Chapter 10!

As there wasn't much information to be had on their probable baykok, the boys did what they always did, and called Bobby—with the added bonus that they also called down Castiel.

"Baykok, huh," mused Bobby, who was, in the back of his mind, wondering which of his junkers would stand a trip to Long Island. Castiel stood considering the baykok with his head cocked to the side. "I didn't know there were any left. They were the white whales of the hunters a hundred, hundred-fifty years ago, and even then they were damned rare. Are you sure you've got one? I mean, Long Island—these things are forest-only, usually."

"Pretty sure," said Sam, "given that it's been ordering half-ton shipments of chinquapin wood."

"That'd do it," said Bobby, sounding almost impressed. "Pretty damn smart, hiding in the cities—no hunter would ever look for a baykok there."

Castiel's head was still cocked to the side. "It is very old."

The brothers exchanged a look, then turned towards Castiel. "Yeah, we guessed that," said Dean. "What else you got?"

"I'm not sure you understand how old," said Castiel, raising his chin a fraction of an inch, which in Cas-language was roughly the equivalent of outrage. "It is certainly older than the legends themselves. This thing you are hunting—unless the shroud hiding it is pushed aside, I can do nothing."

"Let's say, for the sake of argument," said Sam, "that we find it and, uh, push aside the shroud. Would you be able to do anything then?"

Castiel's blue eyes were flinty. "I would smite it from the face of the Earth."

"Whoa-ho," said Dean, clapping Castiel on the shoulder. Castiel did not look especially pleased by the gesture. "I think we've got ourselves the beginnings of a plan, Sammy."

Jordan's mind—or maybe it was her brain—ached dully. There was a sharp pressure at the back of her head, echoed down by identical pains down the length of her spine, into her hips, and down to her joints. She had been lying frozen in place for so long that she wasn't entirely sure that she could get up now, even if the mojo holding her in place lifted. Although she wasn't sure if it really was mojo; she'd awoke once to find a bitter, awful liquid being poured down her throat, and afterward her entire body had gone totally numb.

The horrible laughing face wasn't always there. The room stayed smoky and vague, especially after she'd woken up—the liquid, probably, which they seemed to administer while she was asleep—but the colors were not so vibrant anymore. She was glad of that. She could pretend that she'd lost her glasses, never mind that she didn't actually wear glasses, instead of worrying continuously that she was in the midst of one long hallucination.

Once or twice she thought she caught a glimpse of someone human-shaped, although she couldn't be sure, given how impossible it was to see anything. But she was also sure, that one time she'd awoken while they force-fed her that bitter liquid, that someone had laid a hand on her forehead, feather-light, and brushed back her hair once before it was over. This sincerely perplexed Jordan, who was wavering almost constantly between violent apathy and equally violent terror, depending on how much she wanted to live just that minute. So the laughing face had lackeys. Okay, it wasn't original, but she could accept it.

But kind lackeys?

Some time after this incident, she discovered she was regaining the use of her fingers. Someone had forgotten to give her the smoothie from hell. She was inching her fingers along, trying to find the edge of the table she was on—if indeed she was on a table at all—when someone must have seen her, for a voice very unlike the laughing face's said furiously, "Who forgot? Who?" and then a fist collided with her jaw, sending her plummeting into darkness.

So not all of them were kind.

Sometimes, when the laughing face came to visit, she was permitted—forced, more like—to cry. It was worse, in some ways, to the drugs. Big, feverish tears would slide back into her hair, and she would pray as hard as she could for it to stop. I don't want to cry. Don't make me. It never worked. Nor did her prayers to Castiel, which in and of itself was greatly worrying. Whatever this thing was, it was hiding her even from the eyes of Heaven.

Time did not exist in the place she was kept, for there was no sunlight to mark the time by, nor any particular schedule, unless that was that she was drugged whenever she slept. There'd been a brief stint where she'd done her best not to sleep at all, and therefore delay the drugging, but she'd received another fist to the face for that, and learned her lesson.

However long it was from the time she'd first arrived, the laughing face returned for another chat, one of a dozen chats it'd had with her so far, although it had not shown her its face since that first time. She found she couldn't regret that. When she slept, it was that face that she dreamt about. Had nightmares about.

"Good morning, my pet," it purred, in that revolting voice, viscous and wet. "You slept well, I hope?"

As was her habit now whenever the face returned, Jordan began to imagine dousing the face with gasoline and lighting it on fire. This usually derailed whatever speech it was going to make, at least for a little while, and she enjoyed these few moments of victory immensely.

It didn't work this time. "It seems your friends are more resourceful than I initially imagined."

Jordan wasn't surprised.

"They're coming for you, you know—yes, you do know that. You expect that. Well, I have not lived this long to succumb to a handful of second-rate ghostbusters. This of course means that I will have to take steps."

There was an edge to the voice now, a hardness, and Jordan found herself terrified. Take steps? What sort of steps? She had an awful feeling that her boys were walking head on into a trap, with her as the bait.

"Patience, my pet. We will come to that. But first—" A woman screamed. Jordan's eyes flew open, trying to see what was happening, but she could see only a maddening swirl of black, grey, and milky yellow. The scream grew ragged, and then died. "Well," said the face. "You get the picture."

The body was left much the same as the gold thief's had, attached to a wall by no visible means, but the savagery with which this one had been disemboweled … the boys stood behind the police line and did not bother flashing their fake badges. There was no need to. They could see just fine from here, as could the rest of the neighborhood, for the police hadn't yet been able to figure a way to cover it up. The body was twenty feet in the air, after all.

Sam's face was ashen as he turned away. "Someone you know?" Dean asked, fearing the worst, and Sam nodded.

It was the informant. Her face was etched deep with terror, and her eyes seemed to stare down at him, accusing him. This is your fault, Sam Winchester. "It knows she gave out information," Sam said. "It's taunting us, trying to trip us up."

Dean looked over his shoulder one last time at the woman who had given them their only chance of finding Jordan. "Yeah," he agreed. "And it's working."