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“You won’t see me living in a hole in the ground,” Missouri Moseley says as she hefts Bobby John over to an exhausted Cassie. The baby’s skin is now a soft, deep brown-black, matched with sunny brown eyes and curly black hair. “I think he’s the cutest he’s ever been, aren’t you, peanut?”
Bobby John coos and waves his rattle.
“I guess I’ll find a way to handle everything myself,” Cassie says, forcing cheerfulness into her voice. She’s driven something like 14 hours today, back and forth across flat bare plains. The adrenaline hangover of fleeing South Dakota merged right into the adrenaline hangover from finding the bunker. All she’s eaten since breakfast is one slice of pecan pie and two Girl Scout cookies, and all she wants is to crawl into bed with a bowl of spinach-olive salad and two aspirin.
“I never said you’d be handling it alone. Take the guest room, sleep till you wake, and when you leave, I’ll have a list of names for you.”
“You know people who want to babysit a shapeshifter in a secret bunker.”
“I know people who need you as much as you need them.”
1
“Interview with a vampire?” Lenore Menard laughs the way people do when they’re trying to mock the forces of Hell, a tone Cassie wishes she didn’t know so well.
She found the vegetarian vampire huddled on a park bench in a sere and snow-flecked park in the back end of Idaho, sucking at a limp squirrel.
Cassie shifts her baby sling to ease her shoulders—Bobby John’s snuggled in layers and napping—before perching at the far end of the bench, phone ready to record in one hand, syringe loaded with dead man’s blood in the other. “Interview if that’s all you want. Or a job, if you want that.”
“Everyone’s gone. They all started on humans.”
“I know.” Cassie followed a trail of dead and missing humans to this town. “What happened?”
“The mother… she’s calling to us. She wants us to be… I don’t want to be like that.” Lenore’s pasty face squinches in what could be pain or could be terror. Everything about her is limp: her hair’s gone stringy, her clothes look too loose, even her nose seems ready to droop.
“Who’s calling you?”
“The mother of monsters. She created… us… our forebears. She’s woken up and she’s out there and she wants us and I don’t want to.”
Dean and Bobby haven’t said a word about any mother of monsters in front of Cassie. Either they don’t know, or this came up in the week since she left, or there’s a lot they weren’t telling her about their tangles with Alpha creatures. Given how they shut down every time Sam or Samuel came up, she’s betting on the third option.
“If I could take you to a place where nothing like that can reach you, would you go? Would that help?”
Lenore squints at her. “If you’re offering to kill me, just say so.”
“I’m not.” Cassie says a prayer to whoever’s listening, that Missouri Moseley put enough extra wards on the Volvo to keep a vampire quiet and happy for a two-day drive back to Kansas. “This probably sounds crazy, but I’m looking for a nanny.”
2
They’re not even an hour down the mountain when Bobby John’s diaper needs a change.
“Do you want anything?” Cassie asks as she loads the baby out of the backseat at the first gas station that doesn’t look like a creepy import from another dimension. Lenore drowses, sedated by a voluntary injection of dead man’s blood.
“Cracker nuts, if they’ve got them.” The vampire has enough coherence to react to Cassie’s startled look. “They don’t do anything, but I like the crunch.”
The cashier looks Native, so he won’t give her the blankly hostile look and narrowed eyes that she’s gotten when she stopped in resort areas. The bathroom’s clean, too.
Cassie’s lined up with a bottle of Sobe that matches her sweater, two bags of cracker nuts, and a huckleberry hand pie in a hand-labeled Ziplock bag when an outdoorsy woman taps her shoulder.
“You’re Cassandra Winchester?”
Cassie turns at the mention of her adopted byline, bracing herself for a flashed badge and a pair of handcuffs, her heart slamming into her chest with urgency to protect Bobby John, who raises big golden-brown eyes to examine the stranger. Oh no. Don’t change. Don’t change. She’s already marked every display she could knock over to slow a pursuer. Her big bag works equally well as holy water storage, diaper bag, and weapon.
“Who’s asking?”
“This is going to sound weird, but I think you’re my ride out of town.”
Ellie Rodriguez is all angles and competence. She doesn’t flinch when Cassie asks her to bare a muscled forearm so to be splashed with salt, holy water, garlic powder, food-grade silver powder, and anything else that might be useful.
“Hot sauce?” Ellie says as she wipes her arm with a paper napkin and rolls down her denim sleeve.
“You never know.”
Ellie takes the passenger seat, sips a diet Dr. Pepper, and finds an AM radio station that plays 80s hits. “Demon deal,” is all she says. “Cured my mother’s Parkinson’s. I didn’t know I was slated to be torn up by the hounds of the Baskervilles. A little bird told me there were places I could be safe. Named you. I’ve worked for the same family since I was a kid, but they’re assholes. Not the horses’ fault. That’s not something I can fix. That’s not worth dying for.”
She sings along softly with the radio. You’ve got to make a decision. Leave tonight or live and die this way.
3
Tamara Wilkins turns out to be squatting in a collapsing house in Gary, Indiana. Somewhere in the Apocalypse, she broke a leg badly enough that running isn’t in her future, and walking isn’t something she can do every day. Her clothes hang loose against skin gone ashy with neglect. The place stinks of rotting food, unbathed flesh, mold, and despair.
Her housemates, even with too many or too few or the wrong drugs in their system, sense her hunter past and treat her with respectful fear.
She holds grudges: at the Winchesters for starting the Apocalypse, at demons for killing her husband Isaac, at hunters in general.
“For living a goddamn off-the-grid life where nobody can get medical insurance or disability payments,” she grumbles. “If we’d stayed in England, we’d have the bloody NHS. All you hunters can offer is a bullet in the head, like you’d put down a dog.”
“I’m not a hunter,” Cassie explains again. She wishes she’d brought Ellie, whose manner cuts right through angry fear. Cassie can soothe people on the way to getting answers, but she doesn’t exude the same assurance that help is here. “When Bobby was in a wheelchair—”
“Bobby’s an exception. He’s got something people need. Hunters like me are blunt instruments to beat the terror out of the world.”
“So be something else.”
Tamara stares at her. “Sure. I’ll just grow wings and fly up to Heaven and do some rearranging.”
“Come home with me. I’ve got the largest library of hunter lore in the known world. Help me organize it and read it. Teach us what you know. Do whatever you want around the place.”
“And why do I get this free ride to an easy life? What’s the catch?”
“Shapeshifter baby, vegetarian vampire nanny, not much in the way of natural light, and Ellie’s still learning how to use the infirmary, where a lot of equipment was new and innovative in 1950. On the upside, you get your own room, we split the cooking, and if we do this right, we can remake the hunter world to be less of a shitfest.”
Tamara thinks it over, lips pressed together. After a long moment when Cassie mentally curses hunter prejudices, Tamara nods. “I’ll do it. A change has got to come.”
4
Cassie goes back to Dean because she’s not immune to doing stupid things in the name of love, sex, and nostalgia.
It’s been a productive winter. Lenore perked up within a day of entering the bunker. She smiles, her hair bounces, and Bobby John adores her. Cassie braced herself for a crisis the first time Bobby John splurked—this time, into the image of a red-haired little boy he found in a picture book—but shapeshifter bits hold no appeal for vampires.
Ellie has appointed herself operations manager, which means they have a full pantry, a Post Office box in town, plans for a hydroponic garden, a rotation schedule for cooking and cleaning, and a pair of bicycles. Tamara took over weapons maintenance and is building an inventory of what all these things are, happily ordering rare bullets and fancy body lotions on eBay. She supervises and sometimes participates in a daily unarmed sparring session that leaves Cassie sore but faintly impressed with herself.
The last name on Cassie’s list—Gwen Campbell—doesn’t return Cassie’s calls or texts.
Dean Winchester texts out of the blue.
Sam’s fixed.
It’s 3 a.m. and Cassie’s still up because Bobby John has a cold, so she might as well skim through another book of spells while she’s giving him the herbal mixture recommended by Healing Methods for Cryptids, A Manual for the Surgeon of Creatures of All Sorts.
She sighs, tells herself to leave it alone, reads three more pages with forced concentration, then texts back a single word: “How?”
Not demon blood. Lost his soul.
Cassie waits.
Got it back.
South Dakota seems a lifetime away, and she could reach out to touch it if she dared.
Miss you & BJ.
So it’s one long call to get the whole story because despite her new friends, she’s lonely for parts of herself that she’s left behind. It ends up, two days later, with Ellie assuring her through the car window that everything will be fine if she’s gone for a few days. “That’s the point, isn’t it? We share the work, we get time to do our own thing.”
Six hours and three cups of coffee later, she walks into an argument about cryptids gathering along I-80. Dean slaps her ass, pulls a disappointed face that she hasn’t brought Bobby John, and tugs her into the discussion. Sam lurks gigantically, looking softer than she’s seen him since the difficult time after her father’s death. He keeps eyeing her sheepishly, as if he can’t figure how to spit out an apology. He stays more than arm’s length from Bobby at all times. Every time Sam shifts a hairsbreadth closer, Bobby’s hand twitches to the knife at his belt before he carefully moves it away.
The case is juicy in a grim way—great press, horrible tragedy. A trucker for a cannery in Sandusky suddenly murdered his family with a hammer.
“Siren?” Cassie suggests.
“No talk of any affair” is Bobby’s quick reply. “This pattern of monster activity—”
“Cryptid activity.” It’s an automatic correction, newly learned from books older than her great-grandparents. “Being non-human doesn’t make you a monster.”
“Well, these cryptids are killing innocent people, so I’d say they bought tickets on the monster train.”
“Sirens don’t always…” Dean starts. He’s suddenly blushing. “Not always affairs. You know.”
“If it’s a siren, we still need to check it out,” Sam volunteers.
Bobby clears his throat, glaring under his ratty feed cap. “The point is, the Monster Mash seems to be on the way to hang out with the Mother of All, and that’s our kind of bad news.”
Cassie’s step away from Dean is automatic. “You did know about the Mother of All.”
“How do you know?” Dean asks with a decent imitation of innocence.
“She’s a reporter, idjit. She’s usually two steps ahead of you.”
When she heads for the stairs to get a night’s sleep before they head for Sandusky, Dean stops her with a hand on her hip. “I still. Your room.” He struggles his way into a cocky smile like a kid putting on a too-small shirt. “Nobody changed anything, if you want.”
She wants. She knows she won’t get a real explanation of anything because Dean has no setting between tall-tale teller and total repression, but she’s starving of skin hunger and he’s comfortable to her in a way that transcends life and death.
The next afternoon, she’s on the phone, asking her crew to research black ooze. That bunker library needs to be cataloged, yesterday.
A month ago, none of us had this, she reminds herself. We will climb this mountain.
That evening, she’s following Dean, Sam, and Bobby on an unauthorized excursion into the cannery. If she lets her imagination drift, she can feel hatred oozing in the damp walls. “You know how I feel about the woods,” she says, angling for the comfort of Dean’s picking up a TV quote.
It’s Bobby’s frenemy Rufus who gets it. “‘Black people die in the woods. But after the monster kills the white nerd, and we don't have one of those with us, so we're good.’”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Sam protests. “When did I stop being a nerd?”
When you learned to use a machete, Cassie doesn’t say. Sam and Dean and Bobby go off on some tangent about whether nerds do or don’t shoot straight.
Twenty minutes of darkness filled with looming equipment and the dank smell of raw fish, stalking something unknown with pepper spray in one hand and holy water in the other, wind Cassie’s nerves to the shattering point. She stifles a scream when a door opens and Gwen Campbell steps through, armed.
Everyone blinks at everyone else, guns raised, and this is one hell of a family reunion.
“You don’t return my texts,” Cassie says.
“I was busy.” Gwen tilts her head to Grandpa Samuel, who stalks in behind her, as burly and bald and bullish as ever.
Cassie straight-up doesn’t believe her eyes when Dean levels his gun at his grandfather’s head and announces, in Dirty Harry tones, “Welcome to next time.”
Sam slaps Dean’s gun down, repeating no no no no no.
“I said I’d do it next time,” Dean growls. “This is next time.”
“I take it you’ve met,” Rufus quips.
“He’s our grandfather. We don’t take after him.”
“Oooh, someone didn’t get enough hugs.”
“Long story,” Sam interjects. “Later. Why are you two here?”
“We’re working. You?”
“None of your damn business,” Dean snaps.
Bobby turns to her with a sigh. “Cassie, take Dean for a walk. Please.”
She drops the holy water in her bag so she can take Dean’s arm, because once she’s got a grip, he won’t resist hard enough to hurt her. It takes argument and a strong tug to get him out in a corridor, out of earshot of whatever Samuel Campbell is going to tell Sam and Bobby.
Once she’s sure Dean won’t run, she puts as much space as possible between them.
“Why do you want to shoot your grandfather?” she asks, as if that’s a reasonable question.
Dean froths his way through a story of deals and betrayals, with a long and emotional side-trek into how Castiel, angel of the lord, kissed the demon Meg against the wall of the new King of Hell’s dungeon. She gets it all recorded on her phone, but it’s more like material for a self-published bodice-ripper than anything she can craft into a coherent piece of journalism.
“What could you do other than shooting him, that’d satisfy you?” she asks as she slips her phone back into its pocket. He’s had his gun ready this whole time, and she’ll feel better with a couple spray bottles of cryptid repellent ready to go.
“Punching him. Kicking him. Strangling feels too personal.”
“There exist conflict management strategies other than—”
“Dean!” Gwen calls, skidding into sight. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Did Samuel really try to—”
“Kill me? Yes. He didn’t even blink. If you’re here to tell me that I should hug it out, forget it.”
“I didn’t know.” Gwen steps slowly forward, her hands raised. “He didn’t tell me.”
“The guys aren’t telling us lots of things,” Cassie says. “It’s time to fix that.”
Dean’s lips twitch. “Ask the questions. I’ve got the answers.” He turns, gun aiming at Cassie’s chest, moving too fast even as she raises her pepper spray—
His bullet hits the distant ceiling as his head hits the floor. Cassie’s trembling so hard that she needs a minute to realize she’s still standing. She focuses her eyes to see Gwen squatting over Dean with one knee on his chest and a booted foot on his gun hand. Gwen’s caught his other wrist in one hand and is using the other to punch him.
Cassie squirts him with the pepper spray. “That’ll keep him down while we decide what to do with him. Less bloody, less long-term damage.”
“Less satisfying.”
Since Dean’s curled up, weeping and rubbing his eyes, Cassie’s not so sure about that. She sorts her feelings—terror, betrayal, shattered love, disgust—and wants nothing more than to be back anywhere that doesn’t involve Dean Winchester.
The others have come running—hunters are crazy, they run toward the gunshots—and are making the kind of noises people make when they don’t know what’s going on but want to be in charge. Rufus helps her up, with something close enough to a hug that it helps a little. Samuel removes Gwen from Dean. Sam cleans Dean’s eyes with Cassie’s holy water and makes let’s all get along noises, which everyone ignores.
“Ewwwwwwwwwwwww,” Gwen shrieks, which is not a hunter thing to do.
A slug longer than Cassie’s hand oozes out of Dean’s ear.
Cassie hits it hard with everything in her collection of bottles because it’s moving fast toward a vent, and whatever it had to do with Dean’s trying to shoot her, it’s not good news. Vinegar, ashes, garlic, salt. Salt, you’re a slug, dissolve in the salt. Hot sauce.
Nothing works.
Gwen sets a boot on it, hard, and the thing collapses into a smear of jelly. “I used to step on snails in the garden when I was little. Maybe that’s all it is.”
Dean picks black ooze from his ear, examines it with the speculative expression of a four-year-old with a booger, and finds a rag in his jacket to wipe his hands. “Freakin’ escargots don’t climb in people’s ears. We don’t know how many they are or how they grab people.”
From there, it gets worse. Everyone has to stay together. Nobody wants to be together. Sam’s angry at Gwen for slugging Dean. Dean still hates Samuel. Bobby and Rufus have somehow come up with an argument about something that happened in Omaha.
Cassie flinches if Dean comes near her. The instant when the gun pointed at her is stamped on her brain, right across all the memories of good times.
“What the hell happened when Sluggo was in my ear?” he demands.
She tells him, and then it’s his turn to flinch.
“You know that wasn’t me aiming that gun?”
“I know it was me it was aimed at. Were you possessed when you threatened to shoot your grandfather, too?”
“No. I’ve been planning to do that for a while. Cassie, I wouldn’t… I wasn’t myself, okay? That ear worm… it could have picked Gwen as easy as you.”
“That doesn’t make it as much better as you think.”
“If you expect hunting to always be an episode of Scooby Doo, you’re doomed to disappointment.”
Cassie’s not dignifying that with a response, so when they’re safely in the locker room, weapons locked away, she goes to sit with Gwen, backs against the wall, hands loose in their laps to be ready for something.
“Campbells hunt,” Gwen explains. “Our great-great-whatevers were killing vampires on the Mayflower. When I was six, I thought everyone’s family vacation included taking out a wendigo. Nobody in first-grade show-and-tell believed me.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“It’s better than working shifts at the Gas-N-Sip. I got fired after I disarmed a robber instead of pressing the panic button and handing over the cash. He didn’t even have a good grip on his pistol. I could have taken him when I was ten.”
“If you could do something else—”
“There isn’t a lot that works with having to be ready when the war comes to us. Low-end jobs, jump and run, work a couple weeks and then no-show because something’s up three states away… that’s how it is.”
Cassie thinks back over those few months in Cape Girardeau when Dean tried to make an honest living as an auto mechanic. It was her decision to run, but he seemed so relieved.
“Bobby has the salvage yard.”
Gwen shrugs. “Well, yeah, own your own business, make your own hours. My cousin Christian says… said… that when he was tiny, hunters had homes and jobs almost like anyone else. It all got worse about twenty-five, thirty years ago.”
The guys’ bickering rises to the level of a fight. Bodies slam against the next row of lockers as a gunshot cracks into nowhere, followed by running feet and swearing.
Both women are on their feet, simultaneously holding out an arm to keep the other safe. “I can handle this,” Gwen says.
“We don’t know that you’re not part of this,” Bobby snarls as he steps around the corner, holding a gun. “You’re with him, and he’s not on our side.”
“Look, guys, we need a plan,” Sam pleads.
“Move,” Dean roars. “Everyone together.”
“No. Gwen and I aren’t going.” Cassie doesn’t care if it’s rational. She is not stepping into the dark with any of these gun-toting maniacs.
“If he—” four men say at once.
“No. Give Gwen her gun. I’ve got my bag. We’ll barricade the doors. We’ll be fine.” There are so many holes in this plan that Cassie is sure Bobby will argue, but Rufus nudges him and shakes his head.
So when Sam Winchester shoots his grandfather in the head, Cassie and Gwen are calmly discussing how Gwen’s almost done with an online community college degree and thinking of getting a certificate in criminal justice.
When the guys carry in Samuel’s body, Gwen clenches her hands around her gun and blinks back tears. “He wasn’t a monster.”
“He never meant to be one.” Cassie trembles against her own words of comfort. If she means it, she has to forgive Dean, and… no. Not yet. Not half an hour after that gun was aimed at her.
Bobby peers at the swab he swirls around Samuel’s ear. “Nothing.”
“You mean I ganked him when it wasn’t in him?” handcuffed Sam bleats.
Gwen throws herself at him, using her shotgun as a bludgeon and swearing a blue streak.
“Whoa, whoa, no, I’m sorry, no, I thought it was in him, no, I’m so sorry, Gwen.” He’s so damn big that Gwen looks like a wolf trying to battle a giant. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.”
“You killed him. That’s past the point of sorry.”
Circular saw, someone says, and it all gets much, much worse from there, until it ends in blood and electricity and death.
Nights that start with seven people who are more-or-less friends breaking into a building, only to end with five people who no longer trust one another staring at two corpses, are not happy ones.
“That’s everyone,” Gwen says softly as they stumble through the cannery’s corridors, stinking of fish, ozone, and coppery blood. Someone decided girls don’t carry the bodies, and Cassie didn’t feel up for arguing. She will miss Rufus in the sharply painful way that goes with people who’ve had a single, vital impact on her life.
“Everyone?”
“My whole family. Killed by demons. Killed by djinn. Possessed, murdered. That’s it. Everyone contact in my phone goes to voice-mail for all of eternity.”
Cassie takes a deep breath, letting all that she’s lost and all that she’s gained balance in her chest. “I have a place. I’m starting something. Not about killing. Not about dying. You’re welcome if you want to be there.”
6
“Now that we’re all here, what are we really here for?” Ellie asks, looking around the map table. She has the seat at the foot. Tamara’s at the head, where there’s space for her canes.
Cassie has one long side to herself and Bobby John, who’s pale-skinned and dark-haired today, like his aunties Lenore and Gwen.
Gwen still has the lost look of a person who’s alternating sleep, schnapps, and violent exercise as a way not to think, but she manages a smile. “Saving people.”
“Helping cryptids,” Lenore adds.
Cassie returns the smile. “The family business.”
Tamara slaps a hand on the table. “Now that we’ve got that covered, ladies… We’ve got work to do.”