophile ‘hungers’ for a kid, but like a carnivore eyes a herd of beef cattle going to the slaughter.
He reported his feelings of unease to Coulson, as they were rarely wrong. He knew their handler actually relied on his instincts, as well as his eyes and his weapon of choice. The same with Natasha. She often could sense when something was off about the intel and between them, they’d pulled more missions out of a shitshow successfully than any other STRIKE team at SHIELD. They all held the most impressive sets of scores on the range, as well as off.
Besides a few times Clint and Nat had gone off the reservations either individually or together. Like Budapest.
Phil always had their backs though. He said they’d give him a heart attack one day, before he shooed them away, watching as they winked and darted down a side alley, not to be seen or heard from for the next days.
Fury had grumbled about running a daycare until they returned with ice cream and a paper bag that carried a piece of highly classified, and thankfully rare, tech that a new ideological group had stolen, with plans to backwards engineer it and make their own mass destruction weapons to take power from their government.
He hadn’t asked where they got it or what they did to get it. He noticed a bruise on Natasha’s cheek and the duct tape wrapped round several of Clint’s fingers, but both were smiling and rumors began to appear that the group were scattered, that they had been sabotaged, so their bid for world domination just wasn’t going to happen like they’d planned.
He’d also gotten news from Sitwell that in the same area the terrorist group had been hiding in, a human-trafficking ring had been taken down, as well as an animal testing facility. Both Clint and Natasha had pretended confusion and left, still eating their ice cream.
Now, however, there was new intel afoot about people with powers, mostly evil powers.
Here was a case in point.
The intel had called this a child-trafficking ring, but it was in the middle of a small Midwest city. Not exactly the hub for villainy. Kids going missing would be far more noticed here. It was shaping up to be so much more, as each kid had an evil twin. The wicked stepmother, as Clint was calling her in his head, had a few helpers to switch out the kids and keep them locked out of sight.
It was part Freddy Krueger, part Adam West’s Batman villains. While the mother could contort her face in ways that seemed unnatural, the helper henchmen appeared normal except for the all-black contact lenses they wore.
It had been agreed, via coded clicks over the comms, that if they harmed even one child, all bets were off. Clint would take down the woman and the helpers, while Natasha used the distraction to whisk the kids to safety. Phil would call in back up, then take over with the kids so Nat could sweep in and help him clean up the bad guys. For now, they were trying to hold off long enough to see if it went any further up the chain.
When a side door opened and a new man slipped in, handgun up, staying to the shadows, Clint clicked an alert until he could ascertain more.
The way the guy avoided being seen by the woman and the helpers, walking softly but swiftly, head on a swivel was a clear indication he wasn’t with the group. He was dressed as a civvie, in jeans, flannel, and a canvas jacket, boots amazingly quiet. With the long hair, Clint dismissed him as military, although he carried himself with some military training. The way he breathed to minimize sound, eyes constantly vigilant, bent to make himself smaller as he glided under Clint’s perch.
The man looked up, brow furrowed, almost directly at Clint’s hiding spot, making the archer freeze. His blood froze as well. He knew that face.
Below him, sneaking into the space was Sam Winchester, youngest brother of the infamous Winchester brothers. He and his brother were notorious among the law enforcement circles that often came to SHIELD to borrow operatives for their initiatives. The men spent a lot of time at the top of several Most Wanted lists. Their crimes started small, with credit card fraud, identity fraud, breaking and entering. Then they had escalated to arson, murder, mass murder. That video from the St. Louis diner had turned Clint’s stomach.
Both of them were dead.
Correction. They were supposed to be dead. Maybe the younger had somehow escaped his older brother’s fate. Or maybe their deaths were faked again.
Either way, this put a definite kink in the plan. Luckily, Clint very flexible.
Winchester appeared to dismiss whatever had turned his gaze up to Clint’s hidey hole, and he slipped around behind the cages where the kids were softly crying, the older ones trying to comfort the younger as best they could.
He crouched down to speak to one of them.
*****
“Hey, Brad. You’re Brad, right?” Sam whispered to the pre-teen boy who was holding and rocking a kindergarten-aged boy. Both were smudged and disheveled, with tear tracks through the dirt on their faces.
The older boy gave Sam a suspicious look, even as he pulled one of the other kids in the cage with him further away from where Sam crouched. He nodded.
Sam gave a dip of his head to acknowledge him.
“We’re going to get you out of here, okay, all of you.” Sam whispered, eyes darting around to make sure no one was paying them any attention in the dark corner. There were four kids in this cage, crowded together. The oldest, Brad, had just turned 11. The youngest, Harriet, was closer to 4.
The demons who were helping the changeling mother were on edge, staying near the front of the building, various weapons at hand that they tucked under their jackets when they left to patrol the outside perimeter. The mother changeling was pacing with a cell phone to her ear, a tv turned on in the background. Whatever was showing on the screen was agitating her to no end.
“Are you all okay? Can you walk? Run?” Sam hated perhaps traumatizing the kids, but it was better than what the demons and changeling mother had in mind. When all of them nodded, he laid his gun quietly on the floor, then shifted with his lockpicks to reach around where the cage lock just hung at the front corner.
Using feel only, he was able to get the lock open, grimacing when it made a small click, but his eyes never stopped watching for anyone who might notice him, so he knew he was in the clear.
“Wait,” he whispered. “I’m going to create a distraction, draw them out. As soon as you see the last one leave the room, head out that door over there, okay?” He pointed towards the door he had snuck in through, from the garage. “As soon as you get outside, turn left, that’s towards the big white house on the corner. Just run, stay together, but run past that house.” He took a deep breath, picking up his gun again. “My brother will be coming very soon. Big black, loud car. His name is Dean. He’ll keep you safe.”
Brad was wide eyed, but he nodded. Next to him, Katie, the 8 year old girl, also nodded.
“Is..is my mom okay?”
Sam felt his heart drop. Dean had told him there was blood at the scene of the kid’s houses, but none of their mom’s had been found. It didn’t mean they were dead, but Dean said there seemed to be more government mooks in the area, so they could just be in custody.
“I don’t know, but I’ve met all your moms. They’re tough and they just needs you to be brave for a little longer, okay?” Sam sent a silent prayer up to a God who had most likely abandoned humanity a long time ago. When Brad and Katie swallowed, wiping away their own tears, Sam nodded. He knew that look.
“As soon as the last bad guy leaves the room, run.”
“Left towards the big white house to the big black car and Dean.”
Sam smiled softly.
“You’ll all be safe with Dean.”
*****
Clint wasn’t sure what to think about what he’d just heard, but he knew an opening when he heard one.
He slipped through the attic to the far window that opened over the back porch, where he hesitated for only a moment.
“Coulson,” Clint said softly. There was a click of confirmation.
He dropped from the window onto the roof of the porch, making sure to land flat-footed, so it would be as loud as possible, before he ran the length and leapt into the tree at the far corner.
He felt it when several pairs of eyes snapped in his direction. As he swung his bow around to take aim, putting a taser arrow through the arm of one of the minions, it began a very odd battle.
He was used to bad guys yelling threats and insults, but they just growled quietly. He also expected his arrows to at drop a full grown man when the taser went off, but the guy he hit only shuddered and kept coming.
“Shit,” he said, whipping out a few more arrows, aiming more for pinning them to the porch or something.
All five of the minions were heading towards his tree now, for some reason, only chasing him, not firing even if they had a gun. He scampered backwards, going higher up, but the first two began to clamber up after him quickly.
“Need a little help,” he breathed into the comm, finally firing a lethal arrow directly into the face of one of the black-eyed minions.
*****
There was sudden movement that made Sam duck back into the shadows.
Something heavy had hit the roof of the back porch and was running the length of it. He’d thought he’d seen something peeking from the attic entrance, but as it hadn’t called out or tried to cut him off, he assumed it was an animal or a kid who was hiding. He’d have to deal with it later.
For now, all the demons had fled the house, flooding out into the yard, with the mother changeling gritting her teeth heavily. She crushed the phone in her hand and kicked the television over, making it spark, then fall silent.
“Be quiet!” She snarled over her shoulder at the cage, before she too, ran out the door.
Sam didn’t stop to question what had happened, but swiftly moved around to the front to yank the lock off and help the kids out. There was one less than there should have been, so once he got them through the garage and running along the fence towards the big, white house, he ran back through the house, keeping an eye out for the little boy, 6 years old, Frank. Maybe that was who had been up in the attic.
First to deal with the demons and the mother changeling.
*****
Clint was bent at the waist, his arms twisted behind his back, one of his own arrows buried in his shoulder.
Everything had gotten way out of hand very fast as not even the lethal arrows did anything. The minions barely slowed down, but they appeared to be more about capturing him than killing him outright.
The woman was standing over him, the minions in a circle around Clint, and he just knew she was about to launch into some villain monologue, when he heard a strong voice break across the yard.
“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus…,” the voice started, making all the minions tremble before they could react more than turning in the direction of the speaker.
Clint followed their gazes and saw Sam Winchester, not-dead criminal, standing at full height just outside the circle, his arm held up in focus as he recited the latin exorcism. Having grown up as in an irish catholic family, he could easily recognize the latin. The last few years with SHIELD teaching him linguistics helped, as well.
The hands fell away from him and he scrambled sideways, grabbing for his bow and quiver of arrows, where they had been tossed aside. They seemed to be mostly ineffective, but he was sure a good explosion would stop even these bastards who didn’t want to die.
The woman was now screaming into the sky as all of the minions threw their heads back and howled.
“…tibi facias libertate servire. Te rogamus. Audi nos.” Sam finished the chant just as the woman charged him, throwing him to the ground. The minions breathed out a black cloud that swirled over their heads before flowing up into the sky and away from the area. Every body dropped to the ground and remained still.
Clint was up on his feet in a flash, a nocked arrow covering any minion who moved, but they were all still. The only movement was the eerie screeching from the woman who seemed to warp and twist on top of him. Winchester had emptied his weapon into her, but she pulled back an arm now tipped with claws and slashed down.
Clint let loose an arrow that caught her in the back of the neck. What should have severed her spine and dropped her, she merely shifted her neck and it rolled with her. She didn’t spare him a look when he loosed another into the back of her skull.
“Fire!” Winchester yelled when he could get a breath out. “Flames!”
The next arrow Clint released landed center mass. The flames that flared out caught the fabric of the suit she had been wearing. Finally, the woman’s shriek changed pitch and timbre as she arched and rolled away from the other man. Clint saw her features contorting, the flames catching her skin on fire as well.
It was as though her veins themselves were flowing with an accelerant. No matter how she rolled and shrieked, the flames only spread faster, until she went silent, except a hiss of air as she literally melted into a strange lump of misshapen flesh.
Clint jumped when he heard a phone ring. He wasn’t one to startle, but today had been something new for the records.
“Dean?” Winchester had one arm clutched over his chest, where there was shredded cloth and blood. His other arm held the phone to his ear. “Yeah, we got her. She was working with demons.”
There was a pause as Winchester’s eyes came up to meet his. The taller man, and man, he was definitely taller than all the reports said, smiled at him with a bloody thumbs up.
“Get the kids away first, Dean,” Winchester said, leaning heavily against the swing set that had been knocked over during the fight.
*****
“Who’s ‘we’?” Dean’s voice demanded over the phone.
“Get the kids away first, Dean,” Sam told him. He didn’t know who this guy with the bow and arrow was, but with the Kevlar he was wearing and the excess feds in town, it wasn’t hard to guess he worked with some agency. He didn’t know if he was going to get out of this one, but he definitely needed Dean to get the kids to safety first.
“Sam, I swear to God-,” Dean started, but Sam cut him off.
“I think I got gum on my shoe,” he said. There was a moment of silence, then Dean sighed.
“If you’re not back at McQueen’s by midnight, and you don’t call the other line,” his older brother said, “I’ll find a way to bust you out.”
“Love you too, jerk,” Sam chuckled.
“Stay safe, bitch,” Dean responded before hanging up.
It was very faint, but Sam thought he heard the sound of the Impala’s engine roaring away. And other vehicles, several actually, coming closer.
He slid the phone into his pocket with effort, then sighed, turning his full attention on the man who was now pointing a nocked arrow at his chest.
*****
“Samuel William Winchester,” Clint said, biting back the pain of having an arrow in his shoulder and having to hold the bow steady.
He saw the man in front of him grimace, but he didn’t tense up.
“It’s Sam,” Winchester said. “Are you okay?”
Clint blinked and lowered the bow so that it was still at the ready, but no longer actively aiming for the man’s chest. From what Clint knew, the Winchesters had grown up without a mother, a survivalist dad who was so delusional that he claimed demons killed her. Most of the crimes had been attributed to Dean and their dad, but Sam had followed into the family business of fraud, theft, and murder after their dad went off the radar.
The man in front of him was tall and lanky, not super muscular, but you could tell he could hold his own. His face was beginning to show his age, lines around his eyes and his mouth. His eyes, like Clint’s and Natasha’s, looked far older than the rest of him.
Clint shrugged the shoulder with the arrow, wincing only a little.
“Not the first time I’ve been stabbed with my own arrow.”
Sam huffed a surprised laugh, wincing himself, curling over the wounds that were still weeping on his arm and chest.
“Was that you in the attic?”
Clint lifted one eyebrow in surprise.
“Yes.”
He watched Sam relax a little more.
“Okay, we still have to find the last missing boy,” Sam said, running his least injured hand through his hair to pull it out of his face.
The first SHIELD vehicle arrived and Coulson stepped out, followed by Fury himself. That was enough to make Clint think whatever had happened here was about more than a child-trafficking ring, or a murderer who faked his own death.
“Winchester,” Fury said as he approached. His one good eye scanning over the area, and both of the standing men. “When Bobby called and said one of his boys was in trouble, I thought he meant it was your asshole brother.”
“Dean’s got four of the kids, so you got me, Nick,” Sam smirked.
Clint and Coulson both startled.
*****
“He’s passing them off to Romanov and Hill now,” Nick replied. “The fifth was found hiding in the woods behind his own home.” The yard was now swarming with SHIELD agents, several in biohazard suits that went directly to the melted lump. “She a demon too?”
“Changeling mother,” Sam said, letting the medic settle him on a stump and begin checking him over.
“Hmm,” Nick grunted. “Good thing I was in the area.” He glanced at Coulson and Clint, then sighed. “Guess it’s time to read STRIKE Team Delta in. But let’s get these wounds taken care of, then I want the full debrief.”
Sam nodded absently. He’d known Nick was Bobby’s friend, was some higher up in some government thing, but he was tired and was ready to just roll with it.
“Agent Barton. Cheese,” Nick addressed them before he turned and commandeered one of the SUVs. He waited patiently for Sam to be bandaged, then held the door for him to climb in, one handed as he was for the moment.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam called out to Clint before Nick closed the door.
As the SUV was pulling away, Clint turned to Coulson.
“Do I need to be drunk for this debrief?”
Coulson shrugged.
“I’m contemplating it myself.”