Witch's Canyon

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Wishful thinking, that's all. He threw back the covers and tugged on his jeans.

  By the time they made it to the Impala—a gift from Dad, 1967, midnight black, newly rebuilt—the siren had faded into the distance. But they knew the direction it had taken, back the way they'd come, through town and toward the Grand Canyon. A full moon had risen late and now hung low and golden over the treetops behind them.

  Dean floored it, and within five minutes they could hear the siren again, outside of town. Another couple of minutes later they could see flashing roof lights flickering through the trees up ahead. Dean almost missed the turn onto a narrow dirt track, but he braked, reversed, and pulled in behind a white SUV with COCONINO COUNTY SHERIFF emblazoned on the side. Two similar SUVs clogged the road ahead of it, with a white and blue paramedics' van ahead of those. Trees curtained the sides of the road.

  Dean and Sam got out of the Impala and hurried to a driveway that led to a big white barn. Fifty feet away stood a small house, a single-story cottage with three wooden steps leading to the front door, peeling paint, and a roof that looked like it might cave in at any moment. Cops milled about with big flashlights, beaming them every which way.

  A pickup truck was parked in the driveway, and beside it was the body of what must have been a man, probably not too long ago. The driver's side door of the truck hung open. Blood had spattered up the side of the truck and onto the driver's seat, and the man's arm was hooked up over the step, but his throat was gone, along with the bottom half of his face, and something had opened his chest cavity. It looked like whatever had done that had been hunting for tender morsels, but Dean didn't spend a lot of time counting organs. He glanced long enough to estimate the damage, then looked away, sickened by the sight.

  You could see a lot of carnage without ever growing to like it. He had. He was afraid that someday it wouldn't bother him, that he would be desensitized to it. He didn't want that to happen, because the sight filled him with rage, and that rage spurred him on, kept him in the fight.

  "You need something?"

  A man had stopped in front of them. He wore a white cowboy hat and a sheepskin coat, open, over a tan shirt with a badge on it. Around his waist was a black leather gun belt, and black stripes ran down the legs of his pants. He held a Maglite with its beam pointed at the ground. Cowboy boots and a thick brown mustache almost dwarfed by a generous nose and hard, inquisitive eyes told Dean everything he needed to know. This guy was in charge.

  "We—" he began.

  "You the boys from the Geographic?" Dean realized he must have looked surprised when the man with the badge added, "Don't look so shocked, son. Word travels in a small town. Delroy called us as soon as you checked in. Might have called the Bucket first, might have saved the news until he could go over there in person and let people bribe it out of him with free drinks. Either way, you're almost celebrities, and this ain't exactly tourist season." He toed a clump of snow on the drive, kicked it into trees. "Not tourist season at all. Which is just fine with me. Last thing we need's tourists hearing about this sort of thing."

  "You're right, Sheriff," Sam said. He stuck out his hand. "Sam Butler. This is Dean Osbourne. Sorry for the circumstances, but it's a pleasure to meet you."

  "I'm Jim Beckett," the man said, shaking Sam's hand, then Dean's. He held on like a vise grip. "Sheriff, spokesperson, and sometimes scapegoat, all rolled into one. We don't have a big department up here, so we have to combine duties." He eyed Dean, and for a bad few seconds Dean was afraid the sheriff had recognized him from a Wanted notice, since a shapeshifter in St. Louis had framed him for murder. "There's two t's in Beckett, son."

  "I'll, uh, make a note of that," Dean said. "Can you tell us what happened here?"

  "Something killed poor Ralph McCaig," Beckett said, eyeing the body. "That's about all I can tell you right this minute. About all I got. Animal, I'd say, but beyond that it's all guesswork. Maybe wolf, maybe bear, maybe... hell, I don't know. Bigfoot." He caught Dean's gaze again. "I see that in the magazine, I'll hunt you down."

  "No problem," Dean said.

  "No pictures either," he told Sam. "Not of this mess."

  "I don't want to look at it, much less focus a camera on it," Sam assured him.

  "That's good. My guys'll take some shots of it, and of the crime scene, if it's a crime. But like I said, looks like animal attack to me. Makes it an accidental death."

  "Doesn't look like much of an accident," Sam said.

  "Not on the animal's part, I guess, but it sure was on Ralph's. It's either accidental or death by misadventure, and I don't want to saddle Ralphie with that."

  "I'd go accidental," Dean offered.

  Beckett nodded. "Accidental it is."

  "Have there been any other... accidents, lately?"

  Beckett put a finger on his lips. "No... I mean, nothing like this. Nothing fatal. Construction worker fell off a ladder, over at the new mall, couple days ago. He broke a wrist, but he'll be fine."

  "New mall?" Dean asked.

  "Yeah. You haven't heard about that?"

  "No," Dean said.

  "Canyon Regional Mall," Beckett said. "It's inside the Cedar Wells town limits, but away from everything else—you must have come in from the park direction, otherwise you'd have seen it."

  "We did," Sam said.

  "Well, if you had kept driving another five, seven minutes from the Trail's End, you'd have gone right past it. Opens up on Saturday. Two department stores, three restaurants, plus a food court, movie theaters, the works. There's even a damn Baby Gap in there. Just like downtown. Not Cedar Wells's downtown, but you know what I mean."

  "A real mall," Dean said. "All the way out here?"

  "Population's growing," Beckett explained. "Arizona's one of the fastest growing states in the country, and not everybody's staying in Phoenix. We got a lot of small towns around here, but all those towns are getting a little bigger all the time. Out past the mall there are a couple of new housing developments. The developers of the mall think people will even come over from Nevada and southern Utah for it."

  "That's... that's fascinating," Dean said. "We'll let you get back to what you're doing, but we'll definitely want to talk to you more later on."

  "I'm easy to find," Beckett said.

  Dean and Sam walked back to the car. Dean couldn't shake the image of the dead man, opened up like a present on Christmas morning.

  "A mall," Sam said as they walked. "That's bad."

  "Why's it bad? People need a place to shop."

  "It's bad because if there are enough people for a mall, there are way more potential targets than we can possibly keep an eye on," Sam said. "Forty years ago there was hardly anyone living here, and what, ten percent of them were killed? If this killing cycle takes the same percentage of people in the area, we could be looking at hundreds of deaths."

  Dean opened the driver's door and stopped there, looking across the roof at his brother. "Then we better figure out what's going on here, and fast."

  FOUR

  "Run! Run! Run! Go go go!"

  There were times that the ex-Marine in John Winchester showed up as a wannabe drill sergeant. He had worked his boys hard, pretty much from the time he figured out what had killed their mother and decided to go up against it.

  On this particular occasion, he was running them through an obstacle course he had built—Dean thought it might have been on a farm he'd rented in West Virginia, but they'd moved around so often that his memory of where most things had taken place was jumbled and uncertain. The objective was to scramble up an uneven wooden ramp slanted at about a sixty-five degree angle. At the top they were supposed to turn and shoot a target behind them with a .45 pistol, then jump into open space. On the other side they had to tuck their heads, land, roll, and come up shooting at another target.

  Dean had made it on his third try. But he was twelve, and Sam was only eight. At that age, Dean recalled, Dad didn't allow Sam to handle real firearms, and for the purp
oses of this drill all Sam had to do was point his finger and shout "Bang!" Still, Sam didn't seem to have the strength in his skinny legs to propel him up the ramp, and the spaces between logs were far for him to stretch.

  "You get up there, Sam!" Dad had screamed. Sam wiped snot from his nose, glared at Dad through tear-filled eyes, and tried again. He took a running start, his right hand balled into a fist, index finger extended, hit the log ramp at top speed and launched himself. About two-thirds of the way up there was a gap between logs, then a big log that stuck out past the rest. Sam slammed his knee against that one and let out a yelp of pain, dropping back to the ground.

  "Get up!" Dad shouted. His voice was hoarse and angry. Scary angry, Dean thought. The more Sam couldn't make it, the more Dad seemed to get upset, like he thought Sam was intentionally failing. Dean raced to Sam's side as he sat in the dirt, rubbing his knee. He'd split the skin, Dean saw, and was smearing blood across his filthy kneecap. Tears cut pale traces down his smudged cheeks.

  "You can do this," Dean said quietly.

  "I can't. I can't get past that one log."

  "I know it's hard, Sammy. But if you do it I'll buy you a candy bar next time we're at a store. You like Snickers, right? I'll buy you a Snickers."

  Sam eyed him suspiciously. "How are you gonna buy me a Snickers bar? You don't have any money."

  "Don't worry about that," Dean said. "I'll get you one."

  Although Dad hadn't said anything outright, Dean already knew back then that the mission their father had set for himself—and for his sons—set them apart from regular people and their rules. They ate and had a home—a succession of them—and a truck, but John Winchester didn't have a job like other dads. Still, there was always money for his guns and bullets, knives and other weapons. They had clothing, of course, but also camouflage outfits and steel-toed boots, which couldn't have been cheap. Dad had decided that what he was about was more important than strict adherence to the laws of state and country. Following that example, Dean knew he could acquire a Snickers bar for his brother without too much trouble.

  "Okay," Sam said finally. "I'll try again."

  "What's taking so long?" Dad demanded. "Your life might depend on this one day, Sam!"

  That was always Dad's line when explaining anything he forced them to do. Dean couldn't actually foresee an occasion that would require them to dash up a crudely constructed wooden ramp, turn at the top and shoot a target, then land hard on the ground and shoot again, but Dad knew better than he did. He gave Sammy's bony shoulder a squeeze and got out of the way. "Kill it!" he said.

  Sam nodded, backed up a dozen steps, then took another run at the ramp. This time his legs pushed off at the right moment and he flew over the jutting log. Above it, nearing the top, he slowed a little. Dean thought he was turning too soon, thought he would unbalance himself and come back down, this time from higher up with his arm dangerously extended and a pretend pistol in his hand. The number of ways this could be bad was too high to count. But although Sam wavered, he kept his balance. A little slower than Dean had, but apparently fast enough to satisfy drill sergeant Dad, Sam aimed his finger and gave a shout, then hurled himself into space, landing on the far side of the gap, tucking his arms in and rolling. He came out of the roll a little unsteadily but on his feet, and pretended to shoot the next target.

  Dean gave a whoop and ran to meet his brother on the other side. He expected to hear congratulations from Dad too, but instead the man stood with his arms folded over his chest, looking at them solemnly.

  "What are you waiting for?" he asked. He ticked his head toward the next station on the obstacle course, a series of low-strung strands of barbed wire they were supposed to slither under. Easy enough, and beneath the wire strands was slick, goopy mud, so, bonus.

  "Look at this, Dean." Sam pushed a book—an old journal, in fact, kept in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook—across the scarred library table toward him. Before letting his mind drift into his own distant past, Dean had been studying accounts, preserved on microfiche, of the 1966 attacks from the Canyon County Gazette, a small local newspaper that went out of business in the 1980s. But Mrs. Frankel, the librarian, dug a little deeper to find the journals Sam was now reading, which had never been scanned or otherwise duplicated. The Cedar Wells Public Library was in an old wood-shingled building on Grand Avenue, and at ten-thirty in the morning it was empty except for the Winchesters and Mrs. Frankel.

  "Summarize it for me," Dean said. He was in the middle of a story and didn't want to confuse details of the two by trying to read both at once.

  "According to this," Sam said, "in 1966 there might have been an attack before December fifth."

  "Might have been?"

  "The woman who kept this journal had an uncle who disappeared on the second. He went out on a hunting trip and never came back. This was long before things like cell phones and GPS technology, of course, so when someone went on a hunting trip he was out of touch until he came home. This guy never came home, and they never found out what happened to him."

  "So it's not necessarily part of the pattern," Dean pointed out. "Maybe he'd just had enough and moved to Ohio."

  "Sure, that's a possibility. I can't imagine voluntarily moving to Ohio from here, but that's just me."

  "Or maybe the pattern's right, and the cycle doesn't start until the fifth," Dean said. "Maybe Ralph McCaig wasn't part of it at all."

  "So what got him, a werewolf?" Sam asked. Just in case, they had already checked lunar cycle history for 1966 and 1926, and the full moon hadn't been a factor on those occasions.

  "Could be," Dean said. "The moon was definitely full last night. I admit it'd be a bizarre coincidence to have a werewolf attack occur in Cedar Wells so close to the beginning of the next killing cycle. But we've seen coincidences before."

  "Shhh!" Mrs. Frankel, a woman in her sixties with a rigid spine, silver hair, and a habit of peering over the tops of her reading glasses—a librarian straight out of Central Casting, Dean had thought when they met her—was giving them the over-the-top glare now.

  "Sorry," Dean whispered. He turned back to Sam and said, in a lower voice, "Anyway, you could be right. I'd like to try to confirm it, though."

  "What the hell?" Sam asked. "We're the only ones in here."

  Watching them whisper to each other, Mrs. Frankel burst into loud guffaws. "I was just funning you boys," she said. "The place is empty—you can hoot and holler all you want."

  "That shouldn't be necessary, ma'am," Sam said, shooting her a completely artificial friendly grin. Most people wouldn't have spotted its manufactured quality, but Dean knew the real thing when he saw it, and that wasn't it.

  "Anyway," Sam continued, a little softer than before, but probably just because he was afraid Mrs. Frankel might be listening, "the problem is that we don't have a big enough sample size. We think the start date is December fifth because that's when it seems to have begun in 1966 and 1926, but two occasions isn't enough to really give us firm data. If even one of them is off—if this hunter guy really did disappear because he was the first victim—then our start date could be off by a few days. Which means that Ralph McCaig might have been part of the cycle, and there could even be other deaths that we haven't heard about yet."

  "We should focus on figuring out what's doing it, then," Dean said. "If we assume that it's started, then even if we're wrong we'll still have a head start when it does."

  "You have any good guesses yet?"

  Dean shook his head. He should have been focusing on the articles, or running through the information in his head looking for patterns, not recalling ancient history. But even that was not as significant as the training sessions with Dad. The old man had been right, his lessons had saved their lives many times over. And they had saved more lives than could be counted, by taking out one paranormal killer after another. Sometimes he just wanted something in front of him to punch or stab or strangle, and instead he found himself stuck inside a library, reading
badly written news reports on aging microfiche.

  "I got nothing, Sammy."

  Sam closed the notebook he'd been working through. "Same here," he said. "Big fat zero."

  FIVE

  Juliet Monroe watched Stu Hansen from her kitchen window, where she had been washing lunch dishes. He looked... well, she didn't know what he looked. Sad? Worried? Definitely an unusual state for Stu, who was about the steadiest guy she had ever known. He worked on the Bar M, as Ross had named their small spread, as their only full-time ranch hand. He'd come with the ranch, in fact, having worked for the previous owners too. She had seen him attending the birth of calves—even once carrying a calf for half a mile on his shoulders through a near blizzard—mending barbed-wire fences in hundred-plus degree heat, on his back beneath a truck for hours, hauling hay and shoveling out the stables, and he never complained, most always smiled, even whistled sometimes. Ranching was in Stu's blood, and he seemed to love every aspect of it.

  As he approached the house, though, his shoulders were slumped, his creased, tanned face sagged, and his big hands hung loosely at his sides, looking strangely naked without a tool or an animal in them.

  She hurried to the refrigerator and poured some lemonade into a tall glass, then dropped a couple of ice cubes in it. Rain or shine, hot or cold, Stu loved his lemonade. By the time his boots sounded on the back steps, she had the glass sitting on the kitchen table, waiting for him.

  When he came inside, he seemed to bring a miasma of worry with him; like the cloud of dust that followed Pigpen everywhere in those Peanuts comics. She saw his gaze take in the lemonade, then settle on her.

  "I fixed that for you, Stu," she said.

  "Not just now, thanks, ma'am." He almost always called her that, in spite of her efforts since she and Ross bought the place to convince him to call her Juliet.

  "What is it, Stu? What's the matter?"