Nothing Fucks With My Baby

The case started, as too many of their cases did, with Sam saying, “This one should be simple.”

Dean had hated the sentence on principle for most of his adult life. It ranked somewhere between we should split up and I found this in the basement on the official Winchester Scale of Bad Ideas Masquerading as Reasonable Plans.

He looked across the front seat at Sam, then into the rear-view mirror, where Jack was staring out at the passing strip malls with the grave interest of a visiting prince inspecting a disputed province. Cas sat beside him, coat folded neatly across his lap, expression unreadable except to Dean, who had learned to pick apart the difference between angelic calm, marital disapproval, and the specific silence Cas used when he thought Dean had eaten too many gas-station taquitos.

“This one should be simple,” Dean repeated.

Sam did not look up from his phone. “I said should.”

“Yeah. That’s the problem. You put should on it. Now the universe heard you.”

“The universe is not listening for verbal loopholes.”

Cas said, “It frequently is.”

His voice was steady, but quieter than it used to be before the chapel. Dean caught that too, because Dean caught everything lately where Cas was concerned. Not fussing. Not hovering. Just counting breaths, checking silences, learning the difference between tired and gone somewhere inside himself.

Cas met his eyes in the mirror for half a second.

Still here.

Dean looked back at the road.

Dean jabbed a finger toward the rear-view mirror, catching Cas’s eyes in the glass. “Thank you.”

Sam glanced back at Cas. “Do not encourage him.”

“I was not encouraging him. I was agreeing with him.”

“That is worse.”

Jack leaned forward between the seats. “What would make it simple?”

“Local weirdness,” Sam said, which was already too broad for Dean’s liking. “Abandoned roller rink. Power has been shut off for six years, but the lights keep coming on after midnight. People hear music. A security guard quit after claiming something in the snack counter said his mother’s maiden name.”

Dean considered that. “Rude, but not necessarily supernatural.”

“Three teenagers broke in last week and came out covered in blood.”

“There it is.”

“They were uninjured.”

Dean frowned. “Covered in whose blood?”

“They don’t know.”

“See, that’s the kind of detail you lead with.”

Sam swiped at his phone again. His face stayed neutral, but Dean saw the little dip at the corner of his mouth. The quiet place. The place Sam kept falling into when a silence opened too wide beside him.

There should have been another voice in the car.

Something sharp and dry. Something signed through the rear-view mirror. Something that would have called Dean dramatic, Sam stubborn, Cas weird, and Jack worryingly enthusiastic, all in under five seconds.

Dean kept both hands on the wheel and did not look at the empty space his brain still made for Eileen.

Cas looked out of the window, but one hand came to rest against the back of Dean’s seat, close enough that Dean could feel the quiet offer of it without looking.

Dean let the contact sit there.

Jack, mercifully or instinctively, said, “Can roller rinks become haunted?”

“Anything can become haunted,” Dean said. “People haunt houses. Objects haunt people. Clowns haunt Sammy’s nightmares.”

Sam did not look up. “Leave me out of this.”

“Can’t. It’s your brand.”

“It is not my brand.”

“Dude, Plucky Pennywhistle’s put you on a first-name basis with panic.”

Sam’s jaw tightened. “That place was designed by Satan’s youth outreach department.”

“Uh-huh. And the carnival clown?”

Sam finally looked up. “That was a rakshasa.”

“It was also wearing size twenty shoes and a wig from Hell’s lost-and-found.”

“It nearly killed me.”

Dean paused. “Okay, that part was bad.”

“That part was the event.”

Cas frowned. “Coulrophobia is a recognised phobia.”

Sam pointed at him without looking away from Dean. “Thank you.”

Dean jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Do not give him medical cover for this.”

“It is not medical cover,” Cas said. “It is terminology.”

“It’s clowns,” Dean said. “Clowns don’t get terminology.”

“They get machetes,” Sam muttered.

Dean considered that, one hand lifting off the wheel in a cautious, lawyerly gesture. “Okay, using machetes on supernatural killer clowns, I support.”

Sam’s eyebrows climbed while the rest of his face stayed flat. “Dean. Clown is clown.”

Sam sighed and looked back at his phone. “The rink was called Starlite Palace.”

Dean pulled a face. “Oh, that place is absolutely cursed.”

“You haven’t even seen it.”

“It has Palace in the name and probably carpet on the walls.”

“It did,” Sam said after a pause.

Dean slapped the steering wheel. “Haunted.”

Starlite Palace crouched at the far end of a dead retail park, just past a boarded-up pet shop and a nail salon with a sun-bleached sign promising GEL TIPS WALK INS WELC. The rink itself was low and wide, all faded purple panels and cracked stars painted along the roofline. A smiling cartoon comet still arced across the front wall, though somebody had spray-painted fangs on it and written EAT ME SPACE DAD underneath.

Dean parked beneath a broken security light.

The moment the engine cut, the night seemed to lean in.

No traffic. No dogs. No insects ticking in the grass. Just the wind moving plastic rubbish along the kerb and, from somewhere inside the building, the faintest scrape of wheels on wood.

Sam heard it too. Dean watched his shoulders set.

Jack unbuckled his seatbelt slowly. “That sounds like skating.”

“Yeah,” Dean said. “And since the building is supposed to be empty, I am putting that under bad.”

Cas opened his door and stepped out into the cold. The hem of his coat lifted in the wind, dark and familiar against the washed-out neon carcass of the rink.

Dean followed him, machete tucked under his jacket, gun at his back, flashlight in hand. Sam got the EMF out because Sam still had faith in scientific method even when the scientific method was clearly screaming and wearing rental skates. Jack carried a canvas bag full of salt, iron, holy water, and three granola bars because he had recently decided that field preparedness involved snacks.

The front doors were chained.

The chain had been cut clean through.

Sam crouched, touched the metal, and frowned. “Fresh.”

Dean lifted his flashlight toward the glass. The lobby beyond was dark, but not empty. Old prize machines lined the walls. A faded poster advertised FRIDAY FAMILY FUN NIGHT. Plastic stars hung from the ceiling on curled wires, trembling though there was no wind inside.

Cas studied the lobby through the glass. “Nothing has been stripped.”

Sam glanced over. “What?”

“The arcade machines are still here. The copper wiring has not been taken. Even the prize counter appears intact.” Cas’s eyes narrowed. “Whatever is inside frightened people more than easy money tempted them.”

Dean looked back at the dark glass. “Well, that’s cheerful.”

Then, one by one, the lights came on.

Not overhead.

Not all at once.

The old arcade machines blinked awake first. Green. Blue. Red. Their screens crawled with static. A claw machine hummed in the corner and rotated its metal claw over a graveyard of sun-faded plush frogs.

Then the ticket counter lit up.

Then the snack bar.

Then the rink itself, beyond the lobby doors, bloomed under rotating flecks of mirror-ball light.

Jack whispered, “It is welcoming us.”

Dean watched a long smear of red slide down the inside of the snack counter glass.

“No, kid. It’s setting the table.”

Cas stood very still, listening to something none of the rest of them could hear. His eyes narrowed.

“There is infernal residue here,” he said. “But not cleanly.”

Sam looked over. “What does that mean?”

“It means whatever opened this place did not know what it was doing.” Cas glanced toward the rink doors. “Or did not care what else came through.”

Dean exhaled through his nose. “Messy amateur ritual?”

“Possibly.”

“Great. Love amateur hour. Professionals at least label their jars.”

They moved farther inside.

The smell hit first.

Stale carpet. Old sugar. Damp wood. Mildew. Underneath that, faint but unmistakable, the copper-wet stink of blood.

The lobby floor stuck under Dean’s boots. Every step made a tacky little peeling sound. The arcade machines flickered as they passed, graphics jittering through corrupted loops. A pixel spaceship exploded over and over without sound. A dancing cartoon pizza waved one melted hand. The claw machine’s plush frogs all seemed to face the door.

Sam’s EMF shrieked once, then died.

He held it away from his body like it had personally insulted him. “That was new batteries.”

“Put it on the list,” Dean said.

“What list?”

“The list of things we’re billing to whatever dies tonight.”

Cas moved ahead, blade already in hand.

The rink doors swung open by themselves.

Music drifted out.

Not loud. Not clear. Something warped and far away, like a disco track being played underwater. The bass thudded through the floorboards. The mirror balls turned above the rink, scattering weak silver light across the old maple floor.

And in the centre of the rink stood a goat.

Not a ghost goat. Not a corpse goat. A very real-looking black-and-white goat with curved horns, rectangular pupils, and a tiny red bow tie fastened neatly around its neck.

It stood upright on its back legs.

It held a microphone.

Dean stopped.

Sam stopped.

Jack tilted his head.

Cas said, with the kind of weary precision that made Dean love him so much it was occasionally inconvenient, “That goat has a small amount of infernal residue on its hooves.”

The goat cleared its throat.

Dean shut his eyes. “No.”

The goat opened its mouth.

In Dean’s voice, it screamed, “CAS, GET THE FLAMETHROWER!”

The sound bounced off the rink walls, too loud and too accurate, all Dean’s pitch and panic and gravel dragged through a barnyard filter.

For a moment, the whole rink held its breath.

Then Sam made a sound in his throat.

Dean opened his eyes and pointed at him. “You laugh, you walk home.”

“I didn’t laugh.”

“You internally laughed.”

“I respected the moment.”

Jack looked delighted in the worst possible way. “It can imitate you.”

“It is not imitating me. It is stealing my brand.”

The goat blinked, then leaned into the microphone again.

Still in Dean’s voice, it said, “SAMMY, WHY IS THE GOAT SEXY?”

Sam turned away so fast his hair moved after him.

Dean’s mouth fell open. “I have never said that sentence.”

Cas looked at him.

Dean swung on him. “Do not.”

“I was remembering several similar sentences.”

“Betrayal. In my own marriage.”

Cas’s mouth did something almost like a smile.

The microphone squealed.

The goat dropped to all fours and began to tap dance.

Badly.

Its little hooves clicked out a rhythm on the rink floor: tap, tap, scrape, tap-tap. The sound was comic for exactly two seconds. Then the rink lights dimmed, the disco balls slowed, and all the old speakers lining the walls crackled awake at once.

A voice poured out of them, smooth as oil and bright with forced cheer.

“WELCOME, CONTESTANTS, TO LOVE, GUTS AND CONSEQUENCES!”

Dean’s shoulders sank. “I hate themed evil.”

Sam looked up at the speakers. “Who are you?”

The voice ignored him.

“CONTESTANT ONE: THE TALL ONE WITH THE HAIR AND THE REPRESSION.”

Sam’s eyebrows lifted. “That feels targeted.”

“CONTESTANT TWO: THE ONE WITH THE MACHETE AND THE EMOTIONAL CONSTIPATION.”

Dean’s mouth opened. “Excuse me?”

“CONTESTANT THREE: THE ANGELICALLY CHISELLED SPOUSE WITH THE MURDER EYES.”

Cas looked faintly offended.

Dean muttered, “Not inaccurate.”

“CONTESTANT FOUR: THE SMALL GOD-SHAPED BABY MAN.”

Jack gave the ceiling a cautious little wave.

The speakers hissed.

“And CONTESTANT FIVE—”

The voice stopped.

Static filled the rink.

Sam went still.

The pause stretched too long. It was not comic. It was not even theatrical. It was a blank where a name should have been. Something in the walls seemed to search, fingers scraping through absence, trying to find a body for the shape of a joke.

Dean’s grip tightened around the machete.
Beside him, almost without looking, Cas's shoulder turned a fraction toward Sam. Not a touch. Just presence, angled like a windbreak, his gaze shifted to Sam.

Jack looked between them, bright interest dimming into worry. Jack’s hand twitched at his side, not raised, not glowing, just ready. He had been doing that since the choir room too, every time something used voices like hooks.

Cas noticed. Of course he did.

“Jack,” he said, low.

Jack lowered his hand by an inch. Not all the way.

The speaker popped.

“CONTESTANT FIVE IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE!”

The voice gave a canned laugh track.

It played too long.

Sam’s face shut down.

Dean had seen that look on him too many times lately. Not collapse. Sam did not collapse easily. He folded grief into a blade and carried it handle-in. But every now and then something touched the edge and blood got out.

Dean took one step forward.

“Yeah,” he said, voice quiet now. “You do not get to use her as set dressing.”

The rink floor split open.

Not with a neat crack, not with a dramatic flash. It bulged first. Wood bending upward, varnish snapping, old boards peeling away from each other like ribs. Something underneath pushed through wetly, dragging itself up into the mirror-ball light.

It had too many arms. Too many mouths. A body made of meat, old ticket stubs, half-digested candles, cheap plastic prizes, and pale eyes blinking out of places eyes had no business being. A stained apron hung over its front. Across it, in cheerful block letters, were the words KISS THE COOK.

Its head looked like someone had tried to sculpt a former president out of luncheon meat and malice.

Jack stared. “That apron is rude.”

Dean swallowed against the smell. “That apron is the least of my concerns.”

Sam’s jaw worked once, like he was chewing through something he did not want to say.

Cas’s blade slid fully into his hand.

The thing stretched six arms wide. Its mouths smiled at different speeds.

“LOVE TRIAL NUMBER ONE!” it shrieked.

Dean sighed. “Of course it has trials.”

“It appears to be an amalgam of trickster residue, minor demonic craft, and children’s party trauma,” Cas said.

Sam looked at him. “Children’s party trauma?”

Cas nodded. “Highly unstable.”

The thing snapped one wet hand.

A glitter cannon exploded from the rafters.

Dean took the full blast directly to the face.

Silver glitter coated his hair, eyelashes, jacket, and one side of his mouth.

For a long, holy second, nobody spoke.

Sam pressed his lips together so hard his dimples appeared.

Dean wiped glitter from his eyes with the slow care of a man loading a gun in his soul. “Nobody says anything.”

Cas stepped closer.

Dean pointed at him without looking. “Especially you.”

Cas studied his face with grave, devastating tenderness.

“You are very pretty,” he said.

Sam broke.

Not fully. Not the huge laugh Dean knew he could still do on good days, the one that used to make Eileen roll her eyes and smile despite herself. This was smaller and rougher, dragged out of him against his will.

But it was a laugh.

Dean would take it.

He glared anyway, because dignity was a structure and Dean intended to die pretending his was load-bearing.

The monster clapped three pairs of hands.

The sound was wet.

“QUESTION ONE!” boomed the speakers. “WHAT WOULD YOU DO TO PROTECT YOUR BELOVED?”

Dean and Cas answered at the same time.

“Kill it.”

The goat stopped tap dancing.

The speakers crackled.

Sam looked from one of them to the other. “Guys.”

Dean did not look away from Cas.

Cas did not look away from Dean.

For one bright, stupid second, the whole room narrowed around them: glitter on Dean’s skin, old blood in the air, Cas’s blue eyes cut sharp under the broken rink lights. There had been too many cosmic bastards over the years who thought love was a weak point because they had never seen what love did when it stopped asking permission.

Dean smiled.

Cas’s face softened almost imperceptibly.

The meat thing’s mouths trembled.

“That is—” it said. “That is not how the game—”

Dean lifted his machete.

“Oh, buddy,” he said. “You asked the wrong married couple.”

The monster did not like that.

Dean could tell because three of its mouths turned downward, two of its eyes began to leak greyish fluid, and the apron over its pulsing chest tightened as if something underneath it had clenched.

The speakers screeched.

The goat sneezed.

Then the claw machine at the edge of the rink lit up.

Its internal bulb flickered yellow. The metal claw twitched once, then began to descend over the graveyard of sun-faded plush frogs packed beneath the glass. Their felt bodies were flat with age, their plastic eyes cloudy, their stitched mouths fixed in cheerful little smiles that had gone horrible through sheer persistence.

Dean stared. “No.”

The claw dropped.

It did not pick one frog up.

Every frog turned its head, one cloudy plastic eye at a time.

Sam looked over Dean’s shoulder. “That’s bad.”

Dean did not turn. “How bad?”

“The frogs are looking at us.”

“Frogs do look. That’s allowed.”

“They’re not just looking. They’re making choices.”

Jack whispered, with the reverent horror of a child meeting nature at its least reasonable, “They have tiny jackets.”

Cas glanced toward the rental counter.

Hundreds of old skates sat in rows beneath hand-painted size labels. Cracked white leather. Black laces. Orange wheels. Some small enough for children, some huge and misshapen with age, all of them trembling as if something inside them wanted out.

The claw machine made a bright little winning noise.

The frogs climbed.

They came up the sides of the machine from the inside, pressing soft little hands against the glass and dragging themselves over each other in a slow, determined pile. One reached the prize chute first, squeezed through with a dry squeak, and dropped to the floor.

Then another.

Then the rest came pouring after them.

A smell rose with them. Dust, old felt, spoiled sugar, wet animal heat.

Dean made a face. “Nope. I hate this more than the meat Nixon.”

The first frog mounted a roller skate.

It hauled itself upright by the laces, settled into the cracked boot like a cowboy taking the saddle, and slapped one limp plush hand against the tongue.

The skate rolled forward.

Sam stared. “Is it riding it?”

The frog raised one tiny arm.

More frogs clambered onto more skates. Some rode upright. Some lay flat over the toes like terrible little jockeys. One wore a tiny leather jacket that had split down the back. Another had a missing eye and a sticker on its chest that said U R A STAR.

The rink filled with the squeak of wheels and the dry whisper of plush bodies moving where plush bodies had no business moving.

Dean swallowed. “Okay. I would like to go back to when the skates were just haunted.”

The first frog-skate launched.

It came at Sam like a bat out of Hell, laces streaming behind it, frog mouth smiling. Sam ducked. The skate clipped the top of his hair and slammed into the wall behind him hard enough to leave a wheel-shaped dent. The frog peeled off on impact, slid down the wall, then slowly turned its head toward him again.

Sam touched his hair, then stared at Dean.

“My hair?”

Dean tried very hard not to smile.

Sam’s expression sharpened. “Dean.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You had a face.”

“I always have a face.”

“You had that face.”

A second frog-skate launched.

Cas moved.

Not dramatically. Not with a battle cry. One moment he was beside Dean; the next he was in front of him, blade in hand, shoulders squared. The skate hit Cas square in the forehead.

It bounced off with a sad rubber squeak.

The frog landed on Cas’s shoulder.

The whole rink seemed to pause.

Cas turned his head very slowly.

The frog’s cloudy plastic eyes stared into his.

Its stitched mouth smiled.

Dean looked at Cas.

Sam looked at Dean, already warning him not to do whatever his face was about to do.

Dean lost the fight instantly.

“That,” he said, “was adorable.”

Cas lifted the frog from his shoulder by two fingers. “It assaulted me.”

“It cuddled you after.”

“It struck me with footwear and then trespassed upon my coat.”

“Yeah, with its little wheel and its tiny frog feelings.”

Cas’s eyes narrowed. Then he bent, picked up the fallen skate by its laces, placed the frog neatly inside it, and drove his angel blade clean through both.

The frog and skate went limp together.

Dean’s smile widened. “You murdered a frog jockey for me.”

“I neutralised a threat.”

“I am turned on and emotionally confused.”

Sam threw one hand out. “Could we not process your marriage during the amphibian cavalry charge?”

The frog-skates rose in a wave.

They came off the shelves, out from under benches, from behind the prize counter and beneath the old birthday-party tables. They hit the floor in a clattering flood and rolled toward them with impossible purpose, plush riders leaning forward as if they could smell blood through sun-bleached felt.

Jack lifted both hands.

Half the wave stopped mid-air.

The other half did not.

Dean stepped forward, machete swinging. He caught one skate across the toe, splitting leather and spraying black ichor across the floor. The frog rider popped loose, hit Dean in the chest, and clung there with both soft hands.

Dean looked down at it.

The frog looked back.

“Nope.”

He peeled it off and flung it into the boards.

Sam slammed an iron bar through another skate and kicked two more away before their riders could hook tiny plush hands into his jacket. Cas moved through them with cold, efficient irritation, blade flashing under the broken disco lights.

The frog-skates kept coming.

They moved wrong. Too fast, too eager, wheels spinning over old blood and glitter, laces snapping at ankles like hungry worms while the frogs sat their boots with dead-eyed carnival patience.

One skate wrapped its laces around Dean’s boot.

Its frog rider raised both arms like it had just won a rodeo.

Dean looked down.

“Oh, you did not.”

The skate yanked.

Dean’s feet went out from under him.

He hit the floor hard enough to drive the air from his lungs, slid three feet across sticky varnish, and came to rest under a rain of glitter still drifting from the rafters. The frog rider skidded after him and landed on his chest.

For half a second, he lay there staring up at the mirror balls and thinking, with absolute clarity, that he had survived Hell, Michael, Chuck, and at least four vampires who had smelled like wet bins, only to be taken out by a size-seven roller skate being ridden by a plush frog with abandonment issues.

Cas appeared over him.

“Dean.”

“I’m good.”

“There is a frog on you.”

“I know.”

“It appears victorious.”

“Cas.”

Cas plucked the frog off Dean’s chest and threw it without looking. It hit the wall with a tiny, dusty thump.

“You are bleeding,” Cas said.

“From pride.”

Cas reached down.

Dean took his hand.

The pull up was too strong, because Cas was Cas, and Dean came up too fast, slammed into his chest, and for one stupid, dangerous second they were close enough that Dean forgot the rink, the frog-skates, the meat monster, and the goat currently attempting to eat a microphone cable.

Cas’s hand closed at Dean’s waist to steady him.

His thumb pressed briefly, firmly, into the place above Dean’s hip where his jacket had ridden up.

Dean’s mouth went dry.

The monster shrieked again.

Sam yelled, “Any time you’re done making eye contact!”

Dean did not look away from Cas. “He sounds jealous.”

“He sounds correct,” Cas said.

Then Cas shoved Dean behind him as four frog-skates came at them at chest height.

Dean ducked anyway because he was not dead weight in his own rescue, thanks very much, and hacked one out of the air. Cas caught another barehanded, crushed it until the wheels popped off, and flung it backward into the monster’s face. The frog rider stuck briefly to one of the monster’s mouths before being swallowed with a squeak.

The monster recoiled.

A mouth in its shoulder screamed, “FOUL!”

Dean pointed his machete at it. “You started amphibious shoe violence.”

Jack, still holding half the frog-skate swarm suspended, frowned in concentration. “Should I make them smaller?”

Sam looked up. “No!”

Dean looked up at the floating frog-skates.

Then at the monster.

Then at Jack.

“Maybe.”

“No,” Sam said again. “Do not let Jack experiment mid-combat.”

Jack brightened. “I can experiment carefully.”

“That is not better.”

The frog-skates Jack held in the air began to tremble harder. Their laces stretched toward him, blackening at the tips. The frogs’ stitched mouths split wider, threads popping one by one.

Jack’s smile faded.

“Dean,” he said, very quietly.

Dean knew that tone.

Not scared. Jack was not scared easily, and when he was, it landed wrong because his fear had too much Heaven behind it. This was focus. This was the kid realising something had stopped being funny.

The laces lengthened into thin, vein-like cords. They writhed through the air toward Jack’s hands, seeking his skin. The frogs opened wider, and something white clicked behind the felt.

Cas saw it too.

“Release them,” he said.

Jack opened his fingers.

The frozen frog-skates dropped.

Every one of them hit the floor and burst open.

Not into stuffing.

Into teeth.

Tiny, chattering, enamel-white teeth spilled across the rink by the hundreds, mixed with felt scraps, orange wheels, and cloudy plastic eyes. They bounced once, then began skittering toward Jack.

Dean stared.

“Oh, that is nasty.”

Sam turned pale. “Are those human?”

Cas looked down. “Some are not.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because some are animal.”

“Again, why would you say that?”

Jack stepped back as the teeth clicked faster.

The goat, still chewing on the microphone cord, lifted its head. Its eyes went wide.

Then, in Dean’s voice, it screamed, “I DO NOT CONSENT TO DENTAL HORROR!”

Dean snapped his fingers toward it. “Finally, something accurate.”

The teeth surged.

Cas moved to Jack.

Dean moved with him, because nothing in any universe got to put teeth on their kid.

Sam slammed both hands into his duffel, grabbed a canister of salt, and hurled it hard against the floor. It burst open in a white spray. The front line of teeth hit the salt and shattered like dropped porcelain.

“Salt works!” Sam shouted.

Dean hacked through another wave. “Great! Find me a giant margarita!”

The speakers groaned.

The monster lurched forward, dragging its lower body through the split floorboards. Its hands slapped wetly against the rink as it pulled itself nearer. Its apron had begun to bleed through the letters, red soaking into KISS THE COOK until the words sagged and ran.

The goat trotted in a panicked circle, trailing microphone cable.

Jack raised one hand again, more carefully this time.

The teeth nearest him froze. Then, with a small gesture, he turned them into white dust.

Sam exhaled. “Okay. That one was useful.”

Jack looked pleased for half a second.

Then the popcorn machine coughed.

All of them turned.

The snack counter glowed behind smeared glass. Old menu boards hung above it, the prices yellowed and absurd. Nachos. Hot dogs. Slush. Popcorn. Birthday Combo. A faded cartoon bear in roller skates pointed toward a special offer that had expired before Jack had been born.

Inside the popcorn machine, something moved.

At first it looked like kernels.

Then like fingers.

Then the glass fogged from within.

Dean swallowed. “I hate that we have to care about the popcorn machine now.”

Sam lifted his flashlight.

The beam caught a shape pressed against the inside of the glass. Pale. Tubular. Wet. A loop of something that flexed like intestine and slapped once against the panel.

Jack peered at it. “Is popcorn supposed to have organs?”

“No,” Sam said.

“No,” Cas said.

“No,” Dean said. “But thank you for asking, because I hated imagining that alone.”

The machine coughed again.

Then it belched.

A dark fan of blood sprayed across the snack counter window from the inside. The cartoon bear disappeared behind it. The machine rattled, the warmer lights flickering orange, and something began to push its way out through the little metal flap at the bottom.

It emerged slowly.

A slick rope of intestine. Then another. Then a third, all braided together like something had tried to make fairground food out of anatomy.

The smell hit them a second later.

Hot butter. Burnt sugar. Blood.

Dean gagged. “That is a hate crime against snacks.”

Sam stepped back. “The machine is connected to the main entity somehow.”

“Yeah, I got that from the murder spaghetti.”

Cas’s eyes narrowed. “It is feeding the floor.”

Dean looked down.

The cracks where the monster had broken through were pulsing faintly. Every few seconds, a ripple travelled through the old wood toward the snack counter, and the popcorn machine answered with another wet cough.

Sam followed the motion with his flashlight. “The rink itself might be the body. Or the anchor.”

“Fantastic,” Dean said. “We’re fighting Chuck E. Cheese’s gallbladder.”

Jack frowned. “What is a Chuck E. Cheese?”

“Don’t,” Sam said. “You’re happier not knowing.”

The machine snapped.

One of the intestinal ropes shot across the rink and wrapped around Sam’s ankle.

He hit the floor hard.

Dean lunged. “Sam!”

The rope yanked him backward.

Sam clawed at the boards, boots scraping uselessly. His knife skittered away. Another rope lashed out and caught his wrist, pinning his arm at an angle that made him grit his teeth.

Dean grabbed his other hand.

The pull almost took Dean down with him.

Cas seized the rope with one hand. Steam rose where his palm closed around it. The thing convulsed but did not let go.

“Cut it!” Sam barked.

Dean swung his machete.

The blade bit into the rope. It split halfway, spraying hot black fluid across Dean’s sleeve, then sealed around the metal with a horrible sucking sound.

Dean pulled.

The machete stuck.

“Oh, come on.”

The popcorn machine made a pleased ding.

A fresh bucket rolled out onto the counter.

It was full of teeth.

Sam looked at it, still being dragged inch by inch. “I hate this case.”

Dean planted one boot against a crack in the floor and pulled with everything he had. “Yeah, well, I hate most cases. Specificity matters.”

Jack moved to help, but the teeth skittered toward him again.

Cas glanced from Jack to Sam to Dean. The calculation passed through his face in a single hard flicker.

Then he looked at the goat.

The goat looked back.

It still had the microphone cable in its mouth.

Dean saw Cas decide.

“Cas,” he said. “No.”

Cas strode across the rink.

“Cas.”

The goat tried to back away.

Cas caught it around the middle, lifted it clean off the floor, turned toward the snack counter, and hurled it through the popcorn machine.

The goat screamed in Dean’s voice all the way.

“SON OF A BIIIIII—”

Glass exploded.

The machine burst open in a geyser of blood, popcorn, yellow butter, teeth, and organ meat. The intestine ropes snapped loose at once. Sam slid to a stop on his back, chest heaving, hair full of glitter and something Dean refused to identify.

The popcorn machine gave one last wet cough.

Then died.

A single kernel bounced across the counter and landed in Dean’s boot.

No one spoke.

Cas adjusted his cuffs.

“It was available,” he said.

Dean stared at him.

Cas looked back with perfect composure, except there was a little blood on his cheek and a small piece of popcorn clinging to his shoulder.

Dean felt his entire soul sit up and applaud.

“That,” he said hoarsely, “was so hot.”

Sam, still on the floor, lifted one hand. “Could we please not.”

Jack stared at the demolished machine with open awe. “Should I also throw goats?”

“No,” Sam said.

Dean considered the wreckage.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“No,” Sam repeated, louder.

From inside the snack counter, the goat groaned.

In Cas’s voice, it muttered, “I dislike this.”

Cas’s expression darkened.

Dean pointed toward the counter. “Hey. Nobody does my husband’s grumpy voice but my husband.”

The monster roared.

The sound ripped through the rink, rattling the arcade machines and making the mirror balls tremble above them. The lights flashed pink, red, pink again. The floor bulged around the meat thing as if the whole building had started breathing through it.

Sam sat up slowly, wiping blood from his jaw. “I think we made it mad.”

Dean glanced at him. “Little bit.”

“That machine might have been feeding its manifestation.”

“Good.”

“Dean.”

“If something is eating through a popcorn machine, I am personally comfortable with making it worse.”

The monster’s central torso split.

A line opened down the middle of it, wet and dark and grinning. Inside was not bone or organs, but a bright mess of party decorations: streamers, candles, plastic whistles, deflated balloons, little golden stars, all soaked in gore and twitching as if alive.

Then something small crawled out.

It dropped onto the rink floor with a slap.

A child-sized meat creature.

It wore a paper crown.

Dean went still.

Another dropped beside it.

Then another.

Then six more, each wearing a crown, each with too many little mouths and tiny waving hands.

Jack made a small sound.

Not fear.

Recognition.

Dean felt the mood in the room shift.

Birthdays were a complicated subject in their family. Not bad. Never just bad. But loaded. Jack and Cas’s shared day. Lucifer’s blade. The miracle and the wound, folded together until the date itself felt like a lit match held near dry paper.

The tiny monsters opened their mouths.

They began to sing.

Badly. Sweetly. Wrong.

The birthday song, bent out of tune.

Dean’s vision narrowed.

“No,” he said.

Sam got to his feet beside him. His face had gone tired in a way Dean hated, because Sam’s grief had enough rooms already without this place building another.

Jack stared at the singing things.

Cas looked at Jack.

Then at Dean.

Then at the paper crowns.

His expression changed.

The humour drained out of him so completely the air seemed to lose temperature.

Dean knew that look.

That was not annoyance. Not righteous anger. Not even the old, terrifying angelic fury that had once looked out through Cas and made monsters remember they had invented prayer for a reason.

This was quieter.

This was not the old angelic fury, clean and bright and certain of itself. This was something scraped rawer than that. The kind of anger left behind when someone had reached inside you and learned to wear your voice. When obedience had been the lock and grace the key.
Dean saw it and took one careful half-step closer.

Not in front of him. Not like Cas needed blocking.

Near enough.

The rink lights flickered.

The singing faltered.

The little meat creatures swayed in place, their paper crowns trembling.

The speakers crackled.

“LOVE TRIAL NUMBER TWO—”

“No,” Cas said.

The word moved through the rink without volume.

It struck the walls, the floor, the broken machines, the meat thing, the goat, the dark behind the arcade cabinets. It struck Dean too, not as force, but as a certainty he could feel behind his ribs.

The music died.

The monster recoiled.

Cas stepped forward.

He looked ridiculous, if Dean wanted to be technical about it. Trench coat spattered with gore. Popcorn stuck to one shoulder. Blood on his cheek. A skewered frog-skate behind him. Glitter dusting his hair where Dean had accidentally leaned into him.

But there was nothing ridiculous in his face.

“You misunderstand love,” Cas said.

The monster’s mouths twitched.

“That is common among predators.”

Dean’s hand tightened on the machete.

Sam’s breathing slowed beside him.

Jack watched Cas as if the words mattered, as if every one of them was being put somewhere inside him for later.

Cas kept walking.

“You thought humiliation would weaken attachment. You thought fear would simplify it. You thought grief would make us easier to separate.”

The goat sneezed behind the counter.

No one looked at it.

The monster tried to laugh. The sound came out wet and broken.

“You made a game,” Cas said. “You dressed harm in lights and songs and childish things. You reached for names you did not earn. You reached for absence because you believed absence was empty.”

Sam’s jaw flexed.

Dean did not look at him. Not because he didn’t care. Because he did.

Because sometimes looking was too much pressure.

Cas lifted his blade.

“But absence is not empty,” he said. “Not in this family.”
He was holding himself a half-inch too still. Dean had learned that stillness. It meant Cas was managing something.
The monster backed away, dragging its lower half through broken boards and teeth dust.

“Dean,” Sam said quietly.

Dean nodded once.

Jack’s hands rose, light gathering faintly around his fingers. Not Heaven-bright. Not God-bright. Just Jack, controlled and careful and angry enough that the air around him seemed to sharpen.

Cas stopped a few feet from the tiny singing things.

They had gone silent now. Their crowns drooped.

“Nothing here is new,” Cas said. “Nothing here is impressive.”

His eyes fixed on the monster.

“And nothing here is permitted to touch him.”

Dean’s throat moved.

For a second, the whole rink held still.

Then, from inside the ruined popcorn machine, the goat screamed in Dean’s voice, “I HAVE FEELINGS!”

The moment shattered.

Sam bent over.

Dean shut his eyes. “I am going to kill that goat with my bare hands.”

Jack made a tiny strangled noise that might have been laughter.

Cas inhaled once through his nose, with the patience of a celestial being being tested by livestock.

The monster lunged.

Dean met it halfway.

Badly.

He slipped on a slick of butter, hit one knee, recovered by grabbing a streamer hanging from the monster’s chest, immediately regretted grabbing it when it pulsed in his fist, and still managed to drive the machete into one of its shoulder mouths.

The mouth bit down on the blade.

Dean glared at the mouth clamped around his blade.

“Rude.”

Sam came in from the side and slammed the iron bar into the creature’s lower torso. Something cracked inside it. Jack snapped one hand out, and the nearest cluster of tiny crown-wearing monsters compressed into a squealing knot of meat no bigger than a basketball.

“Be smaller,” Jack said, very firmly.

The knot dropped to the floor.

Dean stared. “Kid, that is deeply disturbing and wildly useful.”

Jack looked pleased for half a breath before another arm swung at him.

Cas cut it off.

The limb hit the floor and tried to crawl away.

Sam stepped on it.

“Absolutely not.”

The creature shrieked. The disco balls spun faster. Light scattered over everything in violent flashes: silver, red, gold, Dean’s glittering jacket, Cas’s blade, Sam’s hair matted with blood, Jack’s face pale and set.

Dean yanked his machete free and drove it in again.

This time, the blade found something central.

The monster convulsed.

Its apron split open.

Behind the fabric, embedded in the meat of its chest, was a tarnished party token. Larger than it should have been. Old brass. Stamped with the Starlite Palace comet logo. It pulsed like a heart.

Sam saw it. “Anchor!”

Dean grinned. “Now we’re talking.”

The monster’s arms snapped toward the token defensively.

Cas got there first.

He caught two wrists, twisted, and forced them apart with a strength that made the creature’s joints crack like dry branches. Dean drove forward, machete raised.

The goat launched itself out of the popcorn wreckage and skidded across the floor between his legs.

Dean tripped.

Again.

“Son of a—”

He went down shoulder-first, rolled through teeth dust and glitter, and came up facing the token from below.

The monster loomed over him.

Dean looked up into its central mouth.

“Hi.”

It opened wide.

Jack shouted, “Dean!”

Cas moved.

Dean moved too.

He rammed the machete upward with both hands.

The blade punched through the token.

For a second, everything stopped.

Then the token cracked.

Light burst out, sour and yellow, spilling over the rink floor. The monster screamed, all mouths at once. The tiny crown-things screamed with it. The speakers screamed. The arcade machines screamed. The goat screamed in what sounded like Bobby’s voice, which was an emotional crime Dean did not have time to process.

Cas grabbed Dean by the back of his jacket and hauled him away just as the monster folded inward.

Not exploded.

Burst.

Like a demonic piñata full of organs, candles, and spite.

Blood slapped the walls. Chunks hit the ceiling. Something long and purple landed across Sam’s shoulder.

Sam glanced down at it, then up again.

“I want everyone to know,” he said calmly, “that I am considering retirement.”

Dean wiped meat confetti off his face. “You say that every week.”

“This week I mean it with intestine on me.”

The last mirror ball turned once.

A sad kazoo version of victory music played from somewhere behind the prize counter.

Then the sound system died.

For several seconds, the only noises were dripping blood, Jack breathing too hard, Sam trying to get cursed intestine off his sleeve without touching it more than necessary, and the goat chewing on something plastic.

Dean rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

A chunk of monster slid down one disco ball and dropped beside his head.

He closed his eyes.

“I hate roller rinks.”

Cas crouched over him.

“Dean.”

“I’m alive.”

“You are covered in viscera.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“And glitter.”

Dean opened one eye. “Do not make this weird.”

Cas reached down and touched Dean’s cheek with his thumb, wiping away a streak of silver and blood.

His hand lingered.

There it was again. The real thing under all the nonsense. Cas looking at him like the world could become meat and teeth and bad music and still not matter as much as Dean breathing.

Dean’s mouth went dry for an entirely different reason this time.

“Cas,” he said, softer.

“I know.”

Sam turned away from them with a roll of his eyes that was almost normal.

Almost.

He crouched to wipe his blade on one of the dead creature’s party napkins. His fingers moved automatically as he muttered something under his breath, and for one stupid, unguarded second, his hand lifted like he was going to sign the joke across the room.

The motion stopped halfway.

There was no one there to catch it.

The silence landed wrong.

Dean saw it. Cas saw it. Jack saw it.

Sam’s hand dropped.

His face closed, quick and practised. Too practised.

Then the goat’s head popped up from behind the ruined popcorn machine.

It stared at Sam.

In Sam’s voice, with perfect timing, it screamed, “I HATE THIS FAMILY!”

Sam froze.

Dean froze.

Jack made a tiny noise of alarm.

Then Sam laughed.

It broke out of him rough and startled, like it had caught on something sharp on the way up. He bent forward with one hand braced on his knee, laughing until his eyes shone and his breath hitched.

Dean’s face softened.

Cas looked down.

Jack smiled carefully, the way he did when joy and grief arrived wearing the same coat.

Sam wiped his face with the heel of his hand. “She would have loved that.”

Nobody asked who. Nobody needed to.

Dean swallowed and nodded once. “Yeah. She would’ve taken video.”

“She would have sent it to everyone,” Cas said.

“She would have edited it first,” Jack added. “With captions.”

Sam laughed again, quieter this time.

It hurt. Of course it hurt. Everything did.

But Dean was glittering like a homicidal Christmas ornament, Cas had just murdered a frog-skate, Jack was trying to comfort a severed paper crown, and somewhere, if Heaven had any mercy at all, Eileen was absolutely laughing herself sick.

Dean clapped Sam on the shoulder.

Sam let him.

For two seconds, that was enough.

Then the goat whispered in Cas’s voice, calm and profound, “Dean, I love you.”

Dean went rigid.

Cas turned very slowly.

Sam lost the fight with another laugh.

Jack looked delighted and emotionally moved.

Dean pointed the machete. “Nobody leaves until that goat is dead.”

The goat screamed.

For one frantic second, it looked as if they were about to lose another twenty minutes of their lives to cursed livestock.

Then the goat stopped.

It turned its head very slowly toward them. The red bow tie sat crooked under its chin. Its rectangular pupils gleamed with the tiny, appalling confidence of something that knew it had overstayed its welcome and intended to make that everyone else’s problem.

Dean raised the machete. “Don’t even think about it.”

The goat smiled.

Actually smiled.

Then it looked past Dean, directly at absolutely no one, and winked.

Sam stared. “Did it just wink at the camera?”

“There is no camera,” Cas said.

The goat’s smile widened.

With a delicate little pop, it vanished like a soap bubble.

For half a second, the bow tie hung in the air by itself.

Then that popped too, leaving a single puff of glitter to drift down onto Dean’s boot.

Nobody moved.

Jack lowered his hand slowly. “I do not understand goats.”

“Good,” Sam said. “That means you’re still sane.”

Dean stared at the empty patch of air. “I’m gonna be mad about that for the rest of my life.”

Cas’s fingers found his, warm and steady under the blood, glitter, and popcorn grease.

Dean let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “Nothing messes with my baby,” he said, like he could pass it off as a joke if nobody looked too closely.

Cas did look closely.

“No,” he said. “It does not.”

The rink answered with a long, exhausted groan. Dust sifted from the rafters, and one of the mirror balls dropped six inches on its chain before producing a final, pathetic kazoo note from somewhere inside its mechanism.

Sam looked up. “We should leave before the building decides to do something symbolic.”

A cracked birthday whistle rolled out from under the dead monster and gave one tiny, accusing tweet.

Dean pointed at it. “Nope. We are leaving.”

They went fast, but not gracefully. Dean’s boots stuck to the floor with every step. Sam had to duck under a sagging streamer of something that might once have been part of a balloon arch and was now mostly biology. Jack tried not to step on any of the scattered plastic frog eyes. Cas brought up the rear, blade still in hand, because no one trusted the building not to have one last opinion.

Behind them, Starlite Palace groaned again.

The lobby lights flickered in a sequence that looked uncomfortably like applause.

“Do not clap at us,” Dean snapped, and shoved the front door open with his shoulder.

Cold night air hit them like mercy.

For a second they just stood outside beneath the broken security light, dripping gore onto the cracked tarmac. The Impala waited twenty feet away, black and beautiful and absolutely innocent of what they had become.

Jack inspected a smear of glittering blood on his hand. “Can we use a motel shower?”

“Eventually,” Dean said.

He looked from Jack, to Sam, to Cas, then down at himself. Blood, glitter, popcorn butter, tooth dust, frog felt, and something viscous he refused to identify had formed a shining paste across his jacket.

His expression hardened.

“Nobody gets in Baby like this.”

Sam followed his gaze to the side of the building, where a green hose sat coiled beneath a rusted outdoor tap.

For the first time all night, something like peace crossed his face. “Hosepipe.”

Dean pointed at him. “Do not enjoy this.”

Sam was already walking. “I’m going to enjoy it a little.”

“Sammy.”

“You have frog felt in your collar.”

Dean reached for his neck, found something damp and fuzzy, and went very still.

Cas peeled a strip of something unidentifiable from his sleeve and let it fall onto the tarmac. “The hosepipe is sensible.”

Dean sighed like a man sending his dignity to auction. “Fine. But nobody uses the spray setting.”

Sam’s hand closed around the tap. “No promises.”

Jack watched the last glitter mote settle on Dean’s boot. “Should we tell Garth we almost had a goat?”

“No,” Sam said.

Dean wrung something wet and glittery from one sleeve before Sam had even turned the hose on. “We are telling Garth nothing until I have showered, burned these socks, and emotionally recovered from being winked at by livestock.”

Sam looked at Dean, then at Cas, then back at the collapsing purple corpse of Starlite Palace, and shook his head as if the universe had personally failed an exam.

“I hate this family,” he said.

Dean laughed so hard he nearly slipped on the wet tarmac.

Cas caught him, of course.

He always did.

Dean let himself lean there for one second longer than the joke required.

Cas allowed it.

Sam pretended not to notice. Jack very obviously did notice, but had learned, recently and painfully, that not every rescue needed a name spoken over it.