Rite of Passage

by John Passarella

  “I guess they don’t entertain much,” Sam said quietly as they approached the front door.

  Before Dean climbed the porch steps, Sam caught his arm and pointed downward.

  A greasy gray feather lay on one warped step.

  “Right place,” Dean whispered.

  As they crossed the porch, the wooden planks creaked under their weight. So much for the element of surprise, Dean thought. He knocked, waited in vain for an answer, and knocked again, louder. He shot a glance at his brother. Sam shrugged. For a silent moment, Dean debated picking the lock versus kicking in the door or putting an elbow through a window, but was spared the decision when an irritated voice shouted, “Go away!”

  “Animal control,” Dean yelled. “We’re investigating reports of illegally imported birds.”

  Sam and Dean had spent a week investigating multiple disappearances in the Adirondacks. The victims had been young and old; several solitary joggers, a night shift worker on a smoking break, a woman walking her Pomeranian, a camper who wandered off to answer a call of nature, an insomniac who stepped out on his balcony for some fresh air, and a hiker who had left his group for a more challenging ascent. All the victims had been out alone after dark. Otherwise, no similarities, no pattern an FBI profiler would ever unravel. Families received no ransom calls or notes. No bodies were found. There were no witnesses. No fresh tire tracks or suspicious vehicles lurking in the area of the disappearances. It was as if the victims had vanished off the face of the earth.

  That had the Winchesters—who often found answers outside the box—wondering if someone or, more likely, something had, literally, lifted them off the earth. Sam had made the suggestion first. Dean wondered if they were dealing with dragon abductions again, but fellow hunter Bobby Singer noticed a dark, grimy feather on the side of the road near where the police had found the cowering Pomeranian. Return trips to several of the crime scenes turned up a few more feathers.

  After reviewing the timeline, they determined that the first disappearance—a jogger—occurred shortly after the arrival in town of three odd women, the Yerakidis sisters. Their behavior bordered on reclusive, but on rare occasions they would appear in town for supplies, always together, wearing bulky, hooded cloaks, no matter the weather. They talked to one another, heads bobbing together in brief intimate exchanges, but rarely spoke to anyone else. According to clerks in stores they patronized, they seemed to lack social skills, resisting attempts by anyone to engage them in casual conversation.

  “Go! Away!” the shrill voice repeated.

  Sam shrugged, unsurprised by the hostile reception.

  Dean raised his fist to knock on the door, but paused when it was yanked open.

  The hooded head of a woman with a pinched face darted forward through the foot-wide gap in the doorway, as if she meant to bite Dean. She had black marble eyes over a hooked nose and a wide, almost lipless mouth.

  “Last warning,” she squawked, her words punctuated with a blast of foul breath.

  Before Dean could utter a reply, she slammed the door in his face.

  They heard the deadbolt click, followed by an eerie silence.

  Dean nodded and took a step back. “On my count,” he said to Sam, who moved beside him. “One, two … three!”

  The combined force of their kicks smashed the deadbolt free of the weathered doorjamb and the door burst open, rattling on rusty hinges. Pulling their automatics, they entered the house, backs to each other as they sighted along the muzzles of their pistols.

  A mixed bag of threadbare and damaged furniture cluttered the first floor. Boxes lined the walls, stacked high enough in places to block several windows and cast the rooms into unnatural gloom. Everything looked as if it had been abandoned by the prior tenants.

  A sudden movement caught Dean’s attention.

  A cloaked figure pitched toward him.

  He held his fire at the last moment, recognizing an empty cloak draped over a coat rack. But who had—

  Behind him, Sam’s gun roared.

  There was another blur of movement as something swooped toward him from the stairwell landing. His own shot missed as it crashed into him, knocking him over the back of a grimy sofa onto an oval coffee table that collapsed under his weight, taking Dean’s breath away.

  In the fall, Dean had lost his gun. Expecting an immediate follow-up attack, he rolled to the side and grabbed a detached table leg to wield as a makeshift club. Instead, the wooden leg became a crude shield as one of the sisters hurled a crumbling cardboard box filled with hardbound books at him.

  Across the room, Sam ducked and leaned away from a flurry of claw swipes by a second sister. He got off another wild shot before she caught him off balance and hurled him against an empty hutch. As he staggered away, she dumped the hutch on top of him, then whirled on her heel and bolted up the stairs.

  From above, the first one shouted, “Hurry, Te!”

  “Coming!” shrilled the second.

  Before Te turned the corner of the first landing, Dean caught a glimpse of long wings, folded behind her back, extending from her shoulders to her calves. He hurled the table leg at her—but a moment too late. It gouged a divot out of the drywall and rebounded down the stairs while Dean recovered his gun.

  “Sam?”

  “Go!”

  Dean bounded up the stairs, two at a time. Behind him, he heard the hutch crash as Sam climbed out from under it. Though the second floor was darker than the first, Dean’s eyes had adjusted to the interior gloom. He dodged a padded bench in a hallway, following a rush of clicking footfalls on hardwood. As Sam thundered up the staircase behind him, Dean ducked through a doorway into the tower section of the house, and glimpsed a flutter of movement as one of the sisters rushed up a wrought-iron spiral staircase.

  By the time he burst through a trapdoor onto the widow’s walk, enclosed by a chest-high wrought-iron railing, he stood alone. He checked the sky, turning in a slow circle, gun raised, as Sam joined him. A moment later, they heard the unmistakable sound of a car engine starting. A green Chevy Suburban pulled away from the back of the house, spewing gravel until it fishtailed onto the country road and roared back the way the Winchesters had come.

  Dean stared down at the three-story drop and rattled the wrought-iron railing in frustration.

  “Friggin’ harpies!”

  By the time they descended two flights of stairs and sprinted the hundred yards to the Plymouth, the harpies were long gone. To add insult to injury, one of the car’s worn tires was flat. Sam volunteered to replace it while Dean checked the house for any clues to the sisters’ destination. Other than the abandoned cloaks they had worn to hide their wings and scattered feathers littering the premises, he found nothing of interest. Until he opened the refrigerator. On the top shelf sat several translucent plastic containers dappled with dried blood and carefully labeled with strips of masking tape to identify the contents: liver, kidneys, lungs, brains. Off to the side, a mason jar held a selection of human eyeballs, shriveled optic nerves still attached. With a pained expression, Dean shoved the door closed. He would never look at pickled eggs the same way again.

  As he hurried back to the Plymouth, he called Bobby on his burner cell. “It was them, Bobby,” Dean said. “The Yerakidis sisters are harpies.”

  “Noticing the present tense,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” Dean said, frowning. “They flew the coop.”

  “You see them fly?”

  “Not exactly,” Dean said. “They lit out of here in their green Suburban.”

  “All three?”

  “Two,” Dean replied. “No sign of the third.”

  “Aw hell,” Bobby said. “Another jogger’s gone missing.”

  They guessed the third harpy would join the other two, but had no idea where they might meet. To cover more ground, they searched separately, with Dean and Sam in the Plymouth and Bobby on the other side of the small town searching for the Suburban in his Chevelle.

  Shortly
after nightfall, Bobby spotted the SUV and tailed it to a foreclosed house, waiting at a discreet distance until the Winchesters could provide backup. They joined him by a sign planted in the corner of the front lawn that read “Foreclosure. Price Reduced.”

  “Any sign of the third one?” Dean asked.

  “Or the jogger?” Sam wondered.

  “Not a damn peep,” Bobby said, nodding toward the house. “Waiting in the dark.”

  “Like maybe they know we’re here?” Sam asked.

  “To hell with bumbling in the dark again,” Dean said. “Let’s torch the place.”

  “What if the third one brought the jogger here before the other two arrived?”

  Dean recalled the plastic containers in the fridge. “The poor bastard might thank us,” he muttered.

  “Look,” Sam whispered urgently.

  Dean followed his gaze to the peak of the gable roof. At first he saw nothing in the darkness. Then two hunched shapes resolved, silhouettes darting with eerie grace toward the edge of the roof. First one, then the other launched from the roof, broad wings spread and pounding against the air. In seconds they soared over the road and higher, over the treetops of the forest on the other side, and vanished.

  “Come on!” Bobby said. “We’ll need rifles.”

  Dean braced the deer rifle across his chest as he stumbled through the underbrush of the unnaturally quiet forest. Sam followed behind him, sweeping the dark ground ahead with a powerful Maglite, his other hand on the hilt of a hunting knife. Bringing up the rear, Bobby—the best shot of the three of them—like Dean, carried a Browning A-Bolt 30- 06. Sam had wanted a rifle for this hunt too, but Dean had vetoed the idea.

  “Dude, no,” he’d said, before they followed a deer trail across the tree line. “It’ll be bad enough with two of us bumbling around in the dark with rifles. We’re in the middle of this, what happens if Lucifer decides to put on a puppet show in your head? I get a bull’s-eye on my back? Or Bobby?”

  “I’m fine, Dean. I was fine in the house.”

  “Yeah, you’re fine until you’re not fine. A pistol in daylight, okay. But a rifle in the dark? Baby steps, Sammy.”

  Sam wanted Dean to believe he was okay, but he had admitted that he sometimes had trouble separating reality from his visions of Lucifer. They weren’t memories of the pit either, released when the wall inside Sam’s head collapsed, but actual psychotic breaks. That freaked the hell out of Dean, he wasn’t afraid to admit. And though Dean had helped Sam distinguish between reality and his Lucifer-vision, Sam was far from acing that test on a regular basis. Sam tried to hide it, but now and then Dean caught his brother squeezing the scar on his left hand, prompting real-world pain to push reality back to the surface of his mind.

  Sam turned to Bobby, looking for support. “Bobby? Back me up here?”

  The older man, the Winchester brothers’ honorary uncle, averted his gaze momentarily. “I’m with Dean on this one, Sam.”

  Bobby reached into the trunk of the Chevelle. “Near as I can tell, bullets won’t kill ’em, just slow ’em down long enough to use this.” He handed Sam a sheathed hunting knife.

  “Got two more of those?” Dean asked.

  “That I do.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were wandering through the forest in the general direction the two sisters had flown.

  The toe of Dean’s boot caught on an exposed tree root, causing him to trip. He released the stock of his rifle and caught himself against a tree trunk. For the third time in fifteen minutes, he patted the hilt of the knife in the sheath looped around his belt. Right then, he would gladly trade the rifle for a pair of night-vision goggles.

  “You okay, Dean?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “I tripped over a tree root.”

  Bobby flicked on his rifle-mounted flashlight and focused the beam on the ground near Dean’s feet.

  “That ain’t no tree root.” Bobby nodded toward the spot. “Had to guess, I’d say that’s a human femur.”

  Sam used his flashlight to scan the area in question. He kicked aside some dead leaves and dirt, exposing more bones. “One victim.”

  “Picked clean,” Bobby observed.

  “We’re on their turf now,” Dean said.

  “Thought crossed my mind,” Bobby said. “Maybe that’s what they intended from the jump.”

  “So we’re walking into a trap,” Sam said.

  “Awesome,” Dean replied.

  “Gonna pretend that’s not in the job description?” Bobby asked. “Maybe toast a few marshmallows? Or do something useful?”

  “Right.” Dean sighed.

  He flicked on his rifle light and they moved deeper into the forest.

  They found a fire pit and Bobby spotted a charred fragment of red sweater and what looked like the corner of a brown leather wallet. The harpies had burned their victims’ possessions, leaving nothing behind but bones buried in shallow graves.

  Now that they knew what to look for, they discovered more graves, at irregular intervals and then with more frequency.

  “Aw, hell …” Bobby said.

  Dean followed the beam of his rifle light to a low branch and the partially eaten body hanging over it with a broken back. A man in his twenties, eyes plucked out, half his face and throat eaten, glistening loops of intestine hanging low enough to touch the forest floor. They stood in silence.

  Plop! Plop …

  Blood dripped from the man’s throat wound to the dead leaves below.

  “Fresh meat,” Bobby said. “The missing jogger. Means we inter—”

  Dean glanced up as a shadow momentarily blotted out the waning crescent moon. There was a rustle of leaves behind them, a gliding shape swooping down.

  “Bobby, look out!”

  Dean swung the barrel of his rifle up to take a shot, but the harpy was behind Bobby, coming in fast. Bobby ducked, but not fast enough. Hooked claws on her feet dug into the shoulders of his vest, took hold and lifted him off the ground. The sudden impact dislodged the rifle from Bobby’s hands. His legs cycled back and forth in a pantomime of running as he rose several feet in the air.

  As Dean jumped back to avoid a collision between Bobby’s knee and his face, Sam grabbed Bobby’s rifle from the ground, tracked the creature with the mounted light, aimed and fired. The harpy cried out and flinched, losing a couple of feathers before pounding her wings furiously to lift her prey out of reach.

  Dean looked up at Bobby, almost directly overhead. The angle was too narrow for him to risk a shot. He could try for the arms, but they were a blur of movement. Instead, he decided to change the physics and hoped Sam would keep his head about him.

  Slinging the rifle over his shoulder, Dean jumped and wrapped his arms around Bobby’s calves. His toes skittered along the forest floor for a few seconds before he felt himself being lifted up. Trying to keep their combined weight airborne was definitely putting a strain on the harpy. Dean looked at Sam.

  “Do it! Take the shot!”

  Sam had worked the bolt after his first shot, expelling the spent cartridge, and took aim for a second shot. Since the rushed first round may have caused a flesh wound, he took an extra moment to target the torso—and fired.

  The dark wings faltered once, twice, and stopped beating. She plummeted to the ground, causing an explosion of dead leaves and twigs, and dropped Bobby and Dean in her wake.

  Dean scrambled to his feet, brushed himself off and looked back at Sam.

  “Good shot.”

  Sam shrugged. “I had a one in three chance of hitting the right target.”

  “You’re hilarious.”

  Before Bobby flipped the creature over, Dean spotted the entry wound, central-mass. If they were lucky, Sam had hit the heart. That would keep her docile long enough to finish the kill.

  “Hold her down,” Bobby instructed.

  Dean pinned the harpy’s shoulders to the ground as Bobby pulled out his knife.

  Her unclothed flesh was covered with
a soft down, medium to dark gray, but she was a messy eater. Human blood and bits of gore streaked her wild, stringy hair, face, torso, arms, and fingers—remnants of her interrupted meal. Black marble eyes stared sightlessly toward the clear night sky

  With his knife held in a double-handed grip, Bobby drove the tip down through the exposed chest, into the harpy’s heart. For a brief moment, her body arched and a mournful shriek burst through her pointed teeth and cracked lips. Then her body sagged.

  “Should keep her down and out,” Bobby said. “Least till we burn her.”

  “How are your shoulders?”

  Bobby rolled them, winced slightly. “They’ll keep.”

  An answering screech sounded from high in the treetops.

  “Incoming!” Dean said.

  In a blur of motion, a second harpy zipped through the clearing, caught Sam’s wrist and dragged him past Dean and Bobby, before hurling him bodily into the base of a tree trunk. Sam grunted with the impact and rolled away dazed, but still clutched the stock of Bobby’s rifle.

  “You killed Podarge!” she shrieked. “They killed Po!” The second comment was directed skyward.

  As she beat her wings and rose away from them, Dean took aim and fired. The bullet breezed through a wing, dislodging a dozen feathers, but failed to slow her down, let alone wound her. She dropped onto a sturdy branch and glared at him with glassy black eyes.

  “Hold that thought,” Dean whispered, and worked the bolt as he sighted along the rifle.

  From behind him came a whistling sound, rising in volume.

  “Oh, crap!”

  The third harpy drilled him like a middle linebacker.

  Dean rolled with the impact, executing an awkward somersault and losing his grip on the rifle, but snagging the shoulder strap as he sprawled across a bed of broken twigs and what looked and smelled like harpy droppings.

  “That’s just nasty!”