Supernatural: Carved in Flesh (28 page)

She’d long ago given up doubting Conrad’s claims. She’d seen too much, accomplished too much with him. If he said the stone would provide some kind of protection against death, then she believed him.

Satisfied that Marshall’s body was ready for the procedure, Catherine double-checked the IV bottles, tubing, and needles. Conrad had no ego when it came to his work. He insisted that Catherine check everything he did to make sure all was in order. The only thing that mattered to him was obtaining his desired outcome. He didn’t care who made a mistake, he only cared about finding and fixing it. In another person, she would have found the quality admirable, but in Conrad, she knew it arose from a single-minded obsession with success at all costs, including the sublimation of his own ego. Why he was so hell-bent on success, she wasn’t certain, but she sensed his motivation was more than merely intellectual, and it sure as hell wasn’t altruistic. He was working toward something, and had been for a long time, and helping her restore her husband and daughter to life was only one more step toward achieving his ultimate goal. She’d never asked him what that goal was, and truthfully, she didn’t care, not as long as she got Marshall and Bekah back.

Once she’d determined the chemicals and IVs were in order, she double-checked the defibrillator while Conrad examined Marshall to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. The defibrillator’s battery was fully charged, and it seemed to be in perfect working condition. When their examinations were complete, Conrad looked at her.

“Shall we finish?” he asked.

She nodded and together they wrapped the treated cloth strips around Marshall’s head and chest, Conrad lifting his body as needed while Catherine wrapped. The cloth needed to be put on immediately before the procedure, because—for reasons she didn’t understand—the chemicals it had been treated with lost their efficacy the longer they were in contact with the skin. They’d only used half the strips by the time they were finished. The other half were for Bekah. They checked to make sure Marshall was wrapped tight, and then Conrad took the Lapis Occultus from the cart and gently, almost reverently, placed it on Marshall’s forehead.

He stepped back and cocked his head as he regarded the stone’s placement. Catherine couldn’t see what earthly difference the position of the object made, but Conrad must have, for he reached out, made a small adjustment, then nodded to himself.

“I believe we are ready to begin inserting the—”

Needles,
Catherine knew he’d been about to say, but he broke off, a look of astonishment on his face. He raised his hand with the X on it and stared at the mark as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The X looked the same to her, but whatever had changed about it had alarmed the usually unflappable Mr. Dippel.

“We need to hurry,” he said, tension in his voice. “They’re coming.”

“Who?”

“Two men. Hunters... Killers. They want to stop us. I thought I’d dealt with them...” He curled his hand into a fist. “...but evidently I was mistaken.”

Catherine’s head was swimming. “What are they? Police? Hit men? Secret agents, for god’s sake?”

“I don’t have time to explain fully. Suffice it to say that they will break into your home, come down here, and not only stop what we’re doing, but destroy Marshall and Bekah’s bodies to ensure they will never rise. Is that what you want?”

Conrad was shouting by the time he reached the end of his words, but it was his emotional intensity more than anything else that convinced Catherine he was speaking the truth.

“What do we do?”

“I can try to hold them off, but at this point, I’m not confident in my ability to do so alone. If I had use of the Lapis Occultus... But no, it’s needed here. No matter what else occurs, it is vital that Bekah be restored to life.”

Just Bekah, she noted. Not Marshall.

Conrad looked down at Marshall’s body, still lifeless and waiting for resurrection. A cold sly smile spread across his face.

“If I had your husband’s help...”

“No! I’m not going to bring Marshall back only to send him into harm’s way. If these men really are as dangerous as you seem to think—”

“I’ll ask you the same question I asked regarding which of your loved ones was to be resurrected first. Given the situation, what would Marshall do?”

As before, Catherine didn’t have to think about her reply. “Protect his daughter.”

Without exchanging another word, they began inserting the IV needles into various points of Marshall’s body.

* * *

Daniel raged inside the confines of the Lapis Occultus. To his perceptions, it seemed as if he was floating disembodied within an endless expanse of darkness, and that he’d been there for a very, very long time. Another being might well have gone insane in the same circumstances, but Daniel was a Reaper. Darkness, no matter how vast or unending, didn’t scare him. It did, however, seriously piss him off.

He couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to be captured by Dippel. It hadn’t occurred to him that the alchemist might have conceived of a way to harness the energy of a Reaper and use it in his obscene experiments. That was something Daniel needed to prevent at any cost. The question was, how? He’d tried translocating, a common ability for his kind. Normally, he could move from one location to another simply by willing it, but no matter how hard he concentrated, no matter how much power he summoned, he was unable to break free of the darkness. He’d tried reaching out to any other Reapers that might be in the vicinity. Considering how many deaths had taken place in Brennan lately, there were bound to be a few around. Yet although he strained to stretch his thoughts outward, he was unable to penetrate his prison’s walls. That left him with only one option—the last option, as far as any Reaper was concerned—calling the boss.

Death was a strong believer in delegating. When he assigned a task to one of his servants, he expected it to be carried out, and if any problems arose, he expected them to be dealt with. What he did
not
want was to be bothered every time some little thing went wrong. Whenever Death was disturbed for something trivial—and given what he was, almost everything was trivial to him—he was not slow to express his displeasure. But Daniel didn’t see any other choice left to him. If Dippel succeeded in incarnating Hel, as bad as it would be for the humans on Earth, it would be far worse for him. Death would make certain of it.

Daniel had no eyes to close in his black prison, but he imagined himself performing the action anyway. He concentrated and called out to Death—

—and received no answer.

Daniel was shocked. There was no place in existence that Death couldn’t reach. All worlds, all times, all dimensions were part of his inconceivably vast domain. Yet Death hadn’t heard him.

Whatever this stone was, it had been created by magic far greater than Daniel had anticipated. Perhaps Hel herself had taken a hand in its construction. She was nowhere near as powerful as Death, but as a goddess of death (with a lowercase d) her power could easily counter Daniel’s.

He was on his own, trapped in a magic artifact, his energy to be used to pave the way for an ancient Norse goddess of death to enter the world of the living. There was nothing he could do but wait and hope the Winchesters found a way to succeed where he had failed. Which didn’t do anything to improve his mood.

* * *

Dean drove past Catherine Luss’s house, then pulled the car off the side of the road onto the shoulder. Catherine lived out in the country. There were no sidewalks, and he didn’t want to park in her driveway. The last thing the brothers wanted to do was announce their presence. Dean turned off the engine.

Then he looked at Sam. “What did you do?”

“I-don’t-know-what-you-mean,” Sam answered quickly, speaking so fast his words ran together.

“Yeah, you do. Ever since we stopped at that gas station so you could hit the head and get rid of all that coffee you’ve been drinking, you’ve been suspiciously wide awake and full of energy.”

Sam shrugged.

Dean noted his brother’s bouncing leg and tapping fingers.

“Maybe-the-caffeine-finally-kicked-in,” Sam offered in his too-rapid voice.

“Something
kicked in,” Dean said, “but it sure as hell isn’t caffeine. What did you do? Steal some pick-me-up pills from the med kit?”

Hunters tended to get banged up pretty good on the job, and even if there was a hospital in the area, they preferred to patch their own wounds whenever possible. Fewer questions that way. So every hunter had a fully stocked medical kit with its own mini-pharmacy. Dean figured that while he’d been busy buying some snacks—extra-hot jalapeno tortilla chips and crème-filled chocolate snack cakes—Sam had grabbed some stimulants from the kit and taken them in the restroom.

At first Sam looked as if he intended to deny it, but then he sighed.

“You know the weird black veiny marks on my leg? They’ve spread.”

Dean didn’t like where this was going. “How far?”

“Basically, my whole leg is covered now. I can still walk, but it’s numb all over. If there’s any chance of fixing whatever’s wrong with me, it lies with Dippel. I can’t afford to sit this one out, Dean. Not if I want to survive.”

“I could—”

“And I’m
not
letting you face the real-world equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein on your own.”

Dean didn’t like it. In fact, it pissed him off something fierce. It didn’t help that he knew he would have done the same thing if their situations had been reversed.

“How large a dose did you take?” Dean asked.

“Large enough. Let’s go before it starts wearing off.”

Sam got out of the car before Dean could say anything else. He sat there for a moment, struggling to deal with his anger.

“Sam, if you die because of this, I’m going to force Dippel to teach me how to resurrect the dead, and then I’m going to bring you back so I can kill you myself!”

He let out a long sigh of frustration and got out of the car. Sam already had the car’s trunk open and was gearing up. Dean joined him, nose wrinkling at the stink of their plastic-bagged clothes. Was there any substance on the planet that could contain the Frankenstench?

They selected the same weapons they’d carried during the hunt for the Double-Header. Dean armed himself with his Colt and the Winchester shotgun, and Sam chose his Beretta and the sawed-off double barrel. They each took a pair of KA-BAR knives and some flares. They hadn’t had a chance to use the latter against the Double-Header, but they could still come in handy. This time, they brought something new, one of their standard pieces of equipment that they rarely got to use: a homemade flamethrower constructed from a container of kerosene, various lengths of pipe, and a control button to regulate the release of fuel. It was capable of producing a flame about fifteen feet long, but the kerosene wouldn’t last forever, so you had to make sure every blast counted.

Sam started to speak, but Dean cut him off.

“Given your condition, there’s no way I’m letting you use this thing, so don’t even ask.”

Sam scowled, but he didn’t protest.

Dean slipped the flamethrower’s straps over his shoulders, then stood for a moment to get a feel for the weight. Carrying the flamethrower always made him feel as if he had a bomb on his back that was ready to go off at any time.
Fun, fun, fun!

“Once more into the breach, eh?” Dean said.

“Unto,” Sam said. “The correct quote is ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ It’s from Shakespeare’s
Henry V.”

Dean sighed. He should’ve known better that to try and get literary on Sam.

“How about this? Let’s go kick some Frankenass.”

“That’ll work,” Sam said with a smile, and together they headed for the house.

* * *

Catherine had attached the electrodes of the automated external defibrillator to Marshall’s chest. Normally the sensors in the electrodes sent data to the AED’s computer, which would determine whether someone was experiencing sudden cardiac arrest and required an electric shock. The computer would then use voice prompts to guide whoever was using the device, but Catherine had deactivated that function, as it was for people without medical training. Besides, at the moment Marshall had no heartbeat, and therefore there was no data for the computer to pick up. In a normal situation, this would mean the device wouldn’t deliver a charge, but she’d paid a local computer repairman a sizeable sum to bypass those safety features for her, and to keep his mouth shut about it. This AED was one of the early models and was capable of delivering a shock of up to four hundred joules. More recent models gave two sequential shocks of only one-twenty to two hundred joules, as that was now considered safer for the patient, but Catherine didn’t need safe. She needed a strong enough charge to, as Conrad had put it, “galvanize the chemical admixture.” Four hundred joules had been sufficient to do that for the dog. She prayed it would be enough for Marshall.

“I believe the moment is at hand,” Conrad said. He stood by the cart containing the IV bottles, monitoring the amount of chemicals that had passed into Marshall’s body.

Catherine nodded. She had gone through this procedure a number of times, first with rats and then with the dog. The rats hadn’t lasted long, decaying in less than a day. The dog had been more successful, but it too had succumbed to tissue degradation in the end. She hoped that Conrad’s magic stone would make the difference, but there was only one way to find out.

Each time she’d gone through this, she was amazed at how unremarkable it all was. No Van de Graaff generators crackling with electricity, no crazed hunchbacked assistant’s mad cackling, no spooky gothic music swelling in the background, just a few chemicals quietly entering the bloodstream and then a single button to push. Bringing the dead back to life should be a spectacular, monumental moment. Instead, it was no more dramatic than any other medical procedure. Of course, the results were a different story.

She stepped over to the defibrillator, said, “Clear,” more as a precaution than from any real worry that Conrad might be in physical contact with Marshall’s body, and pushed the button.