Archive of Our Own

Prologue: Angus Crowley (North Berwick, present day)
Angus Crowley ran an arm over his forehead to brush the damp out of his eyes and peered down at the screen his architect was holding.

“What am I looking at, again?” he asked, and the architect, Tomas Kircaldy, coughed politely.

“Look,” he said, tapping the screen and then pointing toward a gorse-covered bluff. “That bit, there, is where Campbell Associates is planning to run their eighteenth hole.”

“There?” Angus straightened up and gazed out toward the bluff. It looked damp and miserable, as if it knew the steel gray, whitecap-flecked waters of the North Sea had plans for its treacherous cliffs. “They can’t put a golf course there, the whole area’s a bird sanctuary or something.”

“Nonetheless, the plans have been signed off by the council and they break ground early next spring.”

“Fabulous.” Angus mopped his forehead again. Fucking Scottish weather – even when the sun was visible, the rain never seemed to stop. The architect, seemingly oblivious to the fine stinging spray, tapped on his tablet. Angus cleared his throat. “Do you have anything else to show me out here, or can this meeting be continued in the pub?”

Kircaldy brightened. “One more thing, Mr. Crowley, and then I’m thinking we’ll be needing a wee drop, aye.” He jerked his head toward the battered Land Rover and, stowing his tablet, climbed up into the driver’s seat.

Angus, pleased at the thought of getting out of the rain, followed suit, and then found himself grabbing for the stabilizer bar as the Land Rover lurched over a narrow track in the gorse. Kircaldy shot him a quick glance but didn’t say anything, hunching himself over the wheel and, Angus hoped, concentrating on not steering them into the North Sea. Finally the road pulled away from the cliff and headed inland, and Kircaldy pulled them to a stop in front of a battered iron gate. He switched off the ignition and gave Angus an expectant look.

Angus, baffled, leaned forward. A tangle of overgrown trees, looking bare and miserable in the dregs of their foliage, lined what appeared to be yet another meandering track. At its end, though, was an expanse of gray that didn’t appear to resemble the sea they’d been driving past.

“Is that--?” Angus asked, and rolled the window down to stick his head out, hoping to get a clearer look.

Outside, the only sounds he could hear were the ticking of the Rover’s engine as it cooled down and a faint drip-drip-drip as the last of the rain filtered through the branches onto the sodden ground. The crash of the sea was gone, as were any vestiges of traffic noises or even the sounds Angus associated with the countryside: cows, goats, trees being chopped down - Christ, why anyone would build a house out here he couldn’t imagine.

But Tomas Kircaldy had climbed out of the Rover and was standing next to Angus’s door, waving his tablet in the direction of the stone pile. “Aye,” he said. “It’s a house. It’s your house, Mr. Crowley, and I’ve got an idea for it.”

“Imagine it,” he said, shoving the tablet in Angus’s direction.

Angus dutifully grasped the thing and stared at it as Kircaldy fished a tool out from under the Rover’s back seat. The tool was a bolt-cutter of impressive size, and as Angus paged through the drawing Kircaldy had prepared, the architect broke the lock and pushed the gates back into the brush that flanked them. He climbed back into the car and drove them up the track toward the structure Angus had seen, which revealed itself to be a Grade II listed building of great antiquity - and even greater decrepitude.

“You want to turn this into a conference center?” Angus asked, peering doubtfully at its empty window embrasures and the slate tiles littering the ruined drive. He climbed out of the car to pick his way around to the side of the building. The lines were glorious: a central tower flanked by massive stone wings bristling with chimneys, the whole thing set into lawns that had, at some point in the misty past, rolled down toward a Guinness-brown stream. Woods bordered the stream on its far bank, and Angus began imagine successive waves of well-heeled Americans turning over cash in large quantities for the dubious joy of tramping through the woods in pursuit of deer.

He swung the door open and stepped out of the car, leaning back to take in the enormity of the place. Lord Angus Crowley had a nice ring to it, and wouldn’t that bring in the punters in Vegas?

“I like it!” he said, nodding happily.

Kircaldy just tightened his lips. “Aye, well. Best check out the view afore making any decisions,” he said, and pocketing his keys, led Angus around to the back of the house.

There, the house looked a bit like pictures Angus had seen of Detroit. All that was missing was graffiti: the stone of the terrace was gouged and scored, the window openings blank and dark-shadowed. The roof, to judge by the gaping hole in one of the towers, had spilled its load of slate somewhere into the house’s interior. As far as Angus could tell, the walls were intact, mostly, but while the soot had long since washed away, the house had all the other hallmarks of a stone building that had suffered a catastrophic blaze.

 

*

One month later, on a late October day that was, in Angus Crowley’s considered opinion, no more miserable than any other day in North Berwick, Tomas Kircaldy’s bulldozers moved into position and started on the first phase of the work he’d outlined that afternoon. The house, sadly, needed to come down, although Angus, mindful of the Americans, had put up a token bid for preserving the façade. Which Kircaldy had immediately quashed. The house, its stables its garden – even the fucking topiary, which could have stayed, in Angus’s opinion – had to go.

And so it went. And went, and went, and went. Until the afternoon of November 3rd, when the bulldozer chewing through the last of the ancient boxwood topiary lifted up a full load of soil and came to an abrupt stop. From the sudden shattering silence of the dozer came a thin scream, which caused a half dozen heads to swivel toward the machine’s cab, and from there, quickly, to its bucket, from which protruded a series of white sticks. Angus blinked hard and shook his head, but when he focused back on the pile of dirt in the bucket, the sticks were still there.

The screaming, though, had gotten louder, and as the rest of the crew abandoned their dozers and began to run toward the excavator, Angus could see the operator hammering on the glass of the cab with increasingly desperate movements as a dark cloud filled the small enclosed space.

Angus began to run just as the first workman reached his mate and leaped for the door handle, only to fall back onto the ground with a scream of his own. “Fall back! Fall back!” he yelled and the rest of the crew stopped in confusion as the source of the dark cloud revealed itself, and the man in the cab began to burn.

 

Chapter 1: Mary Winchester (Dalkeith, Scotland, 1595)

Late October and the morning air was as crisp as apples, bright with sunshine and a freshening wind. A perfect day for the market, and unusually for market day so late in the year, a grand day for the walk into Dalkeith as well. Mary Winchester hummed a tuneless bit of song to herself as she poured warm sweet milk into two bowls and fed her sons their gruel. Mistress Mosely would surely be happy to watch them for a few hours while Mary got her shopping done; Sam, at six months, loved the market, but carrying him both ways made shopping for anything more than sweets for them and a bit of cheese for her John a wearisome task, and Mary had it in mind to stock up on a few necessities.

So she wiped off four year old Dean’s mouth and held him up to the sink to dip his hands in the bucket and then, propping baby Sam on her hip, whisked them all into the nursery to get ready for Mistress Mosely’s. Still humming, she ticked through her list – cloth for a warm jerkin for Dean and wool for a knitted cap for Sam, a bit of leather to patch their dollies (Dean’s a soldier with prominent bite marks on its leg; Sam’s a faceless corsair whose feathered cap, she noted, needed refurbishing) - and threw several changes of nappies into a satchel. Mistress Mosely, she knew, would have whatever else the boys needed. And Mary would only be gone for a few hours, three at the most, and that only if she had to chase down the herbs she needed to replenish the tincture that soothed the ache in Sam’s teething gums.

Her last task was to slip her locket off her neck and slide it into the wooden casket John had made for it. Then she penned a quick note for John and gathered up the boys, slung the satchel over her shoulder and, pulling the scullery door closed behind her, headed for the Dalkeith road.

 

As fine as the day was, Mary was more than pleased when the road brought them within sight of Mistress Mosely’s cottage. Dean had, as she’d predicted, run nearly all the way there; in the way of most four-year old boys, he’d probably covered twice the distance she and Sam had, darting back and forth across the road to point out horses, sheep and the occasional shaggy cow in a close-cropped pasture. Sam’s wide hazel eyes had tracked his brother’s movements greedily for the first ten minutes, then the combination of the sun and his mother’s firm stride had lulled him into a sound sleep.

He woke up with a start when she snapped her fingers at Dean and pushed open the low gate that separated Mistress Mosely’s front garden from the road. “It’s alright, little one,” she murmured absently, holding the gate for Dean with one foot as she put a hand out to keep him from running headlong into a tall stand of something with hanging purple flowers. “Don’t touch anything –“ she was starting to tell him when the front door opened.

“Mary! Come in, child – is this Samuel, grown so big already?” Mistress Mosely was an imposing figure, her apron nearly as wide as the doorway in which she stood and her smile kind.

Mary grinned back and unfastened Sam’s sling, handing his solid little form over to her with a small sigh of relief.

“I saw that,” the other woman murmured. “Will ye come in and sit for a bit?”

At that moment, Dean pushed his way between them, heading straight for the hearth. “You’ve no fire!” he complained, and Mary laughed ruefully.

“He’s got a thing for watching John’s forge,” she explained, keeping her voice low. “We’re hoping it passes, but if not, there’s worse plans we could make for him than to follow in his da’s footsteps.”

Mary peered past her hostess, trying to get a glimpse of her son through the thicket of shadows cast by the ropes of onions and fragrant bunches of herbs hanging down from the rafters, but even with the bright clear day at her back, the small room was dimmer than it should have been. She rubbed the back of her wrist over her eyes and tucked a stray lock of hair under her kerchief. The last thing she needed was to upset Dean – or Mistress Mosely, who had a reputation for brewing restorative teas much feared by the local children. She was fine, just tired, she told herself firmly, and when her hostess glanced sharply at her, she shrugged the satchel off her shoulder and dropped it onto a stool.

“Sam’s got a couple of changes of nappies in there.” She leaned down to unbuckle the flap and waved a hand toward the neat pile of cloths in the bag. Straightening up, she glanced back into the kitchen.

This time, the room made her feel as if she’d ducked her head below the surface of the millpond, the light spilling onto the walls through the ivy half-covering the window like sunlight through waterweeds. Dean, having abandoned the cold hearth, was sitting under a rough-hewn table playing with a pile of sticks. Mary shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, fighting down the nearly-overwhelming desire to snatch her baby back from Mistress Mosely, haul Dean out from his hidey-hole and flee back toward her own house.

“Mary? Are you sure you won’t sit for a moment, let me pour you a drop of –“

Oh, dear Lord, the tea, Mary thought, and bit back a laugh. “No, Mistress, I’m fine, thank you for seeing to the boys, and I’m sure I’ll be back in two shakes.” She patted her pockets to make sure the purse John had given her was still there. “Sam’ll sleep, I’m sure, and don’t let Dean devil you overmuch.”

Hearing his name, Dean looked up and gave her a solemn wave, then dropped his gaze back to the pile of sticks he was laying out in some complicated pattern. Be good she thought instead of saying, and stepped back out into Mistress Mosely’s sharp-scented and overgrown garden.

The sun on the back of her neck reminded her that the day was sliding past. She set her feet toward road once again. ‘Twas too fair a day for such dark thoughts, she told herself sternly, and didn’t cast her gaze behind her until the road looped around and crossed back over the river, and Mistress Mosely’s cottage was gone from view.

 

Dalkeith’s high street ran wide and straight, a well- cobbled thoroughfare that led Mary past shop windows and the open doors of public houses loud with custom, past an alley that stank of its leatherworkers’ sheds and then another, ripe enough from the fishmongers it housed that Mary winced and held the end of her shawl to her nose, before dropping her at her destination, the broad market square that fronted the old parish church. During the summer the square had been filled to bursting with eggsellers, costermongers, pretty young things hawking flowers and peddlers from far and away displaying wares from distant lands. Now, on the cusp of winter, the stalls were fewer, the flower-sellers and travelers gone south for the season.

Or so Mary presumed, eyeing piles of onions with some dismay. As she got neared the center of the square, calculating how many apples she could buy and still make it home with Sam on her hip, she could see that the decision might have been made for her. Many of the shopkeepers’ stalls were thin of produce: where she had expected to see barrels filled with apples and fat turnips were only baskets and trays, their offerings mean-looking and hard to the touch.

“Have ye no sweeter fruit?” she asked, placing the apple she’d picked up back into the straw with its fellows. “I’d hoped to cook up a posset for my little one.”

She put an extra bit of warmth into her voice, hoping mention of Sam could produce what she wanted, but the shopkeeper scowled at her. “Buy them or don’t, mistress, but you’ll not find better apples much before York.” She turned her head and spat into the dust, then fixed Mary with a hard look. “You’re not local then? Have ye no seen the plants dying in the fields, and no explanation but the will o’ God for a winter that carried on into June?”

Mary glanced up at the clear blue sky. “I’ve been so busy with the babe I’ve scarce left my own kitchen,” she admitted. “But my husband said –“ she started, and let her voice trail off. John’s tales of farmers unable to pay the bills for shoeing their draft horses and cart horses, or even feed the mules that pulled their plows, were hardly likely to win her the apples she sought.

The shopkeeper bent a careful eye on her. “Said what, mistress?”

Mary shook her head, and took refuge in a light smile. “Little enough of importance, I am sure! Isn’t that the way of men, to complain that their belly needs filling just as the baby starts to cry?” She picked up two apples and handed over a halfpenny, and the shopkeeper gave her a grudging smile.

“Too true.” The penny disappeared into her kirtle, and she turned her attention back to her apples, rearranging the meager display before glancing back up at Mary. “Plenty of sugar for the posset, mistress, and your boy willna know the difference…”

Mary smiled assent and turned toward the rest of the market. Surely someone else would have the sweet plump apples she sought, and come next spring, she’d talk to John about planting a tree of their own. Perhaps if she put it at the side of the house, where the rising sun warmed the stones, and where the window in the boys’ bedchamber would look out on its branches as they grew. Aye, that would solve the problem of the fruit, and give them something to dream on as well.

Mary nodded, well satisfied with her plan, and barely noticed as a man with black hair and a black plaid about him brushed past her.

 

Chapter 2: Dean Winchester (Kansas, present day)

Smiling around the flashlight gripped in his teeth, Dean Winchester turned up the music on his elderly tape deck, balanced it carefully on his belly next to the wrench he figured he’d need and slid himself under the car. He’d changed her oil earlier that day and, noticing something that smelled suspiciously like antifreeze on his ass when he was done, bullied Sam into taking him into town; radiator juice and a pair of extra-large pizzas procured, they’d spent a couple hours chewing on pepperoni and combing half-heartedly through Sam’s Google alerts before Dean pushed his chair back and announced that he was heading back down to the garage.

“It’s nearly midnight, Dean,” Sam had protested, but pushed his own chair back and started gathering up the remains of the pizza fest.

Dean frowned at him. “I think I can handle this myself, dude. Go to bed, if you’re tired.” He wadded up a napkin and pitched it toward the box in Sam’s hands, grinning apologetically as it bounced off onto the floor.

Sam bent down to snag the napkin and tucked it carefully into the box. “Yeah,” he said, almost to himself, and then threw Dean a half-hearted smile. “Thought I’d do a little more research, actually.”

“You’re not going down into the basement again?” Sam fixed him with a flat look, and Dean regretted the words almost as soon as they’d left his lips. Whatever it was Sam thought he’d find in the basement storeroom that they’d only just broken the seals on the week before, Dean had no idea. Except he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know. The whole thing, from the way the door had just appeared at the end of a blind hallway to the dusty flaking sigils that held it closed, to the smell of copper and ash that still lingered in the little room behind the door– well, it just gave Dean the creeps. The fact that the sigils came off with sulfuric acid was just the capper, far as he was concerned. But Sam had been fascinated, in a way that really shouldn’t have surprised Dean but still did, even after all these years. “Okay then. But don’t forget we gotta call Garth in the morning.”

Sam had rolled his eyes and disappeared into the kitchen with a single-fingered wave, and Dean had headed happily for the garage, promptly forgetting about the whole exchange in favor of wondering whether he could still get parts for the Vincent Black Shadow in the corner. Ebay, maybe. Once there, surrounded by candy-colored convertibles, he’d laid out the tools he thought he’d need, cranked up the tunes and turned his mind to problems he could actually solve.

 

Two hours later, he slid himself back underneath the car to check his work, and that’s when the door crashed open, hitting the wall with enough force to break through Duane Allman’s guitar. Before he could push back out from under the Impala he found himself being dragged out by one leg, and he paused long enough to rip the headphones off his ears before wrapping the hand not holding the wrench in Sam’s shirt and hauling himself up to a sitting position.

“The fuck, dude?”

“Dean! The storeroom – it’s on fire!” He grabbed Dean’s hand and pulled him the rest of the way to his feet, and yeah, Sammy smelled faintly charred, as if he’d been barbecuing the books instead of reading them. Once Dean was standing, Sam took off running, down the gray-tiled corridor that led toward the mystery storeroom, and Dean swore softly and hauled ass after him. As the smell of smoke got stronger, Dean fell back, looking around in the vain hope of finding a fire extinguisher or an axe, something they could use to put out the flames before they threatened the rest of the structure. The tile wouldn’t burn, true, but an axe might also solve more than the one problem.

With a muffled curse, he skidded to a stop a bare six inches behind his brother. Sam had come to a stop and kicked open the door, and even in the dim light, Dean could see that his eyebrows were drawn together in puzzlement.

Not hearing any flames, Dean shouldered Sam aside and stepped into the doorway. In one of the room’s far corners was the charred and still-smoking remains of a probably hundred year old cabinet. Someone – something? – had taken out a hell of a hateboner on the spindly thing, snapping its legs and blowing open its drawers to dump their contents onto the now-scorched cement floor. The fire, Dean saw, had both started and stopped there, in an ashy pile of what looked like the contents of an old lady’s junk drawer.

“What the hell? Sam, what was in that thing?” Hefting the wrench he hadn’t put down, he started toward the remains of the bonfire, intending to pull it apart. Maybe they could salvage something from it that would give them some clue as to what sort of malevolent spirit went around breaking up the furniture before it decided to take on the rest of the place. But Sam jerked at his sleeve before he could get any closer than they already were.

“Check that out.” He pointed at the floor.

Dean squinted, but all he could see were black smudges on the cement. He frowned, wishing he’d grabbed the flashlight instead of the wrench, but then Sam pulled out his phone and, crouching down, shone a bright beam of light toward the largest of the smudges. After a moment, Dean knelt too, but what he saw made him shudder and stand up abruptly: the floor was marked by fine sooty footprints no bigger than a child’s.

What the fuck was in this room?

“Not in the room any more, I don’t think,” Sam said, with the ghost of a grin, and straightening up, pointed the light down the hallway. Widely-spaced traces of black, whatever they were, seemed to indicate that the thing was in a tearing hurry.

“What do we even call this?” Dean asked, and edged back out into the hall. Pressing himself against the startling chill of the wall, he followed the footsteps to another door, this one secured with a lock that might have been old when the place was built.

“Ghost?’ Sam said, his voice muffled as if he’d gone back into the storeroom.

“Leaving footsteps?”

There was a pause, and then Sam’s voice floated out. “Dean? You gotta see this.”

“Gimme a sec.” Dean put his hand on the lock, unsurprised to find it faintly warm, and twisted its knobs, one after the other. The bolts turned easily, sliding free with the heavy thunk of well-oiled brass, and as the third one pulled loose the door swung silently out on its hinges. Dean gave it a minute, in case the ghost was lying in wait, but when he heard nothing but the sound of the wind, leaned around and peered out.

The bunker’s back forty were familiar, but Dean had never seen the woods across the river from quite this direction. “Sam, did you know we had a back door?” he yelled, not expecting an answer, but getting one anyways.

“Yeah,” Sam said quietly, “but we haven’t needed to use it yet.” Something in his voice made Dean’s skin crawl. “Look,” he added, and pointed at the line of footprints, dark against the ice-rimed field, and now they looked to Dean exactly like the track a skeleton might leave.

If, that is, skeletons could start fires, or escape from them.

Fuck my life, he thought, and pulling Sam back inside, dragged the door closed and twisted its three locks until the bolts slammed home. Where the hell were they going to get a warding spell for a skeleton?

*

“Is it too late to call Garth?”

Dean pulled his head out of the fridge, two beers and the remains of last night’s Thai food in one hand, and looked at his watch.

“Yeah, probably,” he said. “You wanna try him anyways?”

Sam nodded grimly and picked up his phone. “No answer,” he said after listening for a moment, and tapped the screen a few time. “Left a message for him to call.”

Dean uncapped the beers and set one down in front of Sam. “Tell me again what happened.”

“I was down the hall taking a leak. Heard a weird noise, like fireworks in a tunnel, you know?” He wiped a hand over his eyes, frowning, and then continued. “I headed back there once the noise stopped, but the door was closed and something was obviously burning, so…” His voice trailed off and Dean shot him a sharp look.

“Sam, what’s in there?”

“I don’t know, Dean that’s the thing! You saw that pile of garage sale crap on the floor – that’s all I’ve been finding, old letters and bits of jewelry, the kind of stuff we see in other peoples’ houses.”

“No hexbags?”

Sam didn’t dignify that suggestion with even an eyeroll, so Dean pulled the plate with the pizza on it closer and peeled back the plastic stuff Sam had wrapped the last two slices in. He grabbed one and gestured Sam toward the other, and chewed contemplatively for a while.

Pepperoni, he thought, tasted even better cold. How was that even possible?

“Hey, Sam?” he said finally, and Sam looked up from his own contemplation of the wonders of cold pizza toppings.

“What?”

“How come you came down to the garage?”

“What?”

“Why did you come get me, instead of, say, calling 911?” Not that Dean was necessarily a fan of the idea of letting anyone into the bunker, but still: fires, especially the non-demonic kind, were a little outside their expertise.

Sam didn’t answer right away, addressing his full attention to picking the pepperoni off his pizza and stacking it up into a neat pile.

“Electrical fire, man,” he said finally, low-voiced. “Who knows where those things start?”

Dean blinked at him and then, elaborately casual, reached for the pile of pepperoni and shoved it into his mouth. Chewing happily though its greasy cold glory, he swigged down the last of his beer and said, grinning around it all, “You said you wouldn’t try to save me.”

Sam turned a fierce red and pushed his chair back from the table. “I wouldn’t save you if you were already dead,” he muttered. “Asshole,” he added, and reached for his phone. “I’m going to try Garth again, and then I’m going to bed. If you’re still alive in the morning, we’ll regroup.”

Almost – but not quite – stamping his feet, he turned toward the hallway that would take him to his room, and Dean leaned back in his chair to watch him go.

After Sam was gone, the room seemed to sigh and settle in around Dean. Fucking mysteries, he thought; without Bobby to call and bitch to, the tension had been ratcheting up between them without much of a break, and now it seemed like Sam’s restlessness was getting to the building, not just to Dean. He wondered if that wasn’t what the problem was: the whole place was so heavily warded that it wouldn’t be impossible for some kind of magic to have gotten trapped inside the place. Maybe that’s what it was, not a evil spirit at all, but a – what were those things that looked like tornadoes made from flames? Fire devils, that was it, he remembered his grandmother or some great-aunt talking about them on one of those afternoons when the sky was full of ash and the TV full of fire trucks and sirens.

Yeah, fire devils, he thought, Sam’s years-long pissy mood finally manifesting itself in a basement fire. That must be it, he told himself, firmly not listening to the small, Sam-inflected voice that reminded him they’d only found this part of the basement itself a week earlier.

Climbing to his feet, Dean Winchester carried the plate and his bottle into the kitchen, set them down, and went to bed.

*

The next morning, though, he began to think he shoulda listened to the voice. When he finally made his way into the kitchen, Sam was on the phone and tapping furiously into his tablet with his free hand.

“Say that again, Sheriff,” Dean heard, and figuring he might not see another one for a while, poured his coffee into the largest mug he could find. When he sat down, Sam switched the phone to speaker mode and set it between them.

“…damn nasty, whatever the hell is going on. We didn’t even notice her throat had been cut until Doc got the body back to the morgue, and by then, the fire department had pretty much screwed the scene over.” Sheriff Mills paused, and down the line, Dean could hear her take a weary breath. “Thing is, I think I’m gonna need you boys, not that guy with the white hair and the weird glasses from CSI to roll this one up.”

Sam glanced at Dean and leaned closer to the phone. “What makes you say that?”

There was another sigh, and Dean glanced at his watch. Barely nine am, but she sounded like she’d been at it since sometime early the day before.

“It was the fire, actually. The body was… scorched, I guess, and like I said, throat cut, but the fire – guys from SFFD still can’t tell me how it started, and wouldn’t even speculate last night.”

“Sheriff, who was the vic?”

“Well, Sam, that’s the other thing.” She coughed, a dry hacking sound, and her voice was rough when she started talking again. “I’m pretty sure I recognized her from the salvage yard.”

Dean cleared his throat. “One of Bobby’s customers?”

“More like a colleague. And howdy, Dean. Nice to hear your voice.”

“You too, Sheriff. You too.” He glanced at Sam, who nodded, shrugging. “We’ll be there after lunch. You want us to stop and grab you a gallon or so of coffee on the way?”

There was a short laugh. “Red Bull, son,” she said firmly, and they could both hear the relief in her voice before the line went dead.

Dean swallowed the rest of his coffee, wincing. “You sure you didn’t find any hex bags down there last night? Because whatever the hell that thing was, sounds like it’s on the move.”

“Just this.” Sam leaned down and pulled a small box out from under the table. The box seemed to be made out of some kind of leather, its sides strapped with iron and its lid fitted with a latch that looked way older than the already-ancient hardware on the bunker’s doors and windows. When Sam lifted the lid, the box’s hinges squealed in protest. “Took that cabinet apart this morning. This was stuck in one of the drawers, which is why I think it didn’t get caught in the fire.”

Dean poked a finger into the tangle of metal scrap that huddled, somewhat forlornly, in the box’s far corner. Like the stuff they’d examined the night before, the scraps revealed themselves to be… nothing much really, a gold ring and a broken chain, and a little oval pendant that might have been some sort of locket. “Looks old,” he said.

Sam nodded. “Not exactly sinister.”

“Nope.” Dean closed its lid. “Well, we should throw a few things in the car.” He glanced down at the box. Not only did it look ancient, it looked tired, as if its day was nearly done. He shook his head, trying to force his brain back onto the track of the merely supernatural. No use assigning evil plans to objects when there were plenty of living breathing monsters around. No use at all.

Really.

But when Sam headed off toward his room, Dean picked up the little box and hefted it. On the other hand, it didn’t weigh much, and if they needed it or its contents to finish off the ghost – or whatever it was, he heard in Sam’s voice – probably better if they brought it along, however creepy Dean found it.

*

They stopped for burgers once and a leak an hour or so later and still made it through the shorn-flat expanse of prairie between Lebanon and Sioux Falls in less than the four hours Dean had promised. As they drew up in front of the squat red brick sheriff’s station Dean swung the Impala into the parking lot, but before cutting the engine he turned to Sam. “What were you gonna show me last night?”

“What?” Sam stopped rooting around in the glove box and gave Dean a quizzical look.

“Remember, last night, before I opened the back door, you said you wanted to show me something.”

Sam chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek before shaking his head. “Sorry. There’s a shitload of stuff in that room, might have been that nothing else got burned. Weirdest thing, you know?”

Dean stared out the windshield at the familiar outline of the cop shop. The windows looked blank, their blinds pulled down, and the light dusting of snow they’d obviously had the night before was melting into dull gray heaps on the lawn, giving the whole place a drearier-than-usual look. “I think we haven’t even stared with the weird, Sammy,” he said, and swung the car door open.

 

The first thing he noticed inside was that, from the smell of it, somebody’d left the coffeemaker on way past the point that the pot could be salvaged. The second thing was that somebody, maybe the same person, had topped up Sheriff Mills’ Red Bull supply by a factor large enough to keep her walking and talking.

The third thing, after hellos and IDs had been exchanged, and he and Sam were on their way to the back of the building where, he remembered, the coroner had his office, was that the smell in the lobby was really more seared meat than coffee. But before he could become one with that thought, his phone and Sheriff Mills’ rang simultaneously, and after answering hers, Jody led them back out of the office at a dead run.

“Got another one,” was all she said, and Dean motioned Sam to go with her and sprinted back toward the Impala.

Sheriff Mills led them onto the highway and them off, turning onto a road that got progressively worse until it dead-ended at a barn surrounded by bemused-looking firemen and a single ladder truck. The barn, although it tilted sideways at an alarming angle, was obviously a working structure, full of enough tractors to stock a dealership and plenty of the kinds of things Dean associated with barns. Horse tack hung from hooks embedded in the walls, and while the stalls were empty of whatever livestock they’d held, the feed bins inside them were full and a fine pale dust filtered down through the air. Glancing up, Dean could see where the dust was coming from: a filled-to-capacity hayloft directly over their heads.

Which put the charred and smoking body in the middle of the floor firmly into the weird category.

Sheriff Mills threw a quick glace around the place and motioned her deputy closer. “Where are the animals?”

“Owner got ‘em out, put them into the pasture over by the river.” He waved a hand vaguely toward Sam and then looked back at the sheriff. “Said they were all coughing but –“

“Uh-huh. Any idea who the vic is?”

“Um.” The deputy fumbled at his jacket, finally extracting a small notebook, and paged through it rapidly. “No. Farmer said there’d been a couple guys camping down by the creek for most of the summer but they moved on before first frost, and none of his guys are missing.”

“Family all accounted for?”

Back to the notebook, and after a couple of pages, the deputy looked up. “Wife’s dead, daughter’s in Rapid City, son’s a no-good – er, sorry, ma’am.”

She bit back a grin said gravely, “No worries, Frank. Can you show Agent Neidermeyer here the house? I’m sure he’ll want to talk to Mr –“

She lifted an eyebrow, which sent Frank back to his notebook, and he said hurriedly, glancing between Sam and Dean, “Bates, Ma’am. Agent, er, Neidermeyer? If you want to come with me?”

Sam caught Dean’s eye and nodded. “Thanks, Deputy. Now, you said the wife was dead? How long ago?”

Dean watched them walk out and turn left, heading toward a house perched on a small rise and roughly the same vintage as the barn.

Dean walked across the hay-strewn floor to crouch down beside the body. Using a pen, he lifted something that looked like cloth off the vic’s neck then, pulling out his knife, poked and prodded delicately at the remains of his? her? clothing. The thing about farm folk, he’d found, was that the clothes rarely told you if your vic was male or female, at least not if they’d been working when they died.

“You see anything, Dean?” Giving up her post by the barn’s open doors, the sheriff joined him, crouching down to take a few careful photos with her phone.

“Other than – hello!” Dean pulled back sharply, balancing on his heels before leaning back in. “Look.” Holding the knife above the corpse’s legs, he traced the pattern he’d noticed: criss-crossing straps that bound the lower legs together, restraints made from some kind of rope or cord that had resisted the worst of the flames.

“Holy shit,” Sheriff Mills softly, and Dean could see a muscle jump in her jaw before she lifted her camera again. “You ever see anything like this?” she added after she was done and had gotten back up to her feet.

He stood up and paced around to the body’s other side. Now that he was looking for them, he could see that the arms were similarly lashed, the hands tied behind its back. He pointed toward the arch in the spine and shook his head. “Well, if the whole place had gone up, I’d say this was your gig, not ours. But.” He stepped back and gestured toward the body in its neat scorched circle, then out from it toward the intact horse stalls and sun-warmed hayloft. “This is just fucking weird.”

“That an official assessment?”

The new voice came from one of the firemen, an older man in full gear with a helmet under one arm and a serious-looking camera in his hand. “Sheriff Mills,” he said formally, his eyes sliding around her to give Dean the once-over before settling on the body between them.

Dean flashed his ID and slid it back into his pocket. “Unofficial at the moment,” he replied. “Your guys have any idea what happened here?”

The fireman shook his head slowly. “My wife bitches if I don’t let the grill get hot enough to char the ribs, and I know my Weber can hit 2k on a good day. Something like this? How the hell the whole county ain’t in flames I got no idea.”

*

They checked into the motel they’d stayed in after Bobby’s house burned down.

“You think we’re gonna be here for a while?” Dean asked, grimacing at the smell of sour wine that blew toward him when the desk clerk handed him their keys.

Sam shrugged. “Why?”

“Just wondering if we’ll need one six-pack or two.”

The desk clerk turned back around, her eyes gleaming under their load of blue eyeshadow. “If you’re going to the store, could you grab me another Carlo Rossi?”

Sam shrugged again, clearly uninterested, but Dean gave the girl a calculating look. “How much for the fridge?”

She threw the look straight back at him, adding a wink that threatened to leave one false eyelash pinned to her cheek. “Two gallons of rose, and it won’t show up on the bill until Saturday.”

“Done.” He slapped his hand on the desk. “C’mon, Sam, we can grab you a box too while we’re at it.”

 

“Dean. Did you ever hear from Garth?” Sam dropped his duffle onto the floor next to the far bed with an audible thunk. Leaning over, he pulled his laptop out of it and, tracing back from the clock radio bolted to the nightstand to a plug behind Dean’s bed, tugged at the bedframe until it pulled away from the wall. “You need to plug in your phone?”

When Dean shook his head, Sam fished his laptop cord and charger out of his bag. Once they were situated and Sam’s devices were happily juicing up, he straightened up, turned to face Dean and cocked his head. “Well?”

“Well what?”

Sam crossed his arms.

“Okay, okay, I’ll leave him another message.”

Sam frowned. “Another message?”

“Yes, Sam, that’s usually what we do when someone is off getting laid and doesn’t answer their phone.”

A pained grimace crossed Sam’s face, but he contented himself with pulling a beer off the six-pack and settling himself down on the bed next to his computer.

This used to be so much easier, Dean thought, and tapped on his phone until Garth’s cheery recorded greeting sounded in his left ear. “Yadda yadda,” he said to the phone. “Dude, call us.” He tapped at it again, wondering who else he could call. A lot of the hunters they’d known were just gone, down in Key West watching fish die or dead themseves, or not talking to the Winchesters for any number of what Dean had to admit were very good reasons.

“Sam?” he started to say, but Sam cut him off with a grunt, which made Dean revise his earlier opinion. This had never been easy.

“Nope,” Sam was saying, “haven’t heard back from any of the emails or texts I’ve sent either. It’s like Cas used to say about angel radio going dead – it’s just quiet out there.”

“Sheriff said the body in her morgue was a hunter. They figure out who it was this afternoon?” They’d hung around as long as they could, but she’d finally sent them back to town, asking Sam if he could do a little looking around and promising to call.

Which she hadn’t, not yet. He glanced over at Sam, intent on the images moving across the screen, his eyes narrowed in concentration and his skin pale in the blue light of the screen. Sam’s focus was a little like the Impala’s when Dean floored her on a difficult stretch of road: she just settled in and got to it, while Dean tended to twitch and then reach around for whatever weapon was closest.

Sam hit a few more keys and sat back. “Nothing yet, but I think I got something else. C’mere, take a look at this.”

Something else turned out to be the chyron for a news site down in Nebraska, reports of an unexplained fire and a dead body, and when they clicked through, the live feed showed them an unmoving knot of firemen in front of a scorched-looking couch. The couch, sagging as badly as the house it sat in front of, was the only thing that had burned.

He leaned in and peered at the screen, feeling something ugly start to move at the base of his spine. He hated it when it was one of their own lying on the steel morgue table. Going up against something strong enough to take out hunters – even if most of them were, as Bobby would have said, idjits –made him itch to start sharpening his knives.

“Call Sheriff Mills,” he said, bidding a silent farewell to the six-pack. “Tell her we’re headed for Lincoln.”

 

Chapter 3: Ellen Harvelle (Dalkeith, Scotland, 1595)

There were times, Ellen thought, when she missed the bells. Terce to open the doors and compline to close them; the bells had rung throughout the day in her father’s village far to the north, and even in summer, when the sun stayed in the sky long past vespers, the sound of the bells had sent the men home to their beds and their wives. But this was Edinburgh, or nearly so, and the men clustered at the far end of the Traveler’s Road’s long bar had neither wives nor beds to return to.

At least, none within a hundred miles, damned mercenaries, she muttered, hiding a quick warding gesture in her skirt. As if in response, a muffled clank emerged from the pouch sewn into her kirtle, and Ellen rolled her eyes at her own foolishness.

Far too loud and too late abroad they might be, but the mercenaries had one big advantage in Ellen’s book: they paid in coin, not promises or eggs, and generally without complaint. Which couldna be said of the local lads, not that many of them were bringing their trade to the Traveler’s Road these days. Gone south they were, scattered into the chaos churning up the countryside between Berwick and the Solway Firth. It crossed Ellen’s mind that mayhap it were better so: it had been a cold summer, neither the ewes nor the fields producing much, and it was going to be a long poor winter. Better they take it out on the English than their own bairns when their stomachs twisted with hard with hunger.

The voices at the end of the bar rose and fell and rose again, an ugly note thrumming through the harsh unfamiliar accents. Frowning, Ellen grabbed a near-empty bottle by its neck and was preparing herself to wade into the fray when the door slammed open and the night rolled in, bringing with it a face she’d not seen since her Bill was alive.

“John Winchester,” she said, grinning widely, and slammed the bottle onto the bar. He whirled to face her, and at the sight of his face Ellen tightened her grip on the bottle and took an involuntary step back.

The John Winchester she remembered had been a man much given to laughter, a man whose work-torn hands could cradle a babe’s head or his wife’s blond braids with equal gentleness. A man whose strength had helped her put the pain of losing her Bill behind her. This man, though, had the look of a man possessed, and she wasn’t surprised when the stools by the fireplace emptied suddenly, the door banging shut a half dozen times before John spoke.

“Have ye,” he started to say, his voice strangling in his throat. He coughed sharply and started again. “Have you seen Mary, by any chance?”

Ellen frowned at him. Seen Mary? 1595 it might well be, but respectable women didn’t set foot in taverns, no matter how often the floors were swept or the fine glass of the windows washed. What would Mary Winchester be doing at The Traveler’s Road? She loosened her grip on the bottle and pushed it toward him, shaking her head. “Mislaid your wife, have you?” she asked tartly. John had always had a temper, she remembered.

But instead of reaching for the bottle or starting to bluster, as she half-expected, he – well, folded up was the best word Ellen could find, collapsing onto the battered floor of the bar. “Mary,” he whispered.

Ellen grabbed a different bottle, splashed a healthy measure of whiskey into a tankard and pushed it across the bar. She could have sworn the Winchesters had made a love match, for all that Mary’s family were Border landowners and John a simple village blacksmith. She hoped that, whatever he’d done, it wouldn’t take more than an apology to bring the lass back to Dalkeith.

Without looking up, John slammed the side of his fist against the floor and climbed slowly to his feet. Ellen watched him warily, but all he did was reach for the whiskey. When he set the tankard back on the bar, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, she could see that his eyes were red-rimmed, his face pale and drawn underneath his heavy beard.

“Mislaid. At Dalkeith market, on a fair sunny day, gone to buy apples for her sons.” He poured a second measure and drank it, then fished a coin out of his purse and placed it slowly, deliberately on the bar. “Aye, mislaid, indeed, and so well she left her unweaned babe and his four year old brother behind. Jesu Christ, Ellen.”

Ellen pressed her fists against her mouth as he looked up at her, shaking her head, and the silence behind them grew until all she could hear was the snapping of the flames as the great log she’d shoved in there split in a shower of sparks. John’s head swiveled toward the fireplace, his hand dropping to his belt, and a figure detached itself from the shadows.

Stopping just out of range of the oil lamps above the bar, the figure hitched up its cloak and aimed a gobbet of spit back toward the fire. As the wad of moisture sizzled on the hearth, he spoke. “P’raps she were one o’ them witches they picked up today.”

John took a half step in the man’s direction. “Witches?”

Not again, Ellen thought, and moving carefully, recorked the bottle and set it onto the trestle behind the bar. She needed to order more, she thought, wondering absently when McTeigue would be down from Moray with another load. A full barrel this time: the mercenaries, well paid by the King, could certainly drink it all. She grabbed the slate she kept for notes and rooted around in her pocket for a bit of chalk.

The man in the cloak twitched visibly and spat again. “Aye, witches. At Dalkeith market.” This time, it was Ellen he spoke to, his voice bubbling with excitement. “Did you not hear, Mistress? One of ‘em cracked an egg and hatched a raven, right there in front of St Nicholas’ door!”

When her fingers found the hard smooth outline she sought, she gripped it hard enough to feel it crack, and forced herself to turn around. “Ravens? At the market? Imagine that.”

“Ellen,” John said, a note of warning in his voice, and the man in the cloak gave him an oily smile.

“Aye. Luckily the magistrates were there, saw the whole thing. Clapped them in irons straightaway.”

“How… curious,” Ellen said, watching John curl his hands into fists. “I’ve not heard of witches being so bold before.” The fists stayed at his sides, but the man in the cloak, perhaps catching the movement even though his eyes had shifted back to Ellen, tightened his cloak around him and eased himself toward the door. Torn between wanting to push him through it and needing to see if he knew aught else about the market’s so-called witches, she added, hurriedly, “And did they… escort the witches someplace safe?”

“Safe for whom, Mistress?” he asked, and gave the bottles behind the bar a heavy look. “If there’s witches about, even trussed up in the tollbooth, God keep us all.” This time, he crossed himself before spitting on the floor, and Ellen, abruptly losing her patience, grabbed a half-full bottle and shoved it toward him.

“Aye, and if there’s witches about, we’re all safer at home in our beds. Take this and be gone, sir, and leave me to wash my floors in peace!”

When the door had slammed behind him, she sagged against the bar, breathing deeply.

Damn, damn, damn.

“Ellen?”

“Bar the door, would you? We’ll ride, but first I need something to eat, and I need to tell you a story.”

Lowering the oil lamps on their heavy iron chains, she extinguished them and one by one, hoisted them back up to the ceiling. When she ducked out from behind the bar and glanced around the now-darkened room – one last check, to make sure there were no drunks a-snoring in the corners, nor anyone to hear the tale she was about to tell - she noticed that John Winchester had already shifted the heavy screen to its place in front of the still-smoldering hearth. As she watched, he ran a hand along its finely-wrought cross-brace and patted it gently.

“I made this, did you know that?” he asked, perhaps sensing her eyes upon him.

“Aye, Bill told me.” Her Bill, dead these three years, on a hunting trip with the man who stood before her now.

“He loved this place,” John said.

“That he did.” Ellen wiped her hands on a rag and slung it over her shoulder.

 

The tale was long, and no less ugly in its nooks and crannies for being an old one. At the end of it, with a finger’s worth of the kitchen’s stout tallow candle burned down and Ellen’s oldest rooster a mass of bones on its wooden trencher, she stopped and watched the light flicker across John’s face and the hulking mass of his shoulders as he took it all in.

“Witches,” he said finally, struggling to lift his head under the weight of the word.

Ellen let the silence stretch out.

“The Earl of Bothwell was a witch? Witches tried to kill the King? And now someone thinks my Mary is one of these creatures?”

“Ah, no, John, we’ve no proof of ---“

He slammed his fist down on the table, making the flame gutter and cutting her off. “Proof? Proof? Is it more likely, then, that she just wandered off?”

He shoved back on the trestle hard enough to knock it to the ground behind him and stood up. His arms tightened under the homespun wool of his shirt as he curled his hands into fists, and as Ellen watched, impassive, he crossed the room and, without warning, put one of those fists into the soft pine of the scullery’s doorframe.

Well, to judge by his face, knotted and grim as he examined his hand, soft might not be quite the word he’d use to describe it. She had no doubt, though, that he’d chosen the rough-finished wood deliberately: hitting the door itself would not be unlike hitting one of the kitchen’s old stone walls.

“Are you done?”

John flexed his fingers and laughed shortly. “Have you any objection if I go through to the bar and grab whatever was left in that bottle?”

“None at all.” Ellen pushed her own trestle back from the table and reached across for his trencher and knife. Stacking it on top of her own, she balanced the rooster’s remains on top and carried them into the scullery. “I’m thinking we could both use a wee drop, and then there’s a bit of planning to do if we’re to find your wife for you.” She dropped the trenchers onto the scullery table and swept the bones into a bin for the pig. But then, struck by a sudden thought, she poked her head back through the recently-abused doorway. “John! Where are your boys? Are they safe?”

“Safer than she is, I’ve no doubt. They’re with Mistress Mosely.” His hand on the swinging door to the bar, he paused, and then turned heavily to face her. “When Mary didn’t come home –“ his voice faltered and he cleared his throat before starting again. “I – she said they could stay until I found their mother.”

A picture of a kitchen not unlike her own, its rafters hung with fragrant herbs and its doorways, under their veil of soot, carved with ancient runes, came into Ellen’s head, and after a moment, she nodded. Did the same symbols guard Mary’s kitchen or keep the fires in John’s forge burning hard? She’d no idea, none at all, and little hope that if they did they could prevail against the kind of power that had ushered so many of her sisters into the flames.

Her eyes met his dark ones briefly, and he disappeared into the dark barroom. Ellen sighed, crossing the kitchen to pull her oldest cloak off the hook by the door. Whether or not Mary had been taken up by the magistrates that day, there was every chance that one of those who had might have seen something. Or need a message taken, to a husband or bairn.

She felt for the cloak’s pockets and slipped the purse in her kirtle into one of them, hearing the dull clank of coins as it settled into the dun-colored wool. John had his knife, she’d noticed, but it sometimes took weapons forged from many kinds of metal to win a battle, she mused.

When John walked back into the kitchen Ellen was ready, her cloak pulled tight around her shoulders and a wicker basket over one arm. When she raised an eyebrow in his direction, he brandished the bottle he’d grabbed and tucked it into his own coat.

“Are you coming with me then, Ellen Harvelle?”

“Aye, John Winchester, that I am.”

 

Chapter 4: Dean Winchester (South Dakota, present day)

Interstate 29, flat and straight and fast, followed the river through the Missouri Valley, but this time of day? Dean glanced at his watch, figuring they’d hit Omaha right about the time the cubicle farms were emptying out, and took the state road instead. Turns out he was right: there was no one on the highway except the occasional pickup, and Dean was able to find a comfortable spot for his right boot just above the floorboard. This late in the year the corn was gone, the stepped fields shorn close enough that the silos loomed up and flashed past as they drove.

Once they hit Sioux City the sun gave up and dropped behind a rise, and Dean twisted the knob that turned on the heat as the temperature in the car followed it. A couple of times he thought Sam was about to break the silence between them, but he didn’t, and after stopping for gas Dean gave up on waiting and snapped on the radio. He spun the dial, looking for something that wasn’t Taylor Swift or Jesus until Sam finally muttered, “Fuck,” and shoved a cassette into the deck.

Journey. It could have been worse, it had been worse, Joni Mitchell and Jefferson Starship worse, when Sam had been angry at him in the past. This time, Dean just figured it was more a sign that Sam was still way beyond pissed than any effort at making peace. But he didn’t say anything, just put his hands in the 10-and-2 position on the wheel and drove really fucking carefully until Sam barked a laugh, popped the cassette and pitched it out the window.

Dean bit back a grin and sped up. Thirty minutes later Sam, watching his phone, guided them off the highway and through a series of 90-degree turns that dropped them off at a farmhouse cowering in front of two SUVs stamped Lancaster County Sheriff and a white van with the same logo. The vehicles’ headlights lit up a scene that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Ripley’s Believe or Not! exhibit: just to the left of a miniscule front porch sat what had once been a sofa, its springs and the remains of its legs and frame showing through a layer of scorched and sodden upholstery. Six inches clear of the burn zone, though, the remains of the previous night’s snowstorm remained, ash-strewn and filthy but unmelted.

Dean glanced at Sam, grimacing, and they swung their doors open in unison just as two figures in white hazmat suits wheeled a gurney up the front walk toward the couch. As they approached it, an older man, dark-skinned, in a heavy leather jacket and creased uniform pants stepped out onto the porch and yelled, “Barrett!” in a weary-sounding baritone.

A much-younger man in the same pants scurried out from behind the farmhouse and skidded to a stop, lifting a small black camera up to his face and circling progressively closer to them, apparently trying to get a clear shot of what the medics were doing. It was a good plan, Dean thought, until one of the medics said, “Okay, on three!” and after counting off, heaved until something ripped loose from the couch with an audible crack and the other medic said, “Shit,” in a tone of voice that said she hadn’t expected anything else.

At which point Barrett stumbled back, dropped his camera and, sinking to his knees at Sam’s feet, hurled the contents of his stomach toward the Impala’s rear wheel.

“Shit,” Dean said, echoing the medics, and the sheriff, looking up, narrowed his eyes over the glare of headlights and stepped off the porch.

“Brady Wilson,” the sheriff said. “And you boys are?”

Sam moved around the front of the car and they flashed their IDs. Wilson gave them a bored glance, then his eyes dropped to his deputy.

“Sharon, you doing okay there?” His voice was gruff, but the young deputy took a deep breath and hauled herself to her feet.

“Sir,” she said, obviously trying not to look past him at the medics, who’d finished loading their grisly cargo onto the gurney and had pulled a sheet over the remains. Wilson, unmoved, jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the scene and Sharon swallowed audibly.

“I’ll just… grab the camera,” she started, and Sam intervened.

“Let me help you with that. Sheriff, you mind?”

There was a short pause and a sharper once-over, but finally the sheriff nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Sheriff? You got any idea what happened here?” Dean pulled out a notebook, still watching Sam as he picked up the camera and fiddled with it before handing it back to the deputy. How long had they been here? Had the scene even been touched?

As if in answer to his unspoken questions, the sheriff barked a laugh and waved a dismissive hand toward the scene. “I got no more idea what “happened here” than I did four hours ago. Fucking coroner – we can’t touch anything until they clear the body, and now it’s too fucking dark to see anything.” He clapped an arm over Dean’s shoulders. “You Feds want this one, it’s all yours. Meanwhle, you got any idea how to run a percolator?”
“A what?” Dean said, but he followed the sheriff back into the house, where they discovered that yeah, courtesy of Bobby and his collection of pre-war appliances, Dean not only knew how to use one, he could extract a pretty good cup of coffee from one too.

 

“So,” Sheriff Wilson said, once the coffee had been poured and tasted and approved of, “seems our vic wasn’t winning any awards for neighbor of the year, but he had an arrangement with the guy next door to feed his cat whenever he was out of town.”

“And was he out of town a lot?”

Wilson nodded. “Retired truck driver or something, according to the neighbor. Went hunting a lot, apparently.”

“He was off on a hunting trip this time too?” Dean kept his voice carefully casual, but the sheriff pursed his lips thoughtfully before answering.

“Yeah, I can’t of anything that’s in season now either.” He pushed back from the table and pulled open the fridge. It was bare except for a pair of longnecked brown bottles in the door and a handful of opaque plastic containers on a lower shelf. Wilson reached for one. “Says raven,” he announced. “Who the fuck hunts ravens?”

He shoved the container back into the fridge and closed the door forcefully. “Anyways, according to the neighbor he wasn’t due back for a few days, so we’re not even sure that’s him. Neighbor even checked on the house around noon, said no one was home.”

Dean frowned. “Why’d he check, if he knew no one was gonna be home?”

“House alarm went off, guy finally got pissed enough to come break in, shut it down.” He gestured toward the kitchen door, where the remains of a small plastic panel protruded from the wall.

“House alarm?” The kitchen was small and, while it was cleaner than Bobby’s usually was, its appliances dated from roughly the same era, and burn marks and knife scores marred its formica countertops. An equally-small dining room was visible through a partially-closed door and, on the other side of the kitchen, a narrow hallway lit by a single bulb dangling from a cloth-wrapped wire led toward the back of the house. “Seriously?”

The sheriff waved toward the hallway. “Guy was a book collector, the neighbor said. First editions.” He pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the sink, where he rinsed out his coffee cup and placed it carefully in the dish drainer. “Imma go check on Sharon, see if she got anything useful. You want to come with me?”

It wasn’t an invitation, but Dean jerked his head toward the back of the house and pretended it was. “I’ll go take a look at that library. Tell my partner to come inside.” The sheriff stared at him for a long moment. Dean smiled pleasantly. “Tell him there’s coffee, if he kicks up a fuss.”

The sheriff shook his head but didn’t say anything before turning on his heel, and Dean pulled out his phone.

“Sam. You get anything out there?”

Sam’s voice was low and fast when he answered. “Not much. Coroner’s guys seem a little stressed, can’t tell if they’re into overtime or they just don’t see much of this. You get anything?”

Dean flipped on the light in the hall. Two doors, one of which led into a tiled bathroom with porn mags in a pile next to the toilet. “Hmmm, no Bisty Asian Beauties?”

“Dean!”

“Yeah, yeah.” The second door was locked. “Hold on a sec.” Tucking phone between his ear and his shoulder, he fished a lock pick out of his jacket and slid it into the lock. The door gave way silently.

“Holy shit,” Dean said into the phone, and moved into the room.

“Dean?”

“Place even smells like Bobby’s study, Sam.” The smell, Dean saw, came from an open bottle of some kind of rotgut on a desk stacked haphazardly with papers and books. A quick glance at the books actually in their shelves just confirmed it: Malleus Maleficarum, as far as he knew, hadn’t ever been an Oprah’s Book Club selection. “No question, guy was a hunter.”

Before Sam could ask the obvious question, though, there was a blur of voices and the phone went dead. “Sam!” Dean shoved the phone into his pocket and bolted for the door.

Outside, Sam, the sheriff, the now-deathly-pale deputy and the medics had been joined by a tall, broadly-built woman who glanced up as Dean hurtled around the corner. Without interrupting the dressing-down she appeared to be broadcasting toward everyone in earshot, she threw her hand up in Dean’s direction and, without sparing him a glance, kept talking.

“… heard of the need to protect the scene? Maybe – I don’t know, just guessing here – collect the evidence before moving the body?”

The two medics, now out of their hazmat gear, studied the ground at her feet. “But, Doc—“ one of them protested, and the hand went back up.

“I don’t care WHAT Cindy told you, just because the vic was obviously dead does NOT release you to collect the remains!” She crossed her arms and glared at them, and the sheriff cleared his throat.

“Doc –“ he started, “—no, hear me out,” he added as her hand twitched again. “We’ve already been picked up by the nightly news and it’s only a matter of time before every Tom, Dick and J.Edgar makes their way here. Decent thing seemed to be to get our boy here out of sight. Plus, weather guys say it’s going to snow.” He looked up, ostentatiously studying what seemed to Dean to be a flat uniform darkness, and the doc relaxed her arms.

“Gonna be snow before Thanksgiving,” she said finally, and the medics fled back to their van. “I have got to get my secretary to stop pretending she’s Abbie on NCIS,” she added, before giving Sam and Dean a quizzical look. “Feds, hmmm? You staying here or riding in with me?”

They glanced at each other. Best case scenario they did both. “Go,” Dean finally said. “I’ll meet you there.” Sam turned to follow the coroner back to her truck. “Sheriff, your permission, I’d like to spend a bit of time in the house, see if I can figure out what the vic was… hunting.”

Sheriff Wilson chewed on his lip for a few minutes. “Throw a tarp over the scene and hang a bit of tape. No one’s likely to come back out here tonight, not with the weather changing, and I’d like to get Sharon here home.” Getting a solid grip on his deputy’s elbow, he led her toward his SUV and put her into the passenger’s seat before settling himself in.

“Stuff you’ll need is in Sharon’s rig. Turn those lights out when you’re done, wouldja, and lock up the house before you leave,” he threw at Dean, and then the big vehicle was gone.

Dean waited until they were a good half-mile away to pen the back of the deputy’s SUV. As promised, the tarp was neatly folded on top of a stack of road flares and traffic barricades. Digging around in a bin next to the flares, he spotted a heavy-duty jack and a lug wrench. Grabbing them, along with a flashlight, he backed out of the cargo compartment. Might as well take a look under the couch, see if anything interesting had survived the blaze.

Dropping the lug wrench a few feet away, Dean approached the remains. Jacking up the frame might work, he thought, and knelt down to settle the platform under the frame. Working carefully – the last thing he wanted was a lapful of barbecued foam – he cranked it a couple of inches back and shone the light up over the blackened cross-beams of the frame and up into the springs.

As he was about to set it down, a gleam of metal caught his eye, and pushing his sleeve up over his elbow, he reached gingerly into the scorched and still-dripping arm of the couch. There, his fingers touched metal, smooth and worn and still faintly warm, and as he drew them out he could see he’d grabbed some kind of old lady’s necklace, the kind that was hinged so a picture could go inside.

He closed his hand around it and stood up, and fitting the flashlight under his chin, used his thumb to open the thing. As he did, the wind blew up, knocking the couch off the jack and flinging the familiar stink of petrochemicals and burnt grease into his face. And as many incinerated corpses as Dean had seen – and smelled - during his life, this was somehow worse. Skeletons – hell, skeletons were easy, enough kerosene and they smelled like dry ash afterwards, and the couple of hunter’s funerals Dean’d thrown, well, the smell was the furthest thing from his thoughts at those. This was – this was a hunter’s grave, he thought, the last place a man whose name he didn’t even know had downed his final whiskey before heading into straight to hell.

And Dean had no doubt at all that hell had laid its claim to the man who died here. Knew it the way he knew that the smell of this grave would linger in his clothes until Sam pestered him into hitting a laundromat.

When something sharp and cold and wet landed on the tip of his nose, Dean glanced up. The sky was still a solid wall of dark, but now bright specks were filtering out of it. Blinking them out of his eyes, he snapped the locket shut and slipped it into his pocket. Something to show Sam, he thought, and meanwhile, he had a way better chance of finding something useful in the man’s office. Like that half full bottle of whiskey, say. Holding his breath, Dean threw the tarp over the now-collapsed couch and went into the house, shutting the door firmly behind himself.

He’d give it an hour, he thought, and then he’d check in with Sam.

 

Fifty-seven minutes later the phone rang. Sam, it seemed, had had the same idea.

“Got anything?” Dean stood up and stretched his back, and wedging the phone against his ear, carried the whiskey bottle into the kitchen.

“Dean.” Sam’s voice was low but echoed as if he was walking down a hallway. “I’m going to text you the address. You should be able to get down here in fifteen minutes, give or take.”

Dean shoved the bottle into his jacket pocket. “What’s up?” He shoved the notebook he’d been leafing through into another pocket and twisted the bolt on the back door. “Sam? You get anything important?”

“Yeah. Same set of restraints, for starters. But we have another problem. We gotta get home, now.”

Dammit. Dean let Sam fill him in as he ran for the front door. Baby, bless her, started right up, and as he spun her wheels on the loose gravel of the road he didn’t look back at the hunter’s little house or at his neat yard, or at the stinking hulk of his grave.

 

Chapter 5: Ellen Harvelle (Scotland, 1595)

Ellen’s palfrey, born from Border stock, was faster than she looked, but her gait was hard, and Ellen was relieved when the spires of Dalkeith’s churches loomed up against the moonlit sky and they could slow to a walk. There’d likely be no one about, not at this hour, but she wasn’t surprised when John bypassed the route that led to the high street in favor of a narrow alley that ran roughly parallel to it. The alley, she knew, would drop them out at Queen’s Way, and from there it was a matter of some hundred cubits until they reached the gates of the Tollbooth, the structure that served Dalkeith as gaol and courtroom – and, once in a very great while, as place of execution.

Shuddering, Ellen tightened her grip on her reins and resisted the urge to hunch down into the folds of her cloak. The night was cold and getting colder, the cobbles slick with the late autumn mist that in a few weeks would be ice underfoot. ‘Twas ever this time of year, with the trees going black and a raw wind sweeping off the firth, that saw peoples’ fear of the winter turn to hatred and suspicion. This time, the dark gaze had turned toward Mary Winchester, and while a not-so-small part of Ellen was relieved that she herself wasn’t sitting in the dank straw of a Tollbooth cell, a much larger part was simply confused.

Ellen Harvelle knew all the witches in the village precincts, or thought she did, and Mary Winchester had never been part of that company.

When the sound of voices rose above their hoofbeats, Ellen urged her palfrey forward and, edging past John onto Queen’s Way, threw back the hood of her cloak and rode forward. The Tollbooth itself was a squat square building nearly as old as Dalkeith, its rough stone walls pierced irregularly with narrow windows and its high-crowned roof topped by slates that gleamed in the moonlight. Everything about the place, Ellen reflected, was designed to make a person pick up their skirts and run.

She slid off her horse instead, handing the reins up to John and walking forward, and the two men lounging in the doorway looked up. “Hello lads,” she said, brisk instead of the flirtatious they might have been expecting, and they straightened slightly.

“Mistress,” one of them said, touching his fingers to his cap.

“I know ‘tis late, but one of my stableboys tells me his sister never came home after the market, and he’s possessed of the notion that she were swept up in that… unpleasantness today.” She smiled briefly, then, adding a unfeigned touch of weariness to her tone, the much-put-upon widow, said, “I would be much obliged if you’d let me have a word with her, the boy’s quite upset and won’t stop pestering me.”

The two guards glanced at each other. “Mistress Harvelle, is it?” one of them said, while the other lifted his lantern and peered up at John’s bearded face, dark and forbidding under the wide brim of his hat. Whatever he saw there in the uncertain lamplight sent him reeling back, and John spurred his horse forward.

Dropping the lantern, the man flattened himself against the building, opening his mouth as if to sound an alarm, but John moved forward and with a hiss of steel, the guard’s body slumped against the building.

The horse danced sharply sideways and then stood still, his nostrils flared. Ellen lifted her skirts and stepped across to where her own mount had removed herself and stood trembling. Clicking her tongue and wishing she’d thought to tuck an apple or two into her cloak, she reclaimed the reins and urged the little horse forward.

John, meanwhile, had swung himself down from the saddle and was speaking in a low voice to the other guard who, while Ellen watched, slid down the wall to rest on the cobbles, putting his hands out to be tied in front of him. She waited until the trussing was done and then said briskly, “You’ll have gotten his keys from him before tying his hands?”

“Aye,” John said briefly. The guard, his pallor visible even in the dim glow of the lantern, looked from one to the other before letting his eyes slide over to his fallen comrade.

“What do you –“ he choked.

Without answering, John pulled another length of cord out of one of his pockets and leaned down to wrap it around the lad’s ankles, then handed Ellen a heavy iron ring bristling with keys. She stared at them with some dismay, but the main doorway, for all its iron-studded magnificence, was unlocked, and the women who’d been rounded up that morning were all locked in a single narrow cell.

“Who’s there?” she heard, and there was the scratch of a flint and a candle guttered to life. One of the women lifted the candle as Ellen drew closer, and its weak flame illuminated a plain face framed by dark red hair. “Who are you?”

There were, she could see, four other women, all sitting together on a narrow trestle to the left of the cell’s barred doorway. None of them appeared to be Mary Winchester – or anyone else she knew – and Ellen wondered, briefly, what exactly had happened that morning at Dalkeith market. Eh, a mystery for another day, if none of them were practitioners of the craft.

Practitioners of another craft, perhaps? Ellen sighed internally, and held up the keys. “A little information, ladies, and then you can be on your ways. Is Mary Winchester among ye?”

The women looked at each other, but it was the woman holding the candle who finally spoke. “There was another woman taken with us. We didn’t catch her name, not all of it, but the men who took her called her Campbell, I think.”

“Aye, Campbell. Seemed curious, as there’s not so many Campbells hereabouts,” one of the others said, to a chorus of nods and murmurs.

Mary Cambel. Ellen tucked that bit of information aside, and asked, “Do you know where she is, then? One of the other cells?” She rattled the keys. “I’m thinking they must have room for half of Edinburgh in here, from the looks of this thing.”

There was a weak laugh, and a third voice said, “No, she’s not here. I overheard one of the men saying she was the one he wanted, and he reckoned there was a trip to Berwick in it for anyone willing to ride hard and make the boss happy.”

So that was why there’d only been the two guards on the door, and neither of them magistrates’ lads. Where were the magistrates’ lads, come to think of it? Ellen frowned. “Who did they mean by ‘he,’ do you suppose?”

The woman at the door shook her head. “We’ve no idea, Mistress. They sounded English, if that’s any help.” She gave the keys in Ellen’s hand a pointed look. “But now, we’d all really like to be going before they get back.”

“To be sure.” Ellen passed the keys through the bars and, turning on her heel, managed to whisk herself out of sight of the cell before stumbling to a halt and leaning into the slick cold wall. Berwick, dear gods. Berwick was hours away, the clock was hurtling toward midnight, and Ellen was entirely sure that, however unpleasant the trip was on horseback, it was miles more so trussed up in chains.

 

John’s face fell as she closed the door of the prison behind her and walked out alone. Without a word, he handed her up onto her mare and then swung himself up into his own saddle. Shaking his head to warn her against speaking, he led them out of Dalkeith and onto the road that led east, toward Tantallon and the sea. Once the town was far enough behind them that Ellen could no longer smell woodsmoke in the cold night air, she spurred her mare forward and drew even with him.

“John! Hold up – where are we going?”

John whipped his head around as if startled that she was beside him. “North Berwick,” he said, his voice grim, but he pulled his mount into a walk. “The guard said – Mary wasn’t there, was she?”

“North Berwick? But the women said --. No. John, what did the boy say?”

“Barely enough to keep me from slipping a knife between his ribs.”

Ellen glanced into the woods that pressed in against the narrow road. For all that this was the most-traveled route between Edinburgh and the English garrison town of Berwick Upon Tweed, she thought, it was a track barely worthy of the name, even now, before the hard rains scoured it down to rocks. She twisted her gloved hands in the reins tightly enough to bring her mare to a stop and sat back.

“You know, I’ve a public house to open in a few hours, and a cow to milk sometime afore that. Not to mention a stable lad and a passel of hens to feed.”

Ahead of her, John pulled his mount to a stop. Its breath steamed in the frigid air, and after a long moment broken only by the sound of the wind in the bare trees, John’s shoulders slumped.

Ellen smiled briefly. “What I’m meaning to say, John Winchester, is that unless you tell me exactly where we are going and why the men who took your wife called her Mary Campbell, I shall turn right around and go see to my hens.”

With short, sharp gestured, he turned his horse around and shouldered them both past her. “John! Where the hell are you going?”

“Coldstream,” he shouted over his shoulder.

Damnation. Coldstream, down on the border, was a pretty spot, but it was nearly forty miles on a road not much better than the one they were currently on.

Ahead of her, John spurred his horse into a mile-eating canter. Ellen decided that, if she wanted any sort of answers at all, she would need to get them before they got back to Dalkeith at least. “John!” she shouted, leaning forward and giving the mare her head. “At least tell me why Coldstream!”

“Mary’s father,” John threw back at her. “If they took her as Mary Campbell, I’ll bet my forge old Samuel knows why.”

*

Whether Coldstream was forty miles or merely a hundred Ellen had no idea, but when they came to an inn just as the eastern sky was starting to lighten, she turned her horse off into its yard and sat there numbly. Perhaps John would notice that she’d stopped. There was, she thought, an equal chance he might not, in which case she planned to throw herself on the mercy of the inn’s kitchen maids and beg them for the location of their privy.

After a moment, she stretched out her toes in their boots to see if the feeling had come back into them and slid off her horse. Trying not to slip on the yard’s night-slick cobbles, she led the horse over to a trough and gazed around as the little mare drank her fill. The inn was built in the English style, all white plaster crossed by dark beams, its roof bristling with chimneys.

She looked up as hooves sounded behind her, and as she watched, John slid off his horse with a grunt and led it toward the trough. The two nags slurped happily for a while, and as they raised their heads, john pulled a flannel out of his pocket and held it under the clear way=ter that trickled from a spigot into the trough’s far end. He hed the damp cloth out to Ellen and, taking it with a murmur of gratitude, she mopped the dust of her face and neck before handing it back.

“Were I not a respectable widow, John Winchester, I’d –“ she started to say when a door slammed in the yard behind them. The next thing Ellen heard was the unmistakable sound of a matchlock pistol being cocked to fire.

John straightened up. “Don’t move,” he murmured, and without turning around, pitched his voice to carry. “We can pay you for the water, and for a bit of ale as well.”

There was a pause, and a woman’s voice said, “Who are ye then?”

Ellen turned, holding her hands out to her sides. “Only travelers, Mistress, and thirsty.” She curved her lips into something she hoped looked like a smile, and added, “Would you happen to know where we might buy a bit of breads, and oats for our horses?”

After another pause, the woman’s arms relaxed and the heavy pistol dropped to her side. Unobscured by its barrel, her face was young, younger than her own, Ellen thought, but her eyes told a different story, weary and narrow in spite of the early hour.

What the hell was this place?

The sound of water behind her reminded her of another need, beyond the one for sustenance. “Mistress,” she said, without forcing the note of desperation that thrummed through her words. “Would ye happen to have a privy nearby?”

Taken by surprise, the woman laughed, a harsh flat sound, and pointed Ellen toward the building that formed the base of the U-shaped inn. “Scullery, off the kitchen.” She waved the pistol toward John. “You can go behind the barn – that’s good enough for a filthy reiver like you, John Winchester.”

“Good to see you too, Gwen,” he said. The words were cheerful, but there was something underneath them that hadn’t been there even as he was killing the young guard at the Tollbooth, and Ellen added another question to her list as she ran toward the scullery.

 

When she came out, John was still standing by the horses, chewing thoughtfully on a heel of dark bread. Ellen’s stomach growled loudly, and she thought of wistfully of her kitchen, bright and warm with its east-facing windows. As she approached him, he held out a second hunk of bread, and she took it gratefully.

“Gwen’s bringing ale,” he said, and shoved the last of his bread into his mouth.

Ellen’s mouth flooded with saliva and she bit hungrily into the crust. “Gwen?”

His face tightened. “A… cousin, I believe. Of Mary’s. Gwen Campbell.”

Before Ellen could react, the kitchen door swung open and the young woman in question appeared, two tankards gripped in one hand and, Ellen noted, the pistol still dangling from the other. She took another bite of her bread, judging it wiser than to give voice to any of the questions bubbling up to her lips.

Muttering thanks, John took both tankards and handed one to Ellen. “My thanks, Gwen.” He took a long swig, his eyes not leaving the girl’s face, and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Is Samuel about?”

Slowly, the girl shook her head. “Off r—“ quick glance at Ellen, and the girl seemed to correct herself, “—riding,” she finished. “Riding. With the boys.”

John took another, more deliberate pull at his ale. “Riding. I see. And where would they be riding, Gwen?”

“Where do they ride, ever?” she asked, lifting the pistol and gazing at its grip before shoving it into her pocket and stepping back. “Into England, of course.”

Filthy reivers, Ellen remembered her saying, and as John crossed his arms as if holding himself back from strangling the girl in frustration, and before she could turn away, said quickly, “Gwen. Would ye have any knowledge of an Englishman named Crowley?”

“Crowley? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in years!” Gwen cocked her head to one side. “Good times, those were. Colin and the boys – aye, John, you’ll remember. Mary was still living with us then, and you were just back from the west. That one r-- ride, when Colin left his best knife in an –“ she dragged herself bodily to a stop, still grinning. “Bless you, John Winchester. Colin’ll be ever so happy when I tell him you were here.” Stretching herself up onto her toes, she pecked a kiss on John’s cheek and ran back toward the kitchen.

Tempted to scratch her head like a stable boy, Ellen drained her own tankard, wiped off her mouth and swung herself up onto her horse.

“She’s quite mad,” John said unnecessarily, and hoisted himself up into his saddle. “But if you’ve got a few more miles in you, I think I know where Mary might be – and more importantly, why they’ve got her. I’d like to stay until Samuel gets back, but that could be days and –“ he glanced up at the sky, stained red from the dawn “—if I’m right, Mary doesn’t have days. Will you trust me, Ellen Harvelle, and let me explain it all later?”

For the first time since he’d walked through the door of the Traveler’s Road, John face showed the strain he was under, his flesh drawn tight to his bones and his eyes huge and dark in his face. Ellen closed her own eyes against the anguish there, then opened them again, nodding.

“I said I’d go with you, and so I shall,” she said simply, and they turned their horses to the north, and rode.

 

Chapter 6: Dean Winchester (Kansas, present day)

 

Sam was waiting outside the boxy white building that housed the Lancaster County coroner and her thoroughly-cowed employees when Dean got there. “Were they trying to make it look like a jail?” he asked as Sam swung himself into the Impala.

Sam wrinkled his brow and stared back out as if considering the idea. Finally he shook his head. “Lincoln Center, maybe. If Lincoln Center was a mall.” Sam frowned. “Dude. Can we drive through a McDonald’s or something? I think it’s been a week since I ate.”

“Lincoln Center? You are hungry, little bro,” Dean muttered, and ordered an extra chicken sandwich for Sam when they asked him what he wanted, and fries, and a couple of Cokes, and even refrained from asking any more questions until Sam had finished eating.

Once they were back out on the highway and heading west, Sam pulled out his phone and showed Dean the alert he’d gotten from the bunker’s security system.

“Sam.”

“Sorry.” Sam reclaimed the phone. “It says there was, not a break-in per se, but an attempt.”

“Animal, vegetable or mineral?’

Again the heavy brow knotted. “You’re right, I should program it to pick up EMF.”

“You can do that?”Dean was impressed in spite of himself.

“Apparently not.” Sam stopped tapping his phone and looked up. “Nothing I can detect from here, and the cameras aren’t showing me much. Footsteps, that’s about it.”

“Maybe it was just the guy from Amazon.com?”

Sam snorted but didn’t answer. Outside the car, the snow was still falling, bright flecks swirling in the glow of infrequent lampposts and spinning out against the windshield. Sam slouched against the window, his long legs propped against the dash and his features, bottom-lit by the LED, sharp and unfamiliar against the black glass of the window.

Momentarily creeped out by his brother’s resemblance to Boris Karloff, Dean snapped on the radio and, over its statickey whine, ordered Sam to find something that wasn’t fucking Journey. Sam wasn’t gonna talk, they might as well rock out.

Sam put down his phone and fiddled with the radio, but all he could find was Jesus, rap and the cheerful bleating of tubas, so he turned it back off. “What about you? Did you find anything?”

“Not much,” Dean admitted. “Grabbed his notebook, though, and his last bottle of Hunter’s Helper. Thought you could work on one while I worked on the other.”

“Dude,” Sam said, shaking his head, but there was no heat in it, and maybe even the ghost of a grin. “So, what do we know? Guy was a hunter, off on a trip –“ he raised an eyebrow in Dean’s direction, but Dean shook his head. “Okay, so we don’t know what he was hunting, but something made him haul ass back home this afternoon, where he… encountered something with a predilection for rope tricks and died in a fire that didn’t even scorch his lawn.”

“About sums it up.” Dean tapped his fingers on the wheel. “And we still haven’t heard from Garth. Just do me a favor, Sammy. Seeing as how we’re hurrying home from a hunting trip no one knows we’re on, if anything comes after you tonight with a set of vintage bondage gear, just say no.”

 

Two hours later, just as the hands on the dashboard clock hit twelve in unison, they pass the sign for the the Kansas state line.

“Looks just like Nebraska,” Dean said into the car’s interior, and Sam snorted himself awake, rubbing at his eyes and yawning like the little kid he used to be.

“Where are we?”

“Not in Nebraska, like I said.”

His long limbs suddenly awkward in the confined space, Sam crossed his arms and turned to stare out at the invisible wheat fields. Dean gave him a long look, then stabbed a finger toward the radio. Seemed the only time they got along any more was when their mouths were full of junk food or one of them was asleep. Sam was gonna have to – well, Dean thought, a little ruefully, maybe it was time to admit that he actually had no idea what Sam needed to do.

Which didn’t mean that he had any idea what he needed to do, either, just that something needed to change, or they’d be like those people on that Twilight Zone episode, sitting for eternity in chairs and reading back issues of Reader’s Digest, and not talking. Well, once Abaddon was dead, and Crowley, and Cas’s brothers and sister were back to their full-feathered glory.

A grunt from Sam reminded him that there were another couple of steps between them and the crossword puzzles. “What?” Dean demanded, and pushed the Impala up closer to 80.

“Whatever it is, it’s back.”

Sam held the phone up without saying anything else.

“What are those?”

The screen showed pinpricks of light blossoming across the fields that surrounded the entrance to their bunker. A vision of the funeral pyre they’d just left intruded onto the flat highway disappearing ahead of his lights, and Dean patted his pocket, reminded of the little bit of jewelry he’d retrieved from the couch.

Sam stared at the phone, trying to expand the image. “Fire devils, I think,” he said, and seeing nothing but night behind him in the rearview mirror, Dean patted the dash and told Baby to go for it. Ten minutes later he swung them off the highway and onto their road, but as he turned into the path that led around to the back, a wall of flame rose up in front of them.

Dean stood on the brakes, throwing his arm across Sam’s belly. Fishtailing a little on the gravel, the car shuddered to a halt, and Sam and Dean stared out the window.

As quickly as they had appeared, the flames were gone – or rather, they’d dispersed somehow, spinning into a pair of fire devils making their way across the fields toward the power station a mile away. It was weirdly mesmerizing, if you ignored the fact that it was fire and heading more or less directly for an electrical facility.

“Holy shit,” Dean breathed, and as if he’d broken some kind of spell, Sam yelled, “Go!” and pointed toward the entrance to the garage.

“No time.” The locket had been warm when he pulled it out of the couch, even though the temperature hadn’t gotten much above freezing and the couch had been drenched in water. He’d thought, at the time, that he’d seen something like it in the box he’d grabbed out of Sam’s storeroom.

That had to be it, he thought, remembering the smell, too, that he’d put down to the whole barbecued-hunter thing at the time. “Sam! Grab the kerosene. I think I know how to stop this.”

Sam swiveled his head toward Dean and then back to the fire devils. Small as they were, they’d covered a lot of ground in a hurry, and if they hit the transformers, supernatural or not, Lebanon was in for a world of hurt. “Fuck,Sam, move,” he yelled, and threw himself out of the car.

Fortunately, the bag he’d tossed the box into was on top of the weapons cache. The box was more full of crap tha he remembered, so he grabbed it and the kerosene, jogged a few paces away and dumped the contents onto the icy ground. An oval bit of gold, twin to the one in his pocket, caught a shard of moonlight, and he knelt down, grabbed it and forced it open.

“Sammy.” The little necklace was filled with what looked like hair, three different colors twisted into a tiny braid. The same smell, the one that had filled Dean’s nostrils since Waverly, Nebraska, drifted up, and he sat back, dropping the pendant and fumbling for the one in his pocket.

“Yeah, I see.” Sam crouched beside him and opened the kerosene, spilling it over the little heap of metal. “Whose hair do you suppose that is?”

Dean flicked a lighter on and dropped it onto the pendant that held the hair. There was a pause, then a sigh as the blue flame spread and caught, rising up nearly to Dean’s shoulder and twisting itself into a parody of a face before subsiding. Fucking ghosts, he thought. Always gotta try something new. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“Guess not.” Sam turned away, but before he could get very far, one boot slammed into the box Dean had emptied the jewelry out of. He crouched down to grab it, smoothing a hand over its surface. “I’m gonna call 911 just in case our little friend has any tricks up her sleeve. I’ll meet you inside.”

Dean nodded, uncapping the kerosene and putting out his hand. “Let’s set that on fire, too. I want to actually wake up tomorrow.”

As if he hadn’t heard, Sam pulled a lighter out of his pocket and flicked it on, playing it over the box’s interior. “Yeah, thought so,” he said, and setting the box back down, stepped on it hard enough to break its frame. Leaning down, he poked at it until the fragments of wood revealed a narrow tube, which he pocketed.

“Dude?” Dean said, but when Sam tossed him the lighter and took off, he addressed himself to setting the box’s remains on fire and then seeing to the Impala. If she was as tired as he was, he thought… but if she was, she deserved to bed down in the motor bay, not be left out in the driveway to freeze. Besides, it would make getting the trunk unpacked in a day or three that much easier.

His mind made up, Dean drove his car around to the garage.

 

Chapter 7: Mary Winchester (Scotland, 1595)

Mary finally let her anger and fear put her to sleep. When she woke, there were tears squeezing their way out of her tightly-closed eyes, but when she realized that the carriage had stopped its infernal jolting, she levered herself into a sitting position and blinked them open.

She was still alone in the carriage. Now, in the silence, she could hear voices and the nervous stamping of horses hooves. She tried to figure out how many hours it had been since the man in the black plaid had wrapped his hand around her arm at the market, but the leather curtains over the carriage’s windows let in little enough air, never mind light, and Mary gave it up in favor of trying to discern what her captors were shouting about outside.

That, too, seemed a hopeless exercise, until a single set of footsteps detached itself from the group and, approaching the carriage with no effort at concealment, flung the door open. Mary, expecting sunlight, closed her eyes, but when a man merely said, “Open them peepers, lass, we can’t have you falling out into the midden,” she lifted her head and looked around.

Not yet full dark, the sky behind a high wall was blood red with the sunset, and Mary shivered as a fresh salt breeze cleared the stale air. Her captor thrust his hand into the carriage, and, grasping her as firmly as the other man had, hauled her out into an expansive stable yard. Struggling to keep her footing and the remaining contents of her stomach both, Mary planted her boots as firmly as she could and tried to shrug off the unwelcome hand.

To no avail. Once he was sure she wouldn’t fall over, the man tugged her forward. As they crossed the yard, a small group of men in black jerkins, their faces hidden beneath low-brimmed hats, stared at her.

“This one’s a pretty little morsel, Diccon!”

There was a jerk on her arm and Mary stumbled, and the man holding her laughed. “This one’s spoken for, lads: Crowley himself paid five crowns for her, and he’ll not be best pleased if she’s kicked around the yard first!”

He yanked on her again, but this time, holding her weight against her heels, she yanked back, bringing them both to a stop. “I’ll thank you to unhand me, I am entirely capable of walking.”

“So you are.” Peeling his fingers off her arm one by one, he dropped his grip on her and examined his glove for a moment. Then, glancing behind her at the men who’d stopped, he said, casually, “And shall I leave you here? Or will you come with me into the hall?”

Blood pounded in Mary’s head. Above her, the sunset had faded, leaving the sky to the deep indigo of the northern night, and in the stable yard the wind had freshened, whirling small piles of trash and straw into tiny devils. An oily laugh sounded behind her, and Mary straightened her shoulders and gave him as regal a nod as she could summon. He laughed and set out across the stable yard without glancing back. Mary, having compromised her dignity but not, she hoped, her chance of survival, followed him as slowly as slowly as her straining bladder would allow.

When they reached a short flight of stairs the man paused, and to Mary’s surprise, loosened the ropes around her wrists and tugged them off. Mary flexed her hands, biting her lip against the pain of the blood newly flowing into them. She glanced up at the door, but when she would have moved forward, he bent down, putting his lips against her ear, and said “He’ll have a deal for you, lass. Mind you accept it, an’ you want to see your babes again.”

She recoiled. “You’ve been following me! I’m naught but a blacksmith’s wife - whatever could I have that you want?” she hissed, but he shook his head, and, reaching for the door, grasped her roughly and pulled her forward.

 

The room she found herself in was small and as dark as the carriage had been, but “—there’s a candle in the corner, and a washstand against the wall,” she heard as she was shoved forward, and then she was on her knees on the cold stone floor, the silence ringing behind her. This time, though, as much as she wanted to close her eyes and summon Sam’s features, wanted to stay on her knees and sob into her skirts no matter how filthy the floor beneath her, she forced herself to crawl forward, one hand outstretched, in search of the candle stub the man had promised her. When she finally found it, and the flint her hosts had so thoughtfully provided, she sat back, took a deep breath, and concentrated on striking a spark that would light the candle and not the straw that littered the floor.

When the wick finally blossomed into a sharp bright flame, Mary let herself relax and looked around the little room. The room was low-ceilinged and dank, as if it had once been a dairy, and one barred window set high into one wall funneled a continual draft into the room. On the far wall, as promised, there was a low bench equipped with a pitcher and a basin, and as she lifted the candle, she could see that, miracle of miracles, a covered chamberpot rested beneath it.

Ten minutes later she shifted the basin off onto the floor, sat herself down, and tried to figure out what was happening to her. A deal, her captor had said. What kind of a deal? The men who’d grabbed her from the market had been shouting about witches and witchcraft, but the other women in the wagon she’d been thrown into looked like no other witches Mary had ever seen, and when they’d drawn up in front of the Tollbooth, it hadn’t taken long for Mary to realize the other women were little more than a distraction. Like handing Sam his dolly when she needed to dose his cough: Mary, herself, had been the point and purpose of the arrests.

But for what reason? That was the point she couldn’t fathom. Had the charge of witchcraft been real, Mary was willing to wager her own grimoire she’d still be in chains and preparing to face down a witchfinder. It was still, she supposed, a possibility.

Something close to an hour later, the door to her cell banged open, and Mary Winchester, twisting her fingers in her skirts, got to her feet. Apples she thought. All she’d wanted were apples for her boys.

 

This time, two men she hadn’t seen before grabbed her by the arms. “Not a word out of you,” one of them growled. The room they brought her to was much larger, a hall in the old baronial style, lit by a blazing fire at one end and torches at intervals along the walls. In between the torches, tapestries, sagging and faded, hid what Mary assumed were stone walls from view. Her gaolers marched her forward until she stood before a large carved chair holding what looked, at first glance, to be a small carved man.

Mary blinked, and a log broke in the fireplace in a shower of sparks. The man in the chair shifted, yawned, and lifted a cane to prod the men holding her arms. “Begone,” he said simply, and they pulled their hands off her in unison and disappeared. “Did you do that little trick with the fire?”

Mary gave it a look, but the flames were oblivious. “I – no,” she said. “Who the devil are you, by the way?”

This time, the tip of the cane prodded her. “Temper, temper.” The voice was English and sounded bored. “Ten more minutes, maybe less – ah, here we go!” Another door banged open, and Mary’s first captor strode forward, bringing with him cold air and the smell of the sea.

“My men are back, Lord Crowley, and I’m pleased to tell you their hunting trip was a success.” He turned back toward the door and, with an elaborate gesture, ushered the men behind him into the hall.

Mary glanced around, wondering if she could take advantage of the distraction to flee, but as the room filled with men, she abandoned that idea in favor of freezing in shock. There, wrapped in iron chains and surrounded by heavily-armed men, was her father.

“My lord, may I present Samuel Campbell?” Mary’s captor said with another flourish.

“And here it’s not even my saint’s day.” Lord Crowley rose to his feet. He swept a filthy black robe off his shoulders and strode into the center of the room to prod at Samuel Campbell’s belly. “Thank you, dear boy. But we’ve met before, haven’t we, Samuel my lad? Haven’t we?”

As everyone beamed and the fire rose in the hearth behind them, Mary’s father reared back and, chains and guards notwithstanding, launched himself forward and smashed his own head into Crowley’s face. When Crowley dropped to the floor the guards tried to wrestle him back, but Campbell stood his ground, his chest heaving and blood dripping from his forehead to pool on Crowley’s belly.

“That we have, you filthy English scum.”

A momentary silence descended on the hall. Mary stared from her father to the wheezing, cursing figure on the floor – the man who’d had her kidnapped, she reminded herself, who held absolute power over her ability to ever clap eyes on her son or her husband again - and then back to her father, whose actions, she had no real doubt, held the key she’d been searching for.

“What have you done?” she whispered, and then twelve hours of anger and fear overflowed their banks. Mary Winchester marched up to her father and slapped him full across the face, and when he didn’t seem to react, his eyes fixed on the man behind her, she did it again. “Look at me, damn you. What foolishness have you brought down on the heads of my boys, Samuel Campbell?”

The answer, when it came, was Crowley’s: “Ask him about the raid on Wark five years back, and the lives he took that night. Ask him why he came home missing his sword, Mary, if you want to know why you are here.”

Behind her the fire rose higher, and as Mary gazed at her father, the guards holding him began to step back.

“Ask him!” Crowley demanded through the blood in his throat.

Mary shut her eyes, briefly. It was Dean’s face she saw this time, the soft dusting of freckles across his nose, the sweet sleepy green of his eyes as she’d seen them that morning. If she looked hard enough, she could see him in her father’s face, in the set of his shoulders and in the weight of his jaw.

She had to know. “Da- “ she started to say, but Crowley lurched to his feet and, taking her jaw in his bloody hands, forced her to look above the hearth at the single steel blade that hung above its stone mantel. The blade itself was short and wicked, but its hilt bore a device she had known since her days in leading strings: the Campbell crest. Ignoring the fire, roiling in its hearth, she jerked herself loose and walked toward the blade.

It was, she saw, a fine piece. And she knew without lifting it down that, despite its weight, the blade itself would sing in the hand of anyone who carried it, for it was her husband’s work.

She turned back to her father, but it was, again, Crowley who answered. “Aye, Mistress Winchester. It’s over my hearth because it was my son it took.”

“And so you would take my life in exchange?” Mary pitched her voice to carry, but it seemed to get lost in the sudden spill of voices in the room, and she shook her head, trying to clear her ears. “Da, is this true?”

Samuel’s eyes slid past hers to fix on the blade, but as if rooted to the spot, he didn’t come any closer. “Never found a sword to match that one,” he said, wonderingly. “Always wondered where it got to.”

Why will he not move? Mary thought. Her back to the room, she stared into the fire. The flames, she thought, were beautiful, particularly deep in hearts, where the blue was the strongest. But she liked the sparks as well, liked their playful snapping voices and their willingness to fling themselves higher and higher – and liked, too, the smoke that followed their steps, liked its rolling black menace and the way it blanketed the room as the sparks did their work.

 

Chapter 8 Dean Winchester (Kansas, present day)

The place was quiet when Dean finally got out of the shower. He’d half-expected to fall asleep in there, lulled by the water pounding down onto the tiles and through his hair and the steam finally, finally clearing the stink out of his nostrils, but he hadn’t, and when he pulled on his sweats he realized he was too keyed up to sleep. And yeah, there was one – well, two, but who was counting? – good cure for that, so Dean shoved his feet into his slippers and padded down the hall to the kitchen, tying the belt on his robe as he went and trying to remember if they’d made any ice before hauling ass up to South Dakota.

Didn’t really matter, of course: scotch, like pie, was equally tasty at room temp, an opinion that Sam, apparently, shared.

“Were you waiting for the shower?”

Sam didn’t look up when Dean spoke, but he pushed the bottle across the kitchen table, into the pool of clear white light cast by the old glass fixture. Next to the bottle, Dean could see, lay a fragment of yellowed paper, its edges held down by Sam’s glass and a bone-handled knife. Next to the knife were the two matching pendants that Dean had last seen burning in the yard. Sam’s hands, as they moved back across the table, trembled slightly.

Dean frowned. Grabbing a glass, he sat down and splashed enough scotch into the glass to, he hoped, get him through whatever Sam was about to say.

He didn’t have long to wait.

“You should have said something.”

“About what?”

Sam shoved the paper and the blackened bit of gold toward Dean. “You have any idea what these are?”

“No, of course not. But, Sam, we killed whatever was in them – so who cares, at this point?”

Sam stood up and loomed over the table. His eyes narrowed, he spat, “You didn’t think it was important to tell me we drove to fucking South Dakota and back with a witch in the car?” He pointed toward the pendant they’d burned the hair out of. Inside, the gold was discolored, but the outline of the little braid was still visible, and on the opposite side, Dean could see an even fainter image.

“What is that? It looks like a head or something.”

Sam sat back down, heavily. “Yeah, it’s a head. Or something. Thing is, the stuff in that storeroom, it’s really old. And really powerful. Obviously.” He waved his free hand in a gesture that took in the two dead hunters, the not-dead power station and the fact that they still haven’t heard from a bunch of people. Dean opened his mouth to apologize, but Sam reached across the table and lifted Dean’s hand, twisting it hard. Surprised, Dean went with the movement until the sleeve of his robe fell away. There, in the silence between them, the Mark of Cain was clearly visible. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?” Sam said, finally. “Anything else that could kill us that you’re keeping secret?”

Somewhere in the building, the furnace kicked on, and Dean pulled his arm away and pushed his sleeve back down. He was too fucking tired for this, but if they were ever going to have this conversation, four in the morning was probably as good a time as any. Splashing more scotch into both glasses, Dean picked up the little pendant.

“First of all, everything in our lives is trying to kill us. Sooner you accept that, easier it all gets.” Sam opened his mouth, but Dean shook his head. “Second, I grabbed this figuring you could keep working on it if we were gonna be gone for a few days. You seemed to know it had something to do with the first fire – you shoulda brought it yourself. Or we shoulda ganked it right then and there.”

He paused, sucked in a breath and most of what was left in his glass, and then looked directly at Sam. His brother’s eyes were still narrow slits, the irises nearly invisible, and a muscle jumped in his jaw.

Dean swallowed the rest of his scotch. “But Sam, we don’t talk any more. Not about cases, not about Cas, not about – not about anything, so when the hell am I going to --” He faltered for a moment, then finally shook his head and added, “You’re so pissed at me still it’s like you’re not even here anymore.”

“I’m pissed at you for a good fucking reason!” Sam roared, and Dean nodded.

“I get that, dude, I do. But you’re gonna have to forgive me sometime.”

“No I don’t!”

And that was Sam at six, and eight, and thirty, for fuck’s sake, and Dean supposed he should be grateful that Sam still felt he needed to argue his own right to stay mad. Biting back the smirk that wasn’t gonna help anything, he said, “Yeah, dude, you are. Because otherwise you’re gonna end up like whatever was trapped inside that damn necklace, still pissed enough to set fires what? A hundred years later?”

And maybe that finally got through Sam’s Winchester-thick skull, because he relaxed suddenly, sprawling back into his chair hard enough to make it creak alarmingly, and tapped one long finger on the piece of paper. “Four hundred years, give or take. Refill those glasses, I gotta tell you a story.” And before Dean could open his own mouth to argue, he added, with a twist of his lips that wasn’t quite a grin, “And then we can talk.”