Aya discovered that if she stopped running, the demon would just drag her along like a toy on a string. She stumbled, wincing, as they hurried up the sidewalk toward the amphitheater.
"Let me go!" she said. That was pretty much all she'd said since he'd come to get her. She scratched at the hand wrapped around her upper arm. She punched and she pinched and she pushed. "Let go!"
"Shut up." That was pretty much all he'd said, too.
Such a wonderful conversationalist! So effective at keeping her mind off her problems. Like, what had happened to Sam after that awful angel Uriel had shown up? What could have caused an unpossessed human to take on a demonic face the way Sam had? Was Paulie okay? Did Dean and Castiel know what had happened? Why hadn't she been able to talk to Lemara, her best friend, who had been hurting, who had needed her, when she'd been talking to souls her entire life? How was it that she didn't have a single cut or bruise or a concussion after crashing through her front door?
"Ow!" Aya gasped. Dang it. Those cuts and bruises were sure making an appearance now, all over the bottoms of her feet. The rough path, dotted with short staircases, seemed to like the taste of her thin striped ankle socks.
As she fought the demon, she forgot herself and glanced up at him.
Her stomach lurched.
His jaw seemed to have unhinged, kept attached to his skull by sagging corpse-like skin, gray and spotted and as wrinkled as an old paper bag. His eye sockets and his mouth gaped, sloshing with inky blackness that simmered at the edges like dry ice fog.
She tore her gaze away. Boulders, and shrubs and trees half-clothed in spring green, passed by on their left as they climbed higher toward the amphitheater. Aya had been here twice before, in happier times. She had sat upon that low, sandstone retaining wall in the slanting rays of the setting sun while waiting in line for a concert. She had walked past the frightening apparition affectionately known as the Headless Hatchet Lady, who no one else could see but every teenager believed in; Mrs. Johnson, complete with her head, sat on her horse in the middle of the upper parking lot, her bloody hatchet resting across the saddlebow. She did nothing but stare as the demon towed Aya past, however, and in the next moment, she vanished.
The demon hurried between the bollards that protected the widening foot traffic-only path. Creation Rock, the northern monolith, rose in front of them like a giant bent knee. The trees growing at its base thrashed in the frigid wind; Aya whimpered as the wind cut right through her light camisole and sweater combo.
A new sound threaded itself with the moaning wind. High and whining, then low and grumbling, then both together. Like the eager, bone-chilling cries from a pack of coyotes. The towering rocks amplified the cries, bounced them back and forth like a hundred hacky sacks.
Aya began to shake, uncontrollably. Something deep and primal inside of her recognized those cries.
They increased in frequency and intensity as Aya and the demon got closer to the source. Numbly, she let him take her past the construction zone, around the Visitor Center, and through the cluster of half-built merch stands and food kiosks. Not speaking at all anymore, they navigated the first flights of downward steps, took a sharp right, and emerged, at last, into the amphitheater itself.
Aya jerked so wildly against the demon's grip that she almost, almost got free. He yanked her into his chest and wrapped both arms around her, lifting her off the ground. He slung her over his shoulder and continued down the stairs. Her feet flailed in the air, trying to kick the unwanted view of the house away.
The big rocks angled toward each other and the third monolith lower down, Stage Rock. Floodlights strung in the scaffold over the stage lit up the whole area. Aya opened her mouth, her throat full and aching as she tried to scream and sob at the same time.
The slope between the rocks, just past the toes of her torn socks, flipped between two realities like a massive thaumatrope, a perfect circle: the stepped rows of seats painted with a giant pentagram, and a pit so lightless her brain insisted that it wasn't visible, wasn't there.
Within the pit, filling it, a many-lipped mouth irised open and shut, rows of teeth gleaming. The mouth slid back and forth like that of a monstrous plecostomus in an enormous fish tank, sucking at an invisible barrier stretched across the ground. The pointed, petal-shaped lips flapped like tongues, dark pink and barbed with triangular teeth on the inside, slick and olive-green on the outside. Another eerie, haunting cry rumbled through the amphitheater.
Aya thought of Sam, sitting on her couch in the sunshine, a forward-falling lock of his hair curling slightly in the steam from his coffee, explaining that Ditaolane the Diviner had sealed the Eater of the World, not killed it. Looked like he was right.
Aya finally screamed, and then she started to cry.
..::~*~::..
The light show in the clouds continued unabated, thunder crashing deafeningly. Inky-Corpse carried her to the bottom. Neither of them looked toward the thing in the pit.
Once they reached the stage, he flung her down. Aya immediately leaped up and ran on her sore feet, thinking she'd take one of the many paths out of the amphitheater and lose herself amid the rocks and the scrub.
A hot, powerful blast of wind swept her legs right out from under her. Her feet shot forward. She went crashing to the ground again, flat on her back.
Then she lay there, scared out of her mind because she couldn't breathe.
Two shadows fell across her. The first came from a big construction worker. His demonic red rictus of a smile, crammed with far too many teeth, split a greasy, bearded face in two. He leered down at her.
And the other, a brown-haired girl, her arms crossed and her hip cocked, her sequined dress sparkling in the floodlights, who said, "You're lucky I need you alive for the moment."
Aya tried to gasp. To scream. Her lungs wouldn't loosen and nothing came out. The girl had no face, just a revolting mass of fleshy, slightly hairy protrusions that squirmed like worms.
The other demon approached with a roll of silver duct tape.
"You're sure about this?" Wormy asked him, her impatience clear in her voice. "I sense something . . . she can't be a reaper. She's living. But there's something . . ."
"I saw it myself," Inky-Corpse responded. Quickly, efficiently, he bound Aya's wrists and her ankles. "She talks to ghosts. They follow her everywhere. Stand still for a sec. You can feel them out there."
He shivered, glancing warily around at the rocks, and then made to add a rectangle of tape to Aya's mouth. Aya twisted her head away, discovered that she could breathe, and promptly went into a fit of coughing.
Wormy stopped him, pushing his arm down. "I want to test something," she said.
Aya whimpered again; her lungs ached, but at least the demon did stop threatening her with the duct tape.
Wormy picked up a bundle of grayish-brown fur that flopped around sadly, like a wet dishcloth: a dead cottontail. Two-handed, she squeezed the blood from it to draw something directly onto the reddish cement of the stage, something big and circular. Then she set the rabbit aside, wrung out and bloody, its fur sticking out in damp spikes. She filled in the details of her drawing with her finger.
"I'm not going to help you," Aya said boldly, from the ground.
Wormy appeared to suck her finger clean. "You will if you want to stay alive," she said. "Call them, then, girl. Call your ghostie friends."
"Why should I?" It wasn't like she called souls, whatever that meant. They always sought her out, came to her for help. That wasn't the same thing.
Wormy tilted her head down as though looking at her. Aya glared right back, finding it easier to stare at a mass of seething protrusions than a pair of black demon eyes.
A flicker of motion caught their attention. Mrs. Johnson, the Headless Hatchet Lady, had appeared on the stage, just as she had in the parking lot. She sat on her horse, but her head was missing. Blood streaked her blouse and homespun skirts, and her chapped, yellow-nailed hands clutched the handle of her hatchet. She tended to scare the pants back on to teenagers getting a little too friendly in the shadows of the rocks.
Next to the demons, she looked positively cuddly.
Cackling under his breath, Inky-Corpse stalked toward Mrs. Johnson. He gave the apparition a wide berth, squinting at her as though he couldn't believe she was really there. "It's working, Boss."
"Because one soul showed up?" Aya said scathingly. "Hate to break it to you, but she's been haunting this place for over a century. It has nothing to do with me."
"Doesn't it?" Wormy pulled a small knife from a pocket of her skirt. She set the point of the knife into the dip under Aya's collarbone.
Aya did gasp, then. It felt like a cat scratch, but Wormy twisted the knife, slowly, and the pain worsened. Then she swiped the knife to the side, and Aya yelled. Blood, too hot on her frozen skin, gushed from the cut.
Mrs. Johnson, now holding her head under her arm, opened her mouth and let out a banshee screech. It sounded like a warning, a call to arms. Flickering, fizzing, more souls materialized. They formed a broken ring of unspeaking, unsmiling people.
The souls did not attack, though. They did nothing except stand there. The three demons exchanged a look that somehow seemed satisfied.
"Look at them," Wormy breathed in her face, and Aya cringed. "Still think it's not you? You're helping whether you want to or not."
Aya looked around at the souls, shocked. She recognized some of them. Like two of the regulars from Spanky's Roadhouse, the rough rider and the mother killed by a drunk driver. Jeanine, the trans girl with the large round glasses and short green hair who had overdosed in her high school bathroom. She had spoken with Aya but had not been ready to speak with her grieving family. A tall man in a superhero t-shirt riddled with bullet holes who liked to stand mournfully in the middle aisle of the movie theater where he had been killed. He had disappeared every time Aya tried to talk to him. A small girl, her glittery unicorn t-shirt and cotton shorts streaming chlorinated water. She'd lived in Aya's apartment complex with her parents and older brother, but they had moved away. Her complexion was so zombie-like that Aya knew the poor little thing was one step away from too far gone.
They, and the others she didn't recognize, looked at her, still as photographs.
Face after face. Watching. Waiting.
Why were they here? Had the demons been right? Had she had it backward all along? Did they come to her . . . because she called them? Dear Obaa-chan, was it her fault they were here?
"Please!" she cried, without ever having meant to say a word. "All of you! It's not safe. You need to get out of here!"
Mrs. Johnson smiled, a truly ghastly sight. But she didn't leave. None of them did.
So fixated on the souls – their sadness, their grief, their confusion, their anger – Aya didn't hear Wormy tear off a piece of duct tape. "Leave them alone," she pleaded. "Don't hurt them –"
She got out one muffled squawk before the demon slapped the tape crookedly over her mouth.
This was how Julia looked when I first saw her, Aya thought. Tears slipped down the sides of her face and soaked into her hair.
"You're messing with the vibrations, all right," Wormy said, sounding disgruntled. "You're strong, but you aren't going to be able to stop me. I'm stronger, girl. All I need is for you to bring the souls here, and then the Eater can have you."
She lifted Aya, one-handed. She put the other hand against Aya's sternum.
"Levitas!" the demon shouted, and then she shoved Aya off the edge of the stage.
Hot wind buffeted her, strong enough to sweep her up. Terrifyingly, it carried her over the seats to the center of the house, where the wind from the ongoing storm froze her tears to her skin and whipped her hair into a tangled mess. Aya hung there, suspended twenty feet in the air by seemingly nothing, directly over the flower-petal mouth of the Eater of the World. Though her arms and her legs were bound, she thrashed against and screamed into the tape.
Kammapa seemed driven to a frenzy at the sight of her – or maybe the smell, since it didn't seem to have eyes. It rammed the invisible barrier, its teeth scraping against it with the sound of a million brake pads chirping. Appendages, long and skinny and pallid, punched and clawed at it, seeking a weak spot.
Despair threatened to crush Aya. She squeezed her eyes shut. If these were the sorts of things her reikan wanted to show her, then she never wanted to open her eyes ever again.
She wished she weren't so alone.
Help me. Please. Someone help me.
Sam. Dean.
Castiel.
..::~*~::..
Castiel stopped so abruptly that Dean ran into him.
Sam, in the lead, turned around curiously. "Why did you stop? Cass?"
Castiel couldn't answer him. He winced, pressing his thumb into his temple. Prayers. Small, frightened, and loaded with despair. Every word stabbed at him like sharp icicles.
Aya. It was Aya.
Aya was praying for salvation.
..::~*~::..
Because of its great power, the number twenty-two may result in outstand-ing ascendancy or disastrous downfall . . .
Kittney turned her knife on her palm. The cut was quick and clean. She closed her fingers over it before it started to bleed. She hadn't fulfilled the prophecy. Her diablerie was a day early and several sacrifices short, and now this girl . . .
. . . her aura resonated like that of a reaper, a servant of Death, capable of containing and transporting human souls, which were small sources of massive power equivalent to that of several nuclear reactions . . .
Kittney could not have prepared for this. Nothing, not a single one of her divinations, had warned her of the girl's existence.
She could get rid of her, though. After she'd gotten some use out of her. Kammapa would come through the dimensional gate, the seal would break. It just wouldn't be very elegant, but Kittney was beyond caring. She tightened her fingers, and a drop of blood fell and spotted her velour skirt. Steeling herself, she held her fist over her rabbit's blood pentagram.
"Come out, come out, whoever you are!" she bellowed into the storm. "Or are you going to let your precious little reaper girl die?"
She waited a moment. A second drop of blood fell, hissing, onto the pentagram. One of the runes began to glow. Then another. She opened her fingers, let the blood flow. All of the runes lit up, wavering like underwater lights.
The locks of Kammapa's prison began to glow in response.
"Don't be shy!" she yelled at the rocks. "She won't just die, you know. She'll be eaten, soul and all. She'll disappear as though she never existed! Is that what you want?"
More spirits appeared, filling the stage, spilling out into the house. As Kittney had known they would, the redhead and the tall girl joined them, fury rolling off them like heatwaves.
Secretly giving a mental whoop of triumph, Kittney began the summoning, muttering under her breath as fast as she could: "Haec sacrificia offero nomine Kammapa, comedentis Mundi. Veni ad me. Veni ad me. Veni ad me."
The spirits of the two women she'd killed rushed her. Tom raised his hand as though aiming a pistol and blew them apart. They vanished with echoing screams, dusty swirls, and golden sparks.
At that, the other spirits exploded into action. A cowboy and a middle-aged woman appeared next, on Kittney's other side. Carmelo blasted them apart. More screams, more smoke, more sparks.
So it went, Kittney repeating her invocation three times over and the other two demons laughing as they took down the spirits that appeared. The spirits kept trying, coming back again and again, but not one of them reached Kittney to stop her.
The headless spook on horseback, swinging her bloody hatchet, ran Carmelo down. The horse's invisible hooves pounded on flesh and rock. He rolled around, clutching his middle and bawling like a wounded cow.
Kittney didn't care. "Veni ad me!" she shrieked, her throat burning, victory blazing in her heart.
Her blood sank into the pentagram, powering it. A sharp report, as of glass two feet thick cracking, reverberated through the amphitheater. The buzzing floodlights intensified. They blinded Kittney before they exploded, plunging the whole area into stormy twilight.
A swell of violet-tinged darkness spewed out of Kammapa's prison. High above it, the reaper girl floated like a tiny moon, untouched, for the moment – Kammapa could not quite reach her. Bracing itself against the barrier with its six wiry arms, it twisted its lips into a funnel. Its whole body contracted and then inflated like a heart beating in slow motion as it sucked mightily at the air. Kittney and Tom threw themselves aside as a new force – not quite wind, not quite gravity – enveloped the skeletal horse and its headless rider, and Carmelo.
The two ghosts and the demon disappeared down Kammapa's gullet, woman and man and horse screaming.
Kammapa squealed and bucked. A shudder ran through the amphitheater, the earth grinding and moaning, and the creature suddenly expanded, its sides bulging like blisters, like bubbles blown in slime. One limb, pallid as bone, ending in a clawed, pimpled chicken's foot, rose up, up, out of the pit, past the failing, fading barrier. It looked as though it rose from water, from solid opacity to transparent otherworldliness. A second followed, then a third. Ghostly, the legs came down on some of the wooden seats and, when the monster tried to lift itself out of its prison, crushed them.
It skidded backward but sucked greedily at the air again. One after another, more souls spiraled into the darkness. The redhead's eyes, blue as the northern skies, flew wide before she vanished, pulled away like water swirling down a drain.
It was working! By the time the Eater grew large enough to swallow the girl, it would gain enough power to fully enter this dimension, and break the seal. She'd done it! Elated, Kittney threw back her head and howled.
..::~*~::..
Aya twisted on the air, still bound by the levitation spell and the tape. She watched helplessly, hopelessly, as Lemara shot down the long tunnel of darkness after Julia. The wind wailed, thunder crashed, Kammapa squealed, the Earth groaned, and Kittney laughed wildly.
Aya would be next. She was sure she would be next.
Oh, God. She was next.
Help us! Please! CASTIEL!
..::~*~::..
"Cass? What's wrong?" Sam asked, his deep voice frantic and cracking. "Cass? What happened?"
Dean joined in. "Cass!"
Castiel realized that he had been quiet for too long. He had fallen unknowing to his knees on the path as Aya's terrified prayers rang in his head.
"Kammapa. It's here," he mumbled, blinking the dizziness away.
Immediately, the brothers bent over him and started pouring questions over his head. He couldn't understand them. All he could hear, as though he could see her, bright as a burning star, was Aya.
He had to do something. Now. Running through the Earthly dimension on puny human legs was no longer an option.
Too sick to speak, he put his hand on Dean's shoulder, grasped a fistful of soft, worn leather, then reached up and got a second fistful of Sam's scratchier corduroy jacket. He closed his eyes, concentrating. Kammapa's attention was elsewhere, for the moment. Most of the ley lines were severed, sparking at either end like electrical wires. The Void yawned between them.
What he was about to do was dangerous, but he'd agreed that he would not run off on his own, so the two Winchesters were just going to have to come along. And try not to die.
Before he could rethink this plan, he flared his wings, snapping them open to their full extent, latched onto a trembling, faltering telluric current, thin as a wire, and pulled his friends sideways in with him.
A/N: Hello friends! Been a while, but here I am, still working hard to finish this story.
Reviewer Thanks! Darwin, Topkicker26 (five of them!), IHeartSPN, Momochan77, MiMiMargot, happyperson42, Anya Roma (welcome! thank you for the review!), St4r Hunter (three!), allurasgrace (two!), and CaityJoy (welcome to you as well, I'm so glad you decided to review!). Thank you all for your kind words. I gave myself time to say goodbye to my sweet kitty, so I'm okay now. ^_^
Please leave a review before you go, okay? I'd like to know if I'm getting too weird here (I feel like I've graduated from TV show to movie with the FX, lmao).
~ Anne
P.S. If anybody speaks Latin and wants to nitpick my Google translation, I am not opposed to that. LOL
P.P.S. The Headless Hatchet Lady is a local urban myth! If you ever visit Red Rocks, try to get a peek at her. XD