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Fourteen. Fourteen goddamned ghouls. Bobby had been expecting a small familial nest of three; all of the evidence had pointed to two brothers and a mother. But apparently they had an entire nuclear family living in the sewers underneath Spearfish, and he didn’t have fourteen shotgun rounds with him. As they advanced, he debated the chances of using the butt of the gun as a bludgeon against simply dropping everything and running. He was prepared to die but he would prefer taking out at least half of them.
He shot one between the eyes and its forehead cracked open and burst. All that did was piss them off, and they charged him without a second thought.
“Damn!” Bobby clenched his jaw and gripped the shotgun with both hands, ready to use it to ward away their snapping mouths.
The closest ghoul was less than two feet away when it stopped short, staring at something just over Bobby’s left shoulder.
“I’m going to need you to duck.”
A dark figure was in the corner of Bobby’s eye, and instead of ducking he started to turn towards it and get a better look. Halfway through the motion he was forcefully shoved out of the way, stumbling into the wall and knocking his head painfully against it. The wall was covered in something unidentifiable and slimy and Bobby had been trying to avoid touching it the entire trip down. Now his head swam from the collision and he was pawing at the wall and searching for his equilibrium.
Something pricked at his face. Bobby reached a hand up and pulled away a shard of bone. The way it curved suggested that it was a chunk of skull.
He blinked several times and realized the sewer was currently filled with the sounds of ghouls shrieking. The sound echoed off the curved ceiling and walls and Bobby felt almost sick when he heard the undertones of crunching bone and squelching meat.
There were ten ghouls left, and as Bobby watched one of them went down because Crowley had planted a sledgehammer in its brain.
The demon held the hammer awkwardly, with both hands near the base instead of having one near the head. That would have normally made the hammer almost impossible to wield accurately or even lift, yet Crowley was effectively using it to smash in the heads of the ghouls, hitting them square each time. He used the hammer as if it were made for violent, bloody combat, and not for demolishing drywall.
After nearly half of their number fell, the ghouls began to retreat. Their retreat was not the dignified trudge of overwhelmed soldiers, but the frantic sprint of creatures in mortal terror. They ran howling away from the demon Crowley and his merciless attack, practically climbing over each other to get away.
“Well then.” Crowley balanced the sledgehammer against his shoulder, as if he was taking a break from knocking down the wall between his condo’s living and dining room. A thick glob of something organic, with sharp flakes of bone clinging to it, dripped off the head of the hammer and onto the back of his jacket. He looked at Bobby and made a face. “I suppose you need all of them dead?”
Bobby just stared at him. There was blood in the demon’s hair and across the left side of his face and splashed across the slip of white shirt at his neck. Something grey was at the thickest part of a lapel on his jacket.
“I thought so.” Crowley started off after the ghouls, his pace slow and leisurely.
Waiting until the demon was out of sight, Bobby gathered himself, wiped the unknown sewer residue on his hands off on the shirt of one of the dead ghouls, and got right the fuck out of Dodge.
He was in the middle of unlocking his Chevelle when Crowley appeared next to him. He was without the sledgehammer and had cleaned the bloodstains and brain matter from his skin. His jacket was gone, leaving only the suit.
“No ‘thank you’, Robert?” Crowley asked, actually feigning a hurt expression rather well. It would have looked genuine, if not for the wicked gleam in his eyes. “And after slaughtering a group of ghouls for you? I’m wounded.”
Bobby bit back a bad joke and opened the car door, but didn’t get in just yet. “What’re you even doing here? Don’t you have Hell to run or something?”
Crowley shoved his hands in his pockets, his face pensive. “I don’t need to be in Hell to run it, Robert. I’m not its bloody babysitter.” He inspected his suit, as if he hadn’t magically cleaned it and there might still be something left. It was an abnormally human gesture that caught Bobby off-guard. “And I can’t really have much fun anymore.”
“That was your idea of fun?” Bobby got into the car in an attempt to get away from the demon, but Crowley was already sitting in the passenger seat.
“Of course. That sledgehammer was a surprise, though. And a rather nice one at that.” Crowley flexed his fingers. “I thought I was going to have to use my bare hands.” He laced his fingers together and cracked them. A job well done.
He vanished before Bobby had even started the car, leaving him with a mouth full of retorts and maybe one very faint thank you in the back of his throat.
-
Crowley appeared again during a bad hunt against a shapeshifter. Bobby had spent weeks tailing the monster as it traveled across South Dakota and into Montana, and he must have been sloppy because as soon as he caught up with them, it had shifted into the form of a mountain of a man.
The bastard was seven feet tall if it was an inch, and had a neck as thick as an ox’s. There were veins corded through its exposed biceps. It were as quick as a cat as it knocked Bobby’s shotgun from his hands and caught him before he could go for the silver knife in his belt.
Biting back a yelp as the shapeshifter tightened its grip and ground the bones in his wrist together, Bobby raised a hand as the shapeshifter did the same, ready to ward off a blow that would undoubtedly break his forearm.
And then the demon was there, a sharp, three note whistle alerting both Bobby and the shapeshifter to his appearance. Crowley grinned, his teeth sharp and his eyes savage. He didn’t have a weapon this time.
Despite being in a vessel that only reached the shapeshifter’s chest, Crowley was rather confident as he strode up and punched it across the jaw. And even though the blow should have barely tickled the creature, it sent it sprawling. Bobby’s wrist was released and he was scrambling for his shotgun.
The shapeshifter took two more blows to the face and a third to the torso before attempting to run. But Crowley had dislocated its jaw and broken two ribs, and it hunched over in an agonized crouch, losing a few inches in height. It still towered over the demon, who kept stepping in its way whenever it tried to make a break for it. Crowley chuckled and taunted the shapeshifter, punching it in the side and stomach, clapping it open-handed on the side of its head.
While Bobby was occupied for a split second with the gun, Crowley somehow had gotten the shapeshifter on the ground and was raising his foot to stomp on its face. Bobby opened his mouth to shout at him to stop, because he wasn’t one to torture a monster that was already down, but wasn’t able to get it out before Crowley broke the shapeshifter’s nose with a horrible crack. Blood began to gush and the creature made a strangled gurgling noise and clutched its face.
Crowley looked at Bobby with a satisfied glean to his smile. The shapeshifter had gotten in one good blow before he had overwhelmed it, and his right eye was full of burst capillaries and the skin around it was already the sickly green and yellow of a healing bruise. As Bobby watched, the skin healed over completely and the slight swelling went away, but the red in Crowley’s eye hadn’t vanished, but had instead spread. Spread and then vanished when the demon blinked.
Bobby tentatively approached the shapeshifter, not out of fear, but because he was reluctant to see the damage Crowley had done close up. The shapeshifter was choking on its own blood because it hadn’t rolled over, and Bobby could see why – its shirt stuck up in a way that suggested several protruding ribs. When he shot it, the monster’s death rattle sounded almost grateful.
When he started to inspect the surrounding area for anything that could lead back to him, Crowley followed him.
“You should really see someone about your complete inability to express gratitude,” Crowley said snidely, clasping his hands behind his back as he kept one pace behind Bobby.
Bobby mumbled something under his breath in a low and incoherent grumble. Crowley cupped a hand to his ear dramatically and leaned forward. “What was that, Robert? You need to speak up so I can hear that well-deserved thanks.”
“If you just wanted to have ‘fun’,” Bobby slipped into his customary mocking accent when saying fun, and Crowley’s smile turned hard, “Why’re you following me around? Go have ‘fun’ on your own.” He had to stop short as Crowley appeared directly in front of him.
Crowley stared at him for a moment, his expression as unreadable as always. He shrugged with his whole body and said, “Can’t,” taking pleasure in the word, his accent lying heavily over it. Bobby could imagine him telling client after client that a deal was a deal and he just couldn’t give back the soul. He can’t. Bobby resisted the urge to shoot him in the face.
“And why can’t you?”
“When fun includes dismemberment, I could accidentally alert a hunter to my whereabouts.” Crowley made it sound almost tragic that people would be mad at him for going on a killing spree. “And I’m done with having someone dogging after me. So if I kill whatever you’re going to kill anyway, everyone wins.”
Bobby’s gut told him not to believe it. Demons lied; it was as in their nature as it was for a bird to fly. But they were made for it, and Bobby couldn’t tell if Crowley was lying.
He would need help.
-
“Are you trying to start some kind of collection or some shit?”
Those were the first words out of the demon’s mouth when he took the bag off of their head. They were wearing some kind of flash bastard businessman. It seemed like Crowley’s style was catching on in Hell, though this one was a tad too American to pull it off. All of their aggression was at the surface, and they just didn’t have that oily quality to them. He wasn’t impressed.
Bobby stood a foot or so away from the edge of the Devil’s Trap, holding a sawed-off in his hands. The shotgun was only a precaution, with the real motivation being a plastic jug of holy water sitting on the table.
“Tell me what you know about the demon Crowley,” he said, his voice a low growl.
The demon laughed a little too maniacally to keep up their calm facade.
“That’s what you caught me for?” Bobby was reaching for the holy water as their eyes narrowed. “Are you tryn’a woo the King?”
They received a face full of holy water for their comment, and yowled like a cat for a solid minute. Eventually their face stopped smoking and the burns healed and they glared at him with eyes as black as night.
“You already know everything,” the demon said, their lips thin and white and showing some teeth. “You know about his status and his home and his bones for fuck’s sake. You and the Winchesters know more about him than we do.” They rolled their neck and popped some vertebrae, as if they were having a casual chat. “what more could you possibly need.”
Bobby shook the jug of holy water as a warning, letting the demon see how much there was left. Then he said, “What does Crowley call ‘fun’?”
The demon stared at him for a moment, their eyes comically wide. Their lips pressed together, but not before a short giggle had made its way through. “You really are trying to woo him!” They started to laugh, doubling over in the chair as low as the ropes would allow.
Their laughter cut off with a low whimper as Bobby reached over the edge of the Trap and jerked their head up with the shotgun barrel. He pressed the cold metal into their neck, putting painful pressure on their trachea. “Does Crowley kill for fun? Like the rest’a you?”
Their eyes turned suspicious. “No, of course not. The stuck-up fuck’s always complaining about us. He hates us. Why would he be like the rest of us? And even if he did like it, why would he admit it?”
The arm holding the jug loosened and hung at his side. Because it’s better than the alternative, Bobby thought. He capped the jug and placed it back on the table, and then picked up the book that was there. He didn’t need to read the exorcism from the text, having memorized it long ago, but it was nice to have as a scare tactic. “What else can you tell me?”
The demon smirked.
-
Bobby had a string of relatively easy hunts. A skinwalker that was limited to birds. A vampire’s nest of only two young members. Another small family of ghouls. The most dangerous hunt was a death omen that had clocked him one with a vase.
But Crowley was always tailing him. Bobby barely had to lift a finger when the final showdown with the monster happened. He didn’t even get a shot off anymore before the demon appeared and nudged him aside without so much as a move aside, love. He crushed the skinwalker in his hands, the crackle of light, delicate avian bones like the time he cracked his knuckles. He locked the vampires inside their home and burned the nest to the ground, without a care for the forest around it. The ghouls seemed to always be the unlucky ones, because he had a tire iron with him when he appeared on that hunt.
Bobby suspected Crowley sent the ghost to Hell.
The spirit burned away and the demon was left standing in the middle of the room. Bobby was still reeling from having a vase shattered against his temple, and his only focal point was Crowley’s back and the way his shoulders were hunched under his suit.
Adjusting his jacket with a swift jerk of the lapels, Crowley turned to Bobby. “You’re still down there? Come on now – up up. Shake it off.” He reached down and pulled Bobby up. “Oh – you’re bleeding. Hold still.”
The demon reached up and plucked at something over Bobby’s right eye. “You seem to have glass in your forehead,” he said, staring at the shard in his hand. Blood tickled Bobby’s eyebrow and he reached up and touched it, dazed.
Crowley stayed passed the death of the monster this time, helping Bobby to his car as the head wound started to gush an astonishing amount of blood.
“I can patch myself up,” Bobby said as Crowley dabbed at the wound with a bit of gauze soaked in alcohol.
Crowley leveled a hard stare at him. “I’m sure you would have passed out until the wound scabbed over.” He pressed a fresh pad of gauze on the wound and secured it sloppily with medical tape.
He pushed Bobby into the driver’s seat. “Wait a little while to drive, dear. You’re a tad discombobulated.”
He just said discombobulated, Bobby thought in a half-delirious state. Crowley had winked out of existence before he could comment on it. The King of Hell said discombobulated.
Bobby stared blankly out the windshield for a little while, until he could organize his thoughts properly and the throbbing in his forehead had faded a little. He started the Chevelle and drove slowly, thinking about what the demon had said in the basement.
“He’s not having fun, genius. Th’ King is nothing if not efficient and businesslike.”
-
I should have found a way to kill that fucking demon. The gash had been healing nicely from the hunt until the demon had slammed his head into the nearest car in the scrapyard a few days later. Now it was bleeding freely again, and black clawed at the edges of his vision. His ears rang painfully.
Knowledge that he was capturing demons for the shits and giggles must have spread along the Hell-spawn grapevine, because it hadn’t been a month since he exorcised the flash bastard-looking demon before he had an entire goddamn nest at his house. More demons than Bobby could count had been standing around the junkyard when he left the safety of his home, all staring at him with malicious grins stretched across their faces.
He had tried to run back into the house. The panic room was made just for this occasion; except it wasn’t for idjits who stepped outside their homes without turning on the floodlights and doing a sweep of the junkyard. Bobby had gotten soft and heknew it and now it was coming back to bite him in the ass.
“We should flay his fingers to the bone,” a demon was saying. They had taken advantage of his already injured head and he couldn’t even figure out which way was up, much less stand. “We should -.”
The demons had been crowding around him, the majority of them hopping for a chance to rough him up. But as Bobby regained most of this senses, he heard one of them start screaming.
“That’s Bobby Singer!”
The one preparing to break his fingers looked up. “So?”
“You young stupid fucks! Singer’s the King’s.” Bobby’s eyes rolled in their sockets as he looked up just in time to see at least a dozen faces blanch. The way the demon said it made him feel sick – it was either that or the concussion.
The demons all started talking at once, their voices becoming indiscernible chaos that made Bobby’s head pound. He tried to sit up but his head swam as soon as he did, so he just clenched his eyes shut and tried not to slip into a coma.
When the demons went silent, Bobby knew Crowley had arrived.
“My, aren’t we a group of hot-shot little buggers?” Crowley’s voice cut the silence like a knife. The sound of footsteps on the gravel that covered the yard told Bobby he was behind him, probably coming out from behind a pile of scrap like the most dramatic bastard who ever lived.
“We can explain,” one of the demon said, as if those weren’t the most common last words.
There was a heavy, wet sound, and a thunk. Bobby opened his eyes and focused on something that had fallen in front of him. Arm, he thought, and indeed it was. There was a beat or two, and then the demon it technically belonged to howled in pain – a howl that was cut short when Crowley dug a hand into their neck and ripped out the long tube of their throat.
Bobby figured that Crowley wouldn’t kill his own, especially since it would mean a marginally weaker Hell. But he kept them in their vessels and when he was finished, the ground was almost muddy with their blood. He grabbed a demon who was choking on their own blood and had a knob of bone sticking out at the nape of their neck.
“I think you’ve all understood the lesson, yes?” Crowley said in a low purr. The demon he held couldn’t nod because at some point he had broken their spine. Blood bubbled on their lips when they tried to make some noise of affirmation.
He sent black smoke screaming out of their mouths and down to Hell with a wave of his hand, and walked up to where Bobby had eventually managed to sit up. Before he knew what was happening, Bobby found himself standing, with the demon’s hand fisted in his shirt the only thing keeping him up. Bobby noticed that his hands, which had been soaked in blood, were perfectly clean, right down to the nails.
“How many of me can you see, Robert?” Crowley said.
Bobby blinked several times and said, “Four.” God, one was enough.
Instantaneous travel was not something Bobby enjoyed, and it was even worse when his head practically had a dent in it. When he found himself standing in his own living room, nausea tickled the back of his tongue and saliva filled his mouth.
“I’m going t’ be sick,” Bobby said, somehow keeping his footing, if only because he’s rather die than slump against the King of Hell.
“That’s because you’re concussed, love. It will fade.” Crowley pushed Bobby into an armchair. “I’m sure you know the drill? Don’t fall asleep for a few hours?”
Bobby squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. His vision was slowly getting better, and the nausea and dizziness were better now that he was sitting. He looked up at the demon with mistrust in his eyes. “Are you gonna stay with me?”
Crowley scoffed and rolled his eyes so hard it looked like it hurt. “Of course not. You’re a big boy, Robert. I’m not your bloody babysitter either.”
They looked at each other for a moment, the King of Hell with his hands in the pockets of the jacket he wore even in summer, and Bobby with mismatched pupils from the concussion. He desperately wanted the demon to stop messing around on his hunts, because it had only led to trouble for him, but he didn’t have the strength to say what had been on his mind for weeks.
“Crowley has a temper unlike anything I’ve seen. He rose to the top because he could scare the shit out of anyone with that temper.
It’s obvious that he’s not having fun – he’s pissed off at anything that tries to take a swing at you. He’s protecting you.”
“Robert have I ever told you that your kitchen has a horribly confusing layout?”
Bobby snapped out of his thoughts and leaned forward in the chair, trying to see into the kitchen. “What’re you doin’ in there?”
Crowley was standing as tall as he could and rummaging through the cabinets. “Out of base instinct I was trying to find your alcohol,” he lowered back onto his heels and closed the cabinets, “But – alas – I remembered that you drink swill.” He clapped his hands together and his preferred Craig appeared on Bobby’s counter. “Ah, that’s better. And a glass…” One came into existence beside the scotch and Crowley poured himself a healthy drink.
Bobby watched the demon walk back into the living room, set the glass down on the coffee table, peel off his jacket and throw it across the back of a chair, and sit down on the couch.
“So y’are stayin’,” Bobby said with a scowl.
After taking a long sip of his drink, Crowley shook his head and said, “I said I wasn’t staying. I think I have earned myself a drink.”
Bobby felt his lips twitch into what could have been called a smirk. Demons lied.