In the morning, Bobby greeted him with eggs, coffee, and toaster waffles, which made Dean feel like a total prick, getting cooked for by a guy in a wheelchair. "Need you to head into town and pick up a few things," Bobby announced, passing him a list after they'd been fueled and caffeinated. "Oh, and grab a tarp for your Chevy. The ranch down the way has a lamb we're gonna need."
Dean wasn't sure he'd heard that right. "Lamb, as in…"
"As in a wooly Bambi."
"Oh, okay," said Dean, swallowing. Witches, man. Well, what did he expect.
Dean's spine was prickling and his palms were damp against the wheel as he returned to the Yard with his burdens. The windows were open. The lamb had spilled piss and turds all over the tarp in the back seat, and it lay disconsolately in the footwell, occasionally kicking its bound hooves or letting out a deafening, throaty "MWAAAAA!"
It had trim dark fur on its legs and face, and its slotted brown eyes had no whites to them. It flinched from his hand.
He swung up to the house and threw the Impala into park. Bobby had painted a buttload of sigils on the front door and windows in the time he'd been gone; usually, avoiding notice was an important part of staying safe from supernatural creeps, but with this plan, all bets were off. He spotted kimiyah around the lower doorjams in grease pencil, three sealed ofuda booklets duck-taped to the wall and door, a lumpy schematic of a gateway dotted with Hebrew and occult letters, and everywhere huge scowling eyes in charcoal and chalk. No prayers to archangels this time. Dean thought of all the times he and Sam had invoked Michael in the course of an exorcism or blessing and snorted to himself.
Standing at the passenger door, he silently apologized to the lamb before hauling it, fifty pounds baaing and struggling, up to the porch, where it scrambled backward on its knees and elbows until its rump jammed up against the wobbly rail.
It quivered when he returned to the porch loaded with shopping bags of canned food and jugs of water.
Bobby had evidently taken his van on his own shopping trip, because there was a white chicken in a cat carrier on the kitchen table. Clavicula Salomonis was open to the plates on pentagrams, the ones they didn't normally use because hunters just don't tend to summon and command spirits. On the chicken cage sat the big glass bowl that Bobby had put popcorn in sometimes when Dean and Sam were kids.
"Where do you want the rutabaga?" Dean called, setting the bags down on the counter with a thud, and pulling out the spring water. Absopure, only the finest for gray necromancy.
Bobby skid-turned into the hall from a back room. "Bout time you got back. Table's good; get over here, I got some stuff needs lifting."
The back room might have been a study or a den or whatever they called rooms that didn't have beds or plumbing in them, and it was crowded with cabinets, salvaged metal-working tools, and stuff like the demon-finder, which still stood on the big desk, poised over a map. Bobby had shoved some trunks out of one corner, revealing a squat iron tube, mounted on a swivel and filmed with rust, with blurred letters around the side, and a rounded back end—"Holy shit, is that a howitzer?" Dean demanded, hopping over an ammo chest to kneel by the thing. The wood was dry and brittle, but the metal was sound, and the fuse port would be fine with a few scrapes from a .22 wire brush.
"Naw, just a mortar," Bobby replied, smiling. "We'll need that out front. Don't forget to lift from the legs."
"Screw you," said Dean cheerfully, and cleaned the artillery piece to his chest with a grunt.
Sam had been comatose for thirty hours.
At thirty three hours, the sun was just inching westward, and the lamb hadn't moved from its spot crammed into the corner of the house and the porch rail. Dean had carved the rutabaga from Safeway into a crude bombshell and stuffed it with summoning herbs, gunpowder, and the long fuse from a pack of firecrackers. He recognized some of the combinations with a vague feeling of wrong turn, do not touch, do not combine bleach and ammonia: coriander, celery leaves, nightshade, hemlock. Then Bobby had had him bleed the rooster and mix up something based on Sam's horoscope to help narrow down the spirits they would attract: blood for the Sun, pepperweed for Taurus, sulfur for Mars. He didn't like the sulfur, but they had a lot of it, and it made sickening sense for Sam.
The same mix of herbs went into the charcoal grill, just inside the open door with a fan on it to direct the fumes outside. Spring water went in the big bowl, half-filling it.
"You got any rope?" Dean asked, tugging on a screw eye under the porch eaves that had probably been installed to hold one of those pre-filled plastic flower baskets. It still felt pretty strong.
"Try the small garage," Bobby suggested, not looking up from a small wall mirror in his lap that was getting a fairly realistic grease-pencil scorpion on its face. Dean glanced into the house at the salt lines and rebar he'd assembled, which surrounded or incorporated four different pentacles for summoning or commanding spirits, and reminded him of an airport, or maybe a slaughterhouse, with all the fences they'd put up.
The small garage had a cargo strap, which would work just fine. Dean made two loops in it, a forearm apart, and fixed it into the eye on the porch.
"We ready for this?" he asked.
Bobby held up his portrait of a scorpion. It looked fierce. Two claws, eight legs, four beady little eyes. "All finished. For whatever this is all worth. Take your last good look at the sky, boy, 'cause it might be a while before any of us can step out there for more than a second and live."
There was a slow coal fire in the belly of the grill, waiting for herbs. The mortar was loaded and primed. A couple extra bags of salt sat just inside the door. Dean cut off a length of cargo strap and approached the shivering lamb, which rallied, baaed, and tried to struggle to its feet. He looped the strap once around its throat and pulled, knuckles pale with the force, until the lamb slumped and stopped kicking.
Working quickly, he dragged the lamb by the strap to the steel eye, slashed through the thin skin behind its ankles, strung it into the air by its hind feet, and cut its throat into the bowl of spring water. The lamb revived for a second, just before the blood loss put it out for the last time, and Dean automatically wrapped himself around the small body as it twitched in death, the knees banging against his temple, blood dribbling neatly down its gaping jaw to splash into the bowl. Bang on target.
Head-down restraint was always a lot more fun to work with than the rack.
Bobby was looking at him oddly when he came in with the bowl of blood and water, and Dean realized he was sweating, and the liquid in the bowl rippled in his hands. A twisted grin squirmed its way onto his lips, and so there'd be something to match it, he said, "Sam's cooking that thing, not me."
"I'm sure," Bobby said.
Drops of bloody water went on the grill, into the mortar, and onto Sam's forehead. Dean lit the fuse and dashed clear, hands over his ears. The old cannon barked and rocked on its pins, spitting the hollow rutabaga high over the salvage yard until it burst in a flare of black-powder smoke, spreading herbs and ash on the high winds. Bobby threw the herbs into the grill and turned on the fan, and they settled in behind the salt lines to wait.
#
What Dean does to the lamb here is a hybrid of Halal/Kosher slaughter and misapplied old job skills. Threading a rope between the shin and the Achilles tendon is a great way to hold an animal still--after it's already dead. Exsanguination is an approved method of euthanasia--after the animal is anaesthetized. He's DOING IT WRONG.
As I recall, the herbs for this part were selected from The Magus at sacred-texts dot com, with many Google and Wikipedia searches to get less antiquated versions of the various plant names. (Just making sure you know how hard I worked.) A lot of the plants used in black magic were potent neuroactive poisons like deadly nightshade (belladona) and henbane (like locoweed, only from Europe.) So you don't really want the smoke accumulating in the house.
I also looked up Sam's horoscope. Classic, classic Taurus, with influence from the Sun and Mars, hence a Taurus herb, the blood of a white cock, and sulfur.