Disclaimed, they are.
AN: I am so making this up as I go along. For the source of my inspiration, read Diana Wynne Jones' marvelous novel "Deep Secret". Title – and Mary's quotation at the end – from Tolkien, of course.
Circles of the world
John wasn't entirely sure how they'd ended up in Florida. It wasn't as if either of them had any particular affection for the place. No decent leads for counties, either. Maybe they'd taken a wrong turn off the Interstate.
"I think I hate Florida," Mary voiced his thoughts. They were outside a gas station, filling up the Impala, and both of them were sweltering in the humid unmerciful heat. Mary was tying her hair back into a ponytail, squinting even behind her sunglasses. John was debating whether or not to just give in and take his shirt off.
"North it is, then," he said. Mary nodded firmly. "To the Yukon. I'll go pay."
He laughed as he turned to put the pump back, and then jumped when she tugged his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans.
"Oh, sure. Spend my money on your car, why don't you."
"I will, don't worry. Thanks for the offer."
She blew him a kiss and slipped inside the shop. There were a few other customers in the queue in front of her, and some milling around the shop itself, pouring over the magazine rack. Taking advantage of the air-conditioning, probably. John found himself absently watching a pale-looking man about his own age, dressed all in black, peering contemplatively into the ice-cream box. There was something almost furtive about him, hunched and nervous.
The exact opposite to the guy in the pink silk shirt who was currently hitting on Mary. She blew him off, looking caught between exasperation and amusement. The shirt was kinda hilarious, John had to admit.
It also seemed to be the source of superhuman self-confidence. The guy stepped round to face her again after she'd turned away, pouring on the oily charm. Mary's head tilted to one side slightly, and when she spoke, John felt an odd shiver run through him. The guy backed off, moving across the shop, but John was busy rubbing at the goosebumps on his arms and didn't see.
"Everything OK?"
Mary was standing in front of him, ice-cold bottle of water in either hand.
"Yeah," John said slowly, taking one. "Yeah, I'm good. Hey, you use your ability on that jerk?"
"Some people can't take no for an answer," she said with an eye-roll.
"Thought he looked kinda glazed over when he turned away."
She grinned at his half-hearted joke. "On second thoughts, shall we get a room? I think we're due a vacation."
They had had a pretty exhausting week, involving a coven of witches in small-town-Georgia. The spirit they'd summoned had broken free and started killing the coven members, and it had taken them days to track its grave down and protect the idiots who'd summoned it, but John barely heard her. He was staring at the shop, and the back of the guy Mary had used her ability on. Had he actually sensed her using it? Or was it just coincidence?
In the car, Mary insisted on staying someplace with a pool. John's thoughts strayed to an image of her in a bikini and wholeheartedly agreed, earlier discomfort completely forgotten.
They spent the rest of the day by the poolside, swimming and sunbathing. Mary was grateful the motel was otherwise almost deserted; John's scars, in combination with his corps tattoo, were pretty self-explanatory. Hers were a little more difficult. Burn scar above her left knee, a Black Dog's claw marks across her left shoulder and upper arm, pale latticework of scars just above her right hip, relic of a knife-wielding spirit.
"All before I turned twenty," she'd said to John that bright summer's day they'd lain in a clearing halfway up a Colorado mountain and told each other the stories of those scars.
He'd shrugged. "After that, you got better at it. Me, I never learned to dodge bullets."
One below his right shoulder, one in his right thigh. He'd never told her how long it had taken him to walk again.
She got John to rub suncream into her back, and shook her head at him when he didn't bother.
"You'll get sunburn," she said, mock-reproving.
"Nah. I just go brown."
"I envy you. Rather brown than pink."
They lazed until the sun went down, and then had burgers and fries for dinner, both shivering a little in the cool evening breeze, damp swimsuits under their jeans cold and sticky against their skin. Mary wore a thin loose blouse that did nothing to hide her dark bikini top, and John traced the back of it with one finger as they walked up the stairs to their room. She twisted to look at him, one eyebrow raised mischievously. He jumped up a step and laid his arm over her shoulders, pulling her close, her hair damp and cold against him.
"Perfect day," Mary whispered to him as they reached their room. John bent a little and kissed her, warm mouth a sharp contrast to chilled skin, his fingers sliding through her tangled hair. He fumbled with the keys when she pressed herself against him, a breathy laugh escaping into his mouth as they nearly dropped to the floor.
Her hands traced slow fiery paths from his hips over his waist and chest to his shoulders; then she tangled her arms around his neck. The key turned in the lock with a rusty snick, and John yanked it out of the lock and tossed it to the carpet just inside the door before wrapping that arm around her waist, pulling her closer, never breaking that deep slow kiss. Her mouth tasted of fries and strawberry milkshake, her skin overlaid with the scent of pool water and suncream, but underneath it, there was still, always, Mary.
Easiest thing in the world to drop his hands a bit, lift her up. She braced her arms on his shoulders and brought her legs up around his waist, rough heavy denim pressing through the thin cloth of his t-shirt, then a brief pause for air, his lips trailing down her throat to that hollow where her pulse beat, stepping backwards into the room. She bent her head over his, hands coming up to hold him in place as his mouth marked her pale skin, hair trailing around him, over his shoulders, down his back, and he felt her reach blindly past him to close the door.
He pulled back a little to catch her mouth with his again, still walking backwards to where he knew the bed was, but as Mary tossed her hair back, meaning to bend to meet him, she stiffened against him, eyes looking past him to the room beyond, and just as she exclaimed, "John – look!", his heel hit something and they went down in a heap.
John let out a snort of laughter. Mary was lying on top of him, face pressed against his chest, shaking silently.
"Romantic," he said. "Shall we start again?"
"Maybe in a couple hours," she answered, expression a mix of amusement and concern at once. "Look around."
"What…"
The room had been ransacked. John had stumbled over their boots, lying in a heap yards away from where they'd originally left them in the kitchen area. Their clothes were strewn across floor and furniture, most of which had been toppled. Mary's favourite flickknife and both their guns lay clearly visible in her torn bag in the middle of the room. Even the mattress had been moved half out of the frame, hanging onto the floor.
"My god," Mary said softly.
"I'm guessing there's someone in town who knows who we are," John said softly. Mary nodded, rubbing at her arms nervously.
Azazel's Chosen. It made them a target for so many, hunters as well as the supernatural. No spirit or demon attracted by their abilities would bother ransacking their room like this.
So that left humans. Hunters who'd stop at nothing to eliminate anything supernatural that they saw as a threat to the world. Mary could name half-a-dozen of them off the top of her head, fanatics she'd spent years trying to stay away from, although Ben Roberts was on good terms with many of them. Tennant, Carson, Harvelle, Atkins… dangerous men, all.
But none of them knew anything about her and John. Mary had been careful to avoid the more traditional hunter's gathering places these last few months, telling John as little about them as possible, making sure he was as wary of them as she. Lisa Colt's daughter was a bit of a celebrity among hunters anyway. Mary had been involved in a few… escapades… that had only made that worse. Hiding from 'her' people had become a habit even before Cold Oak.
So who had found her?
John's first instinct was to cut and run, but that really would have given the game away. So far, the only suspicious things in their room were their weapons, and those were easily explained. The Impala hadn't been touched, to Mary's relief, so whoever had been through their room so thoroughly didn't have much evidence to go on.
"Think we should complain?" Mary asked, standing in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips.
"I don't know," John admitted, finding his last clean shirt tossed under a chair with all his socks. "I mean, I want to just ignore it and get the hell outta Dodge, but-"
"-that would only prove to them we've got something to hide," she finished. "OK. Let's go kick up a fuss."
She did that very well, John thought, watching her with the horrified hotel manager. If her clothes had been just a bit more expensive, her accent a little more polished, he might have mistaken her for one of the arrogant brats he'd grown up around. Not for the first time, he wondered what his mother would make of Mary, and had to grin at the thought.
In the end, they got a full refund and a new room, and the police promised half-heartedly to look into it. Nothing had been taken, and Mary and John were leaving town soon anyway, so the officers who took their statements were neither enthusiastic nor encouraging.
"D'you think someone saw you use your ability at the gas station this morning?" John wondered that night. They'd set up every protection they could think of, but it was nearing midnight, and so far, nothing had happened. Mary's warm weight lay on top of him, her hand over his heart, breath moving lightly over his skin. Now she raised her head to look at him. He loved the way the movement made her tangled hair fall against his side and trail over his chest.
"Be one hell of a coincidence," she said. "No one knows where we are right now – we haven't even spoken to Dan in a fortnight. No, the more I think about it, the more I think we just got unlucky. And more than a little panicky."
"Stranger things have happened," John said. She was right, but he wasn't entirely reassured.
It didn't show on his face, but Mary could sense his unease in the tightening of his arms around her, fingertips digging into her back. "Like your meeting some pushy blonde chick in a demon-infested ghost town in the middle of Wyoming?"
"Yeah, like that," his words a whisper of laughter as she moved up his chest, hovered over him. Gold flecks in his eyes invisible in the faint moonlight, smile that took her breath away. Her thumbnail rasped through the stubble on his jaw.
"So before you tripped so spectacularly… remind me what we were doing?"
"Went something like this," he said, rolling them over, bracing himself up on his elbows as her legs slid over the back of his thighs, and kissed her. Mary pushed the fingers of one hand into his too-long hair and let the other wander down his back to the waistband of his boxers, thumb hooking into the elastic.
"And then?" she murmured into his mouth, moaned a protest when he broke the kiss.
"Wait and see," John said, trailing kisses along her jaw, down her throat, feeling her laughter hum against his lips. Nothing between them but the thin worn cotton of underwear and sheets. Never anything more than that between them, and soon, not even that.
Mary wasn't sure what woke her – maybe just the humid heat of the motel room. For a while she lay in John's arms in a boneless, contented sprawl, savouring the lazy peace of his embrace. But whatever had woken her also contrived to make her restless, shifting and twisting against her lover. It was like a tickle in the back of her mind, a gentle but incessant poking that wouldn't let her slip back into sleep.
Finally, in exasperation, she slipped out of bed, taking care not to wake John, and pulled on some clothes, moving as silently as possible. Neither of them had ever slept very well; the nightmares about Cold Oak had never entirely gone away, and John's night terrors were exactly that, infrequent but ten times worse than hers, pulling him sweating and trembling and half-panicked from sleep.
He never talked about them, but she didn't need him to tell her they were about Vietnam.
As she buttoned her jeans, he stirred, reaching for her with a sleepy murmur. "I'm just going for snacks," she whispered by his ear, kissed the side of his neck. Then she picked up the gun on the bedside table, pocketed some change and left quietly.
The snack machine was just across the parking lot, the tarmac still warm under Mary's bare feet. The small TV was on in the office, entertaining the night clerk, who must have been sweltering in there. A car occasionally roared past along the road, but otherwise everywhere was silent. Light danced along the buildings near the pool, ever-changing ripples flowing across the pebbled walls.
Quiet, warm, and oh-so peaceful. Mary drew a deep breath, tilted her head back to look at the stars, already soothed. Maybe she should get John up, drag him out here to feel this peace, this contentment suffusing the whole world.
On second thoughts, he'd probably ruin it by grumbling about being woken up.
The coins rattled loudly in the snack machine; Mary felt a bit guilty about causing such a racket, disturbing the night. She bent to fish the chocolate out of the flap at the bottom, and paused, frozen in place, every muscle tense. Had that been a man's reflection in the glass?
No. The parking lot was still empty, and she hadn't heard anything, either. Slowly, her fingers uncurled from around her gun.
"Paranoid, Roberts," she told herself firmly. For all her earlier reassurance to John, she was still on edge, half-expecting someone to –
Something flickered across the filthy glass again, and she turned, twisted away from her attacker and sprang to her feet. The dark-haired man looked vaguely familiar, but she didn't hesitate to step in and knee him in the groin, shove him backwards, reaching for the gun again, but a hand wrapped around her wrist, trying to stop her, and she turned once more, lightening-quick, twisting her arm out of the second man's grip and pushing him back in a move John had taught her.
The crack of his nose breaking was one of the most satisfying sounds she'd ever heard. He fell against the wall with a choked-off hiss of pain, and Mary drew breath angrily, gathered her concentration, feeling that familiar boil and hum in her blood as she let her ability rise to the surface and seep into her voice, and then all she had to do was use it.
"Leave me-"
But they knew what she could do, it seemed, for a hand clamped over her mouth and nose from behind, holding a cloth that stank of chloroform, before she could finish the sentence. She twisted and struggled and might have succeeded in getting free if it hadn't been for the second man, who stumbled to his feet, eyes blazing with pain and hurt pride and anger, and pinned her arms to her sides, trapping her legs between him and his accomplice, holding her still.
Blackness creeping in at the corners of her vision, dizziness and nausea, and John she thought desperately before slipping into darkness.
John wasn't sure how much time passed between Mary leaving and him waking up to an empty bed, but it was long enough that her kidnappers were long gone by the time he found her gun lying on the ground by the snack machine. There was a smear of red against the wall above it, and he felt a rush of satisfaction and reassurance. She was alive; she'd fought them.
If asked, he couldn't have said exactly how he knew it was her attacker's blood, not Mary's own.
The police, of course, were no help at all. They were more bothered about filling out missing persons forms, explaining how there was no proof yet of a connection between Mary's disappearance and their room being ransacked yesterday, and, of course, checking into his and Mary's backgrounds. The weary, routine, almost contemptuous way they treated him made John want to hit them all.
In the end, John demanded to use a phone and called Daniel in Colorado.
"Disappeared?" his friend's voice crackled over the line.
"Taken," John corrected himself. "Little help here, Dan. I'm completely in the dark."
Perhaps the panic using his stomach for a trampoline bled through into his voice, because Dan said soothingly, "Milton, Florida, you said? Heard of the place before… OK. Now tell me everything."
John started at the gas station and left nothing out, including the pink silk shirt, the guy at the ice cream box, the young couple they'd briefly chatted with at the pool side, and the consumptive-looking girl who'd served them their burgers later on in the evening.
Dan was silent a while after he'd finished; John could hear the faint rustle of papers being moved about, books being opened. Then, "Johnny? Still there?"
"Where the fuck else would I be?"
Dan chuckled. "Silly question. Right." Still the calm, soothing tone of voice. John was vaguely grateful for it. He didn't even mind Dan calling him Johnny, a nickname only Mary dared to use, generally.
"Right," Dan repeated. "So, going with the theory that whoever took Mary did so because of her abilities, we might have a problem."
Hundreds of miles apart or no, John took comfort in that we.
"Milton is the site of a so-called node, John. You know what that is?"
"Electrics, isn't it? Latin for knot."
"Usually. In our line of business, it means a place where… well, literally, it's a knot of, of magic, of power. You know how poltergeists and spirits, lesser demons, they can be attracted to certain places because of something having happened there, something so evil it leaves scars in reality itself?"
"Yes," John said slowly.
"Over time, with enough new arrivals, enough new evil, those scars become nodes. Places where power… collects, you might say. Builds up, you know? Points where the veil between worlds becomes thin. The thing is, John, that a number of those points in Europe, and three here in America, have been known to open into Devil's Gates in the past."
Devil's Gates. Doors into Hell itself. Openings between the worlds.
"And the trouble with that is?" John asked hoarsely. "I mean, if it hasn't opened, then no problem, right?"
"You're Azazel's Chosen, John. There's no way to tell what's gonna happen if you and Mary start getting involved with black magic while you're on a node. You're too strong, the both of you. And don't forget what he said in Minneapolis. Hades and Persephone. You're his favourites. For all we know, this is the sort of thing he was planning for in the first place. Nodes can often amplify a psychic's abilities, make them more powerful."
John shuddered at the memory of those yellow eyes, those vicious taunts, but nodded into the receiver. "I'll be careful."
"I'm coming to meet you," Dan said. "Don't do anything stupid."
"No," John said, "no, stay where you are. If I can't get Mary back in the time it'd take you to get here…"
… she'll probably be dead.
He couldn't say it, but Dan understood.
"All right. Better stock up on the first aid kit."
"Funny, Elkins," John said drily, and hung up.
… she'll probably be dead.
The thought terrified him. He wasn't sure how or when, but over the last year they'd become so intertwined with each other he could no longer imagine a life without her, a world she didn't exist in, somewhere. It just… wasn't possible.
When he rejoined the detectives in the outer rooms, they gave him slightly nervous looks, almost as if they were afraid of him, and he knew instantly they'd checked him out. Father a three-star Marine General, mother Caroline Stendahl, CEO and owner of one of the biggest, richest companies on the West Coast… he hated when people discovered that.
On the other hand, they'd refuse him nothing now. The thought angered him: the scruffy young mechanic who'd been vacationing with his wife, they didn't give a damn about, not really. Caroline Stendahl and Harry Winchester's son, on the other hand, was Not To Be Messed With.
Still, he drew that authority around him, that attitude, his mother's imperious steely glare that he never even realised he had added to his military bearing, the self-confidence his Dad had taught him from before he could remember, and glared round at them.
"Is it all right if I see the security camera footage?"
They practically fell over themselves complying. If Mary had been there, she would have had trouble keeping a straight face, he knew.
There was only the one security camera in the motel parking lot, just over the door to the office. It overlooked the entrance to the lot, and John nearly cursed when he saw the snack machine wasn't in the picture.
Neither was Mary. "She left sometime after one-twenty," John said. "That was about when I fell asleep. Woke up at four-ten, so…"
"Right," the Detective murmured. John hadn't bothered remembering his name.
Around three o'clock, a man passed in front of the camera. The detective froze the film. "Recognise him?"
"No," John lied. "Who is he?"
"Paul Sheppard. Not surprised he's not our guy. A bit crazy, but harmless – a geek, you know? Keeps himself to himself. Lives out by the bay."
"Crazy how? I mean, midnight walks are unusual, sure, but…"
"Paul's just a bit strange, you know? Came here when we were all, oh, twelve or so. Put into foster care, see. Then his foster parents died when he was seventeen, and he got that early majority or whatever it's called. I mean, he's capable and everything, he just has strange ideas about stuff. Interested in weird things, like UFOs and the occult."
"I see," John said slowly.
Paul Sheppard was the pale guy who'd been in the gas station when Mary had used her ability on the pink silk shirt.
John left the police station with excuses about not being able to sit still and wanting to check again and make sure that nothing had been taken from their room yesterday afternoon; the cops didn't try to stop him. Then all he had to do was find a phone booth and get out the directory.
Every instinct he had was pushing him to go straight up to Sheppard's place and put an end to whatever the son-of-a-bitch was planning, but if something supernatural was going on, it wouldn't happen in the daytime. John very much doubted nodes and black magic were anything resembling inconspicuous. Besides, he wasn't about to walk up to the house in broad daylight. Sheppard would recognise him from the gas station.
Nevertheless, he begrudged every second of the wait, impatient, pacing, doing everything he could not to think about Mary.
Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore.
The closer John got to the address he'd found in the directory, the colder it seemed in the Impala. Goosebumps pricked his arms, and his head hurt; a vague ache behind his eyeballs.
Paul Sheppard's house was in a lonely suburban street, at the edge of town. John found himself blinking several times to try and clear his vision as he pulled the Impala over a few blocks away. The vague ache had become a full-on pounding against the inside of his skull, his mouth was dry, and his skin felt oddly greasy, oily, as if covered by a thin film of filth.
Nodes amplified psychic abilities, Dan had said. Was it possible he was sensing what was happening in that house? Because if so… it was definitely evil. And strong enough that he could probably find it just by closing his eyes and following the source of his discomfort.
He sat in the car for a few minutes, gripping the steering wheel, trying to get some control back, to force the nausea down till he'd found Mary. Then, he got out and started to walk. Sheppard's house wasn't far. John turned into the street it was on and spotted it instantly; the garden was an overgrown, leaf-strewn mess, and the house itself in need of a new paint-job at the least. Practically a cliché.
He snuck into next-door-but-one's back yard and started climbing fences.
The full moon gave him more than enough light to see by, and he moved quick and quiet as a shadow, technique perfected in a hellish blood-soaked jungle over the other side of the world.
Never thought he'd have to use it in small-town America.
No need to climb the last fence into Sheppard's yard. There was a gap between the rickety slats just wide enough for John to slip through, and he was quietly grateful. The fence didn't look like it would have held his weight.
Grass on the other side was calf-high, wet with dew and awkward to sneak through, but again, John crossed the garden with practiced ease. A light was on in the house, the red blinds over the windows making them glow eerily like a demon's eyes. John couldn't make out much, but he was sure the room behind them was A) the kitchen and B) empty.
He switched his gun into his left hand so he could pick the lock, but some instinct made him give the handle a slow turn first, and lo and behold, the door swung open.
John shook his head in silent despair at the boy's stupidity, and slipped inside. The house wasn't quite as dilapidated, but it needed a serious vacuum and tidy. From books to take-aways, nothing seemed to have been put away for years. It reminded him of Katie's littered dorm at college.
He stepped over a large pile of books on the floor and into the sitting room. Streetlights, moon and kitchen lamp gave the place a dim ominous glow; John snapped his flashlight on to get a better look at the books and papers littered across the room. Many were in Latin, Greek or even Hebrew (although those didn't look very well read); they were all of them on magic. Aleister Crowley was the most innocent of them.
The wall opposite the sofa had been decorated with a huge collage of handwritten pages, copies of medieval woodcuts depicting hell or witches' Sabbats, drawings of Satanic symbols and one large piece of paper in the middle that had been torn away, its edges still glued to the wall. The whole thing looked much like one of John's own research sessions. He couldn't see the centerpiece anywhere in the room, but what remained was bad enough.
Devil's Gates, doorways to other dimensions, Faustian pacts, witchlore… this Sheppard kid was messing with some pretty serious black magic. None of the lore John could see here would get him anything less than an eternity in Hell.
While he was reading, there came the sounds of movement in the hallway, quiet voices, the creak of the stairs. John snapped the flashlight off and moved back to the doorframe, gun at the ready. Sheppard was just coming out of a door further down the hall, meeting a guy who'd come down the stairs. A third man followed Sheppard out of the room, looking nervous.
"Is it safe?" upstairs-guy asked, uncertain.
Sheppard glared at him. "Of course. I told you, all we need is the right conduit. She's so much stronger than anyone else, and she's absorbing all the energy. Now all we need to do is shape it, harness it, and release it in the direction we like."
Conduit? Mary? For what?
"Harness it? This isn't like taking an attack dog to the park, pointing it at some random guy and saying 'kill', Paul," the third guy hissed. "What good will this do us if we're dead when the ritual's complete?"
"We won't be dead!" Sheppard snapped. "We'll be gods! Do you have any idea how much power this will give us? What we can gain by this? The control we'll have over them?"
He spoke in the fervent tones of the fanatic preaching to the converted, eyes alight, the movements of his hands jerky and excited. John felt a shiver of unease run through him; the guy seemed half-mad.
"All right," upstairs-guy said at last. "Let's go downstairs, and… harness."
John let out a hiss of frustration when they locked the door behind them. It cost him valuable time to pick the thing, but he was afraid to just kick it down; interrupting the guys holding Mary's life in their hands like that probably wasn't a smart idea.
The door opened onto a flight of stairs leading into the basement. Naturally. They hugged the wall, a wooden railing on the other side, and took a sharp turn in the corner, a small landing four steps up from the ground. John's boots scuffed the stone, barely audible, as he came down them. He paused on the landing, and took stock of the scene in front of him.
The two guys whose names he didn't know sat opposite each other in either side of a Devil's Trap chalked on the stone floor. It took up almost all of the available floor-space. Sheppard sat directly in front of the stairs, back to John, blocking his view of the circle, chanting softly. The basement was lit by candles, of course, but John was a bit surprised they hadn't bothered with a black altar.
Then Sheppard's chanting rose to a brief crescendo, and as it died down again, the other two joined in. The chalk lines on the floor seemed to glow briefly, and inside the double circle of men and chalk lines, someone groaned, twisted, uncurling themselves so that John could see them past Sheppard.
It took him a moment to realise it was Mary.
She was sweating, face tight with exertion, body twisting ceaselessly as if trying to escape something.
"Stop it," she coughed out hoarsely. "Don't. You even know what you're messing with?"
"Of course they don't," John said, voice loud and harsh in the dim room, cutting through the chanting. The guy on the right jerked back in surprise, breaking the circle and interrupting the chant at the same time.
"What are you doing here?"
"Gate-crashing," John said angrily, moving down the stairs. Sheppard's head had jerked round to look at him, but he and the third guy wearing the same alarmed looks, but neither of them had stopped chanting. As John got closer, he thought Sheppard's look changed from surprised to triumphant, and raised the gun, aiming for Sheppard's head.
Nice clean shot that would kill him instantly.
Sheppard smirked at him, never once interrupting that monotonous chant.
"Too late now," the guy on the right said softly. "It's gone too far. She's saturated with it, with the power of the node."
John swung the gun round and shot the third guy, the one on the left. No hesitation, no worrying about it, just point and pull the trigger, putting a bullet through his temple. He collapsed sideways, breaking the circle, blood and brains seeping out onto the stone floor.
That got everyone's attention.
Sheppard and the other man scrambled to their feet, horrified and panicked, gawping from John to their friends body and back. Silence at last… except for Mary's low groan of pain.
"John?"
"Right here," he called back. "Hang in there, love."
"Are you mad?" Sheppard whispered, dragging his eyes from the body in the corner to look John in the face for the first time. "You've broken the circle – interrupted the ritual!"
John looked back at Mary. The chalk lines were glowing again, dim but steady this time, a reddish sickly light filling the room. Not a Devil's Trap, at all, or rather, a modified one. John couldn't recognise half the symbols scrawled inside it, around the edges.
"Good," he said to Sheppard. "I don't know what the hell you're playing at –"
"Playing! Idiot, this isn't playing! We knew what we were doing. There were controls, restrictions I needed to set up! It would have been a doorway only I could open. You've blown it open! Created a – a chasm!"
He really was panicked, eyes darting this way and that, hands trembling, whole body poised to run. John got the sense it wasn't the gun in his hands that Sheppard was afraid of.
Behind him, Mary sucked in a harsh unsteady breath, movements slowing down. "God… God, no." Her eyes fluttered closed, brow furrowing in concentration. John fought down the urge to drop his gun and run to her.
"What did you do, you sonovabitch?" he demanded, eyes on Mary still. The third guy tried to get past him while he was watching her, but John caught his movement out of the corner of his eye, and simply shot his kneecap out.
Sheppard flinched at the gunshot, the screams of his friend, but didn't move, or say anything.
"Well?" John repeated, voice low and angry and as intimidating as he could manage.
"It's a portal," Sheppard said at last. "A doorway. To Hell. This town, it's built on a node, a point of power. Your girlfriend's a powerful psychic, but I'm guessing you knew that, huh? The energy, she's just… she's soaking it up. Like a sponge. When… when the time was right, I would have completed the ritual and directed the power collected in her to make a crack, a doorway that only I could control."
He was serious. He knew what he was doing. John had half-expected him to be a kid messing about without any real idea of what he'd gotten into, but no. Sheppard knew, and he didn't care.
Suddenly, John wanted to throw up. His hands shook and his eyes widened and all he could see was Alex' face, features spattered with blood and twisted in agony, cold and lifeless and unmoving.
So much death in the world already, and this boy wanted to make it even worse?
"Why?" he wanted to know, barely audible over the other man's sobs in the corner.
But Sheppard did hear him, and his eyes widened.
"Why? Why not? Hm? Why the fuck not? What has humanity ever done for me, other than beaten and starved and scorned me? Nothing. Ever. So when I found my foster mother's books, her dirty little secret… I started to learn. And soon, I could see a way out. A way to get free. So, I took it."
How did one maltreated little boy turn into this fervent, fanatical monster?
"You'll destroy us all."
"No. You did that, interrupting the ritual. I had restrictions in place. I could have controlled anything that came through, made it do my bidding."
"How do I reverse this?"
Sheppard sneered. "You don't. you can't. it's too late. The ritual was meant to end with her sacrifice – her death would have released the power and let me control it. But you've blown all our safeguards to Hell, pardon the expression, and now, everything is just going to… blow up."
John wasn't sure if it was the sneer, or Mary's harsh laboured breathing, or the nausea still rushing over him, but, "I see," he said, soft and slow, nodding understanding.
Then he shot him.
Sheppard dropped instantly, dead before he hit the floor.
"Get outta here," John snarled at the last guy, sobbing and trembling in the corner, clutching at his shattered knee. He sucked in a breath and started to crawl, terrified wide-blown eyes not leaving John.
But John neither noticed his leaving nor cared. He'd already stepped over Sheppard's body and into the glowing circle, kneeling beside Mary, still and silent now but for those awful tearing breaths.
Her skin was soaked in sweat, and so hot it burned his hands. Almost, he thought she was shining like the circle around them, the colour of a flashlight shone through fingers, a patina of red light laid over her skin.
"Mary," he said. "Mary, please. Wake up, love."
She didn't hear him, didn't respond, didn't notice when he caught her shoulders, lifted her into his lap, shook her desperately, slapped her hot flushed face. She just lay there, unmoving, burning up from inside.
Finally, in sheer desperation, John bent his head and kissed her, quick and chaste, a mere press of his mouth to hers.
It worked, in a way. As their mouths met, he felt a spark of connection, a flicker of… something between them, not physical but mental, as though their minds rather than their mouths had touched.
Nodes amplify psychic's abilities. And if even half of what Sheppard said was true, then Mary should have so much power inside her right now she could probably destroy the world herself.
He drew back. Her eyes were open now, but there was no spark of awareness in them, nothing but emptiness, dull green glass instead of the dancing fires he loved. Mary's eyes could go from gleaming dark gold to sun-dappled green to the deep, endless emerald of a mountain lake, but right now they were as shallow and lifeless as a doll's.
And yet, that spark of connection…
He kissed her again, deeper this time, tongue sweeping into her mouth and back in firm strokes, exploring a mouth he knew by heart, trying to provoke a reaction.
Between one second and the next, she was kissing him back, arms wrapping around his shoulders, pulling him down to her. John settled over her, weight on his elbows, their bodies touching from chest to knees, and reached for that elusive connection.
It was as if he'd been freed from his body; not that he couldn't still feel it, but it simply didn't matter anymore. Here, she seemed to whisper to him, and he could see the power Sheppard had summoned like a pulsing tangle of sickly red light inside her, feeding off her, sinking into her, growing larger with every second that slipped by. All Mary's concentration, all her strength, was centered on holding it, containing it, keeping it locked inside her.
She'd been fighting it since the beginning, he realised, for hours now, struggling against it like it was a live thing invading her body, trying to take over her, claw its way out of her.
John knew that feeling: the same thing happened every time he used his telekinesis, like a separate entity sitting in his gut, waiting to pounce on him and destroy him. But he'd always been able to control it, force it down – as had Mary. This, though… he didn't know how they were going to control this build-up of raw, utterly alien power.
He reached out to Mary tentatively, feeling like an intruder in her body. He knew somehow that in the real world, their positions hadn't changed a whit, but to all intents and purposes, he was sharing her body with her right now.
She caught his hand, metaphorically speaking, and pulled him in, linking with her somehow, wrapping himself around her, letting his fresh strength bleed into her, helping her fight this thing inside her, this almost-living knot of power.
What's happening to us?
He wasn't sure if she spoke out loud or not, if they're still kissing or not, but either way, he answered her in the same manner.
It's magnifying our abilities.
Go figure. He cut my arm… used my blood for something.
Sonovabitch.
What now?
He was trying to open a Devil's Gate. Crazy as Justin was.
He wasn't far from succeeding. Can't you feel the cracks?
And suddenly, John could. Like wounds in the world, thin red cracks in reality, seeping evil, ever widening.
The power accumulating inside Mary was enough to blow them so far open they'd never be closed again.
What do we do? he asked anxiously.
I think… Sheppard took this power to open a doorway, right? So why can't we use it to close one?
You mean – plug the cracks?
The conversation, John suspected, had taken no real time at all. He sensed Mary's assent; and then, instead of pushing that pulsing knot of power back, keeping it contained, they were unraveling it, shaping it, like weaving a rope, passing it back and forth until it was the right shape, the right length, channeling strip after strip through Mary's exhausted body to plug the holes in the universe itself.
It might have taken hours or minutes, that back-breaking mental labour. Neither John nor Mary could tell, could see or feel or sense anything beyond their shared connection, their slow controlled shaping of a power that should have torn them both apart. As the knot shrank, so the red cracks began to fade away, one by one, until John wasn't sure if they'd ever been there. Perhaps he'd just imagined it. Perhaps both knot and cracks had been a hallucination…
When the last one finally winked out, the world around them seemed to shudder briefly and then settle back into place with a relieved little click.
Just like that, John snapped back into his own body, the connection with Mary severed as neatly as if cut by a knife, and he became painfully aware of the fact that he was still lying on a cold stone floor kissing the girl he loved in the immediate proximity of two dead bodies.
He yanked away – or tried to. Mary's arms were still around his neck, and their noses bumped.
Her eyes were a deep, shining green.
"Nice place to make out in," she said, her voice low and hoarse. Her skin was still wet with sweat, but it no longer burned so unnaturally hot, and the tremours that shook her body now were of pure human exhaustion.
"First thing I could think of that was sure to get your attention," John said, surprised to find his voice was equally hoarse.
Mary gave a long weary sigh. "The arrogance of you."
John moved to his knees beside her and lifted her into his arms. She pressed herself against him, forehead resting against his neck, shoulders tensing briefly with the fierce hug she gave him. He stood up, a little unsteady, but still, and she raised her head to look around.
"You killed them?"
"Yep."
No guilt. Not this time. Not over the men who'd tried to kill Mary.
He thought he heard regret in her second sigh, but she didn't say anything as he carried her up the steps and out of the house. To his surprise, it was still dark out, and no one saw them walk the two blocks to the Impala – or if they did, they had no reason to suspect anything strange was happening.
A trail of blood led from the stairs through the hall and lounge out onto the front porch, and then tapered off on the garden path. John had no intention of searching for the guy. Ever.
Four o'clock in the morning, the clock in the car said. Mary practically snuggled into the Impala's passenger seat. He wanted to drive back to Sheppard's place and set it on fire, but it just felt like too much effort. For a few moments, he sat there, watching her.
Eventually, her eyes opened. "Go on. I'll be fine."
He smiled. "You're still mind-reading."
"No. But I did teach you well."
John threw his head back and laughed. Then he reached into the back seat for the lighter fluid.
Three days later, they were at Dan's, getting yelled at.
"You plugged it!" Dan shouted. "What do you mean, you plugged it? You can't go around plugging holes in reality like they're a leak in the Impala's gas tank, for Chrissakes!"
"Actually," Mary said slowly, "it's probably more accurate to say we put what Sheppard had taken out and forced into me back where it belonged."
"Forced into you?" Dan said, frowning.
"He used my blood for something. To create a link between me and the node, I'm guessing."
"Well, there is a belief that a psychic's powers are held in their blood," Dan told them, calmer now there was a mystery to unravel. "What I really don't understand is that connection you described between the two of you."
"Neither do we," John said. "I just – suddenly, I was in Mary's head with her, could help her hold that stuff in."
"I wonder if there's a kinship between your powers and the node," Dan said thoughtfully. "I mean, if we're going with the theory that – our yellow-eyed friend actually gave you these abilities rather than just used powers you already had, then that would make this a lot easier to understand. Both of you would have already had an affinity of sorts with both the node and each other."
"Dan," John interrupted his rambling thoughts, watching Mary's still-pale face worriedly, "can we talk about this later? Mary's still tired."
"Don't you dare coddle me," she snapped. "I'm fine."
"Sure you are," Dan drawled, stepping in to stop the impending argument. They both looked exhausted, drained, pushed beyond their limits. "Upstairs, both of you. Go sleep."
"If you call Ben, I'll kill you," Mary threatened.
Later that day, after a long sleep, dinner, and much theorizing, John found her on the back porch, sitting in the fading sunlight and coaxing soft sad notes out of her guitar. She'd hauled it out of Mark's attic the last time they'd been in Connecticut and packed it into the Impala's trunk, and he loved to hear her play.
"Nick Drake?" John teased, knowing perfectly well she was playing Joni Mitchell.
"Everything comes and goes," she sang softly, "Marked by lovers, and styles of clothes."
"Bit sad for an evening like this one."
"I was feeling contemplative."
"Oh. Dangerous."
"Are you mocking me, Johnny?"
"Know any CSN?" he evaded the question, laughing.
"As in Suite: Judy Blue Eyes?"
"As in, Guinevere, had green eyes, like yours, my lady like yours."
She laughed softly, turned away, long gold curls hiding her faint blush. "Making you my Lancelot?"
"They parted," he said. "Guinevere and Lancelot parted after the final battle against Mordred, never to meet again in this life."
"But we are not bound forever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory," she quoted softly.
John laughed. "Promise?"
Mary looked up at him and smiled. "Of course."
It was all he needed. All either of them needed.