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1
Cassie’s smile is tight and forced as she straps Bobby John into his car seat in the back of an elderly Volvo station wagon that looks like an animal cracker box on wheels.
The baby coos questioningly when she hands him a plushy Pokémon Ditto, but keeps his current blue-eyed, dark-haired form. Cassie’s learned the hard way not to give Bobby John toys that look like people unless she’s prepared to clean up Shifter Sludge. (Dean has a ruder term for it that he’s been told not to use in front of the baby.)
The car runs, which is all she asks of it.
Nobody asks questions when she loads Bobby John’s gear and a couple bags of her own into the back of the car. Anyone can see Sam Winchester is a ticking bomb.
2
Missouri’s smile is warm, welcoming, and utterly unsurprised when Cassie parks the Volvo in front of her little frame house.
“You have time for pie before you need to hit the road again,” the psychic says as she reaches into the back seat for Bobby John. “There’s a good baby, he is, he is.”
The fear she thought she’d left somewhere north of Omaha sparks through Cassie’s bones again. “Sam’s after us?”
“No. There’s good news waiting for you, but it’s got an expiration date. Tomorrow will be too late.”
Cassie lets Missouri bustle her into the cluttered, brightly colored front room. The minute Bobby John is set down on a blanket, he tries to crawl away and put things in his mouth. A glance around shows any pictures in Missouri’s house are turned around, so he won’t splurk. He had a diaper change at a Gas-N-Sip half an hour ago, so they’re probably fine for a while.
“Don’t even think about what that Dean of yours is up to,” Missouri calls from the kitchen. “He made his choice and his road is his.”
As Cassie eats pecan pie, drinks sweet tea, and updates Missouri on Bobby Joe’s development, she suddenly, acutely misses the afternoon sunlight in her old home, back in Cape Girardeau. Her host’s house is scented with incense and roses, not spice bush and coffee, but the hominess rips at her heart.
“I wish I could go home,” she says. “Not to Dean. Back to Missouri. Where I came from. Where my friends are.”
Missouri Mosely lifts an eyebrow. “If that’s your choice, go.”
“I can’t protect Bobby John from the Alpha Shapeshifter by myself. I want to go back, but… some things, you can’t have.”
“Here’s one you can.” Missouri opens an enameled box and pulls out a note card. Written on it, in her neat, swirling script, is a name—Tom Carey—and an address in Lebanon, Kansas. “A little bird told me he’s the oldest hunter alive. One-hundred and twenty-seven.”
Cassie’s reporter skills ping hard. “Hunters are lucky to live past thirty-five.”
“Exactly. If you get there today and ask him everything you can think of, you might learn something to your advantage.”
“You sound like a fortune teller.”
“Imagine that. While I’m watching your Bobby John, is it okay if I put out photos that might inspire him to look a little more like us?”
3
Tom Carey has the narrow-lipped secretive smile of old age. He’s three-quarters blind, with a stern, adoring wife, living in a narrow frame house that has the recliner, the TV, and the faint scent of canned pasta sauce that Cassie expects from old men.
His tales of his glory days are wild.
A secret organization. A ritual invaded by a knight of hell. Tom’s best friend shooting a bullet etched with a devil’s trap into the demon’s head before dying of his wounds. All his friends dead and their meeting place burned. Years of hiding even from hunters, lest Hell track him down.
“But Hell didn’t get what they came for,” he finishes.
“Which was?” Cassie prompts. Her notebook is so full that she’s writing sideways in the margins.
“The key to every object, scroll, spell ever collected for thousands of years under one roof.” He smirks.
“The supernatural mother lode.” Getting access to something like that is a reporter’s wildest dream come true. “Where is it?”
The old man scribbles a set of coordinates on the page of a tiny drugstore notepad, holding it close to his eyes. “Won’t do you much good, though. The key didn’t go to Hell, but we don’t know where else it went. I haven’t seen or touched it since that night in 1958.”
4
Cassie and the pallid wife exchange tentative smiles across the front gate, both lingering a little too long in the chilly twilight. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Peggy.” The little faded woman runs a wrinkled finger along the picket fence posts, half-smiling. “I was there, you know. Tom doesn’t.”
“You were one of the Men of Letters?”
Peggy Carey laughs. “No. I was a maid at that hotel they burned down. Barely more than a kid, curious as a cat and no common sense at all.”
“What did you see that night?”
“Most terrifying things in my entire life. I pulled Tom out when the place went up in flames. He thinks he crawled out, thinks the little Irish girl who took him to her brother’s house and looked after him was passing by. If he thought at all.”
“And you fell in love?”
“Not really. Tom got better and went on the run. I grew up, got courted, got married, got divorced. He dropped in again in 1973, and we’ve been together ever since.” Her smile grows secretive. “There’s a thing I’d kept that I thought about giving him then, but I didn’t want to live in a hole in the ground, no matter how many books it has.”
Peggy Carey pulls a box from her sweater pocket and presses it into Cassie’s hands. “You’ll know what to do with this.”
Cassie stumbles over thanks that Peggy waves aside. “If you come back and tell us about it, don’t make it sound too good. I like my garden and my neighbors and my shift at the visitors center.”
5
Cassie parks the Volvo in a wide spot next under something that’s half wooded bluff, half abandoned WPA-era power plant. The door, set in a structure of brick and concrete and painted steel poles, looks like an old maintenance access in the beam of Cassie’s flashlight. Trash on the ground says teenagers have partied here.
She breathes in cold air scented with dead leaves and wonders if she should wait until daylight. Every habit she’s developed as an investigative reporter of the weird and uncanny says this is not a place she should enter without holy water, salt, and a large fly swatter.
She can always shut the door once she’s opened it. She hopes.
“There ain’t nothin’ but space and opportunity here.” The key fits the lock. The door opens, as doors tend to do. She reaches a hand into the darkness—no point in walking right into a trap or a spiderweb—and finds a light switch.
Oh.
Oh my.
Three steps forward put her on a balcony, above a circular room lined with the kind of radios and gear that’s usually buried at the back of Bobby’s sheds. It’s institutional, all tile and dials, with the elaborate aesthetic of an old government building or a movie supervillain’s lair. There’s no dust, which is odd, and no scent of mold or decay.
Cassie descends the stairs slowly—partly from caution, partly from awe, and partly because this kind of stair demands making an entrance, preferably in a sweeping satin evening gown to a flurry of jazz trumpets.
She can just about handle all this until she steps into the library. Tom Carey wasn’t kidding about having hundreds—no, thousands—of books. The scent of old paper and leather, old ideas and long-ago furniture polish, is seductive as perfume. With this kind of knowledge, she can cut through the layers of rumor and superstition. She can write truth, and where there’s truth, the next step is change.
What draws Cassie’s gaze, even before she looks for a catalog to this library, is the lines of symbols engraved, etched, inlaid, and painted in the woodwork and the warm golden stone walls. This place is warded up the yin-yang.
This place will be safe for raising Bobby John.
She explores more because she’s no fool—anything this good usually is a snare and a delusion. The place is weird but free of cold spots, slime, giant spider webs, anything detectable with EMF, bats, nine-banded armadillos, and obvious portals to Hell. Precautions against unnamed horrors have also made it surprisingly child-proofed, with most levers, buttons, and sharp edges too high for little hands to reach.
When her steps lead her back to that library at the heart of the building—so like the tiny downtown library she remembers as a kid, but magic—she pulls out a wooden chair to just sit at a table and take it all in.
Tears slide down her face to join a smile so bright and broad, it makes her cheeks ache.