Disclaimer: Supernatural and its characters are the property of Eric Kripke. I do not own any of the characters, barring any OCs, in this story.
A/N: I finally updated this again! Woo! Okay, so I apologize in advance, but this one is very dialogue/exposition-heavy. It was a necessary evil. After this, there will be one more main chapter and a short epilogue. So please, enjoy the rest of this case-fic.
"Dean? You'd better come look at this."
Sam was sitting on the couch by the coffee table when Dean located him, Castiel standing awkwardly just off to the side and looking curiously at whatever Sam had found. Looking closer, he realized it was an old leather-bound book, which in and of itself wasn't that strange; people collected things like that all the time just because they thought old books looked cool. But when he got a closer look at what was scrawled on the thick yellow pages, he groaned and sank down on the couch beside his brother.
The book was filled with spells, both white and black magic, as well as several recipes for potions and medicines made from herbs that did not even carry those names anymore. Some spells were simple chants for health and fertility or protecting crops from bad growing seasons, but others were used for things like binding demons and summoning spirits, or even trapping angels on the mortal plane to use as powerful slaves.
"Aw, hell, are you telling me she's a witch?" Dean asked, already dreading how bad this could get if she was. "I made a date with a friggin' witch?"
"I'm not sure about that," Castiel said slowly, taking the book from the table and leafing through it as if looking for something specific. "There are definitely some powerful evil spells written in this book, but I don't sense the amount of malevolent energy and demonic presence here that should be attached to an object used for dark magic. It doesn't repulse me any more than the average paperback could. And neither did the woman who now owns it."
"So what's this mean?" Dean asked, glancing between the book and the angel as if he expected Castiel to light it on fire. "Did the original owner just use the white magic parts of it? And why would Valerie have a book this powerful if she isn't a witch?" This was all starting to get way too complicated way too fast for his liking.
"That's what I'm trying to…" Castiel paused, squinting at something on the inside of the front cover, and then handed the tome back to Sam. "There. Read the inscription on the inside."
Sam did, Dean leaning over his shoulder so he could see it too:
From John Young
To my dearest wife Alse,
On our wedding day
Second Day of April, Year of Our Lord 1625
Sam stared hard at the inscription for a long time, trying to remember where he had heard that name before, and then it hit him like a punch to the face.
"Dean! Do you remember that book Bobby had us read as kids about all the people hanged for witchcraft in the seventeenth century?"
"Vaguely. How do you remember that? You were like eight years old."
Sam ignored him, pulling out his smart-phone so he could look something up. "Here it is: Alse Young – she was one of the first people ever killed for practicing witchcraft in the U.S. colonies, back in 1647 in Connecticut. It was forty-five years before the Salem Witch Trials began. Apparently she was highly respected as a midwife and healer in the village where she lived, until her husband suddenly accused her and her thirteen-year-old daughter of practicing black magic and trying to kill him. The townspeople believed him, and both women were executed the next day, on May twenty-sixth, 1647."
"Why would he want to kill her?" Dean asked. "I thought the whole point of marrying a woman was to be together until one of you died back in those days. Shouldn't he have been proud of her for being so well-liked or something? And besides, he was the one who bought her that damn book in the first place, right? What the hell's with that? Weren't those colonists supposed to be super-Christians who feared everything pagan?"
"Not everything," Castiel corrected. "They did hate and fear the black arts, but many of the old pagan traditions of healing and medicine were still widely used and respected, even among the most devout Puritans. I think I can reasonably guess John's motivations, though," he added quietly. "It says that Alse and her only child, a girl named Alice, were sentenced to die, correct? In those days, having a son was the most important thing a man could accomplish. Alse would have been almost fifty when she was hanged, past her child-bearing years, and she had never given John a male heir."
"So what, you think he found another woman he could knock up and decided he didn't want his wife and daughter anymore?" Dean asked, disgust twisting his features into a scowl.
"To put it crudely, yes. In those days, adultery was a sin that was guaranteed to earn you expulsion from the Puritan colonies and public shame for the rest of your life, if not a death sentence. He probably thought he had no other choice but to remove his wife and daughter from the picture entirely." He paused, running a hand down the worn spine of the old spellbook. "But that still doesn't explain how this wound up here."
"I think I might have just found the answer to that, too," Sam said, lifting up another book from the stack on the edge of the table.
It was a book of genealogy, claiming to date all the way back to the medieval era. Sam flipped it open to a page that he could see had been dog-eared, looking over the names until he found "Young, Alse and John." There, beside the photo-less names, someone had written, "ancestor on Dad's side."
"I think Valerie's a descendant of John Young and this, 'Tabitha Butcher,'" he said, reading the name of the woman who had fathered two sons for John Young that obviously weren't Alse's. "But this is weird, look." He trailed his finger down the list of descendants, waiting for Dean and Cas to figure it out too. Surprisingly, Dean got it before the angel did this time.
"All of their direct descendants are men," the older Winchester said slowly, reading the names as Sam's hand passed them. "The only women in the bloodline married into it; there hasn't been a single recorded daughter born until Valerie."
"Right," Sam said, nodding grimly. "And since it doesn't look like any of the men in the bloodline had any issue with their spouses dropping dead for no reason, this whole thing probably means Valerie's been unlucky enough to inherit the first round of some kind of family curse."
"You think?"
"I'd bet the Impala on it."
"You don't get to bet her, she's my baby."
"Fine, then I'd get you to bet the Impala. The point is, John Young pissed off a witch, one whose daughter was probably a witch-in-training, so he could find himself another woman. It would make sense that she might have cursed him and his descendants."
"But why only women?"
Sam sighed. "As weird as it sounds, she probably still loved her husband to some degree even after all he'd done, and would've blamed the woman who seduced him more than she blamed him. She'd want to make sure no women that descended from Tabitha could ever take another woman's husband from his family again – maybe even if that meant killing the men to keep her alone forever."
"Uh-huh… You sure seem to be good at thinking like a woman today, Sammy. Is it that time of the month again? Do I need to run to the pharmacy for you?"
Sam blushed a little. "Shut up. I don't know why I know all that, I just do, okay? And it's the best lead we've got so far."
It was only then that the two of them realized Castiel hadn't said anything for quite some time, which was odd considering the angel had been a lot chattier than usual today. They turned to look at him, eyes widening in concern when they realized he had sunk down into one of the chairs on the other side of the room, clutching his head in his hands like he was suffering from a migraine and muttering softly to himself.
"Cas?" Dean asked, going to the angel's side and putting a hand on his shoulder. When Castiel didn't respond, he shook him a bit. "Cas, hey! What's wrong?"
"Not unfaithful… My vessel was never unfaithful, and neither am I. Why does she keep saying that? What does she mean? I know she's trying to tell me something, but what is it?"
"CASTIEL!"
That startled the blue-eyed man out of whatever trance he seemed to have been in, and he was up on his feet in an instant, angel blade drawn in defense before he came back to himself and realized it was only Sam and Dean in the room with him. He immediately lowered the weapon, looking like he would be blushing if angels were capable of it, and shook his head.
"I'm sorry. What were you saying?"
"Alright, that's it," Dean said, grabbing up the spellbook from the table and striding toward the front door. "We've gotta get this thing out of here and burn it. There's been something weird going on ever since we met Valerie, and I bet it's got everything to do with this damn book."
He had just opened the door, letting Sam and Castiel out first, when he suddenly felt himself flying through the air, smashing into a trinket-covered table in the entryway and landing on the floor in a pile of shattered glass and porcelain. Groaning, he looked up, noticing that Sam had been knocked out cold just outside the door; Castiel was glaring murderously at something from inside a circle of holy fire, pacing like a caged animal looking to kill its captor.
And then, stepping out from around the base of one of the large trees in the front yard as casually as could be, was Valerie. She waved her hand, and Sam's arms and legs were bound by thick vines from the plants in her garden before he was pushed up and bound to an enormous oak tree.
"You Winchesters," she said softly, shaking her head and chuckling as she made her way to the front door. On her way in she stepped easily around the edge of the holy oil, laughing and spitting at the angel still trapped inside the fire. She closed the door and smirked at Dean, kicking him in the nose with the sharp toe of her high-heeled black shoe and making him cry out as he felt the bones break. The pained groan drew a furious sound from the angel outside.
"You just don't know when to leave well enough alone, do you?" She picked up the old book from where it had fallen to the floor, flipping through it like a magazine while Dean tried and failed to get up with her magic pinning him to the ground. Once she found a page she seemed to like, she smirked, stooping down and pulling Dean's head up by a fistful of his hair as her eyes flashed black.
"You be a good boy now, Deano," she said, her voice now a low, menacing hiss. "You and I are going to have so much fun together."
