“Rub this candle on your hair, your face and your body,” Xochi said.
Sam looked skeptical but did as requested. Lulo took the candle, lit it and added it to the others cluttering up the glittery altar.
“Can we go now?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” Xochi said. “We can go now.”
FORTY-THREE
El Museo De Las Momias was still closed when they got there. Which was a good thing. The last thing Dean wanted to deal with was crowds of sunburned tourists if Elvia decided to go on another rampage.
It was an old colonial building, tan and brown with rows of columns and archways along the front. The place was locked up tight as a drum, all heavy bars and steel gates. No windows and only one other side door—some kind of emergency exit around the corner from the main entrance. The alarm was a pushover, but the lock was a bitch, a Medeco 80 series MVP cam lock. Not totally pick-proof, but a real pain in the ass. Dean sent Sam to watch out for guards while he disabled the alarm, got out his picks, and went to work on the lock.
Dean had always thought of locks like women, and he liked a challenge. He shut out everything else around him and zeroed his focus down to the smallest micro-movements of his fingertips. Didn’t think about Claudia, or Sam, or the Star Demons. He just concentrated on the feel of the picks against the tumbler. He almost had it. Almost had it—
Then the door opened from the inside, startling Dean and making him step back and drop the picks, hand going reflexively to the shotgun grip. Xochi stuck her head out of the doorway, looked around, and waved Sam and Dean inside.
Sam smiled and held out his hand for Dean to go first. Dean gathered up his picks and ducked into the dark, stuffy interior of the silent museum.
“How the hell did you get in?” Dean asked Xochi.
Xochi gestured toward a young, chubby guard lurking in a distant doorway looking pink faced and smitten.
“You’re not the only one who knows how to sweet talk the opposite sex,” she said.
She blew the guard a kiss and winked. He looked down, turning even redder. Dean grinned.
“Okay,” Sam said. “So how are we going to find Elvia?”
“I think I have an idea of where she might be,” Xochi said.
She clicked on her mini-Maglite and led them down a long dark hallway and into an exhibition hall lined with glass cases. Dean followed with his own flashlight and Sam took the rear. Playing his light over the glass cases, Dean knew what he would be seeing, but knowing and seeing are two different things.
The cases were filled with corpses. Dozens and dozens of desiccated dead bodies. Delicate, papery, and dry, with yawning mouths and empty eye sockets. Many still had hair. Some had ragged clothes. Most were naked. Some were laid out flat, others propped up with wire as if standing on their withered, curled up feet.
“What’s with these all corpses anyway?” Sam asked.
“They are natural mummies,” Xochi said. “Dried up because of certain minerals in the soil. Around the late 1800s, a burial tax was created and if families could not pay for their loved ones, the bodies would be dug up and kicked out of the graveyard. But nobody wanted to just throw the bodies away with the garbage, so they piled them up in storage. This practice was outlawed in the fifties, but soon tourists started coming to see the collection of mummies. That’s why they opened this museum.”
“Wow,” Dean said, shining his light on the box-kite ribcage and shriveled breasts of a mummy with long wispy hair bound into a braid. “Fun for the whole family.”
Truth was, Dean knew that while Lisa would probably be less than thrilled, Ben would love something like this. Dean needed to push thoughts like that right out of his mind and stay focused.
“So where do you think Elvia is hiding?” Sam asked.
“Well,” Xochi said. “If I was a confused, crazy mama who lost her baby daughter, I think I would want to be with the angelitos.”
“The what?” Dean asked.
“Little angels?” Sam said, with a questioning tone.
“Yes,” Xochi said, pointing at a doorway down at the far end of another long hallway. “The little angels.”
Dean raised his light to a sign reading “LOS ANGELITOS” and under that in English “The world’s smallest mummy!”
The angelitos were dead babies. Everything from larger toddlers to the “world’s smallest,” an unborn fetus that had been inexplicably been removed from its dead mother and displayed separately. Many were dressed up in fancy outfits and laid out on lacy pillows. Some had little plaques explaining who they were and others were unlabeled, mysterious and unknowable.
Xochi froze and put her hand on Dean’s chest, holding him back and pressing a finger to her lips. That’s when Dean heard it too. A soft, keening sound, like a hurt and lonely dog. One of the cases at the far end of the room was open.
FORTY-FOUR
They’d been forced to leave the obsidian weapons back in Nogales, Arizona, and even though Dean knew he was supposed to be trying to talk to her, not kill her, he still hated going into a situation like this without a suitable weapon in hand.
“Dean,” Sam said, gesturing to the open case.
The old-fashioned wooden cases were raised up off the tiled floor on six-inch-high legs, leaving a gap beneath. A long gray hand was reaching slowly out from the shadows underneath the cases. Dean could feel that same weird static charge he felt at Claudia’s house racing across the surface of his skin.
“Elvia?” he said.
He crouched down slowly, tilting his head to peer underneath the cases. The Borderwalker was crammed into the narrow space, clutching a mummified baby in a dusty christening dress. Her form was human but abnormally thin and covered in patchy gray hair. Her black-hole eyes bored into Dean, black lips dripping venom and twitching into a snarl. She was breathing too fast, almost panting.
“Elvia, we’re not going to hurt you,” Dean said, looking back over his shoulder at Xochi.
Xochi repeated his words in Spanish.
She growled, low and harsh, nails clawing at the tile.
“Your daughter’s in danger,” Dean said. “She needs our help.”
Again, Xochi translated.
“Where is she?” Dean asked. “Where is Claudia?”
Xochi got down on one knee beside him and repeated his words.
Silence.
“We should cure her now,” Sam said. “Cure her, or kill her.”
“What?” Dean said. He kept his eyes on Elvia.
“Now, while we have the chance,” Sam said. “We may not get another shot.”
“If we cure her now,” Xochi said. “She will be an ordinary human again. Her bond with Claudia will be severed. Same if we kill her. Without that psychic connection, we won’t find Claudia. Once the Nagual know the connection has been severed, there will be no reason for them to keep Claudia alive.”
“Look, I’m sorry about that, but...”
“No, Sam,” Dean said. “No way. I already see where you’re going with this, and you’re overruled.”
“Overruled?” Sam took a step closer to Dean. “We can’t put the life of one girl before the millions of lives that will be lost if the Clawed Butterfly makes it into our world. Including our own. That’s just crazy. Suicidal.”
Elvia retreated further under the cases, shivering.
“You’re scaring her,” Xochi said.
“Back off, Sam,” Dean said. “Just let me talk to her, will ya? I’ll try to get her to accept the cure after I find out where Claudia is. But it’s Claudia first. I said I was gonna do everything in my power to protect that kid, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. You just watch the door and make sure I don’t get c-blocked by Teo and those crow-guys.”
Dean moved closer to the case, easing himself down onto his belly. Xochi was right beside him.
“Elvia, listen to me,” Dean said. “I know you’re scared, but your daughter is scared too. You can feel it can’t you? How scared she is?”
<
br /> He waited for Xochi to translate, studying Elvia’s shifting face and hollow eyes. She was staring intently at Dean, frozen and tense as a cornered animal.
“She needs her mother,” Dean said. “She needs our help just like you do. Tell us where she is and we’re gonna get the both of you out of here, okay? I’m not gonna let Teo hurt you anymore.”
Those bony gray fingers slid back out and gripped Dean’s hand. It was hard not to flinch from her feverish touch, but he managed.
“Where is she?” he asked again.
Her answer came as a brutal blast of raw agony inside Dean’s head, accompanied by a powerful sense memory of shoving baby Claudia into a clump of dry brush and a rush of something that wasn’t really words, more like a primitive torrent of emotion.
“...leftherleftherleftherlefther...”
Dean touched his nose, fingers coming away wet with blood. Elvia’s anguished shriek was echoing inside his head like the worst migraine of all time.
“You had to leave her to protect her,” Dean said, struggling to keep his thoughts straight. “But now you have a chance to find her again. Find her and save her, Elvia. Tell me where she is.”
Elvia let go of Dean’s hand and came crawling out from under the cases. No one else moved. Sam’s hand was on the grip of the Magnum, eyes narrow, watching.
“Easy now,” Dean said.
Elvia dropped the mummified baby, shifting as she crawled. More coyote-like now but hunched and mangy, scabrous skin alive with insects. She was moving away from Dean, toward the doorway of the exhibit hall.
“Where are you going?” Dean asked.
Xochi translated. Elvia ignored them.
“Elvia?” Dean said, getting slowly to his feet. “Elvia, where is your daughter? Where is she?” Xochi’s rapid Spanish followed his words.
He could see the muscles in her scrawny haunches bunching up, ready to run. He was afraid he was losing her.
“Elvia, wait, listen to me—” he began. But he was cut off by her answer, echoing inside his skull like the whine of a damaged buzz saw.
“...here...”
He caught a flickering image of Claudia, flanked by Nagual and standing in front of a row of female mummies.
Elvia leapt, tearing down the hallway.
Dean swore and took off after her, calling back over his shoulder.
“She’s here. Claudia’s here, in the museum.”
Dean followed Elvia down the hall and into a larger room with three doors, the one they came in through, one to the left, and one to the right. Xochi and Sam were close on his heels.
The chubby young guard who’d let Xochi in to the museum was dead, face down in a pool of blood.
There was a soft, rustling sound like the whisper of turning pages or the swish of a woman’s skirt. The sound was building and growing in volume. Then a massive, ear-shattering crash as every single glass case in the building shattered simultaneously. Dean grabbed Xochi and hit the tile, covering her with his body, his arms thrown across his face to protect against the spray of jagged glass.
“Sam!” Dean called, raising his head and spotting Sam in the left-hand doorway. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Sam said, pulling a shard of glass from his right shoulder. “But we got a problem.”
That was an understatement.
The mummies were climbing out of their cases.
FORTY-FIVE
“Awesome,” Dean said, shaking broken glass out of his hair and pulling out the sawed-off shotgun. “This is just what we need.”
The mummies were surprisingly fast, their movements jerky and puppet-like. Dean let one have it with the shottie, blasting its desiccated head into dust. It kept coming, reaching for him with shaky, skeletal arms. Dozens more were pouring in through all three doorways, separating him from Sam and pushing his brother backwards out the left-hand door.
“You gotta be kidding,” Dean said, kicking and swinging, knocking the brittle mummies back—but they just kept coming. “Come on. What the hell is going on here, Xochi?”
“No,” Xochi cried, getting up on her knees. “No! Elvia!”
She held her hand out toward the Borderwalker, but the mummies were all over Xochi. They didn’t seem to be biting or even really attacking, just crowding her and pushing her back, away from Elvia. Xochi was using her telekinetic spell to smash through the crowd of mummies but they were an unstoppable tide.
Dean risked a look toward Elvia and saw her struggling, enveloped in glowing blue strands just like the ones Teo had used to bind her at Claudia’s house.
Xochi screamed something in Spanish. The only word Dean recognized was her sister’s name: Teo.
A pair of Nagual, one male and one female came in through the right-hand door, animal forms shifting to human as they reached out to grab the bound Borderwalker. Dean took a shot at the man, but several bumbling mummies got in the way, taking the force of the slug and pushing the barrel up toward the ceiling. The Nagual and Elvia were gone before Dean could reload.
Xochi had torn a two-foot long piece of wood from one of the shattered cases and was busting mummy heads left and right. Dean followed her lead, breaking off a heavy chunk of wood for himself. It seemed like blunt-force trauma was the way to go with these things. They didn’t stop coming until they were smashed to pieces.
“What’s with these mummies?” Dean asked. “Why can’t we kill them?”
“They are not real,” Xochi replied.
“They seem pretty real to me,” Dean said, swinging the chunk of wood and caving in a leathery ribcage.
“I mean they are not autonomous,” Xochi explained, taking the twiggy legs out from under a half-dressed female mummy. “They have been animated by Teo to slow us down and block us.”
“Damn, that bitch is good,” Dean said.
Dean heard the distinctive baritone bark of Sam’s Magnum, twice, then three times, in the chamber to their left.
“Come on,” Dean said, heading for the left-hand door.
Xochi followed him.
“Here,” Xochi said, putting her shoulder against one of the larger cases right by the door. “Help me.”
Dean put his weight against the case.
“One, two...” Xochi counted.
Together they shoved the case over, blocking the mummies from the large room from entering the hallway. There were still plenty of stragglers in the hallway, but it looked like Sam had really cut a swath through the ones on this side of the door. The floor was littered with dry bones and rags and flaps of parchment skin.
Dean dodged the remaining mummies and ducked through another doorway. There, in a long narrow gallery, was Sam, facing off against a single Nagual woman. Several of her fellow shifters lay dead around her. She had her arm around a pale and wide-eyed Claudia, stone knife pressed against her throat, using the girl’s body as a shield.
Dean raised both his hands, letting the wood drop to the floor.
“Okay,” Dean said. “Take it easy. Don’t hurt her.”
Sam was totally calm and still, expression neutral. The Nagual hissed something Dean couldn’t understand. Sam raised the Magnum, exhaled slowly and shot the Nagual between the eyes.
The Nagual went down in shower of sparks. Claudia ran to Dean, while Sam stepped up to the fallen shifter and gave her a precautionary double tap in what remained of her head.
“You okay, kid?” Dean asked, lifting Claudia’s chin and eyeing the trickle of blood where the Nagual knife had bit into her skin.
“I knew you’d save me,” she said, squeezing Dean’s waist so tight he could barely breathe.
“Yeah, well how about a little sugar for Sam?” Dean asked. “He’s the one who saved you, not me.”
Sam was reloading the Magnum, not paying any attention to either one of them. Claudia let go of Dean and went over to hug Sam.
“Thanks, Sam,” she said.
Sam looked over the top of her head at Dean, eyebrows knitting.
“Say ‘you�
�re welcome,’ Dexter,” Dean said.
“You’re welcome,” Sam said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here and figure out how to get Elvia back.”
“I heard Xochi’s sister saying they needed to get to Mexico City,” Claudia said. “But she didn’t say exactly where.”
“Then we’d better get on the road.”
Xochi boosted the only vehicle in the museum parking lot, a bondo-ed pick-up truck covered in religious stickers. Claudia rode up front while Sam and Dean climbed into the bed. The ride was slow and bumpy, constantly thwarted by crazy traffic, and for a good hour, Sam and Dean didn’t speak.
“Why did you save Claudia?” Dean finally asked.
Sam didn’t answer for a minute, just squinted against the sun.
“Why not?” Sam said. “We still need her, don’t we?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t know that at the time,” Dean said. “For all you knew, Elvia could have been dead at that point.”
“I saw that I had a shot. I took it.” Sam shrugged. “Couldn’t really think of any reason not to.”
Dean knew it was impossible, just wishful thinking really, but he found himself wanting to believe that maybe there was some tiny scrap of conscience left in Sam after all. Some little echo inside his head that kept him from taking the easy shot, through Claudia’s chest and into the shifter behind her.
A few minutes later, the truck coughed, spluttered and died. Xochi was able to coast over onto the shoulder to get them out of traffic.
Dean and Sam got out of the back while Xochi leaned out the driver’s side window.
“This truck has no third gear,” she said.
“Lovely,” Dean said. “Pop the hood.”
He raised the hood, releasing a ton of toxic smoke as he propped it open and peered inside.
“Who knew that you could make a whole engine out of duct tape?” Dean said, waving a hand in front of his face to clear the smoke. He shook his head and closed the hood like it was a coffin lid. “This thing isn’t going anywhere.”
Xochi got out and fished around in her pockets.
“Let me call Alejandro,” she said, unfolding a crumpled bar napkin.
Supernatural 8 - Coyote's Kiss Page 22
