Jesse shoved him against the wall. “I must be,” he said angrily, “to have stood your drunken bullshit all these years.”
“You got it wrong, buddy boy,” his father shouted, spittle flying freely. “I’ve had to put up with you all these years. Now make yourself useful—get me another beer and clean up this damned mess!”
“Do I look like your servant, Pop?”
His father leaned in so close Jesse had no choice but to inhale the sour mixture of booze and dried vomit steaming out of his mouth. “No,” his father said. “You look like something I scraped off my shoe.”
Jesse grabbed his father’s chin and shoved him backward, hard, slamming his head into the wall. A framed picture of his father standing with a few fishing buddies at some lodge fell off the wall and clattered down the stairs. Before his father could react, Jesse slugged him in his big gut, then grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him sidewise, down the stairs.
His father rolled awkwardly, his foot splitting two balusters on the way down. At the base of the stairs, he swayed on his hands and knees, fighting for the strength or balance to rise.
Jesse charged down the stairs and grabbed his father by the hair, lifting his face up high enough for a punch.
“Go ahead, tough guy,” his father slurred. “Do it, you stupid son of a bitch. Kill me, just like you killed your own mother!”
Jesse released him and stepped back, staring at his father as if he had sprouted a second head. “What?”
“You killed her,” his father repeated. “So go ahead and kill me. A matched set.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jesse yelled angrily. “Mom ran away. She couldn’t take living with you. And who could blame her?”
Jesse blamed her. For leaving him with this worthless human being, for abandoning him. His father liked to blame Jesse for her leaving, saying she couldn’t take raising a kid and left to avoid the responsibility, but Jesse knew she left because her husband was a worthless drunk. The only doubt that had ever crept into his mind was trying to understand why she would throw out the baby with the beer-drenched loser.
“It was you,” his father said, pointing at him, “you freak. You killed her.”
His father climbed awkwardly to his feet, clutching the edge of the kitchen table for support. In his inebriated state, standing and regaining his balance required all his remaining wits and stamina. Panting, he staggered back until he bumped into the counter. Jesse stalked after him, fists clenched at his sides.
“You’re a worthless liar,” Jesse said. “She ran away from you!”
“Want proof, smartass? I’ll take you to her grave!”
“Liar!”
All his life, the idea that Jesse’s mother might come back for him, might contact him and offer him an escape from this worthless excuse for a father, had kept him sane. A tiny scrap of hope that somewhere life made sense. He hated that she had abandoned him, but he thought he could forgive her… if she came back for him.
“She died giving birth to you, jackass,” his father said. “Bled out on the table. Worst part is, you’re probably not even mine. I loved your mother, but she was no saint. Sure, I’d go on my benders, but she’d shack up with a different guy every other week, always looking for something else, something better. Never satisfied with what we had. And in the end, it caught up to her. She gave birth to a freak bastard and it killed her.”
“You’re a worthless drunk and a lousy liar,” Jesse said, his lips drawn tight. “Why should I believe a word out of your mouth?”
“Believe what you want,” his father said. “But you know it’s true.” He raised his hands over his head and laughed. “Hell, I’m a hero! Raising somebody’s bastard. I should get a medal.”
“Shut up!”
“Know why I never told you she died, where she was buried?” his father asked, his slobbery mouth hanging open. “Because I was afraid you might piss on her grave, that killing her wasn’t good enough for—”
Without thinking, Jesse had grabbed the largest butcher knife from the wooden block on the counter and shoved the blade up to the handle into his father’s chest. Only after he released the handle did Jesse comprehend what he’d done.
His father looked down, taking several seconds to understand what had happened. Then he looked up at Jesse again.
“Had to have the…”
He dropped to his knees.
“… matched… set.”
He toppled forward, driving the knife a bit deeper, before slumping on his side in a growing pool of blood.
Backing away, Jesse grimaced at the pain burning through his scalp. He pressed his palms against the twin bumps and it seemed to him that they had grown larger in the minute or two since he rushed down the stairs.
He grabbed his jacket and his father’s car keys and ran out of the house.
Dalton Rourke sat on the edge of his unmade bed and stared at his dark, pointed fingernails. After punching a hole in his wall, he had washed the plaster dust off his hand and rinsed the vomit out of his mouth. But no amount of scrubbing removed the darkness from his fingernails. Some kids his age painted their fingernails black, but he hadn’t done anything of the sort. The darkness seemed natural somehow—if not normal—possibly from a vitamin deficiency. If that were true, he thought it should be a slow process, starting at the beds of the nails. But the weird coloring and coarsening had happened rapidly. Maybe it was a symptom of a disease. His grandparents never turned off the television, even when they weren’t watching it, and he had heard them talking about a bunch of epidemics in town. Could he have been infected? The really weird part was that his nails seemed stronger than before. After lashing out and punching a hole in the wall, he’d have expected bruising on his hand, too, but it felt fine.
His head continued to throb and the two bumps above his hairline felt dry and scaly. Probing with his fingers, he felt a cut in his skin but, strangely, no blood. Beneath the slit, something hard pressed upward, almost like adult teeth erupted from the gums, pushing out baby teeth.
Grabbing his gray knit hat off his headboard, he walked down the hall to the bathroom. He paused mid-way to listen to his grandparents below.
“… punish him if we’re not here?” his grandfather asked.
“I’m certainly not going to let Fiddler tickets go to waste,” his grandmother replied.
He nodded to himself, recalling that they had purchased tickets for Fiddler on the Roof at the Cheshire Theater months ago. If that was for tonight’s show, he’d have the house to himself. He wouldn’t have to listen to them bitch about how he was a disappointment as a grandson, an embarrassment to the family name, a juvenile delinquent headed for life in jail, yadda, yadda, yadda.
“We’ve got less than a year left to put up with his nonsense,” his grandfather said.
Of course, he thought. They’ll be kicking me out as soon as I turn eighteen.
That had been their threat for the last three years. Not that he should straighten up his act or they would throw him out—they weren’t offering an either-or proposition. They had simply told him that at eighteen he would have to find somewhere else to live, their obligation would be finished. Nobody could speak ill of them after that. In the end, all that mattered to them was their reputation.
His grandfather had suggested on more than one occasion that he join the military at eighteen: “Maybe they can whip a loser into shape.”
Dalton grimaced as a spike of pain shot across his forehead. He stumbled into the bathroom and stared at his head in the mirror. Normally, his buzz cut revealed his scalp, but his red hair seemed longer, as if it had grown a half-inch in the last twenty-four hours. With the fingers of both hands, he pushed his hair away from the bump with the split skin over it. He saw something bone-white underneath. He prodded it with his index finger, expecting something loose, embedded under his skin, but it felt sturdy and hard as bone. “What the hell is that?” he whispered to himself.
He reached into a
drawer under the sink and removed a pair of scissors, spreading the blades as far apart as possible. Holding one of the blades in his hand like a miniature ice pick, he shoved the point into the cut in his scalp and pressed against the hard substance. If he could wedge the blade under the obstacle, he thought, he could pry it out of his head. But as much as he probed and prodded, he couldn’t find an underside to the hard object. Grimacing, he dug deeper, then yelped when the blade slipped and gashed his scalp.
Letting the scissors fall into the sink, he reached up with his palm to press on the fresh cut. Blood flowed between his fingers and down one side of his face. He grabbed a clean towel from the small closet in the bathroom and pressed it against the open wound. The throbbing in his head accelerated, accompanied by steady waves of excruciating pain. Now it felt as if something with sharp claws had crawled under his scalp and wanted to burrow into his brain. Grimacing again, he rammed his head against the mirror over the sink. The blood-soaked towel cushioned the blow, but the mirror was thoroughly fractured. His vision swam and he thought he might pass out. With his free hand, he clutched the edge of the sink while biting on his lower lip, hoping the sudden burst of fresh pain would help him focus and stay upright.
From outside the bathroom, he heard the plodding footfalls of his grandfather coming up the stairs. “Dalton!” he called.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. Then, louder, “What?”
“Where the hell are you?”
Dalton hurried to the bathroom door, opened it and leaned out. “Bathroom,” he said. “I’m cutting my hair.”
His grandfather squinted in his direction as if trying to make sense of the image of the teenager leaning through a doorway. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s just a nick.”
“What kind of dumbass nicks his scalp while cutting his own hair?”
Dalton shrugged. “I sneezed. Jabbed myself with the scissors.”
“You’re paying for that towel out of your allowance.”
“Sure,” Dalton said. What friggin’ allowance are we talking about, you senile tightwad?
Dalton tried his best not to mouth off to the old man. Between the thundering pain in his head, the blood running down his scalp, and the blood pooling in his mouth from where he’d bitten his lip, he just wanted the old bastard gone. Arguing would only prolong the encounter.
“Your grandmother and I will be attending a play tonight.”
“Fiddler,” Dalton said. “I heard.”
“So you’re eavesdropping now?”
“Whatever,” Dalton said. “Like I give a rat’s ass about your social calendar.”
Well, he’d tried to keep it civil. Screw them.
“That’s the type of disrespect that gets you in trouble,” his grandfather said, waggling a wrinkled finger at him. “We’re going out tonight. You are still grounded. You will remain in this house and stay out of trouble. No visitors. I better not find out you let that creepy Ferrato kid in this house. He’s a no-good thief.”
“Whatever,” Dalton said again. “That all?”
“If I find out you crossed any lines, I’m taking away all your privileges.”
Guy’s delusional, Dalton thought. What friggin’ privileges?
“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “I got a head wound to treat.”
“So it’s settled?”
“For the third time, old man.”
“I’d lose the attitude if I were you, boy,” his grandfather said, his face livid.
Now he had gone too far and provoked the old timer simply because he wanted to get rid of him.
“We let your mother run wild and see what happened to her. A no-good tramp who got herself knocked up and gave birth to a troublemaking bastard.”
Dalton flung the door aside and let the bloody towel fall to the floor.
“Shut the hell up about my mother!”
“What do you know about her, boy? She was a whore with no self-respect and she died giving birth to a worthless piece of—”
Dalton was on him in a second, wrapping his hands with their dark, sharp fingernails around his grandfather’s wattled throat, ready to squeeze the life out of the old bastard’s frail body. “I should rip your head off!”
Movement from the bottom of the stairs drew Dalton’s attention. His grandmother was staring up at him with a cold loathing that was almost palpable. “Put one mark on your grandfather and I swear to God I will have you charged with assault and battery and locked away.”
Not if I kill you both, Dalton thought. I could get away.
She raised the telephone clutched in her hand. “One call and your life is over.”
Dalton glared at her for a moment, looked at his grandfather who seemed much too calm for having two powerful hands wrapped around his scrawny throat, and back at his grandmother. Suddenly, he realized they wanted him to lash out. That was the only excuse they needed. Raising a delinquent, trying to set him on the straight and narrow, might look noble in the eyes of their neighbors and the members of their church. If he assaulted them, nobody would blame them for having him locked up. If he was dangerous to his own family, his grandparents got a free pass. They would be off the hook.
How long have they been waiting for me to hit one of them, to inflict a bruise or broken bone, something worthy of a long jail term?
He couldn’t give them the satisfaction.
With a muttered curse he dropped his hands and backed away. Blood flowed freely down his face, dripping on the front of his shirt.
Oh, if they want violence, I’ll give them violence, he thought. But I’ll dish it out on my terms, when I’m ready …
Twenty-Four
Dean took the wheel of the Monte Carlo, which allowed Sam to review information on the laptop. The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” crackled through the car’s crappy speakers. The enlarged map spread out on Roy’s breakfast nook table had, so far, proved to be a dead end. Once Sam had determined from witness statements that two weird fatal accidents occurred two minutes and five miles apart, they had to face the possibility that the oni’s malevolent effect no longer required his physical presence. Unless he had access to a vehicle traveling 150 miles per hour, the effective radius of his power had expanded to include both locations. Another disturbing possibility was that he may not have been local at either accident, which would make him that much harder to locate. Their new plan was tenuous at best. Sam and Dean would patrol the town, like a police cruiser but without supernatural blinders, while Bobby and McClary reviewed traffic and security cam footage on the chance they would spot something suspicious, then direct the Winchesters to the trouble zone.
“Needle in a haystack time, Sam,” Dean said.
“He’s building toward something,” Sam said. “He came here for a reason.”
“Maybe this is oni vacation time,” Dean suggested. “Show up in a medium-size town, create havoc for a week, kill a few dozen locals, go back into hibernation.”
“Hibernation?”
“Well, some kinda disappearing act,” Dean said. “We haven’t been able to find a trail of destruction leading here.”
After a few quiet moments, Sam said, “You really thought McClary might be one of them?”
“A Big Mouth?” Dean said. “Sure.”
“Why him?”
“Why not?” Dean shot back. “We don’t know their numbers or what they’re planning. They were us, Sam. They painted a friggin’ bull’s-eye on our backs in neon colors. So how do I trust a stranger without knowing?”
“Right,” Sam said.
He looked down at the laptop, frowning in thought. “Skip the residential neighborhoods,” he said. “Let’s assume small stuff doesn’t require his presence anymore. But maybe he still needs to be hands-on for the big stuff.”
Dean nodded. “Like pile-ups and overpass collapses.”
“If he’s planning something big,” Sam said, “he needs lots of bodies in one place.”
“Right.”
�
�I downloaded the community events calendar,” Sam said. “It might give us some possibilities.”
Bobby helped Sergeant McClary move three computer workstations to one desk in the open patrol area of the Laurel Hill Police Department. McClary logged into the security software to pull up a grid of traffic and security camera feeds on each monitor. As Bobby soon discovered, the feeds varied tremendously in quality. Most cameras had stationary views or limited tilt and zoom. Others produced blurry images or were mounted too high on traffic or utility poles to show any detail. But the oni was distinctive enough, assuming he retained his bowler and cane, that even a distant image would suffice.
McClary seemed nervous, his hands shaky as he juggled data and power cables around to set the monitors side by side. Back at the cabin, he had opted for the hard truth rather than the comfortable lie. The first thing he’d asked after Bobby told him that the weird accidents were the work of a supernatural being known as an oni was, “Does Roy know about this stuff?”
“Yes,” Bobby said, “but he’s retired.”
“Retired from what?”
“Hunting,” Bobby replied, explaining that Roy had lost his wife and his arm to another type of supernatural creature.
“What about Lucas? Did he know?”
“Not sure how much Roy told him,” Bobby said, figuring it was Roy’s prerogative to go into those details. “But I know he wanted to keep the boy out of this life.”
“So instead of becoming a… hunter,” McClary said, “Lucas goes into law enforcement.”
“Apples don’t fall far.”
McClary lowered himself onto a stool beside the kitchen counter. “The weird thing is, the roadside accident that killed Lucas fits the same profile as this… oni.”
“If the oni was around then,” Dean said. “Second car rams the first, gas tank explodes, both drivers and Lucas die.”
“How do you hunt something like this?” McClary asked. “How do you stop it?”
“We find its weakness,” Dean said, “and gank it.”
“‘Gank it’?” McClary asked. “You mean, kill it?”
“No due process for monsters,” Bobby said. “It’s them or us.”
Supernatural 10 - Rite of Passage Page 20
