Unfinished Gems

Rifles and Ravens - 2

Chapter 2

~

It had been two months, and Sam was going slowly insane.

He might have cut Bobby out, trying to bring Dean back from hell...except that Dean apparently wasn't in hell at all. The demon called Crowley had been quite irate about that.

Apparently someone stole his identity to make a fake deal, and now he was getting the worst of the fallout, next to Alistair.

Lilith was pissed, because Dean wasn't in hell and Alistair had been seen kidnapping him. Except Dean wasn't on the racks and there was no sign of hellhounds.

Which meant someone else had the hunter.

Ruby had barely escaped with her life when she inquired about Dean. It had only set Lilith off.

To Sam that meant one thing.

There was a very, very high chance that Dean was still alive.

To make matters more confusing, he kept finding weird messages in his email from someone called 'quoth_the_raven'. Messages that he was forced to ask Bobby for help translating.

Finally by the third month, Sam noticed a pattern to the messages.

There was always some form of backwards writing on it. Words written in a way that he had to read differently in order to find out what it said.

So when he accidentally knocked over the only copy of Dean's contract...his brain had been conditioned to find patterns out of chaos.

He took one look at the contract...and noticed it had a weird writing style to it.

On a hunch, Sam held it up to the light. From the front, it looked normal...but on the back...

"Oh my god...Bobby, you have to see this."

"What is it boy?"

"Look at the contract when you hold it to the light and read it from the back."

"I'll be damned. It never occurred to me the demon used mirror writing to make this."

Using a small hand mirror, Bobby read the contract slowly. The further he read, the higher his eyebrows went up in disbelief.

"What?"

"You're not going to believe this."

"It can't be any worse than Dean in hell."

"Dean's not in hell. He wouldn't have ended up there had the year ended anyway. No hellhounds, no sudden violent deaths, and more importantly, no demons."

"What? I thought..."

"This wasn't a demon deal. Though he still has to repay the one who brought you back in order to even the scales. He has a few more months before the remainder is up, but it doesn't say to whom," said Bobby.

Sam borrowed the mirror, and read the contract himself. Like Bobby, his eyebrows shot up to his hairline by the time he got to the last sentence.

It basically stated that the 'Contractor' would owe four to five months of 'service' to the one raising the soul of one Samuel Winchester in an undisclosed location. The maximum amount of time before the contract was activated was a full year after it was set, but it could be activated early.

In exchange all information save for the location itself would remain with Dean Winchester, who would be dumped at a random location of his choice...alive.

The blood was apparently the main thing tying Dean to the contract at all.

"Dean's alive," said Sam, relief filling his features.