#except in this steve isn't going to turbo hell

[theladycarpathia]

“What are you?” Billy demands, finger already resting on the trigger. He’s glad that Max isn’t here, that he left her at the diner doing research. Because the man in their motel room has  broken past the hex marks, the warding, every anti-demon trick that they ever learned from their parents or from Hopper. He’s sitting on Billy’s bed, flicking through Billy’s mom’s journal like he has the right, and the sight of her neat writing under his long fingers makes Billy’s blood boil with rage. 

“Hey, I could be a hunter for all you know,” the man says easily. He looks completely normal, with soft brown hair falling into his dark brown eyes and brushing the top of his blue polo shirt. But Billy snorts - since he came back from Hell, he’s all too good at sensing when something isn’t quite human. And despite the pink tongue brushing that full bottom lip, the mismatched socks poking out from clean white sneakers, Billy knows that this thing isn’t human.

“You’re not,” Billy says in a low voice, aiming right for the center of its forehead. “You’re the thing that’s been following us since I got topside. The gas station, that motel in Utah, the car radio. So I’ll ask again - what the fuck are you?”

But the man looks up with a bright smile. “You knew that was me?” he asks, sounding genuinely pleased. 

“It had to have been you,” Billy mutters, unwilling to admit the truth. Hell changed him so much, giving him extra edges, and sharpening the ones he already had. He feels the trickle of cold down his neck at every demon that walks by, the bile that rises in his throat in the presence of a witch. And since he rose, there’s always been something following him that makes him feel…

Billy swallows. He doesn’t want to react to this creature.

“I’m only asking once more,” he spits, taking a step to the side to get a better shot. “What are you?”

“Steven,” the thing answers, and carefully closes the journal. “You can call me Steven.”

Billy pauses. Right. Not exactly the name of a monster that he was expecting. 

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” he says, but Steven doesn’t seem to care. He places the journal back where he’d found it, tucked inside Billy’s duffel, and rises from the bed.

“Your mother was a gifted hunter,” Steven muses, eyes flicking around the motel room like he’s in a museum staring at a particularly interesting exhibit. Billy’s leather jacket, the badly hidden porn mags (he still has to share a room with Max after all, it’s not like they have the funds for two rooms,) the packet of nicotine patches. “You take after her.”

“What the fuck do you know about my mother?” Billy says, stunned. He hasn’t seen his mother since he was seven, the day she walked out. It turns out that between her father and the demons, the demons were the monsters that she could take. He’s been hunting with Max for five years now, ever since she was old enough to, and they’ve never once caught a break. Abigail Hargrove seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth.

“She’s not dead, if that’s what you mean,” Steven says, looking away from Billy’s Led Zeppelin t-shirt. Billy’s breath catches in his throat. 

“What?” he breathes. He’s spent so long….in every town they visit, in every state, he hunts in the local directory searching for her name. It occurred to him long ago that maybe she changed it, wanting to be sure that Neil couldn’t find her. But it was also ensuring that her son couldn’t find her. And that hurt.

“Oh, she’s alive,” Steven says easily.  “And hiding. Your father wasn’t the only reason she had to leave. There’s a powerful demon out there…I believe you’ve met the Yellow Eyed demon already?”

“Vecna,” Billy says, mouth sour with every syllable. That fucker had already toyed with him, and especially with Max when he’d been gone. Vecna had invaded her every nightmare, and even her waking moments, taunting her with the idea that it was her fault that Billy was dead, that she could have done more.

It was all lies. Billy would have died to save Max a thousand times over. Even if he’d ended up spending a thousand years in hell, Max is all the family he has. 

Or so he thought. 

“Yes,” Steven agrees darkly. “I’m afraid that he has plans for you and Maxine…and your mother.”

“Can we find her?” Billy asks desperately. He barely remembers her but he still dreams of the floral perfume he used to wear, her favorite sunhat dangling from her fingers, how she’d sing the Beach Boys around the house. But then she was gone and the singing stopped.

He loves her. He misses her. He hates her. He wants to know more than anything why she’d left him behind.

But maybe she didn’t have any choice. 

“We can,” Steven says firmly.  “We have to. Vecna wants to open the gates to Hell into this world and we don’t have a lot of time to stop him.”

“And we’re the ideal candidates for world saving?” Billy snorts, glad for a reason to pull his eyes away from Steven’s. It’s probably just a meat suit and if so, Billy has no right to be admiring the thick lashes of some possessed bastard. “Hate to tell you this but you’ve got the wrong people. I just got back from Hell and Max is all sorts of fucked up about it. We’re your regular salt and burn hunters, okay? We’re not heroes.”

“I disagree,” Steven says, tilting his head like he can’t quite work Billy out. “No matter what you think, you are worth it. And the only hope the Earth has is you and Maxine. That is why I pulled you from Hell.”

Billy blinks and then suddenly, Steven is standing right in front of him, having cleared the whole room in less than a second. Billy swallows. Fuck. This thing is so, so powerful. They’d thought as much, from what Murray had told them…but shit. 

“You did…what?” Billy croaks. They’d always wondered what the fuck had pulled him from Hell. Honestly, he’d half expected Max or someone to have pulled some shit to get him out. A crossroads demon, or Yellow Eyes perhaps. He didn’t know anything else was capable of breaching Hell, all to rescue one human. 

He raises the gun - the one that he’d forgotten about in all this and had let fall to his side - and aims it once more at the thing’s chest. 

“I’m going to ask once more, Stevie,” he says, in the calmest voice he can manage, even though every inch of him is trembling in fear. “What are you?”

The room almost closes in, like every piece of oxygen has been sucked out of it. Or maybe it doesn’t get smaller, maybe the creature in front of him gets bigger. The lights flicker furiously overhead and the shitty TV crackles and then explodes. Billy shields his face from the sparks, cursing internally. Shit. They’ll have to leave before they get charged for that.

When he looks back at Steve, he doesn’t know if this is the most frightening or most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The deep brown eyes are now glowing with an other-worldly blue, the same color light that ripples under his skin.

“I don't really have time for your bullshit now, William Hargrove,” Steven says, stepping so close to Billy that he can feel the sparks off his skin. There are large shadows unfurling and spreading across the wall behind him, visible in the flickering lights. For a moment, Billy can’t make out what they are but when he does, it upends everything he thought he knew about the world and the monsters in it. They’re wings. 

“I’m an angel of the Lord,” Steve says somberly. “And we have work for you.”