Nighttime descended on Adrienne and Bobby as the trees welcomed them into their embrace. The cool air whipped by the witch's ears and sawed in and out of her lungs.
Oxygen bonding to red bloodcells diffused through her capillaries. Magic physically binding her to Bobby, to her eye a series of evanescent threads between them, floated and reformed with each movement. It tightened her jaw when she thought of the pain that would soon course down those lovely threads and into her body, the consequences of the spell, but her constitution was metallic with doggedness.
Living shield, surrogate brother. She felt the oddest mixture of seriousness and hysteria, almost out-of-body. She felt scared, but unshakably tenacious.
Her body was strong, lithe. Her senses saw the individual leaves, felt the brush of each molecule of humidity, smelled the decaying detritus and divined the traces of old blood on the air that signified their quarry. Her power flitted down her nerve endings in sweet pulses, seeking an escape from her carefully reined willpower.
It wanted out.
She was hunting.
Bobby was not as young as he used to be, but he was neither old nor slow. He paced and slightly overtook Adrienne in stride, shotgun clenched tightly in one hand and a witch bomb in the other.
His heart rate was steady, his boots beating time with his breath. Parts of his perception opened wide in response to the adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream, gifting him with extended senses. In him burned that purpose men cross oceans and continents for, and spend their entire lives seeking. That purpose drove him: irrevocably, eternally.
He was hunting.
They ran a half mile before she said, "Stop." She pulled a thin band of handspun from her belt. "I can smell her, them," she whispered, scarcely a sound in this odd fishbowl of a forest. "Time to implement phase one." She tied the string around his forehead tightly, lips barely moving as she cast the spell.
Suddenly, Bobby was left completely without his adrenaline-amplified hearing. Testing, one-two-three, he called mentally, finally using the mental link that also bound the Winchesters to their animal partners.
Read you. We're on silent from now on.
From here they stalked quietly through the woods. Adrienne could tell the lack of hearing affected Bobby deeply. His head was practically on a swivel. It was a risk, forcing him to rely on her ears, but it was the only way to keep his heart from stopping at the sound of Sarai's voice. Adrienne had taken her own precautions, unbeknownst to the hunters (who would only protest her grimly realistic expectations).
Now I can smell 'em, too, thought Bobby pointedly.
Getting closer, she agreed, jerked from her dim future. They slowed almost to a crawl.
Bobby spotted the first witch just as he spotted them. As the man opened his mouth to yell and raised a blood-dipped hand from the dead rat in his grasp, Bobby's witch bomb splattered on his chest. It burned through his skin, pectorals, ribs, and lungs faster than white phosphorus, leaving a gruesome, bloody 3/4 fraction of a human.
Damn, thought Bobby and Adrienne at the same time. After concurring on Dean's Unibomber potential, they took a few cautious steps.
Not cautious enough.
With an enraged hiss, the witch's snake familiar reared up as tall as a man before them, it's scaly hood flaring wide. Adrienne jumped forward, heart in her throat and a spell on her fingers. She caught the snake's strike at her face in the web of it. Gritting her teeth, she stared down its pink, flexing throat as it's venom-slick, hand-length fangs chomped at her. At her spoken urge, the threadspell cleanly sliced through its jaw and head like razor string.
Its body fell writhing to the ground. They stepped over it and moved on.
That was a scout, Bobby thought to Adrienne. We found 'em: now we've gotta follow the trail of ants to the queen.
Adrienne nodded in agreement, then wondered how Sam and Dean were doing. Guiltily, she looked to see if she had accidentally projected her worry. If the old hunter shared her concern, he did not show it.
Dean could see the Hex's smooth, lion-like gait out of the corner of his eye. The creature's determination of stride eliminated any anxiety about their destination.
The cat was hunting.
The scent of their blood-magic is strong on the air, echoed Hex's voice in his mind.
Blood, nothin', countered Dean. I can see 'em.
As one, like a coordinated pack, the hunter and the cat flanked the guarding witch and familiar in the dark and scraggly underbrush.
As one, they leaped.
Dean commando-sprinted out of the bushes, trying to match the ground-eating stride of the cat bursting forth from the other side. The witch never stood a chance: Dean covered his mouth with one hand and buried his herb-dipped knife in his heart just in time to watch the cat snatch the crow familiar out of the air with one long-clawed paw. Hex snapped the bird's neck with a quiet, wet crack.
Dean felt the life fizzle out of the witch's body, and a scant amount of blood run down the knife. Sweet revelry.
He was hunting.
This is way too easy, he told the cat.
Indeed, the creature replied, rising from the bird carcass with black, bloody feathers sticking out of his mouth. Let's hope Hannibal and Samuel aren't taking the brunt of the assault.
The hope was sadly placed. Sam and Hannibal were coming upon one noisy confrontation after another. Adrienne's words rang in Sam's head: "They're going to have several scouts out," she informed the hunters as they studied a map on the table. "They're gonna be the first wave. We should try to sneak as close as possible before engaging the Matriarchs. The second wave, the minor witches, will be a stone's throw from the Matriarch, and it's a possibility that she will attack when you're tangling with them. Remember, these footsoldiers practice some nasty blood magic. Don't give them time to work a spell."
As two witches charged them with twin wolf familiars, Sam lost all pretense of sneak. He lobbed a witch bomb at one of them, a female. It splattered on the ground in front of her, wrecking her legs and sending her shrieking to the ground. Her familiar literally howled with rage, until Hannibal's teeth closed on its windpipe. The second wolf came to the first's aid, sinking its teeth into Hannibal's haunch. Hannibal yelped into the scruff in his mouth, then flicked his flaming tail at the attacker, setting the wolf ablaze like a dry Christmas tree. It collapsed in a smoldering pile of stinking, burned fur moments later.
As he clashed with the second witch, Sam only heard the sounds of pained yelps, angry snarls, and colliding bodies: not all from the animals. He roared and swung his shotgun into the jaw of the he-witch, knocking him away long enough to aim down the sights and shoot.
If time had stilled long enough, Sam would have perceived the tiny, incandescent, spider-web-thin strands connecting each iron pellet of buckshot, and within this matrix, the suspended herbs and salt sparking with latent magic. Like so many razors, the threads of magic sliced through skin and bone and vital organs, competing with the buckshot for blood. What they left scarcely resembled a human corpse, at all.
Sam was just trying to figure out how to help Hannibal when he heard the triumphant cry of the witch on the ground. He turned in time to see her drawing symbols in the air with the blood from her crippled legs.
"Suck it, hunter!" she hissed. The symbols she drew blazed with red light in midair, and she flung them with all her might at Sam.
Sam ducked and rolled, cursing his slow, mortal frame. The spell clipped his ear, but he surprisingly did not register pain.
Hannibal unhinged his teeth from the now-dead wolf only to cry in pain as Adrienne's spell claimed its first wound. He bowed to the ground, pawing at the magically-induced injury, whining frantically.
Sam turned and coldly shot the she-witch, reducing her to pulp. "Hannibal, are you alright?" he asked tersely but concernedly, breaking the gun and reloading it.
I'll be fine, came the ground-out reply. The silhouette against the creature's flaming tail had only one ear. We must move.
They didn't go ten steps before they met the five other pairs of witches and familiars that had heard the fight and charged at them from the trees.
Sam yelled and let his instincts take control. He removed limbs with the herbed knife until the dip ran thin, then he switched to the shotgun. He was a symphony of death, a dancer of destruction. Hannibal growled, snarled, clawed and snapped at the array of magical animals before him, taking them down two at a time under his ferocious paws. The dog was unbridled fury, undiluted animal power.
They were hunting.
They drowned amidst the violence and gore, resurfacing with bloody weapons and bloodier eyes that took in the bodies at their feet with wild, grotesque victory.
I missed one, said Hannibal, nose to the sky.
Sam looked up and watched helplessly as the bird familiar flapped into deeper forest.
"It's going to warn the sister," asserted Sam. "I bet Agnes knows we're coming now."
The Matriarch is that way, not far, said Hannibal, sniffing.
Sam gripped his knife, stained with crimson. "Then let's get her."
Adrienne snarled through the pain of Bobby's failed attempt to dodge a knife. A large cut opened up in her forearm and thick, moon-black blood flowed freely.
It was one thing to experience the cause of injury: it was another entirely to receive it by telegraph.
It pissed her off. Massively.
Perfect, she thought harshly, her fingers dragging through the fluid leaking from her body. A moment later, she shouted a series of clipped, just-out-of-understanding words. With the sound of the ancient language, the array in her hand lit, and Adrienne watched with morbid satisfaction as blood erupted from the mouth of the witch locked in combat with Bobby. Bobby broke her loosened grip on the gun she had tried to wrest from him and brought it to bear on her, finishing her off.
They're getting meaner! he called to Adrienne, who was whispering brokenly to the string tied over her bleeding arm.
We're almost there, she replied grimly. The tickle of knitting skin only served to remind her that much more pain was to come.