Chapter Text
In the night the city air was hot and black, and it tasted like the ocean. People were up at all hours here. There was always something better to be doing than just lying in bed and failing to sleep. The world was alive with music and neon and the sharp spice of the place where the bayou and the shoreline met. The moon hung fat and brilliant like a white flower. Sam twisted and kicked in his sweat-stiff sheets and gave up on sleep.
Dean was in the other room, either sleeping or faking it; both were possible. The door stood mutely open. It was late, too late, and the city was still whirling. For a bitter moment Sam wondered if anyone else in this whole goddamn city had a job to get to in the morning. The flash of irritation was tiring. He stared blindly at the ceiling, feeling the seconds slip past like syrup.
Stop it, he told himself. You have to sleep. Go the hell to sleep. Stop thinking. Stop worrying. It’s not doing you any good. You’re going to die of exhaustion at the age of twenty-five, and then what’ll happen to Dean? Shut your stupid mind off.
In the army it was so much easier. They said sleep and you slept. They said eat and you ate until they said you were done. If you didn’t you paid for it the next day.
His shoulder hurt with an old dry ache. He rubbed it and stared out the window, and watched New Orleans bubble and rage far away.
The second he pushed open the door of the Roadhouse, the blonde woman looked briskly up from the counter, said “Good, you’re here. Take this,” and dumped a tin bucket into his arms. The bucket was astonishingly heavy, like it was full of cement, and gave off a sticky rotten stench. He staggered for a moment, staring at her. “What?”
“You simple, boy? Take it outside.” The woman nodded at the door, still hanging on its crusted hinges. She was pretty but faded, with dull cornsilk hair and a face traced with lines. Her hands were thick and hard as a man’s. He had a brief confusing flash of his mother and pushed it aside with some difficulty. “Outside?”
“Yes. Outside. The place on the other side of the door. Throw it in the street, the dogs’ll take care of it.”
When he hesitated, she barked “Go,” and he fled.
The bucket proved to be half full of rank sour vomit. Sam tossed it across the street. A few people glared at him, but most walked on by. It occurred to him that they might be used to this kind of thing by now. That thought did not trouble him as much as it should have.
The blonde woman was polishing a row of crusted glasses when he walked inside. “Thanks,” she said. “Some idiot drank three more scotch and sodas than he could handle and didn’t make it to the john. Times like these make me think I should go legit.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. “Um,” he tried, and then, rather weakly, “I’m Sam Winchester.”
A brief opaque flicker of eyes over the dirty glasses. “I’m aware. Bobby said you’d be coming in today. He didn’t say you’d be a bit slow, but I suppose that’s a side effect of his caring and generous nature. I’m Ellen.”
He groped vaguely for a memory of the name. “The owner’s wife.”
The eyes glanced up again, sharper this time. “Not since 1918. Got his head blown off by some Jerry bastard in the Marne. I’m the owner now.”
For a moment the impact of memory hit him like a blow--filth and gore and the hot gritty sting of gunpowder. “I was at the Marne,” he said, and wondered at himself for saying it.
Ellen watched him for a long moment, her face tight and unreadable. Finally she looked back at the glasses. “Is that so,” she said flatly. “Well. Welcome to the Roadhouse, Sam Winchester.”
The other employees of the bar arrived in irregular trickles, with little regard for timing. There was a slender girl with liquid blonde hair and soft eyes who introduced herself, somewhat unnecessarily, as Ellen’s daughter; she looked precisely like Ellen, minus twenty years of running a bar and the violent death of a spouse. Her name was Jo and she was exactly the kind of girl Dean liked. Had liked. Hell, probably still would like, if he got any contact with the female gender anymore. She gave Sam a crisp but friendly smile and a cursory explanation of where everything was, from the mops for scrubbing up stale beer (in a dusty corner) to the shotgun for dealing with unpleasant customers (behind the bar, where Ellen presided with implacable calm). Sam found himself liking her in an instinctual way.
Benny Laffitte slouched in about ten minutes after her. Of the other workers, Benny was the only one Sam had met before, and it was mostly due to him and Bobby that Sam had this job at all. A tall man with a lazy, predatory, grace and a wiry smile, he was one of Dean’s old drinking buddies from before the war. Sam didn’t know him very well, which was due largely to the fact that Dean was the sort of person who specifically classed some of his friends as ‘drinking buddies’ and Sam really wasn’t. Benny wore a drooping cloth cap and spoke with a fluid Cajun accent like honey and hot pepper. Sam didn’t like him, for reasons he could not define or articulate. He smiled at him and tried to stay out of his way.
Finally there was the blind woman. Her name was Pamela and Sam had never seen anything like her before. She was sleek and gorgeous, with a wild tumble of black hair and long silky legs, and she wore thick lenses of smoked glass which completely covered her eyes and a lot of the upper half of her face. When she walked in, she called out “Is everything the same as yesterday?”
“More or less,” Ellen replied.
“Thank you, sweetheart.” She walked across the room with a kind of rolling confidence. Sam, who had become something of an expert in the habits of the blind, watched her incredulously. Dean had lived in their mousetrap apartment for weeks without once leaving and still walked in fear of knocking things over. It didn’t seem possible that this woman, with her brassy self-assurance and her bright dress, could really be blind. Surely there were eyes hidden behind those black glasses, watching him with the muted spark of laughter.
“One new addition,” Jo said, pushing out of the kitchen. “Go be friendly, Sam.”
Sam stood up, uncertainly. “Hi, I’m Sam, like she said. This is my first day. It’s great to meet you.”
“Yeah?” The dark holes of the glasses turned in his direction. “New to the gin mill, huh? It’s not so bad. Just stay away from Ellen’s coffin varnish. She makes that shit in the john.”
“You didn’t seem to mind it so much last night,” Ellen replied darkly, planting a half-dried glass on the shelf. “Or the night before that.”
“Needs must when the devil drives.” Pamela tugged a chair out from one of the rickety tables and dropped into it. “Sam, you drink?”
“A little. Sometimes.”
She leaned back, her glasses fixed on him like empty sockets, and he had the distinct feeling she was watching him again. “Don’t tell me you’re some god damn blue noser.”
“No, I drink. It’s just more my brother’s thing.”
“Really?” She smiled, wide and catlike. “I might like this brother of yours.”
Not many people were interested in violating the 18th Amendment at nine o’clock on a Wednesday. The Roadhouse was largely deserted apart from a scattering of pale, dusty, sunlight and the sour haze of last night’s liquor. In the corners were the truly devoted drunks, the ones with no jobs and no families, nothing but the chipped glasses of amber in front of them. They carried the dark stink of alcohol and hopelessness and there was little in their vacant, shapeless, faces to identify them as human. Every so often Jo would go over and top them up. Benny lingered by the door, keeping watch down the street with artistic casualness. The cops in this part of town had little interest in the thriving bootleg trade and had long since given up trying to control it, but once in a while the federals dropped by and it never hurt to be too careful.
“Bobby tells me you can play the piano,” Ellen said abruptly.
Sam looked up. “Sure. That was in the job description.”
Pamela shifted. “Really.” Her voice was oddly flat. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.
“I took lessons. Not for very long, but…I mean, I like it. I’ve always liked music.”
“Play us something,” Benny said amiably, and gestured at the battered old upright piano in the corner.
“Yeah,” Jo said. “Show us what you got.”
Sam laughed, embarrassed in a slight and pleasant way. “Okay, if you insist. What do you want to hear?”
“Give us a surprise,” Ellen said. She was smiling faintly.
Sam shrugged and rose. “You asked for it.” The piano keys had that pearly yellow tarnish that came with years of use, and the stool let out a squeal as he sat. He ran his fingers over the chipped geography of black and white, feeling the strange, familiar, mixture of calm and excitement settle over him. Experimentally, he pressed middle C, and a note of wheezing but genuine sweetness rang out.
He dove into the first five bars of “Tin Roof Blues”. It was a good piano, if a bit banged-up. The keys were slippery and the music roared out like it had been waiting for him. He pulled away, suddenly uneasy. It was, after all, not his piano.
“Very nice,” said Pamela. “You’ll make a fine replacement for me.”
Sam glanced back. “Sorry?”
“You heard me. I used to provide the musical accompaniment for this dump before all this.” She gestured vaguely at her face.
“Oh. That’s--a lot to live up to.”
“Damn right it is.” She sprawled backwards in her chair. “You better start taking better care of your hair.”
“His hair looks pretty good to me, Pam,” Jo said drily.
“So what brings you our way for a job?” Benny asked. He was leaning against the doorframe, picking idly at his nails.
Sam blinked. “I need a job to earn money so that I can buy the things I require for survival.”
Ellen let out a sharp laugh. “He has you there.”
“Not what I meant.” Benny tilted his head back. “You only end up in a job like this if you’re desperate, on the lam, addicted to something expensive, or all three. So what’s your story?”
A slight twist of discomfort moved in Sam’s stomach. “It’s long. And complicated.”
“None of us are doing anything.” Pamela leaned over the table, her hands tucked beneath her bony chin.
“Okay, okay. You want to hear my big story, here goes.” He twisted around at the stool and slid backwards against the face of the piano. “I was eighteen when the war started. Started for us, I mean.”
“Already I can see where this is going,” Benny muttered.
Jo shot him a sharp glance. “Benny, shut up.”
“Anyway, I was all set up for college. Scholarship and everything. Then the war came along and I figured, my father was a soldier, my grandfather was a soldier, and I should probably follow in the tradition. So I joined up. And Dean, my big brother, he joined up too. To look after me.”
He fell silent for a moment. This was the worst part, not the horrors that came after but this simple, inescapable fact; that Dean had joined up to take care of him, and everything else that happened after was because of that. There was no way through it or around it. That was the truth, and he couldn’t ignore it just because it might make things easier to live with.
“They shipped us out to France,” he continued finally. “We were there for nine months. The AEF, under Pershing. I met Pershing once. Dean and I were stationed together most of the time. We were together at the Marne, and at Argonne Forest, which was when--well, we were fighting, and we were separated. There was some kind of chemical gas where he was, I never knew exactly what. Almost everyone else died. It knocked him unconscious and the bodies covered him, which I guess is how he survived--they must have shielded him somehow. So he was alive when they found him. Not by much.”
The bar was very quiet now. Sam did not look up. He didn’t want to see the faces of the people around him, because he knew what he would find there. It was the same look everyone got when he told this story, and it got old very quickly.
“He’s blind now, and he has trouble breathing,” he went on. “They sent him home after that. I had to stay more or less right up until the end, but when they let me go I came back and found him.”
“Where was he?” asked Jo softly.
“They sent him to our dad. In Kansas. He was having trouble living by himself.” Sam kept his voice level with an immense effort of will. This was the other difficult part--not remembering it, so much, but telling the story in a way that didn’t involve yelling and breaking things. “I took him and we left.”
“Why?” asked Benny curiously, which was always the question that came next, and always impossible to answer.
“He wasn’t taking care of him,” Sam managed, This was technically accurate, although it failed to capture the filth of the house, the alcoholic reek, the rats nesting in what was left of the bed. When Sam came Dean had been so weak he could barely move; he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten, and it was like he didn’t care, like he was content to disintegrate of neglect and starvation in their father’s ruined house. It wasn’t a huge surprise, really. John had never been very good at taking care of anyone, even himself.
He realized that he had been quiet for too long. “We were on the move for a little while after that. Looking for treatments, mostly. We went everywhere and nothing worked. I did some odd jobs to pay for all the doctor bills which amounted to nothing. Then Bobby--he’s an old friend of our dad’s--he got in touch with us and said that he had a room he could rent us, and maybe a job. So we came down here.” He looked up with a bright vacant smile. “And that is the extent of my story.”
Jo breathed out and shook her head. “That is quite a story, Sam Winchester.”
He shrugged with an edge of discomfort. “Now you know why I need the job. I figure I’ll take a look around here, see what local frauds and faith-healer crazies I can find to waste my money on this time. New Orleans can’t be any worse than the other places I’ve been.”
“That’s just tempting the powers that be,” Ellen said mildly.
Benny was looking at him from the doorway with an odd, intense, look, like a man on the verge of untangling a complex problem. He folded his arms, unfolded them, scratched irritably at the back of his neck, and folded them again. His gaze slid, uncomfortable and skittish, over to Pamela’s face.
“Pam,” he said, and there was the unfinished hint of a question in his voice.
Pamela’s head moved curiously in his direction, her black glass eyes calm. Then a spasm of shock and understanding crossed her face like a slap and she said “No,” very sharply.
“He could help,” Benny said, almost apologetically. “He could do something.”
She was shaking her head, stiff and insistent. “No. Benny, don’t. Please.”
Sam shot a glance of helpless confusion at Ellen, who was watching the exchange with interest and completely ignoring him.
“Come on, Pam,” said Benny. “He needs this.”
“No he doesn’t. No he goddamn well does not. Nobody needs this.”
“He does. Listen, I have to tell him. I’m sorry.”
Pamela stared at him for a long second, shaking her head, but in a weaker way. Then, very quietly, she said “Fuck this,” got up, and left. She walked out the door with the same swinging grace with which she had entered it, and it fell shut behind her.
Ellen sighed bleakly. “That girl is so temperamental. Always has been.”
Sam blinked and looked around. “I’m sorry, what just happened?”
Benny pushed away from the door, walked over, and dropped into Pamela’s chair. He leaned forward. “If you’re looking for healing,” he said quietly, “I know someone who might be able to help you.”
“Yeah?” Sam replied, hearing the voice of routine already start to drone. Here it was; my doctor, he did these amazing things, modern medicine and God’s mercy, and in the end it was nothing but bills piling up and Dean throwing up in the waiting room trash can.
“Hey. Listen up.” Benny snapped his fingers. “This is not your average bullshit. This guy is the real McCoy. He has references and whatever you’re thinking, he’s not that.”
“Okay, then what is he?”
An uncomfortable ripple moved over Benny’s mouth. “He’s got magic.”
Sam, who had been halfway prepared to tune out for the remainder of the conversation, felt his heart stutter. “I’m sorry, did you say magic?”
“Yeah, magic. Vodou.”
“Oh,” said Sam, and then was silent, unsure of what happened next. He was aware, of course, of the vodou culture in New Orleans. It was the sort of thing you heard about a place before making a commitment to live there for any long period of time. Somehow, though, it had always seemed distant, separated from him by the impenetrable reality of his life and the things he actually did. It existed, but in such a far removed way that it might as well have been a fairy tale.
Now here was Benny with his soft liar’s voice and his threadbare cap, saying “He’s the real thing. I’ve seen fake and he ain’t it. My cousin--she was having some real trouble with her husband, and he fixed it for her.”
“Fixed it?” Sam replied, slightly uneasily.
“Yeah. You know--” a lopsided shrug. “Fixed it.”
“Benny, stop feeding him shit,” said Jo briskly, filling a mug with acid gin.
“It’s not shit,” Benny insisted. “I swear on my life, it’s the truest thing I’ll ever tell you. That man is in contact with some powerful things.”
“Much as I hate to invest in any of this superstitious horsefeathers, or to agree with anything this layabout says, he happens to be right,” Ellen added. “There are people in this town who can do things you wouldn’t believe. If Benny says he’s the real thing, he probably is.”
Jo looked up with a quick sting of shock. “Mama, you can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious. Just because you ain’t seen it don’t mean it ain’t real. Some of these vodou people have done things neither you nor I can explain, and until the day we can, I’m inclined to believe them.”
Despite himself, Sam’s curiosity had its ears pricked and was sniffing the air. He had tried dozens of faith remedies, but none of them were like this--something that was flatly and unequivocally witchcraft, strange and unchristian in the most basic way. And Ellen, who seemed almost mercilessly sensible, believed it. That had to be worth something. It made for a change, anyway.
But something about it still made him feel off-balance. “What about Pamela? Why was she so upset?”
Benny and Ellen exchanged tight glances, the kind of look you give someone with whom you share a prickly and disagreeable truth. Jo was not included, which meant she didn’t know. That was interesting.
“Pamela had a bad experience with that crowd,” Ellen said finally, her voice flat. “She got in deep and getting out wasn’t without its cost. Some of those people are nasty. Not all of them, but nowadays that’s all Pamela can see. She doesn’t trust any of them anymore.”
“That doesn’t exactly inspire me to trust them,” Sam pointed out.
“Not all of them. Is the important category,” Benny said. “A fair number of them are decent people. Damn strange, but decent. And they get results.”
Jo shook her head and looked away, murmuring “I don’t believe this.”
A part of Sam, the part that was hungry for order and logic and rules, shrieked its agreement, Most of him was too busy turning the situation over in his mind. He’d tried everything else, all the latest miracle cures and snake oils, things that had made him doubt his own sanity to hope for. And Benny said results and meant it.
And at home, Dean would be crawling out of bed now, going to the ice box for the first clammy sour beer of the day, his eyes clouded and dead.
“Okay,” he said, and then “Okay,” with more certainty. “Who is this person and where do I find him?”
“His name’s Lucifer,” Benny said, almost apologetically.
Sam coughed explosively around his next breath. “I’m sorry. Lucifer, as in the devil?”
“It’s what he calls himself. I can give you an address. He might not be there, he isn’t always. And he’s not cheap. But what you pay for you get in full.”
“That’s the important thing,” Sam said, hearing in his head the echo of another job, cut meals, electricity out in the hottest part of the year, but those things really didn’t matter. There were a lot of things that seemed like they mattered but didn’t. Dean was not one of those.
“Yes, I guess it is.” Benny sighed and looked away. “Look, this guy--he’s good, and he’s straight, most of the time. But watch your step.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. You never know until it happens. What I’m saying is that he’s got a reputation and not all of it’s good.”
“I see,” said Sam, not at all sure that he did.
“Be careful is all. He’s slippery. They all are. Watch what you do and he’ll run you a fair bargain, but you have to be sure you’re not giving him more than you mean to.”
“Don’t trust a man named Lucifer is a pretty simple rule to go by,” Ellen added.
That sounded ominous in the extreme, but Sam tucked his misgivings in the back of his mind. “But he does things. He gets results.”
“Every time. Just don’t try to be friends with him.”
“I don’t know. This all sounds very sketchy.”
“It is,” Ellen said crisply. “It’s sketchy all over.”
“Hey, I’m just offering some simple advice. You want to make use of it or not, that’s your problem, not mine.” Benny shrugged with elastic disinterest.
Sam stared back at him, his mind running in circles. The whole thing was dubious; it sounded improbable and possibly illegal, and the idea of turning to something which was obviously and unapologetically unscientific did not sit well with him. But both Benny and Ellen, who was probably the sanest person in the room, seemed to put real stock into it. Maybe it was something about the city--vodou floated in the water, danced in the air. Magic here was as pervasive as breathing. Even if it worked nowhere else, it did here, because everyone believed it did.
He had tried so hard. Dragged Dean to an army of overeducated, disinterested doctors who peeled his eyes open and shone lights on him and shot him full of chemicals which did nothing except make him sick. Paid with blood and sweat for every minute of treatment he could get. Listened to the tent preachers, the herbalists, the spiritualists, and the liars. Now he was here and Dean was no less blind and his options were looking extremely thin.
He exhaled and glanced at the ceiling. “I’ll take that address, if it’s still on the table.”
Benny grinned his broad, sprawling, grin. “There. Seeing sense at last. Wait until I’m off shift, Ellen will find us some paper.”
There was a wiry old man with eyes like a sparrow’s at the side of the road, waving his arms over a rickety table piled with old books. “Only a quarter!” he called, his cracked voice riding over the chatter of the street. “Books for a quarter or less. Fine literature! Ma’am, perhaps some light reading for the long nights? No? Sir--yes, sir, you there. I can see you have the look of a reading man about you. Yes you do. Take a look at what I have. Something for all tastes, and the price is a trifle, a nothing.”
Despite his own better judgment, Sam drifted over to the table. It had been a hysterical few weeks getting down here, scrounging up money for the apartment, and setting things in order for the job. He hadn’t had time to so much as look at a book for almost a month. His stash of ragged, water-stained, novels lurked under his bed, but he had read all of them at least twice. It was a new city, a new job, a new event in his life. He wanted words that were fresh and surprising.
On top of the stack was a slender volume in a tattered skin of wax paper. The pages were chewed. Dimly printed on the front were the words The Great God Pan, and the smudged image of a statue, a snarling man with horns.
He held it up. “How much is this one?”
The bookseller peered at it and laughed sharply. “That one? That one you can have. Take it, no charge.”
“Really? Uh--thank you. Why?”
“Listen, my friend, no one but you is going to want that book. It’s yours. Go on.”
And so Sam tucked the book under his jacket and wandered away from the table, feeling gratified but vaguely confused. The address Benny had given him on a crumpled scrap of paper was in the part of town where the roads got smaller and the buildings got older. Around him milling crowds of people rushed through their lives, yelling and laughing and sweating in the salty swamp heat. Most of them were black, in this neighbourhood. Sam felt disturbingly pale, like a drop of cream in a coffee cup. Every so often a flivver would rattle by, blowing thick clouds of greasy smoke. The air smelled like exhaust and human waste and wet concrete, with a faint aftertaste that was almost sweet, like wildflowers. A skinny androgynous child with skin the colour of ink gave him a broad luminous smile, and Sam smiled back.
Around him there were shops with a bright tasseled mosaic of herbs and charms in the window, peeling signs offering love and money, old hunchbacked buildings with strange designs sketched in charcoal and ashes on their doorposts. None of those were what he was looking for. He squinted at Benny’s looping scrawl and kept going.
And there it was. The building was less of a building and more of a shack. The paneling was composed of graying wood, but it looked sturdy all the same. The roof shingles had clearly been replaced recently, and were stained a dark, blue-gray color. There were two stories to the place and a quaint, shaded porch with colorful wind chimes and a small “Open” sign hanging from the roof.
A tall tree provided half of the house with shade, and it looked like small fruits of some sort were beginning to grow on its middle and lower branches. It wasn’t an extremely old tree, but it wasn’t young either—maybe twenty or so years old, at most? The grass beneath it grew in abundance as it relished in the partial shade it had.
The lawn was fairly well-maintained, overall. It had patches of dirt here and there from long exposure to the sun and its heat, but, then again, so did every lawn in the area. A dirt path divided the property, stretching from the main road to the few steps that led up to the porch. Just in front of the porch were metal sticks with a few branches sticking out of their sides at an upward angle. Each branch had a colored glass bottle topping it(some were dark blue, some were sea green, and some were more of a magenta color). The wind chimes hanging overhead made glassy clinking noises whenever breezes graced the street. It created a comfortable setting, really.
The front door creaked when Sam opened it, as well as the screen door beneath. Inside the shop was dark and musty. He saw a long, dusty, counter running across the room, like a sort of front desk. Behind it was a jumble of tables, shelves, cabinets. The glitter of glass jars moved in the shelves, and he saw clutter; things as diverse as a record player to candlesticks to drying herbs which he couldn’t name. A Persian rug sat on the floor. At the back of the room, in the middle of the far wall, was a doorway covered by a thick curtain like a green shadow. No one seemed to be there. Sam moved forward, slipping around the front counter.
“Hello?” he called uncertainly. There was no sign of life in the dust and darkness of the room. He breathed in and tasted spices and ash. An awkward step forward and his leg smacked into the edge of a low table with a shuddering collection of crusted glass jars on it. One of them contained a gelatinous mound of small slippery things which looked unsettlingly like eyes of some kind. He bent to stare, feeling electric fingers play up his spine, and then pulled away. It wasn’t his business, and he was making this even stranger than it already was.
“Did Cas send you?”
The man was at the far end of the room, in the cramped curtained doorway that led to the back. Sam jerked, hearing his voice; it was soft but direct, low and slightly rasping. The man leaned against the door frame, arms folded, and watched him evenly.
Sam swallowed grittily, recovering from the shock. “Sorry?”
“I said, did Cas send you? He said that he had a customer.”
“Uh, no. Don’t know anyone named Cas. Sorry.”
The man shrugged and slid out of the doorframe. “It’s all the same.”
On closer inspection, he was tall--not as tall as Sam, who even as a child had been built like a gorilla, but definitely not short--and had a kind of wiry slenderness. His hair was a dull blonde and looked like it had been cut in the dark, and his face was lean, eloquent, catlike. He had strange glassy blue eyes like frost. He wore patched black trousers, suspenders, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows.
He was also white, which was the most surprising thing. In this neighbourhood, and in a place of this type, the last thing Sam had expected was a young blonde-haired blue-eyed man behind the counter. Especially one as good-looking as this one. Which was an entirely inappropriate thought and which he ignored.
“So can I help you with something?” the man asked, lifting a tray of leather charms.
“Lucifer,” Sam guessed on instinct.
“That’s me.” Lucifer dusted his hands off and turned.
Curiosity nibbled at Sam and he said “Why do you call yourself that, anyway?” before he could think better of it.
Lucifer’s face was still. “Call myself what, exactly?”
“Lucifer. The devil. It can’t be good for business.”
Lucifer turned away, expressionless, to sort the charms. “I don’t call myself anything. Except my name.”
Sam paused, torn between laughter and indecision. “What--are you saying your mother named you Lucifer?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” Deft corded hands moving over burnt leather. “And I happen to like it.”
“Oh,” said Sam, and got stuck there. He had no idea what to do. He had the distinct sense that he was being lied to, but wasn’t at all sure enough to say it out loud. There was no way to respond to a man who had told you that the name on his birth certificate was Lucifer and that he liked it.
“Something I can do for you?” Lucifer said, glancing up.
Right. Sam cleared his throat. “I heard you help people. With problems.”
“Some kinds of problems. Some kinds of people. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Medical,” Sam said.
There was a slight pause. Then Lucifer sighed very delicately, shifted a stack of crumbling papers off a bowed wicker chair, and gestured to it. “Sit.”
For some reason the prospect of sitting made Sam distinctly uneasy. “I’ll stand, if it’s all right, thanks.”
Lucifer stared at him with those translucent eyes. “If you want.” He dropped the papers back onto the seat with a stale exhalation of dust. “Tell me about this medical problem.”
“My brother. He was in the war. Well, we both were. He was blinded.”
“How?”
“Poison gas. Battle of Argonne Forest.”
“Mmm.” Lucifer glanced down at the stack of papers. “And you want me to fix this.”
“Yeah. Believe me, I would not be coming here if I hadn’t exhausted every other option. I’ve been to all the doctors I can stand for one lifetime and they haven’t done shit. I’m not sure I believe all this--“ Sam gestured widely around the cluttered interior of the little shop “--stuff, but it’s all that’s left.”
“Where do you work?”
“What?”
“I asked where you worked.”
It was a strange question, but it was also a strange situation. “I got a job at the Roadhouse. It’s a sort of--a café. Not far from here.”
“I’m familiar with it. Nice place.” Lucifer finally looked up from the apparent entrancement of the stack of papers. “Listen, I mean no offence by this, but I seriously doubt that you are rich enough to afford the kind of treatment it would require to help your brother.”
“Don’t I kind of have to make that judgment for myself?” Sam tried for a lopsided grin. “How much does it cost, anyway?”
Lucifer regarded him evenly. “Fifty dollars a session.”
It was like a blow to the chest. Sam sucked inward sharply. “Fifty dollars a--that’s ridiculous.”
“It’s what it costs.”
“I can’t afford that. Nobody can afford that.”
“I know. That’s what I just told you.”
“Do you seriously expect people to pay those prices?”
“A surprising number do.”
“What, because this town has a high incidence of suckers?”
“No, because I do what I say I’m going to do. There are some things I provide which matter more than money. And I always provide them.”
Sam shook his head, frustration knotting in his chest. “How many sessions?”
“It’s different for everyone.”
“Take a guess.”
The pale eyebrows rose. “At a guess, maybe seven or eight.”
Seven or eight. That came to about four hundred dollars in total. At his current arrangement with Ellen, he was making thirty-seven dollars a week, and almost half of that went to rent. He realized, with a cold sense of inevitability, that he literally could not afford this. No matter how many things he sacrificed and how many odd jobs he took, it would cost him more than he could physically give to get together four hundred dollars for this man.
“I can’t afford that,” he said quietly. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
Lucifer was silent for a moment, watching him. A haze of dust from the papers had settled on his shirt, leaving it a faint grey. After a few seconds, his eyes flickered down to Sam’s hands.
“What’s that?” he asked.
A moment of confusion passed and Sam realized he was still carrying the book from earlier. “Oh--it’s a book. Obviously. I bought it from a guy on the street.”
“Skinny bastard? Black eyes, calls you “my friend”, sells smut out the back of his table?”
All of that sounded about right, except for the smut, which Sam had somehow failed to notice. He nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s Cornelius. He’s a liar and a thief but he carries some good books sometimes.” Lucifer gestured at the book. “May I see?”
Uncertainly, Sam handed it over. He felt the dry brush of Lucifer’s skin and the book changed hands with a crackle of paper. “The Great God Pan,” Lucifer read. “Interesting cover.”
“It was free,” Sam said, feeling an irrational embarrassment.
“That’s nice.” Lucifer passed a finger over the cracked face of the stone man on the cover. “You read?”
“When I can afford it.”
“Have you read Paradise Lost?”
It was another odd thing to ask, but oddly pleasant also; someone else in this city knew about Paradise Lost, and had experienced some of the painful old truths it held in its pages. “Parts of it. In the library, when I was a kid.”
“It’s my favourite book,” Lucifer said absently.
Sam grinned despite himself. “That’s ironic.”
“Painfully so.”
A sudden instinct took him and he said “My favourite’s A Tale of Two Cities,” without really knowing why he wanted Lucifer to know that.
A quick reflection of blue eyes in the dark. “Dickens. Very classy.”
“It’s his finest work.”
“He was better when he wasn’t being paid by the word.”
“That he was.”
They looked at each other for a long moment. Lucifer was smiling very slightly. Sam felt something unnamed shift in the room.
“Okay,” Lucifer said, and handed the book back. “Okay. I’m not going to lower the rate for you. I’m sorry but that’s not possible. I have bills to pay like everyone else.”
Bitter disappointment gathered in Sam’s throat. “Oh,” he said, and dug his fingers into the book’s fissured cover.
Lucifer ran his fingers through his uneven mess of cornsilk hair. “But you want to take care of your brother. I respect that. I really do. So I can change the means by which you pay, if you agree.”
The frustration dissolved into curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“How long are your hours at the Roadhouse?”
“Nine to three and then seven to ten. Every day but Sunday.”
“All right. If you want me to do this, you will come here when you’re not at the Roadhouse. Three to seven you belong to me, do you understand? Sundays too. You’ll work for me, here. Nothing serious. Odd jobs, manual things. I will not pay you. You give me your time until the treatments are completed. And in exchange, I will lower the price to twenty dollars per treatment.”
“Work?” said Sam, and then, with rising incredulity, “For you?”
“That’s the idea.”
Sam glanced around the cramped space, mind whirling. To work here--to work for a bokor, a sorcerer, someone he didn’t fully trust or understand. He had no idea what that would entail. The treatment sounded shady enough by itself.
“That’s a sixty percent discount. Mathematically, I’m being incredibly generous,” Lucifer said lightly.
“How often are the sessions?”
“Not more than once a week. In total it’ll take about eight weeks to complete.”
Eight weeks of working here. It was true that what he was offering was ridiculously generous, almost suspiciously so. Twenty dollars was doable. Twenty dollars meant maybe a few skipped meals and some wrangling with Bobby about the rent, but he could manage it and still keep his life in one piece. Twenty dollars plus eight weeks of four hours a day in this place. It was a fantastic offer, but it relied on his willingness to make a commitment to someone he knew nothing about, in a strange part of a strange town, based on something he wasn’t sure he believed in.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I have to think. Talk to some people about it.”
“Of course you do. The offer is open until tomorrow, Mr….”
With a slight sting of surprise, Sam realized that he had not told him his name. “Sam Winchester. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” That smile again, thin as a sickle moon. “Go and think, Mr. Sam Winchester. Come back tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Sam gathered himself. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“Thank you for coming.” Lucifer was already half-turned away, picking through the charms, a ghost in the dark. Sam nodded awkwardly and turned to go. As he made his way out through the tangle of the shop, he had the crawling feeling of eyes moving over him; Lucifer’s bright pale ones, and others, quick savage eyes that lived in the oily darkness under tables and between shelves.
When he got home it was to the ripe smell of corn whisky and an apartment with most of the lights turned off. Dean was sprawled on the ratted couch that was also his bed, staring at the ceiling. One lamp was on, casting a rusty flickering light over the room. In one hand there was a crusted bottle of brown glass. As Sam watched, he took a long wet drag from it.
He was twenty-nine years old now. He hadn’t had a job in seven years. Sam had memories in his head of quick restless eyes the colour of sunlight through leaves, alive with sudden humour and rage. Those eyes were only memories, now. Some part of him had not yet given up on the possibility of seeing them again.
The man on the couch yawned and ran a hand over his mouth. He was already quite drunk and he would probably continue drinking for several hours more. The air had the heavy sticky feeling of a dedicated grope for oblivion in progress.
“Dean,” Sam said quietly.
Dean’s head rolled towards him on instinct, even though it did no good now. There were his new eyes--a hazy scarred white, the green erased by cataracts and pearly occlusions. He smiled his big flat smile.
“Sammy,” he said, his voice slightly slurred. He was in a good mood, which meant that he hadn’t really gotten underway yet. His pattern of drunkenness was very similar to their father’s; first there was the relaxation and the stupid amiable happiness, and then came the anger and the desperation and the incoherent, irrational, brutality. After that he either cried or passed out. Mostly it was passing out, these days. Dean had never had much use for tears, now less than ever.
The bottle hung limp in his hand. It was unmarked and smelled homemade. Sam had never been able to figure out where Dean got his endless supply of cheap gritty liquor, although he suspected that Bobby might have something to do with it.
“You’re late,” Dean said cheerfully as Sam sat down next to him. “Long first day with the drunks of New Orleans?”
“You’re one to talk,” Sam said grimly.
“I certainly am.” Dean poured more whisky down his throat and breathed out in satisfaction. “So how was it? You like the people?”
“Yeah, they’re good. There’s a girl there. Jo. You’d like her.”
“Is that a fact? You’ll have to get me out there sometime.”
“Sure, but be careful. Her mother’s the owner, she keeps a shotgun behind the counter, and I’m pretty sure she’s killed someone before.”
They both laughed at that, and Sam realized, with a pulse of sadness. That it was a different kind of laughter than it would have been before the war. Eight years ago it would have been funny because they had never killed anyone, never seen a dead body, knew nothing about death. It would have been funny because it was impossible. Now there were men rotting into the black French earth because of them and they laughed because they both knew that.
Sam folded his hands between his knees and stared at the floor.
“Listen,” he said. “I met someone.”
“Your first day? You son of a bitch.” Dean elbowed him over the shoulder with surprising accuracy. “This Jo girl, or someone else?”
“What? No. Not like that.” Sam coughed a laugh. “I mean, I met someone. And I think maybe he can help you.”
Dean’s face went tight and cold and he dropped back into the couch. “Jesus, Sammy. Not this again.”
“I know we don’t exactly have a good track record, but we can’t just stop trying. And this guy, he’s--”
“I don’t want to hear about what he is. Seven years of fucking doctors poking me and sucking our blood is enough. I’m done, Sam. I’m just done.” He passed a hand wearily over his glazed eyes. “I’m not doing it anymore.”
“Yeah, well I am. I still am.” Sam kept his voice fairly level with an effort of will. After their first shouting match the ancient Polish man upstairs had nearly gotten them evicted. “Look, I get that it’s frustrating. We’ve been trying for years and gotten jack shit. I get that.”
“It’s not just frustrating, it’s hopeless,” Dean muttered.
Sam chose to ignore this. “But this guy, he’s different. He’s got something different.”
“Yeah. They’re all different, until they’re not.”
“Dean.” Sam blew out harshly. “He’s a bokor.”
“The hell’s that?”
“A sorcerer. Vodou.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then Dean said quietly, “Well, that is different.”
Sam felt abruptly, intensely, exhausted, in a way that pulled at his bones. He rose stiffly. “I have to be back at the Roadhouse in a couple hours. I’m going to get some more sleep. Put something on the stove, okay?”
“Beans and sausages sound okay?”
“Fine. And think about it, okay? It really is different this time.”
A dry laugh. “Can’t hurt to think. You’ll just do whatever the hell you want to whether I like it or not.”
Sam laughed too, partly against his will. “That’s true. Take care of yourself.”
“I’m going to be ten feet away from you, Sam. Don’t kill yourself over me. Go sleep.”
As Sam turned to close the door into his shuttered closet of a bedroom, he saw Dean rise and shuffle over to the stove. His back was to Sam as he groped for matches, a stained pot, a dented can of brown beans. He was already used to the way things were in this kitchen, running on an easy instinct that didn’t need eyes. The bottle sat on the end of the couch, glittering in the dim light. To an unfamiliar eye it would seem forgotten, but Sam knew that when Dean wanted it again he would know exactly where it was, exactly how to pick it up so it wouldn’t spill, exactly how much he had left. The beans splattered onto the burnt floor of the pot.
He was humming now, softly, with an indistinct rasp in his voice. The gas had done something to his lungs, the doctors had said. One of them had made a joke that he would never sing opera again.
He had hummed like that, back in France, and before that, too. When he came to pick Sam up from school, or when he went out to get a job he wasn’t legally old enough for so that they had enough food in the house. There had been a lot of times like that, when it had been like Dean was the only other person in the world because he was the only one who cared. A bony big-eyed child in his father’s ill-fitting clothes, hands stained with dirt, smiling even as he didn’t know what they’d eat that night. Don’t worry, Sammy. We’ll figure something out. We’ll be fine.
And as Sam closed the door and moved into the darkness of his room, he knew what his answer was going to be.