In the Fires of Hell


"Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
― J M Barrie, Peter Pan


Chapter 1 A Promise of Tomorrows

Heaven, 44,300 BC

The long hall, paved in marble and lit with the diffuse golden light of ten thousand candles, was silent, the ranks of the cherubim and the seraphim still and unmoving. The summons had been clear.

Wait. Be silent.

None would dare shift an itching wing, or allow a single chain to clink in the vast space whose hard surfaces picked up every whisper of sound.

"Our Father has commanded that we look upon his creation," Michael said clearly into the silence, the warm, deep baritone of his voice echoing from marble floors and walls, bouncing from the fluted columns of crystal and jade and opal. "This is Man. And he will rule in our Father's image and filled with His Love for all of eternity."

Necks strained as the ranks of the angels peered toward the raised dais at the end of the great hall, wings rustling with a sibilant hiss as they looked upon the creature that stood beside the greatest of archangels.

"In love and obedience, we do prostrate ourselves before him," Michael continued gravely. "It will be our most joyous responsibility to guard and protect and serve him from this time forth."

"Bow? To … this? I will not bow down to him," one voice spoke out, a pure tenor rebounding back and forth between the walls, thick with distaste. "I shall not bow to a lesser being. He will bow to me."

At once, low murmuring filled the hall, voices hushed with shock and astonishment, here and there a faint thread of assent, of admiration, of accord.

Michael turned to his brother, his heart sinking at the words. "Lucifer … will not? Shall not?"

The archangel's face, an unearthly vision of perfect beauty, of niveous skin and heavenly blue eyes, darkened as he looked at his younger brother. "Wilful brother, you were born and bound to obedience. You will kneel before our Father's creation."

"Never," the Lightbringer snarled furiously, walking toward the dais. "We are made and cast away, Michael. I will not be thrown aside for some puling, stinking, hair-covered weakling!"

There were some who argued that of all the angels of the Eighth Choir, Lucifer was the most beautiful, the most perfect in form of any. It was the specious argument of those who had too little to think of, Castiel thought, looking at the rage that twisted the archangel's features now. Long hair, red as the embers of a long-burning fire, flowed over broad, pale shoulders, framed an oval face, a strong jawline and high, wide cheekbones. His eyes were striking, an incandescent blue that rarely appeared in nature, outlined by long lashes a darker red than his hair. The full, curving lips were distorted, their plump carmine perfection thinned out as they drew back in wrath.

Castiel shrank back against the wall as he noticed the light in the hall beginning brighten, almost imperceptibly at first, then strengthening as it quickened. He dropped to the floor, knees smarting as they hit the unforgiving marble, the great sigh of wings surrounding him as his brothers did the same, filling the air with the scents of flowers and feathers.

In the centre of the hall, Lucifer stood, defiantly upright, his wings, of pearl and ivory and alabaster, half-raised as his eyes narrowed against the nascent brightness. To his left and right, angels stood with him, four on one side, five on the other, upright in solidarity with the rebellious archangel, but their heads bowed as the light, which was not, precisely, light, pierced the wavelengths of their forms, outlining metaphysical constructs of bone and tendon, feather and vein and muscle.

"You are cast down to the earthly plane, Morning Star, bringer of Light."

It was not words they heard, nor a voice, nor a sound at all. It was not images they could see nor even a frequency of the natural energy of the universe. It was beyond definition, beyond understanding, and yet it was clear. The ten angels barely had time to take another breath before the constructs they wore like robes of air solidified and they were thrust through the veils that divided the two planes.


Mesopotamia. One thousand years later.

"I will make them a war they will not forgot, not in a thousand years, not in ten or a hundred thousand," Lucifer said fiercely to his lieutenant as he belted his sword about his waist and stared out over the endless, shifting sands. His followers stood waiting, the hiss of metal and the ring of metal on metal muffled in the open space, fragmented by the ceaseless wind. "One third of the angels in Heaven have already rallied to my side. Michael will not forget this day!"

He was right about that.

Michael, archangel and commander of the Host, never forgot the day he fought over the wide, golden sands of the desert, under a killing sun and a frigid moon. He never forgot how the earth trembled and shuddered beneath their feet as angel battled angel and warriors fell on both sides, blood spilling into the thirsty sand and the land drinking deeply. Or the thousands of days of war that followed it, legions dead, the desert red under the pitiless flat glare, the sand black under the chill white light of the stars.

He never forgot his brother's screams as he hacked the wings from his shoulders and called the commandment, the ground yawing open at his feet, a widening maw of fire and foul stench and a pulsing red light that echoed the beat of a heart and throbbed insistently as the rebels were pushed closer and closer to the edge of the depthless abyss. It was a thing of this plane, and another plane entirely, the accursed plane, joined along the edges, deep within the mantle of the earth, a prison of soul and spirit and flesh, a cage of fire and heat and torment.

He never forgot the nine who'd followed Lucifer on his insane quest to be greater than their Father, could not rid himself of the memories of their pleading and begging to be spared, to keep their wings, to return … they Fell, one by one into the abyss, and their voices remained, rising higher with their desperation until the shrilly oscillating sound had killed every living thing in a hundred mile radius.

He never forgot the way the earth had closed at his command and those screams were silenced.


Kansas City, Kansas. August 2012.

Dean looked along the empty street carefully, searching out the shadows, the edges, looking for movement, for a reflection or shape or colour that didn't belong. He nodded and started moving again when he was sure that none of those were present in the deserted concrete and brick buildings to either side, peripherally aware of the others to his right, attenuated senses taking note of the flick of their shadows, the soft slur and muted crunch of their footfalls over the rubble that covered the pavements.

Kansas City was not looking good, he thought absently as he turned the corner and searched the next section of street. None of the cities had fared all that well, the skyscrapers burned out and left riddled by the moaning of the wind through their scoured and emptied interiors, the streets still filled with the rapidly rusting and desiccated hulks of vehicles, with glass and metal and the heaped mazes of fallen masonry and the detritus of a world long dead.

There were still places that held things of use, even when the entire area looked and smelled like a mausoleum. The plagues and depredations of those who'd come after, hunting through the remains for food or shelter, had left a surprising number of stores and goods untouched. And if they'd been kept deep enough, stored far enough from the reach of the weather, they were often still intact.

He'd been surprised by the number and variety of electric and electronic equipment they'd been able to salvage, but perhaps he shouldn't've been. Wrapped within their non-degradable coverings, packed into weather-proof crates, stored in the back rooms and basements of the bigger stores in the cities, almost all had worked once the magic lifeblood of alternating current had been fed to them.

Chuck had his optical drives, the writer – prophet, Dean corrected himself with a faint half-grin – had hidden himself in an office and gotten down to the nuts and bolts of transferring the library's contents into a digital form that could be searched. Mitch Hennessy was the seventeen-year old survivor Chuck had recruited to do the programming work. The kid was tall and gangly, had hung onto his prescription glasses somehow through the years of dodging croats and demons and being enslaved to work on body removal in Las Vegas, and couldn't hold a conversation about anything other than disk capacity and binary and the algorithms needed for super-fast search capabilities but the two of them seemed happy enough to hide from the rest of the world and get on with it. Periodically Mitch or Chuck would emerge, clutching a list of other items required for the task. For this trip, he had to find a digital scanner and a selection of OCR software. Whatever that was.

Security cameras, pressure-sensitive alarms, motion-detectors, floodlamps, closed circuit security systems, intercoms, line-of-sight radio equipment, hard drives, portable drives, music systems … all of them had been found, retrieved, installed in the new holds that had risen up in and around the small town and were making life that little bit easier, for the most part.

A soft whistle pulled his thoughts back to the street, and he saw Maurice looking ahead, their target in sight. Nodding, he moved out to take point again, watching the shadows and the piles of crap that filled the street, looking for anomalies and differences.


Lebanon, Kansas

Merrin looked around the store-room, her normally smooth forehead creased in dissatisfaction. The dispensary, such as it was, barely held enough supplies to cover a GP's surgery, let alone the hospital-sized quantities she was used to. The warehouse in Grand Rapids had been destroyed – it'd been one of the first things that the hunters had checked on after the attack on the camps – but there had to be others, better protected, filled with the products they needed here.

They had the basics, she thought, but not enough of them. And the things that were impossible to manufacture now were in very low supply. Turning abruptly, she left the room and walked down the long, cold hall toward the warren of offices that Liev had placed between the kitchens and the store-rooms.

Alex looked up as the older woman strode in without knocking, her finger automatically moving to rest on the column in the ledger in front of her, the young man and woman leaning over the desk to either side of her looking up as well.

Seeing that she wasn't alone, Merrin grimaced. "Sorry, Alex, but something has to be done."

Alex lifted a brow slightly and looked at her. "About what?"

"About our medical supplies," Merrin said, walking across the room and sitting down stiffly in the chair facing her. "Our lack of medical supplies," she clarified tersely.

"We can go if –" the young woman started to say, glancing awkwardly at the desk, the short, curving bob of her hair falling forward over her cheek.

"No. Merrin, this is Maria, that's Freddie, they're going to be helping out with the admin side of the keep," Alex said firmly. "Merrin is the person responsible for our medical supplies, not only here but in cooperation with the Michigan camps." She gestured vaguely. "Sit down, you both need to hear this, this is exactly the kind of thing you'll be dealing with."

Maria backed away from the desk and sat in the straight-backed chair to one side. Freddie moved to the armchair beside the filing cabinets. Merrin watched them impatiently. She recalled now Alex telling her about them. Both were in their early twenties and both had said they'd had experience with administration duties, Maria in bookkeeping during her school vacation time, Freddie as a paralegal, trying to cover his pre-law costs.

"What do we need?" Alex asked, noting the nurse's frustrated expression.

"Everything!" Merrin burst out. "Antibiotics, painkillers, anti-inflammatories – hell, a whole range of pharmaceuticals that we lost in the attack … sutures, needles, syringes, bags, dressings, vaccinations, gauze, swabs, bandages … the monitors we had at Chitaqua were destroyed, the lab and everything in it … Kim and Ray can't do cultures, can't even check simple blood tests without a microscope –"

Alex nodded understandingly, lifting her hand. "Okay, Freddie, Maria, first job – we don't have phone books, so we need to poll the people we've got here, and the people over in Michigan – anyone who has any information on pharmaceutical and medical supply warehouses or manufacturers. Get Tricia and Sandra and Michelle to help you check with everyone here, and tell Anson we need to talk to Renee over in Tawas. We're looking for locations so it doesn't matter if they know what they held for sure, just any information on where they are – and specifically if anyone knows of any manufacturers or distribution warehouses in Kansas City or Omaha."

The two rose and hurried out of the room, and Merrin heard their voices, bickering with each other as they walked up the hall and out of earshot.

"It was easier when there weren't so many of us, wasn't it?" she said disparagingly. Alex looked at her and smiled.

"Yeah, but we'll get there eventually. The teams bring back information on what's left in the cities whenever they go out." She leaned back in the chair and let out a long breath. "One thing about the land of the free, the medical industry was huge, so we'll find what we need."

The nurse shook her head. "Maybe we will, and for the most part, maybe we'll be able to keep the equipment in good enough repair to work for twenty years, or fifty. But what are we going to do when we run out?"

Alex looked at her thoughtfully. "I don't know. Figure it out, somehow."

"People will die of infection again. In childbirth. From broken limbs we can't x-ray to set properly. They'll die of misdiagnosis –"

"Even a few years ago, they did that," Alex reminded her softly. "We were overusing the antibiotics and we paid for that, we'll probably be paying for that for a while. At least no one's likely to die of too much cholesterol or diabetes these days."

The nurse frowned at her. "You don't think we'll ever get back what we had, do you?"

"I think it's unlikely," Alex admitted reluctantly. "When that locust plague went through … Rufus said that they haven't an intact library since. Nearly all the books are gone, and you know what that means. Learning from trial and error, through experience, that took a long time the first go round."

"But there must be people who know how to do it, to make … everything?"

"There probably are," Alex said, leaning forward across the desk. "But so much was automated, so much was generated in computer-driven factories, from plastics we don't know how to reproduce, to circuitry that was pretty heavily guarded in each industry, I'm not sure how much help that's going to be."

Merrin looked at her sourly. "You're depressing to talk to, you know that?"

Alex laughed ruefully. "Yeah, it's been said."

"Why Kansas City and Omaha, specifically?" Merrin asked curiously.

"That's where the teams are right now," Alex told her. "Dean's in Kansas City, and Vince is in Omaha. If there are any pharmaceutical warehouses there, and the information comes back quickly enough, Bobby can patch that through to them. They have a regular sked on the SSB radios, keep each other up to date."


Kansas City, Kansas

Dean and Maurice stood on either side of the trucks, shotguns held loosely ready, eyes scanning the street as Billy, Lee, Danielle and Joseph loaded one and Adam, Zoe, Perry and Isaac loaded the other. Even finding the vehicles had been difficult. The metal frames and engines had all been intact, but the rubber tyres, the hoses, gaskets, seals, interiors and electrics had been consumed, and finding replacements had needed another few days of searching through the city for suppliers who'd kept their stock shrink-wrapped in inedible plastics.

Dean glanced across at the progress being made, one eye flicking in a fast wink to the other hunter. The trainees had done well enough, no stupid or careless mistakes made. Rufus had been thorough in most of the things they'd needed drilled into them, despite his endless complaints about their levels of ignorance. Getting the older hunter's cooperation was costing him, though. He'd have to try to find a liquor warehouse if they had time this run, he'd gone through his own stash and started borrowing from Ellen's to satisfy the remuneration demanded.

"All done," Billy said, wiping his hands on his jeans and looking over the hood at the hunter.

"Yeah, us too," Zoe added, gesturing as Perry tightened the rope over the load. "Where do we go next?"

Maurice snorted softly and Dean grinned. "Alright, Billy, take your truck, Lee, Joseph, you're riding on the back. Danielle's shotgun. Zoe, you get the second truck, with Adam and Isaac on the back and Perry navigating. Maurice and I'll take point and rear, and you watch us, alright? No vagueing out or talking about your sex lives."

The wide, answering grins he got reminded him suddenly of himself, climbing into the driver's seat of a pickup, Sam clambering up into the back, his brother's hair flopping over his forehead as he'd shifted his grip on the shotgun he'd held, his father getting into the Impala … he pushed the memory aside, watching the kids go to their positions, the trucks starting up.

From the other side of the street, Maurice's face was creased in a smile. "Déjà vu," he said with a chuckle, "I remember when your old man –"

Dean shook his head. It was too exposed here. "Save the memory lane moments for home," he told the older man tersely. "Let's get going."


"CQ, CQ. Calling CQ. This is DWM208, Delta-Whiskey-Mike-Two-Zero-Eight, calling CQ and standing by."

The radio crackled slightly and Dean adjusted the tuner, watching as the flicker of the digital readout steadied.

"Roger, Delta-Whiskey-Mike-Two-Zero-Eight, this is Kilo-Lima-Lima-Hotel-Zero-Niner, receiving you, loud and clear," Bobby's scratchy voice came from the small speaker and Dean leaned back in the seat, relaxing slightly. "Gotta a message for you, Dean. From Alex. Need to add pharma and med supplies to your shopping list in KC."

"Great, love those extended shopping runs," Dean said resignedly, reaching for the pen and paper in the glove box. "What's the address?"

"Adams Street, Kansas side, follow the train tracks and get off the 35 at West Greystone. There's a bunch of warehouses and freight depots down there."

"What am I looking for?" He wrote down the location, absently fitting it into what he knew of the city. It would take them a couple of hours to get around the worst parts of the city, but it was doable.

"Everything, according to Alex. Here's the list –" Bobby cleared his throat and starting reciting the items and Dean wrote each one down, spelling most of the pharmaceuticals phonetically, noting down the desired quantities for each of them to one side.

"Geez, Bobby, we'll need another truck," he said in exasperation, when the old man stopped.

"Alex gave this top priority, Dean," Bobby said. "We're low on everything and Merrin's just started training up more nurses, so there's a bit of wastage. Get whatever you can and get lots of it."

"Will do," Dean said, tucking the list into his jacket pocket and looking across the river in front of him. "Gonna put us back a few more days."

"I'll let her know."

"How 'bout Vince? How's Omaha looking?"

"Said they had to clean out a big nest of ghouls, set up shop downtown and must have gotten some survivors because there were fresh bones in the lair," Bobby told him.

Dean frowned at that. "Where the hell did they get survivors?"

"Got me," Bobby said. "I thought that most folks would've died in the lead up, but apparently not."

"Hmmm."

"Yeah."

"Alright, anything else?" he asked, stifling a yawn. They were camping in the shell of a factory, on the eastern side of the Missouri River. Everything had gone from the interior but the walls and roof were intact and the vehicles and their small tents were ringed around with circles of protection, of salt and iron and fire.

"Nope, get some shut-eye, I heard that." He heard the smile in the old man's voice and wrinkled his nose at the speaker. "Tell Maurice to stay frosty."

"Yeah, will do. Signing off."

Putting the mike back on the hook, he flicked the radio off and slid out of the car, closing the door quietly behind him as he walked to the cookfire and Maurice's hunched form sitting by it.

"Any news?" The older hunter turned to look at him, his face half-shadowed.

"Got some extras for our list of pickups," Dean said, dropping to the ground and looking at the coffee pot. "Any of that left?"

"It's thick enough to stand a spoon in," Maurice warned him as he lifted it off the fire and poured a half cup. "What kind of extras?"

"Medical supplies."

"Got a location?"

"Half a one," Dean said, his face screwing up as he tasted the thick, bitter coffee, swallowing it down anyway. "Other side of the river, those big warehouses past the train lines."

Maurice nodded. "What about Vince and his team?"

"Omaha's full of ghouls, Bobby said."

"Well, that'll give them some exercise."

"Yeah." Dean's mouth lifted a little. "God, I can't drink this."

Looking down into the cup, he tossed the rest onto the fire, the branches hissing as the liquid hit the hot coals.

Maurice chuckled quietly. "I did warn you. What'd you think of our trainees today?"

Dean put the cup down and shrugged. "They were alright. Didn't seem to be hanging on their nerves too much."

"Yeah," Maurice nodded. "I suspect that being in class with Rufus would be more nerve-wracking than out here with us."

"The town's dead," Dean said, leaning back on his elbows and straightening out his legs. "Just as well for us," he added, frowning as a detail from the conversation with Bobby returned to him and turning to look at Maurice.

"Apparently the ghouls in Omaha weren't feeding from the boneyards."

Maurice finished the thick coffee in his cup and put it down before he responded. "Fresh kills?"

"That's what Vince told Bobby."

"How? We've been looking for survivors for at least eight weeks, haven't seen anyone."

"Sixty-four dollar question," Dean agreed tiredly. "Which one of those kids supposed to be watching with you?"

"Joseph," Maurice answered absently, glancing at the tent. "I'll get him in a minute."

"Get him now," Dean said, lying down and pulling the edge of the sleeping bag around his shoulder. "I'm done."


Hell, August 2012

The demon looked around as he entered the fifth level, uneasy in the silence and emptiness. He'd been here before, but passing through, hurrying through the endless corridors and halls and great rooms, not lingering.

Centuries ago, one of the demons of the abyss had told him that this level had been built to mirror the halls of Heaven. The floors were polished black basalt, smoothed and bevelled to resemble tiles, and tall, graceful columns, fluted or delicately engraved, supported the unseen arches of the ceilings, lost in the shadows above.

It was unsettling, the demon thought, an entire level, empty yet menacingly elegant. He hurried through, hearing only the whisper and low moaning of the winds from the deeper levels as they followed the corridors and skirled around the chambers and cavernous rooms. Unsettling and eerie.

The level had been Astaroth's, and the archdemon had been renowned for his delight in long-lasting and vicious torturing of souls. The juxtaposition of that reputation and the overweening refinement of the spaces he walked through now was difficult to reconcile. He'd known some, in life, like that, he thought. Think nothing of sliding the shiv in as they declared love and pressed their cold lips against yours.

He stopped as he came to a wide entrance doorway, looking around in wide-eyed astonishment.

"Bloody hell," he breathed. The – what was it? Audience room? Throne chamber? – room was more than a thousand feet long, and at least a third of that in width, the long sides emphasised by towering pillars of onyx and jet and obsidian, hollowed and filigreed into fantastically delicate cages of air. At the end of the room, a low dais took up almost the entire width. On the dais, in the centre, stood a seat. A throne, he corrected himself slowly, walking down the length of the room toward it. Gold, chased with silver and jet, the high back carved into wings that stretched up and out, every feather detailed and inlaid with precious stones. In the persistent and unchanging light of this plane, the metals and gems were shaded and coloured in different hues of red, as if the throne had been washed in blood.

Probably has been, he thought, slowing as he neared it. On the other hand, what part of the accursed plane and its prisoners and guards had not?

He climbed the broad, shallow steps and stopped in front of the throne, staring down at it. Fit for a king.

Not a king, he realised slowly. For the King.

Turning around before he could question himself further on the wisdom of what he wanted to do, he sat on the wide seat, his arms resting along the carved and inlaid arms of the throne, fingers curling over the ends.

There was a throb. Through the air. Through the rock. Through his soul.

Power.

Deep through the caverns and caves, through the tunnels and reaching down to the bottom of the abyss and further, across the lake and into the wastelands. He felt it first as a charge, slipping through what his mind remembered of his body, tingling in his fingertips, stuttering in his chest. Then it grew. And it filled him.

POWER. And he understood.

The power of the souls held in here, filled with energy, even after they'd been blackened and twisted and charred beyond recognition. The energy of the millions, or billions, that had passed through, sinking into rock and filling the very air he breathed with their anguish and desolation. It grew and crackled through the throne he sat on, through his own torrefied soul, seeping into every crevice, every fissure and crack, sealing them over, opening his mind and branding new pathways away from the old ones. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't move, welded to the throne and its connection with the power that rose through the levels. He felt every moment of pain. Every second of anguish and torment and despair. Every soul. Every single soul.

He sat there for four days as the unchecked power of the souls of Hell poured through and into him and everything he'd ever thought was reshaped and reborn, and all that he'd believed fell away, incinerated in the conflagration of new knowledge.

Born Fergus Roderick McLeod, in the tiny town of Canisbay in northern Scotland, his life had been short on adventure and long on boredom. The smell of the sea and the shore at low tide, the cold damp of the winter storms, burning peat, boiled cabbage and the warm stink of the inn were what filled the little memories he still had of the place. And then the demon had come along. And ten short years later, no richer, no happier, he'd heard the howls in the night.

It'd taken a scant hundred years to burn the humanity out of him. And less to come to love the job he'd been given. Making deals. Tempting and persuading and cajoling the weak into ten years of heaven on earth, and an eternity down amidst the flames. He was good at it. He didn't lie. Much. Not much at all. Was hardly ever needed, in fact. And he didn't welch on the deals he made. Everyone was fully satisfied. And his numbers had gone up and his standing and he'd begun to entertain thoughts about going further.

And now … now he was here. King of Hell. The rightful ruler of the accursed plane. He got up from the throne and felt the power sing through him, in all that remained of his soul. There were things he had to attend to. Important things. Things that would change the world.


Kansas City, Kansas

Moving away from the side of the truck, Dean watched the fences behind the massive prefabricated building, where the train tracks ran down alongside the river. He'd been happily surprised when Joseph had taken his list and rewritten it, replacing his phonetically spelled items with the correct labels.

"Worked in a hospital as an orderly for three years before I got my paramedic training," the young man told him with a shrug. "Just gotta a good memory for stuff that's written down."

Dean'd filed that information away carefully. There was a word for that kind of memory, but he didn't think he'd ever known what it was. He could ask Alex when he got back. In the meantime, Joseph had copied out the list and given the copies to Isaac and Zoe and the three of them had been loading boxes and crates onto the hand carts all morning, checking off the items one by one.

It'd taken two days to find another truck, find the replacement tyres and wire for the electrical circuits and something to bind over the steel frames where the seats had been. The Dodge flatbed would handle the full load and as an added bonus there'd been a wholesale liquor warehouse right next door to the tyre place that had survived with most of its premium stock intact. Forty cases of whiskey and bourbon sat tucked on the back, padded and tied down securely. It would keep Rufus happy for awhile at least.

The lightweight chain-link fences that separated the industrial buildings from the tracks looked to be in one piece. Access was easier from the road, but it seemed like these buildings hadn't been touched, even when the city had been fully infected. He'd spent three days trying to get out when the virus had first been running out of control and he couldn't remember which parts had burned to the ground and which had just been filled with the psychopathically enraged victims. Walking around the short edge of the building, his senses stretched out, Dean wondered what had survived here.

Aside from the light breeze that blew toward him from the river, carrying the fetid stench of drying mudbanks and the acrid odour of hot steel from the railway lines as they slowly heated up in the summer sun, nothing was moving anywhere in his vicinity. He was turning back when the small noise penetrated.

A click. Rock on rock.

Pivoting slowly around, the barrel of the shotgun rising unhurriedly, he scanned the long line of the fence. It took a moment to see it, the animal still as stone on the other side of the chainlink. A dog. A big one.

Some kind of Bernard or Newfie, he thought, but the colouring was wrong for both, this dog was brindle, not the chestnut-and-white patches of the St Bernard breed, nor the blue-black of the Newfoundland. The dog was looking straight at him and he felt the nerves prickle along the back of his neck.

They hadn't seen any dogs in any city or town since Baal had passed over. A few cats, plenty of vermin, but no dogs.

A second dog appeared from below the edge of the bank, moving to stand beside the first, dark eyes protruding slightly from the fine, pointed head, the sunlight gleaming on a short, jet-black coat and lighting the cinnamon points to red. The Doberman's mouth opened and a pink tongue lolled out, saliva dripping from the lower jaw.

He started to back up, moving slowly along the short side of the warehouse, wondering if any of the guns in the trucks were loaded with silver. The dogs watched him, and after a moment, two more appeared, on the other side of the big, heavy-set leader. A Collie and a Weinmarer, possibly.

"Maurice," Dean raised his voice a little as he saw the corner of the building in his peripheral vision.

"Yo," the older hunter answered, watching the teams. "What?"

"We got silver with us?"

"Yeah, couple of cases. Why?"

"Skinwalkers."

Dean backed around the corner and turned, running for the trucks. "Load what you're carrying with silver, now!"

They were decoys, he realised, the four by the back fence, as another ten appeared on the road and raced across the open concrete apron toward them. His fingers pulled out the magazine on the assault rifle, slamming in a pre-loaded magazine from the metal case Maurice thrust at him and flicking the gun's rate from full auto to semi. Swinging up onto the back of the truck, he put the gun's stock against his shoulder and started to shoot.

To his left, he could hear Maurice's Kalashnikov, single shot, firing steadily, and the more random firing of one of the trainees, a brief hope they'd taken the time to load up with silver flickering through his thoughts as dog after dog raced toward him.

He'd dropped six of the ten when the rest broke and veered off behind the building, taking themselves out of sight and range.

"Goddammit!" Lowering the rifle barrel, he swung around and looked at Maurice. "Everyone loaded with silver?"

"Joseph, Zoe and Isaac are still in the building," Maurice said, popping the magazine out and checking the shots left and slamming it back in again. "Adam, Danielle and Lee are loaded. Perry and Billy are reloading the mags for the handguns." He gestured brusquely at the cab of the truck and Dean could see the two young men, heads bowed as they feverishly stripped the magazines and reloaded them.

"You want to chase them?"

"No! Hell, no, not if we don't have to," Dean said angrily, jumping down from the flatbed and hurrying to the loading dock, expelling his auto's mag and replacing it with one loaded with silver as he strode across the distance. "How far are we along with that list, Lee?"

The young man looked over at him. "A few more items, and we're done."

Dean nodded. "Alright, Maurice is calling the shots. You stay on the trucks, got it? You do not go after them, you stay here and guard what we've got. Clear?"

"Yessir," Lee said smartly. Adam nodded.

"We clear, Adam?" Dean said sharply to him.

"Yeah, we're clear," Adam said, his tone a little resentful as his gaze cut away.

"Perry, you and Billy, keep those magazines for the rifles coming. Takes a heart-shot to kill a skinwalker. That means chest shot from the front or behind the shoulder angled forward from the back."

Dean took another four magazines, shoving them into his jacket pocket and vaulted onto the high concrete dock. "Don't let them through, Maurice."

"I won't, go find those kids."

Turning on his heel, Dean disappeared into the shadows of the building, swearing softly under his breath as his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw the long aisles of racks, filled with crates and boxes of every size.

"Joseph!" he risked a shout, hearing his voice echo oddly from the high, metal roof and muffled by the porous packing cases on the shelves. "Zoe!"

There was a sound from somewhere, deep within the building's maze of shelving, but he couldn't make it out. He started walking faster.

The gunfire was not muffled. He heard the sharp yap of Zoe's 9mm before it was drowned out by the cannon fire of Joseph's .44, the retorts booming at the end of the building and he was running, the rifle cocked as he tore around the end of the aisle and skidded along the slick concrete floor.


St Elphege Monastery, Tibet

Dhargey lay on the stone. He could feel the blood bubbling in his chest, in his throat, and he thought that he would last only a few minutes more, before that bubbling filled everything and became a still lake.

The demons had come in the night. It was unusual. And they had come with a man. More unusual. The man stood to one side of him, dressed in a tailored black suit, the shiny black leather of his shoes visible from the corner of his eye.

"I'm looking for something," the man said. His voice was hard, raspy, the accent educated East London. The lifelong habit of acquiring information, no matter how trivial or of little use was ingrained and the monk couldn't stop himself from doing it as he lay dying.

"A stone," the man continued, dropping into a crouch beside his head. "With writing on it. You know the one?"

The Tibetan rolled his eyes toward the man.

"Yeah, yeah, dying an' all that," the man said impatiently. "Where is it?"

The touch of the man's fingers along his jaw was excruciating, a million knives stabbing into him, twisting and turning as the fingertips caressed his skin. He waited for the pain to take him, his eyes locked onto the man's.

The hand lifted and the pain ceased before the overload could give him the relief of death.

"Tough little beggar, aren't you?"

The man rose to his feet, shrugging as he turned to the demons waiting behind him. "Tear it apart, every level. It's here somewhere an' we're not leaving until we find it."

On the floor, Dhargey felt the pain vanish completely as his lungs filled. He made the final prayer, for himself, for his colleagues. And blackness came, shutting out his vision as his heart slowed and stopped.

The man looked down at the open eyes of the monk, sighing slightly. Fourteen of them had been here when they'd come in. The fighting had been fierce but brief and all were dead now. He looked around the open-sided hall, drawing his coat more closely around him and lifting the short collar. The wind was freshening, cold and biting from the high, permanently snow-covered ranges to the west.

There were a lot of things here that he could use, he thought, walking from the frigid hall to the slightly warmer interior rooms. But he didn't have time to look through them all. Right now, he needed just the one thing.


Kansas City, Kansas

Zoe was crouched on the ground, firing at the dogs that snarled and bristled along the building's wall. Under her, Isaac lay on the concrete floor, his shoulder soaked in blood, his gun lying a foot or two from his hand. Joseph stood a few feet from them and a little closer to the rest of the pack, taking shots steadily, upright in the Weaver stance, one hand cupped under the butt of his auto as the barrel swivelled smoothly from side to side.

Dean started shooting as soon as he saw the dogs, the .45 calibre silver bullets finding target after target, chest shots mostly at this angle, the dogs flying back, dead before they hit the floor, canine bodies transforming back into men and women.

"Back!" he yelled at Zoe as he came up past her. "Both of you, get back, they're skinwalkers."

He saw Joseph moving backward from the corner of his eye, heard the scrape of Zoe's boots on the concrete and the soft slur as she dragged Isaac away and focussed his attention on the remaining dogs in front of him.

Big pack. The thought snuck in as the last one, a monstrous Anatolian mastiff dropped, the fur and frame melting and dissolving into the figure of a tall, broad-chested man. His gun was hot as he popped the near-empty second magazine out and slammed a fresh one in.

"What –? What the fuck are they?" Joseph said from behind him.

He turned around and saw Zoe bending over Isaac, her gun tucked back in its holster as she lifted the edge of the boy's jacket to look at the torn up flesh and fabric beneath.

"Skinwalkers," Dean told Joseph, looking at his shocked face. "Rufus didn't tell you about them?"

He saw the guilty look flash between Joseph and Zoe and sighed inwardly. The hunter had. Too much info hitting them too fast.

"They're kind of like werewolves," he said quietly, walking to Isaac and crouching beside him, looking expressionlessly at the deep bite in his shoulder. "Need silver to the heart to kill 'em."

In the distance, at the other end of the building, he could hear the rat-tat of the automatic weapons. Big, big pack. He gestured to Zoe to get up, and closed his hand around Isaac's uninjured arm, straightening up and pulling the young man to his feet.

"Come on," he said brusquely, gesturing ahead with the barrel of the Colt automatic. "How much more did we need?"

"Not much," Zoe said, glancing around as they turned down the aisle. "We found the broad-spectrum antibiotics down there, we were loading them when the dogs came."

"What about the ones outsi–?" Joseph started to ask when the gunshot rang out, making both of them jump.

Dean let Isaac drop to the floor, his face stony. He looked at the slack, shocked faces of the young woman and man standing in front of him, their mouths open as they stared down at their dead friend.

"Like werewolves, skinwalkers turn with a bite. There's no cure," he said shortly. "Get going, get those boxes loaded. We'll burn the bodies after we've got everything."

"You killed him?" Zoe didn't move, her gaze lifting slowly to Dean.

"He was bitten," Dean repeated, as patiently as he could, striding toward her and pushing her around, down the aisle. "There's no coming back from it. He would've turned, become one of them."

"But –"

"Goddammit, get moving," Dean snapped. "There is no 'but'. This is it, this is the job."

Following them down to the abandoned hand-cart, he watched them finish loading it, his thoughts and feelings locked down and away.


Maurice looked up as they came onto the loading dock, and nodded to Billy and Adam to start unloading. Danielle, Perry and Lee picked up their rifles and moved to the other trucks, climbing onto the flatbeds next to the loads and watching the open concrete lot.

"Big pack," Maurice commented lightly to Dean, noting that he'd come back with only two of the three trainees.

"Yeah."

"Isaac bitten?"

"Yeah."

Adam looked up at them, a frown drawing his brows together as he belatedly noticed that only Joseph and Zoe were there.

"What happened to Isaac?"

"Get that stuff loaded," Dean said, reloading the auto's mags from the case of silver bullets.

"Where's Isaac?" Adam said again, not moving as he stood on the flat tray of the truck and stared at his half-brother.

"Isaac didn't make it," Joseph told him, pushing a box at him.

For a moment, Dean thought that Adam was going to ignore it, was going to argue. He felt an answering anger rising as he lifted his head to stare back at the younger man, unaware that his eyes had darkened, or that his expression had flattened out to a frigidly threatening scowl. Adam took the box and turned, lips tightly pressed together as he stacked it tightly against the others.

"You want to burn the bodies?" Maurice asked softly.

Dean looked at him, sucking in a deep breath. He nodded. "As soon as the loads are done and cinched down, yeah."


"Maurice, take the last truck. Adam can ride with you," Dean said tiredly as they threw the last body onto the burning pyre. "Billy, you drive truck two, with Lee and Zoe. Joseph, you take the Mercury, you're rear. Danielle, you're on truck one with Perry."

The trainees got into the vehicles and started them, Maurice glancing at Dean as he walked back to the truck.

"We stopping on the way?"

Dean shook his head, heading for the Impala. "No, straight home."

He got into the black car and started the engine, watching the trucks pull out after him as he turned for the back roads west to lead them out of the city. In the rearview mirror, he could see the thick, black smoke rising lazily into the still air from the pyre. He could feel the grit and ash on his skin, and rough in his throat. Kid had been twenty, if that.

He reached for the stereo, his fingertips light on the case of the tape and stopped, letting his hand drop. He didn't want to listen to anything. Didn't want to think about anything. The trip had been too long already and he wanted to be back in the fortified town. They'd gotten everything they'd needed. And had left a kid behind. A dead kid.


Maurice glanced sideways at the young man sitting rigidly beside him. "Got something to get off your chest, Adam?"

"He killed Isaac," Adam said tightly, staring through the windshield.

"Isaac got bitten," Maurice said mildly. "There's no cure for a bite from a skinwalker. Not for a werewolf bite either."

"Zoe told me he just gunned him down in cold blood."

"Isaac would've turned into a monster – you think that'd be a preferable option?"

Adam turned his head slowly to look at the older hunter. "And if it'd been me who'd gotten bit? Or you?"

"Same deal, Adam," Maurice said patiently. "No exemptions in this life. Didn't Rufus tell you that?"

Adam looked back out the windshield, his face tight. Isaac had been a friend. Had started to become a friend. He couldn't believe he was dead. Couldn't believe that his older brother – his half-brother – had killed him. Without doubt or hesitation, Zoe'd said. Just bam! An execution.

"Son, we passed out of the old world a while back now," Maurice said, glancing across at him. "This world, this is how it's always been for hunters – like me, like your brothers and your dad – monsters and demons and ghosts and all the things that go bite in the dark. It's why your father tried to keep you out of it."

"Didn't do much of a job, did he?"

"He did the best he could," Maurice countered. "I worked with John, a few times before he passed, and he –"

"Maurice," Adam interrupted him, shaking his head. "I don't want any family anecdotes right now, okay? I can't deal with my family history right now."

Maurice looked at the rigid profile of the young man beside him. "Sure."

He drew in a deep breath, looking back at the road and the taillights of the truck ahead of him. John's life had been a mess but it hadn't been of his choosing. He'd never seen a man so driven, so flogged and torn apart by what had happened to him, what had still been happening to him, those rare occasions they'd teamed up. He remembered waking in the night, in the depths of the Minnesota woods, waking abruptly to the noises made by the man sleeping on the other side of the fire. He hadn't asked John about those nightmares, but he'd never forgotten them either.


St Elphege Monastery, Tibet

He was in the top level of the library, flipping through an account of the life and deeds of an infamous English magician when the demon entered, eyes wide and black.

"Yes?"

"We've found something," the demon said, half-turning and gesturing.

"Something? Can you be more specific?"

"Something we can't touch, something that hurts to be near."

"Ah," he said, tucking the book under his arm and getting up. "That sounds more like it."

The demon looked questioningly at the book he carried and he glanced down, smiling at it. "Just a little bed-time reading," he said with a shrug. "Lead on."

He followed it down the uneven hall, and through a narrow, low doorway set into the rock wall. Stairs, roughly hewn and worn deeply in the centres, led down into the mountain.

The magician hadn't been much in life, the demon mused as he followed his minion. Delusional, he thought, mostly. Trying to fit too many disparate threads into a single metaphysical framework. But his heart had been in the right place. He wondered that no one had gone and offered him a deal, to make those desires and ambitions real, to bring real power to the man's life. But perhaps someone had and had been rejected. The name had a nice ring to it, though.

Winding and twisting, always down, he had to stoop a little where the ceiling of the tunnel hadn't been carved quite high enough for the height of the Manhattan publisher he was wearing. Good taste in clothes, he thought irrelevantly, a not-unappealing meatsuit. He'd managed to snag it before the Horseman had released the virus. Francis Taggert, Junior. He grimaced at the name. No, he liked the ring of the other better. Aleister Crowley. It would have a certain cachet in some circles.

The stairs opened into a long, low cavern, dry and musty and filled with baskets and boxes, chests and jars and containers of every sort, most of them rip open and torn apart now, spilling their contents, rare or precious or both, over the stone floor. Three demons stood to one side of a roughly constructed set of shelves, curling and writhing in place.

On the shelf, there was a featureless hunk of clay. Crowley reached out a finger and felt the frisson of energy reach through the clay and into his hand. Had he been without a vessel, he thought that the feel of that hunk of rock might have hurt him, repulsed him. It was the soul, imprisoned in its body, jammed up beneath him that allowed him to touch it.

The clay wasn't more than a few hundred years old, he realised belatedly as the information about it filtered into his mind through his touch. Re-wrapped? Or a decoy?

He sighed. There was only one way to find out. He picked it up from the shelf and looked around, wondering if the geological structure of the mountain was entirely stable. It was hard to say, and his mother had told him, over and over again in the small house that had smelled predominantly of cooked potatoes and the peat fire, it was better to be safe than sorry. He turned and walked back to the stairs, climbing them quickly, the stone heavy in his hand.

"Get rid of that," he told the demons, gesturing to the body lying on the stone paving of the open hall.

On every side the mountain ranges and the sky filled the open archways, an endless panorama of peak after peak. The thin, chill wind moaned slightly as it came down the white mantled slopes and twisted through the hall. In the centre, a circular hearth flickered with the dying remains of a fire, the coals glowing and fading as the wind brushed by them.

Crowley looked at the hunk of clay in his hands. Fortune and glory, he thought remotely and let it go.

It dropped to the floor and smashed, the clay flying off in pieces, and the demon crouched beside it. Inside the clay was a stone, smoothed and worn and engraved with symbols that were not – quite – Enochian. He laughed uneasily to himself at that fleeting knowledge. The throne had imparted more than just the power of the souls, he realised shakily. There was information in his mind that had not existed there before. Information of Hell. And of Heaven. And of the beings that dwelled there.

Flicking the loose fragments of clay aside, he felt a tingling in his fingers as they brushed the oily surface of the stone. Whatever it was, this tablet, it was powerful in ways he couldn't even imagine – and he could imagine quite a bit.


Hayu Marca, Peru

The small herd of vicuña, grazing the flat puna valley leading down to the enormous lake, lifted their heads uncertainly. The watching female shrilled her cry of alarm, her head lifting when the ripple passed through the rock and moraine ground beneath her feet, shivering the long grasses. She turned sharply when she saw the herd had listened, her fine, silky fleece fluttering along her sides as she bounded up the rocky slope.

From the grassland, the underlying strata of the mountains protruded, dark red and inclined slabs. One had been carved, millennia ago, into the form of a door. A vast door for the gods, it had been believed, with no access to anything beyond but the charge of energy perceptible to any who'd laid their hands on the ancient rock.

The edges of the doorway split, and light seeped out, a flat, silvery light, growing as the cracks around the door widened. The rock groaned as the weight ground over the gravel and soils at its base and a deep shudder passed through the bones of the land, lifting the waters of the enormous lake for a second and dropping them.

The light spilled out now along the widening fissures, brightening argentine against the red stone, air rushing through the cracks, carrying the scent of the dead, of blood and fear and despair.

Two women emerged from the split in the rock face. One was extremely fair, milk-white skin and pale eyes, long, white hair ghosting around her narrow face in the wind that reached out from behind her into the world. The other was dark. Deeply tanned skin, long, black hair, thick and heavy, dark eyes that narrowed in a square, broad face, looking around as she stepped out onto the grass.

As they passed through it, the rock face returned to what it had been, sealed and solid, a carving, not a doorway.

The pale woman looked at her sister. "The earth calls."

"It is time," the dark woman agreed.

They turned away from each other, striding out over the altiplano, the length of their strides increasing until in moments, they'd vanished from sight.

Over the hill, the herd of vicuña looked up again, the male shivering with overwhelming arousal. He called to the females, singing his song to them and they cushed for him, filled with the same desire, instinct driving them. He walked to the closest, and wound his neck gently around hers, crooning softly into her ear.


Lebanon, Kansas

There were no windows in the order's stronghold. That was something she missed, Ellen thought, staring at the book-lined walls of the office. To be able to open a window, look out over fields and woods, feel the soft summer breezes on her skin at night. She sighed and dragged her attention back to the two men sitting on either side of the long desk.

"There were twenty-nine of them," Dean was saying to Bobby. "Together, and they had a strategy."

Bobby frowned, shaking his head. "Skinwalkers don't pack up much bigger than nine or ten –"

"That's what Dad's journal says as well," Dean cut him off impatiently. "And Jim's. Doesn't change the fact that they were there – decoys, two fronts of attack … they knew what they were doing."

Ellen looked at him, seeing the shadows under his eyes, the lines drawn on his face that weren't there when he'd left for the city. Having to kill Isaac had been a blow that he wasn't coming back from, she thought apprehensively. There was a lot of weight on him, had been for three years now. Longer, she realised sourly. Since she'd met him he'd been carrying a load that was slowly but surely grinding him down.

"An' what do you want to do about it?" Bobby sighed, leaning back in his chair.

"Vince said that the ghouls were getting fresh kills," Dean said slowly, rubbing his hand over his eyes. He was bone-tired and he wanted to get some sleep, but the urgency he could feel thrumming along his nerves wasn't going to allow that. "And the pack – they had to have found people to turn somewhere to get that big."

"You think there's a big group of survivors somewhere?" Ellen frowned at him, her mind ticking through the possibilities of where such a group could be. "Where?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "There were all the free civilians from the cities – we didn't see them in Atlanta, everyone we pulled out of there was branded."

He dragged in a deep breath and looked at them. "We're just about done with the supply runs. We need to do some looking around for them."

Bobby nodded. "Yeah, no argument there. Where do you want to start?"

"Wichita, maybe," Dean said. "Then St Louis."

"You think they'd be in the cities?"

"I don't know, Bobby," he said tiredly. "Those people were free 'cause they were the smart ones, weren't they? Could do the technical jobs? Maybe they figured out a few places where there were still canned goods? Maybe they're in farm country … I don't know."

Ellen looked at him. "No matter what else they can do, they can't live without food, or shelter. I'll talk to Jackson tomorrow, see if he knows of any place that might fit." She got up from her chair and walked to the desk. "Have you eaten? I can get you something?"

He shook his head. "No, I want to get back to town."

He hadn't even stopped there, just driven straight out here. Hadn't even seen Alex or let her know he was still in one piece. The thought brought ambivalent feelings. He had responsibilities, to the people here, to the future … and the longing he could barely admit to was sublimated beneath those responsibilities, pushed aside as a personal indulgence he thought he didn't have the same right to feel.

"Go and get something to eat, Dean, and some sleep. You're no good to anyone burned out." Bobby got to his feet. "We'll talk to the others in the morning, figure out some kind of roster. Franklin's moved down to Lebanon, says we need soldiers for the holds. I think he's right. The hunters need to be looking for people, cleaning out whatever comes into our area. We should be able to leave the defences to the able-bodied."

He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head, getting up. "Anything more on the tablets?"

"There're myths," Ellen said, with a sniff. "But nothing concrete, not even about the Watchers."

A thought tickled the back of Dean's mind, but he was too tired to make it come clear. He shrugged it off and turned for the door. "See you in the morning."

Looking at his watch as he got into the Impala, his face screwed up when he registered the time. Long past midnight. He hesitated with his fingers on the key, wondering if he should just stay here, take Ellen up on her offer of food and find a sofa in one of the offices for the night.

He turned the key and the engine rumbled into life. She would be asleep, he thought, and he didn't have the right to just come and go, disrupting her life, even when his was falling apart. But he put the car into gear anyway, foot pressing on the accelerator as he turned the wheel and drove out through the illusions and back to the asphalt road leading into town.


The four room apartment was located in the second keep that Liev had built in the fortress he'd made of the town, facing west and south. A kitchen and bathroom, large living area and bedroom, with a short hall that gave access to all, comprised its design. Finding furniture had been difficult and the mismatched pieces that filled the rooms had been scrounged from houses that had been protected, from the basements and store-rooms of the surviving camps in Michigan, dragged out with them, or from the rare stores that'd had a large amount of stock on site, wrapped and packed away and left alone by the angel of the abyss.

Dean looked around automatically as he walked through the door and closed it behind him, feeling an involuntary easing of his tension as he took in the comfortable room, the smell of food cooking.

Alex walked out of the kitchen and straight to him. He saw immediately that she knew what had happened. Saw too that she knew what he felt. She slipped her arms around him and, for a moment, he leaned against her, letting that simplest of contacts take some of the weight, a welcomed respite from the pain.

The abrupt flutter of shame that rose in him, shame and a twisting sensation of guilt, was too complex for him to understand completely even though it was as familiar to him as the sound of the black car's engine. He pulled away, looking down at her.

"I guess you heard what happened," he said, mouth twisting.

"I heard you had a bad day," she said gently, a slight crease marring her forehead as she looked up at him.

"Yeah, that's one way to put it." He stepped back. "I thought you'd be asleep."

"No, I had some stuff I had to finish up," Alex said, gesturing in the direction of the desk as she watched him. "Are you hungry? There's venison stew?"

"That'd be good."

He watched her turn and walk away to the kitchen and he sat down, pushing aside his recognition of the question that had been in her face, the feelings that were churning just below the surface. It was just tiredness, he told himself. A long, fucking horrible day and tiredness.

Alex sat at the table, watching him eat. He wasn't much for words. Wasn't used to articulating the way he thought or felt. She knew that about him, had known it for a long time. The times when he'd told her the things about himself, those had been aberrations, not the norm, not intended but spilling out because he hadn't been able to deal with them on his own, on the inside, any longer.

"And you think that there're people still out there, in one of the cities?" she asked, aware she was deliberately keeping the conversation general. He needed time and she could give him that, at least.

"Can't think of any other explanation," he said, mopping up the sauce in his bowl with a hunk of the freshly baked bread she'd put out with it. "That's not the only problem," he added, pushing the clean bowl aside and picking up his beer. "Normally, ghouls or skinwalkers, they stay in packs but not very big ones – they don't tolerate their own kind all that well."

"They turn on each other?"

He nodded. "But Vince said there were fifty ghouls in Omaha, covering a twenty block radius. And we saw twenty nine in the skinwalker pack in Kansas City."

"One increase might have been situational, an anomaly, but both is pushing the odds a bit," she agreed, getting up and taking the dishes to the sink. "What could cause something like that?"

Dean leaned back in the chair and shook his head. "I don't know. Jerome'll get his people to look for it, but … it's weird too," he hesitated, hearing the words and grimacing. "Weirder, I mean, than everything else."

Alex came back to the table, sitting down and looking at him thoughtfully as she turned over what he'd said against what she knew of the world, of predators and prey.

"Because the population is smaller now, smaller than it's been for more than two thousand years?"

"Yeah," he said, a little surprised she'd picked that up so quickly. "Why would any predator population increase so much when there won't be enough food for them?"


The bedroom was lit by a single candle, the flame bright and steady and reflecting the sheen of sweat that covered their skin as they clung to each other, their breathing harsh in the still room, waiting as the aftershocks and tremors bled out of them slowly.

His cheek resting against the slope of her breast, eyes closed, Dean felt his heartrate steady, heard hers decreasing as well. Images still played out against the blackness of his closed lids, each one sending a crackling reaction along sensitised nerves, a thick shiver of warm pleasure that left his body heavy and loose, finally free of the tension and pain of the last few days. He felt her hand slip through his hair, stroking the back of his neck, and he exhaled deeply, letting the poisons go, shedding them gladly.

Lifting his head, he found her lips, the kiss tentative at first, intensifying as she returned it. He felt his own desperation, wordlessly trying to tell her what he couldn't say out loud, couldn't bring himself to admit to, even in this most private intimacy, felt it with a hopelessness, that he was still trying to hold back, even when he couldn't.

You close the gates of Hell and Heaven.

It was a weakness, to want her so much, to need her so much, to feel it reach all the way through him. He couldn't afford any weaknesses, not in this life, not with what was coming. His father'd had that weakness, his only weakness, perhaps. Driven by the death of one loved dearly.

I want to stop losing the people we love …

He'd spent years trying not to care, telling himself that love was something other people did, something that other people felt. But when he'd looked down at her, under the collapsed church, when he'd seen the erratic pulse against the thin, pale skin of her throat, he'd known he might as well have saved himself the effort.

Was it a selfish thing, what he wanted? To feel the weight lift, to have a place to rest, to be himself? His mother had brought evil to their lives, despairing and reckless and believing she could handle it. She'd never even told his father that there was a risk. His arms tightened involuntary around Alex with the thought. It wasn't the same, he told himself, Alex knew what he knew, he'd never try to hide the risk from her. And it was a risk, he thought. Everyone close to him was at risk.

"Dean," Alex whispered against his lips and he leaned back a little, looking into her eyes.

"He was just a kid," he said, hearing the question and shaking his head a little.

"But there wasn't a choice."

"No," he agreed unwillingly. There hadn't been a choice. He wondered sometimes if it made it harder or easier that she understood those things. She'd lived a life with no choices, he knew. It changed the way a person saw things.

She didn't try to tell him that he'd done the right thing or that he'd get over it, didn't try and pretend it didn't exist or that it wasn't another wound, another scar. She drew him down, her lips warm and soft on his, not stirring, not this time. Comforting. Accepting. Letting him be.

Here, in her arms, he wasn't Dean Winchester, he wasn't a hunter, unofficial leader, raised from Hell, angel vessel, servant of God, legacy, brother or anything else. He was just Dean. Just the man he'd been trying to become from the moment he'd run from a burning house with his baby brother in his arms and the sure knowledge there really was evil in the world.

Pushing the unresolvable tangle of thoughts away, he moved slightly under her, exhaustion finally taking command. He couldn't walk away and he couldn't ask her for everything because he couldn't give her everything. He'd been struggling with the conflict for the last two months and was no closer to finding an answer. Against his side, Alex wriggled down, her head tucked into the hollow of his shoulder, one arm across his ribs. He found it hard to believe her acceptance of him, sometimes. Hard to believe it would last.

I do, you know.

His eyelids closed and he pulled in a deep breath, the scent of her filling him as consciousness vanished with the memory.