Chapter Text
For some reason Dean was blasting Abba of all things in the Impala as they sped along the highway on a cold September evening. Sam didn’t know what the sudden shift in mood was about, because his brother had never shown Waterloo tendencies before, but he was used to the whole ‘driver picks the music’ spiel by now.
They almost ignored the beat-up, baby blue jeep pulled over by the side of the road with the hood open. Almost.
They never picked up hitchhikers, it just wasn’t a thing they did, okay? For one, they knew that there were much more scarier things out there than lame little axe murderers. Things that could easily hide from the naked eye and reveal themselves only when it was way too late. And two, Dean rarely allowed strangers in the car. The Impala was their home as much as any place was.
But Sam wasn’t really surprised when his brother pulled up beside it, because there used to be a beat-up jeep in that exact same color in Bobby’s yard when they were kids. It had been in such a bad shape that the old man let Dean play mechanic on it since he was strong enough to lift a wench. It had been the rustiest, most hazardous playground ever and they’ve both loved it.
It was nostalgic, is what it was.
“You need a hand, kid?” Dean asked as they rolled to a stop beside the jeep and saw the driver. He looked like a college kid, but he was wearing flannel - and not in a hipster way - that was always a plus.
“I need two. Preferably attached to a mechanic,” he said with a huff, face pulled into a sort of adorable grimace.
From the corner of his eye Sam could see Dean grin, and knew that his brother had the exact same thought about the adorableness.
“Well you’re in luck, kid. I happen to be good with cars,” he said, getting out. He pulled the lapels of his jacket up against the wind and peered under the hood. Sam knew it wasn’t good from the expression on his face.
It looked like this may take a while so he got out too, stopping beside the kid.
“Hey, I’m Sam. This is my brother, Dean,” he said, shaking the boy’s hand. He had long fingers and a confident grip. There was some dirt on his fingertips, probably from poking around the engine.
“Hi, I’m Stiles, nice to meet you guys,” he said, brown eyes twinkling as he looked Sam up and down in a way that was hard to miss.
Well.
Sam got a bottle of water from the Impala.
“Here, you got some grime on your hands,” he offered. Stiles held his hand out and Sam poured some on his fingers so he could scrub the worst of it off.
His skin didn’t start to blister or smoke from the holy water. Human then.
Dean watched from in front of the jeep, like he’d been only waiting for the result of the test and closed the hood with a loud thunk.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said, making the kid’s face fall. “As far as I can see, you need a new v-belt, which is easy enough to fix. Unfortunately we don’t have any on us.”
Stiles sighed, rubbing a hand over his face.
“Well, thanks for looking at it anyway. Guess I will have to call a tow or something.”
The next town was about fifty miles away, and Sam wasn’t even sure they had a mechanic.
“Hey, we can give you a ride, and drop you off at the next garage we see,” Sam said, patting his shoulder. He tried not to linger, but Stiles had a nice frame - not too built, but obviously toned.
Dean met his eyes for a second, the corner of his lips tugging into a smile. Yeah, they were on the same page.
Stiles grinned, looking between them.
“That would be cool! I’m sure I will find a way to pay you back…”
***
A few weeks after that, Sam had bigger things to worry about than hitchhiker twinks who gave amazing head.
“Damn it,” Dean said with feeling. That about summed it up.
At first, they thought it would be a quick salt and burn - some ghost terrorizing a smaller city in south California. Find the corpse, torch it, rinse and repeat.
Except, the ghost turned out to be the ghost of a witch. Or a witch ghost, with a very much alive and very much populous coven - directed right from the afterlife.
Sometimes, Sam hated the family business.
They barely made it back to their hotel, and only breathed a sigh of relief when they were behind a solid line of salt.
“Damn it,” Dean said again. They weren’t hurt - thankfully - but it had been close. Too close for comfort. And what was worse, the coven now knew about them. It was only a matter of time before they found their hiding place, and if he wanted to be honest, Sam had no idea if they would be able to fight them off.
“We need to call Bobby,” he said. Witches were always bad. They didn’t know enough about them - it always felt like a hit and miss when magic was involved.
Dean nodded, throwing him one of their phones. Sam dialed from memory.
“What is it, you idjits?” Bobby asked immediately, sounding wide awake, despite it being well after midnight.
“Hey, Bobby,” Sam said wincing. “You happen to know anyone in the Los Angeles area who could help us with a few witches?
The man huffed on the end of the line.
“How many is a few?”
Sam licked his lips.
“Um. Thirty… -ish?”
There was a second of silence, with only the sound of the distance cracking between them.
“ Balls .”
***
Bobby apparently knew a guy. It wasn’t an ideal situation, because - according to him - on that scale you had to fight fire with fire unless you were ready to nuke the whole city.
Dean didn’t want to work with a warlock at all, and Sam was 100% behind that, even though the warlock came with the endorsement of a prominent hunter family. They haven’t yet met a magic user who was not some way corrupted.
Still. They had no choice, and if they wanted to have the advantage of surprise, they had to act quick. There was no way the coven was expecting them so soon after blowing their cover.
It was 4 am when they were supposed to meet Bobby’s warlock in front of a little diner. As soon as they got there Sam spotted a faded blue jeep in the parking lot, but before he could point it out, Stiles was already coming out of the building with a bag of curly fries in his hand.
Dean did a double take and Sam… Sam had a bad feeling about this.
“Hey guys,” Stiles said, hair rumpled and looking like he just threw some clothes on in the dark. “You want to give me the rundown?”
Sam could see Dean stiffening beside him, his face going stony as it always did when he was caught off guard or felt betrayed.
“You’re the warlock.” It wasn’t really a question.
Stiles pulled up a few feet short of them, but didn’t seem too taken aback by the chilly tone.
“Yes, it is I, the great Stilinski,” he said with a little bow. Sam wanted to snort, but he wasn’t sure he should.
“You lied to us,” Dean blurted out, voice a little rougher than usual. The light of a passing car illuminated Stiles’ face for a second, and Sam was a bit surprised by the carefully neutral - cautious - expression he saw there.
“I didn’t. I just didn’t bring it up, especially after I realized who you were… Don’t get me wrong, I know you’re more-or-less good guys, but damn, you’ve made some shitty decisions down the road… And let me tell you, you’re whole ‘Shoot now, ask questions later’ approach to basically anything not human is a bit too rough for me,” Stiles told them with a shrug.
If possible, Dean turned even stonier.
“Hey, hey . Okay. Let’s just... Calm down, take a deep breath and continue this conversation on the way to the coven, shall we?” Sam butted in, tired of being the voice of reason, but not about to shoot their only chance at winning in the foot.
It took a second for both Stiles and Dean to nod.
***
“... and anyway, that’s sort of how my home town became a supernatural hub. And let me tell you, we had to improvise a lot . So, it’s not like this coven is easy if they are really as bad as you say, but that time with the harpies we had to-”
“You didn’t talk this much last time,” Dean growled, glaring at Stiles in the rearview mirror.
It was almost weird that Sam didn’t even have to turn around to perfectly imagine the bitchy expression on the kid’s face.
“Yeah, well. Last time , I had my mouth full,” he said, and seriously. Sam tried to cover his laugh with a cough.
***
By five in the morning they had the beginnings of a plan. All three of them had hexbags around their necks that should make them invisible to whatever protection spells were around the place - an old, abandoned church at the edge of the city, because of course.
Stiles adamantly called them charms.
“They aren’t charms ,” Dean said, and Sam could see his fingers just itching to tear the whole thing from around his neck and throw it as far away as possible. “They are hexbags . Full of… of bones, and frog parts and god knows what.”
Stiles raised an eyebrow, looking unfairly attractive under the flickering lamplight of the nearby parking lot where they were brain-storming.
“ Frog parts ? Seriously? I thought you were the Winchesters, not the Whinechesters.”
Sam stepped between them before things could get out of hand.
“Okay. Let’s act like we’re older than four,” he said. He was at least 80% sure that the barbs on Dean’s part were a nasty, vengeful version of pigtail pulling. It wasn’t like he was fine with the fact that Stiles forgot to mention what he was when they last met, but if there was one thing he learned from hunting, it was to trust his instincts. And his instincts were telling him that Stiles wasn’t there to fuck them over.
Dean huffed in annoyance, but nodded, scowling at Stiles’ shit eating grin.
“Alright. So what now, warlock?” His brother asked, making Sam roll his eyes.
Stiles sighed.
“Well, from what you’ve told me, it looks like they have some… link to the ghost. It would help the ghost to be anchored to the world of the living, and it would help the coven to gain otherworldly powers. My best guess is that they’ve somehow consumed her body.”
Dean looked a bit green around the edges, and honestly, Sam wasn’t too far away from throwing up either.
“They ate her?!”
Stiles shrugged.
“Yeah, well, probably not, like, chomped down on the corpse. You said that the ghost had old-timey clothes on?”
Sam nodded.
“Around late nineteenth century.”
Stiles bit his lip, looking off to the distance for a bit. He looked like he was spacing out, but his fingers were busy, turning a plain ring on his thumb over and over.
Sam met his brother’s gaze, but Dean seemed just as clueless about what was going on.
“Okay,” the boy said suddenly, shaking off whatever stupor he had been in. “Here’s what I think happened; You’ve said that the coven members are around the same age and went to the same high school, like, twenty years ago?”
It was Dean who grunted out a yes this time. Despite whatever hard feelings he harbored, his brother knew when someone was talking business, and it looked like Stiles figured something out.
“Right. So,” he pulled his phone out and started browsing, the brightness of the screen lighting his face up, putting his features in sharp contrast.
“Ha! Look at this!”
He held the phone out for them to see. It was a site with local news; High school reunion. Two months ago.
“That’s when all the shit started going down,” Dean said with a frown, looking at Sam for confirmation.
“Yup. It took a bit of time for it to get on my radar, but the first reports I found were from around that time.”
Stiles grinned.
“So, these stupid assholes held a seance at their reunion. My best bet is that one of them is either a descendant of the ghost witch, or somehow got under her influence before then. They used the seance to get more members and make the coven more powerful.”
Damn. That sounded like Trouble with a capital T.
“The others possibly didn’t even know what was happening. The ghost’s accomplice probably used the bones to make something… a tea. Or cookies. Maybe a pie?”
“Nope. No. Don’t even go there,” Dean said, holding his hands up like he was about to turn tail and get back to Kansas.
Stiles blinked at him in surprised and shrugged.
“Okay, so maybe not a pie. Anyway. The bones got ground into powder. The powder was fed to the people. The people ended up under the ghost’s influence. End of story.”
That made a scary amount of sense. None of the coven members they could identify looked like they had close ties to supernatural before. No tragedies, no nothing.
“So, how do we stop them?” Sam asked, because that was the real question here.
Stiles hummed under his breath.
“She doesn’t have a body anymore, but something of her must have been left behind. Something tangible. It’s either some of her bones, or a possession important to her. I’m thinking the head of the coven - the first one under her influence - will have it,” he said. He dug around in the bag he brought with himself, pulling out a baseball bat of all things. “It was a smart move of her to have the others consume her body - you can’t burn it that way. But at the same time she spread herself a bit too thin. If we destroy what she has left, it should weaken her enough that I will be able to kick her back to the afterlife for good if the rest of the coven is distracted.”
He looked at them with a raised eyebrow, waiting to see if they were in, because they would obviously have to provide the distraction.
Sam looked at Dean for a long moment. It was a risky plan, but they could pull it off. With a bit of luck.
“Damn it. Alright, let’s get to work,” Dean said, scrubbing at his face.
Stiles grinned, swinging his bat before starting down the road towards the church.
“It’s gonna be awesome!”