Sam and Dean Winchester are investigating a string of disappearances, which require the help of both Rowena and Bobby to solve.
What on earth peels off skin and meat to eat the bones? And why is Rowena so eager to help?
Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Rowena MacLeod, Bobby Singer, OFC.
Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, curse words, Dean making stupid jokes.
Dividers by: @easytiger-xo's blogpost.
Word count: 3,472 words
This story is also available on AO3.
This was so much fun to write!
@leatafandom and I had been talking about this in the @spnfanficpond 's discord, after I posted a meme about how the tooth fairy had a lesser known and evil cousin: the bone fairy.
Leata posted their story yesterday and it knocked me right back into the creative mode I had been missing the last few weeks. This story is a kind of prequel to Leata's "Too many bones", but the two stories can be read separately as well.
This is my rendition of what a bone fairy could look like, heavily inspired by this picture of a Bone Fey from The Witcher's universe.
Something was wrong. Like… VERY wrong. The wrong you feel in your bones, in your soul. The wrong that slithers down your spine in icy waves. The spell was supposed to bind the tooth fairy, at least that’s what the translation said. Yet the room had filled with the stench of rotting flesh, swamp or mould – she couldn’t identify it, but it was horrible. Leanne swallowed and turned towards the crackling sound from the thing she had summoned.
It snarled at her, low and bone-chilling. Its sunken eyes staring at her, tilting its head slightly to the side as if curious or calculating the distance between them. It was unnerving. Its skin so pale it seemed almost translucent, hiding nothing of its innards or bones. And there were so many bones. Leanne was by no means a biology major, but even she knew too many bones when she saw them. And the wings weren’t fairy-like – they were grotesquely stretched like bat wings, but with claws.
She had never really believed that phrase before, thinking it to be something only authors used in their books. The sound of the thing in front of her, though, rendered her unable to even think about moving. When it took a tentative, sickening step forward, its head still tilted and a long, slithering tongue tasting the air in front of it, she even stopped breathing.
That was her last thought as the creature jumped forward with unnatural speed and precision, its clawed feet clasping onto her legs and its disproportionately long and sleek fingers ripping through her shoulders like they had been designed for it by centuries of evolution. The last thing her eyes saw were the enormous mouth, filled with too many teeth as it closed around her face.
She didn’t even have time to scream.
“Hey Sam, check this out!”
Sam sighed, knowing his brother was about to say something incredibly stupid. And, given that they were in a morgue, it was undoubtedly something insensitive and idiotic. Still: he turned towards him, already expecting the worst.
Yep: Dean was holding a skull as a ventriloquist puppet. In a morgue. While appearing as FBI.
“SILENCE! I kill you!” Dean laughed, his terrible impression of a certain dead muppet already cracking himself up.
“Dean…” Sam sighed again, pinching between his eyes. “We’re supposed to be feds…”
Dean, however, had moved on to a femur now.
“What, Sam? You don’t find me… humerus?”
The youngest brother pressed his lips together in an attempt to restrain himself and yanked the bone from Dean’s hand, whispering his shout instead: “Stop fucking around and get serious, Dean!” As Dean started humming “The hip bone’s connected to the… thigh bone,” he was half tempted to whack his brother over the head with it
“Hehe, what? You got a bone to pick with me or something?” He was quick to grab it back, though.
Sam didn’t get to answer that, and just stared angrily at his brother as the coroner walked into the office, glancing from the skeleton model to the two men in suits.
“Just, uh… inspecting the… uhm…” Dean’s voice tapered off into nothing as he tried and failed to put the femur back.
“Sorry about that, Ma’am. My partner is… an idiot.” Sam extended his hand to the coroner and introduced himself as agent Booth and Dean as agent Brennan.
She gracefully accepted the introduction and walked over to correct the skeleton, holding out her hand. “Happens all the time.” Dean handed her the plastic bone and had the decency to look embarrassed when she added “Mostly with kids, but here we are...” under her breath as she sat down behind her desk.
“What can I do for you, agents?”
“We’re here about the recent string of disappearances, and we heard you had recovered a body a few days ago?” Sam smiled his best fed-smile to the woman, who raised her eyebrows.
“Calling it a body is stretching it a little, but it’s what we told the papers.”
“What would you call it, Miss Seeley?”
“It’s Mrs Seeley, agent Brennan.” She fixed Dean with a glare, clearly not having forgiven him about messing with her bony decoration.
“And,” she added, her eyes now at the taller of the men: “It was honestly more a pile of meat and skin at that point.” She shuddered, closing her eyes as if trying to avoid looking at her own memory.
The two brothers glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.
“A… a pile of meat and skin? Isn’t it usually called a pile of skin and bones?” Dean huffed.
Again, she fixed him with a glare so powerful he shifted in his seat and wanted to apologize for something, anything, to avoid it. “No, not this time, agent,” she said dryly. “There weren’t any bones left.”
Dean swallowed, his mouth dry. “No… No bones?” He looked at the skeleton he had played with, imagining a corpse without its structural foundation.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Sam started, eager to end the tension of whatever-the-hell is going on between Dean and the coroner. “How did you identify the victim?”
“Fingerprints. Luckily the poor guy had a record and whatever happened to him left his arm like a de-gloved pile of… Well: you can imagine.”
Dean’s stomach clenched and he swallowed down some of the bile that had risen up at the word “de-gloved”.
Sam, already regretting his next words, put on his most professional smile: “May we see the remains? It’s for our report.”
Mrs Seeley nodded, fishing out a copy of her own findings before leading them towards the cool storage room.
“Fucking hell, man. That was…” Dean was bent over next the impala, holding his tie off to the side.
“Yeah, it was like nothing I’ve ever…” Sam stood next to him, trying his best to hold down his lunch.
“It was almost liquid, dude!”
Another round of heaving sounds followed and Sam jumped away from the splash zone. “Watch it!”
Dean stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing. “This is out of our league. Nothing about this says demon or ghost or chupacabra or … not even a rugaru would do…. THAT!”
“Yeah, I dunno, Dean.” Sam combed his fingers through his hair. “I think we have to call Bobby.”
Dean reaching into the cooler in the back seat and grabbed a bottle of water to rinse his mouth, then emptied the rest of it to flush off the stains he had made on Baby. Once empty, he grabbed a beer and proceeded to down it in one go, trying to rid himself of the aftertaste.
Sam, watching with his arms folded, rolled his eyes. “You done?”
“Yeah, yeah, bitch. Get in the car.”
Unfortunately, Bobby had nothing for them. He suggested an Ōkami, given the brutality of the attack, but the victim’s heart was still present. Nothing in his books said anything about missing an entire skeleton.
“I dunno, boys,” Bobby’s resigned voice came from Sam’s phone as they drove towards the motel. “I’ll check out some more, but missing an entire skeleton? That’s just… messed up.”
“Right?!” Dean nodded like Bobby could see him.
“It looked like whatever attacked him, peeled off his skin to get to his bones. And in a messy way, too,” Sam offered.
“Peeled off? Like a banana or more like a potato?”
“Neither,” both brothers said at the same time. Dean held his hand out to let Sam continue the sentence as he focused back on the road. “It looked like something had butchered him with its claws and pulled or sucked out the bone. There were teeth marks, but nothing like I’ve ever seen.”
“Tell ya what: I’ll keep checking my books here and you boys call Rowena. She might know more about this. And be careful, ya idjits.” With that, Bobby hung up on them.
Dean glanced at Sam “Think he meant us to be careful about whatever the hell this is, or careful about Rowena?”
Sam shrugged. “At this point, I’d say both.”
Dean nodded and turned the radio up, filling the car with Ozzy’s “Under the Graveyard”.
“I don’t know what the damn thing looks like, Rowena!” Dean shouted in exasperation to his phone on the table. “We haven’t seen it yet. All we’ve seen is what it left behind: Piles of flesh and skin, and no bones.”
“Well, dearie, are there any bite marks or claw marks then? What kind of victims are there? Are th’ victims bairns or adults?” She had apparently resigned to treating him like a toddler, coaxing information out of him instead of giving straight answers.
“Bears or adults?! Look… do you have any ideas about what kind of creature only eats bones or not, lady?”
“I am trying tae help ye, wee lad, but I cannae help wi’oot you at least offering me some more details.”
Dean clenched his fists in frustration and barely managed to tell Sam, through his teeth, to take over as he went outside for some air.
“Dean, are ye still there?”
“Hey Rowena, Dean had to… take a walk,” Sam sighed. “I’ll fill you in.” He proceeded to tell her about the numerous missing people and wildlife, the one victim the police had found (which was now more of a soggy pile than a body) and that they hadn’t found any correlation between the victims other than they all went missing during night and in a certain area of the town.
“Ta, Dear. That wisnae so hard, wis it?” Rowena purred into the phone. “Now, I think I ken what it is and ye cannae take it alone. I’ll be there by midnight.”
“Wait, what? Rowena… You don’t have to come all the way out here to…” The phone’s screen told him she had already hung up on him. “Great.”
When Dean returned with supplies (mostly beer, beef jerky and pie) ten minutes later, Sam had already tried calling her back several times. The older brother was not happy about her promise to be there personally, but he agreed it would be practical to at least know what they were up against.
Twenty minutes before midnight, there was a knock at their door and there she was: Her red hair hanging loose over her shoulders, and a knowing grin on her face. “Lads!” she smiled as Dean stepped back to let her in.
“Be a dear and get ma bags, Dean, will ye?” She didn’t even look back to check whether he actually did it, but sauntered over to Sam with a smile. “Ah Samuel. Still tall and broody, I see?”
“Rowena,” he nodded stiffly. “You said you knew what it was, and I called you back a million times. Why couldn’t you tell us over the phone?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Ah, dinnae fuss, Samuel. I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Sam folded his arms across his chest, glaring down at the woman who, to her credit, didn’t flinch at the sight. “Well?”
“Well what, dearie?” Rowena blinked up at him, pretending she didn’t know.
“The damn monster, Rowena!” Dean threw her bag onto the bed. “What is it?” He, too, folded his arms and glared at her.
“Careful, lad! I have vials in there ye daenae wish be broken!” She pointed her thin finger at the eldest brother, which did not help calm him at all.
“Listen: l have half a mind to load my gun with witch-killing bullets if you don’t tell us what the hell you think it is! And it sure ain’t adult bears, I can tell you that much.”
Rowena frowned. “Adult bears? No, it most certainly is not that, lad. Yer dealin’ with a fae.”
That stopped Dean in his tracks. “Fae? As in… fairies?”
“Aye: fairies. A very dark and rare one, I’m afraid.” She turned around to face Sam again and neither of the two noticed Dean swallowing hard and clenching his jaw like he was remembering something uncomfortable.
“A dark fairy? What kind of dark fairy?” Sam frowned, mentally going through his knowledge of faes. There were the ones Dean saw, which apparently were weak to iron and microwaves, and the one Charlie almost hooked up with… But dark fairies?
Rowena made herself comfortable on one of the two available chairs and crossed her legs under her skirt, leaning back a little. “Well,” she started. “I take it ye’ve heard of the tooth fairy? Gathers bairns’ teeth and leaves coins as payment?”
“Bear teeth? I thought he took children’s teeth…” Dean mumbled.
Sam sighed: “BAIRN, Dean. Not bear. It’s Scottish for children.”
“Oh. Right. What about the tooth fairy, Rowena? Garth killed one some years back,” Dean continued.
That caught Rowena’s attention, raising her eyebrows at him. “Oh, he’s dead? Well… That rules him oot, then. The tooth fairy is, or should I say was, an ancient dark fairy, who was mis-credited for collecting and paying for teeth for centuries. In reality, it fed on the knowledge from the teeth of bairns, feeding on the dreams and memories that went away as each tooth fell. It preferred teeth, but would sometimes take bones as well.”
“Wait, like that movie about Jack Frost?”
“Dean…” Sam sighed dramatically. “A movie about a snowman? What the…”
“No, no: It was…” Dean snapped his fingers, trying to remember it. “It was called Rise of the Guardians or something. There was this tooth fairy there who collected teeth and all the teeth had memories.”
Sam couldn’t contain his laughter: “Seriously, Dean? You’ve watched movies about tooth fairies?”
“Ye know,” Rowena interrupted their bickering before Dean could retaliate. “That film wasnae too far off with their lore, actually. So yes: teeth have memories. And the tooth fairy collected them – only not as gently as most folk believed. A few centuries ago, The Fairy Tribunal commanded it to only collect already discarded teeth, which improved bairn mortality rates all around.”
“Alright, so it’s not the tooth fairy, then, ‘cause he’s dead. What is it instead?” Sam leaned forward, ignoring the fact that his brother was grinning obnoxiously and flipping him off.
“It’s called a bone fairy. It’s a sort of cousin to the tooth fairy, only they feed on bones. Nasty buggers, and th’ only way it could hae appeared here is if someone summoned it.”
Dean frowned. “Summoned it? Who the hell knows what a bone fairy is, let alone summons it?”
“Did any of the missing persons have bairns or younger siblings?” Rowena tapped her perfectly manicured nails on the table, looking between the two men, as if waiting for the penny to drop.
Sam sat up straight and flipped through the notebook he used while posing as an FBI agent. “Uhm… the first one to go missing did have a younger sister who was…” He flips another page. “Yep: she was six years old, perfect age for losing her teeth.”
“There ye go. That’s the one who summoned it,” she said victoriously, slapping her palm on the table.
“Wait, wait, wait….” Dean protested. “That teenager was only, what? Seventeen? How did she know about it? And let alone manage to summon it? If King Oberon had decided the tooth fairy was too violent, he must’ve at least done something to the bone fairy?”
Sam frowned at him. “King Oberon?” Then it dawned on him. “Oh right… The fairy king. You never did say how you serviced him after they kidnapped you.”
“I didn’t service anyone, Sam! And besides: it’s none of your damn business what happened when…”
“Ach!” Rowena stood up, brandishing a finger at them. “Both o’ ye: Gie yer haverin a bye or a’m gonnae gie yer bahookies a skelp!”
Neither Sam or Dean had any idea what that meant, but they both quickly shut up.
“Good.” She sat back down and straightened her skirt, already calmer. “Now, like I said: Bone fairies are amongst th’ rarest and fiercest of th’ dark faes, and if th’ wee lass tried tae summon th’ tooth fairy, she might hae accidentally made contact wi’ his cousin instead. Tooth and bone aren’t tae different in th’ fae language and it’s easy tae mispronounce.”
The three then spent the next hour searching for more information about the bone fairy. Sam wished he was back at the bunker, where the Men of Letters surely would have had something they could use. It was Bobby, however, who texted them pictures of what he found in his library – and it was not exactly encouraging.
“Oh no,” Sam moaned. “They … they regrow and assemble themselves again.”
“What?” Dean grabbed Sam’s phone, and zoomed in trying to read the swirly hand-written notes on some old parchment Bobby had found.
“Yeah: And they’re fast too. Especially if they’ve been feeding. We have to be quick and separate the limbs into bags after killing it.” Sam’s face was already scrunched up at the mere thought of it.
“Shit. I guess we’re not wearing out best shoes, then,” Dean huffed, not really committing to the joke as he read more about what the fairy looked like. From what the text said, it was the stuff nightmares were made from: almost translucent skin, wings like an engorged bat, claws made to rip off flesh and crack open bones, and teeth aplenty.
Rowena stifled a yawn and glanced at her watch. “Ach well, I will see ye two lads tomorrow. No earlier than ten o’clock, mind ye.” She lifted her bag from where Dean had discarded it earlier and gracefully left them to find the more expensive room she had reserved for herself before knocking on their door.
The next day, Sam decided to scope out the local crematorium since they needed to incinerate the remains of the bone fairy. The normal salt and burn wouldn’t be enough; these bones had to be turned into ash. Bobby had called him mid-day to tell him about the magical properties of fae bones, and how Rowena sure as hell shouldn’t get her hands on one of those.
“She can do serious blood magic with that, Sam,” he’d warned, and Sam had no illusions: If Rowena showed up like she did last night, there were definitely something she could gain from this. And a fairy bone was exactly the kind of thing she would try to get away with. The call solidified his intentions of incinerating the beast after dismembering it.
He made a quick stop at a local hardware store to stock up on drain products, cloth bags and iron filings he could shove into some hollow bullets later. He didn’t exactly have the resources at the motel to heat it up to over 2000 degrees to melt iron into bullets. Back at the bunker, he could have used the small smithy in the walls of the lab, but not here – so he improvised. The impala had a couple of wrought-iron machetes they could use to chop it up.
Sam also stopped by a local mechanic to see if he could take some old car batteries off their hands. He did not tell the mechanic he needed the sulfuric acids inside them to subdue a fairy; in case the drain cleaner wasn’t enough to dissolve the monster’s limbs. That might not have gone over so well. He left with five batteries, carried in the bags he had purchased at the hardware store. Before returning to the motel, he also made sure to restock the medical kit in the impala.
Dean was out tracking where he thought the fairy could have its lair, and found an abandoned factory of sorts out in the woods. He didn’t dare approach it, though: The ground was littered in animal remains and furs, and the surrounding forest was eerily quiet. He settled for looking at it with his binoculars instead. After a while, he caught movement in one of the windows, a giant shadow passing it, but it was too dark inside the building to tell what it was.
Rowena had told him dark fairies in general were mostly active at night, avoiding the sun if they could help it – which was why he was scoping the area in plain daylight. Better safe than sorry, he figured. The wind gusted in his direction from the building and whatever doubts he had dissipated: the stench of death, blood and gore carried all the way to him from hundreds of feet away. It was fouler than at the morgue, every instinct in him telling him to stay the hell away from it.
Yet: he knew he and his brother had to go there at midnight. Right into the son of a bitch’s lair.
Please run over to @leatafandom and read their story “Too Many Bones” too, which continues this story.
And let me know what you think about it all in the comments <3
If you enjoyed this, feel free to check out my Tumblr masterlist!
For reference, this is the meme I was inspired by:
