Supernatural: The Unholy Cause (28 page)

“Through here,” the sheriff said in a low voice.

She stopped in front of the pulpit. There was a high oak platform rising fifteen feet above them. Running her fingers along the outer edge, Daniels found what she was looking for and pressed on it. There was a click of some mechanism uncoupling, and the pulpit’s front panel dropped open to reveal a dark rectangle of dusty space directly in front of them.

Crouching, she ducked through it, vanishing inside. Dean heard her and wished for a flashlight.

Then blackness swallowed him whole.

They were in a narrow passage, the walls tight enough that he could feel them on both sides, brushing against his shoulders. Off in the void, the shuffling sounds of Daniels’ footfalls led him forward an inch at a time. Dean stretched his hands out in front of him, groping for something of substance and touching only air.

He crept forward.

Reaching...

And feeling something cold and tight grab him from behind. A hand.

“There you are,” McClane’s voice spoke brightly in his ear, laughing. “You made it after all.”

Hunched down in the coal car, Sam bent over Sarah, doing chest compressions, alternating with rescue breaths. When he pushed down on her chest, blood bubbled up from underneath her blouse.

She’s dead. You can’t save her.

He ignored the voice.

Kept working.

“Come on,” he said, unaware that he was speaking aloud. “Come on, Sarah.”

Her mouth dropped open slightly, as if she’d just remembered something she’d wanted to say. Instead, a shiny blood-bubble formed at her lips and burst, painting her lower lip with a bright smear of kabuki makeup.

Her head rolled to one side.

Footsteps rang out in the coal car behind him, and when Sam lifted his head, he saw five demons in blue and gray uniforms grinning down at him. The barrels of their muskets looked huge in his face.

“You should never have left the gun,” one of them said. It drew closer.

It’s up to you now, child.

Jackie Daniels came off the ladder and stepped down into the square, lead-lined room.

It was absolutely dark in here, drained of every germ of light, but that didn’t matter. She knew this space by heart. The walls, floors and ceiling, and the square of dirt in the middle where the reliquary waited—these intricacies were as familiar to her as her own body. She’d been made to learn all of it when she was young, instructed by her grandfather when he’d told her of the enormous responsibility that lay before her as the next guardian of the noose.

It’s up to you.

In the darkness, something clinked, dragging closer.

Daniels froze. Her scalp prickled, the sensation spreading down between her shoulder blades. Her heart sped up, pounding so hard that she could feel it in her throat. She smelled old animal skins, ancient fabric and dust.

The jingling, clinking sound grew closer.

“I brought it back,” she said into the darkness, and she forced herself to take another step. She almost expected to collide with the jingling shape—that was how close it felt. “The last coil. It’s here.”

The jingling shape moved again. It must have heard her, but it didn’t speak.

Kneeling down, she felt the damp crumbs of dirt and the cold edge of the reliquary. It was already in place—open and waiting.

She dropped the last coil inside, and snapped it shut.

For an instant nothing happened.

Then everything did.

* * *

In the darkness, McClane’s laughter was very close, the sound of it horribly familiar. It smelled like sweat and burning rubber and brimstone.

“You know something?” Dean said, doing everything he could to keep his voice steady. “You know the difference between you and me? I never bent down to kiss the devil’s ass.”

The laughter stopped.

Dean felt the other hand land on his throat.

Not a hand.

A
claw.

Squeezing.

The vice-grip shut his airway down instantly, and there was an almost inaudible popping sound as the cartilage began to crush inside him.

Dean’s hand went to his belt, where he’d tucked the demon-killing knife, and he drew it out.

Hope you got it where it needs to go, Sheriff
, he thought, and as the darkness began to spin, he plunged the blade into McClane’s chest.

Even on his knees inside the coal car, Sam could see the light erupting out of the church windows, flooding the stained-glass Bible scenes from the inside and spraying the colors into the morning air. A pillar of pure white light shattered its way through the steeple and into the sky, cutting a wide bright shaft of radiance straight up into the cloudless expanse. The old planks creaked, knocking together, rattling hard. Energy shuddered and throbbed from inside, a pulsing storm of megawatt intensity, as if some silent, benevolent detonation had just occurred.

At that point Sam stopped watching.

He was more preoccupied by the demons smoking out in front of him, their muskets falling to the bottom of the coal car. The last of them collapsed with a yowling cry of anger and dismay, its black substance swirling out through its nose and mouth.

The host-bodies lay where they fell.

Some groaned and awoke, injured, confused, bleeding from the injuries to which the demons had subjected them.

Others, like the body of Sarah Rafferty, remained still.

Dean didn’t just hear Tommy McClane scream—he
felt
it. He’d been prepared for the demon to flash out, but the simultaneous return of the coil to its proper resting place must have somehow amplified what happened. The demonic essence didn’t just flee, it exploded.

There was a loud, moist
pop
, accompanied by a spraying sensation against the bare skin of his cheek and forehead, and the crushing pressure on his throat was gone.

Just like that.

Dean cringed. His skin was freckled with something cold and sticky, as if a balloon covered in cold syrup had burst open in front of him. The stink was familiar, rotten and nauseating—halitosis from Hell.

Then the darkness itself exploded.

Dean’s hair stood up on the back of his neck, stiffening across his forearms. The numbing crackle of ozone filled the air. His first gut-reaction was that he’d been hit by lightning, and he began to back up as quickly as he could.

The lightstorm opened up around him in every direction. It was flashing through the sanctuary in vast, booming pavilions of pure luminescence as he charged out of the open passageway, down the center aisle, and through the front door.

Sam saw his brother racing for the front steps, leaping down them all at once and landing on the sidewalk, then whirling around to watch the last of the light ebbing away inside the First Pentecostal Church of Mission’s Ridge.

When it finished, he turned and looked up and down Main Street. Columns of smoke rose over the buildings, no doubt from a handful of fires that burned in various parts of town.

The demons’ host-bodies lay everywhere, dangling from windows and sprawled across rooftops. Sam watched them stirring, starting to stand up, wincing and clutching their injuries. Debris littered the sidewalks, broken glass and collapsed awnings, and a layer of airborne murk that was already dissolving in the atmosphere.

Car alarms hooted and shrilled, the modern day birdsong of early morning catastrophe.

“Sammy?”

Sam climbed down, carrying Sarah’s body.

“I’m sorry,” Dean said.

“Where’s the sheriff?”

Dean nodded back at the church. Sirens were rising up now underneath the cacophony of car alarms. Sam imagined federal investigators, government officials and television reporters, state police, more suits and uniforms than he could imagine. They would descend upon Mission’s Ridge and turn it into a buzzing hornet’s nest of questions and accusations and delays.

“We don’t want to be here for this,” he said.

“Yeah, well,” Dean said, “I’m not leaving Sheriff Daniels.”

“Impala’s in the impound lot. Two blocks from here.”

Dean brightened at the prospect of getting his car back and somehow found the strength to smile.

“I’ll bring it around.”

“I’ll go in and look for the sheriff.” Sam set Sarah’s body down next to him, turned, and started toward the church.

As he did so, the front door squeaked open, and he saw Sheriff Daniels emerge from the church and into the light. Her face was glowing, almost sunburned, her eyes bright, utterly vibrant.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She looked down at him, at first not seeming to recognize him, then out at the ruined streets of her town, the bodies of the citizens, and those who were regaining their bearings, coming out of hiding.

“Yes.” Her voice was far away. “Are they gone...?”

Sam nodded. He could already hear the familiar growl of the Impala’s engine making its way closer. A moment later it appeared around the corner and pulled up to the curb. Dean opened the door and climbed out. Sheriff Daniels stood looking at them.

“I guess none of us was straight with the other,” Dean said.

“I suppose not,” she agreed.

“My brother and I...” Sam began, and paused, unsure how to proceed. “We came because we knew there was demonic activity here. We’re hunters.”

The sheriff nodded.

“I’m glad you came. My job—my real job, protecting the noose—isn’t easy. My family has given their lives to it. Sometimes literally.” She shrugged. “I’m not used to having any help.”

Sam looked over at Sarah’s body.

“I wish we could have done more.”

“I probably wouldn’t have let you,” Daniels said. “I’m used to being the only one who knows what’s really going on. But it can be hard protecting everybody when you can’t trust anyone.”

The words seemed to weigh on Dean in particular.

“Yeah,” he said, “I get that.” And then, glancing back at the car, he added, “Well, we should get going.”

Daniels nodded.

“My grandfather always said, there’s a time for headlights and a time for rearview mirrors.” She paused. “If you see your friend again, tell him I hope he finds what he’s looking for.”

Sam nodded. He and Dean climbed into the Impala. The sheriff stood at the curb, watching them drive away.

After the Civil War was over, the world watched the South’s long Reconstruction through newspapers and eyewitness reports and telegraphs. It was perhaps appropriate, then, that Sam and Dean Winchester watched the reconstruction of Mission’s Ridge on TV in St. Mary’s Medical Center in Athens, Georgia.

Dean’s most fervent wish, that the hospital’s cafeteria food would at least be decent, proved to be relevant—they didn’t leave there for almost two days.

Mission’s Ridge was on every channel, local and national. The town was still in flames, figuratively if not literally. In the wake of what had happened, investigators and the media were discussing everything from bioterrorism to mass hallucination to religious hysteria. All the usual analysts, crisis experts, and pundits were brought in to comment.

Larger discussions of the Civil War, Southern culture, and racism loomed large in the background, and Dean Winchester, who tended to think about “big themes” the same way that alcoholics think about hangovers, stopped listening.

But still he watched.

Sitting out in the waiting room, looking at the screen, he saw Sheriff Jacqueline Daniels talking to reporters from the steps in front of her office, patiently answering questions and proffering explanations. She didn’t seem worried. She looked calm and utterly professional.

Yet every so often Dean would see something in her eyes, a flicker of deeper recognition, as if she somehow knew he was out here, fifty miles away, watching her on TV.

Nah, she’s got bigger fish to fry
, he mused.
Besides, she was a real tough cookie.

He wondered what it might be like if he could drive back to the Ridge one more time, catch her in between interviews, take her out for a beer and a bump. Would a woman like that drink whiskey? Dean had no doubt that she would.

Give it up. Put her on the list. Ones that got away.

“Hey.”

He looked over and saw Sam standing next to him. The bandage on Sam’s face looked white, clean and entirely out of place.

“Ready to go?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

They walked back through the waiting area, out of the door toward the parking lot where the Impala was waiting. It was a perfect afternoon in late spring, cloudless, and Sam could smell the live oak. He glanced up to see a familiar figure standing next to the car waiting for them.

“Cass,” Dean said. “Sorry again about the whole Witness thing.”

Castiel looked away without comment.

“Did you ever talk to him?” Sam asked. “To Judas?”

“Yes.” Castiel appeared even more dour than usual, as if pressed down by some burden so heavy that he alone could measure its weight. “Enough to...”

He let the words trail off with a shrug.

“Can we give you a ride or something?” Dean asked.

The angel shook his head.