Merry Christmas! In the spirit of giving, I am planning on a total of three chapters in December—so the last one, this one, and one more coming in the next week or so.
Adelaide doesn't know herself anymore.
In the months Noah has been gone, his absence has invaded her quiet hours, her mornings and nights, her meals, her work, everything. There is no moment that is safe from it, no corner of the house or the family that isn't a little bit darker.
It's all so… senseless.
The thought she keeps circling back to is if he'd just been standing a few feet off to the side, maybe he would've lived. Maybe the force that ended his life wouldn't have reached him, or if it did, maybe something could've been different, he would've not been thrown up so high, or hit a weaker part of the ceiling or landed on some of the hay that was piled against the walls in some areas.
It's useless to think about these things but she does about a hundred times a day. She doesn't recall what she used to think about. What were her hobbies? Art, music… lately… hunting.
Since Emery, since that monster took her brother away and destroyed her life, at any given time her emotional state has fallen into one of two categories. Sometimes she is deeply and irrevocably unhappy, empty even, with little to no energy and barely any capacity to stand, let alone smile. Other times, she's angry. Angry almost to the point of boiling over. She snaps at her parents, her brother, her teachers, her friends, Cody, Walter.
When she has energy, it manifests as relentless rage. And there's been only one thing to channel that rage into.
She used to only hunt with Noah and Cody. They were a team. They'd been hunting for about six months when it happened, totaling no more than five or six jobs. But now, it's the only thing that seems worth doing. She's constantly taking the car she and Noah used to share on long road trips, often leaving in the middle of the night, to check out each and every news story that seems remotely weird. Half the time it's nothing. Most of the rest of the time, it's not what she expects.
She doesn't talk to Cody about it. He knows he doesn't approve, and the old version of her, the version that had Noah, would've agreed. Walter doesn't like it either, and the more often she comes to him for advice and research help, the more hesitant he becomes to answer her questions. Sometimes, because of this, she goes chasing a hunt without consulting him first. She just doesn't want to have to deal with that look in his eyes.
Part of it is truly that nothing else feels worthwhile anymore. But the other part is hoping to find the worm that killed her brother.
Walter's not sure how long it will take for Emery to crawl back out of the pit. He said that as far as he knows, it's pretty unpredictable. But the thought that the world might never be free of Emery leaves Adelaide believing she's never going to rest easy again. It's been only two months and she hasn't come across it yet but she knows she's going to spend the rest of her life chasing it.
There must be a way to kill it. There just has to be. Walter once hinted that he'd heard "legends" of weapons that could kill demons, but he implied both that they were very rare, and that there was no guarantee one would even work against a demon that was immune to devil's traps.
Even if it takes her decades to find one, she's going to find one. And along the way, surely she'll come across some other… home remedies.
Naturally, of course, to find out more about Emery and what he was, she went to the horse's mouth—she snuck a peek at Walter's phone right after Noah's funeral and got Sam Winchester's number. He picked up after one ring with the words "This is Sam."
"My name is Adelaide Walsh," she began without hesitation, having rehearsed what she'd say many times. "My brother, a friend, and I encountered the demon named Emery, the one immune to devil's traps, about a week ago. We managed to exorcise it but I was wondering if you could tell me what you know of it and what, exactly, it is."
"Ah, Adelaide. Your friend Cody mentioned you. He and, um, Walter? Called several days ago. Told me what happened. I'm very sorry about your brother."
"Thanks," she said curtly. She'd made the call, of course, during an angry phase, because if she was in her other persona she wouldn't have had the energy to. And so, though tears immediately stung her eyes, she was able to ignore them. "Could you answer the question?"
He was silent for a few seconds. "You want to know about the demon."
"Yes. What do you know about it? Walter said you knew why it was immune to devil's traps."
"Did he now." He sounded exhausted. "I'll tell you what I told Walter and Cody—he's very dangerous, immune to devil's traps and demon-killing weaponry, and if you ever see him again, the best thing you can do is contact me immediately with your location."
"Great, yeah, knew that already." Her voice was thick with impatience. "One more time: what is it?"
There was another pause, and he finally said, still sounding at least as tired as Adelaide sometimes felt, "Look. It might not make sense to you, but that's a very personal question, one that I'm simply not going to answer, for my own reasons. I'm sorry."
She stood there in the middle of her room with her mouth hanging open, hot anger and indignation rising inside her, but no words found their way to her tongue. And Sam said, "But please, for your own safety, do let me know if you see him again," and hung up.
She wanted to scream. And she immediately ran downstairs, got into her car, and started on a meandering drive so she could do just that without anyone hearing.
Needless to say, that son of a bitch has been no use. In light of his refusal to help, she's had to do her own research, which has yielded nothing. And so, just a week ago, she snuck several pictures of Walter's address book, and called everyone up, asking if they had any unconventional solutions to demons or anything at all that might work against higher level ones.
Most of them haven't had anything for her. Many have given her numbers for other hunters. That second tier gave her the most promising lead she's come across, when the hunter said, "I did come across a witch a while back who had this old book with a page that detailed a supposedly 'more powerful' devil's trap. It was this strange sigil that has to be painted in a mix of lamb and human blood but her notes were… pretty crazy, let's just say, so I couldn't decipher too much else. I haven't encountered a demon in the year or two since that hunt, so I've never tested it, but I'll send you a photo."
The sigil's appearance on its own is pretty disturbing and dishearteningly intricate, but Adelaide has been doing her best to commit it to memory. Part of her hopes she'll never have to try it. The other part has, perhaps irrationally, grimly accepted that she will.
Sometimes, when she's lying in bed at night, or staring at the wall in her room, or listening to her phone ring and just watching "CODY" light up the screen, she spaces out, picturing where that creature is now. She's always pictured hell to be pure fire. She doubts it's anything like what Dante described, but his writings paint a picture far more horrible than anything she could imagine. And yet, somehow, it seems too tame for that monster.
She knows how damaging it is to her, spiritually, to think like this, but she doesn't lift a finger to stop herself from hoping that thing is in even worse pain than she is.
Emery's tired of hell.
He's tired of Crowley.
He's tired of going back and forth from here to earth and back.
He's tired of checking in on Rowena.
He's tired of not having the Blade.
So when she says, "It's ready," with such a calm, relaxed smile, completely unacknowledging of how much he's been suffering, showing enough leisure to make it apparent that telling him was not the first thing she did upon the spell's completion, he doesn't stop himself from slamming her against the wall.
"Bitch," he snarls, and she's wearing the same casual expression, but behind her eyes, he can see how frightened she is. "How long has it been ready?"
"You're like an addict," she whispers, though her voice shakes. "Try to control that temper. If you kill me, you can't get your precious weapon."
Even as he glares, he draws in deep breaths, realizing every word is true, and abruptly steps back. She rubs her upper chest, smooths down her dress, and says sternly, "There'll be no more outbursts like that. Come with me."
He follows her, excitement now mounting through the initial anger, to the dank old storage room in the archives she's taken as a workstation. There's not much to the room—a few crates of books and materials, and a creaky old table with an equally ancient chair. Dust and slime covers the walls and floor. He understands why she wants a higher position around here.
On the table sits a wooden bowl, an open book, and several jars half-filled with unsavory materials like blood, bones, fur, and what appears to be… urine? Emery turns his attention to the bowl then, which definitely contains some measure of each material, plus what appears to be a snippet of Crowley's hair floating in the middle.
Rowena stands by the table with the bowl in front of her and looks at Emery, silently signaling she's about to do the deed.
It's nothing particularly showy. Certainly nothing he hasn't seen many times before, given his former line of work. She strikes a match, reciting an incantation in a language he doesn't recognize, and tosses the match into the bowl, which ignites with blue flame almost reaching the ceiling, and dies down almost as quickly. She stands still for a long moment, staring down into the mixture in the bowl as it settles back down, and turns towards him. "The bones are in Guam," she says certainly.
"Guam." He frowns. "Where is that exactly? South-ish Pacific, right?"
She looks at him pensively for a long moment, and abruptly heads towards the door, beckoning him to follow. Several minutes later, she leads him into a room filled to the brim with maps and atlases, and strides over to the largest one, occupying a lot of wall space. "This is about two hundred years out of date, but the land masses are the same." She alights a finger on a small island about a thousand miles east of the Philippines. "That's Guam. Do you think you can get us there?"
He stares at the tiny bit of green with a knot between his brows. He's never teleported somewhere he's never been before. He had been beginning to theorize about a way he could do it, by picturing somewhere he has been, then using his teleport-sense to work his way mentally to the new location, but this is thousands of miles away from anything he's ever seen. It's a lofty challenge, to say the least. "I'm not sure," he says frankly, still fixed on the map.
A pause, and then a light huff from her direction. "Well, a teleport spell wasn't part of the bargain, dearie. If you can't get there, that's not my problem."
"You know what the deal was," he deadpans, still not turning around. "Your son's bones for a breach of trust. You're not finished till his bones are in my hands. I might be able to do it. Just give me some time."
With these words he turns, sits down cross-legged on the floor right where he was standing, and closes his eyes. He pictures the point furthest west he's familiar with—a safehouse just outside Sacramento where he and Sam stayed for three weeks when Dad—when John was on a hunt once. Dean was eight at the time, Sam four. The house was owned by a recently deceased hunter whom John had known. They'd come to call it home by the time they had to leave.
None of that matters. Not anymore. Once De—Emery's there, he starts pulling himself west, gradually gaining speed until he's covering several miles each second. Soon enough, he hits water, and keeps going.
Seconds stretch into minutes, stretch into hours. He's lost awareness of whether or not Rowena's even still present.
He hasn't seen the ocean in years, and in fact has never seen the Pacific, which, he is beginning to remember, is the largest body of water in the world.
Doesn't matter.
Scouring the globe for a tiny island is still better than scouring it for the Blade.