“It looks like an old operating room.” Sam’s flashlight found a table with leather restraints and metal buckles. “Aristede Percy’s old office, I’m guessing.”
“In the sub-cellar of a church?”
“Nobody’d think to look down here, would they? And Doc Percy must have figured that even the Union army would leave it be.” His flashlight played along the walls, and he realized that what he’d first thought were cobwebs were actually lines etched into the surface. “Dean, check this out.”
“Diagrams.” Dean glanced back at Sam. “Doc Percy’s amazing rope tricks.”
And they were—hundreds of technical drawings, painstakingly detailed, depicting every imaginable type of knot. It was as if Dr. Percy had run through his entire vocabulary of bends, twines, loops and hitches in pursuit of the one true Judas noose.
“I think we’re close, Dean,” Sam said.
“I think we’re more than close.”
Dean pointed his light forward, the beam settling in the middle of the room. At the dead center Sam saw a hole in the lead plates where the otherwise seamless surface had been left open to reveal a square of raw black earth, three feet wide and three feet long. The metallic edges of something heavy and square gleamed inside the dirt, a box the size of a tombstone, its exterior illuminated in the same way Beauchamp’s coffin had shone—with its own unearthly radiance.
“That’s a reliquary,” Sam said. “I’ll bet that’s what the demons were looking for out on the battlefield.”
Dean walked over and hunkered down next to it, wiping the dirt away.
“Someone’s been down here recently. It’s already been dug up, removed, and put back in.”
Sam bent down beside Dean, found a long metal handle on his end of the box, and they both pulled. The reliquary came out of the dirt without much resistance, and they set it on the lead floor.
“Be careful,” Sam said.
“If this is just full of more bones, I’m gonna be so pissed,” Dean said.
Together, they lifted the lid.
It wasn’t full of bones.
The brass interior of the box was so intricately engraved with tiny lines of text and symbols that it reminded Dean of circuitry, the prehistoric ancestor of the modern microchip. Looking at the lid made his head throb. It was as if his mind was trying to take in all the thousands of lines of tiny words without his eyes realizing it—as if the codes and charms of the reliquary were actually leaping fully formed into his consciousness.
He shut his eyes and turned away.
Get out, he thought, shaking his head hard. Get the hell out of my head, box.
“Dean,” Sam’s voice was saying. He sounded shaken as well. “Look.”
With a grunt, Dean opened his eyes again and looked down, careful to avoid the reliquary’s inner lid. In the middle of the box, curled like a snake on red velvet, he saw the noose itself. Thick, rough rope, stiff with age, its knots dark with a century and a half of spilled blood.
“So that’s it,” he said. “That’s the noose that Aristede Percy tied.”
“It really does have seven coils,” Sam said, lifting the noose up and holding it. “Except the seventh one’s hidden, see? It—”
He froze, the flashlight slipping from his hand, striking the lead-lined floor and rolling in a lazy half-circle to the wall.
Dean aimed his own flashlight at his brother. Sam was staring at him wide-eyed, the noose still held loosely in his fingers, his expression a portrait of sheer, unvarnished panic, its message horribly clear: I can’t breathe.
Under his chin, a ring of shadowy indentation rippled against his throat, squeezing off his windpipe, as if invisible tension wires were cranking tighter into his skin. Sam’s eyes bulged, mouth opening and closing, unable to produce more than muted glottal clicks.
He fell to his knees.
“Hang on, Sam. Hang on, bro. I’m gonna cut you out of this thing, once and for all.”
Being careful not to touch the noose, Dean used his flashlight to knock it from his brother’s hand. It hit the floor with a heavy thwop, as if it was sopping wet.
Wedging his flashlight under his arm, Dean reached back to the sheath on his belt, groping for the demon-killing knife.
But the sheath was empty.
The knife was gone.
TWENTY-ONE
On the floor of the room, Sam was helplessly staring up at Dean. His face, formerly white, had begun tingeing a cyanic shade of blue as the first signs of irreversible oxygen deprivation sank deeper into his features.
Finding a loose handle, he picked the noose up and dropped it back into the box. Then Dean whirled around and splashed the white beam of his flashlight around the room.
When did I lose the knife?
Wouldn’t he have heard it, if it had fallen out of his pocket onto the metal floor?
What if I lost it earlier? Outside, or up in one of the other rooms?
He looked back at the floor. Sam was tilting slightly to one side now, unable even to sit upright. The look of panic had started sliding away, along with his sense of awareness.
Dean hunched down and lifted his brother back up, searching for a spark of life in his eyes.
He’s going to pass out, a mental voice yammered. He’s not getting any air. I have to do something.
He flashed hard to something an ambulance driver had told him once.
When you’re dealing with a choking victim, you don’t have time to mess around. Time is brain.
There was no time to go looking for the knife.
Desperate, out of options, Dean swung his brother in front of him, wrapping his arms around him from behind. He made a fist with one hand and locked his other hand around it, thrusting up and into Sam’s diaphragm.
At first nothing happened.
Dean did it again, harder.
Sam made an abrupt hiccuping croak and something flew up and out of his mouth, landing on the floor with a clank.
Sam whooped in a deep, rattling breath.
“You all right?” Dean asked tautly.
Sam managed a weak nod. His eyes and nose were streaming with tears, and dirt streaked his face like warpaint. For a moment he looked about six years old, freshly fallen off his bike with a skinned knee.
“What...” he rasped. “What came out of me?”
Dean aimed his flashlight over the lead-lined floor, training it on the small, wet leather pouch that lay five feet away from them. Its drawstring had come open. A few tarnished silver pieces lay scattered around it, gleaming there like flat, incurious eyes.
“Thirty pieces of silver—shekels of Tyre,” Dean whispered, turning his attention back to the reliquary. “The noose...”
There was a faint clinking noise. He twitched the flashlight back at the bag of silver pieces again.
“Dean?” Sam’s voice came hoarsely. “What...?”
From the far corner came a shuffling noise.
“We’re not alone down here,” Dean said.
He looked at the spilled coins.
A long, slender hand dipped out of the darkness and plucked one of them up.
Dean jerked the flashlight upward to reveal a bearded face, grinning wildly at them.
The figure stepped forward. He was tall and skeletal, and except for his thick black facial hair, his skin appeared almost unnaturally white and smooth. But moist as well—less like porcelain and more like the flesh of a mushroom. From the emaciated hunch of his shoulders, a colorless, shabby-looking cloak hung down to the floor, its hood thrown back. The hem of the figure’s robe dragged on the floor.
“I believe this belongs to me.” Kneeling, the figure began to scrape the silver coins up, depositing them carefully back into the satchel from which they’d spilled. The satchel then disappeared under the cloak.
“Judas?” Dean whispered in disbelief.
“No. I’m more of an aide-de-camp.” The man looked up again, and this time Dean saw his eyes, their orbits stained an absolute, soull
ess black.
“Great,” Dean said. “Another scum-sucking demon. Just what we—”
“I am not a demon.” The figure’s arms shot forward, taking hold of Dean’s throat and jerking him off his feet and straight up into the air. His flashlight slipped from his fingers and went out. There was a weightless, spinning moment in the dark when Dean had time to think, This is gonna hurt, and then something flat and hard—the floor, the wall—collided with his skull, ringing it like a bell.
His vision doubled, then tripled. Constellations—whole galaxies of stars—rattled through his head, and when he tried to sit up, all he could taste was the coppery trickle of his own blood.
“You sure... you’re not a demon?” he croacked.
“I’m a Collector,” the figure said. “Probably the closest term you have for me is spirit. Except that I inhabit a solid form. Case in point...” He drew back one foot with crazy, stuttering speed and swung it forward, smashing Dean hard in the head.
It was a perfectly placed kick, connecting just above the ear, and Dean felt the world closing down around him fast, like a tent whose poles had been yanked away.
Sam grabbed his flashlight and swept it up until he saw the Collector coming toward him. Its robe swung heavily back and forth, jingling as it walked. As it got closer Sam realized that the garment was loaded with pockets, perhaps hundreds of them, each containing leather pouches and satchels of silver pieces. It had to weigh half a ton.
“Where’s Judas?”
“He couldn’t make it,” the figure responded. “Sends his regards.”
“Is this what you do?” Sam asked. “Go around for all eternity, picking up blood money?”
“At least I didn’t trigger the Apocalypse,” the Collector replied. It smiled. “Not that I’m complaining. My employer is back on the A-list again. Suddenly everybody wants the noose—humanity, lesser demons, witches.” He shrugged, clinking. “It’s a bull market on betrayal.”
Sam looked around. There was only one weapon he could see in the room. He picked up the reliquary and threw it as hard as he could at the creature.
Laughing, the Collector ducked.
The box slammed off the wall and landed between them. The Collector stepped over it and blurred toward him, one arm pinioning forward. When the punch connected, it was with the full weight of all the metal loaded in the sleeves, as if the thing’s entire body was packed with the silver it had been gathering.
Sam’s head jolted backward and bounced off the wall. He dropped the flashlight. Every ounce of light in the room was now gone.
But he could hear something, a sound he recognized.
The scrape of metal against metal. It was a thin, hard sound, and when Sam looked up, he actually saw a few sparks flying along the floor. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for him to glimpse, however briefly, the tip of a gleaming steel blade in the Collector’s pale hand.
“Did you really think that I would just let you traipse into my house,” the voice in the darkness murmured, “with your filthy little weapon?”
A sharp beam of light burst out from the doorway, illuminating the room around them.
“What makes you think it’s your house, you son of a bitch?” Tommy McClane’s voice asked.
TWENTY-TWO
Through concussion-glazed eyes, Sam gazed back at the steep stairs leading up and out.
Tommy was standing in the doorway with his flashlight pointed at the Collector, while Nate flanked him, his own flashlight steady in his small hand. Neither of them made a move to come any closer.
Smart guys, Sam thought foggily. You don’t want any part of this.
“Sam?” Tommy said. “Dean? You two okay?”
Dean didn’t answer, but Sam sat up and looked at him.
“Okay’s not exactly the word I’d use,” he said. “You were supposed to go home after you dropped us off.”
“It’s ‘Bring a Friend to Church Day,’” Tommy said, but he didn’t take his eyes off the figure standing in front of him. Sam saw the demon-knife clearly now, still shining in the Collector’s hand. “Give me the blade,” Tommy said, “and the noose.”
The Collector made a brief clucking sound that might have been a laugh.
“If you want it so much, come in and get it yourself.”
“We don’t have to.”
“That’s what I thought.” The Collector shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
“I guess we’ll see about that,” Tommy shrugged. “Go ahead, son.”
Still standing in the doorway, Nate reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of yellow parchment, unfolding it nimbly and pointing the flashlight at it. It looked very big in his hand.
He began to read.
The incantation was a mix of French and Latin and some other lyrical language Sam didn’t recognize. Nate’s high, sweet voice make the words sound almost like a song.
“What’s this?” the Collector asked.
“Hoodoo binding charm.”
“I’m honored,” he said. “Unfortunately, as long as I’m able to block it out with the sound of my own voice—”
Sam saw Dean rise up behind the cloaked figure. Dean was holding the noose’s reliquary over his head, and he swung it down with a sharp, hard bang. The Collector tumbled forward, the blade flying from his hand, his pockets spilling open, his robe ringing out with loads of spilled silver coins.
“Block that, you son of a bitch,” Dean grunted as Sam grabbed the demon-knife. “Do it, Sam.”
Sam didn’t need to be prompted. He raised the knife and shoved it down into the Collector’s chest.
The Collector screamed, thrashing, but didn’t flash out.
“Moneybags was telling the truth,” Dean said. “Not a demon. Oh well. I guess that’s—”
The Collector jerked upright again, his face a howling tunnel of rage and violence, and lunged at Sam with both hands.
His fingers locked around Sam’s throat, holding him at arms’ length as he had with Dean when he’d endeavored to crush Dean’s windpipe.
Sam’s reaction was pure instinct. His right hand came straight up, driving the demon-knife hard and fast. The thrust planted the blade back in the Collector’s chest, in the area where Sam presumed the heart would be, if the Collector had one. The figure shrieked, a strangled, failing cry, and Sam stabbed him again, twice more, until the Collector fell.
Hitting the floor, he lay totally still.
Panting, catching his breath, Sam stepped back, watching for any further sign of life. But there was none forthcoming.
“What about the noose?” Tommy asked from the doorway. “Just don’t touch it with your bare hands.”
“Yeah, we figured that out.” Sam handed the knife to Dean, then bent down, hands still trembling a little, and cut a strip of fabric from the Collector’s cloak, wrapping it around his palm like a glove. Duly protected, he lifted the noose from the floor—it seemed somehow heavier than it should have—then fired a glance at Tommy.
“I hope you’ve got transportation out of here. I don’t want to hold onto this thing any longer than I have to.”
TWENTY-THREE
It was 3:05 a.m. when Jacqueline Daniels walked into her office, switched on the light, and saw the man standing next to her desk. He had been waiting there in the dark for her, and for a moment she was so surprised that she couldn’t speak.
“You,” she managed.
The man stood perfectly still, looking back at her with dark-eyed intensity. The trench coat he’d been wearing earlier hung open, and she couldn’t see any kind of weapon in his hands or on his person.
Somehow that made him seem even more dangerous.
“How did you get in here?”
“Please sit down.”
“Who are you?”
“We need to talk.”
Daniels felt a surge of adrenaline in her temples, a sensation like hot coins being pressed on either side of her head. After the collision
out on the road, she had spent the rest of the day out looking for the Winchesters. The FBI had joined in the manhunt, and their involvement had only made her job more complicated.
“We need to talk,” he repeated.
“You’re under arrest,” she told him. “That stunt out on the highway today is more than enough reason to lock you up.”
Turning, she started away from him, but the man raised one hand and the door slammed shut in front of her face.
“Now please sit down,” he instructed.
Daniels turned back to face him. She dropped the pretense of ballsy, hard-case female law enforcement. It was replaced by something somehow harder—an air of cold, almost clinical detachment.
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” she said flatly.
“My name is Castiel.”
“I don’t care what you call yourself.” Walking back to the desk, she reached around for her handcuffs and felt a sharp sting of pain fork up the back of her neck, the result of the car accident earlier. “You think you can just waltz in here, into my office, and start ordering me around?”
“This is bigger than you.”
“Nothing in this town is bigger than me.” She brought the cuffs forward, but Castiel caught her wrist and held it tightly. With a quick, effortless flick, he turned it over to reveal the tattoo imprinted on her skin. He touched it lightly.
“This sigil won’t protect you.”
A flicker of doubt wavered over Daniels’ face, and then was gone.
“You like that?” she said. “I got it at Mardi Gras, spring break twelve years ago. Dumb kid stuff, I know, but...”
“You’re lying to me.”
“What if I am? Why should I care what you think?”
“Time is short,” Castiel said. “I need the Witness. Judas. Where is he?”
Daniels shook her head.
“I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know about the noose. It disappeared twice while it was under your care.” His eyes flicked down at the sigil again. “I know that mark.”
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 14
