She said nothing.
“Direct me to my Witness,” he demanded. “I won’t ask again.”
The sheriff didn’t move, allowing Castiel to hold onto her hand for another moment, the Santeria tattoo hovering between them like some small but vital lie that had been found out.
Then, unexpectedly, she smiled, and drew her hand back from him.
“Ask all you want, Castiel... or whatever your name is. Poke around my head. Make yourself comfortable. Stay all night.” The smile disappeared. “I don’t know anything.”
Castiel’s entire face tightened. Although he didn’t actually move forward, he seemed to get both larger and somehow more imposing until his presence filled her entire field of view. His voice trembled with barely suppressed rage.
“I am an Angel of the Lord,” he said. “Simply being here has cost me valuable time. Time that I will never get back. This is important.”
Daniels stepped back, her eyes widening, feeling her autonomic nervous system respond—sweat prickled under her arms and her pulse quickened in her throat, where she could feel it pumping in her neck. Then she forced herself to calm down again.
“If you really were an angel,” she said, like a stern mother facing an errant child, “you wouldn’t need me to point you in the right direction, would you?” She shook her head. “Sorry. This is my town. My people have been here since long before you arrived, and we’ll be here taking care of things long after you leave.” She blew back a wisp of hair that had fallen over her eyes. “Now if you’re done with the questions, I’m going home to take some aspirin. Some douche bag wrecked my car today, and I’ve got one hell of a headache.”
Castiel reached out, his fingers brushing her forehead, almost casually.
“It’s about to get much worse.”
Sheriff Daniels opened her mouth to answer, and then clapped it shut again. Her mind was flooded with images and sensations—blinding light and threatening darkness, righteous anger, walking the battlefields of history, and grace, divine grace.
“I won’t ask again,” Castiel said. “Where is the noose?”
This time Daniels didn’t hesitate. Although she didn’t realize it, she had fallen to her knees, and her voice—not ballsy, not anymore, not at all—was spewing out the words without so much as a qualm.
“The church. It’s in the basement of the church,” she said.
By the time the overwhelming sensations had finally faded, leaving behind the mother of all migraines, Castiel was gone.
Making her way slowly to her feet, Sheriff Jacqueline Daniels staggered the rest of the way to her desk chair and collapsed into it, cradling her face in her hands.
She could scarcely bear to think of what she’d done.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sam and Dean left the church the way they had come in. Father and son followed the Winchesters out of the door without comment. Tommy’s pickup was parked behind the rear entrance, Sam climbed into the front seat, sitting in the middle and still holding the noose.
A footstep scraped in the shadows behind them, and Dean turned to see Castiel stepping out of the alleyway.
“Whoa.” Tommy raised his flashlight. “Who the hell are you?”
“Easy,” Dean said. “He’s okay.”
“Where is he?” Castiel’s eyes were locked on the noose in Sam’s hand. His voice was tight with urgency. “Did you see him?”
“The Witness?” Dean shook his head. “Sorry, Cass—he sent his stunt-double. A Collector. Guy didn’t know squat.”
“We’ll see what he tells me,” Castiel said, brushing past them on his way down the stairs, toward the back entrance of the church.
“Ah, Cass...? I don’t think that’s gonna happen either.”
The angel stopped and looked back. “What?”
“Sam kind of... killed him.”
“What?” Castiel glared at him, appalled. “What were you thinking?”
“It was him or me,” Sam said from the cab of the truck.
“I don’t think you realize what this is going to cost us,” Castiel said. “Neither of you do. Your selfishness might have cost us our last chance.”
“His selfishness kept him alive,” Dean countered.
Castiel’s expression of thinly veiled outrage didn’t change. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something—perhaps a great many things. In the end he simply turned and descended the back steps.
Tommy exhaled.
“Should I ask?”
“No,” Dean said. With a shrug that was more tired than resigned, Tommy crossed the alley to where the pickup was parked and opened the passenger door for Dean.
“It’s okay,” Dean said, “let the kid ride up front. It’s the middle of the night.”
“You’re in worse shape than he is,” Tommy said. “Besides, he’s got something back there to keep him occupied.”
“You mean, like a game?”
Tommy gave a distracted nod.
“Something like that.”
They drove away from the church and down the empty, moonlit alleyway. Tommy steered easily through town, glancing at the noose that Sam still held on his lap, carefully protected by the swath of torn fabric. On the radio, the Marshall Tucker Band was playing ‘Can’t You See.’
“It’s funny,” he said thoughtfully, “you hear stories about something for your whole life and when you finally find it, it’s almost a let-down, you know?”
“We need to destroy it,” Sam said. “Sooner rather than later.”
“On the battleground,” Tommy said. “That’s where it’s got to happen.”
“Why there?”
“Because that’s where it was first tied. Aristede Percy put it together in a medical tent. Used the same knots that he used to stitch up the corpse of Jubal Beauchamp.”
Dean’s phone chimed. He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
“Huh, must have recovered from its dunking in the swamp,” he said, and hit TALK. “Hey, Bobby.”
Sam watched his brother peering at the blade in his hands while listening to what Bobby was saying.
“Bobby, what’s happening, man?” Bobby’s voice was a buzz, the words not clear enough to make out. “What? Yeah, we did.” He looked over at the noose on Sam’s lap, and then at the blade again. “We’re getting ready to do it now. Out on the battleground.” He raised an eyebrow at Tommy. “How much further is it?”
“We’re almost there,” Tommy replied. “See?”
Outside the window, the hillside loomed in the moonlight, though the first hints of pre-dawn light were appearing in the east. Sam could just make out the shapes of tents still spread out across it, between the craters. He remembered what Sarah had said about the re-enactors refusing to leave camp until somebody explained what had happened to their compatriots.
“So yeah, we’re...” Dean stopped. “What? Say that again?”
The pickup crunched across the parking lot and came to a halt. Before Sam could ask what was happening, he heard something thumping in the back of the truck. The tarp that had covered him and Dean on the way back from the swamp was shifting around. There was a clatter of commotion underneath it, like kicking feet or thudding fists. Sam peered over his shoulder, but it was too dark to see what was happening.
“Tommy? Is Nate okay back there?”
“Oh yeah,” Tommy said. “He can take care of himself.”
“Are you sure? He’s only what? Eleven? “
“Wait a second,” Dean cut in, his voice sharp with urgency, “Bobby says we’re not supposed to cut up the noose. He says if you do that—”
Something in the back of the truck screamed.
TWENTY-FIVE
Dean jumped out and ran around the back.
He grabbed the tarp and ripped it back. What he saw beneath it took several seconds to understand. There were two figures struggling in the shadows, one pinning the other down, smashing its victim with a series of fast, brutal punches. The screams grew louder, more intense.
&
nbsp; “Leave him alone!” Dean shouted and gripped the attacker around one arm, swinging him back. As the figure spun around, he realized that the arm he was holding onto belonged to Nate McClane.
“What...?”
The boy gave him a savage grin. Dean turned to stare at the half-conscious face of the victim looking back from the bottom of the truck. He realized that he was looking down at Sarah Rafferty.
“Sarah?”
She groaned, lips barely managing to shape the words.
“Help...”
“What did you do to her?” Dean asked, spinning back around to look at Nate.
The boy was still grinning, his lips peeled back to reveal every tooth in his mouth.
His eyes flicked black.
Up in front, both doors of the pickup flew open. Sam jumped down and a moment later Tommy McClane stepped out on his side, sidling unhurriedly toward the back of the truck.
McClane’s grin matched his son’s. The insides of his eyes seemed to have filled with thick black ink. A shroud of moonlight lay over him like an unearthly cowl.
“We took the girl to play with,” McClane said, “just for fun. Kind of a nice reward, don’t you think? Sure as hell beats an e-book.”
“You did all this just so you could get your hands on the noose?” Dean said.
“Let’s just say that Judas and his Collectors were a little too selfish when it came to letting everybody have a turn with it,” the McClane-demon sneered. “So me and my kin just started looking around for it ourselves.”
Dean thought of the demons they’d encountered on the hillside, and the ones out on the country highway.
“Your kin.”
“We’ve got plans,” McClane said. “Big plans.”
Dean shook his head.
“Dammit! I knew I had you pegged right the first time.”
“We could never have set foot inside that room.” McClane nodded. “But you did it for us.” He glanced at the Nate-demon. “Go ahead. Finish her off.”
Nate lunged toward Sarah Rafferty with a snarl. Sam grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed his face into the side of the truck. The demon’s head bounced off and slumped away.
He felt something ripped away from him and realized that the noose was gone—he’d lost it when he’d grabbed the demon.
McClane had it now. Almost faster than Sam’s eyes could process, the demon lashed out with it, looping the coil around Dean’s wrist and yanking the blade from his hand.
Sam started to charge toward McClane, and pain exploded through his head from behind, blasting his vision into a kaleidoscope of shattered rhinestone. When he staggered around, he saw Nate grinning at him again, rubbing his fist. And behind the demon, he glimpsed Sarah crawling away, inching slowly, painfully, away into the darkness.
Off to his left, McClane had Dean on his knees and was kicking him. Dean struggled to his feet and McClane kicked him again, harder. The cold clatter of his laugh was like someone spilling a bag of marbles across a museum floor. There was nothing human in it.
“You ready?” he asked, and Nate nodded. The look of unwholesome eagerness scrawled over the boy’s face was almost obscene.
Raising the knife, McClane stuck its tip into the first of the noose’s coils, shoving it upward. Sam heard a ripping noise as the blade tore through the weave of the hemp.
Black ooze spurted from the rope like drainage from an infected loop of bowel, trickling down McClane’s hands and up to his elbows.
Seeing it, Sam remembered how heavy the rope had felt, and realized that was because it was alive and pulsating, nearly sloshing in Tommy’s hands. He stared as the black substance rose up, shimmering in the night air, moving the way they’d seen it move in the back of the morgue van.
The Moa’ah.
It swirled over their heads and flung itself outward, across the battlefield and up the hill, a streak of greater blackness against the gloom that preceded sunrise.
A sudden eruption of thunder shook the world, lights flashing and shivering over the hillside, illuminating the full curvature of the landscape in a series of silent-movie flickers.
No, Sam realized, not thunder.
Guns.
Up on top of the hill, figures began to appear, manning the siege howitzers that the state police had not been able to bring down. More of them rose up every second.
They seemed to be rising up out of the ground itself.
But they weren’t—the meat-suits they wore were the bodies of the re-enactors who had refused to abandon the battlefield.
* * *
“Ah.” Reaching the final loop, McClane changed the angle of the blade, as if anticipating greater resistance. “The seventh coil. Now you’re going to see why Judas wants to keep the noose so closely protected.”
Dean swung at him.
It should have worked. McClane wasn’t even looking at him—he was still apparently absorbed by the task at hand. But when Dean’s fist came at him, McClane switched hands with the noose, then reached up almost casually and gripped Dean by the wrist, swinging him around sideways and applying pressure to his radial nerve.
A thin lancet of icy-hot pain sprang up Dean’s arm and his knees went out from under him, dropping him to the ground.
“Nate?” McClane called out. From inside the cab of the truck, Nate stepped out holding what Sam Winchester recognized as a Civil War musket from the gun rack. Wielding the gun with ease, the boy aimed and pulled the trigger. There was a flat, eardrum-rending report as the muzzle-flash ignited the air in front of him. Dean flailed backward, twisted and was landed face-first in the dirt.
“Dean!” Sam shouted.
McClane turned and eyed him speculatively.
“I hope you’re gonna be a little tougher to crack,” he said, drawing the demon-blade, tipping it back and throwing it at Sam at point-blank range.
TWENTY-SIX
Jacqueline Daniels’ head continued to throb mercilessly.
It was four in the morning and she was still in her office. She had called her deputy, Jerry, in from the stakeout at the Winchesters’ motel. He had arrived along with Sergeant Earl Ray Harris and a handful of State Troopers, plus an FBI agent.
She couldn’t tell them about the noose, or the thirty silver pieces that she’d removed from the battlefield, or her recent excavations in the basement of the First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge.
She definitely couldn’t reveal the recent visit from the self-proclaimed angel in a trench coat who had called himself Castiel. And besides, even if she told them the truth, none of them would believe her.
“Let’s go over what happened out on the highway again,” said the FBI officer, a slicked-back thirty-something careerist named Andrew Tremont. In the last hour or so, Sheriff Daniels had silently upgraded Agent Tremont’s status from localized pain-in-the-ass to world-class hemorrhoid as his questions had become less random and more focused on how and when her particular investigation had fallen apart.
Also, he was drinking her coffee—the good stuff, the French Roast that she normally kept hidden under the microwave.
“You said someone stepped out in the middle of the road, in front of your cruiser, and forced you to stop. You have reason to believe this person was working with the two men?”
“I already told you that—we’re just wasting time,” Daniels said. “Besides, I’m not the one under investigation here.”
Tremont lifted his mug to his lips and sipped noisily.
“May I remind you, Sheriff, that you called us.”
“To help me catch a couple of men who were impersonating Federal Agents, not to pick my investigation to pieces.”
“I submit that our goals might not be mutually exclusive.” Another two ounces of premium coffee disappeared into Tremont’s mouth. “Now, two of our DMORT workers claim they saw you taking something from the corpse of Phil Oiler and placing it in a bag,” Tremont said. “One of them said that it jingled.”
“Jingled?”
/> “Like coins. Can you tell me anything about that?”
“That’s right. I stole a bag of quarters from a corpse.” Daniels knuckled her eyes and waited for one of the State Troopers—or even her own deputy, for that matter—to stick up for her. Jerry hadn’t even had the consideration to stay awake.
When none of them spoke, she glared back up at the Fed.
“Look, Agent Tremont...”
“That’s a very interesting tattoo on your wrist, Sheriff. Might I ask after its provenance?”
“Its what—?”
BOOM!
Everybody jumped up and scraped back their chairs.
“Not again,” Jerry moaned, sitting up in the seat where he’d been drowsing.
Tremont stiffened, then stood, wiped the spilled coffee from his shirt cuff and put the cup aside, heading toward the front window to look out onto the street.
“Who do you have stationed out at the battlefield?” Daniels asked Sergeant Harris.
“Two details,” Harris said. “At midnight they were still trying to get those re-enactors to leave.”
Nobody else spoke.
They headed out.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sam ducked the blade.
It hissed past his head like a low-flying comet, and when he came up again, both Tommy and Nate McClane were barreling toward him. Nate had discarded the gun and was circling about looking for the demon-killing knife.
BOOM!
The skyline erupted with the biggest explosion yet, heaving up vast ripples of convulsed air that blew back Sam’s hair and made the pickup jounce sideways on its shocks. He sprang up into the back of the truck, kicked out the window above the gun rack, and yanked down the shotgun and the canister of salt.
He broke the weapon open, dumped in salt and worked the action.
He pointed it down at Nate.
The boy froze.
“Please, mister.” All at once the young face went smooth and innocent, becoming that of an average kid—one who’d stumbled in far over his head. His eyes had changed from black to a pale blue, and they were filling with frightened tears. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
Supernatural The Unholy Cause Page 15
