Chapter 12


July 20, 1988. Blue Earth, Minnesota

Dean looked around the bedroom as if seeing it for the first time. He'd thought it would feel different, thought it would feel safe. It was just a bedroom, he realised uncomfortably. The bed stood under the tall window, sunshine spilling through the panes to cross-hatch the plain white and blue coverlet. To either side, nightstands stood like sentinels, holding a lamp to the left and the small, polished timber chest Jim had given him on the right. Turning slightly, his gaze drifted disinterestedly over the bureau's flat top, a half-dozen toys arranged there, all of them looking babyish to his eyes now.

It was just a room, no longer a sanctuary. He didn't know how to feel about that.

Walking to the desk, he picked up the sheet-metal windup car from the shelf above the writing surface, turning it over in his hands, unable to recall, exactly, why it had been a favourite. Sammy loved it, had coveted it from the first moment he'd seen his big brother wind it up and set it down. It screamed like a banshee when it was wound up tight and let go, racing and bouncing over the gravel drive at speeds that were impossible, proportionally speaking, for a full-sized car to go. Maybe that was why it was failing to catch his feelings now, he thought.

They'd been back for a day, and already he knew that Stan and Ricky had made sure everyone in the village knew exactly what had happened. Had happened to him. Walking down the crooked, narrow streets in the warm twilight the previous evening, he'd seen the looks on people's faces, avidly curious but frightened at the same time, mothers drawing their children aside as he'd passed.

Monster.

He'd felt his little brother's grip tighten on his hand and had known that Sammy'd seen those looks too. Maybe not understanding it all, not yet, but still seeing them. Coming home, he'd pushed the feelings aside, refused to give them mental room and had pinned a grin on his face when he'd come through the front door, feeling the eyes of Abely and his father and Millie on him, knowing they were looking for any sign that he was hurting, inside, aching with the burden of being different. They'd watched him for a while and he'd made it through dinner and escaped afterwards, claiming a weariness he hadn't felt.

Hum had apologised, when he'd seen him in the grocer's, a hurried, secretive apology between the aisles of sugar and cereals and the methane-powered deep freezers holding ice-cream and meat. Something about his mother and what she'd heard and how it would blow over, everyone would forget but for now it was just better not to rock the boat.

Rock the boat, he thought, staring at the metal car in his hands. Don't rock the boat.

But he had. He'd rocked it hard.

His hand tightened around the car and he left the room, walking down to his brother's bedroom.

Sammy looked up from the game he was playing on the floor as he came in.

"Here," Dean said, handing him the car.

The little boy took it reverently, his gaze flashing up to Dean's, eyes wide. "This is your favourite."

"You can have it." Dean shrugged, turning back to the door.

"Dean …" Sammy said, very softly, and he turned around, seeing the big hazel eyes filled with doubt, knowing exactly where it came from.

"S'alright, Sammy, I – I'm just too old for it now," he told him.


Thunder muttered in the distance and Jim saw the horizon flicker with light. Storm would be through before morning, he thought, turning back to the room and looking at the four men and one woman sitting there. An apt metaphor.

Emerson sat in one armchair, chestnut-bright hair receding from his forehead, gathered into a pony-tail with a dark green ribbon at the nape of his neck, dark grey eyes wide behind the fine, gold-wire frame glasses. On the sofa, John and Abely sat side by side, both men looking tired and drawn. At the table, Mina's burgundy hair gleamed in the lamp-light, her head bowed over the ledger in front of her, a glass of brandy beside her elbow. And in the other armchair, Gillette sprawled, his long, pale fingers fiddling with the lenses of his spectacles, cherubic face still and serious as he listened.

"The traps worked," Emerson said, tapping his pipe on the edge of the table absently. "And, for the moment, Lincoln and Kansas City have been, well, exorcised, for lack of a better term."

"'For the moment' being the operative phrase," Mina countered tartly, the brandy in her glass matching the silk of her skirt precisely as she lifted the snifter and the light hit it. "There is a Gate, Emerson, and our first priority should be finding and closing it."

"I'm utterly agog to hear your proposal for achieving that very worthy goal, Mina," the legacy said, his indulgent smile not quite reaching his eyes. She glared at him over the rim of her glasses.

"What about Moira?" Jim diverted the response he could see the woman formulating, looking at Emerson. "She had a gift for feeling disturbances along the joins."

"Moira was killed, three weeks ago," Mina told him, her voice clipped and harsh. "We don't yet know all the circumstances."

"Murdered?" Abely leaned forward in his chair, brows drawn tightly together. "By what?"

"'What' is the question," Emerson said, letting out a deep exhale. "We don't know."

"Have any of the children manifested their mother's Sight?" Jim asked, settling himself into a chair at the table. "Moira said it had always passed down the female line."

"We don't know that either," Mina said, pushing a stray lock of hair back from her temple with a sharp, frustrated gesture. "Iain disappeared, took them with him. We haven't been able to find them."

"And what do we do when we find the Gate?"

John turned to look at Gil. The lanky inventor had been silent throughout most of the conversation, watching and listening. He put his spectacles on, pushing them up his nose, put the half-full snifter of brandy down on the table and stood, looking around at the faces watching him, the light picking up the golden-grey of his magnified irises.

"Every single that has happened has been unprecedented," he began, his wide-legged, bottle-green trousers flapping around his legs as he walked around the sofa. "And you've established that it began in 1972, with the murder at the convent," he directed to Emerson, who nodded.

"Something let a powerful demon through or a demon of extraordinary power found a way through itself," Gil said, pacing back and forth across the room. "Powerful enough to be able a Gate. Why didn't the demons flood through then? Even now, we're only seeing a tiny fraction of what could've come through."

"Gates don't stay open, Gil," Mina said, her eyes following him. "Every one will close if the sacrifice is not kept going."

"Precisely," Gil said, stopping abruptly and pointing a finger at her. "Why would this demon murder a priest and nuns in a location that has never been mapped for a Gate?"

"The order doesn't have the location of eve–" Mina began to argue and Gil held up his hand to forestall her.

"No, it's possible that there is a Gate there and we missed it, but nine people, even from a convent, is not a sufficient amount of blood to open a Gate and you know that," he said.

"You're suggesting that this demon has another agenda?" Emerson leaned back in the chair and tamped tobacco into the pipe bowl.

"I am suggesting that we need to ask why a demon, strong enough to punch a hole into this world, would be pussy-footing around with a few demons here, and a few there," Gil said, shaking his head. "With searching out families, and attacking them, for no earthly or unearthly reason that we can ascertain."

"And why," he said softly, looking down at the floor and drawing in a deep breath. "the Keeper has not been in contact, despite all that has been happening."

Abely turned to look at Mina. "Did you find her yet?"

"Yes, she's in Wisconsin," Mina said, drawing out a map from her piles of notes. "North of Green Bay, by the lake."

"We'll go tomorrow." Abely looked at John, and he nodded.

"She can't be dead," Jim said, lifting a brow at Emerson.

"No, another would've shown the Signs if she was," the scholar confirmed, rising from the chair as he lit his pipe. "As Gil said, this is as unprecedented as everything else, even for the order. A fresh pair of eyes would help with the research, Gil, if you're staying."

Gillette nodded. "As long as I can."

"John, I need to talk to you," Mina said quietly as Emerson walked to the hall, followed by Jim and Gil.

He got up, going to the table and sitting opposite her.

"The boys should begin their training in the order, now, while they're still young enough to absorb the knowledge easily. At least Dean," she said, closing the files in front of her and lifting her head, green eyes peering over her half-moon glasses.

"The order? Why?" John glanced around for Abely, but the hunter had left the room as well.

"Didn't Abely tell you?" she asked, brows rising in surprise. "Or Jim?"

"Tell me what?" he asked, feeling his ears heat slightly at the tone of her voice.

"Your father – John, you should have been initiated into the order as a child, your father was a member and the legacy right runs in your family," Mina said, a crease appearing between her fine, dark brows as she looked at him.

"My father?" John sat back in the chair, shaking his head. "My father was a mechanic – in Lawrence."

"Your step-father was," she asserted. "Your real father was a legacy of the order, an Initiate who was about to become an Associate when he disappeared."

"My real father died when I was four," John said doggedly. "There's a headstone in Stull Cemetery you could visit, if you want proof."

"A headstone marking an empty grave," Mina corrected him, gesturing toward the hall, her slight scowl deepening. "We brought the histories, you can read them for yourself. I told Emerson we should have made you stay longer when you saw us at the store," she added peevishly, mostly to herself. "The order is a part of your history, John, and that of your sons."

"My sons are already too involved," he grated argumentively, his voice dropping slightly as the familiar guilt rose with the admission.

"They are," Mina agreed. "So, do you give them everything or do you leave them partly in the dark, susceptible to things that they might have been able to avoid if they knew it all?"

"What are you talking about, exactly? You want them to become like you? You and Emerson? Legacies?"

"That is their birthright, if they choose it," she said. "But that decision is theirs, when they reach their maturity, John. The initial training is focussed on knowledge, on an understanding of the order and what we do, on research and a widening of the mind."

"How much time will it take away from their schoolwork?" he asked her, wondering if they would be any safer, studying with the legacies.

"If you agree, then they will come to us for their schooling," she told him. "We will not neglect the necessary foundations of a classical education."

"Aren't you both kind of busy right now?"

She smiled at the sardonic tone of his voice, looking down at the table. "We've contacted another chapter. The boys could go to them."

"Go to them?" John shook his head. "Go where?"

"Oregon."

"No." The answer was immediate and without thought, his ears prickling furiously in alarm and a thread of ice worming its way through his gut at the idea. "No, they stay with me."

"John –"

"No!" John said vehemently. "They're staying here."

"I can give them some training here," Mina said reluctantly. "But it wouldn't be the same as letting them go to –"

"It'll have to be enough."

"They would be safe there," she said quietly, looking down at his hands. They were trembling against the warm, polished wood of the table top with the strength of his feelings.

John's brows rose at her. "There's nowhere safe, Mina. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. They're staying with me."

"You're hunting half the time," she argued, a slight edge to her voice. "And you could go with them. It's your birthright as well."

"I don't have time to sit and study your order, Mina! I have to find that demon, before he finds me, before he finds them. I have to be ready, can't you understand that?" He got to his feet abruptly, the chair falling over behind him, his eyes, shadowed beneath his brows, fixed on her.

"I do understand it," she told him, her voice dropping to a soothing murmur. "We all do, John. We'll do our best here, but you must understand –"

"You can do what you can," he cut her off, hands closing into fists. "The boys stay here. When I'm not around, or Abely, Jim and Millie will look after them."


He was hot and he couldn't take his eyes off a fat robber fly, batting helplessly against the glass of the window. It sounded like a bee, buzzing and humming as it repeatedly hit the pane.

"Mr Winchester, are you with us?" Mr Alleyn's voice had a similar, rasping timbre as the noise of the fly and Dean looked around slowly, refocussing on the teacher, realising belatedly that the small class in the sun-filled schoolroom were all looking at him.

"Yes, sir?"

"The answer, if you please?" Alleyn asked, one brow cocked in expectation.

He replayed his last memory of the teacher's voice, the droning intonation hard to separate from the droning of the fly. Alleyn expected him to flounder, he thought, had seen his distraction and was anticipating his humiliation. His jaw set unconsciously as he refused to give the teacher that satisfaction. "Uh, in the first four generations of a new werewolf line, the creatures are not limited by the state of the moon, and can control transformation by will."

"Very good," Alleyn said acerbically, his eyes narrowed. He turned away and looked at the rest of the children. "Class, that concludes the lesson. I suggest that you pack your bags quickly and quietly and enjoy the rest of the day."

The classes took a couple of hours a day, in the early afternoons. Dean thought it was a waste of time with the summer sunshine flooding through the big windows and making everyone too drowsy to remember what they were supposed to be learning. Lore on the creatures, occasionally a bit about the mythology of the other planes, a couple of times interesting lectures on the weapons used for hunting different monsters and how they were made. That kind of lesson didn't happen nearly often enough to make the rest worthwhile, he decided, yawning as he got to his feet.

"Missing your coffin? Must be hard to be up in the daylight, Winchester" Stan said to him as he passed, mouth curled into a self-congratulatory smirk as the kids within hearing laughed.

"Your old man still leaving skidmarks in his drawers when he's hunting?" Dean snapped back, shoving his books in his bag and walking out past Stan as the older boy turned beet-red amidst a louder burst of laughter.

Cheap shot, he thought, kicking at the gravel on the road home. Too easy and not aimed at the right Belthorpe. It'd been the first thing he'd thought of, and he was getting tired of the vampire jokes.

At the crossroads near Jim's church, he almost turned to go down to the river, then hesitated, memory stirring of violet eyes, glittering above him. He was supposed to see Mina anyway, he thought, veering back to the church gate and walking up the path. Something about the order's training.

Jim opened the vaulted wooden door, smiling easily as he stood aside to let Dean pass by.

"Where's Sammy?"

Dean looked back at him. "At home, with Millie," he said, brow creasing as he wondered if he'd forgotten something. "Dad didn't say anything about Sammy."

Jim nodded. "Well, Mina's down in the crypt, take the stairs from the sacristy."

"Should I go and get him?" Dean asked, worried now.

"No," Jim said, shaking his head. "You go on down, I'll check with Millie later about Sam."

Turning away with a feeling of uncertainty, Dean followed the priest's directions, feeling the temperature drop as he walked down the stairs, the underground rooms much cooler, a faint air moving through them.

The red-haired legacy looked up as he walked into the long, narrow room, her chair scraping on the stone-flagged floor as she pushed it back.

"Have a seat, Dean," Mina said, getting to her feet and gesturing to a chair at the wooden table. "Do you want a drink? Mrs Parker made up some lemonade." She didn't wait for an answer, going to the small sideboard against the interior wall where a jug of pale yellow liquid sat, moisture condensing in fat droplets and running down the sides. He knew Uncle Jim's house-keeper. She made great lemonade, not too sweet, enough of the lemon's sour to make it refreshing.

"Uh, sure, thanks," Dean said, dropping his bag and looking around the room. At the other end, a set of double doors were closed, but he could just hear the murmur of voices beyond them. The basement rooms had been built of stone, and the cool, grey blocks were smooth, fitted tightly together. Rough shelving had been built around the walls, holding books and scrolls and manuscripts. He looked up as Mina set a tall glass beside him.

"Did your father tell you what you'll be doing here, Dean?" she asked him as she walked back to her chair and sat down.

"No," Dean said, wiping his mouth after the first deep swallow. "Uh, Uncle Jim asked where Sammy was – is he supposed to be here too?"

"Not yet, he's a little young for this," she said, looking down at the books piled up beside her. "What do you know of the order?"

Dean looked at her, shrugging slightly. "Not much. No one really talks about it."

"With good reason," she said, smiling at him. "We've existed for more than fifteen hundred years, in secret, collecting and harbouring the knowledge of … well, let's just call it the dark side of the world."

He took another sip of the lemonade, watching her over the rim of the glass.

"Originally, the order was formed by a number of men, who had been given a message. To find the truth of the mythology, of legends and folk-lore, of magic, black and white and neutral, of the artefacts that were cursed and those that were blessed, to be the guardians of that knowledge, and to train and give it to the people who needed it, in times of chaos, and great evil," Mina said, watching him as he watched her. "Can you imagine how much the order knows, how much we've gathered and sifted and hidden away, after fifteen hundred years, Dean?"

"Not really, no," he answered, not sure if the question was rhetorical or not. She was trying to impress him, he thought, but he couldn't work out why.

"You're here because the legacies, those of us who work for the order, are from the handful of bloodlines that swore an oath to the search for the truth in the past," she told him, her eyes narrowing fractionally behind the half-moon glasses perched on her nose. They were the same colour as his father's, he thought, a little distractedly.

"The Winchesters have always been in the order," Mina continued, and he blinked, thinking of his father, a crease appearing between his brows as he looked at her.

"Your grandfather was Henry Winchester. He disappeared, a long time ago, when your father was only four years old." Mina pushed a book toward him, and Dean looked down at the cover, a deep brown leather, worn and polished with handling. In gold foil, his family's name was stamped in the centre. Under it, a set of dates. 1850-1983. He looked up at her, his hand creeping across the table to touch the edge of the book.

"It's your history," she said, her gesture inviting him to open it. "Read it. It will tell you more than I could about your family and their place with us."

Dean lifted the thick, heavy binding. The pages were a creamy parchment, the writing a decisive and densely black copperplate hand. He pulled the book closer and leaned over the page, reading.

1850.

Jeremiah Jameson Winchester, born in Charlotte, North Carolina, migrated with his family to Pittsburgh in 1855, driven by the increasing pressure on the South from the northern States on the slavery that drove the economy of the time. His father, Jonathan Henry, knew that war was coming and his first loyalty was to the order, to the training of his two sons in an environment where war could not interfere …

History had never been of interest. Dean sat and read, oblivious to the passing of time, of the lemonade in his glass warming, the beads of moisture evaporating gradually, of the growls of his stomach, demanding food, of Mina moving around the room, of Emerson and Gil passing by.


"Dean."

He looked up, eyes refocussing on the man standing beside him. "Uncle Jim?"

"It's nine, son, time to go home," Jim said gently, placing a purple silk ribbon along the page Dean had been reading and closing the book. "Millie wants you to have some dinner."

Looking down at the book, Dean nodded, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet.

"I'll walk back with him," Gil said as Jim stepped toward the crypt stairs. "I need the fresh air to clear my head."

The two men looked at each other, and Dean saw Jim's slight nod. "Give Millie my best."

He followed the lanky inventor up the stairs and through the dimly-lit church, feeling his chest expand, the sore muscles of his neck relax as he breathed in the cool night air, redolent with the scents of the fields and the garden. In the eastern quarter of the sky, the moon sailed, throwing a pale light over the landscape, enough to see his way.

"You wanted to talk to me?" he asked Gil and heard the man's soft laugh in the shadow of the church porch.

"Not much gets by you, does it, Dean?" Gil said, his voice warm. "Yes, I wanted to ask if you've had any headaches, or any physical debilitations."

"No, sir," Dean answered, honestly enough.

"Have you perceived any changes at all? Emotionally? Mentally?" Gil turned to look at him, and Dean saw the flash of moonlight from the round lenses of his spectacles.

"No," he said. It wasn't anything, he thought. Nothing that could be counted as a change exactly. He felt more, sometimes. Sensed things, sometimes. That wasn't much. Nothing for anyone to worry about.

"Good, good," Gil said, following the path unerringly to the garden lych-gate, the squeak of the rusted hinges loud as he pushed it open.

"What happened to Mr Elkin's wife, Gil?"

Gil slowed and Dean felt his reluctance to talk of it, to think of it.

"We didn't have the vampire's blood," he said and his deep voice was filled with a regret at the memories. "We didn't even know at the time that it was a vital component. The hunger was stilled and most of the process was reversed, but the mental connection, that never disappeared and - and she could … hear things … and she felt things, sensed things … and it drove her mad."

Dean stumbled in the long grass beside the path, catching himself before he fell, the beat of his heart pounding in his ears.

"But, we had the blood, so the cure worked on me?" he asked, barely able to hear the sound of his voice over the insistent thunder of his pulse.

"Yes. Yes, with you, the cure was complete," Gil said firmly, glancing around at him as they reached the house. "And you haven't felt anything out of the ordinary, which is the best possible indication that everything worked as it should."

Dean nodded, following him to the broad stone porch and through the tall French doors.

Worked as it should, he thought. It all worked as it should. He wasn't different. Wasn't changed. It'd all worked as it should.

"There you are," Millie's voice broke through his thoughts and he looked up, forcing a smile onto his face as she beamed at him.

"Dinner's keeping hot, I'll get you a plate, Dean," she said, turning to Gil. "You'll have a bite, and keep us company?"

"Where's Sammy?" Dean asked.

"In bed, sound asleep," Mille said over her shoulder, taking Gil's silence as assent. "Take Gil to the dining room, Dean. I won't be a moment."

He walked through the big living room, weaving his way automatically through the furniture and the odds and ends of Abely's experimentation with the armour and weapons that he was forever tinkering with, searching for improvements, hearing Gil's footsteps behind him.

The dining room was set for three, and Dean sat down, staring at the tablecloth.

"Are you all right, Dean?" Gil asked, his voice quiet.

He looked up, nodding. "Just thinking about the – the, uh, history of the order," he lied, the memory of what he'd been reading flooding back, pushing aside the other thoughts. "Hard to believe."

Gil smiled. "Some parts of it, very," he agreed. He leaned forward, elbows akimbo on the table. "You can learn all you can from it, Dean, but you don't have to follow in your grandfather's footsteps. Being a legacy is not an easy path to follow, nor is it suited to all."

Dean absorbed that, wondering what had prompted the disclosure. Gil seemed to be speaking from some kind of personal experience.

"Here we are," Millie said, coming through the dining room door with three plates balanced on her arms. "And you can tell Mina that if the study is going to involve these sorts of hours, I would appreciate it if Dean could bring the books back here, and do his reading in the comfort of his home rather than trekking across the fields at all hours."

Gil ducked his head, glancing at Dean from under his brows, a conspiratorial smile curving his mouth high on the side that Millie couldn't see.

"I'll be sure to pass that along, my dear," he said.


WI-22 E, Wisconsin

John looked at the road through the windshield, repressing the urge to use the wipers to remove the bug-splats that were rapidly narrowing his field of vision to a few square inches. All they did, even with the water sprayed with them, was to turn the millions of dots into an uneven and opaque smear. That one he'd learned from experience.

"Mina said you knew about my father," he said to Abely, and heard the other man's deep sigh.

"Jim knew about it," Abely admitted. "From Emerson, I guess. Didn't seem like you were interested in your history, John. You never talked about your father, hardly talked about your childhood."

John chewed on the inside of his cheek as he recognised the truth of that. The man who'd become his father had been straightforward, not stupid by any means, but Ed had preferred to see life in black and white, rather than shades of grey, and he hadn't welcomed unanswerable questions about the past. His mother had never spoken of her first husband, and somehow he hadn't been able to bring himself to ask, not even when he'd signed up for service. He thought she'd preferred Ed's lack of curiosity to her son's need to know.

"I – uh, I learned not to ask," he said, his voice only slightly louder than the noise of the tyres over the rough road.

Thinking back through those memories, he realised that, over time, he had learned to do exactly that. To accept what he saw, to stop thinking of what could be, to fit himself into the world no matter how that might have contorted him. He wondered uncomfortably how much of that he'd passed onto his son.

Clearing his throat, he flicked a sideways glance at his partner. "So, without the mumbo-jumbo, you were going to tell me about the Keeper?"

Abely made a noise in his throat and straightened up against the passenger door. "Yeah, right. Alright, this is what I know," he said, eyes half-closing as he spoke. "Back in the day, and I mean way back, when demons and angels were walking around, creating merry hell for most of humanity on earth, the order began to recruit hunters."

His eyes popped open. "Don't get me wrong, there were always hunters, since before language, or the written word, or people livin' in groups bigger than a family or tribe, but at this time, the order decided that they needed hunters who could do more than just stick their necks out to save the people under their protection, hunters who could take the fight to the source."

John huffed and Abely smiled. "Yeah, well, they didn't have much of an idea back then of how big the problem could be, but you could say, their hearts were in the right place." He ran a hand over his jaw absently. "In any case, they started to train hunters. They tested them and they found the best, the ones who'd survived long enough to get their own knowledge and lore pretty much bedded down, and they taught them about everything they'd learned, got right into the weapon-making and using those weapons, combat, strategy, the works. And these hunters were the vanguard an' they went out an' sorted out the demons and the angels and the half-breeds and somehow, no one knows how exactly, they got the Gates sealed and locked."

"Which should leave us with no problem at all," John commented dryly.

"Yeah," Abely said, nodding. "One of the hunters was a man who had a bit of the Sight," he said, looking over at John. "You know what that is?"

"In Celtic tradition, psychic power," John said. Abely nodded.

"Right, not just Celtic, a'course, but yeah, primarily the Irish and the Scots, and the Welsh. This man, he could see the edges of the planes, where they joined together. Could do a lot of stuff, if you believe the Council's history about him. He became the first Keeper, kind of a watchdog for the order and the hunters, someone who could see trouble in the distance."

"How'd he manage the immortality thing?"

"Well, the Council says he used a spell. He wouldn't age as long as he was the Keeper," Abely told him, his voice holding a slight edge.

"But he could be killed?" John guessed, his eyes narrowing as he watched the road.

"Yeah, he could be killed," Abely confirmed. "The spell had a knock-on effect, 'cos when that man died, another hunter began to get visions, and the power of not only the Sight but the immortality was transferred to them."

"No choice in the matter?"

"Didn't seem like it," Abely said. "At that time, it was a great honour, an' all of that."

"Unless you didn't want the honour."

He heard a snort beside him. "Yeah, unless that."

"And the Council?" John asked. He'd been hearing about the Council for years now, but he couldn't work out how it worked, since none of the hunters he knew seemed to be on it.

"The Council was formed by the first Keeper, as a kind of liaison, I guess you'd call it, with the hunters and with the order. There are thirteen members –"

John frowned. "Like a coven?"

"I guess, yeah, it's a number with a power of its own." Abely shrugged. "Anyway, that Council has carried on from then to now. The members are chosen once every thirteen years, voted in secret ballot by every hunter and every order legacy, initiate and associate. No one knows who'll end up sitting on it. Most of us don't know who's on it, even now."

"Is Lorena a member?"

The older man nodded. "She'll round them up, get them to make a decision on getting everyone together, to fight this."

"Gil said something about closing the Gate, if we ever located it," John said uneasily. "How do we do that?"

"Ah, that's Jim's department," Abely said, smiling slightly. "He's the only one who ever has."

"He has? How'd he do it?"

"You'll have to pour a couple of quarts of Irish whiskey down his throat to get an answer to that, John," Abely laughed. "Keeps it very close to the chest, does our Jim."

He looked through the windshield and tapped John's arm. "Turnoff's coming up, about eighty yards."

They were driving through countryside that was utterly black, the last town had been more than thirty miles behind them, and even that had been a small one.

"How does she live out here, so far from everyone?" he asked.

"Doesn't like company," Abely answered with a shrug. "Apparently, that's a part and parcel of the spell and the job."


Shore of Lake Michigan, Wisconsin

The black car pulled in front of the small cabin, headlights flashing over the exterior, showing a narrow porch, piled with firewood, and a couple of narrow windows, the glass reflecting the lights of the car sharply back at them. As he killed the engine, John looked at the dark house, wondering if anyone was even there.

"Grab your toys, Johnny, time to play," Abely said, getting out, the soft whirr of the gears in his armour loud in the still silence that filled the clearing beside the open body of water.

He got out, picking up the short-barrelled multi-round shotgun and cocking it, feeling for the long machete sheathed behind his hip. Abely climbed the steps to the porch and peered into the darkness of the interior through the window, shaking his head and making an abrupt gesture to the rear. John nodded and felt for the door handle, feeling it turn easily under his hand, waiting for his partner's signal. From the back he heard a crash and he turned the handle, shoving the door wide and striding in and to the right, out of the doorway, the gas-powered flashlight at the side of his helmet lighting up the long single room as Abely's lit up the other side.

No engine meant no power, and he turned his head slowly, looking for what to be there, seeing it a second later. The oil-lamp was half-full and he lit it with the flint and steel lying beside it, another pool of light spilling out a few yards away as Abely found another lamp.

John undid his helmet and set it down on the table, looking around as his eyes became used to the soft, golden light of the lamps. It was a big single room, an open hearth for cooking to one side, a bed at the other end, shelving covering floor to ceilings around the walls, filled with books, most of them hand-bound, he thought, looking more closely.

"John," Abely's voice cut through his thoughts and he turned, seeing him standing by the bed, a slender pale arm in one hand.

"Is it her?" he asked as he crossed the distance in two strides. Half-hidden beneath the covers, the woman was skeletally thin, her skin waxen and translucent, the blood vessels clearly visible beneath it. "What happened to her?"

"Poison, I think," Abely said, gesturing to the jug on the nightstand beside the bed. "Test it. It won't be lake water, maybe a well, somewhere around the cabin."

He lifted her into a sitting position, arm supporting her back as her head rolled over his shoulder. "Get the kit," he called softly to John.

Running outside, John lifted the heavy wooden box from the back seat. Gil had replenished most of their stock and there were a number of antidotes in the box, if he could narrow the poison down. He hadn't been able to see a pulse in the long, slender throat of the woman, but that gave him a clue as well. Some poisons didn't kill outright, they simply slowed everything down, until the person appeared to be dead, but wasn't.

Carrying the box inside, he left it beside Abely and pulled out the testing swabs, long strips of a variety of materials. Dipping them into the water, one at a time, he watched for the reactions that were expected. The fifth strip, of a thick, felted paper, told him what was in the water.

"Arsenic," John told Abely. The hunter nodded, holding up the Keeper's hand. White lines showed clearly in the lamp-light, horizontally across the nail beds.

"Gil has the antidote," he said, face screwing up slightly as he tried to remember what it was called. "The Capitulas bottle, I think, dark blue or purple liquid."

Searching through the open box, John found the bottle, the contents a deep indigo. "How is it administered?"

"Down the hatch, one capful," Abely said, shifting his position on the bed to support the woman's head. "Works the same way the arsenic does, through the digestive system."

John poured the measure carefully and lifted the cap, tipping the contents into her open mouth. Immediately, her lips and tongue were stained a dark blue and he looked nervously at Abely.

"Supposed to do that?"

Abely nodded, easing her down. "This is going to take a couple of days," he said. "Check the well and we'll need to go over the cabin with a fine-toothed comb. Someone's been in here, maybe someone she trusted, to set this up. We need to figure out who."