John killed the Impala's engine with a quick flick of his wrist. He'd been driving for twelve hours straight, only stopping briefly for fuel after dropping the boys off at Jim's. He'd not eaten since the day before and only drunk the stale brackish water left in his canteen from his previous hunt. He needed sleep but first he'd talk to Bill.
The car door creaked as he pushed it open. He made yet another mental note to oil it but somehow he never remembered until it creaked again. He loved the car, he'd bought it when he and Mary had been going steady and had spent many hours lovingly restoring it. Mary had joked that he loved that car more than her, which wasn't true but it was a close second best until the boys came along.
Pulling himself from the driver's seat John was stretching the stiffness from his shoulders when a piece of white paper fluttered to the muddy ground. He stooped slowly to retrieve it and smiled as he realised that it was the picture Sammy had drawn him as a present.
John loved his sons fiercely. Sometimes he caught himself watching them while they slept, Dean with his smattering of freckles and Sam with his cute little nose. He could see his wife in them both her delicacy and toughness and it brought a lump to his throat every time.
A picture of Dean's reproachful face as he'd driven away came unbidden but he pushed it away. Since his wife's death John had found it difficult to relate to his eldest. Dean was a changed child, silent and watchful. He wasn't disobedient in fact the opposite. He did everything asked of him, obeyed John without question and looked after his little brother better than any sitter but sometimes in his darker moments John wished for the mischievous four year old bundle that he'd swung up into his arms for a cuddle.
Slamming the car door John, in an unconscious movement, checked that his gun was in place. Feeling its reassuringly solid presence lying snug up against his spine he adjusted the collar of his leather jacket and crossed the empty lot to the door of the Roadhouse.
Opening the screen John paused hand flat on the wooden panel. He hated the bar the very idea of a place for hunters made a mockery of the philosophy that Bill had drummed into him. 'Rule number one, we do what we do and we shut up about it.' The credo had suited John fine. He had no inclination to discuss his business outside of the few people he trusted and the rest of the hunting community he viewed with as deep a suspicion as the creatures that he hunted.
John wouldn't have been here now if he hadn't owed Bill Harville.
*********The bar was noisy; the jukebox blaring Country and the pinball game pinging maniacally as a massive beefcake of a man dwarfed the machine pressing the two buttons at the side with rapid violence. Paying no attention John crossed to the bar and received a big smile from Ellen, Bill's wife.
"John, good to see ya. What'll it be?"
He shook his head and Ellen immediately dropped the act.
"Bill's out back."
He nodded, followed the bar around to the glass-panelled door and exited from the main room. The Harville's kitchen was two openings down and by the time John had turned into it the noise of the bar had receded to a minor buzz.
"Bill." He nodded at the man sitting at the table.
"John." Bill nodded back and indicated for John to sit.
Harville was not a big man but he exuded strength. With intelligent sharp features and clipped greying blonde hair he looked every inch a bank manger but his mild appearance belied the hard steel of the hunter underneath. John has seen the man take out a nest of vampires virtually single handily and he knew that Bill didn't suffer fools gladly.
"What's so bad that you couldn't talk about it on the phone?"
John sat and Harville slid several photos across the table to him. John blanched and felt the bile rising in his throat. The first picture was of a small figure, a child of no more than Sammy's age, six or seven.
"She was alive…" Bill's voice was grim. "…they cut her windpipe so …she couldn't scream."
John's hand shook as he viewed the picture again. It looked like the body had been skinned. Apart from the head, arms and legs it was red-raw and he could see the muscles, veins and organs.
A glass of whiskey slammed onto the table in front of him, John took it and swallowed the strong liquid down in one go.
"There are more…" Bill took a swig of his own whiskey and poured a double shot into his glass and then another into John's.
Shuffling through each of the photos, six in all John took in the details, pushing aside his emotions to deal clinically with the facts. Each showed a child the windpipe cut, the skin peeled from their backs and chests and a stab wound to the heart.
"He didn't need to have stabbed them the shock and blood loss alone would be enough to kill them."
John steadied his breathing trying to bring his thoughts away from the atrocities and focus on the practicalities. "Where?"
"Nelson, New York State."
"And what makes this one for us rather than some nut job serial killer?"
"It was a ritual."
John looked up at his friend. There was a fine line between the observances of a disturbed mind and a satanic ritual but Bill was obviously sure.
"They found traces of Datura on the soles of their feet hence no sign of a struggle and the knife wounds are consistent with a Athame a double bladed dagger and gut feeling."
John's eyebrows raised at the mention of Datura.
"Witchcraft?"
The herb was better known as Devil's Apple and was poisonous but used in spells and by rubbing on the skin to induce sleep or at least a state of calm lethargy. That was how the killer had kept the children quiet that and the slit…John didn't want to think about it.
"Could be…" Bill rubbed his hand over his face eyes staring ahead lost in thought for a minute, "…but witches these days don't usually go in for human sacrifices. Animals yes but humans …it causes too many complications."
"Is that what you think this is? A Sacrifice?" John was surprised he'd only come across witches a couple of times in six years of hunting and they'd proved petty, self-serving and concerned with the mundane rather than the arcane.
"I don't know John, things don't add up. If it is witchcraft then it's pretty hardcore." The man pulled a hand across his tired face. "I've never come across anything like this before but I do know that six children are dead, killed in the same way and I can't rest easy on this one."
The theory was pretty thin but John was with Bill he had no qualms in investigating the deaths either way, nobody who did that to a child deserved to get away with it but if it was ritualistic then it must have a purpose.
"Why? What would they …skin them for? A knife through the heart yeah but the skinning…"
"Who knows John, who knows." Bill sat again shaking his head then resting it wearily in his hands. "I've been trying to research what it could have been….and I've found sacrifices, yes but nothing…nothing…like this." He took a breath visibly moved. "She…she was blonde…the first one."
"DADDY, DADDY, SAY YES." A small figure hurtled into the room and launched herself onto Bill's lap. John immediately turned the photos over and shuffled them into some kind of pile.
"Daddy wanna story."
Ellen appeared at the doorway a helpless look of apology on her face.
"Jobeth Harville Daddy's busy."
The child pouted and turned on John.
"Uncle John won't mind will you Uncle John." She gave him the full blast of her pleading eyes. It brought a smile to John's lips. Bill scraped his chair back and stood the little girl clinging onto him like a monkey.
"No Uncle John won't mind." And without looking at John he carried his daughter from the room. Her blonde hair cascading in shining ripples as she snuggled into her father's neck and then John understood why this case was affecting Bill so much.
John took another swig of whiskey. Jo was a year younger than Sammy but much more of a handful a firecracker of a blonde and the same age as the child in the photo, John could see now that for Bill this was personal.
"So where do you want to start?" John sat at the motel table rubbing an oiled cloth over the disassembled parts of his handgun. They'd left the roadhouse soon after first light John following Bill at a discrete distance; a necessary precaution to avoid arousing suspicion.
Bored hick cops with nothing better to do often targeted cars with out-of-state plates and two together would be too damned enticing; luring even the most indolent officer away from his coffee and donuts.
Both hunters had experienced the officiousness of the petty bureaucracy in small town law enforcement at one time or another and both were keen to avoid the time and cost it took to circumnavigate 'Official Procedures'.
Bill had already signed them into Nelson's only motel and mumbled something about food as he exited past the newly arrived hunter. John dumped his duffle onto the far bed and retrieved the half bottle of whisky from its depths.
That had been an hour and a half ago and he'd had begun to get anxious as well as hungry by the time Bill returned carrying a neon pink striped take-out bag from what John presumed was a local diner. 'Bonker's Burger Bar' arced over a cartoon picture of a wide-mouthed boy biting into a giant Burger. John made a face, was it his imagination or did the kid look like Dean.
"Got talking to the waitress…." Bill placed a neatly wrapped burger on the table in front of John, "…seems she was a cousin to the mother of one of the children." He sat heavily staring at the food in his hand but not eating. "She cried."
Sliding and clicking the gun parts into place John was silent. What could he say? Nothing was going to 'make it better', he and Bill weren't going to wave a magic wand and he knew that even if the relatives could find out what happened or understand why, nothing was going to fill that black hole inside them. He snapped the last piece into his gun, checked the mechanism and pushed the clip into place.
"Could start with the Coroner, see if they got any further forensics …" Setting the gun aside John ignored the burger and leafed through a series of papers which lay strewn over the table in front of him "or the Sheriff …a Sheriff Johansson…. "
"S'as good a place to start as any." Bill didn't sound enthusiastic but John reckoned that perhaps enthusiasm in this case was probably not what was required.
"…and Jim called."
"Oh?" Bill's face shifted from slack absorption to keen interest.
"Yeah… The closest ritual he found is that of the Virgin Parchment,"
The Pastor had an extensive occult library housed in the basement of his church. John wasn't taking any bets on the fact that the Church Council had no idea it was there.
John pulled out another piece of paper and referred to his notes, "… The ritual requires that a new-born calf is killed by slitting its throat and letting the blood like preparing Kosher meat. Then the carcass is skinned and the skin is cured and prepared for use in a summoning ritual…they write on it apparently…"
Looking back up at his partner across the table John continued, "…but he couldn't find any reference to human skin being used for it." There was another moment's silence as John scanned the page in his hand. "And there's a ton of lore on shapeshifters and Skinwalkers using the skin of victims to transform but nothing about them only using part … " here John frowned, tailing off, the image too disturbing to voice.
Bill grunted. "We can't rule anything out."